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Chapter One

"Have you seen it?" asked Samantha.

I leaned close to my computer so my editor 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 supermodel
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&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&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 freelance 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&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
re-treated.

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.

Excerpted from GOOD IN BED © Copyright 2002 by Jennifer
Weiner. Reprinted with permission by Washington Square Press. All
rights reserved.

 

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