Praise for
Fat Chance

“Food and men are two of Maggie O’Leary’s favorite pastimes…. To snag her star, she ignores her own antidieting dictates and sheds the pounds but eventually finds that you can get a man and eat your cake, too.”

—People, Spring’s Best Chick Lit, 2004

“Light as a cupcake and as fun to devour, Blumenthal’s debut novel (and Red Dress Ink’s second hardcover) will likely find many fans.”

—Booklist

“Maggie is likable throughout the story line, but especially when she tries to live life to the fullest without concern to her size, and the support cast adds insight into what makes Maggie tick. To learn whether she got her hunk—read the book.”

—Harriet Klausner on reviewcentre.com

“Deborah Blumenthal’s deliciously amusing novel offers a refreshing chick-lit twist: a heroine who embraces with gusto her inner—and generously proportioned outer—food-loving self. Zaftig Maggie O’Leary happily devours barbecued ribs rather than obsessing about whether her own will be visible to the naked eye—and builds a high-profile career encouraging fellow females to do the same. Fat Chance is as much sparkling, laid-back fun as good champagne sipped from a bottle!”

—Wendy Markham, author of Slightly Single and Slightly Settled

Fat Chance
Deborah Blumenthal

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

There are several people that I would like to thank for making this book possible: Claudia Cross, my agent at Sterling Lord, for her quick and spirited response to the book, and Sarah Walsh, her assistant, for handling business so quickly and efficiently, even when computer glitches threw themselves in our path. Renni Browne and Mary Costello are writing teachers extraordinaire, and I thank them both for their vision. My editor, Ann Leslie Tuttle, deserves special thanks for being such a hearty supporter of the book from the start. She is a joy to work with. She is gracious, elegant, supportive, sensitive and always available. I would also like to offer deep-felt gratitude to Margaret Marbury and her associates at Red Dress Ink for their unswerving enthusiasm.

My husband, Ralph, my best friend and mentor, is always having drafts of my work dropped on him and, as ever, I am eternally grateful for all his guidance. Our daughter, Annie, is also a faithful reader and editor as well as an overall great kid, and much love and appreciation goes to her for her unflagging support. Our younger daughter, Sophie, also deserves thanks and love for putting up with seeing my back at the computer for as many years as she has been with us. Thanks to Connie Christopher for offering her wise counsel. To all my other friends and family who have been willing to listen to the whining all these years, thanks for staying on the line.

To Ralph

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Epilogue

Prologue

Chewing the Fat

How could I forget the way it started? We chewed the fat—on our filet mignons that were charred to blackened perfection outside, bloodred inside, topped with a pebbly crust of crushed green peppercorns. We were having lunch at Gallagher’s, Bill’s favorite steak restaurant, and the more excited he got about the idea, the more he waved his fork through the air like a conductor’s baton, never mind that the end of it held a wedge of baked potato enveloped in sour cream that I feared he might inadvertently fling down on my head.

“The entire planet is fat, Maggie,” Bill said, shaking his head. “Between 1991 and 1998 alone, the incidence of obesity almost doubled, and you know better than I do that the only people who benefit from bestselling diet books are the people who publish them.” I opened my mouth to answer, but he went on.

“So here’s my thought,” he said, pausing just long enough to reach for the salt sticks. “Why not cover it in a regular space? But not the pap weight loss stuff—”

“A counterculture perspective,” I said, finishing Bill’s sentence.

“That’s right, that’s right,” he said, the fork alighting once again, this time precariously freighted with a dollop of creamed spinach. “Your audience is bigger than ever—one out of every four adults is fat—and they’re crying out for compassion.”

“Bill, it’s time for someone in the media to stand up and offer America an alternative vision about their overweight: ‘Live with it and love it.’” I could almost hear the first stirring strains of “America the Beautiful.”

“Exactly! You’ll be their counselor, Maggie, you’re perfect for the job.”

I put down my fork and pressed my hand to my fluttering heart, as if to recite the pledge. “I’m speechless, Bill, it’s brilliant. I’m behind it a hundred percent.”

“We’ll move you into a new office,” he said with mounting excitement, “and you’ll have carte blanche to indulge yourself at the city’s finest restaurants.”

With a fine stroke of the knife, I teased off a sliver of beef. “I can’t wait to get my teeth into it.”

Within a week of my lunch with the managing editor, my column was announced in the paper, and from then on my wit and wisdom sparked nationwide attention, leading not only to an outpouring of calls and letters from desperate readers, but also radio and TV interviews, and speaking engagements. In January, just nine months later, yours truly’s face adorned the cover of People with the headline, The New Face of Fat: Is Maggie O’Leary America’s Anti-Diet Sweetheart?

“Fat Chance” was launched, and I was becoming a rising media star. And readers? Well, they were eating up my words.

one

Five minutes to deadline and adrenaline surges through my gut. Eyes on the screen, I pound the keys with my usual vigor, stopping only to sip my Rhumba Frappuccino Venti—Starbucks’ malted-rich, soda-fountain-sized coffee drink that tamps down a leaning tower of reader mail. A perfect marriage with the cinnamon-dusted apple pie from the Little Pie Company down the street. Mmmm… Nobody could beat their pie crust. And they got the chunky consistency of the apples just right. Texture. That’s what perfect apple pie is all about. I turn back to the computer, dropping a few flakes of crust between the keys. The phone rings.

“I’M FED UP, YOU HEAR ME?”

I jerk the phone arm’s length from my ear, but the voice rockets. “I CAN’T LOOK AT MYSELF ANYMORE. I’M FAT AND—”

“Wait, please I—”

“I’M DESPERATE…NO ONE UNDERSTANDS…”

“I do, but—”

“I’m all alone and unpopular. None of the friggin’ diets—”

“—LISTEN, I’ll call you back,” I insist, wagging my foot. “I’m just on—”

“So what do you suggest, huh? You say live with it and love it, but how am I supposed to love fat dimpled thighs that are like, so repulsive, you know?”

“DEADLINE. I’m on D-E-A-D-L-I-N-E! Eat some comfort food, and call me in the morning.” I slam down the phone, and check the clock. Minutes before deadline I finish, hit the send key and feel the familiar rush of having dodged another bullet.

I lean back, exhale and reach around to close the button on the waistline of my skirt. Time for dinner. I reflexively tap out Tex Ramsey’s extension—1-8-4-5—the year that Texas was admitted to the Union. I know he arranged that, but how? As it rings, my eyes sweep the corkboard wall speckled with bloodred pushpins piercing ads for dubious achievement products: Dr. Fox’s Fat-Blocker System, Appetite Suppressant Brownies and Seaweed Thigh-Slimming Cream. A magazine article, “Ideal Weight is an Ordeal Weight,” takes center field, with a quote from Phyllis Diller: “How do I lose unwanted pounds? I undress.”

Framing the perimeter is eye candy: Brad Pitt on the cover of Vanity Fair, his tanned, sinewy torso sheathed in a sleeveless white undershirt; a Marlboro Man, weathered complexion, cowboy hat tilted provocatively shadowing soulful green eyes; James Dean, the prototype haunted bad boy in Rebel Without a Cause.

Dreamboats. That’s what girls used to called alpha hunks like that. Taut, archetypical physiques, suggestive gazes that held your eyes promising long steamy nights of…

“Metro.”

“Tex,” I say, coming up short. “Dinner ce soir?”

“Barbecue?”

“Mmmmm. Virgil’s?” I ask, naming a popular joint in the Manhattan Theater District.

“Great, pick me up.”

Dinner plans on short notice. No pretense. No frantic search for something to wear: “Does this skirt make me look like the back of a bus?” Why couldn’t romance be as easy?

I ring Tamara, my assistant and trusted confidant. “What are you doing?”

“Answering your fan mail.”

“Do I have to call the producer from AM with Susie back?”

“You dissed her when she called.”

“I was on deadline—”

“—she’s doing a show on the fat phenomenon.”

“Get her on the horn, I’ll grovel for forgiveness.” I turn back to a talk I’m preparing on the traumas of extreme weight loss, prompted by the story of a surgeon who was not only overweight but also a smoker. Facing the upcoming wedding of his daughter, he went on a crash diet, quickly dropping fifty pounds. The morning of the wedding as he dressed to go to the church, he slumped to the ground suffering a massive heart attack. His death was caused by the drastic diet, doctors ruled, not his excess weight.

The intercom beeps. “Wanna play cover girl for the Lands’ End plus-size catalog?”

“Fat chance.”

Another beep. “Wanna talk to a South Carolina group about leading the next Million Pound March?”

