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Illustration: Ryan Inzana
Comedy writer Jen Spyra’s recent pregnancy cravings have mostly meant a return to childhood favorites — grilled cheese, mac and cheese, lots of milk — but she says her food choices have always been “depraved,” or maybe just innovative, like the salami-and-challah sandwiches she made as a kid. In addition to third-trimestering her way through a heat wave, Spyra (a former writer for the Onion and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert) is working on a screen adaptation of her own short story, “Big Time,” about a 1940s starlet who accidentally time-travels to the present. Her weekdays are spent at various cafés and coffee shops that serve as mobile offices — “I like working around other deadline-crunched souls,” she says — as she lets her crêpe cravings build for the weekends.
Monday, June 17
Breakfast is a SugarBee. Have you met my friend, the SugarBee? If not, please allow me to introduce you to this exciting new apple. According to CentralMarket.com, SugarBees have a “juicy, aromatic flesh that shears when bitten into with just the right amount of sweetness and acidity” —not unlike how I imagine it might taste to bite into David Beckham, a prospect that has occurred to me with some regularity after having randomly watched Beckham with my husband, Thomas, who, despite gentle prodding, is uninterested in acquiring any back tattoos. I also eat two Brazil nuts, three walnuts, and a fistful of prenatal vitamins. It’s a girl!
I’ve eaten an apple for breakfast every weekday for the past 11 years. I like apples fine, but we’re all adults here. They’re not what I’d be eating if I wasn’t trying to keep it tight. I’ve found that in order to indulge in the manner I require, I have to keep myself under lock and key during the week. Nun during the week; stripper nun on the weekends. Or, in the parlance of the young: “Goblin mode activated.”
A word about my goblin mode. There’s an incredible book about Ted Bundy called The Stranger Beside Me. It’s written by Ann Rule, a woman who befriended him when they both worked — this is amazing — at a crisis hotline center. Anyhoo: There’s a description in there about Bundy’s hunting method. The way the need would build, then the act, the mind-numbing satiation followed almost instantly by shame, and then a “cooling off” period where the desire slowly rebuilt. That’s exactly how it is with me and crêpes! When that little crêpe voice starts purring, it’s only a matter of time. I’m just grateful that the thing I need to do is eat Nutella crêpes on Saturday, instead of strangling a nurse and tossing her body in a creek.
Today isn’t Saturday, so I eat the second part of my breakfast (two hard-boiled eggs) from today’s “mobile office,” the New York Society Library. (To be clear: I eat the eggs outside. If you try to eat in there, they know, and they will find you.) I bounce between several approved mobile offices during the week: a mix of Upper West and Upper East Side coffee shops. I like working around other deadline-crunched souls. Right now, I’m finishing a script rewrite, and if I don’t finish it before we go to Maine on Thursday, I’ll creek-strangle myself.
At 12:15, I pop a Ricola en route to my secret job as the announcer for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, where I used to work as a writer. Hard candies and gummies help slick up your voice. I love representing Stephen and the show in this small way. And the money, the sweet beautiful money, means I get to focus on the writing jobs I want to do, like this screenplay, and my novel, and the short stories I’m cheating on the novel with.
Lunch is restrained. A plate of sautéed string beans and a sliced-up orange, followed by a bowl of pomegranate seeds, two Persian cucumbers with hummus and everything-bagel-flavored Greek-yogurt dip from Trader Joe’s, Carr’s whole-wheat crackers with sharp cheddar cheese and fig jam, and a couple glasses of 2 percent milk. I’ve been hitting the leche hard since I got knocked up.
Dinner is feeble. Thomas is at the gym now, and I’m still in my script hole, so I’m reduced to opening up the fridge and seeing what’s in there. It ain’t pretty. There’s a brick of vacuum-sealed venison and some underripe watermelon. I make it work and cap off the deer patty with some Justin’s Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups, a couple glasses of white gold, some cheddar, and then a mug of rooibos tea while I work.
