Good in Bed

ONE

“Have you seen it?” asked Samantha.

I leaned close to my computer so my edit or wouldn’t hear me on a personal call.

“Seen what?”

“Oh, nothing. Never mind. We’ll talk when you get home.”

“Seen what?” I asked again.

“Nothing,” Samantha repeated.

“Samantha, you have never once called me in the middle of the day about nothing. Now come on. Spill.”

Samantha sighed. “Okay, but remember: Don’t shoot the messenger.”

Now I was getting worried.

“Moxie. The new issue. Cannie, you have to go get one right now.”

“Why? What’s up? Am I one of the Fashion Faux Pas?”

“Just go to the lobby and get it. I’ll hold.”

This was important. Samantha was, in addition to being my best friend, also an associate at Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick. Samantha put people on hold, or had her assistant tell them she was in a meeting. Samantha herself did not hold. “It’s a sign of weakness,” she’d told me. I felt a small twinge of anxiety work its way down my spine.

I took the elevator to the lobby of the Philadelphia Examiner, waved at the security guard, and walked to the small newsstand, where I found Moxie on the rack next to its sister publications, Cosmo and Glamour and Mademoiselle. It was hard to miss, what with the super-model in sequins beneath headlines blaring “Come Again: Multiple Orgasm Made Easy!” and “Ass-Tastic! Four Butt Blasters to Get your Rear in Gear!” After a quick minute of deliberation, I grabbed a small bag of chocolate M amp;M’s, paid the gum-chomping cashier, and went back upstairs.

Samantha was still holding. “Page 132,” she said.

I sat, eased a few M amp;M’s into my mouth, and flipped to page 132, which turned out to be “Good in Bed,” Moxie’s regular male-written feature designed to help the average reader understand what her boyfriend was up to… or wasn’t up to, as the case might be. At first my eyes wouldn’t make sense of the letters. Finally, they unscrambled. “Loving a Larger Woman,” said the headline, “By Bruce Guberman.” Bruce Guberman had been my boyfriend for just over three years, until we’d decided to take a break three months ago. And the Larger Woman, I could only assume, was me.

You know how in scary books a character will say, “I felt my heart stop?” Well, I did. Really. Then I felt it start to pound again, in my wrists, my throat, my fingertips. The hair at the back of my neck stood up. My hands felt icy. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears, as I read the first line of the article: “I’ll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.”

Samantha’s voice sounded like it was coming from far, far away. “Cannie? Cannie, are you there?”

I’ll kill him!” I choked.

“Take deep breaths,” Samantha counseled. “In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

Betsy, my editor, cast a puzzled look across the partition that separated our desks. “Are you all right?” she mouthed. I squeezed my eyes shut. My headset had somehow landed on the carpet. “Breathe!” I could hear Samantha say, her voice a tinny echo from the floor. I was wheezing, gasping. I could feel chocolate and bits of candy shell on my teeth. I could see the quote they’d lifted, in bold-faced pink letters that screamed out from the center of the page. “Loving a larger woman,” Bruce had written, “is an act of courage in our world.”

“I can’t believe this! I can’t believe he did this! I’ll kill him!”

By now Betsy had circled around to my desk and was trying to peer over my shoulder at the magazine in my lap, and Gabby, my evil coworker, was looking our way, her beady brown eyes squinting for signs of trouble, thick fingers poised over her keyboard so that she could instantly e-mail the bad news to her pals. I slammed the magazine closed. I took a successful deep breath, and waved Betsy back to her seat.

Samantha was waiting. “You didn’t know?”

“Didn’t know what? That he thought dating me was an act of courage?” I attempted a sardonic snort. “He should try being me.”

“So you didn’t know he got a job at Moxie.”

I flipped to the front, where Contributors were listed in thumbnail profiles beneath arty black-and-white head shots. And there was Bruce, with his shoulder-length hair blowing in what was assuredly artificial wind. He looked, I thought uncharitably, like Yanni. “ ‘Good in Bed’ columnist Bruce Guberman joins the staff of Moxie this month. A free-lance writer from New Jersey, Guberman is currently at work on his first novel.”

“His first novel?” I said. Well, shrieked, maybe. Heads turned. Over the partition, Betsy was looking worried again, and Gabby had started typing. “That lying sack of shit!”

“I didn’t know he was writing a novel,” said Samantha, no doubt desperate to change the subject.

“He can barely write a thank-you note,” I said, flipping back to page 132.

“I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser,” I read. “But when I met C., I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to live with.”

“I’ll KILL HIM!”

“So kill him already and shut up about it,” muttered Gabby, shoving her inch-thick glasses up her nose.

Betsy was on her feet again, and my hands were shaking, and suddenly somehow there were M amp;M’s all over the floor, crunching beneath the rollers of my chair.

“I gotta go,” I told Samantha, and hung up.

“I’m fine,” I said to Betsy. She gave me a worried look, then retreated.

It took me three tries to get Bruce’s number right, and when his voice mail calmly informed me that he wasn’t available to take my call, I lost my nerve, hung up, and called Samantha back.

“Good in bed, my ass,” I said. “I ought to call his editor. It’s false advertising. I mean, did they check his references? Nobody called me.”

“That’s the anger talking,” said Samantha. Ever since she started dating her yoga instructor, she’s become very philosophical.

“Chubby chaser?” I said. I could feel tears prickling behind my eyelids. “How could he do this to me?”

“Did you read the whole thing?”

“Just the first little bit.”

“Maybe you better not read any more.”

“It gets worse?”

Samantha sighed. “Do you really want to know?”

“No. Yes. No.” I waited. Samantha waited. “Yes. Tell me.”

Samantha sighed again. “He calls you Lewinsky-esque.”

“With regards to my body or my blow jobs?” I tried to laugh, but it came out as a strangled sob.

“And he goes on and on about your… let me find it. Your ‘amplitude.’ ”

“Oh, God.”

“He said you were succulent,” Samantha said helpfully. “And zaftig. That’s not a bad word, is it?”

“God, the whole time we went out, he never said anything…”

“You dumped him. He’s mad at you,” said Samantha.

“I didn’t dump him!” I cried. “We were just taking a break! And he agreed that it was a good idea!”

“Well, what else could he do?” asked Samantha. “You say, ‘I think we need some time apart,’ and he either agrees with you and walks away clinging to whatever shreds of dignity he’s got left, or begs you not to leave him, and looks pathetic. He chose the dignity cling.”

I ran my hands through my chin-length brown hair and tried to gauge the devastation. Who else had seen this? Who else knew that C. was me? Had he shown all his friends? Had my sister seen it? Had, God forbid, my mother?

“I gotta go,” I told Samantha again. I set down my headset and got to my feet, surveying the Philadelphia Examiner newsroom – dozens of mostly middle-aged, mostly white people, tapping away at their computers, or clustered around the television sets watching CNN.

“Does anybody know anything about getting a gun in this state?” I inquired of the room at large.

“We’re working on a series,” said Larry the city editor – a small, bearded, perplexed-looking man who took everything absolutely seriously. “But I think the laws are pretty lenient.”

“There’s a two-week waiting period,” piped up one of the sports reporters.

“That’s only if you’re under twenty-five,” added an assistant features editor.

“You’re thinking of rental cars,” said the sports guy scornfully.

“We’ll get back to you, Cannie,” said Larry. “Are you in a rush?”

“Kind of.” I sat down, then stood back up again. “ Pennsylvania has the death penalty, right?”

“We’re working on a series,” Larry said without smiling.

“Oh, never mind,” I said, and sat back down and called Samantha again.

“You know what? I’m not going to kill him. Death’s too good for him.”

“Whatever you want,” Samantha said loyally.

“Come with me tonight? We’ll ambush him in his parking lot.”

“And do what?”

“I’ll figure that out between now and then,” I said.

I had met Bruce Guberman at a party, in what felt like a scene from somebody else’s life. I’d never met a guy at a social gathering who’d been so taken with me that he actually asked me for a date on the spot. My typical m.o. is to wear down their resistence with my wit, my charm, and usually a home-cooked dinner starring kosher chicken with garlic and rosemary. Bruce did not require a chicken. Bruce was easy.

I was stationed in the corner of the living room, where I had a good view of the room, plus easy access to the hot artichoke dip. I was doing my best imitation of my mother’s life partner, Tanya, trying to eat an Alaskan king crab leg with her arm in a sling. So the first time I saw Bruce, I had one of my arms jammed against my chest, sling-style, and my mouth wide open, and my neck twisted at a particularly grotesque angle as I tried to suck the imaginary meat out of the imaginary claw. I was just getting to the part where I accidentally jammed the crab leg up my right nostril, and I think there might have been hot artichoke dip on my cheek, when Bruce walked up. He was tall, and tanned, with a goatee and a dirty-blond ponytail, and soft brown eyes.

“Um, excuse me,” he said, “are you okay?”

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Fine.”

“You just looked kind of…” His voice – a nice voice, if a little high – trailed off.

“Weird?”

“I saw somebody having a stroke once,” he told me. “It started off like that.”

By now my friend Brianna had collected herself. Wiping her eyes, she grabbed his hand. “Bruce, this is Cannie,” she said. “Cannie was just doing an imitation.”

“Oh,” said Bruce, and stood there, obviously feeling foolish.

“Not to worry,” I said. “It’s a good thing you stopped me. I was being unkind.”

“Oh,” said Bruce again.

I kept talking. “See, I’m trying to be nicer. It’s my New Year’s resolution.”

“It’s February,” he pointed out.

“I’m a slow starter.”

“Well,” he said, “at least you’re trying.” He smiled at me, and walked away.

I spent the rest of the party getting the scoop. He’d come with a guy Brianna knew from graduate school. The good news: He was a graduate student, which meant reasonably smart, and Jewish, just like me. He was twenty-seven. I was twenty-five. It fit. “He’s funny, too,” said Brianna, before delivering the bad news: Bruce had been working on his dissertation for three years, possibly longer, and he lived in central New Jersey, more than an hour away from us, picking up freelance writing work and teaching the occasional bunch of freshmen, subsisting on stipends, a small scholarship, and, mostly, his parents’ money.

“Geographically undesirable,” Brianna pronounced.

“Nice hands,” I countered. “Nice teeth.”

“He’s a vegetarian,” she said.

I winced. “For how long?”

“Since college.”

“Hmph. Well, maybe I can work with it.”

“He’s…” Brianna trailed off.

“On parole?” I joked. “Addicted to painkillers?”

“Kind of immature,” she finally said.

“He’s a guy,” I said, shrugging. “Aren’t they all?”

She laughed. “And he’s a good guy,” she said. “Talk to him. You’ll see.”

That whole night, I watched him, and I felt him watching me. But he didn’t say anything until after the party broke up, and I was walking home, feeling more than a little disappointed. It had been a while since I’d even seen someone who’d caught my fancy, and tall, nice hands, nice-white-teeth grad student Bruce appeared, at least from the outside, to be a possibility.

But when I heard footsteps behind me, I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking what every woman who lives in a city thinks when she hears quick footsteps coming up behind her and it’s after midnight and she’s between streetlights. I took a quick glance at my surroundings while fumbling for the Mace attached to my keychain. There was a streetlight on the corner, a car parked underneath. I figured I’d Mace whoever it was into temporary immobility, smash one of the car windows, hoping the alarm would go off, scream bloody murder, and run.

“Cannie?”

I whirled around. And there he was, smiling at me shyly. “Hey,” he said, laughing a little bit at my obvious fear. He walked me home. I gave him my number. He called me the next night, and we talked for three hours, about everything: college, parents, his dissertation, the future of newspapers. “I want to see you,” he told me at one in the morning, when I was thinking that if we kept talking I was going to be a wreck at work the next day. “So we’ll meet,” I said.

“No,” said Bruce. “Now.”

And two hours later, after a wrong turn coming off the Ben Franklin Bridge, he was at my door again: bigger than I’d remembered, somehow, in a plaid shirt and sweatpants, carrying a rolled-up sleeping bag that smelled like summer camp in one hand, smiling shyly. And that was that.

And now, more than three years after our first kiss, three months after our let’s-take-a-break talk, and four hours after I’d found out that he’d told the entire magazine-reading world that I was a Larger Woman, Bruce squinted at me across the parking lot in front of his apartment where he’d agreed to meet me. He was blinking double-time, the way he did when he was nervous. His arms were full of things. There was the blue plastic dog-food dish I’d kept in his apartment for my dog, Nifkin. There, in a red wooden frame, was the picture of us on top of a bluff at Block Island. There was a silver hoop earring that had been sitting on his night table for months. There were three socks, a half-empty bottle of Chanel. Tampons. A toothbrush. Three years’ worth of odds and ends, kicked under the bed, worked down into a crack in the couch. Evidently, Bruce saw our rendezvous as a chance to kill two birds with one stone – endure my wrath over the “Good in Bed” column and give me back my stuff. And it felt like being punched in the chest, looking at my girlie items all jumbled up in a cardboard Chivas box he’d probably picked up at the liquor store on his way home from work – the physical evidence that we were really, truly over.

“Cannie,” he said coolly, still squinching his eyes open and shut in a way I found particularly revolting.

“Bruce,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “How’s that novel coming? Will I be starring in that, too?”

He raised his eyebrow, but said nothing. “Remind me,” I said. “At what point in our relationship did I agree to let you share intimate details of our time together with a few million readers?”

Bruce shrugged. “We don’t have a relationship anymore.”

“We were taking a break,” I said.

Bruce gave me a small, condescending smile. “Come on, Cannie. We both know what that meant.”

“I meant what I said,” I said, glaring at him. “Which makes one of us, it seems.”

“Whatever,” said Bruce, attempting to shove the stuff into my arms. “I don’t know why you’re so upset. I didn’t say anything bad.” He straightened his shoulders. “I actually thought the column was pretty nice.”

For one of the few times in my adult life, I was literally speechless. “Are you high?” I asked. With Bruce, that was more than a rhetorical question.

“You called me fat in a magazine. You turned me into a joke. You don’t think you did anything wrong?”

“Face it, Cannie,” he said. “You are fat.” He bent his head. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love you.”

The box of tampons bounced off his forehead and spilled into the parking lot.

“Oh, that’s nice,” said Bruce.

“You absolute bastard.” I licked my lips, breathing hard. My hands were shaking. My aim was off. The picture glanced off his shoulder, then shattered on the ground. “I can’t believe I ever thought seriously for even one second about marrying you.”

Bruce shrugged, bending down, scooping feminine protection and shards of wood and glass into his hands and dumping them back into the box. Our picture he left lying there.

“This is the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me,” I said, through my tear-clogged throat. “I want you to know that.” But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true. In the grand, historical scheme of things, my father leaving us was doubtlessly worse. Which is one of the many things that sucked about my father – he forever robbed me of the possibility of telling another man, This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and meaning it.

Bruce shrugged again. “I don’t have to worry about how you feel anymore. You made that clear.” He straightened up. I hoped he’d be angry – passionate, even – but all I got was this maddening, patronizing calm. “You were the one who wanted this, remember?”

“I wanted a break. I wanted time to think about things. I should have just dumped you,” I said. “You’re…” And I stood, speechless again, thinking of the worst thing I could say to him, the word that would make him feel even a fraction as horrible and furious and ashamed as I did. “You’re small,” I finally said, imbuing that word with every hateful nuance I could muster, so that he’d know I meant small in spirit, and everywhere else, too.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at me. He just turned around and walked away.

Samantha had kept the car running. “Are you okay?” she asked as I slid into the passenger’s seat clutching the box to my chest. I nodded silently. Samantha probably thought I was ridiculous. But this wasn’t a situation I expected her to sympathize with. At five foot ten, with inky black hair, pale skin, and high, sculpted cheekbones, Samantha looks like a young Anjelica Huston. And she’s thin. Effortlessly, endlessly thin. Given a choice of any food in the world, she’d probably pick a perfect fresh peach and Rya crispbreads. If she wasn’t my best friend, I’d hate her, and even though she is my best friend, it’s sometimes hard not to be envious of someone who can take food or leave it, whereas I mostly take it, and then take hers, too, when she doesn’t want any more. The only problem her face and figure had ever caused her was too much male attention. I could never make her feel what it was like to live in a body like mine.

She glanced at me quickly. “So, um, I’m guessing that things with you two are over?”

“Good guess,” I said dully. My mouth tasted ashy, my skin, reflected in the passenger’s side window, looked pale and waxen. I stared into the cardboard box, at my earrings, my books, the tube of MAC lipstick that I thought I’d lost forever.

“You okay?” asked Samantha gently

“I’m fine.”

“Do you want to get a drink? Some dinner, maybe? Want to go see a movie?”

I held the box tighter and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see where we were, so I wouldn’t have to follow the car’s progress back down the roads that used to lead me to him. “I think I just want to go home.”

My answering machine was blinking triple-time when I got back to my apartment. I ignored it. I shucked off my work clothes, pulled on my overalls and a T-shirt, and padded, barefoot, into the kitchen. From the freezer I retrieved a canister of frozen Minute Maid lemonade. From the top shelf of the pantry I pulled down a pint of tequila. I dumped both in a mixing bowl, grabbed a spoon, took a deep breath, a big slurp, settled myself on my blue denim couch, and forced myself to start reading.

Loving a Larger Woman

by Bruce Guberman

I’ll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.