“Not in a million years.”

I search my mail for readers’ stories on the perils of extreme weight loss. It’s one thing to champion fat acceptance, but another to convince readers. Actually, a tiny microcosm of them sits right outside my office.

The cherubic Arts secretary is slightly—but only slightly—over her ideal weight. Still, every bite is contemplated, measured out and then double-checked using both the imperial and metric systems.

“It’s simply a matter of sheer willpower,” she says.

I want to strangle her.

Then there’s fashion reporter Justine Connors, a former model who works in a Fortuny-swathed cubicle down the hall. She isn’t fat, just obsessed with it. Every nugget of food is eyed as a bullet destined to destroy her reed-like shape. The only other thing you have to know about her is that she swears thong panties and stilettos are comfortable, a physiological impossibility, as I see it. When the office was chipping in to buy her a thirtieth-birthday gift, my suggestion:

“Why not a gift certificate for a colonic?”

Tamara is yet another veteran waist-watcher whom someone at the coffee cart once described as a slightly overblown version of sultry model Naomi Campbell. She’s category three: Lost. The New York Lotto slogan is her own. “Hey, you never know.” Tamara’s bookshelves are a Library of Congress for the overweight, holding every weight loss tome ever published. It starts with golden oldies, like the quacko The Last Chance Diet, by Robert Linn, advocating a liquid protein regimen that the U.S. C.D.C. later pronounced could lead to sudden death; Triumph Over Disease by Jack Goldstein (stop eating altogether); The Rice Diet by Walter Kempner (nutritionally unsound, but lowers blood pressure); the U.S. Senate Diet (no promise of a Congressional seat); The Prudent Man’s Diet, by Norman Jolliffe M.D. (became the basis for the Weight Watcher’s diet); Live Longer Now by Nathan Pritikin (tough to follow); The Amazing Diet Secret of a Desperate Housewife (you don’t want to know); The Paul Michael Weight Loss Plan (“If your intake of carbohydrates is low, some of the fat will pass right through your system without being broken down and stored in adipose tissue”—“Pure nonsense,” said Consumer Guide magazine); and on and on, up to and including prestigious tomes of today such as Eat, Cheat, and Melt the Fat Away, and The Zone.

Tamara can leave any diet bigwig on the mat with her grasp of diet lore, but all for naught. None of the regimens work for long, and the proof hangs limply in her closet. Dresses starting at size 12, barreling out to 18. Yo-yo couture.

A copy editor pokes his head into the office, jarring me from my thoughts. “You sure the fat doctor you mentioned is affiliated with Yale?”

“Let me check.”

I press Play on the VCR and am about to fast-forward it, but I freeze. What’s wrong with this picture? Instead of a medical conference, the screen explodes with an odd menagerie of Great Danes, goats and horses jumping, panting, pushing, heaving, whining and neighing in the midst of sexual delirium.

“WHAT IN THE WORLD?” I pop out the tape: Mammals Mating.

Barsky—that animal!

I peer into the newsroom to make sure Alan Barsky is there, then grab the Yellow Pages and phone a West Village sex boutique. For the next hour, I monitor the newsroom until I see a delivery man hauling a carton in his direction. The bold black typeface reads: CONDOMS FOR SMALL PECKERS: ONE GROSS. Over the hush of the newsroom, a single voice rings out.

“WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?”

I ring his extension and at the sound of his voice, I sing the Marvin Gaye song “Let’s Get It On.”

Time to get serious, and I turn back to my work. I make a note to do a column on the down side of exercise—in rats, anyway. Science News reported that rats who were forced to run on treadmills had lower antibody levels than the ones free to run at will. Of course. Can’t trick the old immune system. If exercise makes you miserable, you might get thinner, but your killer cells pay the price.

Another column I’m sketching out looks at the pressures of dieting on women as a form of oppression. By starving, they put themselves at a distinct disadvantage to their energetic, burger-and-fry-packin’ male counterparts in the workplace. In effect, dieting is political suicide. It not only reduces women’s stamina, but also leaves them handicapped because they crave satisfaction.

That hits close to home. After living under the tyranny of a diet binge, I once walked into a chocolate shop and bought a giant replica of the Statue of Liberty. Bitter chocolate. First I bit off Ms. Liberty’s head, then I devoured the rest of her. It felt…liberating.

Reggie, the mail carrier, empties a canvas sack of letters on my desk. “You really read all this crap?”

“It’s my bread and butter.”

From the day I started the column, the mail was my window on the world. Hard to imagine that it’s been only four years since giving birth both to the column and the realization that in losing—again—the war against fat I’ve fought all my life, nature has the upper hand. The size-sixteen rack was my destiny, and the only real choice I had was whether or not to accept it. But instead of looking at fat in terms of defeat, my publisher and I used it as a springboard to offer America a fresh take on obesity. As I made that quantum leap to fat acceptance, I’ve been crusading to carry overweight America with me. What I never imagined was that I would become not only a columnist but also a “Dear Abby” to the weight challenged.

Dear Maggie:

I’m twenty-five years old and fat. I’ve been trying to lose weight since I was six. I diet and diet, lose a few pounds, and then gain it all back. Everyone makes fun of me. My parents nag me all the time about controlling my eating, and it drives me insane. They say they’d stop if I just lost the weight, but I can’t. What should I do?

Women of all sizes, shapes, ages and temperaments now seek me out as a sounding board, shrink and diet counselor. But so do some censorious health experts who insist that I’m in perpetual denial, advising me to get my “fat head” out of the sand. Either way, the calls and letters never stop. Yes, I’m popular—at least with readers.

Popularity, of course, is a rare commodity for the overweight, and sympathy is, well, slim. We’re blamed for lacking willpower, and self-control. Few can fathom the intractability of the problem. Ironically, the overweight resent each other. One reader said:

Even though I’m heavy, I still feel that I can control myself and can lose weight if I want to. But other overweight people disgust me. I think that they’re just indulging themselves, and not showing any self-control.

There is no shortage of themes. Overweight infiltrates every part of one’s life, from bedroom to boardroom to the altar. But who said life was fair? Remember what the jury did to Jean Harris? No, she wasn’t fat, she was just mad. Okay, okay, so she killed a man, but you know, not so terrible—after all, he was a diet doctor. In some circles, women thought she deserved sainthood. Personally, I’m not against killing certain men. I doubt that there is any woman over thirty who hasn’t already come across at least one guy who deserves a toxic martini.

My phone rings nonstop, and even though I’m no longer on deadline, I try to avoid answering it. But where is my so-called secretary?

“Tamara? T A M A R A?” It’s futile.

“Maggie, my name is Robert Clancy. I’m an executive producer with Horizons Entertainment in Los Angeles.”

Ugh. “What can I do you for?”

“We’re starting production on a new blockbuster movie called Dangerous Lies. We’re all very excited about it. It’s going to be a very, very big film about a diet doctor in a weight-loss clinic who has to care for women obsessed with becoming thin…”

“Sorry, I can’t take the lead. I’ve already committed to playing Scarlett in the remake of Gone With the Wind….”

“Cute…but…the movie’s cast, Maggie. What we’d love to do is hire you as a consultant.”

“Pourquoi?”

“To coach our lead actor about the milieu of the overweight world and bring him up to speed on the mind-set of weight-obsessed women…”

What? No overweight women in Los Angeles? He had to call me? But to be fair, maybe there were some before they were all forced out of the city limits under the cover of darkness by a death squad of diet police.

“Look, Bob, I’m pretty tied up here with the column and—”

“Of course, I understand, but this wouldn’t take that much of your time, maybe just a couple of weeks.”

“Weeks?” I start opening the mail.

“We pay pretty well…would you just consider it?”

“Mmmm…I doubt it, but leave me your number.” I grab a Chinese menu and jot it down along the border next to the two-red-chili-peppers rating of the Orange Beef. “I’ll get back at ya.” Tamara walks in, as if on cue.

“HOLLYWOOD!”

“Run that past me again,” she says.

“They want me to fly out to Hollywood. Do you love it?”

“I hope you told them that I’m free to go as well. How much moola?”

“Not enough to get me on a plane.”

Celebrating the Gift of Ampleness

Like an overprotective parent who lends you the family car with spare tires in the trunk, nature is looking out on your behalf. Natural selection provides a surplus, and the reason is obvious. Just listen to former Yale surgeon Sherwin Nuland.

“An injured creature is more likely to survive and reproduce if it has a surplus to fall back on.” The human body is made with an abundance of cells, tissues, even organs. “We really do not need two kidneys or such a huge liver, or more than twenty feet of small intestine.”