I reflect with shame on my menu and my day. Why did you pick this week for your Diet, you moron? Jeremy O. Harris would have logged six work meetings at Crown Shy and a fucking Skims campaign by the time it took you to tell people about your stupid little apple!!!
I sigh, take the prenatal vitamins that I forgot, and chug some water. As my husband turns out the light, I wonder, Is there any way in hell I could get into Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi tomorrow?
Tuesday, June 18
It’s a Fuji for breakfast today, the poor man’s SugarBee. Those sweet, darling SugarBees are tantalizingly elusive … which, of course, only adds to their appeal. I eat my eggs and nut assortment and prenatal vitamins, then get burned on my first “office” choice. I walk to Tarallucci, a chic little Italian café, but reject it because they’re not using AC for some reason, just open windows and doors, and it’s already a scorcher. So I settle in at About Coffee. I’m there from ten to 1:30.
En route home for lunch, my husband and I rendezvous at Zingone Brothers, a gem of a grocery store a few blocks from About. He’s been working nearby, and he’s going to escort me home to carry my backpack. As I’ve gotten bigger, I’ve regrettably started injuring myself, and right now I’m walking around with an ankle brace, a hip brace, and a huge bandage around my right hand. I pick up some dried pineapple and overhear one of the employees reassuring a customer about a melon. Did I say I live on the Upper West Side?
Being third-trimester pregnant has really slowed me down, but there’s one thing I do at the speed of light now. My husband and I can enter our apartment at the same time, and before his keys have even hit the bar cart, I’m standing naked in front of the living-room AC unit, looking out over the city like fat Batman.
Lunch is the same as yesterday: green beans, fruits, dips, cheese, and crackers. Dinner promises more excitement.
I’m meeting my dear old Onion chums Django and Jermaine at Loring Place. I’ve brought a book to return to Django, the coffee-table-size Robert Blake memoir, Tales of a Rascal. (Blake was a child actor on The Little Rascals who almost certainly murdered his wife.) Django just handed it to me one day and said, “You need to read this.” It was so kind; I felt so seen. The book is like nothing else. I can’t recommend it enough.
We split everything, and it’s really good: zucchini fries (best part), charred broccoli, tomato pie, ricotta on toast, cornmeal-crusted skate wing and short rib. When the pizza comes, Django takes an amazing corner slice, and then Jermaine offers me the other corner slice that he could have simply taken for himself. It’s a small, gentlemanly act that reminds me he is a prince and Django is an animal.
When I get back to our building, I’m greeted by my favorite night doorman, Dishaun, and we discuss the new Planet of the Apes movie, which I have led him to believe I’m slightly more interested in than I am. Once inside, I eat a frozen chunk of chocolate babka from my Bat perch in front of the AC unit. Plus a couple spoonfuls of frozen salted-caramel sauce. The 2 percent flows like wine.
Wednesday, June 19
The morning is a Fuji-fueled blur. I finish the script from home and send it off to some trusted readers. I’m so dialed in as I finish the freaking thing that I have to remind myself to eat my eggs, nuts, and the rest of it, but I do. I’d prefer if my daughter had limbs and stuff.
At 1:30, I get a prenatal massage with Sara Lyon at Glow Birth & Body. She’s a Bay Area healer-witch, and she is incredible. You walk into her little studio and she gives you a snack: a dish with two Medjool dates, almonds, and some dark-chocolate nubs, and a glass of water. It’s very civilized. Then she gets you onto the table and artfully hurts you.
Feeling motherly and refreshed, I stick out my hand and get in a cab to the village for a donut date with my pal Suzy at Mah-Ze-Dahr. I’m traveling with my new buddy, Cup — a slime-green seasonal Starbucks plastic cup and straw that Thomas gave me as a gift after I asked him to buy it for me. It brings me a degree of pleasure that’s a little concerning, that calls into question “how I’m doing.” There’s just something about the neon-green and pink and blue blobs on it and the promise of the color-changing delights ahead that activates the part of my brain that Nickelodeon still owns. I sip iced rooibos tea from my new best bud as I call my brilliant friend Adam to needlessly caveat the script I just sent him.