She was out on a bike ride, and I was home watching football, leafing through the magazines on her coffee table, when I found her Weight Watchers folder – a palm-sized folio with notations for what she’d eaten, and when, and what she planned to eat next, and whether she’d been drinking her eight glasses of water a day. There was her name. Her identification number. And her weight, which I am too much of a gentleman to reveal here. Suffice it to say that the number shocked me.

I knew that C. was a big girl. Certainly bigger than any of the women I’d seen on TV, bouncing in bathing suits or drifting, reedlike, through sitcoms and medical dramas. Definitely bigger than any of the women I’d ever dated before.

What, I thought scornfully. Both of them?

I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser. But when I met C., I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to live with.

Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome. Holding her felt like a safe haven. It felt like coming home.

But being out with her didn’t feel nearly as comfortable. Maybe it was the way I’d absorbed society’s expectations, its dictates of what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed to appear. More likely, it was the way she had. C. was a dedicated foot soldier in the body wars. At five foot ten inches, with a linebacker’s build and a weight that would have put her right at home on a pro football team’s roster, C. couldn’t make herself invisible.

But I know that if it were possible, if all the slouching and slumping and shapeless black jumpers could have erased her from the physical world, she would have gone in an instant. She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft.

As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world’s voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat.

And I knew it wasn’t paranoia. You hear, over and over, how fat is the last acceptable prejudice, that fat people are the only safe targets in our politically correct world. Date a queen-sized woman and you’ll find out how true it is. You’ll see the way people look at her, and look at you for being with her. You’ll try to buy her lingerie for Valentine’s Day and realize the sizes stop before she starts. Every time you go out to eat you’ll watch her agonize, balancing what she wants against what she’ll let herself have, what she’ll let herself have against what she’ll be seen eating in public.

And what she’ll let herself say.

I remember when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and C., a newspaper reporter, wrote a passionate defense of the White House intern who’d been betrayed by Linda Tripp in Washington, and betrayed even worse by her friends in Beverly Hills, who were busily selling their high-school memories of Monica to Inside Edition and People magazine. After her article was printed, C. got lots of hate mail, including one letter from a guy who began: “I can tell by what you wrote that you are overweight and that nobody loves you.” And it was that letter – that word – that bothered her more than anything else anyone said. It seemed that if it were true – the “overweight” part – then the “nobody loves you” part would have to be true as well. As if being Lewinsky-esque was worse than being a betrayer, or even someone who was dumb. As if being fat were somehow a crime.

Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it’s even an act of futility. Because, in loving C., I knew I was loving someone who didn’t believe that she herself was worthy of anyone’s love.

And now that it’s over, I don’t know where to direct my anger and my sorrow. At a world that made her feel the way she did about her body – no, herself – and whether she was desirable. At C., for not being strong enough to overcome what the world told her. Or at myself, for not loving C. enough to make her believe in herself.

I wept straight through Celebrity Weddings, slumped on the floor in front of the couch, tears rolling off my chin and soaking my shirt as one tissue-thin supermodel after another said “I do.” I cried for Bruce, who had understood me far more than I’d given him credit for and maybe had loved me more than I’d deserved. He could have been everything I’d wanted, everything I’d hoped for. He could have been my husband. And I’d chucked it.

And I’d lost him forever. Him and his family – one of the things I’d loved best about Bruce. His parents were what June and Ward would have been if they were Jewish and living in New Jersey in the nineties. His father, who had perpetually whiskered cheeks and eyes as kind as Bruce’s, was a dermatologist. His family was his delight. I don’t know how else to say it, or how much it astonished me. Given my experience with my own dad, watching Bernard Guberman was like looking at an alien from Mars. He actually likes his child! I would marvel. He really wants to be with him! He remembers things about Bruce’s life! That Bernard Guberman seemed to like me, too, might have had less to do with his feelings about me as a person and more to do with my being a), Jewish, and hence a marriage prospect; b), gainfully employed, and thus not an overt gold digger; and c), a source of happiness for his son. But I didn’t care why he was so nice to me. I just basked in his kindness whenever I could.

Bruce’s mother, Audrey, had been the tiniest bit intimdating, with manicured fingernails painted whatever shade I’d be reading about in Vogue the next month, and perfectly styled hair, and a house full of glass and wall-to-wall white carpeting and seven bathrooms, each kept immaculately clean. The Ever-Tasteful Audrey, I called her to my friends. But once you got past the manicure, Audrey was nice, too. She’d been trained as a teacher, but by the time I met Audrey her working-for-a-living days were long past and she was a full-time wife, mother, and volunteer – the perenniel PTA mom, Cub Scout leader, and Hadassah president, the one who could always be counted on to organize the synagogue’s annual food drive or the Sisterhood’s winter ball.

The downside of parents like that, I used to think, was that it killed your ambition. With my divorced parents and my college debts I was always scrambling for the next rung on the ladder, the next job, the next freelance assignment; for more money, more recognition, for fame, insofar as you could be famous when your job was telling other people’s stories. When I started at a small newspaper in the middle of nowhere, covering car crashes and sewage board meetings, I was desperate to get to a bigger one, and when I finally got to a bigger one, I wasn’t there two weeks before I was already plotting how to move on.

Bruce had been content to drift through graduate school, picking up a teaching assignment here, a freelance writing gig there, making approximately half of what I did, letting his parents pick up the tab for his car insurance (and his car, for that matter), and “help” with his rent and subsidize his lifestyle with $100 handouts every time he saw them, plus jaw-droppingly generous checks on birthdays, Chanukah, and sometimes just because. “Slow down,” he’d tell me, when I’d slip out of bed early to work on a short story, or go into work on a Saturday to send out query letters to magazine editors in New York. “You need to enjoy life more, Cannie.”

I thought sometimes that he liked to imagine himself as one of the lead characters in an early Springsteen song – some furious, passionate nineteen-year-old romantic, raging against the world at large and his father in particular, looking for one girl to save him. The trouble was, Bruce’s parents had given him nothing to rebel against – no numbing factory job, no stern, judgmental patriarch, certainly no poverty. And a Springsteen song lasted only three minutes, including chorus and theme and thundering guitar-charged climax, and never took into account the dirty dishes, the unwashed laundry and unmade bed, the thousand tiny acts of consideration and goodwill that actually maintaining a relationship called for. My Bruce preferred to drift through life, lingering over the Sunday paper, smoking high-quality dope, dreaming of bigger papers and better assignments without doing much to get them. Once, early in our relationship, he’d sent his clips to the Examiner, and gotten a curt “try us in five years” postcard in response. He’d shoved the letter in a shoebox, and we’d never discussed it again.

But he was happy. “Head’s all empty, I don’t care,” he’d sing to me, quoting the Grateful Dead, and I’d force a smile, thinking that my head was never empty and that if it ever was, you could be darn sure I’d care.

And what had all my hustle gotten me, I mused, now slurping the boozy slush straight from the bowl. What did it matter. He didn’t love me anymore.

I woke up after midnight, drooling on the couch. There was a pounding in my head. Then I realized it was someone pounding at the door.

“Cannie?

I sat up, taking a moment to locate my hands and my feet.

“Cannie, open this door right now. I’m worried about you.”

My mother. Please God no.

“Cannie!”

I curled tight onto the couch, remembering that she’d called me in the morning, a million years ago, to tell me she’d be in town that night for Gay Bingo, and that she and Tanya would stop by when it was over. I got to my feet, flicking off the halogen lamp as quietly as I could, which wasn’t very quietly, considering that I managed to knock the lamp over in the process. Nifkin howled and scrambled onto the armchair, glaring at me reproachfully. My mother started pounding again.

“Cannie!”

“Go ’way,” I called weakly. “I’m… naked.”

“Oh, you are not! You’re wearing your overalls, and you’re drinking tequila, and you’re watching The Sound of Music.”

All of which was true. What can I say? I like musicals. I especially like The Sound of Music – particularly the scene where Maria gathers the motherless Von Trapp brood onto her bed during the thunderstorm and sings “My Favorite Things.” It looked so cozy, so safe – the way my own family had been, for a minute, once upon a time, a long time ago.

I heard a muttered consultation outside my door – my mother’s voice, then another, in a lower register, like Marlboro smoke filtered through gravel. Tanya. She of the sling and the crab leg.

“Cannie, open up!”

I struggled back into a sitting position and heaved myself into the bathroom, where I flicked on the light and stared at myself, reviewing the situation, and my appearance. Tear-streaked face, check. Hair, light brown with streaks of copper, cut in a basic bob and shoved behind my ears, also present. No makeup. Hint – well, actuality – of a double chin. Full cheeks, round, sloping shoulders, double D-cup breasts, fat fingers, thick hips, big ass, thighs solidly muscled beneath a quivering blanket of lard. My eyes looked especially small, like they were trying to hide in the flesh of my face, and there was something avid and hungry and desperate about them. Eyes exactly the color of the ocean in the Menemsha harbor in Martha’s Vineyard, a beautiful grapey green. My best feature, I thought ruefully. Pretty green eyes and a wry, cockeyed smile. “Such a pretty face,” my grandmother would say, cupping my chin in her hand, then shaking her head, not even bothering to say the rest.

So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliché, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed, and there were two determined lesbians banging on my door. My best option, I decided, was hiding in the closet and feigning death.

“I’ve got a key,” my mother threatened.

I wrested the tequila bowl away from Nifkin. “Hang on,” I yelled. I picked up the lamp and opened the door a crack. My mother and Tanya stared at me, wearing identical L.L. Bean hooded sweatshirts and expressions of concern.

“Look,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m just sleepy, so I’m going to sleep. We can talk about this tomorrow.”

“Look, we saw the Moxie article,” said my mother. “Lucy brought it over.”

Thank you, Lucy, I thought. “I’m fine,” I said again. “Fine, fine, fine, fine.”

My mother, clutching her bingo dauber, looked skeptical. Tanya, as usual, just looked like she wanted a cigarette, and a drink, and for me and my siblings never to have been born, so that she could have my mother all to herself and they could relocate to a commune in Northampton.

“You’ll call me tomorrow?” my mother asked.

“I’ll call,” I said, and closed the door.

My bed looked like an oasis in the desert, like a sandbar in the stormy sea. I lurched toward it, flung myself down, on my back, my arms and legs splayed out, like a size-sixteen starfish stapled to the comforter. I loved my bed – the pretty light blue down comforter, the soft pink sheets, the pile of pillows, each in a bright slipcover – one purple, one orange, one pale yellow, and one cream. I loved the Laura Ashley dust ruffle and the red wool blanket that I’d had since I was a girl. Bed, I thought, was about the only thing I had going for me right now, as Nifkin bounded up and joined me, and I stared at the ceiling, which was spinning in a most alarming way.

I wished I’d never told Bruce I wanted a break. I wished I’d never met him. I wished that I’d kept running that night, just kept running and never looked back.

I wished I wasn’t a reporter. I wished that my job was baking muffins in a muffin shop, where all I’d have to do was crack eggs and measure flour and make change, and nobody could abuse me, and where they’d even expect me to be fat. Every flab roll and cellulite crinkle would serve as testimony to the excellence of my baked goods.

I wished I could trade places with the guy who wore the “FRESH SUSHI” sandwich board and walked up and down Pine Street at lunch hour, handing out sushi coupons for World of Wasabi. I wished I could be anonymous and invisible. Maybe dead.

I pictured myself lying in the bathtub, taping a note to the mirror, taking a razor blade to my wrists. Then I pictured Nifkin, whining and looking puzzled, scraping his nails against the rim of the bathtub and wondering why I wasn’t getting up. And I pictured my mother having to go through my things and finding the somewhat battered copy of Best of Penthouse Letters in my top dresser drawer, plus the pink fur-lined handcuffs Bruce had given me for Valentine’s Day. Finally, I pictured the paramedics trying to maneuver my dead, wet body down three flights of stairs. “We’ve got a big one here,” I imagined one of them saying.

Okay. So suicide was out, I thought, rolling myself into the comforter and arranging the orange pillows under my head. The muffin shop/sandwich board scenario, while tempting, was probably not going to happen. I couldn’t see how to spin it in the alumni magazine. Princeton graduates who stepped off the fast track tended to own the muffin shops, which they would then turn into a chain of successful muffin shops, which would then go public and make millions. And the muffin shops would only be a diversion for a few years, something to do while raising their kids, who would invariably appear in the alumni magazine clad in eensy-beansy black-and-orange outfits with “Class of 2012!” written on their precocious little chests.

What I wanted, I thought, pressing my pillow hard against my face, was to be a girl again. To be on my bed in the house I’d grown up in, tucked underneath the brown and red paisley comforter, reading even though it was past my bedtime, hearing the door open and my father walk inside, feel him standing over me silently, feeling the weight of his pride and his love like it was a tangible thing, like warm water. I wanted him to put his hand on my head the way he had then, to hear the smile in his voice when he’d say, “Still reading, Cannie?” To be little, and loved. And thin. I wanted that.

I rolled over, groped for my nightstand, grabbed a pen and paper. Lose weight, I wrote, then stopped and thought. Find new boyfriend, I added. Sell screenplay. Buy large house with garden and fenced yard. Find mother more acceptable girlfriend. Somewhere between writing Get and maintain stylish haircut and thinking Make Bruce sorry, I finally fell asleep.

Good in bed. Ha! He had a lot of nerve, putting his name on a column about sexual expertise, given how few people he’d even been with, and how little he’d known before he’d met me.

I had slept with four people – three long-term boyfriends and one ill-considered freshman year fling – when Bruce and I hooked up, and I’d fooled around extensively with another half-dozen. I might’ve been a big girl, but I’d been reading Cosmopolitan since I was thirteen, and I knew my way around the various pieces of equipment. At least I’d never had any complaints.

So I was experienced. And Bruce… wasn’t. He’d had a few harsh turn-downs in high school, when he’d had really bad skin, and before he’d discovered that pot and a ponytail could reliably attract a certain kind of girl.

When he’d shown up that first night, with his sleeping bag and his plaid shirt, he wasn’t a virgin, but he’d never been in a real relationship, and he’d certainly never been in love. So he was looking for his lady fair, and I, while not averse to stumbling into Mr. Right, was mostly looking for… well, call it affection, attention. Actually, call it sex.

We started off on the couch, sitting side by side. I reached for his hand. It was ice-cold and clammy. And when I casually slung an arm over his shoulder, then eased my thigh against his, I could feel him shaking. Which touched me. I wanted to be gentle with him, I wanted to be kind. I took both of his hands in mine and tugged him off the couch. “Let’s lie down,” I said.

We walked to my bedroom hand in hand, and he lay on my futon, flat on his back, his eyes wide open and gleaming in the dark, looking a bit like a man in a dentist’s chair. I propped myself up on my elbow and let the loose ends of my hair trail gently across his cheek. When I kissed the side of his neck he gasped as if I’d burned him, and when I eased one hand inside his shirt and gently tugged at the hair on his chest, he sighed, “Ah, Cannie,” in the tenderest voice I’d ever heard.

But his kisses were horrible, slobbery things, all bludgeoning tongue and lips that felt as if they were somehow collapsing when they met mine, so that I was left with a choice between teeth and mustache. His hands were stiff and clumsy. “Lie still,” I whispered.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered back unhappily. “I’m all wrong, aren’t I?”

“Shh,” I breathed, my lips against his neck once more, the tender skin right where his beard ended. I slid one hand down his chest, lightly feathered it over his crotch. Nothing doing. I pressed my breasts into his side, kissed his forehead, his eyelids, the tip of his nose, and tried again. Still nothing. Well, this was curious. I decided to show him a trick, to teach him how to make me happy whether he could get hard or not. He moved me enormously, this six-foot-tall guy with a ponytail and a look on his face like I might electrocute him instead of… this. I wrapped both of my legs around one of his, took his hand, and slid it into my panties. His eyes met mine and he smiled when he felt how wet I was. I put his fingers where I needed them, with my hand over his, pressing his fingers against myself, showing him what to do, and I moved against him, letting him feel me sweat and breathe hard and moan when I came. And then I pressed my face into his neck again, and moved my lips up to his ear. “Thank you,” I whispered. I tasted salt. Sweat? Tears, maybe? But it was dark, and I didn’t look.

We fell asleep in that position: me, wearing just a T-shirt and panties, wrapped around him; him, with only his shirt unbuttoned, only halfway, still in underwear, sweatpants, socks. And when the light crept through my windows, when we opened our eyes and looked at each other, it felt like we had known each other much longer than just one night. As if we could never have been strangers. “Good morning,” I whispered.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

I decided that I could get used to hearing that in the mornings. Bruce decided that he was in love. We were together for the next three years, and we learned things with each other. Eventually, he told me the whole story, about his limited experience, about always being either drunk or stoned and always very shy, about how he’d been turned down a few times his first year in college and just decided to be patient. “I knew I’d meet the right girl someday,” he said, smiling at me, cradling me close. We figured it out – the things he liked, the things I liked, the things we both liked. Some of it was straightforward. Some of it would have been raunchy enough to raise eyebrows even in Moxie, where they ran regular features on new “sizzling sexy secrets!”

But the thing that galled me, that chewed at my heart as I tossed and turned, feeling clammy and cotton-mouthed from the previous night’s tequila binge, was the column’s title. “Good in Bed.” It was a lie. It wasn’t that he’d been some kind of sexual savant, a boy wonder under the sheets… it was that we had loved each other, once. We’d been good in bed together.

