by Tanya Isch Caylor
For the game to work, Jan must know precisely how many calories she's consumed that day.
In terms of weight loss, which is ostensibly the goal of the exercise, she should aim for something in the 1200s. That is, technically, her goal. But secretly she lets herself slide past 1700 and even into the 1800s because that's her comfort zone, both in terms of not feeling deprived but also because -- especially because -- that's the time period in which she most likes to lose herself.
She'll be washing dishes after dinner, with the boys careening about and Sara's music blasting upstairs and Phil oblivious to all but ESPN, and without doing anything that anyone would notice -- an elaborate mental ritual that requires no physical movement other than an eye blink -- she slips into the past.
Her favorite place to start a session is the London apartment of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. They're never home when she arrives. It's easier that way, because she doesn't want to interact with them so much as to hang out in their world -- to take long, slow yoga breaths in an era where the phone isn't always ringing and music isn't always blaring and computers aren't always crashing all around her.
Jan is not what you would call a diehard fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She does not, for instance, know the exact street address of this infamous Baker Street apartment she's been using as a mental crash pad. Frankly, she can think of nothing more unnerving than conversation with a detail specialist like Holmes. The last thing she needs is to have someone point out that her left index fingernail needs filing and her dark roots are coming in and what these observations, along with her excess weight and all the other unflattering things she imagines people routinely notice about her, imply about her life.
She does, however, envy the great detective's focusing abilities and problem-solving skills. Not to mention the fact that he's got a housekeeper. How sweet is that? She's hoping to soak up some mental clarity, along with the ambiance.
Jan finds the most comfortable chair in the room, draws up to the fire, and inhales the lingering aroma of Holmes' pipe. Which is actually, of course, the remembered scent of her grandfather's pipe. Who smokes a pipe anymore? No one she knows.
Here, she thinks, there is time to read a newspaper. To dip a pen in ink and write a letter. To hear your thoughts unfurl as you gaze into the fire. Time, plenty of time.
The gadget that helps whisk Jan away -- she can't really call it a time machine, since she never physically leaves the kitchen or that stack of dishes in the sink -- is a Christmas gift from her husband.
"It's a little stereo you mount underneath the kitchen cabinet," Phil explained. "I thought you could use it to listen to those audio books. You know how you're always saying you never have time to read anymore."
"How can I listen to a book with the kids around?" she'd wondered aloud.
Phil's not a big reader himself. More of a numbers guy, he likes to say. Still, she couldn't help thinking he'd secretly bought it for himself. She could picture him at the kitchen table, slurping his late-night bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios (which he would later deposit in the sink without rinsing, leaving tiny sodden O's to form barnacles on the sides), all the while listening to that inane radio program where insomniacs were always calling in to report UFOs and Bigfoot sightings and whatever else was keeping them up at night.
But it was, she now realized, a thoughtful gift for a guy who has come up with some real clunkers over the years. It was amazing how easily she could be transported, even while scrubbing a pan or grubby face. This must be how it was during the days of old-time radio, she thought.
Of course, some novels were off-base for an environment that included kids. When in doubt, she applied their family movie night safety net: No matter what the genre, anything created before 1970 was probably safe.
It was, she thought, not unlike the substitutions you make when you're dieting. If, while scanning the library shelves of recorded books she found herself tempted by a Stephen King novel, she would force herself to bring home Bram Stoker's
Dracula instead. If chick lit sounded appetizing, she would bypass Jennifer Weiner for Jane Austin.
These antiques worked their magic just as well, maybe even better, than what was currently on display at Barnes and Noble. The passages were remote and exotic, but the narrator proved an able tour guide, keeping her from stumbling over the vintage language.
Sometimes, between the end of one CD and the start of another, Jan would find herself replaying scenes in her mind, lingering inside especially inviting locales, or straying off the plot path altogether and exploring the world that lies just beyond the story.
And then one day, in a secret bit of synchronicity that seemed all the more vivid because she could imagine a narrator reading it like a line from a novel, she realized that the year she was exploring in her imagination was the same as the number of calories she'd recorded in her food log that day.
According to the rules she's crafted, Jan has to land somewhere between 1869 and 1889 if she wants to visit the Baker Street apartment. She's never checked to see if that is the exact time period that Holmes inhabited the apartment. It works for her. That's all that matters.
Getting there is easier than she would have imagined. She starts her day with a 300-calorie "diet donut" -- half a whole-wheat bagel topped with a tablespoon of peanut butter and 12 chocolate chips -- then follows up with three 500-calorie mini meals over the course of the day.
That puts her at 1800. After that, it's just a matter of coming in for the landing: Nibbling a carrot stick or an olive or a couple of grapes as dinner is winding down, carefully moving out five or ten calories at a time until she closes in on the right decade.
She rechecks her calculations while doing the dishes, and plans her bedtime snack accordingly.
The cellophane rolls of Smarties candies always make her smile. Her grandparents kept a jar on their counter, next to the old-fashioned coffee pot. She didn't know it then, but they're only 25 calories a roll -- around two calories per tablet.
As a kid she'd strip candies from the wrapper with her thumb like she was dislodging peas from a pod, then pop the whole handful of tangy sweetness in her mouth and crunch happily. Now she takes only what she needs to reach her desired destination, twists the wrapper back into place, and sets the roll aside for another time.
She's experimented with M&Ms and Hershey's Kisses, but Jan always blows way past her target if she even thinks about chocolate. And besides the negative ramifications to her waistline, she can think of absolutely nothing relaxing about contemplating the future. The Oh-Ohs, as she once heard someone call this decade she's mired in in real life, feel like a roller coaster ride along the edge of a cliff. She's not obsessed with all the stuff that could go wrong on a perspiring planet teeming with humans as it whizzes through space -- unlike the listeners who call into Phil's radio program -- but she's not crazy enough about the future to want to go there any sooner than she has to.
