This is part nine in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here.

Once she got over the shock of the “I’m going vegan” announcement, Janet alternately interrogated (“And you really don’t miss cheese?”) and taunted. She seemed to love to eat, but she didn’t have a particularly healthy relationship with the food on her plate. Every few weeks she would announce—over a bowl of broth and a glass of water—that she was going on another diet. First it was the cabbage diet, then Weight Watchers, then starvation. She would give up in hunger after a few days of each and eventually cycle back through the list after several months.

She wasn’t supermodel skinny, but I thought she looked good. She wasn’t as thin as her daughter (and as she, presumably, once was), but who is after giving birth to five children? There was even a treadmill on the fourth floor, and it sat silent and unused while she fought her way through bowls of cabbage soup. But I was the one with the strange eating habits. Me, the crazy vegan.

In December holiday cookies began appearing around the house. A rare fit of motherly feeling and a promise to bake cookies with the twins got me an afternoon off. In the kitchen again the next afternoon I was trying to decipher a German newspaper when Janet came in to snack on the previous afternoon’s results. She picked up a butter cookie and took a big bite. “Ha ha ha! You can’t eat any of the Christmas cookies!” I have a vague memory of her holding a handful of cookies toward my face while doing a little hopping dance and chuckling. She took another handful and left the room. On the days when she wasn’t taunting me, she would ask me how it was I stayed so thin.