TWO

I woke up on Saturday morning to the sound of the telephone. Three rings, th en silence. A ten-second pause, then three more rings, followed by more silence. My mother was not a fan of answering machines, so if she either knew or believed that I was home, she’d just keep calling until I picked up. Resistance was futile.

“This is so obnoxious,” I said, in lieu of “hello.”

“This would be your mom,” said my mother.

“I’m shocked. Could you call me back later? Please? It’s very early. I’m very tired.”

“Oh, quit whining,” she said briskly. “You’re just hung over. Pick me up in an hour. We’ll go to the cooking demonstration at Reading Terminal.”

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.” Knowing, even as I said it, that I could protest and complain and come up with seventeen different excuses, and, come noon, I’d still be in the Reading Terminal, cringing as my mother offered a high-volume play-by-play critique of the hapless chef’s menu selection and cooking skills.

“Drink some water. Take some aspirin,” she said. “I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Ma, please…”

“I’m assuming you read Bruce’s article,” she said. My mother is not big on elaborate transitions.

“Yeah,” I said, knowing, without having to ask, that she had, too. My sister Lucy, a charter subscriber to Moxie and eager reader of any and all things related to femininity, still had her copy delivered to our house. After last night’s door-pounding debacle, I could only assume that she’d pointed it out to my mother… or that Bruce had. The very thought of that conversation – “I’m just calling to let you know that I had an article published this month and I think Cannie’s pretty upset by it” – made me want to hide under the bed. If I could even fit. I didn’t want to walk around in a world where Moxie was on the newsstands, in mailboxes. I felt scalded by shame, like I was wearing a gigantic crimson C., like everyone who saw me would know that I was the girl from “Good in Bed,” and that I was fat and that I’d dumped some guy who’d tried to understand and love me.

“Well, I know you’re upset”

“I’m not upset,” I snapped. “I’m fine.”

“Oh,” she said. This, obviously, was not the response she was expecting. “I thought it was kind of crummy of him.”

“He’s a crummy guy,” I said.

“He wasn’t a crummy guy. That’s why it was so surprising.” I slumped against my pillows. My head hurt. “Are we going to debate his crumminess now?”

“Maybe later,” said my mother. “I’ll see you soon.”

There are two kinds of houses in the neighborhood where I grew up – the ones where the parents stayed married, and the ones where they didn’t.

Given only a cursory glance, both kinds of houses look the same – big, rambling, four- and five-bedroom colonials set well back from the sidewalk-less streets, each on an acre of land. Most are painted conservative colors, with contrasting shutters and trim – a slate-gray house with blue shutters, for example, or a pale beige house with a red door. Most have long driveways, done in gravel, and many have in-ground pools out back.

But look closer – or, better yet, stay a while – and you’ll start to see the difference.

The divorce houses are the ones where the Chem-Lawn truck doesn’t stop anymore, the ones the plowing guy drives past on the mornings after winter storms. Watch, and you’ll see either a procession of sullen-faced teenagers, or sometimes even the lady of the house, emerge to do the raking, mowing, shoveling, trimming, themselves. They’re the houses where Mom’s Camry or Accord or minivan doesn’t get replaced every year, but just keeps getting older and older, and where the second car, if there is one, is more likely some fourth-hand piece of automotive detritus purchased from the Examiner’s classified ads than the time-honored stripped-down but brand-new Honda Civic or, if the kid’s really lucky, Dad’s cast-off midlife crisis sports car.

There’s no fancy landscaping, no big pool parties in the summer, no construction crews making a racket at seven A.M. adding on that new home office or master bedroom suite. The paint job lasts for four or five years instead of two or three, and is more than a little bit flaky by the time it gets redone.

But mostly, you could tell on Saturday mornings, when what my friends and I dubbed the Daddy Parade began. At about ten or eleven o’clock every other Saturday, the driveways up and down our street, and the neighboring streets, would fill with the cars of the men who used to live in these big four- and five-bedroom houses. One by one, they’d exit their cars, trudge up the walkways, ring the bells of the homes where they used to sleep, and collect their kids for the weekends. The days, my friends would tell me, would be full of every kind of extravagance – shopping excursions, trips to the mall, the zoo, the circus, lunch out, dinner out, a movie before and after. Anything to keep the time passing, to fill the dead minutes between children and parents who suddenly had very little to say to each other once they’d got done either mouthing pleasantries (in the cordial no-fault cases) or spitting vitriol (in the contested cases, where the parents paraded each other’s shortcomings and infidelities in front of a judge – and, by extension, in front of a gossipy public, and, eventually, their children as well).

My friends all knew the drill. My brother and sister and I did it a few times in the early days of my parents’ split, before my father announced that he wanted to be less like a father, more like an uncle, and that our weekend visits didn’t fit in with his vision. Saturday nights would be spent on a pullout bed in his condo across town – a small, dusty space full of too much expensive stereo equipment and top-of-the-line TVs, and either too many pictures of the children, or, eventually, none at all. At my dad’s place Lucy and I would huddle on the thin mattress of the pullout couch, feeling the metal frame poke us all night long, while Josh would sleep beside us in a sleeping bag on the floor. Meals would be taken in restaurants exclusively. Few of the newly single dads had the skills to cook, or the desire to learn. Most of them, it turned out, were just waiting for a replacement wife or girlfriend to come along, to stock the refrigerators and have dinner waiting every night.

And on Sunday morning, in time for church or Hebrew school, the parade would begin again, only in reverse: the cars pulling up and disgorging the kids, who’d hustle up the driveway trying not to run or look too relieved, and the fathers trying not to drive away too fast, trying to remember that this was supposed to be a pleasure, not a duty. For two years, three years, four years they’d come. Then they’d vanish – remarried, mostly, or moved away.

It wasn’t that bad, really – not third-world bad, not Appalachia bad. There was no physical pain, no real hunger. Even with the drop in the standard of living, the suburbs of Philadelphia were still a damn sight better than the way most people in the world – or the country – lived. Even if our cars were older and our vacations less lavish and our in-ground swimming pools less than pristine, we still had cars, and vacations, pools in the backyards, and roofs over our heads.

And the mothers and children learned how to lean on each other. Divorce taught us how to deal with stuff, whether it was reduced circumstances, or what to say when the Girl Scout leader asked what you’d like to bring to the Father/Daughter banquet. (“A father,” was the preferred answer.) My girlfriends and I learned to be flippant and tough, a posse of junior cynics, all before we hit sixteen.

I always wondered, though, what the fathers felt as they drove up the street they used to drive down every night, and whether they really saw their former houses, whether they noticed how things got frayed and flaky around the edges now that they were gone. I wondered it again as I pulled up to the house I’d grown up in. It was, I noticed, looking even more Joad-like than usual. Neither my mother nor the dread life partner, Tanya, was much into yard work, and so the lawn was littered with drifts of dead brown leaves. The gravel on the driveway was as thin as an old man’s hair combed across an age-spotted scalp, and as I parked I could make out the faint glitter of old metal from behind the little toolshed. We used to park our bikes in there. Tanya had “cleaned” it by dragging all the old bikes, from tricycles to discarded ten-speeds, out behind the shed, and leaving them there to rust. “Think of it as found art,” my mother had urged us when Josh complained that the bike pile made us look like trailer trash. I wonder if my father ever drove by, if he knew about my mother and her new situation, if he thought about us at all, or whether he was content to have his three children out there in the world, all grown up, and strangers.

My mother was waiting in the driveway. Like me, she’s tall, and heavy (a Larger Woman, I heard Bruce’s voice taunt in my head). But whereas I am an hourglass (an extremely full hourglass), my mother is shaped like an apple – a round midsection on toned and muscular legs. A former high-school standout in tennis, basketball, and field hockey, and the current star of the Switch Hitters (her inevitable lesbian softball team), Ann Goldblum Shapiro has retained both the carriage and the sensibilities of a onetime jock, a woman who believes there’s no problem that can’t be solved, and no situation that can’t be improved, by a good brisk walk or a few laps in the pool.

She wears her hair short and lets it stay gray and dresses in comfortable clothes in shades of gray and beige and pale pink. Her eyes are the same green as mine, but wider and less anxious, and she smiles a lot. She’s the kind of person who’s constantly being approached by strangers – for directions, for advice, for honest assessments of whether bathing suits made the would-be wearer’s butt look big in the communal dressing room at Loehmann’s.

Today, she was dressed for our outing in wide-legged pale pink sweatpants, a blue turtleneck sweater, one of her fourteen pairs of activity-specific sneakers, and a windbreaker accented with a small triangular, rainbow-colored pin. She wore no makeup – she never wore it – and her hair was in its usual air-dried spikes. She looked happy as she climbed into the car. For her, the free cooking demonstrations at Philadelphia ’s premiere downtown food market cum meeting place were better than standup comedy. They weren’t intended to be participatory, but nobody bothered to tell her that.

“Subtle,” I said, pointing at her pin.

“You like?” she asked, oblivious. “Tanya and I picked them up in New Hope last weekend.”

“Did you get me one?” I asked.

“No,” she said, refusing to take the bait. “We got you this.” She handed me a small rectangle wrapped in purple tissue paper. I unwrapped it at a red light, to find a magnet depicting a cartoon girl with squiggly curled hair and glasses. “I’m not gay, but my mother is,” it read. Perfect.

I fiddled with the radio and kept quiet during the half hour drive back to town. My mother sat quietly beside me, obviously waiting for me to bring up Bruce’s latest opus. On the way into the Terminal, in between the vegetable vendor and the fresh fish counter, I finally did.

“Good in bed,” I snorted. “Hah!”

My mother gave me a sideways glance. “So I take it he wasn’t?”

“I don’t want to be having this conversation with you,” I grumbled, as we worked our way past the bakeries and the Thai and Mexican food stalls and found seats in front of the demonstration kitchen. The chef – a semiregular I remembered from the Southern Favorites lesson three weeks before – blanched as my mother sat down.

She shrugged at me, and stared at the blackboard. This week it was American Classics with Five Easy Ingredients. The chef launched into his spiel. One of his assistants – a gangly, pimply kid from The Restaurant School – started hacking away at a head of cabbage. “He’s going to cut his finger off,” my mother predicted.

“Shh!” I said, as the front-row regulars – mostly senior citizens who took these sessions way too seriously – scowled at us.

“Well, he is,” said my mother. “He’s holding the knife all wrong. Now, getting back to Bruce…”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. The chef melted a gigantic glob of butter in a pan. Then he added bacon. My mother gasped as if she’d witnessed a beheading, and raised her hand.

“Is there a heart-healthy modification for this recipe?” she inquired. The chef sighed and started talking about olive oil. My mother returned her attention to me. “Forget Bruce,” she said. “You can do better.”

“Mother!”

“Shh!” hissed the front-row foodies. My mother shook her head. “I can’t believe this.”

“What?”

“Would you look at the size of that pan? That pan’s not big enough.” Sure enough, the chef-in-training was cramming way too much imperfectly chopped cabbage into a shallow frying pan. My mother raised her hand. I yanked it down.

“Just let it go.”

“How’s he going to learn anything if nobody tells him when he’s making a mistake?” she complained, squinting at the stage. “That’s right,” agreed the woman sitting next to her.

“And if he’s going to dredge the chicken in that flour,” my mother continued, “I really think he needs to season it first.”

“You ever try cayenne pepper?” asked an elderly man in the row ahead. “Not too much, you understand, but just a pinch gives it a really nice flavor.”

“Thyme’s nice, too,” said my mother.

“Okay, Julia Child.” I closed my eyes, slumping lower in my folding chair as the chef moved on to candied sweet potatoes and apple fritters, and my mother continued to quiz him about substitutions, modifications, techniques that she’d learned in her years as a homemaker, while offering running commentary to the bemusement of the people sitting near her and the fury of the entire front row.

Later, over cappuccinos and hot buttered pretzels from the Amish pretzel stand, she gave me the speech I was sure she’d been preparing since last night. “I know your feelings are hurt right now,” she began. “But there are a lot of guys out there.”

“Yeah, right,” I muttered, keeping my eyes on my cup.

“Women, too,” my mother continued helpfully.

“Ma, how many times do I have to tell you? I’m not a lesbian! I’m not interested.”

She shook her head in mock sadness. “I had such high hopes for you,” she fake-sighed, and pointed toward one of the fish stalls, where pike and carp were stacked on top of each other, open-mouthed and googly-eyed, their scales gleaming silver under the lights. “This is an object lesson,” she said.

“This is a fish stall,” I corrected.

“This is telling you that there are plenty of fish in the sea,” she said. She walked over and tapped one fingernail on the glass case. I followed her reluctantly. “You see that?” she said. “Think of each one of those fish as a single guy.”

I stared at the fish. The fish, stacked six high on the crushed ice, seemed to gape back. “They have better manners,” I observed. “Some of them are probably better conversationalists, too.”

“You want fish?” asked a short Asian woman in a floor-length rubber apron. She had a filleting knife in one hand. I thought, briefly, about asking to borrow it, and what it would feel like to gut Bruce. “Good fish,” she urged.

“No thanks,” I said. My mother led me back to the table.

“You shouldn’t be so upset,” she said. “That article will be lining birdcages by next month”

“What an uplifting thought to share with a journalist,” I said.

“Don’t be sarcastic,” she said.

“I don’t have any other way to be.” I sighed.

We sat down again. My mother picked up her coffee cup. “Is it because he got a job at a magazine?” she ventured.

I took a deep breath. “Maybe,” I acknowledged. And it was true, seeing Bruce’s star rise while mine just stayed in place would have hurt even if his first story hadn’t been about me.

“You’re doing fine,” said my mother. “Your day will come.”

“What if it doesn’t?” I demanded. “What if I never get another job, or another boyfriend”

My mother waved her hand dismissively, as if this was too silly to even consider.

“But what if I don’t?” I asked raggedly. “He’s got this column, he’s writing a novel”

“He says he’s writing a novel,” said my mother. “Doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“I’m never going to meet anyone else,” I said flatly.

My mother sighed. “You know, I think some of this is my fault,” she finally said.

That got my attention.

“When your father used to say things…”

This was definitely a turn I didn’t want the conversation to take. “Mom…”

“No, no, Cannie, let me finish.” She took a deep breath. “He was awful,” she said. “Mean and awful, and I let him get away with way too much, and I let it go on for too long.”

“Water under the bridge,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” said my mother. I had heard her say this before, of course, but it hurt every time, because every time it made me remember just what she was apologizing for, and how bad it had been. “I’m sorry because I know it’s what’s made you this way.”

I stood up, grabbing her cup and mine, our used napkins, the remains of the pretzels, and headed off to find a garbage can. She followed behind me. “Made me how?” I asked.

She thought about it. “Well, you’re not great with criticism.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You don’t seem very comfortable with how you look.”

“Show me a woman who is,” I shot back. “It’s just that not all of us get to enjoy having our insecurities exploited for millions of Moxie readers.”

“And I wish…” She looked ruefully toward the tables at the center of the market, where families were gathered, having sandwiches or coffee, passing sections of the Examiner back and forth. “I wish you believed in yourself more. Like with… romantic stuff.”

Yet another conversation I didn’t want to be having with my late-in-life-lesbian mother.

“You’ll find the right guy,” she said.

“I’ve been underwhelmed by the choices so far.”

“You stayed with Bruce too long”

“Ma, please!”

“He was a nice guy. But I knew you didn’t love him that way.”

“I thought you were out of the heterosexual advice-giving arena.”

“I’m making a special guest appearance on an as-needed basis,” she said cheerfully. Outside, by the car, she gave me a rough hug – a big step for her, I knew. My mother is a great cook, a sympathetic listener, and a good judge of character, but she’s never been big on touchy-feely stuff. “I love you,” she said, which was also out of character for her. But I wasn’t going to object. I needed all the love I could get.

THREE

On Monday morning I sat in a waiting room full of women too big to cross t heir legs, all of us wedged into inadequate armchairs on the seventh floor of the University of Philadelphia Weight and Eating Disorders Center, thinking that if I ran the place I’d make sure to have couches.

“A few surveys,” the smiling, skinny secretary behind the desk had said, handing me a half-inch thick slab of forms, a clipboard, and a pen. “There’s breakfast,” she added chirpily, pointing at a stack of desiccated bagels, a tub of fat-free cream cheese, and a pitcher of orange juice with a thick film of pulp floating on the top. Like anyone would eat in here, I thought, bypassing the bagels and sitting down with my forms beneath a poster that read “Taking it off… one day at a time!” and depicted a model in a leotard romping through a field full of flowers, which was not something I planned on doing, no matter how skinny I got.

Name. That was easy. Height. No problem. Current weight. Ack. Lowest weight maintained as an adult. Did fourteen count as an adult? Reason for wanting to lose weight. I thought for a minute, than scribbled, Was humiliated in national publication. I thought for a minute, than added, Would like to feel better about myself.

Next page. Diet history. Highest weights, lowest weights, programs I’d enrolled in, how much I’d lost, how long I’d kept it off. “Please use reverse side if more space is needed,” read the form. I needed. In fact, judging from a quick glance around the room, everybody needed. One woman even had to ask for extra paper.

