150 Pounds (8 page)

Carlos took the flyer out of Alexis’s hands slowly. “Ha! You’ve got the hots for him already! This guy is a lady-killer. Like, thirty women have already signed up for this class. It’s the most we’ve ever gotten for one of our special cooking series. I think he looks like one of those Calvin Klein models that have that billboard on Canal, you know, the ones in their underpants that everyone gets all worked up about?”

She rolled her eyes. “I do not have the hots for him, I don’t even know him,” Alexis said, putting on her coat. “If he has good ideas about nutrition I could use him on the blog, that’s all.”
Really! Carlos was so immature sometimes.

“Sure, sure. Well, it will be good to see you there,” Carlos said. “It’s next month, so you might want to sign up now because there’s only two spots left.”

“No problem. I’ll just pay now,” Alexis said. “How much is it?”

“Fifty bucks,” Carlos said.

Alexis swallowed. She only had a hundred dollars left in her bank account. She was due checks from advertisers on
Skinny Chick,
but so far they were behind on payment. Since the recession, checks were arriving in the mail slower and slower. She made a note on her iPhone to call around to her various advertisers when she got home, and signed up for the course. Since it was related to her blog, she could probably write it off come tax season.

“Can you take a check?” she asked Carlos, who was greeting people as they hustled in, carrying gym bags and flashing IDs at him.

“For you, doll? Anything.”

Alexis reached into her Chanel bag she had on loan for five more days from the Web site
Beg, Borrow, Steal
. She carefully wrote out the check, dating it for a week from now, when she’d hopefully have more dough, hoping Carlos wouldn’t notice. He didn’t.

“See you in class,” he sang after her, as she pushed through the revolving front door of the gym.

“Namaste,” she called back jokingly, her head spinning with Sarah’s news and the fact that she’d just signed up for her first cooking class ever, and one she really couldn’t afford. But really, all she could think about was Noah’s deep, warm brown eyes. She suddenly had to meet him. She was filled with excitement about a total stranger. What did that say about her?

The day was definitely not going as scheduled.

Fat and Fabulous

PEDICURE BEFORE FOOD

Okay, so I know my job is to talk about food, and how important it is to eat it. And believe me, I eat frickin’ plenty. But if someone threatened me with an imminent Indian burn on my arm unless I chose between pedicures and food, I’d starve. May we discuss? Oh, how do I describe the warm flow of love that moves up from my toes to my heart while my feet are being scrubbed, washed, lavished with lotion, and pampered? We all like to pretend to be queen for a day (at least I do) and sitting there on that pedicure chair, well, one might just mistake me for royalty atop my golden plastic throne.

For those thirty minutes of heaven, it doesn’t matter that I wear a size sixteen. Sure, I’m in public, but it’s a different kind of public in the nail salon. It’s all women, and believe me, no one is looking at how wide my ass is or how big my boobs are (and you all know from reading this column that they’re gigantic!) when there’s free issues of
Us Weekly
to pore over and important decisions to make such as how hot one likes their water temperature or choosing between Bikini Strap pink or Meet Me at Sunset red. I pick crazy colors: purples, hot pinks, blues, and greens. Because when you’re fat with a capital
F
you stand out anyway, so who cares if you have wild toes?

I used to not like myself very much, and you all have heard about my struggles with depression. For so long in my teens and early twenties I denied myself the pleasures of getting a pedi because I thought,
Shoshana, you are so fat you don’t deserve this. That’s for other girls, skinnier girls.
Well, today I’m taking a stand. Or a seat, if you will. What you weigh does not determine your quality of life. If you want to have happy feet, you get happy feet!

This theory works for bigger pleasures as well. Can’t fit into Theory jeans? So what? You still can take that vacation, drink that fine wine, buy that second home. Hedonism rules! So what if you’re Fat? It’s the good
F
-word. Say it loud and say it proud. Now close that laptop and go out there and get a pedicure!