I catch up with darling Suzy, swing by the Strand to pick up All Fours, the new Miranda July book, and then Thomas and I meet his brother Alex and his wife, Lillian, for dinner at Ippudo. I get the Karaka spicy ramen and add an egg, but kick myself for forgetting to sub in the wavy noodles. Lillian makes little origami chopstick stands out of everyone’s straw wrappers; we have a few laughs about Thomas’s origami-themed 12th-birthday party. It’s lovely.
It is only later, as we’re walking home from the subway, that I realize my cup is gone. I stop in the middle of the sidewalk, struck dumb with misery. Then Thomas puts his arm around me, and together, somehow, we make it back home.
Thursday, June 20
We’re going to Maine!!! Thomas insists on taking every stitch of luggage to the car, so all I have to carry is my sunglasses. I lie on the couch with the AC blasting, mouth full of Fuji, reading the last chapter of Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde. Delightful! The only thing weighing on me is losing my cup.
When Thomas returns, I tell him he really needs to look into getting himself a Thomas. I can’t recommend it enough!
On the road, we stop at Starbucks. Thomas gets a nitro cold brew and decides against a sandwich in favor of a PowerBar in the car, but as a white woman in her 30s, I am legally bound to order egg bites. How I love them! I select kale mushroom and throw in an iced Earl Grey tea. I’ll have to sip it out of a disposable plastic cup like a slob, but ah, well. My thoughts turn rueful. How I wish I still had …
… MY CUP!!! There it is, by the register! Thomas buys it for me, and my heart sings.
Back in the car, I’ve got my cup in one hand, egg bites in the other, 200 pounds of perfect man to my left, and we’re headed to MAINE during a heat dome, motherfuckers!! Bye-bye, sweltering city slaves!!! SUCK ON DEEZ OCEAN-CHILLED NEW ENGLAND NUTZZZ!!!!
Four minutes later, the egg bites are gone, and I must say: There is quite a bit of traffic on this extremely warm thoroughfare.
No matter. I’ve got our lunch all mapped out, and it’s a showstopper. We’re going to stop in Ogunquit and walk along one of the most scenic cliff paths in New England to Footbridge Lobster, a beloved local lobster shack!
The sun is shining. The mood is jolly. Thomas starts telling me about Willie Mays, the famous baseball player who died. He plays a song for me, an earwormy doo-wop ditty called “Say Hey.”
Normally, I’d go on autopilot for this. But I’m sipping ice-cold agua from the coolest cup in the land. I’m in a generous mood. So I start singing along. I even ask him to play the song again.
“Say who, say Willie / Say hey, say who? Swwiiiingin’ at the plate! Say hey, say who? Say, Willie!”
Ogunquit, here we come!!!
The mood in the car darkens noticeably in the moments after “we” miss the exit to Ogunquit. All of my goodwill toward Thomas for letting me lounge on the couch that morning, and for buying me a new cup, vaporizes. In fact, I want to impale his stupid fucking head on this cup. My fetus and I are starving, I’m battling a ferocious need to urinate, and 27 unconscionable minutes have been added to this trip.
Thomas suggests forgetting about Ogunquit, and instead “picking something up on the road,” such as at another, random-ass, unvetted lobster shack in the middle of fucking nowhere. I can’t even look at him. This man took my bathroom from me. He took my pleasant 15-minute cliff walk from me. He took my vetted, 4.8-star-rated lobster shack from me.
SCUTTLE OGUNQUIT?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
But it’s 4:37 p.m. Traffic has been shit, the day is gone, and our unborn daughter is starving.