Page three. Parents’ weights. Grandparents’ weights. Siblings’ weights. I took guesses for all of them. These weren’t things that were discussed around the table at family gatherings. Did I binge and purge, fast, abuse laxatives, exercise compulsively? If I did, I thought, would I look like this?

Please list your five favorite restaurants. Well, this would be easy. I could just walk down my street and pass five fabulous places to eat – everything from spring rolls to tiramisu before I’d gone three blocks. Philadelphia still lived in the shadow of New York City and often had the character of a sulky second sister who’d never made the honor roll or the homecoming court. But our restaurant renaissance was for real, and I lived in the neighborhood that boasted the first crêperie, the first soba noodle shop, and the first drag show dinner theater (so-so female impersonators, divine calamari). We also had the obligatory two coffee shops per block, which had hooked me on three-dollar lattes and chocolate-chip scones. Not, I knew, the breakfast of champions, but what was a girl to do, except try to compensate by avoiding the cheesesteak shops on every corner? Plus which, Andy, the one real friend I’d made at the paper, was the food critic, whom I often accompanied on review meals, eating foie gras and rabbit rillettes and veal and venison and pan-seared sea bass at the finest restaurants in town while Andy murmured into the microphone wire running through his collar.

Five favorite foods. Now this was getting tricky. Desserts, in my opinion, were an entirely separate category from main dishes, and breakfast was another thing altogether, and the five best things I could cook bore no relation to the five best things I could buy. Mashed potatoes and roast chicken were my go-to comfort foods, but could I really compare them to the chocolate tarts and crème brûlée from the Parisian bakery on Lombard Street? Or the grilled stuffed grape leaves at Viet Nam, the fried chicken at Delilah’s, and the brownies from Le Bus? I scribbled, crossed out, remembered the chocolate bread pudding at the Silk City Diner, heated and with fresh whipped cream, and had to start again.

Seven pages of physical history. Did I have a heart murmur, high blood pressure, glaucoma? Was I pregnant? No, no, and a thousand times no. Six pages of emotional history. Did I eat when I was upset? Yes. Did I eat when I was happy? Yes. Would I be tearing through those bagels and that funky-looking cream cheese at this very moment, were it not for the present company? You betcha.

On to the psychology pages. Was I frequently depressed? I circled sometimes. Did I have thoughts of suicide? I winced, then circled rarely. Insomnia? No. Feelings of worthlessness? Yes, even though I knew I wasn’t worthless. Did I ever fantasize about cutting off fleshy or flabby areas of my body? What, doesn’t everyone? Please add any additional thoughts. I wrote, I am happy with every aspect of my life except my appearance. Then I added, And my love life.

I laughed a little bit. The woman stuffed into the seat next to mine gave me a tentative smile. She was wearing one of those outfits I always thought of as fat-lady chic: leggings and a tunic top in a soft, periwinkle blue, with silk-screened daisies across her chest. A beautiful outfit, and not cheap, either, but play clothes. It’s as if the fashion designers decided that once a woman hit a certain weight, she’d have no need for business suits, for skirts and blazers, for anything except glorified sweatsuits, and they tried to apologize for dressing us like overaged Teletubbies by silk-screening daisies on the tops.

“I’m laughing to keep from crying,” I explained.

“Gotcha,” she said. “I’m Lily.”

“I’m Candace. Cannie.”

“Not Candy?”

“I think my parents decided not to give the kids on the playground any extra ammunition,” I said. She smiled. She had glossy black hair twisted back with lacquered chopstick-y things, and diamond studs the size of cocktail peanuts in her ears.

“Do you think this will work?” I asked. She shrugged her thick shoulders.

“I was on phen-fen,” she said. “I lost eighty pounds.” She reached into her purse. I knew what was coming. Regular women carry pictures of their babies, their husbands, their summer houses. Fat ladies carry pictures of themselves at their skinniest. Lily showed me the full-figure view, in a black suit, and then the side profile, in a miniskirt and sweater. Sure enough, she looked terrific. “Phen-fen,” she said, and sighed gigantically. Her bosom looked like something governed by tides and gravity, not mere human will. “I was doing so great,” she said. Her eyes took on a faraway look. “I was never hungry. It was like flying.”

“Speed’ll do that to you,” I observed.

Lily wasn’t listening. “I cried the day they took it off the market. I tried and tried, but I gained everything back in, like, ten minutes.” She narrowed her eyes. “I would kill to get more phen-fen.”

“But…,” I said hesitantly. “Wasn’t it supposed to cause heart problems?”

Lily snorted. “Given a choice between being this big and being dead, I swear I’d have to think about it. It’s ridiculous! I could walk down two blocks and buy crack cocaine on the corner, but I can’t get phen-fen for love or money.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You never tried phen-fen?”

“No. Just Weight Watchers.”

That brought a chorus of complaints and rolled eyes from the women sitting around me.

“Weight Watchers!”

“That’s a crock.”

“Expensive crock.”

“Standing in line so some skinny thing can weigh you”

“And those scales were never right,” said Lily, to a chorus of enthusiastic uh-huhs! The size six behind the desk was looking worried. Fat lady insurrection! I grinned, imagining us surging down the hall, a righteous, stretch-pant-wearing army, tipping over the scales, toppling the blood-pressure machine, tearing the height-weight charts off the walls and making all the skinny clinicians eat them, while we feasted on bagels and fat-free cream cheese.

“Candace Shapiro?”

A tall doctor with an extremely deep voice was calling my name. Lily squeezed my hand.

“Good luck,” she whispered. “And if he’s got any samples of phen-fen in there, grab ‘em!”

The doctor was fortyish, thin (of course), and going gray at the temples, with a warm handshake and big brown eyes. He was also extremely tall. Even in my thick-soled Doc Martens I barely came up to his shoulders, which meant he had to be at least six and a half feet. His name sounded like Dr. Krushelevsky, only with more syllables. “You can call me Dr. K,” he said, in his absurdly deep, absurdly slow voice. I kept waiting for him to drop what I took for a misguided Barry White impression and talk normally, but he didn’t, so I guessed that basso profundo was the way he did talk. I sat, holding my purse against my chest, while he flipped through my forms, squinting at a few answers, laughing out loud at others. I looked around, trying to relax. His office was nice. Leather couches, a comfortably cluttered desk, a real-looking Oriental rug covered with piles of books, papers, magazines, and a television/VCR in one corner, a small refrigerator with a coffee machine perched on top in another. I wondered if he’d ever slept there… if maybe the couch unfolded into a bed. It looked like the kind of place you’d want to stay in.

“Humiliated in national publication?” he read out loud. “What happened?”

“Ugh,” I said. “You don’t want to know.”

“No, really. I do. I think that’s the most unusual answer anyone’s ever given.”

“Well, my boyfriend…” I winced. “Ex-boyfriend. Excuse me. He’s writing this column for Moxie ”

“Good in Bed?” asked the doctor.

“Why, yes, I like to think so.”

The doctor blushed. “No… I mean…”

“Yeah, that’s the column Bruce writes. Don’t tell me you read it,” I said, thinking, if some fortysomething diet doctor had seen it, I could pretty much assume that everyone else in my life had, too.

“I actually clipped it out,” he told me. “I thought our patients might enjoy it.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, it was actually a fairly sensitive appreciation of… of…”

“A fat lady?” The doctor smiled. “He never called you that.”

“Just everything but.”

“So you’re in here because of the article?”

“Partly.”

The doctor looked at me.

“Okay, mostly. It’s just, I don’t… I never thought of myself… that way. As a larger woman. I mean, I know I am… larger… and I know I should lose weight. I mean, it’s not like I’m blind, or oblivious to the culture, and how Americans expect women to look…”

So you’re here because of America’s expectations?”

“I want to be thin.” He looked at me, waiting. “Well, thinner, anyhow.”

He flipped through my forms. “Your parents are overweight,” he said.

“Well… kind of. My mom’s a little heavy. My father, I haven’t seen in years. He had kind of a belly when he left, but…” I paused. The truth was, I didn’t know where my father was living, and it was always awkward when it came up. “I have no idea what he looks like now.”

The doctor looked up. “You don’t see him?”

“No.”

He scribbled a note. “How about your siblings?”

“Both skinny.” I sighed. “I’m the only one who got hit with the fat stick.”

The doctor laughed. “Hit with the fat stick. I’ve never heard it put quite that way.”

“Yeah, well, I got a million more of ‘em.”

He flipped some more. “You’re a reporter?”

I nodded. He flipped back. “Candace Shapiro… I’ve seen your byline.”

“Really?” This was a surprise. Most civilians skipped right over the bylines.

“You write about television sometimes.” I nodded. “You’re very funny. Do you like your job?”

“I love my job,” I said, and meant it. When I wasn’t obsessing over the high-pressure, in-the-public-eye nature of being a reporter, or scrapping for good assignments with territorial coworkers, and entertaining dreams of the muffin shop, I managed to have a good time. “It’s really fun. Interesting, challenging… all those things.”

He wrote something down in the folder. “And do you feel like your weight affects your job performance… how much money you make, how far you’ve advanced?”

I thought for a minute. “Not really. I mean, sometimes, some of the people I interview… you know, they’re thin, I’m not, I get a little jealous, maybe, or wonder if they think I’m lazy or whatever, and then I have to be careful when I write the articles, not to let the way I’m feeling affect what I say about them. But I’m good at my job. People respect me. Some of them even fear me. And it’s a union paper, so financially I’m okay.”

He laughed, and kept flipping, slowing at the psychology page.

“You were in therapy last year?”

“For about eight weeks,” I said.

“May I ask what for?”

I thought for a minute. There is no easy way to say to someone you’d just met that your mother had announced, at fifty-six, that she was gay. Especially not to someone who sounded like a thin, white James Earl Jones, and would probably be so tickled he’d repeat it out loud. Possibly even more than once.

“Family things,” I finally said.

He just looked at me.

“My mother was… in a new relationship, that was moving very quickly, and it kind of freaked me out.”

“And did the therapy help?”

I thought of the woman my HMO assigned me to, a mousy woman with Little Orphan Annie curls who wore her glasses chained around her neck and seemed a little bit afraid of me. Maybe hearing about the newly lesbian mother and my absent father within the first five minutes of taking my history was more than she’d planned on. She always had this vaguely cringing look, as if she feared that at any moment I would charge across her desk, knock her box of Kleenex to the floor, and try to throttle her.

“I guess so. The therapist’s main point was that I can’t change things other people in my family do, but I can change how I react to them.”

He scratched something in my folder. I tried to do a subtle lean so I could make some of it out, but he had the page tilted at a difficult angle. “Was that good advice?”

I shuddered inwardly, remembering how Tanya moved in six weeks after she and my mother had started dating, and her first act of residence was to move all of the furniture out of what had been my bedroom and replace it with her rainbow-striped sun catchers and self-help books, plus her two-ton loom. By way of saying thanks, she wove Nifkin a small striped sweater. Nifkin wore it once, then ate it.

“I guess so. I mean, the situation’s not perfect, but I’m sort of getting used to it.”

“Well, good,” he said, and flipped my folder closed. “Here’s the thing, Candace.”

“Cannie,” I said. “They only call me Candace when I’m in trouble.”

“Cannie, then,” he said. “We’re running a year-long study of a drug called sibutramin, which works somewhat the way phen-fen did. Did you ever take phen-fen?”

“No,” I said, “but there’s a lady in the lobby who misses it sorely.”

He smiled again. He had, I noticed, a dimple in his left cheek. “I consider myself warned,” he said. “Now, sibutramin’s a lot milder than phen-fen, but it does the same thing, which is basically to fool your brain into thinking that you’re full longer. The good news is, it doesn’t have the same health risks and potential complications that have been associated with phen-fen. We’re looking for women who are at least thirty percent above their ideal weight…”

“… and you’re delighted to inform me that I qualify,” I said sourly.

He smiled. “Now, the studies that have been done already show patients losing between five and ten percent of their body weight in a year’s time.”

I did some quick calculations. Losing ten percent of my body weight was still not going to put me anywhere near the weight I wanted to be.

“Does that disappoint you?”

Was he kidding? It was so frustrating! We had the technology to replace hearts, to put septuagenarians on the moon, to give old geezers erections, and the best modern science could do for me was a lousy ten percent?

“I guess it’s better than nothing,” I said.

“Ten percent is a lot better than nothing,” he said seriously. “Studies show that even losing as little as eight pounds can have a dramatic effect on blood pressure and cholesterol.”

“I’m twenty-eight years old. My blood pressure and cholesterol are fine. I’m not worried about my health.” I heard my voice rising. “I want to be thin. I need to be thin.”

“Candace… Cannie…”

I took a deep breath and rested my forehead in my hands. “I’m sorry.”

He put his hand on my arm. It felt nice. It was probably something they’d taught him to do in medical school: If patient becomes hysterical at prospect of relatively minute weight loss, place one hand gently on forearm I moved my arm away.

“Look,” he said. “Realistically, given your heredity, and your frame, it may be that you were just never meant to be a thin person. And that’s not the worst thing in the world.”

I didn’t lift my head. “Oh, no?”

“You’re not sick. You’re not in any pain”

I bit my lip. He had no idea. I remember when I was fourteen or so, on summer vacation somewhere by the beach, walking down a sidewalk with my sister, my slender sister, Lucy. We were wearing baseball caps and shorts and bathing suits and flip-flops. We were eating ice-cream cones. I could close my eyes and see the way my tanned legs looked against my white shorts, the sensation of the ice cream melting on my tongue. A kindly-looking white-haired lady had approached us with a smile. I thought she’d say something like how we reminded her of her granddaughters, or made her miss her own sister and the fun they’d had together. Instead, she nodded at my sister, walked up to me, and pointed at the ice cream cone. “You don’t need that, dearie,” she’d said. “You should be on a diet.” I remembered things like that. A lifetime’s accretion of unkindnesses, all of those little lingering hurts that I carried around like stones sewn into my pockets. The price you paid for being a Larger Woman. You don’t need that. Not in pain, he’d said. What a joke.

The doctor cleared his throat. “Let’s talk about motivation for a minute.”

“Oh, I’m very motivated.” I lifted my head, managed a small, crooked smile. “Can’t you tell?”

He smiled back. “We’re also looking for people who have the right kind of motivation.” He shut my folder and crossed his hands over his nonexistent belly. “You probably know this already, but people who have the best long-term success with weight management decide to lose weight for themselves. Not for their spouses, or their parents, or because their high-school reunion’s coming up, or they’re embarrassed over something that somebody wrote.”

We stared at each other silently.

“I’d like to see,” he said, “if you can come up with some reasons to lose weight, other than the fact that you’re angry and upset right now.”

“I’m not angry,” I said angrily.

He didn’t smile. “Can you think of other reasons?”

“I’m miserable,” I blurted. “I’m lonely. Nobody’s going to date me looking like this. I’m going to die alone, and my dog’s going to eat my face, and no one will find us until the smell seeps out under the door.”

“I find that highly unlikely,” he said with a smile.

“You don’t know my dog,” I said. “So am I in? Do I get drugs? Can I have some now?”

He smiled at me. “We’ll be in touch.” I stood up. He pulled a stethoscope around his neck and patted the examining table. “They’ll draw some blood on your way out. I just need to listen to your heart for a minute. Hop up here for me, please.”

I sat up straight on the crinkly white paper on top of the table and closed my eyes as his hands moved against my back. The first time a man had touched me with any regard or kindness since Bruce. The thought made my eyes fill. Don’t do it, I thought fiercely, don’t cry now.

“Breathe in,” Dr. K. said calmly. If he had any idea what was going on, he didn’t let on. “Nice deep breath… and hold it… and let it out.”

“Is it still there?” I asked, staring at his head, bent over, as he wedged the stethoscope beneath my left breast. And then, before I could stop myself, “Does it sound broken?”

He straightened up, smiling. “Still there. Not broken. In fact, it sounds like you have a strong and healthy heart.” He offered his hand. “I think you’re going to be fine,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

Out in the lobby, Lily the daisy-shirt woman was still wedged into her chair, half of a plain bagel balanced on one knee. “So?” she asked.

“They’re going to let me know,” I said. There was a piece of paper in her hand. I was unsurprised to see that it was a Xeroxed copy of “Loving a Larger Woman” by Bruce Guberman. “You seen this?” she asked me.

I nodded.

“This is great,” she said. “This guy really gets it.” She shifted as much as her seat would allow her and looked me right in the eye. “Can you imagine the idiot who’d let someone like this get away?”

FOUR

I think every person who is single should have a dog. I think the governmen t should step in and intervene: If you’re not married or coupled up, whether you’ve been dumped or divorced or widowed or whatever, they should require you to proceed immediately to the pound nearest you and select an animal companion.

Dogs give your days a rhythm and a purpose. You can’t sleep ridiculously late, or stay out all day and all night, when there’s a dog depending on you.

Every morning, no matter what I’d drunk, what I’d done, or whether or not my heart had been broken, Nifkin woke me up by gently applying his nose to my eyelids. He is a remarkably understanding little dog, willing to sit patiently on the couch with his paws crossed gracefully in front of him while I sang along to My Fair Lady or clipped recipes from Family Circle, which I subscribed to even though, as I liked to joke, I had neither family nor circle.