While Voltaire might not have been thinking about the fleshy woman when he said, “Le superflu, chose très nécessaire”—the superfluous, that most necessary stuff—his words make biological sense too. The generous female body is the fertile one. Anorexics don’t menstruate, well-fed women do, a fact that tells us that we need sustenance to nourish our children and continue the species; reserves to carry us through periods of disease; and ample stores to sustain us in case of starvation. So bless your flesh. Look at your generous, sensuous, nubile body as a miracle of scientific engineering, a delicate, responsive, harmonious creation designed to perpetuate life and keep the human spirit burning.

At the very least, your lush human fat cells now come with a newer, higher price. Stem cells, harvested from fat, represent the new frontier for scientists in search of high-tech treatments for disease.

Why? Because they have the magical ability to turn into a variety of other types of cells. In other words, sometime in the near future, stem cells taken from your glorious globules may be used to replace injured or worn-out cells.

“It’s not a static spare tire around our waist. It’s really a dynamic tissue, and there are a lot of things in it that could help us fix people with diseases,” said Dr. Marc H. Hedrick, a University of Pittsburgh researcher.

So next time you look down at the scale, smile, don’t frown.

two

To know Tex Ramsey is to love him. I’m perched on the corner of the Metro desk—he’s the big honcho, Metro editor—with my legs crossed coquettishly, chewing a wad of purple bubble gum to get myself noticed, reading People magazine and waiting. You always have to wait for Tex, especially when it’s dinnertime. It’s not that he doesn’t have an appetite. Just the opposite. It’s just that dinnertime is synonymous with deadline, and the phone next to him rings constantly. He glares at it momentarily and then looks back at the computer screen.

“Don’t we have a secretary around here?”

“Out sick, Tex.”

“Sick of what, this joint? Anyone think to call a temp?”

“Don’t think.”

Business as usual.

“T E X, you cut half the story,” the police reporter’s whine fills the room. “I spent three hours with the commissioner and you give me four hundred words?”

“No space. We’ll do a follow.”

“Follow? He won’t spit at me after this abortion.”

“Bring me a hankie.”

A general assignment reporter shows up next, a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism graduate, with no obvious pathology, who in two short years at the paper has developed a tic. He’s smacking a copy of the newspaper against his hand in fury and grousing about a typo in his story about a hero cop. He closes his eyes, dropping his head in despair.

“We said he’s been with the department for ONE HUNDRED years.”

“Only an extra zero,” Tex says, waving it away with his hand. “Look at the bright side. Now the department thinks they owe him 90 years of back pay, the guy’s rich, and he’s eligible for immediate retirement.”

He winks at me, then fogs his glasses, wiping them on the sleeve of his shirt, before turning back to the lead story on his screen about a supposed affair between the mayor and his press secretary. At the press briefing, they decided, uncharacteristically, to take the high road and play it down, hiding it deep inside. The mayor already hated the press. They had alienated him sufficiently with their in-depth probe right before the election. But now that every gossipmonger in the city had weighed in, it would be the cover.

Tex stretches his legs up over the desk, crossing his scuffed Tony Lamas. “Here’s our head: CITY HALL HOTBED. What the hell—it would sell papers. If the megalomaniac mayor couldn’t stand the…”

“I’m starving….” I sing out sweetly. “Ribs encrusted with honey and teriyaki glaze.” I dangle the thought before him. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to start filing my nails. Bingo. He looks out at the copy desk.

“Okay, bro’s, put it to bed. I’ll be at Virgil’s if you need me.”

“You and Maggie eatin’ Pritikin again, eh?”

Tex snorts. “Not likely. No spinach salads and Diet Sprites for her,” he says, punching my arm. “She’s the only girl I ever met who knows how to eat.” That’s a compliment, I think. He grabs his coat and we hail a cab. I can’t wait to tell him about California.

I gnaw off all of the red caramelized beef on the baby back ribs and then soak up the remaining droplets of amber glaze on my plate with a slab of doughy bread. The oval platter between us that had been heaped with crisp golden brown shoestring fries is now bare except for a sprinkling of burned crumbs and flakes of coarse salt.

I lean back on the thick wine velvet banquette and sigh. “So then the phone rings, and guess who called yours truly?”

“The papal nuncio?”

“Negative.”

“Temptation Island?”

“No, and I’ll spare you your remaining eighteen questions. A hotshot from L.A. who wants me to fly out there and help with a movie they’re making.”

Tex closes his eyes and looks down. “You’re such a pushover. It was Alan Barsky.”

“It was not Alan Barsky.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Alan Barsky would have said he was Steven Spielberg.”

“Hmmm…I see your point…so what did you say?”

“I said I’d drop everything and be there in a heartbeat.”

Tex guffaws. “They sending a Lear?”

“No, a Peter Pan Bus ticket.”

He shrugs. “Hell…you’re on a roll, why not? You’ve got the media eating out of your hand, go for it. It could beef up your career even more. Celebrity fat columnist reaches to the stars. Definitely a sound career move.”

I’m suspicious now. “Why are you so gung ho?” I can’t help but think of Tex as, well, my protector. Maybe it’s his build. Former star tackle—the kind of guy who’d smile as he was hauling your couch up a flight of stairs. He hoists his beer bottle and drains it. That’s the sum total of his daily exercise, not counting the jaw work of the job.

“You’ll be the next IT girl and I can say I knew you when.”

“Naw, it’s not me…. I’ll just forget the whole thing,” I say, flicking bread crumbs into a miniature replica of the pyramid at Giza. “I mean, even though it probably means mega bucks—you know how these movie companies pay consultant fees when they want help—I despise L.A. anyway. I mean who doesn’t?”

“Remember that Woody Allen movie?” He works at keeping a straight face, but his own stories always set him off. He leans back into the seat to get more comfortable before he starts spinning the yarn.

“You know where he’s in the car with Tony Roberts who’s got on this space-age, silver Mylar jumpsuit? Roberts zips up the hood that just about engulfs his entire head, like he’s going to be launched to Mars, and Woody turns to him, deadpan, and asks, ‘Are we driving through plutonium?’” Tex almost doubles over with his loud, roaring laughter. I give him a small tolerant smile.

“Yeah, the clothes, the cars, you can’t walk anywhere,” I say, “except for the treadmill in your home gym. And then there’s the Freeway. What an oxymoron. The Freeway, where you sit in traffic, looking at the guy in the next lane. How did he get that car? What does he have that you don’t? The car and the phone, the phone and the car, that’s their whole shtick. I think they all have phones jammed up their asses, I swear. What a disgusting way of life!”

“Maybe you’ll get into it, who knows?”

I look at Tex and wonder. What if he got a call from, say, someone like Gwyneth Paltrow or Kim Basinger asking him, in a breathy voice, if he could tutor her for an upcoming role as a newspaper editor? Would he go? I can only imagine his reply. “Let ’em try.”

“So,” he says, slapping his hand on the table, “how about we go to that Italian bakery on Third Avenue for tiramisu?”

We walk across town and up Madison Avenue. The trees in front of the Giorgio Armani shop are laced with tiny sapphire Christmas lights, arboretum couture, while window-lit mannequins wear strapless gowns and tuxedos of tissue-thin silks and crepes, and high-heeled sling-backs encrusted with ruby crystals. We pass candlelit restaurants where dark-haired men with romantic eyes face blondes in white wool suits with minks draped over the backs of their chairs, while just outside on frosty street corners open to the sharp wind lie vagrants with unkempt hair under cardboard shelters offering bent paper cups for spare change. The fragmented New York mosaic.

For all its opulence, and all its shortcomings, the city tapestry seduces me. Why would I want to leave it for L.A.? Who wants to spend half a day flying out to a place where nobody thought about anything but competing for parts and coveting awards for pretending that you were someone you weren’t? They were all bent out of shape, pretentious. The whole damn place was pretentious.

We walk to Third Avenue, passing the Tower East movie theater and a Victoria’s Secret. The long expanse of windows is devoted to sherbet-colored Miracle Bras that can incrementally ratchet up your cleavage, a “have it your way” for bras instead of burgers. They’re paired with matching thongs as sheer as snowflakes. I’m watching Tex.

“So what was the name of the movie anyway?” he says, raking a hand through his dark, curly hair as he finally turns from a blond mannequin in a sea-green thong.

“What movie?”

He shakes his head in disbelief. “The one they asked you to help on, darlin’.”

