Edible Etiquette

She said would you like store-bought rugelah or my home made apple strudel? I said strudel to be polite although I wasn't particularly hungry. I know how much I love to share the bread that I bake. She cut a small piece and put it on a large white dinner plate. She mentioned that she used up some old filo dough pastry she had lying around in the fridge. Although she was fashionably thin she did not inhabit her body. She was a spindly woman; thin in a frightening way. I could not look at her arms, they were freckled broomsticks. She moved like a disembodied head hovering over a vacant brown dress slung from a wire hanger floating across the kitchen. I took a bite and it tasted like wet cardboard with cooked apples. I wanted to dispose of it but she was sitting there watching me take bites. I got the feeling that eating, for her, was a necessary evil so making a dessert out of stale pastry actually made perfect sense and maybe feeding someone else was a way to eat vicariously without ingesting any calories.