Nifkin is a small and neatly made rat terrier, white with black spots and brown markings on his long, spindly legs. He weighs precisely ten pounds and looks like an anorexic and extremely high-strung Jack Russell, with a Doberman pinscher’s ears, pointing permanently upright, tacked onto his head. He’s a secondhand dog. I inherited him from three sportswriters I knew at my first paper. They were renting a house, and they decided that a house required a dog. So they got Nifkin from the pound believing that he was actually a Doberman pinscher puppy. Of course, he was no such thing… just a full-grown rat terrier with oversized ears. Truthfully, he looks like pieces of a few different dogs that someone put together as a joke. And he’s got a permanent, Elvis-like sneer on his face – the result, the story goes, from when his mother bit him when he was a puppy. But I refrain from remarking on his shortcomings when he’s within earshot. He’s also very sensitive about his looks. Just like his mother.

The sportswriters spent six months alternately showering him with attention, letting him lap beer out of his water bowl, or leaving him penned up in their kitchen, completely ignored, all the while waiting for him to grow into his Doberman pinscher-hood. Then one of them got a job at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and the other two decided to split up and move to their own apartments. Neither one wanted to take along anxious little Nifkin, who did not in any way resemble a Doberman pinscher.

Employees could run free classified ads in the paper, and their ad, “One dog, small, spotted, free to a good home” ran for two weeks with no takers. Desperate, with their bags packed and security deposits already paid on their new places, the sportswriters double-teamed me in the company cafeteria. “It’s you or the pound again,” they said.

“Is he housebroken?”

They exchanged an uneasy look. “Kind of,” said one. “For the most part,” said the other.

“Does he chew things?”

Another uneasy look. “He likes rawhide,” said one. The other one kept his mouth shut, from which I inferred that Nifkin probably also enjoyed shoes, belts, wallets, and anything else that came his way.

“And has he learned to walk on a leash, or is he still pulling all the time? And do you think he’d answer to something other than Nifkin?”

The guys looked at each other. “Look, Cannie,” one of them finally said, “you know what happens to dogs in the pound… unless they can convince somebody else that he’s a Doberman pinscher. And that’s unlikely.”

I took him in. And, of course, Nifkin spent the first months of our time together pooping furtively in a corner of the living room, chewing a hole in my couch, and acting like a spastic rabbit whenever his leash was attached to his collar. When I moved to Philadelphia I decided that things would be different. I put Nifkin on a rigorous schedule: a walk at 7:30 A.M., another one at 4 P.M., for which I paid the kid next door $20 a week, then a brief constitutional before I went to sleep. We did six months of obedience boot camp, after which point he’d pretty much stopped chewing, was thoroughly housebroken, and was generally content to walk politely beside me, unless a squirrel or a skateboarder distracted him. For his progress, he was allowed on the furniture. He sat beside me on the couch while I watched TV, and slept curled up on a pillow next to my head every night.

“You love that dog more than me,” Bruce would complain, and it was true that Nifkin was spoiled rotten, with all manner of fluffy toys, rawhide bones, small fleece sweaters, and gourmet treats, and, I am embarrassed to say, a small dog-size sofa, upholstered in the same denim as my couch, where he sleeps when I’m at work. (It was also true that Bruce had no use for Nifkin, and couldn’t be bothered to walk him. I’d come home from the gym, or a bike ride, or a long day at work, to find Bruce sprawled on my couch – frequently with his bong nearby – and Nifkin perched, quivering, on one of the pillows, looking as if he were going to explode. “Has he been out?” I’d ask, and Bruce would shrug shamefacedly. After this happened a dozen times or so I just quit asking). Nifkin’s picture is my screen saver at work, and I subscribe to the online newsletter Ratter Chatter, although I’ve managed to refrain from sending in his picture – so far.

In bed together, Bruce and I used to make up stories about Nifkin’s history. I was of the opinion that Nifkin had been born into a well-to-do British family, but that his father had disowned him after catching him in a compromising position in the hayloft with one of the stable boys, and banished him to America.

“Maybe he worked as a window dresser,” Bruce had mused, cupping one hand over my head.

“Hand hat,” I cooed, and snuggled into him. “I’ll bet he hung out at Studio 54.”

“He probably knew Truman.” “And he’d wear custom-made suits, and carry a cane.” Nifkin looked at both of us as if we were nuts, then strolled off to the living room. I tilted my head up for a kiss, and Bruce and I were off to the races again.

But as much as I’d rescued Nifkin from the sportswriters, the clas-sified ads, and the pound, he had rescued me, too. He kept me from being lonely, he gave me a reason to get up every morning, and he loved me. Or maybe he just loved the fact that I had opposable thumbs and could work a can opener. Whatever. When he laid his little muzzle next to my head at night and sighed and closed his eyes, it was enough.

The morning after my appointment at the weight management clinic I hitched Nifkin to his extend-o-leash, tucked a plastic Wal-Mart bag into my right pocket, four small dog biscuits and a tennis ball into my left. Nikfin was jumping about crazily, caroming from my couch to his couch, down the hall to the bedroom and back again at warp speed, pausing only to dart a lick toward my nose. Every morning, to him, is a celebration. Yay! he seems to say. It’s morning! I love morning! Morning! Let’s go for a walk! I finally got him out the door, but he kept prancing at my side as I fished my sunglasses out of my pocket and put them on. We proceeded down the street, Nifkin practically dancing, me dragging behind.

The park was almost empty. Just a pair of golden retrievers sniffing at the bushes, and a haughty cocker spaniel in the corner. I unleashed my dog, who promptly and without provocation made a beeline for the cocker spaniel, barking frantically.

“Nifkin!” I hollered, knowing that as soon as he got within a foot or two of the other dog he’d stop, give a deep, disdainful sniff, perhaps bark a few more times, and then leave the other dog alone. I knew that, Nifkin knew that, and it was more than likely that the cocker spaniel knew it, too (it’s been my experience that other dogs mostly ignore the Nif when he goes into his attack mode, probably because he’s very small and not all that menacing, even when he’s trying). But the dog’s owner looked alarmed as he saw a spotted, sneering rat terrier missile streaking toward his pet.

“Nifkin!” I called again, and my dog for once listened to me, stopping dead in his tracks. I hurried over, trying to look dignified, and scooped Nifkin into my arms, holding him by his scruff, looking into his eyes and saying, “No,” and “Bad,” the way I’d learned in Remedial Obedience. Nifkin whined and looked disgruntled at having his fun interrupted. The cocker spaniel wagged his tail hesitantly.

The cocker spaniel guy was looking amused.

“Nifkin?” he asked. I could see he was getting ready to pop the question. I wondered if he’d have the nerve. I made myself a bet that he would.

“Do you know what a nifkin is?” he asked. Score 1, Cannie. A nifkin, according to my brother’s fraternity friends, is the area between a guy’s balls and his ass. The sportswriters had named him.

I put on my best puzzled look. “Huh? It’s his name. Does it mean something?”

The guy blushed. “Uh, yeah. It’s, um… it’s kind of a slang term.”

“For what?” I asked, trying to look innocent. The guy shuffled his feet. I looked at him expectantly. So did Nifkin.

“Um,” said the guy, and stopped. I decided to have mercy.

“Yes, I know what a nifkin is,” I said. “He’s a secondhand dog.” I gave him the abbreviated version of the sportswriter story. “And by the time I figured out what a nifkin was, it was too late. I tried calling him Nifty… and Napkin… and Ripken… and, like, everything else I could think of. But he won’t respond to anything but Nifkin.”

“That is rough,” said the guy, laughing. “I’m Steve,” he said.

“I’m Cannie. What’s your dog’s name?”

“Sunny,” he said. Nifkin and Sunny sniffed each other tentatively as Steve and I shook hands.

“I just moved here, from New York,” he said. “I’m an engineer”

“Family in town?”

“Nope. The single guy.” He had nice legs. Tanned, slightly furry. And those dumb Velcro-strapped sandals that everyone was wearing that summer. Khaki shorts, a gray T-shirt. Cute.

“Would you like to have a beer maybe sometime?” he asked.

Cute, and evidently not averse to the sweaty, queen-size woman.

“Sure. That’d be great.”

He smiled at me from under his baseball cap. I gave him my number, trying not to get my hopes up, but feeling pleased with myself nonetheless.

Back home, I gave Nifkin a cup of Small Bites kibble, ate my Special K, then gargled, flossed, and took deep, calming breaths, preparing for my interview with Jane Sloan, lady director extraordi-naire who I’d be profiling for next Sunday’s paper. In deference to her fame, and because we’d be lunching at the très chic Four Seasons, I took extra care with my clothes, struggling into both a panty girdle and control-top pantyhose. Once my midsection was secured, I pulled on my ice-blue skirt, ice-blue jacket with funky star-shaped buttons, the requisite chunky black loafers, uniform shoe of twentysomething would-be hipsters. I prayed for strength and composure, and for Bruce’s fingers to be broken in some bizarre industrial accident guaranteeing that he’d never write again. Then I called a cab, grabbed my notebook, and headed to the Four Seasons for lunch.

I cover Hollywood for the Philadelphia Examiner. This is not as easy as you’d think, because Hollywood is in California, and I, alas, am not.

Still, I persist. I write about trends, about gossip, the mating habits of stars and starlets. I do reviews, and even the occasional interview with the handful of celebrities who deign to stop by the East Coast on their promotional juggernauts.

I wandered into journalism after graduating from college with an English degree and no real plans. I wanted to write. Newspapers were one of the few places I could locate that would pay me to do it. So, the September after graduation, I was hired at a very small newspaper in central Pennsylvania. The average age of a reporter was twenty-two. Our combined years of professional experience were less than two years, and boy, did it show.

At the Central Valley Times, I covered five school districts, plus assorted fires, car crashes, and whatever features I could find time to churn out. For this I was paid the princely sum of $300 a week – enough to live on, just barely, if nothing went wrong. And of course, something was always going wrong.

Then there were the wedding announcements. The CVT was one of the last newspapers in the country that still ran, free of charge, lengthy descriptions of weddings – and, woe to me, of wedding dresses. Princess seams, alençon lace, French embroidery, illusion veils, beaded headpieces, gathered bustles… all of these were terms I found myself typing so often that I put them on a save-get key. Just one keystroke, and out would pop complete phrases: freshwater pearl embroidery, or ivory taffeta pouf.

One day I was wearily typing the wedding announcements and musing on the injustice of it all when I came across a word I couldn’t read. Many of our brides filled their forms in by hand. This particular bride had written in looping cursive, in purple ink, a word that looked like CFORM.

I carried the form over to Raji, another cub reporter. “What’s this say?”

He squinted at the purple. “C-FORM,” he read slowly. “Like MDOS, or something.”

“For a dress, though?”

Raji shrugged. He’d grown up in New York City, then attended Columbia Journalism School. The ways of Central Pennsylvanians were strange to him. I headed back to my desk; Raji went back to his dread chore, typing in a week’s worth of school lunch menus. “Tater Tot,” I heard him sigh. “Always, the Tater Tot.”

Which left me with C-FORM. Under “contact for questions” the bride had scribbled her home phone number. I picked up the phone, and dialed.

“Hello?” answered a cheerful-sounding woman.

“Hello,” I said, “this is Candace Shapiro calling from the Valley Times. I’m trying to reach Sandra Garry”

“This is Sandy,” chirped the woman.

“Hi, Sandy. Listen, I do the wedding announcements here, and I’m reading your form and there’s a word… C-FORM?”

“Seafoam,” she answered promptly. In the background I could hear a kid screaming, “Ma!” and what sounded like a soap opera on TV. “That’s the color of my dress.”

“Oh,” I said, “well, that’s what I needed to know, so thanks”

“Except, well, maybe… I mean, do you think people will know what seafoam is? Like, what do you think of when you think of seafoam?”

“Green?” I ventured. I really wanted to get off the phone. I had three baskets of laundry reposing in the trunk of my car. I wanted to get out of the office, go to the gym, wash my clothes, buy some milk. “Like a pale green, I guess.”

Sandy sighed. “See, that’s not it,” she said. “It’s really more blue, I think. The girl at the Bridal Barn said the color’s called seafoam, but that’s really more of a green-sounding thing, I think.”

“We could say blue,” I said. Another sigh from Sandy. “Light blue?” I essayed.

“See, but it’s not really blue,” she said. “You say blue, and people think, you know, blue like the sky, or navy blue, and it’s not, like, dark or anything…”

“Pale blue?” I offered, running through my bridal announcement-gleaned gamut of synonyms. “Ice blue? Robin’s egg blue?”

“I just don’t think any of those are quite right,” Sandy said primly.

“Hmm,” I said. “Well, if you want to think about it and call me back…”

Which was when Sandy started to cry. I could hear her sobbing on the other end of the phone as the soap opera droned in the background and the child, who I imagined, had sticky cheeks and possibly a stubbed toe, continued to whine, “Ma!”

“I want it to be right,” she said between her sobs. “You know, I waited so long for this day… I want everything to be perfect… and I can’t even say what color my dress is”

“Oh, now,” I said, feeling ridiculously ineffectual. “Oh, listen, it’s not that bad”

“Maybe you could come here,” she said, still crying. “You’re a reporter, right? Maybe you could look at the dress and say what’s right.”

I thought of my laundry, my plans for the night.

“Please?” asked Sandy, in a tiny, pleading voice.

I sighed. The laundry could wait, I supposed. And now I was curious. Who was this woman, and how did someone who couldn’t spell seafoam find love?

I asked her for directions, mentally cursed myself for being such a softie, and told her I’d be there in an hour.

To be perfectly honest, I was expecting a trailer park. Central Pennsylvania has plenty of those. But Sandy lived in an actual house, a small white Cape Cod with black shutters and the proverbial picket fence out front. The backyard boasted a plastic orange SuperSoaker, an abandoned Big Wheel, a new-looking swingset. There was a shiny black truck parked in the driveway, and Sandy stood at the door – thirtyish, tired-looking around her eyes, but with a tremulous species of hope there, too. Her hair was pale blond, fine as spun sugar, and she had the tiny snub nose and wide cornflower-blue eyes of a painted figurine.

I got out of the car with my notebook in my hand. Sandy smiled through the screen door. I could see two small hands clutching her thigh, a child’s face peeping around her leg, then vanishing behind it.

The house was cheaply furnished, but neat and clean, with stacks of magazines on the pine-veneer coffee table: Guns amp; Ammo, Road amp; Track, Sport amp; Field. The ampersand collection, I thought to myself. Powder-blue wall-to-wall carpet lined the living room floor; fresh white linoleum – the kind you roll down in a single sheet, with patterns stamped on it to make it look like separate tiles – covered the kitchen. “Do you want a soda? I was just about to have one myself,” she said shyly.

I didn’t want soda. I wanted to see the dress, come up with an adjective, hit the road, and be good amp; gone by the time Melrose Place was on. But she seemed desperate, and I was thirsty, so I sat down at her kitchen table under the stitched sampler that read “Bless This Home,” with my notebook at my side.

Sandy took a gulp of her drink, burped gently against the back of her hand, closed her eyes, and shook her head. “Excuse me, please.”

“Are you nervous about the wedding?” I asked.

“Nervous,” she repeated, and laughed a little. “Honey, I’m terri-fied!”

“Is it…” I wanted to tread carefully here, “have you done the whole wedding thing before?”

Sandy shook her head. “Not like this. My first time I eloped. That was when I found out I was pregnant with Trevor. Justice of the peace over in Bald Eagle,” she said. “I wore my prom dress to that one.”

“Oh,” said I.

“Second time,” she continued, “there never was a wedding at all. That was Dylan’s daddy, who I guess you could call my common-law husband. We were together seven years.”

“Dylan, that’s me!” piped up a little voice from underneath the table. A small, sleek blond head peeked out. “My daddy’s in the army.”

“That’s right, honey,” said Sandy, absently tousling Dylan’s hair with one hand. She raised her eyebrows significantly toward me, shook her head, and whispered, “J-a-i-l.”

“Oh,” I said again.

“For stealing cars,” she whispered. “Not anything, you know, too bad. I actually met Bryan, my fiancé, when I went visiting Dylan’s dad,” she said.

“So Bryan’s…” I was just starting to learn how the long pause could sometimes be a reporter’s best friend.

“Going to be paroled tomorrow,” Sandy said. “He was in for fraud.”

Which, I guessed from the pride in her voice, was a step up even from grand theft auto.

“So you met him in prison?”

“We were actually corresponding for some time before then,” Sandy said. “He put an ad in the classified section… here, I saved it!” She hopped up, causing our soda glasses to rattle, and came up with a laminated piece of paper no bigger than a postage stamp. “Christian gentleman, tall, athletic build, Leo, seeks sensitive pen-pal for letters and maybe more,” it read.

“He got twelve responses,” Sandy said, beaming. “He said he liked my letter the best.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I was real honest,” she said. “I explained my situation. How I was a single mother. How I wanted a role model for my boys.”

“And you think…”

“He’ll be a good daddy,” she said. She sat down again, staring into her glass like it contained the mysteries of the ages instead of flat generic cola. “I believe in love,” she said, her voice strong and clear.

“Did your parents…” I began. She waved one hand in the air, as if to shoo away the very idea.

“My father left when I was four, I think,” she said. “Then it was just my mom and one boyfriend after another. Daddy Rick, Daddy Sam, Daddy Aaron. I swore it wasn’t gonna go that way for me. And it’s not,” she said. “I think… I know… that this time I got it right.”