“Oh…. I forgot…. Hmmm…dangerous, dangerous something…oh…I think Dangerous Ways, Dangerous Lies. That was it.”

“Gossip’s doing an item on it tomorrow,” he says offhandedly, and snorts. “The sleazy jerk who’s starring in it has this global fan club that issues daily reports on ‘sightings,’” he says. “Get this. Never mind that he was busted once for drunk driving, and likes coke, Hollywood doesn’t hold that against him. They paid him twenty mil for his last movie. And you know what he tells Cindy?”

I shake my head.

“‘Money doesn’t mean that much to me. It doesn’t buy spiritual fulfillment. It’s something that you barter with. It has no intrinsic worth.’” He laughs out loud. “I’m going to use that on my landlord when he asks for the rent,” he says, deadpan. “‘It has no intrinsic worth.’”

For some reason my skin is starting to prickle. “Exactly who are you talking about?”

“The guy from that TV show…that hustler astronaut from The High Life.”

I slow my pace. “What?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Gelled hair, what’s his name?”

“Mike Taylor?”

“Yeah.”

I’ve fallen out of step with him now, dragging my feet. “Would you mind if I took a rain check on dessert?”

“You okay? You’re lookin’ a little pale.”

“I’m fine…it’s just been a really long day, and suddenly it’s all hitting me.”

Later on, I sit back and go over my phone messages. Shortly after I started the column, my phone started ringing with offers to do TV. Initially, I ducked them. How would it feel to be in front of the TV camera? I had this frightening scenario in my head: I was in an electronics store and everywhere I looked I saw my full face on all the screens of the demo models. Twenty different Maggies, starting with a ten-inch screen, graduating up to one the size of the eight-story Sony Imax screen, all in different gradations of harsh, artificial color. A too-red me, a pink-and-fuchsia me, a yellow-green me, a harsh black-and-white version, all color leached out. A flat-screened Maggie, a fat-screened Maggie. A United Nations of Maggie O’Learys. A fun-house house of horror come to life. Halloween. The vision makes me cringe.

Then there’s the business of speaking my mind without the safety net of print. Would I start to stutter and stammer? Could happen. There was no delete key on a live TV show, and I wasn’t used to expressing myself in sound bites. It was safe to work behind a computer screen. But ultimately, what it came down to was that I was never one to retreat in the face of a challenge…so…

First stop on the AM with Susie show is makeup. They redden my cheeks, add more lipstick to return the color that the lights wash out, then dust me with a giant powder brush to cut the shine. I’m ushered into the studio, and seated in front of the audience. The camera rolls up, the eyes of America are on me, and I feel as though the spotlight will imbue my words with greater meaning. I envision viewers alone in their kitchens or bedrooms, sipping coffee and eating coffee cake. They stop in the middle of paying bills or maybe cleaning the sink, hoping to come away with some moral or inspiration that will elevate them from the state of feeling disembodied, alienated, in perpetual despair about their weight and their lot in life. The effect I can have on TV dwarfs anything I can offer in print.

Susie cross-examines me. In a nice way.

“As America’s antidieting guru, Maggie, tell us a little about your own struggle. Was being overweight an issue for you all your life?”

“Well, I got my workouts in the family bakery in Prospect Park, instead of the playground, as a child,” I say, evoking sympathetic smiles from the audience. “I blame my weight problems as a kid on after-school snacks of hot cross buns, crullers and scones instead of carrot sticks and celery. And then, rather than climbing monkey bars and getting real exercise, I rolled dough in my parents’ bakery. Arts and crafts was decorating cookies with colored frosting and rainbow sprinkles, then gobbling up my jewels.”

“Didn’t your parents see what was happening?”

“In those days, feeding your kids was a way of showing you could love and provide.”

“So they were blind to what food had become to you?”

I weigh that for a moment. “Let’s say their gift was disproportionate. When you take a vitamin in the recommended dose, it keeps you healthy. Overdose, and it can be lethal.”

The discussion opens up to the audience, with no time to describe how I continued to overeat as I grew up. In my teens, I got my just desserts—Saturday nights in my room staring at rock-star posters on the walls, and listening to a blaring boom box while entwined in marathon confessional conversations on my pink princess telephone with desperate girlfriends. The secondhand stationary bike that my parents bought me soon became invisible, slipcovered with rejected clothes. If only abandoned exercise equipment could speak.

I was incarcerated in my room under self-imposed house arrest. Everyone else was out on the weekends, at movies, parties or concerts, and I was a prisoner of both my body and the four walls. One night, after going to a dance with my best friend Rhoda, wearing too much makeup and high platform shoes, we ended up in a back booth of Tony’s Pizza parlor at eleven o’clock. There sat Rhoda, black eyeliner melting, sipping Diet Coke and reaching for a third slice of pepperoni pizza. She smirked.

“At least it doesn’t walk away from you.”

It didn’t. Food was the gift that kept on giving.

To make things worse, my parents lightly brushed aside my preoccupation with my weight like crumbs on the counter, seemingly unaware of the pain and disappointment of growing up invisible to boys.

“Just use a little willpower,” my mother would say. “Learn to control yourself.”

Not my sister Kelly’s problem. Like our father, she could eat anything she wanted, and never gain. But I took after my mother. Our bodies followed some Manifest Destiny theory, expanding beyond appropriate borders and nothing could be done about it. Once the fat cells developed during early childhood, the number stayed constant for life. All that diet could do was shrink them down.

“Have you always been at war with your body?” Susie asks after a commercial.

“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t wending my way through cycles of gorging, deprivation, self-punishment, anger, resentment and rebellion, all of it siphoning off feelings of self-worth.”

Susie turns to the audience for reactions, and a teenage girl in tight jeans with short wavy hair stands.

“I was chubby, as my mom put it, in elementary school and my body made me feel like I was a living sin.” She pauses, taking a breath, then stares into the camera.

“I’m four-nine and I weigh 142 pounds. I feel suffocated, trapped in a dark hole, hopeless.” She looks out beyond the audience. “At first I isolated myself from everybody and all I did was eat, then at the age of thirteen, everything changed.”

“What happened?” Susie asks.

“I became anorexic. I was so paranoid about my unhappiness, I went on for two years being like that. It got to the point where if I had more than thirty calories a day, I would literally hurt myself.” She pushes up the sleeve of a baggy gray sweatshirt to reveal an arm disfigured by the rubbery red scars. “I am a cutter.”

There is stunned silence in the audience. Susie says nothing, as though participating in a moment of respectful observance.

“I know that wasn’t easy,” she says finally. “Thank you.” Thunderous applause rings out, then she turns back to me. “At what point did your thinking change?”

“Staring down at the scale one day. The numbers hadn’t changed and I was ready to smash it to see if that would make it budge. Maybe it was broken. I wanted to pick it up and see, the way you check the phone to see if it’s working when the boy you’re in love with doesn’t call. But then it struck me that there was another option. I could triumph over that meaningless rectangle of steel that I had inveighed with so much of my self-worth by ignoring it and taking back charge of my life. Instead of wallowing in embarrassment and self-hatred, I would take my liability and flaunt it. It was time to fight back against the western world’s prejudice toward a condition that most people couldn’t change. From then on, I refused to dress like a mourner in black to look thinner. I opted for hot pink, chartreuse. I didn’t care if it had horizontal stripes and made my waistline as wide as the equator. I’d go over the top. ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,’ as Mae West said. Diets were a sham, biology was destiny, so I ran with it.”

“What did you do?”

“Aside from shopping sprees in plus-size stores where things actually fit, I turned my attention to my soul. It was time to get in touch with who I really was because everything inside of me that was real and vulnerable had been buried. I started going to Overeaters Anonymous where they began each session by holding hands and saying a prayer: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference.’”

“The same prayer that AA uses,” Susie says.

“Yes. And that environment made me realize how much I needed spirituality in my life because I had become so closed off to love and meaning outside of myself. I was turning to a higher power for the love, strength and generosity that I couldn’t find in myself anymore. Until then, I was locked in a one-dimensional life that was consumed with what I weighed and ate, not who I was or could become.”

There are murmurs of agreement from the audience.

“I had lost my place in the universe. Everything in my life was out of proportion.” In the eye of the camera, it all comes back to me. The hot TV lights shine down on me like heavenly beacons there to illuminate the truth, and I’m sweating as if I’m arriving at some religious epiphany. The studio is silent.

“Night after night, I sat in a windowless basement of an East Side church where compulsive eaters shared their stories. One night a withdrawn teenager told of being afraid to fall asleep at night, staying up listening for the sound of her abusive father’s footsteps approaching her room. Strawberry ice-cream sundaes in the kitchen after school were the only thing that made her feel good, and forget his touch, at least for a while.