Y2K may not have panned out in real life, but in her game, the world always ends at 2000.
Jan knows what Phil would say if she tried to tell him about her time-travel diet. At this point in their marriage, she not only knows how to complete his sentences, but how to begin them as well.
If, for instance, she makes a passing reference to one of her male cousins -- no matter how small a role this cousin plays in relation to the point she's trying to make -- he'll invariably say, "You know, after all these years, I still can't tell those guys apart."
And then he'll begin to work the problem: He knows there are three men in the set, and he'll dredge up a list of three names, three jobs and three wives. (He has retained almost no data about the cousins' collective set of children, so he doesn't bother jotting this material on his mental chalkboard.
It's frustrating to navigate their way out of these conversational cul-de-sacs, no matter whose wrong turn got them off track. So she strives to avoid them whenever possible. But she can't always shut down the sound bites in her head.
"For all the work you put into that, you could've lost that weight a long time ago," he'd say.
Or: "It doesn't matter what kind of a diet you're on -- it's really just a simple mathematical equation. You've still got to subtract 3,500 calories to lose one pound."
Which means she needs to atone for 105,000 calories. Well. Thirty pounds -- who is she kidding? According to those "healthy weight" charts on the counter at Phil's insurance company, she's packing 52 pounds of excess baggage.
To his credit, Phil doesn't go around citing those figures all the time. For one thing, he could stand to lose a few pounds himself. At least she doesn't have a problem with nighttime eating. Once she's decided to take a mental vacation, she locks in on those Smarties and locks out temptation. Everything else -- the kids, the dog, the leftover pizza in the fridge -- shifts into another dimension that's already starting to pull away from her own.
It's only on days when she's not traveling, when she loses count after breakfast or is simply too busy for this interior video game, that she struggles with mindless eating.
So they don't argue about her being fat. What they would argue about, if she ever let it slip, is her problem-solving technique.
"Yet another example," Phil would say, "of how women strive to complicate the straightforward."
And somewhere inside her head, Sherlock Holmes would stir, just long enough to nod in agreement.
And then one night they're lying in bed, touching but not really talking, and Jan, who's booked a trip to 1826, lingers inside the beach house she's been renovating on the coast of Massachusetts.
According to the biography of John Adams shes been listening to, that's the year the second president and his best frenemy, Thomas Jefferson, both died on the Fourth of July, exactly 50 years after both signed the Declaration of Independence.
Jan had mentioned this historical factoid to Phil earlier in the week. It was easily the most interesting thing to report about her day. Funny to think she once thought working in a newsroom would be exciting. With all the budget cuts, shoveling words into the day's paper feels more like a factory job these days.
"Hey," she'd said, "I heard something shiny today."
It was a reference to another game, one they used to play together, called "I Spy a Star Fragment." Jan came up with the name. But Phil provided the impetus: His opening line, that day they met back in college.
"You ever notice," he'd said, watching her labor over her trigonometry book, "that when you multiply by nine, the answer always adds up to nine?"
She had not. As he showed her on a page of his notebook -- "See, nine times two equals 18, and if you add those digits, one plus eight equals nine" -- she felt simultaneously ripped off that she'd never learned this in school and embarrassed that she'd never noticed it herself. She was, after all, an A student. Phil was not. Or at least that was her impression.
"Yeah, I was just playing around with my multiplication tables one day, and there it was," he said. "It was like the most amazing thing."
It was, they both agreed, one of those tiny tingly discoveries that make the universe seem to glow. Like looking up at the stars, and then noticing shards of the same exquisite material stitched into the fabric of everyday life.
They don't play the game much anymore. Not together, anyway. The star fragments that Phil gleans from baseball and insurance data and Jan harvests from the day's headlines don't resonate like they once did, competing for air space with the pressing issues of the day, like who's picking the boys up from soccer. The Adams nugget worked better than most -- in part because, like the Rule of Nines, neither one of them could believe they hadn't learned it in school -- though its mesmerizing power faded quickly.
But now Jan's head's been all fogged in for a couple of days, and she's been itching to go time traveling. So today she set her calorie dial to 1826. Braintree, Massachusetts. Not because she wants to see a frail old Puritan on his deathbed, but because she thought it would be cool, somehow, to reconstruct the basic framework of the Baker Street flat onto the beach a couple of miles away. She thought she'd add on a porch, where she could gaze out at the ocean.
Jan's not much of an interior decorator -- she selects paint chips based on the pleasingness of their names rather than their hue -- but she thinks this shape-shifting shack of hers is going to positively glow in the celestial light given off when these two historical supernovas wink out of existence.
And that's when Phil, who's been idly stroking her back, says, "What are you thinking about?"
She yearns to show him. Invite him to snuggle up beside her here on the porch. But she knows this little house would dissolve in the physical universe they share. At best, she could only hope to describe some stick-figure representation. And that would lead them smack into another conversational cul-de-sac.
"Nothing much," she says, wondering if he realizes she's calling long distance, from the vacation home in her head.
* * *
Tanya Isch Caylor is the author of Declutter Your Diet: Buffet Goggles, Infinite Pie and Other Imaginary Devices that Helped Me Cut 90 pounds in 9 Months. She lives in Northeast Indiana but spends a lot of time fooling around at the intersection of math and metaphor, much to the amusement/irritation of her husband, Bob, and four kids.