“Mom?” Dylan was back, his lips dyed Kool-Aid red, holding his brother’s hand. Where Dylan was small and fine-boned and blond, this boy – Trevor, I guessed – was darker and sturdier, with a thoughtful look on his face.

Sandy stood up and shot me a tentative smile. “You wait right here,” she said. “Boys, you come with me. Let’s show the reporter lady momma’s pretty dress!”

After all of that – the prison, the husbands, the Christian classified ad – I was prepared for something dreadful, some off-the-rack horror show of a dress. The Bridal Barn specialized in those.

But Sandy’s dress was beautiful. Tightly fitted on top, a fairytale princess boned bodice spangled with snowflake-sized crystals that caught the light, a deeply scooped neckline that showed off the creamy skin of her chest, swelling into a wave of tulle that swished around her feet. Her cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes sparkled. She looked like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, like Glinda the good witch. Trevor held her hand solemnly as she made her way into the kitchen, humming “Here Comes the Bride.” Dylan had appropriated her veil and popped it on his own head.

Sandy stood under the kitchen light and twirled. The edge of her skirt whispered along the floor. Dylan laughed and clapped his hands, and Trevor stared up at his mother, how her bare arms and shoulders rose out of the dress, how her hair fell against her skin. She twirled and twirled and her sons stared at her as if they were under a spell, until finally she stopped. “What do you think?” she asked. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was breathing hard. I could see each breath make her bosom swell against the tight-fitted scalloped edges of the bodice. She turned once more, and I could see tiny cloth rosebuds stitched all down the back, tight as a baby’s pursed lips. “Is it blue? Green?”

I looked at her for a long moment, her pink cheeks and milky skin, and her sons’ delighted eyes.

“I’m actually not sure,” I said. “But I’ll figure something out.”

I missed the deadline, of course. The city editor was long gone by the time I made it back to the newsroom, after Sandy had shown me her pictures of Bryan, and told me all about their honeymoon plans, after I’d watched her read her sons Where the Wild Things Are, and kiss their foreheads and their cheeks, and add a finger’s worth of bourbon to her soda, and half as much to mine. “He’s a good man,” she’d said dreamily. Her lit cigarette moved through the room like a firefly.

I had three inches to fill, and I had to write to fit, write only enough to fill the allotted space beneath the blurry picture of Sandy’s smiling face. I sat at my computer, my head spinning a little, and keyed up my fill-in-the-blank marriage form, the one with spaces: bride’s name, groom’s name, attendants’ names, description of dress. Then I pressed the “escape” key, cleared the screen, took a deep breath, and wrote:

Tomorrow Sandra Louise Garry will marry Bryan Perreault in Our Lady of Mercy Church on Old College Road. She will walk down the aisle with antique rhinestone combs in her hair and will promise to love and to honor and cherish Bryan, whose letters she keeps folded beneath her pillow, each one read so many times it’s worn thin as a butterfly’s wing.

“I believe in love,” she says, even though a cynic might say there’s every indication that she shouldn’t. Her first husband left her, her second is in jail – the same jail where she met Bryan, whose parole begins two days before the wedding. In his letters, he calls her his little dove, his perfect angel. In her kitchen, the last of the three cigarettes she allows herself each night burning between her fingers, she says he is a prince.

Her sons, Dylan and Trevor, will attend the bride. Her dress is a color called seafoam, a color perfectly balanced between the palest blue and the palest green. It isn’t white, a color for a virgin, a teenager with her head full of sugar-spun romances, or ivory, which is white tinged with resignation. Her dress is the color of dreams.

Well. A little florid, a little overwritten and overwrought. A dress the color of dreams? The whole thing had “Recent Graduate of College Creative Writing Workshop” stamped on every syllable. The next morning I came to work and there was a copy of the page splayed over my keyboard, the offending passage circled in red copy-editor’s grease-paint pencil. “SEE ME,” said the two-word message scrawled in the margin, in the unmistakable hand of Chris, the executive editor, an easily distractible Southerner who’d been lured to Pennsylvania with the promise of moving on to a bigger, better paper in the chain (that, plus unparalleled trout fishing). I knocked timidly at his office door. He beckoned me inside. A second copy of my story was opened on his desk.

“This,” he said, pointing with one spindly finger. “What was this, exactly?”

I shrugged. “It was just… well, I met this woman. I was typing her announcement and there was a word I couldn’t read, so I called her, then I met her, and then…” My voice trailed off. “I guess I thought it sounded like a story.”

He looked up at me. “You were right,” he said. “Want to do it again?”

And a star was born… well, sort of. Every other week I’d find a bride and write a short column about her – who she was, her dress, the church and the music and the party afterward. But most of all, I wrote about how: how my brides decided to get married, to stand up in front of a minister or rabbi or justice of the peace and promise forever.

I saw young brides and old brides, blind and deaf brides, teenage brides pledging themselves to their first loves and cynical twentysome-things taking vows with the men they called their baby’s fathers. I attended first, second, third, fourth, and a single fifth wedding. I saw eight-hundred-guest extravangazas (an Orthodox wedding, where the men and women danced in separate ballrooms and there were a total of eight rabbis in attendance, all wearing Tina Turner -style glitter wigs by the end of the night). I saw a couple get married in adjoining hospital beds after a car accident that had left her a quadriplegic. I saw a bride left at the altar, watched her face crumple when the best man, his face pale and grave, made his way down the aisle and whispered, first into her mother’s ear, and then into hers.

It was ironic, I knew, even then. While my peers were writing hip, sarcastic first-person columns for nascent online magazines about being single in the nation’s big cities, I was toiling at a little local newspaper – a dinosaur, quivering on the tar pit of extinction in the evolutionary scale of the media – investigating marriage, of all things. How quaint! How charming!

But I couldn’t have written about myself the way my classmates did, even if I’d wanted to. The truth was, I didn’t have the brio to chronicle my own sex life. Nor did I have the kind of body I’d be comfortable exposing, even in print. And sex didn’t interest me the way marriage did. I wanted to understand how to be part of a couple, how to get brave enough to take someone’s hand and leap across the chasm. I would take each bride’s story, each halting narrative of how they met and where they went and when they knew, and turn them over and over in my mind, looking for the loose thread, the invisible seam, the crack I could pry open so I could turn the story inside out and figure out the truth.

If you read that little paper in the early 1990s, you could probably see me at the edges of a hundred different wedding pictures, in the blue linen dress that I wore – plain, so as not to call attention to myself, but dressy, in deference to the solemnity of the occasion. See me in the aisle seats, my notebook tucked into my pocket, staring at a hundred different brides – old, young, black, white, thin, not thin – looking for answers. How do you know when a guy is the right guy? How can you be sure enough to promise someone forever and mean it? How can you believe in love?

After two-and-a-half years of the wedding beat, my clips happened to cross the right editor’s desk at the precise moment that my home-town’s big daily paper, the Philadelphia Examiner, had, as an institution, decided that attracting Generation X readers was of utmost importance, and that a young reporter would, by her very existence, draw those readers in. So they invited me to move back to the city of my birth and be their eyes and ears on twentysomething Philadelphia.

Two weeks later, the Examiner decided as an institution that attracting Generation X readers mattered not a whit, and went back to desperately trying to shore up circulation among soccer moms in the suburbs. But the damage had been done. I’d been hired. Life was good. Well, mostly.

From the start, the single biggest drawback to my job was Gabby Gardiner. Gabby is a massive, ancient woman, with a cap of bluish-tinged white curls and smeary, thick glasses. If I’m big, she’s super-size. You’d think we would enjoy some solidarity because of our shared oppression, our common struggle to survive in a world that deems any woman above a size twelve grotesque and laughable. You would think wrong.

Gabby is the entertainment columnist for the Philadelphia Examiner and has filled that post, as she’s fond of reminding me and anyone else within earshot, “for longer than you’ve been alive.” This is both her strength and her weakness. She’s got a network of contacts that spans both coasts and two decades. Unfortunately, those decades were the 1960s and 1970s. She stopped paying attention somewhere between Reagan’s election and the advent of cable, so there’s a whole universe of stuff, from MTV on down, that simply doesn’t register on her radar the way, say, Elizabeth Taylor does.

Gabby’s age could be anywhere from sixty on up. She has no children, no husband, no discernible hint of sexuality or hint of any life at all outside of the office. Her lifeblood is Hollywood gossip, and her attitude toward her subjects is rarely anything less than reverential. She talks about the stars she covers, mostly thirdhand, in reprinted bits of regurgitated gossip from the New York City tabloids and Variety, as if they are her intimates, her friends. Which would be pathetic if Gabby Gardiner were the least little bit likable. And she’s not.

She is, however, lucky. Lucky that most of the Examiner’s readers are over forty and not interested in learning anything new, so her “Gabbing with Gabby” column remains one of the most popular parts of our section – another fact that she frequently remarks upon, at top volume (allegedly she shouts because she’s deaf, but I’m convinced that she does it because it’s more annoying than simply talking).

For my first few years at the Examiner we left each other alone. Unfortunately, things escalated last summer, when Gabby took a two-month leave to address some nasty-sounding medical problem (“polyps” was the only word I caught, before Gabby and her friends shot me laser-beam hate looks, and I scurried out of the mailroom without even having retrieved my copy of Teen People). In her absence, I got to write her daily column. She lost the war, but won the battle: They kept calling the damn thing “Gabbing with Gabby,” appending a short note in an embarrassingly small font about how Gabby was “on assignment” and that “Examiner staff writer Candace Shapiro is filling in.”

“Good luck, kid,” Gabby had said grandly, waddling over to my desk for her farewell, beaming as if she hadn’t spent the past two weeks lobbying for the editors to run wire copy instead of giving me a chance while she was off, presumably being de-polyped. “Now, I told all my best sources to call you.”

Terrific, I thought. Hot gossip about Walter Cronkite. Can’t wait.

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Every morning, Monday through Friday, I could look forward to my daily call from Gabby.

“Ben Affleck?” she’d rasp. “What’s a Ben Affleck?”

Or, “Comedy Central? Nobody watches it.”

Or, pointedly, “Saw something on Elizabeth on ET last night. Why didn’t we have it?”

I tried to ignore her – to be pleasant on the phone and every once in a while, when she got particularly crabby, to toss in a line about “Gabby Gardiner will return at the end of September” at the end of the column.

But then one morning she called and I wasn’t there to pick up my phone, so Gabby got my voice mail, which was basically me saying, “Hello, you’ve reached Candace Shapiro, entertainment columnist at the Philadelphia Examiner.” I didn’t realize my misstep until the paper’s executive editor stopped by my desk.

“Have you been telling people you’re the entertainment columnist?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m not. I’m just filling in.”

“I got a very irate call from Gabby last night. Late last night,” he emphasized, with the expression of a man who did not appreciate having his sleep interrupted. “She thinks you’re giving people the impression that she’s gone for good and you’ve taken over.”

Now I was confused. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

He sighed again. “Your voice mail,” he said. “I don’t know what it says, and, frankly, I don’t want to know what it says. Just fix it so Gabby isn’t waking up my wife and kids anymore.”

I went home and wept to Samantha (“She’s completely insecure,” she observed, and passed me a pint of half-melted sorbet as I moped on her couch). I raged on the phone to Bruce (“Just change the damn thing, Cannie!”). So I took his advice, altering my voice mail to say, “You’ve reached Candace Shapiro, temporary, transient, impermanent, just-filling-in, in-no-way-here-for-good entertainment columnist.” Gabby called the next morning. “Love the message, kid,” she said.

But the damage was done. When Gabby returned from her break she took to calling me “Eve” – as in All About – when she spoke to me at all. I just tried to ignore her, and focus on my extracurricular activities: short stories, scraps of a novel, and Star Struck, the screenplay I’d been laboring over for months. Star Struck was a romantic comedy about a big-city reporter who falls for one of the stars she interviews. They meet cute (after she falls off a bar stool ogling him at the hotel bar), get off on the wrong foot (after he assumes she’s just another plus-size groupie), fall for each other, and, after the appropriate Act Three complications, end up in each other’s arms as the credits roll.

The star was based on Adrian Stadt, a cute comedian on Saturday Night! whose sense of humor seemed in sync with my own – even when he was doing his memorable three-month stint as the Projectile Vomiting Pilot. He was the guy I’d watched all through college and beyond and thought, if he were here, or if I were there, we’d probably get along. The reporter, of course, was me, only I named her Josie, made her a redhead, and gave her stable, straight, still-married parents.

The screenplay was what I’d pinned my dreams on. It was my answer to all of my good grades, to every teacher who’d ever told me I was talented, to every professor who’d ever said I had potential. Best of all, it was a hundred-page response to a world (and to my own secret fears) that told me that plus-size women couldn’t have adventures, or fall in love. And today I was going to do something gutsy. Today, over lunch at the Four Seasons, I was interviewing actor Nicholas Kaye, star of the forthcoming Belch Brothers, a teen-pleasing comedy featuring twin brothers whose gas gives them magical powers. More importantly, I was also interviewing Jane Sloan, who’d executive-produced the movie (with one hand holding her nose, I figured). Jane Sloan was a hero of mine, who, before her slide toward the crassly commercial, had written and directed some of the sharpest, funniest films Hollywood had ever seen. Better yet, they were films with sharp, funny women in them. For weeks I’d been distracting myself from the missing-Bruce blues by constructing an elaborate daydream of how we’d meet and she’d immediately recognize me as a kindred spirit and potential collaborator, slipping me her business card and insisting that I contact her the moment I turned my attention from journalism to screenwriting. I even smiled a little, imagining the look of delight on her face when I modestly confessed that I had indeed penned a screenplay, and that I’d send it to her if she liked.

She was a writer, I was a writer. She was funny, I figured, and I’m funny, too. True, Jane Sloan was also rich and famous, successful beyond my wildest dreams, and about the size of one of my thighs, but sisterhood, I reminded myself, is powerful.

Almost an hour after I arrived, forty-five minutes after we were scheduled to meet, Jane Sloan seated herself across from me and laid a large mirror and a larger bottle of Evian next to her plate. “Hello,” she said, her throaty voice emerging through her clenched teeth, and proceeded to give her face a few healthy squirts. I squinted at her, waiting for the punch line, waiting for her to crack up and say she was kidding. She didn’t. Nicholas Kaye sat down beside her and shot me an apologetic grin. Jane Sloan finally put the mirror and bottle down.

“I’m sorry we’re late,” said Nicholas Kaye, who looked much like he did on TV – cute as a button.

Jane Sloan shoved the butter dish aggressively across the table. She picked up her napkin, which had been folded into the shape of a swan, opened it with one dismissive flick of her wrist, and carefully wiped her face with it. Only after she’d set the napkin, now stained ecru and crimson and mascara-black, onto the table, did she deign to speak.

“This city,” she pronounced, “is wreaking havoc on my pores.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid as soon as the apology had left my mouth. What was I sorry for? I wasn’t doing anything to her pores.

Jane waved one pale hand languorously, as if my apology for Philadelphia was of no more consequence then a mold spore, then picked up her silver butter knife and started poking at the flower-shaped butter pat in the dish she’d just banished to my side of the table. “What do you need to know?” she asked, without looking up.

“Umm,” I said, fumbling for my pen and my notebook. I had a whole list of questions ready, questions about everything from how she’d cast the movie to who her influences were, and what she liked on TV, but all I could think of was, “Where’d you get the idea?”

Without lifting her eyes from the butter, she said, “Saw it on TV.”

“That late-night sketch comedy show on HBO?” Nicholas Kaye said helpfully.

“I called the director. Said I thought it should be a movie. He agreed.”

Great. So that was how movies got made. Strange little butter-averse pint-size Elvira with squirt bottle makes phone call, and voilà, instant film!

“So… you wrote the script?”

Another wave of that ghostlike hand. “I just oversaw.”

“We hired a few guys from Saturday Night!,” said Nicholas Kaye.

Double great. Not only did I not work for Saturday Night!, I wasn’t even a guy. I quietly abandoned my plan of telling her that I’d written a screenplay. They’d probably laugh me all the way to Pittsburgh.

The waiter approached. Both Jane and Nicholas scowled at their menus in silence. The waiter shot me a desperate look.

“I’ll have the osso bucco,” I said.

“Excellent choice,” he said, beaming.

“I’ll have…” said Nicholas. Long, long pause. The waiter waited, pen poised. Jane poked at the butter. I felt a drop of sweat descend from the nape of my neck, down my back, and into my underwear. “This salad,” he finally said, pointing. The waiter leaned in for a look. “Very good, sir,” he said, relieved.

“And for the lady?”

“Lettuce,” Jane Sloan mumbled.

“A salad?” the waiter ventured.

“Lettuce,” she repeated. “Red leaf, if you have it. Washed. With vinegar on the side. And I don’t want the leaves cut in any way,” she continued. “I want them torn. By hand.”

The waiter scribbled and fled. Jane Sloan slowly lifted her eyes. I fumbled my notebook open again.

“Umm…”

Lettuce, I was thinking. Jane Sloan is eating lettuce for lunch, and I’m going to sit here and suck down veal in front of her. And, worse yet, I couldn’t think of a thing to ask.

“Tell me your favorite scene in the movie,” I finally managed. A horrible question, a freshman-at-the-school-‌paper question, but better than nothing, I thought.

She smiled, finally – faintly, fleetingly, but still, it was undeniably a smile. Then she shook her head.