“A bearded man, very overweight, spoke of atrocities in Vietnam. He had nightmares of seeing the bullet that ripped through his buddy’s chest, and getting there too late to save him. Eating was his escape from the guilt he had over his own survival. Others described stultifying days filled with nursing aging, bedridden parents; facing job loss; empty existence after retirement; the death of a spouse, all tales offering pinholes of light into their intimate worlds of grief and despair. So many people felt orphaned, split off from a world where everyone else seemed to be living purposeful, fulfilling lives.

“Eating filled them all with comfort and satisfaction, but like a euphoric drug, once the high wore off, it left them more despondent than when they started. Watching these people reveal themselves helped me. So did the idea of living life one day at a time, and drawing strength from this community.”

A Clairol commercial prevents me from talking about how science writing connected me to the outside world in a more concrete, expansive way, and how the column and my like-minded thinking with Wharton later propelled me, Maggie O’Leary from Brooklyn, New York, to cult celebrity. Back in the eye of the camera I end by telling viewers:

“Eat to appetite instead of eating to extreme. I’m not saying don’t lose weight if you want to, but I think you should do it without making your life miserable and impossible and unfortunately that’s what very restrictive regimens do. And if you choose to remain at a weight that America deems ‘fat,’ well, that’s okay too if you’re okay with it because in the long run it just might be better than cycling over and over.

“What I hate to see are people subsisting on diet foods that they hate. Food is a source of pleasure, and we should enjoy it. I’m not saying that many of us don’t have terribly serious food issues—it would be disrespectful to be glib about it. There are suicide eaters out there, and they need therapy, not chocolate Kisses.”

“And, Maggie, let’s talk about your column,” Susie says. “Isn’t ‘Fat Chance’ really a rallying cry for women all over America? Isn’t it really about a lot more than the issue of fat?” As I nod, she goes on.

“Isn’t it about accepting yourself no matter what it is in life that you’re at war with? Isn’t it about giving yourself a break and loving yourself no matter what kind of pressures you perceive that society is putting on you to change, even when those changes may be biologically impossible for you?”

“That’s exactly it, Susie. Fat is something of a metaphor for pain and unhappiness in a world that appears to be filled with people who have it all. The truth is that women everywhere, no matter where they come from, no matter what they do for a living, no matter whether they’re married, or single, rich or poor, famous or utterly anonymous, have issues to deal with and things about themselves that they’d like to change. Ultimately, though, they must come to terms with those issues, because if they can’t or they won’t, they’re destined to be at war with their—”

“And, Maggie—”

But I’m fired up now, and I don’t let her break in.

“And despite liposuction, dieting, exercise, plastic surgery, or what have you, we are a product of our genes and our environments, and the whole business of living the best life that we possibly can means making peace with who we are and overcoming our private saboteurs.”

The audience bursts into applause, and I feel the color in my face rising.

“Thank you, Maggie,” Susie says. “Thank you for being with us today. You’ve brought a very sober perspective to the issues that plague all of us.”

I walk out, surprised with all that I said. A biology teacher of mine once told me that he never really understood his subject until he had to teach it. Now I know what he meant.

Out of the Running

The widespread ill will toward the obese leads to discrimination in schools and the workplace, and reduces chances of women going the old-fashioned route and climbing the social ladder through marriage.

When was the last time a society column pictured a fat woman at a social event? Or sitting on the board of a major corporation?

Undoubtedly, being overweight sabotages success. Ninety-seven million of us are overweight, but when it comes to fame, celebrity, recognition and status, we are invisible.

Over and over again, I hear about discrimination at the office—how women are passed over for promotions. Some are too embarrassed to sue, unable to handle the attention that would put them in the spotlight. Instead, they endure lower-level jobs, less pay and the anger that comes from being victimized and unable or unwilling to fight back.

But should you have the courage to stand up and fight back, the sad truth is that juries often show the same lack of sympathy toward the overweight that is mirrored in the real world. Out of the entire United States, only Michigan, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Santa Cruz, California, make it illegal to discriminate against the overweight. Every place else, society is largely off the hook. The rationale: If you’re fat, it’s your own fault.

And here’s the saddest evidence yet of how much society despises overweight. In a national survey done by Dorothy C. Wertz, an ethicist and sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, 16 percent of the general adult population said they would abort a child if they found out that it would be untreatably obese. By comparison, the survey found that 17 percent would abort if the child would be mildly retarded.

three

I hear my phone ringing before I even turn the corner to my office.

“It’s Our Lady of Prospect Park,” Tamara calls out when she sees me.

How could my mother not have seen the show? The TV was background music in the bakery. Always the drone, the predictable barks of laughter, applause. It would be a miracle if I could just get some work done.

“It’s my fault that you’re fat?”

“I wasn’t blaming you, Mother.” Oh, here goes. “It was the lifestyle—”

“You never learned self-control, it’s—”

“Mother, it’s a little more complicated!”

“What did you ever want that we didn’t give you?”

“That’s just it,” I say, pounding my fist silently on the desk. “I have to go, Ma, I’m on deadline. I’ll call you.”

Several hours later, I look up to see a messenger at my door, bearing a large golden shopping bag imprinted with one of the most welcome names on earth: Godiva. The bag is filled with the signature gilded boxes with samples as opulent as Fabergé eggs. But these ovoid wonders are edible: Godiva’s new truffle collection. I lift the first. Outside is a domed shell of black-brown bittersweet chocolate, a confectionary canvas covered with Jackson Pollock–style café-au-lait drippings. I bite. My tongue is having a party for my mouth as it is washed with cappuccino cream. I take another, milk chocolate with a hint of hazelnut. The third is bittersweet mocha chocolate filled with cherry cream.

“I’ve found religion. Tamara, you have to try these.” No answer. “Tamara?” The phone rings again. Is Godiva publicly held? I lick my fingers and lift the receiver. Does that count as exercise?

“Maggie O’Leary? I have Robert Redford on the line from Sundance…”

I bite into another—“Mmm mmm mmm”—then swallow. “I know Bob, and I’m on deadline, mon cher, bad timing.” I slam down the phone. It rings again, but this time I lift it up and then drop it into the garbage pail.

“Do you know how low you are Barsky? You’re in the bottom of the garbage pail, you swine.” I hear his signature nasal laugh as I fish the receiver out of the garbage.

The morning a pail of bulls’ balls was delivered from a Ninth Avenue bodega, just after I got the column, I filled Tamara in. “He’s been at the paper forever, and pulling this stuff keeps him awake between stories.”

“You could ignore him.”

“But then he’d stop.”

I consider returning fire using a foreign identity. German? Dietrich? No, I can do better. Later. Now I have to apply ass to seat and get to work.

“SHIT.” The phone’s ringing again. “Tamara! Tamara! Tell Barsky to cool it.” I wait, but my phantom assistant is gone. I snatch up the phone.

“Enough, asshole. I have work to do. This is a newspaper, remember?”

There is silence on the line.

“Alan! Don’t ignore me and don’t start that sick breathing thing again. You don’t sound sexy, you sound like you’re having an asthma attack.”

There’s a silence, and just as I’m about to hang up I hear the voice.

“Maggie? I’m sorry, I hope this isn’t a bad time…. I’m, this is Mike Taylor, I’m an actor in Los Angeles. I don’t know if someone from the studio ever reached you or not, but I’m about to start working on a new movie here, and that’s why I’m calling. I need your help.”

My eyes open wide, then wider. An alarm goes off deep inside my head. Not Alan Barsky. Not Alan Barsky. He wasn’t that good. It was… My skin starts to prickle. It did sound like him. Oh God, I am such a complete moron.

“Sorry…SO-ORRY…just fooling around here….” I clear my throat. “I…I know who you are…” I say, trying to conceal a certain shakiness that’s starting to spread over me like a violent onset of the flu. Who could ever forget his rippled abs on that Calvin Klein underwear billboard in Times Square!

“Oh, okay, well, I thought I’d try you myself because…anyway…I’m going to be starring in a new movie about a diet doctor, and I’m so out of my element with this. I wondered if there was any way that you could help me out.”

The Mother Teresa of journalism to the rescue…. Oh…whatEVER you need. But I say nothing, half out of fear of saying the wrong thing, the other half because I’m afraid that if I hear my own voice, I’ll wake up and the dream will be over.

“Maggie? You there?”