So lunch happens quickly and quietly in a Kennebunk parking lot, like two GIs putting away a meal kit. The place was called Ocean Roll; the lobster roll (I get mine hot with butter, Thomas gets his cold with mayo) is actually pretty great, but we were still in the shadow of The Exit at this point, so ’tis best not to tarry.
Tissues restored, we gun it to Fielder’s Choice, a baseball-themed soft-serve ice-cream stand in Bath, Maine, that appears to have been designed by Thomas’s id. The whole menu is baseball-themed. Thomas gets the Papi, I get the Muddy Cleat, and it’s so big that it ends up being dinner. Dr. Jin (my wonderful OB), if you’re reading this, I’m sorry.
Friday, June 21
Day one in Maine. I eat my normal healthful slop while lying on the couch with my feet in Thomas’s lap as he sips cold brew and we watch another installment of Lawrence of Arabia. It’s raining lightly outside and he’s heating up a cranberry muffin from the general store in the oven. While I wait for script notes, I’ve got a short story on deck, a fun little thing about Satan that I’ve been antsy to dive back into. Life is groovy!
If I were you, right about now, I’d be like, Okay, bitch. You talked a good game about goblin mode and Ted Bundy, but all you do is eat apples and work. Time to back that shit up. I believe this will clarify matters.
After my morning writing session, it’s time for first lunch. This begins with a toasted cinnamon roll from the East Boothbay General Store. I slice it in half and slather it with Kerrygold salted butter. Anyone who’s seen me in action with butter knows it’s kind of weird. It’s just so much more butter than I’ve ever seen anyone else use. I also have rosemary crackers stacked alternately with thick slices of fried salami and gobs of pimento cheese. But sometimes, I leave off the dripping salami coin and just slather the pimento-cheese-loaded cracker with blueberry jam. Many glasses of COLD milk. This mini-meal is a dairy-forward flavor tsunami and leaves me feeling just a little bit sick. But it’s a sickness that settles the mind, a slow and steady Zamboni that smoothes over the mental static, leaving my brain a sparkling sheet of pure, white ice.
My body, however, is another story. My body is paying a toll. This little meal did things to me. For starters, getting up from the table is not fun. You don’t feel this way after you eat an orange. After an orange, you pirouette from your seat, twirling through the rest of your afternoon like a sun-dappled butterfly. Following my pimento rodeo, I hoist myself up like a grunting, peg-legged whore dismounting a trucker’s lap.
After a misty, moody ramble along some craggy Maine shoreline, real lunch occurs at 4:48 p.m. at Shannon’s Unshelled, my very favorite seafood shack. This is really why we’re in Maine. Yeah, we’re here to relax, bond, work, walk, read, all that stuff. But really, we’re here so Mommy can get her crab roll.
Maybe you hear “Maine” and you think lobster. Wake up, sheeple. It’s CRAB. Crab rolls are a TEE-RILLION times better than lobster rolls. I say this as a former lobster-roll fanatic. There is nothing more luscious than a pile of fresh, silky crab on a griddled bun, drenched in lemon juice and dipped liberally in hot, drawn butter. Lobster is always, even at its finest, a smidge chewy. You know it is. Crab is subtler and more luscious. Class dismissed.
So, yes, at Shannon’s, I order the crab roll and sluttily sub rings for fries. Thomas orders a lobster roll and fries. He’s wrong, but I believe he finds it more filling, which I have to respect. He is large. I add a basket of fried haddock to split with T. The haddock is the other reason we adore Shannon’s, and a strawberry lemonade for me and extra tartar sauce and drawn butter and malt vinegar. The Zamboni’s rolling over my mind chatter at warp speed, and I am at one with God and man.
On the way back, we stop for penuche fudge at this old-timey candy place, Orne’s. I ask the teen behind the counter what “penuche” means. “It’s a brown-sugar-based fudge,” she says. I nod thoughtfully.
I know what it is. I just wanted to hear her say it.
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