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roasts with calorie-laden gravy and egg noodles and tuna casseroles topped by a generous half-pound of sharp cheddar cheese.
    Ann had not lived with her parents in rural Pennsylvania since she was twenty-two years old, eighteen really, when she first left home for college. As a young teenager, Ann was a chubby, awkward girl with few friends and a mother whose idea of a proper weeknight dinner was meat loaf, baked potatoes, buttered green beans, buttered rolls, and a homemade dessert. The rib-sticking meals at the end of the day made sense for Ann’s father, who worked alongside his day laborers six days a week to squeeze a living from their dairy farm, but not for a girl who wanted to blend in with her thinner, urban-minded contemporaries. But when Ann complained about the amount of food on the table to her mother, nothing changed. Eileen had grown up in another generation, when food was sometimes hard to come by, when an abundant table was a blessing.
    So, the kitchen was the center of Eileen’s life. She spent most of the day there. And when Ann was home, she was tacitly expected to join her mother. It didn’t occur to Eileen, patient and chatty as she worked, that Ann might want to be doing something else—going to the movies, shopping, or gathering with girls at one another’s houses. No, Eileen and her daughter, side by side, scrubbed their seven-room farmhouse on Saturday mornings and the rest of the time hovered over the stove, making homemade jellies, pies, hearty beef stews, and starchy side dishes, sampling whatever they made.
    Ann continued to put on weight. By her sophomore year in high school, she was thirty pounds more than what the county doctor called ideal. When he put her on a diet, when her mother finally began to understand, it was too late. She had already been ostracized by her trimmer female classmates, and the boys had simply stopped looking at her. Because she was invisible at school, Ann turned to her mother, not only for baking tips and comfort but also for social interaction. Ann even went with her parents to the potluck dinners at the Grange, where, when other mothers lamented about their teenagers’ recalcitrant behavior, Eileen happily boasted about the close relationship she had with her daughter.
    Ann managed to shed several pounds before heading off to college on the East Coast. After being away from home cooking for nine months, she lost even more weight, gaining a sense of independence in its place. Until now, she had never been away from home for more than a weekend. By the time her parents picked her up in May, she was weighing what the doctor called “very close to normal.” Taken aback by her daughter’s diminished body, Eileen served Ann farmhand portions and encouraged her to snack between meals. But achingly aware of how difficult it was to lose weight, Ann pushed her plate aside, rebelling against her mother’s efforts to fatten her up, newly suspicious and disdainful of her mother’s controlling behavior. Ann and Eileen fought that summer. Sam often supported Ann, telling Eileen that she had to let go. But it was a women’s battle that he at times didn’t understand. By early August, both Ann and Eileen couldn’t wait for school to start again in September.
    In the tub, Ann parted the bubbles to look at her stomach. With the exception of three small fuzzy lightning stretch marks, it looked like something out of a teen magazine: smooth, flat, and toned. It had looked, more or less, this way since Ann was twenty, and it was not going to change. If Eileen wanted to cook, Ann couldn’t stop her. But she couldn’t make Ann eat. No one could. Again closing her eyes, Ann relaxed for another ten minutes before running the razor over her hairless legs and the bare pits of her arms.
    As soon as she had dried and moisturized, Ann wrapped her body in her robe and her head in a towel, and then sat in one of two bedroom reading chairs and flipped through Architectural Digest . She