“Yes…I… Sorry, I’m in…I got distracted for a minute—”

“Oh, well, anyway, I wondered if there was any way you might be able to come out to L.A. for a couple of weeks?”

“Weeks? A couple of weeks?” What the hell is happening to me, echolalia?

“I know you’re working, but we could get you a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There are amazing restaurants here—you could take lots of time for yourself and—”

“I don’t think I could just—”

“Well, we could make some other arrangement if you don’t like it there… L’Hermitage or… I mean, you could even stay here if you’d be more comfortable. I have a pretty big place—you could have your own wing—there’s an office…and I have a great kitchen. You could make my place home base, and just give me some coaching—you know, background stuff—on the way overweight women think, and how they’d react to me. I usually spend a couple of months preparing for a role, and it would be a tremendous favor if—”

“I…I don’t know—”

“I realize that it’s not easy to just get up and leave—”

“No, but—”

“Don’t answer now, just think about it.”

“Well—”

“We would pay all your expenses, and a consulting fee. The studio is usually pretty generous, I’m sure we could work something out so that at least financially it would be worth your while. Just consider it, okay?”

“Maybe, maybe, Mike,” I say, coiling a strand of hair around my finger like a tourniquet. “Can I get back to you?”

“Sure, sure, Maggie. This is great. I’m thrilled that you’ll even think of helping me.” Then his rich voice turns softer, intime. Caressing. And by God, it’s working wonders.

“Honestly, people out here really look up to you, you know? This is a crazy town, everybody’s into some diet routine or other, nobody’s happy with themselves the way they are. That’s why it would be so helpful if I could hear your take on it all.”

There are other experts—I can rattle off a dozen names off the top of my head. Bloated, academic types, but they knew the stuff, they could fill him in. Or he could read my clips. The column was easy to call up, why did he need the flesh-and-blood me? On the other hand, SHUT UP. Did it matter WHY he called me? He called me. ME. He wanted ME. Needed ME. Maggie O’Leary.

We say goodbye, but I’m still holding the phone. Finally I place it in the cradle, gently. Mike Taylor. Mike Taylor.

I lean back in my chair, pressing my fingers over my eyes, seeing shapes and colors collide like shooting stars. How often does someone get offered her fantasy on a silver platter, there for the taking? Lotto Jackpot. And the winner is… I’m nervous now, uneasy. Is my breath getting short? My panic circuitry is supercharged, as though my insides are a pinball machine and Mike Taylor the little steel ball that has been spring-loaded into my body and is ricocheting around, slamming the buttons and bumpers, setting off ringers and bells and arcades of pulsating lights.

I tear open the suffocating top button of my blouse, grab for my fan and open the bottom desk drawer where I stash the omnipresent reserve sack of Rainbow Chips Ahoy. I reach in and pull out a handful of cookies, admiring the gems of green, red and yellow chocolate that stud their rough surface. I lift one toward my lips. I can already taste it. My mouth knows cookies the way the fingertips of the blind know braille. Each pillow of chocolate…its dense, creamy center oozing satisfaction out along my tongue…washed down with a tall glass of chilled milk…comfort, fulfillment. I bite down and chew it slowly, as if mesmerized. Then another. But as quickly as I raise the third cookie to my lips, I pull it away.

Suddenly it becomes a grenade and I’m considering suicide. I hold it, just hold it, and wait. A moment later I put it on the edge of the desk, and, like a kid shooting bottle caps, use my thumb and pointer finger to flick it into the garbage where it lands with a resounding ping on the empty metal base. I shoot another and another until I’m out of cookies and the bag is empty. Bingo. I smooth out the bag and pin it to the bulletin board. It’s flat now, thin, and it weighs next to nothing.

Breaking the Mold

“Don’t change your body, change the rules.” Those aren’t my words, they’re Jennifer Portnick’s. Jennifer who? A girl after our own hearts. Jennifer, who weighs 240 pounds, and is 5' 8", is an aerobics teacher who reached a settlement with Jazzercise Inc. after being rejected as a Jazzercise franchisee because of her weight—she then proceeded to file a complaint with the Human Rights Commission.

In a decision that every plus-size woman should rejoice over, Jazzercise said, “Recent studies document that it may be possible for people of varying weights to be fit. Jazzercise has determined that the value of ‘fit appearance’ as a standard is debatable.” The announcement was made at the 10th International No Diet Day in San Francisco, which was dubbed a celebration of “diversity in shape.”

Ms. Portnick’s lawyer, Sandra Solovey, who is the author of Tipping the Scale of Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination, told the New York Times that Ms. Portnick was lucky to be a resident of San Francisco, one of only four jurisdictions in the country where it’s against the law to discriminate on the basis of weight.

“On one side of a bridge you can be protected from weight-based discrimination,” she said of the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, “and on the other side you’re vulnerable.”

I’m about to press the send key on the column when Tamara struts in like a windup doll on a talking tirade that has a long way to go before it fizzles.

“So I’m in your office, on my way home, about to turn out your office light.”

I wait.

“I’m about to flick the switch on the M&M’s lamp, and what do I see?”

“I give up.”

“Your pink phone-message pad with doodling all over it.”

“Your point is?”

“Not just any doodles, Maggie….” Her voice begins to trail.

I won’t go for the bait.

“Mike Taylor doodles in all kinds of cutesy-poo little writing.”

Unmasked.

“Block letters, puffy pastel two-dimensional letters, calligraphy, flowery script, and then little red hearts.”

I’m not in the mood now for the drama queen who is studying me. She switches gears and is trying another approach as she drops the armload of mail she’s been holding onto my desk.

“You okay, Maggie? You been acting a little strange lately, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Strange how?”

“Strange like…” She drums her iridescent green fingernails on top of a thick hardcover book called Aberrant Eating Behaviors. “Uh, aberrant…you’re not here, your mind is elsewhere.”

“My mind’s right here, Tamara, you want to take a CAT scan?”

“I’m not your doctor, babe, I don’t want to take no CAT scan. But I’ll tell you that you are most definitely not your ever-lovin’ self. You are adrift. Something bothering you?”

“My job, my column, a water pill, my next meal, the exchange rate of the yen, that’s what’s bothering me, okay? What else could be on my mind? WHAT? WHAT? There is nothing else whatsoever. End of discussion. You read me?”

Tamara holds up her hands in surrender. “Not another word from me, I swear. I’ll just sit myself back down outside and let you have your estro/progestero hissy fit. I’m out of here.” She cha-chas toward the door.

I should let it go, but I can’t. “Come back.” I point to a chair opposite my desk. My pencil turns into a drumstick. Tap tap tap tap. “You’re right. You know me. I wear my heart on my sleeve. I can’t hide anything from you…although Lord knows I try.” We eye each other over a drumroll.

Tamara crosses her legs and leans forward, twirling a corn-row around her finger. She raises her eyebrows and checks her watch. Then she sits back, and uncrosses her legs.

“H-E-L-L-O—”

“WHO has a body like no other man?”

She screws up her face. “Fabio?”

I fling open the paper to the TV page. “Ever heard of a show called The High Life?”

“Starring that lowlife…er…what’s his name?”

“That gorgeous lowlife, yes.”

“So?”

“So? The SO is that that sexy lowlife, Mike Taylor, called me last week. He needs my help. He wants me to fly to L.A. and help him with a movie he’s making.”

This is apparently the funniest thing that Tamara has ever heard. “You’ve been had, girl. Barsky’s at it again. That guy slaughters me, I swear—” She smacks her thigh and laughs harder.

“No, my child, no no no no—”

“That man should sell a CD. ‘Get ’em going with Alan Barsky.’ God, he EXCELS! Barsky RULES!”

“Fine then, ask for a transfer and work for him if you’re so tickled with his bullshit. Of course, you won’t get Godiva truffles, chanterelles, tins of Beluga caviar. On Metro you’ll get Tic Tacs. You like Tic Tacs, Tamara? What color? Or more likely you’ll get gift baskets of poison apples and hemlock.” Vicious pencil tapping now.

Tamara waves her arms over her head as if to clear the air.

“Girl, you are a pushover. Barsky is head and shoulders above you in the pranks department. You are just not up there in his league. Boy, do we have to bring that boy to his knees, make him pay. Oh, I love this…it’s gonna take some thinking, but we can do it, we—”

I stare at her unflinchingly. “Barsky was out on assignment.”

One perfect eyebrow arches up, then her whole body slumps. “You mean…?”

“Yes…it really was—”

“Mike Taylor?”

“Mike Taylor.” I take an Internet picture of him out of my desk drawer. We both stare at it for a moment. “How could anyone not want to help that?”