XO,

Shosh

Shoshana’s alarm clock went off early Thursday afternoon. In response, she chucked a pink ballet flat at it that had mysteriously ended up on the pillow next to her head. One of a set she’d bought just last week at Target, it was part of her attempt to look more grown-up, because she had to meet with advertisers in the city later in the week, and because of her look, which she liked to describe as “Stevie Nicks meets a fairy in the woods.” The shoe bounced off the alarm, hitting the button for the radio, and the sounds of Adele came streaming out.

“I love you, Adele, but shut up!” Shoshana yelled. “It’s the break of dawn!”

“It’s noon,” Andrea said, laughter in her voice, as she came into Shoshana’s room and plunked her petite body down on the bed. “You are
so
not a morning person, Shosh; it’s hilarious.”

“In another part of the world it’s much earlier,” Shoshana moaned.

“I brought you a cup of coffee,” Andrea said. The mug read
DON’T ANNOY THE WRITER. SHE MAY PUT YOU IN A BOOK AND KILL YOU.
It was a present from Shoshana’s father, who had salvaged it at a yard sale. (Her parents were suckers for a good yard sale. They’d been tickled with delight when they learned such an event held in Hoboken was called a “gate sale,” given the lack of yards in the city.)

“Okay, now I’m suspicious,” Shoshana said. She sat up in bed and took a sip. She licked her lips. “Suspicious, but now in ecstasy.”

“Can’t I just be a good friend and bring you a cup of joe to be nice?” Andrea asked, fluttering her eyelashes.

“No, you cannot. Give it up.”

Andrea was one of four women Shoshana lived with on Bloomfield Street, on the second floor of a five-story walk-up, above Empire Coffee. Luckily, they all equally prayed to the caffeine gods in the morning, so their four-bedroom apartment (Andrea and another roommate, Karen, shared) was in the perfect location. Shoshana woke daily to the faint vibrations of beans being ground.

Andrea had jet-black curls, and large, almond-colored eyes. She was Puerto Rican and Dominican, and she’d been Shoshana’s roommate during their freshman year at Princeton. She’d strolled in and said, “Hi, I’m Andrea. I’m here so Princeton can fulfill its affirmative action quota.” They’d been friends ever since, along with the three other girls, all Princeton grads now trying to push and shove their way into success in New York during bad economic times. Andrea really wanted to be an actress, and took the PATH into Manhattan and went on auditions some mornings, other times on Saturdays. She’d been in a deodorant commercial three months ago where she had to apply the deodorant fifty-seven times, and she’d been eaten alive by mosquitoes later that evening at a cookout, finally giving her a real excuse for calling out of work.

“Do you remember when I told you that someday, and that day may never come, I’ll have to call on you to do a favor for me?” Andrea was asking. She moved closer to Shoshana, snuggling into her back.

“Are you seriously quoting
The Godfather
to me?”

On the wall near her bed was a framed photograph of Lane Bryant, the dress manufacturer. It had gotten knocked askew. (They’d had a few friends over the night before and there’d been an impromptu dance-off in her room.) Shoshana reached out and straightened the picture with her toe. Bryant was the first person to make plus-size clothing on a national scale, with the idea that larger women came in three body types: all-over stout, flat-busted stout, and full-busted stout. Shoshana was definitely in the full-busted stout category.

“Okay, you caught me. I do need to ask you for a favor. Frankie says it’s okay, don’t you, Frankie?”