“Can’t,” she said. “Too personal.”

Oh, God, help me. Rescue me. Send a tornado shrieking through the Four Seasons, uprooting businessmen, sending fine china flying. I’m dying here. “So what’s up next?”

Jane just shrugged and looked mysterious. I felt the waistband of my control-top pantyhose give up the fight and slide down my midsection, coming to rest at the top of my thighs.

“We’re working on something new together,” Nicholas Kaye volunteered. “I’m going to write… with a couple of my friends from college… and Jane’s going to show it to the studios. Would you like to hear about that?”

He launched into an enthusiastic description of what sounded like the world’s dumbest movie – something about a guy who inherits his father’s whoopie cushion factory, and how his father’s partner double-crosses him, and how he and the spunky cleaning lady triumph in the end. I took notes without hearing, my right hand moving mechanically over the page as my left hand ferried food to my mouth. Meanwhile, Jane was dividing her lettuce into two piles – one of mostly leaf pieces, the other of mostly stem pieces. Once this division was complete, she proceeded to dip the top third of the tines of her fork into the vinegar pot, then carefully spear a single piece of lettuce from the mostly leaf side and place it precisely in her mouth. After exactly six bites – during which time Nicholas polished off his salad and two pieces of bread and I downed half my osso bucco, which was, all things considered, delicious – she patted her lips dry with her napkin, picked up her butter knife, and started poking the butter again.

I reached over and pulled the butter dish away, thinking that I couldn’t stand to see this, and, also, that I had to try something, because the interview was going down the crapper. “Cut it out,” I said sternly. “That butter hasn’t done anything to you.”

There was a pause. A pregnant pause. An icy, yawning crevasse of a pause. Jane Sloan stared at me with her dead black eyes.

“Dairy,” she said, as if it were a curse.

“Third largest industry in Pennsylvania,” I countered, without any idea of whether it was true. It sounded about right, though. Whenever I went for a bike ride that took me more than a few miles out of the city, I saw cows.

“Jane’s allergic,” Nicholas said quickly. He smiled at his director, and took her hand, and then it hit me: They’re a couple. Even though he is twenty-seven and she is… well, God, at least fifteen years older than that. Even though he is recognizably human and she… isn’t. “What else?”

“Tell me…,” I stammered, my mind stuck on blank at the sight of their interlaced fingers. “Tell me something about the movie that not everybody knows.”

“Part of it was shot where they shot Showgirls,” offered Nicholas.

“That’s in the press packet,” Jane said suddenly. I knew that, but I’d decided to be polite, take the quote, and get the hell out of Dodge before I found out what a woman who ate six lettuce leaves for lunch did when they asked if she wanted dessert.

“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “The girl in the flower shop? She’s my daughter.”

“Really?”

“Her first role,” Jane said, sounding almost proud, almost shy. Almost real. “I’ve been discouraging her… she’s already obsessing over the way she looks”

Wonder where she gets that, I thought, but said nothing.

“I haven’t told anyone else that,” Jane said. The corners of her lips twitched. “But I like you.”

Heaven help the reporters you don’t like, I thought, and was trying to construct a reasonable response when she suddenly stood up, taking Nicholas along with her. “Good luck,” she murmured, and they swept out the door. Just as the dessert cart arrived.

“Something for mademoiselle?” said the waiter sympathetically.

Can you blame me if I said yes?

“So?” asked Samantha, on the phone that afternoon.

“She ate lettuce for lunch,” I moaned.

“A salad?”

“Lettuce. Plain lettuce. With vinegar on the side. I almost died.”

“Just lettuce?”

“Lettuce,” I repeated. “Red leaf lettuce. She specified a variety. And she kept squirting her face with Evian.”

“Cannie, you’re making this up.”

“I’m not! I swear! My Hollywood idol, and she’s this lettuce-eating freak, this, this miniature Elvira with tattooed eyeliner”

Samantha listened dispassionately. “You’re crying.”

“I am not,” I lied. “I’m just disappointed. I thought… you know… I had this idea that we’d hit it off. And I’d send her the screenplay, but I’m never going to get to give anyone the screenplay, because I didn’t go to college with a single cast member of Saturday Night!, and those are the guys who get their scripts read.” I glanced down at myself. More bad news. “Also I got osso bucco on my jacket.”

Samantha sighed. “I think you need an agent.”

“I can’t get an agent! Believe me, I’ve tried! They won’t even look at your stuff unless you’ve had something produced, and you can’t get producers to look at something unless it comes from an agent.” I wiped my eyes viciously. “This week sucks.”

“Mail call!” said Gabby gleefully. She dropped a stack of papers on my desk and waddled off. I said good-bye to Sam, and turned to my correspondence. Press release. Press release. Fax, fax, fax. Envelope with my name carefully lettered in the handwriting I had long since learned to identify as Old Person, Angry. I ripped the envelope open.

“Dear Miss Shapiro,” read the shaky letters. “Your article on Celine Dion’s special was the filthiest, nastiest smear piece of garbage I have seen in my fifty-seven years as a loyal Examiner reader. Bad enough that you mocked Celine’s music as “bombastic, overblown ballads,” but then you had to go and make fun of her looks! I’ll bet you’re no Cindy Crawford yourself. Sincerely, Mr. E. P. Deiffinger.”

“Hey, Cannie.”

Jesus Christ. Gabby was forever sneaking up behind me. For being massive, and old, and deaf, she could be quiet as a cat when it suited her. I turned around and there she was, squinting over my shoulder at the letter in my lap.

“Did you get something wrong?” she asked, her voice full of sympathy as thick, and fake, as Cheez Whiz. “Do we need to run a correction?”

“No, Gabby,” I said, trying not to scream. “Just a little opposing viewpoint.”

I tossed the letter in the trash can and shoved my chair back so fast I almost ran over Gabby’s toes.

“Jeez!” she hissed and retreated.

“Dear Mr. Deiffinger,” I composed in my head. “I may not be a supermodel, but at least I’ve got enough working brain cells to know what sucks when I hear it.”

“Dear Mr. Deiffinger,” I thought, walking the mile and a half from work to the Weight and Eating Disorders office where my first Fat Class was meeting. “Sorry you took offense at my description of Celine Dion’s work, but I actually thought I was being charitable.”

I stomped into the conference room, seated myself at the table, and looked around. There was Lily, from the waiting room, and an older black woman, about my size, with a bulging briefcase beside her, poking away at one of those hand-held e-mail readers. There was a blond teenager, her long hair swept off her face in a hairband, her body hidden beneath a bulky oversized sweatshirt and gigantic droopy jeans. And there was a woman of perhaps sixty who had to weigh at least four hundred pounds. She followed me into the room, walking with the aid of a cane, and surveyed the seats carefully, measuring her bulk against their parameters, before easing herself down.

“Hey, Cannie,” said Lily.

“Hey,” I grumbled. The words Portion Control were written on a white wipable message board, and there was a poster of the food pyramid on one wall. This shit again, I thought, wondering if I could place out of the class. I’d been to Weight Watchers, after all. I knew all about portion control.

The skinny nurse I remembered from the waiting room walked through the door, her hands full of bowls, measuring cups, a small plastic replica of a four-ounce pork chop.

“Good evening, everyone,” she said, and wrote her name – Sarah Pritchard, R.N. – on the board. We went around the table, introducing ourselves. The blond girl was Bonnie, the black woman was Anita, and the very large woman was Esther from West Oak Lane.

“I’m having a flashback of college,” whispered Lily, as Nurse Sarah distributed booklets full of calorie counts, and packets of printouts on behavior modification.

“I’m having a flashback of Weight Watchers,” I whispered back.

“Did you try that?” asked Bonnie the blond girl, edging closer to us.

“Last year,” I said.

“Was that the One Two Three Success program?”

“Fat and Fiber,” I whispered back.

“Isn’t that a cereal?” asked Esther, who had a surprisingly lovely voice – very low, and warm, and free of the dread Philadelphia accent that causes natives to swallow their consonants like they’re made of warm taffy.

“That’s Fruit and Fiber,” the blond girl said.

“Fat and Fiber was where you had to count the grams of fat and the grams of fiber in every food, and you were supposed to eat a certain number of grams of fiber, and not go over a certain number of grams of fat,” I explained.

“Did it work?” asked Anita, setting down her Palm Pilot.

“Nah,” I said. “But that was probably my fault. I kept mixing up which number I was supposed to stay below and which one I was supposed to go above… and then I found, like, these really high-fiber brownies that were made with iron filings or something”

Lily cracked up.

“They had a zillion calories apiece but I figured it didn’t matter because they were very low in fat and very high in fiber”

“A common mistake,” said Nurse Sarah cheerfully. “Fat and fiber are both important, but so is the total number of calories you take in. It’s very simple, really,” she said, turning back to the board and scribbling the kind of equation that had confounded me in eleventh grade. “Calories taken in versus calories expended. If you take in more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight.”

“Really?” I asked, my eyes wide.

The nurse looked at me suspiciously.

“Are you serious? It’s that simple?”

“Um,” she began. I suspected that she was probably used to fat ladies sitting meekly in the chairs, like overfed sheep, smiling and nodding and being grateful for the wisdom she was imparting, staring at her with abashed, admiring eyes, all because she’d had the good fortune of being born thin. The thought infuriated me.

“So if I eat fewer calories than I burn…” I slapped my forehead. “My God! I finally get it! I understand! I’m cured!” I stood up and pumped my hands in the air as Lily snickered. “Healed! Saved! Thank you, Jesus, and the Weight and Eating Disorders Center, for taking the blinders from my eyes!”

“Okay,” said the nurse. “You’ve made your point.”

“Damn,” I said, resuming my seat. “I was going to ask if I could be excused.”

The nurse sighed. “Look,” she said. “The truth of it is, there’re a lot of complicating factors… and science doesn’t even understand all of them. We know about metabolic rates, and how some people’s bodies just seem to want to hang on to excess weight more than other people’s do. We know this isn’t easy. I would never tell you that it was.”

She stared at us, breathing rapidly. We stared right back.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said into the silence. “I was being fresh. It’s just that… well, I don’t want to speak for anybody else, but I’ve had this explained to me before.”

“Uh-huh,” said Anita.

“Me, too,” said Bonnie.

“Fat people aren’t stupid,” I continued. “But every single weight-loss program I’ve ever been to treats us like we are – as if as soon as they explain that broiled chicken is better than fried, and frozen yogurt’s better than ice cream, and that if you take a hot bath instead of eating pizza, we’re going to all turn into Courteney Cox.”

“That’s right,” said Lily.

The nurse looked frustrated. “I’d certainly never mean to suggest that any of you are stupid,” she said. “Diet is part of it,” she added. “Exercise is part of it, too, although probably not as big a part as we used to believe.”

I frowned. That was just my luck. With all of the biking and walking I did, plus regular workouts at the gym with Samantha, exercise was the one part of a healthy lifestyle that I had down pat.

“Now today,” she continued, “we’re going to be talking about portion size. Did you know that most restaurants serve portions that are well over the recommended USDA guidelines of what most women require over an entire day?”

I groaned softly to myself as the nurse arrayed the plates and cups and little plastic pork chop on the table. “The correct portion of protein,” she said, speaking in the slow, loud, careful voice commonly employed by kindergarten teachers, “is four ounces. Now, can anyone tell me about how much that is?”

“Size of your palm,” muttered Anita. “Jenny Craig,” she said to the nurse’s surprised look.

Nurse Sarah took a deep breath. “Very good!” she said, making a visible effort to sound happy and upbeat. “Now, how about a portion of fat?”

“Tip of your thumb,” I muttered. Her eyes widened. “Look,” I said, “I think we all know this stuff… am I right?”

I looked around the table. Everyone nodded. “The only thing we’re here for, the only thing that this program has to offer us, is the drugs. Now, are we going to get them today, or do we have to sit here and act like you’re telling us things we don’t already know?”

The nurse’s face went from frustrated (and slightly dismissive) to angry (and more than slightly scared). “There’s a procedure to this,” she said. “We explained it. Four weeks of behavior-modification classes…”

Lily started thumping her fist on the table. “Drugs… drugs… drugs…” she chanted.

“We can’t just hand out prescription medication”

“Drugs… drugs… drugs…” Now Bonnie the blond girl and Esther were chanting along as well. The nurse opened her mouth, then closed it again. “I’ll get the doctor,” she said, and bolted. The five of us stared at each other for a moment. Then we all burst out laughing.

“She was scared!” Lily hooted.

“Probably thought we’d crush her,” I muttered.

“Sit on her!” gasped Bonnie.

“I hate skinny people,” I said.

Anita looked very serious. “Don’t say that,” she said. “You shouldn’t hate anyone.”

“Agh,” I sighed. Just then, Dr. K. stuck his head through the door, with the chastened-looking nurse right behind him, practically clinging to the hem of his white coat.

“I understand there’s a problem,” he rumbled.

“Drugs!” said Lily.

The doctor had the look of a man who wanted very badly to laugh and was trying very hard not to.

“Is there a movement spokeswoman?” he asked.

Everyone looked at me. I got to my feet, smoothed my shirt, and cleared my throat. “I think that it’s the feeling of the group that we’ve all been through different lectures and courses and support groups concerning behavior modification.” I looked around the table. Everyone seemed to be nodding in agreement. “It’s our feeling that we’ve tried to change our behavior, and eat less, and exercise more, and all of those things that they tell you to do, and what we’d really like… what we’re really here for, what we’ve all paid for, is something new. Namely, drugs,” I concluded, and sat back in my seat.

“Well, I know how you feel,” he said.

“I doubt that very much,” I shot back.

“Well, maybe you can tell me,” he said mildly. “Look,” he said. “It’s not like I know the secrets to lifelong weight loss and I’m here to tell them to you. Think of this as a journey… think of it as something we’re in on together.”

“Except that our journey led us to the wonderful world of plus-size shopping and lonely nights,” I grumbled.

The doctor smiled at me – a very disarming grin. “Let’s forget about fat or thin for a minute,” he said. “If you guys already know the calorie counts of everything, and what a serving of pasta’s supposed to look like, then I’m sure you all know that most diets don’t work. Not over the long term, anyhow.”

Now he had our attention. It was true, we’d all figured this out (from bitter personal experiences, in most cases), but to hear an authority figure, a doctor, a doctor who was running a weight-loss program say it… well, that was practically heresy. I half expected security guards to come rushing through the door and drag him off to be re-brainwashed.

“I think,” he continued, “that we’ll all have much better luck – and we’ll be happier – if we think instead about small lifestyle changes – little things that we can do every day that won’t prove unsustainable over the long term. If we think about getting healthier, and feeling happier with ourselves, instead of looking like Courteney…”

He looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“Cox,” I supplied. “Actually, Cox-Arquette. She got married.”

“Right. Her. Forget her. Let’s concentrate on the attainable, instead. And I promise that nobody here will treat you like you’re stupid, no matter what your size is.”

I found I was touched in spite of myself. The guy was actually making sense. Better yet, he wasn’t talking down to us. It was… well, revolutionary, really.

The nurse gave us one last disgruntled glance and scurried away. The doctor closed the door and took a seat. “I’d like to do an exercise with you,” he said. He looked around the table. “How many of you ever eat when you’re not hungry?”

Dead silence. I closed my eyes. Emotional eating. I’d been through this lecture, too.

“How many of you eat breakfast, and then maybe you come to the office and there’s a box of doughnuts and they look good and you’ll have one just because they’re there?”

More silence. “Dunkin’ Donuts or Krispy Kremes?” I finally asked.

The doctor pursed his full lips. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, it makes a difference,” I said.

“Dunkin’ Donuts,” he said.

“Chocolate? Jelly? Glazed that somebody from Accounting ripped in half, so there’s only half a doughnut left?”

“Krispy Kremes are better,” said Bonnie.

“Especially the warm ones,” said Esther.

I licked my lips.

“The last time I had doughnuts,” said Esther, “someone brought them to work, just like we’re talking about, and I picked out one that looked like a Boston cream… you know, it had the chocolate on top?”

We nodded. We all probably knew how to recognize a Boston cream doughnut on sight.

“Then I bit into it,” Esther continued, “and it was…” Her lips curled. “Lemon.”

“Ick,” said Bonnie. “I hate lemon!”

“Okay,” said the doctor, laughing. “My point is, they could be the best doughnuts in the world. They could be the Platonic ideal of doughnut-ness. But if you’ve already had breakfast, and you aren’t really hungry, ideally, you should be able to walk right by.”

We thought about this for a minute. “As if,” Lily finally said.

“Maybe you could try telling yourself that when you are really hungry, if what you’re really hungry for is a doughnut, then you can go get one.”

We thought again. “Nope,” said Lily. “I’m still eating the free doughnuts.”

“And how do you know what you’re really hungry for?” asked Bonnie. “Like, me… I’m always hungry for the stuff I know I shouldn’t be eating. But, like, give me a bag of baby carrots and I’m all, like, whatever.”

“Did you ever try boiling them and mashing them with ginger and orange rind?” asked Lily. Bonnie wrinkled her nose.

“I don’t like carrots,” said Anita, “but I do like butternut squash.”

“That’s not a vegetable, though. It’s a starch,” I said.

Anita looked confused. “How can it not be a vegetable?”

“It’s a starchy vegetable. Like a potato. I learned that in Weight Watchers.”