“Lord have mercy. What are you going to do, Maggie?”

“After I have my heart massaged? What do you think? I’m going to give him the name of a diet doctor I know out on the coast, and then go back to my column and forget the whole thing. Do you think I’d just take off because I get a call from a smart-ass in Hollywood? Yes he’s gorgeous, but out there they’re all gorgeous—”

“Well, they’re not all THAT—”

“They’re plaster casts created in operating rooms. The plastic surgeons out there can carve George Clooney’s face out of Danny DeVito’s behind. Tight skin, nipped eyes, shaved noses, chins, cheekbones, six-pack abs. The only thing they don’t do yet is head transplants. That is one sick universe. So that’s your answer. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“Good for you, Maggie.” She high-fives me. “You are your own person.” She walks toward the door, and then does a 180-degree pivot.

“Want me to arrange transpo?”

“Done.”

“Huh?”

“DreamWorks booked it. How’s that for a perfect name?”

Tamara turns again, but I’m not done. “One more thing. Of course you have to swear on your life—”

“What life?”

“—not to tell another living soul.”

She shuts the door, then stands there, the other eyebrow raised.

“When I got home last night, I stripped off all my clothes and took a long look in the mirror, and let me tell you there’s a reason my bathroom mirror is the size of a postage stamp.”

“Amen.”

“I stared at a body that I wanted to divorce, uncontested. I saw someone who didn’t look like the real me that was trapped inside. So I declared war. The Maggie O’Leary who’s going to L.A. in eight weeks will be nothing like the one that this world knows and loves.”

“You lost me.”

“I’m going to do something utterly heretical, and I need you to be my partner in crime.”

“Maybe you better just tell me.”

“You have to swear, swear, not to tell a soul, otherwise I’m going to be burned at the stake, excommunicated from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. They’ll haul me before them, like Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms—”

“Never tried that diet, any good?”

I drop my head in prayer. “The Maggie who’s going to L.A. is going to attempt something more far-reaching than ever before.”

“Like?”

“With my motivation at an all-time high, I’m embarking on a stealth-bomber food plan and will emerge my thin twin.” I hold up my fist triumphantly. “Chiseled, whittled down, tight, taut, tantalizing, terrific and T-H-I-N!”

“Say it,” Tamara says. “Say it.”

“THIN.”

She smiles, then suddenly her eyes cloud over. “But how? You can’t diet, you don’t, you won’t. Diets are a sham, a lie, a trap to undermine the empowerment of liberated twenty-first-century women, enslave them mentally and hold them politically hostage. Your whole theory of who you are, self-love and acceptance and all that bologna that you’ve made your name by, not to say a career out of, is going out the window because some movie maharaja calls you up and asks for a little advice? Keep it together, Maggie—we’re talking just another M A N—so maybe you want to think this one through a little more. Maybe you’re bein’ just a trifle rash, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“I’m doing it, Tamara—total body and fender work. This is just a short leave of absence from my public persona. And it will surely be my last attempt to shake my booty and get it together. I’m doing it because if there was ever a motivation for me to recreate myself, this is it. If the thought of coaching Mike Taylor can’t fire me into a body makeover and be successful where legions of others have failed, then there’s no hope for anyone—EVER! This is the acid test, Tamara. BIOLOGICAL WARFARE! I can’t ever really and truly accept the concept of self-acceptance unless I know what my capabilities are. I need to do this. You with me?”

“Spreadsheets are starting to call my name again,” she says, going out the door.

“Now, that’s aberrant. C’mon, Tamara,” I yell as she leaves. “This is going to be fun!”

four

Don’t Worry. Be Happy. Weigh Less.

Stress. I’m an expert, aren’t you? Isn’t everyone? Does it make you eat more? Duh.

Who doesn’t walk, zombielike, into the kitchen for comfort as soon as the world gets too much to handle? Well, now the scientific community weighs in (ha) with this news and I hope it helps rid you of some of your guilt because, dear hearts, it’s not just a matter of willpower: Your body chemistry is partly to blame.

Stress does make you eat more—especially sweets—because it causes the body to produce more of a hormone called cortisol. And not only do you eat more, but the fat that you put on as a result, is the “deep-belly” stuff that’s associated with a higher risk of health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke and cancer.

And while some women experience elevated levels of stress and cortisol periodically, depending on what is happening in their lives, others suffer from “toxic stress,” in the words of Elissa Epel, Ph.D., a health psychology researcher at the University of California at San Francisco. “Toxic” or long-term stress is associated with feeling helpless and defeated. It leads to perpetually high cortisol levels that invite deep abdominal fat to be deposited—and that can happen whether you’re fat or thin. So bottom line: It’s a lot more complicated than just blaming your paunchy gut on the fact that you can’t resist that second or third Krispy Kreme.

What to do?

* If stress is long-term, ditch the lousy job, or the lousy husband, or at least think about therapy to change the dynamic.

* When you’re tempted to pig out, try to steer clear of the refined, sugary stuff that causes insulin levels to soar and then drop, making your urge to eat even greater.

* Try to counteract the urge to eat by doing something physical—sweeping the floor works and so does scrubbing the bathroom—at the very least, get yourself out of the house, and particularly away from the refrigerator.

* Next time you do head to the refrigerator, stop and ask yourself: Why am I eating? Better yet, needlepoint those words onto a pillow that you can stare at every time you get up off the couch heading for the kitchen. If the answer, honestly, isn’t hunger—assuming you remember what that feels like—get yourself into another room.

“So you’re heading home?” I look up from my column to see Tex carrying his briefcase. He looks like he could be a poster boy for my article on stress.

“Mitchum’s on the late movie,” he says, as if that explains it all.

Tex, the movie buff, worships Mitchum. I’d heard it all before. Mitchum, the sadistic ex-con in Cape Fear; the American destroyer skipper in The Enemy Below; the cool American up against Japanese gangsters in The Yakuza. The heavy-lidded, laconic Mitchum.

“No one came close,” he said. He had seen every one of his movies three, maybe four times. “That swaggering stride,” he says, “the great laid-back antihero. So completely his own man, no matter what the role. And so cool.”

I bought Tex Mitchum’s biography and we laughed over the part about the end of his life. When Mitchum’s emphysema worsened, he had to be put on oxygen. His droll comment: “I only need it to breathe.”

When Tex walked into the office the next morning, it was clear that his moviefest had included a six-pack, maybe two.

“You okay?”

“If you don’t count the fact that the back of my head feels like it was slammed with a brick.”

Before he opens the mail, he reaches into his bottom desk drawer and shakes out two extra-strength Excedrin. He grabs his University of Texas mug, and goes over to Metro’s Mr. Coffee and fills it too full. Coffee starts to flow over the rim.

“Shit,” he says, trying to sip it down, failing miserably, not to mention scalding his tongue. “What a piece of shit this is,” he says, slamming the coffeepot.

Tex puts on a good show. I sit down to enjoy it. I consider telling him he’s cute when he’s mad, but decide against it.

“With Brauns, Toshibas and Cuisinarts, what MORON spent the company’s money on a Mr. Coffee?”

The secretary’s back becomes his target.

“Not that nine-tenths of the idiots in this office know the first thing about good coffee anyway.”

He picks up a coffee can bought at the supermarket and looks at it mockingly. “I should shove the poor excuse for a coffeepot—and the swill that’s in it—off the shelf, but as sure as day follows night, it will be magically replaced the next day with another one, a clone, that makes the same weak, lousy, piss-poor excuse for coffee.”

The moment he sits down at his desk, he reaches for his prop: the black cowboy hat that he wears when he wants to disappear. He pulls the brim down, nearly covering his puppy-dog eyes. It looks good, actually. What is it about the cowboy mystique? He glances at the slew of mail that always greets him.

“Releases, releases, more releases,” he mumbles, tossing a pile of them in the garbage. They land with a thwack that makes the secretary turn and give him a stern look.

“What a job it is to sit in an office all day and write pumped-up garbage about your client and their great new innovative product. NEWS. EMBARGOED UNTIL…” He laughs weirdly. I should be going, but I stay.

Larry Arnold, the number two man on Metro, sits down at the desk next to him and peers under the brim of the hat. “So, who are you doing? What news from down under?”

Tex massages his temples. “Actually, I feel like complete shit.”

“PMS?”

“Caught it from you, sucker. What’s goin’ on?”