Frank Sinatra, the one-eyed, long-haired mini-dachshund-slash-Chihuahua-slash-unknown mix Shoshana had adopted three years ago, right after her father died, was sprawled out on the pillow next to Andrea’s head. He wore a doggie T-shirt with a tiny picture of Janis Joplin stretched across its front. Hearing his name, he let out what might have been a groan of pleasure as she stroked his lumpy-shaped head. He was very famous in the Church Square Park dog run, and around town, as Hobokenites loved that he was named for one of their own. (He also had a wardrobe to rival
The Real Housewives of New Jersey
.) The real Frank Sinatra (or shall we say the furless one) had once lived on Monroe Street, just a few blocks away. Shoshana named him after Old Blue Eyes because of an incident on the day she took him home from the animal shelter in Jersey City. After stepping off the light rail, she took him for his first walk about town. The dog was not content to pee anywhere near her apartment, so a frustrated Shoshana walked toward the back of Hoboken, away from the water, to Monroe, and wandered around. Well, wouldn’t you know that as she rounded the corner of Fourth, her tiny little ugly dog wagged his hairless tail and quivered all over like one of those metal detectors on the beach coming into contact with gold. She heard the sound of his tiny toenails scraping against the ground, and when he finally lifted his leg and let out a stream of yellow pee, she looked down and gasped: he was peeing directly on a giant gold star, marking the plot where Sinatra was born! And thus, a tiny runt of a dog was given the macho name.

“God, this dog is ugly,” Andrea said in a singsong voice. Sinatra licked her nose, not upset over the insult. “But he sure is a sweetie pie.”

“You’re not ugly, are you, son?” Shoshana asked Sinatra, who promptly licked her across her mouth.

“Gross!” Andrea exclaimed. “You shouldn’t let him lick you like that. Dogs carry different germs than us.”

“They do not,” Shoshana said. She laughed. “There aren’t special dog species germs.”

He was the ugliest dog Shoshana had ever seen when she visited the shelter, but she fell in love with him immediately. She knew all about being judged on appearance. He weighed four pounds (on a good day) and had a long, mostly furless skinny body with black and white spots, like a cow. Where he did have fur was around his face and ears, like an old man. He had an unexplainable missing left eye, which was grown over with luminescent, pale pink skin like the inside of a shell, and a tongue that didn’t set right in his jaw and therefore stuck absurdly out the side through his teeth. Shoshana suspected he’d been abused at one point, given his injuries.

“Why’s his eye like that?” a child in the park with chocolate on his face once asked her, as she was out walking.

“He’s a pirate,” Shoshana answered, smiling when the kid’s jaw dropped open.

Sinatra was the love of her life and she didn’t go anywhere without him in one of her large, unfashionable bags made from recycled material, his face sticking out, his crooked tongue flapping against his cheek as the wind swept his face and whipped his fur back, making him look like a bat.

“I’m actually glad you woke me up,” Shoshana said. She took off the pink eye cover that she wore to sleep and placed it on her white Shabby Chic for Target bedside table.

She’d been having the strangest dream, that Victoria Beckham, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton were all holding hands and dancing in the moonlight on her mother’s back deck in Summit, and it seemed only natural that their little bit of skin left would slip right off and their skeletons would gleam, their jawbones creaking into eerie, see-through grins, as they joined hands and danced, bones clacking, wind whistling through their rib cages.

Andrea had started bouncing on the bed.

“I really do hope I throw up on you,” Shoshana said, throwing a pink, lace-trimmed pillow at her friend, which bounced off her head. She had a pillow problem. Something about them just filled her with happiness. Her favorites were crocheted ones with silly sayings, like
STRESSED SPELLED BACKWARDS IS DESSERTS,
or
CONSERVE WATER, DRINK MARGARITAS.

“I wish you would, girl,” Andrea said. “It would make my case for calling in sick a little more believable.” She worked as a cocktail waitress at the W Hotel in Hoboken down by the water and hated it.

“You’re not seriously calling in sick
again
, are you? Andrea, you are going to totally get fired and you need this job! We’ve got the rent bill coming up in six days.” Shoshana had always been the most responsible of her group of girlfriends; maybe it had something to do with being the firstborn. She was the mama bear. Friends flocked to her for advice, to borrow five bucks, or to help them learn how to knit. She was never judgmental in any way.