“On Fat and Fiber?” asked Lily.

“Okay then!” said the doctor. I could tell from his eyes that the unruly chatter of five veterans of Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Pritikin, Atkins, et al., was starting to get to him. It couldn’t be fun.

“Let’s try something,” he said. He walked to the door and flicked off the lights. The room dimmed. Bonnie giggled. “I want you all to close your eyes,” he said, “and try to figure out how you feel right now, right this minute. Are you hungry? Tired? Are you sad, or happy, or anxious? Try to really concentrate, and then, try to really separate the physical sensations from what’s happening emotionally.”

We all closed our eyes.

“Anita?” asked the doctor.

“I’m tired,” she said immediately.

“Bonnie?”

“Oh, maybe tired. Maybe a little hungry, too,” she said.

“And emotionally?” he prodded.

Bonnie sighed. “I’m sick of my school,” she finally muttered. “The kids say rotten things to me.” I snuck a peek at her. Her eyes were still tightly screwed shut, and her hands were clenched into fists on top of her oversized jeans. High school, evidently, had not gotten any kinder or gentler since my own attendance ten years prior. I wished I could put my hand on her shoulder. Tell her that things would get better… except, given recent events in my own life, I wasn’t sure it was the truth.

“Lily?”

“Starving,” Lily said promptly.

“And emotionally?”

“Umm… okay,” she said.

“Just okay?” asked the doctor.

“There’s a new episode of ER on tonight,” she said. “I can’t be anything less than okay.”

“Esther?”

“I’m ashamed,” said Esther, and burst into tears. I opened my eyes. The doctor pulled a small packet of Kleenex out of his pocket and handed it over.

“Why ashamed?” he asked gently.

Esther smiled weakly. “ ‘Cause before we started I was looking at the plastic pork chop, and I was thinking that it didn’t look half bad.”

That broke the tension. We all started laughing, even the doctor. Esther sniffled, wiping her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” Lily said. “I was thinking the exact same thing about the pat of butter on the food pyramid.”

The doctor cleared his throat. “And Candace?” he asked.

“Cannie,” I said.

“How are you?”

I closed my eyes, but only for a second and what I saw was Bruce’s face, Bruce’s brown eyes close to mine. Bruce saying that he loved me. Then I opened them and looked right at him. “Fine,” I said, even though it wasn’t true. “I’m fine.”

“So how’d it go?” asked Samantha. We were panting on side-by-side StairMasters that night at the gym.

“So far, not bad,” I said. “No drugs yet. The doctor who’s leading the class seems okay.”

We climbed in silence for a few minutes, the belts grinding and squeaking beneath our feet as a Funky Fitness class blared away beside us. Our gym seemed determined to attract new members by offering every flavor-of-the-week fitness class, so we had Pilates, gospel aerobics, interval spinning, and something called the Fireman’s Full-Body Workout, complete with hoses, ladders, and a one-hundred-pound mannequin to be hauled up and down the stairs. Meanwhile, the roof leaked, the air conditioners were iffy, and the Jacuzzi always seemed to be under repair.

“And how was the rest of your day, dear?” asked Sam, wiping her face with her sleeve. I told her about Mr. Deiffenger’s angry defense of Celine Dion.

“I hate readers,” I gasped, as my StairMaster kicked into a higher gear. “Why do they have to get so personal?”

“I guess he probably figures that you were messing with Celine, so you deserve it.”

“Yeah, but she’s public property. I’m just me.”

“But not to him, you’re not. Your name’s in the paper. That makes you public property, just like Celine.”

“Only bigger.”

“And with better taste. And not,” said Samantha sternly, “with any plans to marry your seventy-year-old manager who’s known you since you were twelve.”

“Oh, now who’s being critical?” I asked.

“Damn Canadians,” said Samantha. She’d spent a few years working in Montreal, had endured a disastrous love affair with a man there, and never had anything nice to say about our neighbors to the North, including Peter Jennings, whom she steadfastly refused to watch, arguing that he’d taken a job that should have rightfully gone to an American – “someone who knows how to say the word about.”

After forty miserable minutes, we adjourned to the steam room, wrapped ourselves in towels, and assumed prone positions on the benches.

“How’s the Yoga King?” I inquired. Sam gave a satisfied-looking smile and raised her arms above her head, reaching toward the ceiling.

“I’m feeling very flexible,” she said smugly. I threw my towel at her head.

“Don’t torture me,” I said. “I’m probably never going to have sex again.”

“Oh, cut it out, Cannie,” said Samantha. “And you know this won’t last. Mine never do.” Which was true. Sam’s love life, of late, had been uniquely cursed. She’d meet a guy and go out with him once, and everything would be wonderful. They’d meet again, and things would be clicking along. And then, on the third date, there’d be some horrible awkward moment, some unbelievable revelation, something that would basically make it impossible for Sam to see the guy again. Her last guy, a Jewish doctor with a fabulous résumé and enviable physique, had looked like a contender until Date #3, when he’d taken Sam home for dinner and she’d been disturbed to find a picture of his sister prominently displayed in the entryway hall.

“What’s wrong with that?” I’d asked.

“She was topless,” Samantha’d replied. Exit Dr. Right, enter the Yoga King.

“Look at it this way,” said Samantha. “It was a lousy day, but now it’s over.”

“I just wish I could talk to him.”

Samantha brushed her hair back over her shoulders, propped her head on an elbow, and stared down at me from her perch on one of the upper tiers of wooden benches. “To Mr. Deiffledorf?”

“Deiffinger. No, not him.” I ladled more water on the hot rocks so the steam billowed around us. “To Bruce.”

Samantha squinted at me through the haze. “Bruce? I don’t get it.”

“What if…,” I said slowly. “What if I made a mistake?”

She sighed. “Cannie, I listened to you for months talk about how things weren’t right, how things weren’t getting better, how you knew that taking a break would be the right thing to do in the long run. And even though you were upset right after it happened, I never heard you say that you’d made the wrong decision.”

“What if I think something different now?”

“Well, what changed your mind?”

I thought about my answer. The article was part of it. Bruce and I had never talked about my whole weight thing. Maybe if we had… if he had some sense of how I felt, if I had some inkling of how much he understood… maybe things could have been different.

But more than that, I missed talking to him, telling him how my day went, blowing off steam about Gabby’s latest salvos, reading him potential leads for my stories, scenes from my screenplays.

“I just miss him,” I said lamely.

“Even after what he wrote about you?” asked Sam.

“Maybe it wasn’t so bad,” I muttered. “I mean, he didn’t say that he didn’t find me… you know… desirable.”

“Of course he found you desirable,” Sam said. “You didn’t find him desirable. You found him lazy, and immature, and a slob, and you told me not three months ago lying on this very bench that if he left one more used piece of Kleenex in your bed you were going to kill him and leave his body on a New Jersey Transit bus.”

I winced. I couldn’t remember the line exactly, but it sure sounded like something I’d say.

“And if you called him,” Samantha continued, “what would you say?”

“Hi, how are you, planning on humiliating me in print again anytime soon?” I’d actually had a monthlong reprieve. Bruce’s October “Good in Bed” had been called “Love and the Glove.” Someone – Gabby, I was practically sure – had left a copy on my desk at work the day before, and I’d read it as fast as I could, with my heart in my throat, until I’d determined that there wasn’t a word about C. Not this month, at least.

Real men wear condoms, was his first line. Which was a hoot, considering that during our three years together Bruce had been almost completely spared the indignities of latex. We’d both tested clean, and I went on the pill after a handful of dismaying times when his erection would wilt the instant I produced the Trojans. That minor detail was, of course, notably absent from the story, along with the fact that I’d wound up putting the thing on him – an act that left me feeling like an overprotective mother tying her little boy’s shoes. Donning the glove is more than a mere duty, he’d lectured Moxie’s readers. It’s a sign of devotion, of maturity, a sign of respect for all womankind – and a sign of his love for you.

Now, the memory of the way he’d really been regarding condoms seemed too tender to even consider. And the thought of Bruce and I in bed together made me cringe, because of the thought that came dashing in on its heels: We’ll never be like that again.

“Don’t call him,” said Sam. “I know it feels awful right now, but you’ll get through it. You’ll survive.”

“Thank you, Gloria Gaynor,” I grumbled, and went to take a shower.

When I got home, my answering machine was blinking. I hit “play” and heard Steve. “Remember me? The guy in the park? Listen, I was just wondering if you’d like to get that beer this week or maybe dinner. Give me a call.”

I smiled as I walked Nifkin, grinned when I cooked myself a chicken breast and a sweet potato and spinach for dinner, beamed all through my twenty-minute consultation with Sam on the question of Steve, Cute Guy from the Park. At nine o’clock precisely I dialed his number. He sounded glad to hear from me. He sounded… great, in fact. Funny. Considerate. Interested in what I did. We quickly covered the basics of each other’s lives: ages, colleges, oh-did-you-know-Janie-‌from-my-high-school, a little bit about parents and family (I left out the whole lesbian mother thing, in order to have something to talk about in the event of a second date), and a little bit about why-we’re-single-right-‌now (I gave the two-sentence synopsis of the Bruce denouement. He told me he’d had a girlfriend back in Atlanta, but she’d gone to nursing school and he’d moved here). I told him about covering the Pillsbury bake-off. He told me that he’d taken up kayaking. We decided to meet for dinner on Saturday night at the Latest Dish and maybe catch a movie after that.

“So maybe this will be okay,” I told Nifkin, who didn’t seem to care much, one way or the other. He turned three times and settled himself on a pillow. I put on my nightgown, trying to avoid glimpses of my body in the bathroom mirror, and went to sleep feeling cautiously optimistic that there was at least a chance that I wouldn’t die alone.

Samantha and I had long since identified Azafran as our designated first date restaurant. It had all the advantages: It was right around the corner from her house and my apartment. The food was good, it wasn’t too expensive, it was BYOB, which gave us the chance to a) impress the guy by bringing a good bottle of wine, and b) eliminate the possibility of the guy getting blotto, because there’d be nothing more than the single bottle. And, best of all, Azafran had floor-to-ceiling windows, and waitresses who worked out at our gym, who knew us, and who would obligingly seat us at the window tables – our backs to the street, with the guy facing forward – so that whichever one of us didn’t have the date could stroll by with Nifkin and scope out the prospect.

I was congratulating myself, because Steve looked eminently scop-able. Short-sleeved polo shirt, neat khakis that looked as though he might actually have ironed them, and a pleasant whiff of cologne. A nice change from Bruce, who was given to stained T-shirts and droopy shorts and who could, absent frequent reminders on my part, be somewhat haphazard in his deodorant use.

I smiled at Steve. He smiled back. Our fingers brushed over the calamari. The wine was delicious, perfectly chilled, and it was a perfect night, with a clear, starry sky and just a hint of fall in the wind.

“So what did you do today?” he asked me.

“Went for a bike ride, up to Chestnut Hill,” I said. “Thought about you…”

Something flickered across his face then. Something bad.

“Look,” he said quietly. “I ought to tell you something. When I asked if you wanted to have a beer with me… well, I told you I was new to the neighborhood… I mean, I was really just looking for… you know. For friends. For people to hang out with.”

The calamari turned into a lead ball in my stomach. “Oh.”

“And I guess I didn’t make that clear enough… that, I mean that this isn’t a date or anything… oh, God,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that.”

Don’t cry, I told myself. Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry. How had I misread this so badly? I was pathetic. A walking joke. I wanted Bruce back. Hell, I wanted my mother. Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry.

“Your eyes,” he said softly. “Your eyes are killing me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said dumbly. Apologizing as always. This cannot get any worse, I thought. Steve stared over my head, out the window.

“Hey,” he said, “isn’t that your dog?”

I turned, and, sure enough, there was Samantha, and Nifkin, both peering through the window. Sam looked impressed. As I stared, she flashed me a quick thumbs-up.

“Will you excuse me?” I murmured. I stood up, forcing my feet to move. In the ladies’ room I splashed cold water on my face, concentrating on not breathing, feeling the tears I couldn’t cry mass behind my forehead and instantly transform themselves into a headache. I considered the night ahead: dinner, then we were supposed to go see the latest world-ending disaster flick at the multiplex. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t spend the whole night sitting next to a guy who’d just declared himself an un-date. And maybe that made me too sensitive, or ridiculous, but the truth was, I couldn’t do it.

I went to the kitchen and found our waitress.

“Almost ready,” she said, then looked at my face. “Oh, God… what? He’s gay. He’s an escaped convict. He used to date your mother.”

“Along those lines,” I said.

“Want me to tell him you’re sick?”

“Yeah,” I said, then thought again. “No. Tell you what… pack up the food, and don’t tell him anything. Let’s see how long he sits there.”

She rolled her eyes. “That bad?”

“There’s another way out of here, right?”

She pointed to the fire exit, which was propped open by a chair containing a busboy on a break. “Go for it,” she said, and a minute later, clutching two to-go containers and what remained of my pride, I slunk past the busboy and out into the night. My head was pounding. Fool, I thought fiercely. Idiot. Stupid, stupid idiot to think that somebody who looks like that would be interested in someone who looks like you.

I got upstairs, dumped the food, took off my dress, pulled on my ratty overalls, thinking furiously that I probably looked like Andrea Dworkin. I stomped down the stairs, out the door, and started walking, first down to the river, then north, toward Society Hill and Old City, and finally, west toward Rittenhouse Square.

Part of me – the reasonable part – was thinking that this was not a big thing, just a minor bump on life’s bicycle path, and that he was the idiot, not me. The single guy, he’d said. Was I wrong to think that he was asking me out on a bona fide date? And so what if this wasn’t a date after all? I’d had dates before. I’d even had boyfriends. It was completely reasonable to think that I’d have them both again, and this guy wasn’t worth another second of my time.

But another part – the shrill, hysterical, hypercritical, and, unfortunately, much louder part – was saying something else entirely.

That I was dumb. That I was fat. That I was so fat that nobody would ever love me again and so dense that I couldn’t see it. That I’d been a fool, or, worse, been made a fool of. That Steve, the Teva-wearing engineer, was probably sitting at an empty table, eating calamari and laughing to himself about big, dumb Cannie.

And who was I going to tell? Who could comfort me?

Not my mother. I couldn’t really talk to her about my love life after I’d made it so clear that I didn’t approve of hers. And plus, with Bruce’s column, she’d learned enough about my after-dark activities for the time being.

I could tell Samantha, certainly, but she’d think I was crazy. “Why are you assuming this is about the way you look?” she’d demand, and I’d mutter that it could probably have been about something else, or just a plain old misunderstanding, all the while feeling the truth in my bones, the Gospel according to my father: I was fat and I was ugly and nobody would ever love me. And it would be embarrassing. I wanted my friends to think of me as someone who was smart and funny and capable. I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me.

What I wanted to do was call Bruce. I wouldn’t tell him about this latest humiliation – I didn’t want his pity, either, or for him to think I’d come crawling back, or was planning to, simply because some fuzzy-legged jerk had rejected me – but I wanted to hear his voice. No matter what he’d said in Moxie, no matter how he’d shamed me. After three years, he knew me better than probably anyone else in the world, except Samantha, and at that moment, standing on the sidewalk on 17th and Walnut, I wanted to talk to him so badly that I got weak in the knees.

I hurried home and heaved myself up the stairs two at a time. Sweaty, hands shaking, I sprawled on the bed and reached for the phone, punching in his number as fast as I could. He picked up instantly.

“Hey, Bruce,” I began.

“Cannie?” His voice sounded strange. “I was just going to call you.”

“Really?” I felt a small spark of hopefulness flare in my chest.

“I just wanted to let you know,” he began, and his voice dissolved into harsh, ragged sobs. “My father died this morning.”

I don’t remember what I said then. I remember that he told me the details: He’d had a stroke and he’d died in the hospital. It had been very fast.

I was crying, Bruce was crying. I couldn’t remember when I’d felt so horrible about something. It was so unfair. Bruce’s father was a wonderful man. He had loved his family. He had even, I thought, maybe loved me, too.

But even as I was feeling horrible, I felt the spark growing. He’ll get it now, a voice in my head whispered. Once you’ve had a loss like that, doesn’t it change the way you see the world? And wouldn’t it change the way he saw me, my own fractured family, my own lost father? Plus, he’d need me. He’d needed me once before, to rescue him from loneliness, from sexual ignorance and shame… and surely he would need me again to help him get through this.

I imagined us at the funeral, and how I’d hold his hand, how I’d help him, hold him up, be there for him to lean on, the way I wished I could have leaned on him. I imagined him looking at me with new respect and understanding, new consideration, with the eyes of a man, not a boy.

“Let me help. How can I help?” I said. “Do you want me to come over?”

His reply was dismayingly instant. “No,” he said. “I’m going home, and there’s a ton of people there now. It would be weird. Could you come to the funeral tomorrow?”

“Of course,” I said. “Of course. I love you,” I said, the words out of my mouth almost before I’d finished thinking them.

“What does that mean?” he asked me, still crying.

To my credit, I recovered fast. “That I want to be there for you… and help you any way I can.”

“Just come tomorrow,” he said dully. “That’s all you can do right now.”

But something perverse in me persisted.

“I love you,” I said again, and left the words hanging there. Bruce sighed, knowing what I wanted, and unwilling, or unable, to give it to me.

“I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry, Cannie.”