“The mayor’s holding his press conference at eleven to put the rumors to rest about his affair, so now we’re more convinced than ever that he’s getting it on the side…. There’s a school board meeting tonight that we have to cover because it’s rumored that the chancellor’s going to be ousted. The police commissioner is holding a press conference this afternoon about the police brutality investigation in the Bronx. The Lion King is opening in yet another theater, a murder in Brooklyn and your mother called to tell you her ‘dawg’s’ vomiting.”

Tex closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Get somebody down to hammer the mayor. Payback time. And send someone to get a quote from his wife. See how she’s reacting to the mess. Let’s do a man in the street, too. We’ll give it a full page.”

“Boy, you really are in a pissy mood,” Larry says, heading back to his desk. “Sharon dump you for a fatter guy?” Sharon was Tex’s latest flame.

Tex pulls the hat down lower. That’s my cue to get to work.

Instead of research, I do something that shows my true colors. I log on to Google, opening one after another of the Mike Taylor entries. I want to see the pictures, read interviews, hear his words. I can’t help looking over my shoulder. Not a smart move to be caught by the publisher while gawking at movie-star pictures when all of America is waiting for my next column. I open up one of “Melanie’s pages,” a picture gallery of “gorgeous Mike.” There’s a shot of him in a black T-shirt and a black leather jacket at a movie premiere; hair gelled back, dark eyes sparkling, dressed in a tux at the Emmy Awards; shirtless in a tight bathing suit playing basketball at the beach. I enlarge it.

In another, his arm is locked around the waist of his current flame, French model Jolie Bonjour. Clearly, she is having many bon jours these days, thanks in large part to the fact that she’s probably the one broad who fits into those stupid size 0 clothes, or worse still, 00, that always piss me off because they’re made to fit only anorexics or eleven-year-old adolescents, in which case they belong in the children’s department. To boot, Miss Bonjour is barely drinking age, and has luminescent blue eyes, and poreless skin. Was there even a word in French for zit? And that platinum hair. No wonder hair color manufacturers offered five hundred shades of blond that were used by more than a third of the women in the world. Now, brown hair, on the other hand, came in something like three shades. Light brown, medium brown and dark. End of story. Dullsville, really.

The plastic-Barbie image of perfection never died. No matter that if Barbie’s body were translated into human scale, her measurements would be 38-18-34. So what if no one on the planet had those proportions, women still wanted them.

At least, to their credit, Barbie’s manufacturers were now giving the dolls wider waists, smaller busts and closed mouths, a far cry from “Lilli,” the prototype for Barbie—dating back forty years—who was a German doll based on a lusty actress who was in between gigs.

This poupée smiles widely in every shot. No wonder. Mike Taylor’s arm was hooked around her waist.

I open up interview after interview with Taylor. Thank God for the Internet. Actually, his life was an open magazine—just this past month the six-page cover story in Architectural Digest with the headline: “Perfection in Pacific Palisades.” It began with a double-page spread showing the cobalt blue of the Pacific as a backdrop to the bright Southern California sun glinting off the polished steel of the Nautilus machines in his sprawling home gym. Fifteen behemoths in all, each with a precise function, either to tone and strengthen a specific muscle group, or offer an aerobic challenge. A trainer visited as often as the postman, the story said, to take him through the routine.

Sotto voce, Taylor admitted that he loathed exercise, but his romantic roles made it mandatory that he stay in shape. Legions of fans just waited for the moment when they would glimpse his contoured physique as he pulled off a snug T-shirt and fell into an embrace with a lush-lipped nymphet.

“Part of the job,” he said.

According to the cover story, Taylor had been in Los Angeles for twelve years, but had quickly gained fame and fortune after a TV pilot based on the lives of a group of elite NASA astronauts was picked up for a regular series on CBS.

In The High Life, he played womanizing Scott Bronson, a rocket scientist who joined the space program and rose to become one of its top advisors, a job which had come to define who he was. His exalted standing didn’t hurt his appeal to the nubile NASA recruits—whom he had a reputation for quickly bedding—or the thirty-million fans who watched—captivated by Mike’s work—his long-term relationship with a curvaceous fellow astronaut, his secretive one-night stands, and all the bizarre twists and turns that his life took on this earth and beyond. In addition to the show, he told the writer that he spent weekends and vacations making films.

“Exhausting? Sure, but my career’s on a roll, and that’s not something you take lightly in Hollywood. I started out doing some awful TV work, and now, finally, at age thirty-eight, I feel that I’ve hit my stride.”

“Where would you like to see yourself in the next five years?”

He shrugged. “No clue, man. I just take it from day to day, and I’ve no idea where this frantic roller-coaster ride is headed. All I know is that I’m holding on tight, and enjoying the ride.”

His day started at sunrise, and his bedroom, the story showed, was a marvel of simplicity—a gray granite floor and a king-size bed covered in gray linens. He worked out in the gym, showered in a glass-walled bathroom with a panoramic ocean vista and had coffee in a cavernous granite, concrete and stainless-steel kitchen. The story followed him through the gardens outside the house, where he chatted with the writer about his future projects. One of them, he said, was a movie called Dangerous Lies.

My stomach is growling. It’s almost one o’clock. I bookmark the site.

“How about some lunch?” I call out to Tamara.

“What’s your pleasure?”

“Greens,” I whisper pathetically.

“Can’t hear ya.”

Would she hear beef goulash? Fettucini Alfredo? It reminds me of the painful day that I went to buy my first bra. The hearing-impaired saleswoman walked to the back of the store toward the stockroom and yelled out for every New Yorker to hear, “What size bra did you want again, honey?”

And my pained whisper. The trainer, 34 triple A. Was that how it felt for a guy who bought his first box of condoms?

“Hey, big guy, you want the ribbed for extra stimulation? And what size? Small, medium? Behemoth?”

I get up and go over to Tamara’s desk.

“A double order of gale-force greens,” I mouth, “with balsamic vinegar and a large mineral water.” Then I can’t stop myself and shout, “Ahh, screw it, put an order of potato salad on top.”

Wilhelm’s sandwich shop. I adore it. Never a wait. Never a tie-up. It’s run with military precision by a highly trained staff of beefy Bavarians who stand elbow-to-elbow behind a thick wooden cutting board where they prepare football-size sandwiches. German heroes, as it were. Despite the long line snaking around the glass-covered counter, there’s never more than just a moment’s wait, the piercing cry, “WHO’S NEXT?” serving as a cracking bullwhip that keeps patrons rhythmically goose-stepping up to the counter.

Wilhelm’s has become an institution in the East 40s, and I am one of their cherished patrons. Who else but yours truly is intimately familiar with every one of their thirty-three sandwiches? Who else calls on them to cater parties? An autographed picture of me with my chunky arm around owner and sandwich meister Wilhelm Obermayer is mounted on the wall as if I’m a visiting dignitary. It says, “To Wilhelm, my hero.”

There is a reason for my devotion. A sandwich from Wilhelm’s isn’t a sandwich, it’s an indulgence. Who doesn’t wake up at night hankering for the smoked chicken salad, a marriage of white chicken, chunks of tangy blue-veined Stilton, ruffles of bacon and slivered red pepper, all lovingly dressed with a dollop of mayonnaise mustard sauce?

Or the Zeitgeist tuna salad blending white tuna with sun-dried tomatoes, mayo, fragrant dill and bits of sautéed Vidalia onions. Some prefer the Mediterranean version with chopped calamata olives, pimentos and anchovies.

In the mood for egg? Maybe the egg salad with caviar? The curried egg salad cradled in arugula and packed into a crusty French roll? Or the jalapeño egg salad?

For beef lovers there’s a hero, combining thin slices of rare roast beef, red onion rings and watercress, dripping with honey mustard and enjoyed with a side order of Wilhelm’s coleslaw made with thickly sliced green cabbage, chunks of carrots and a thick coating of mayonnaise.

Tamara’s face is familiar to the staff at Wilhelm’s, but when she orders the triple-size greens topped with potato salad, order turned to chaos. I double over, laughing in pain as she describes it.

“VAT?” Chief sandwich-maker Brunhilde Braun shakes her head in denial. “Nein, nein. Das is nicht for Maggie. Corned beef, eh? Das is guuuut.”

“You know you’re right. I got mixed up,” I told her.

Brunhilde shoots me a wide gold-toothed “I told you so” smirk, and I say, “It’s actually TWO orders of triple greens.”

According to Tamara, she was the only one smiling as Brunhilde attacked the luncheon board, lifting a lump of greens and looking at them disparagingly while shaking her head. Tamara stares at Brunhilde as she leaves. One sour kraut. It wouldn’t surprise me if she tries to right things by sending me a quart of fat-glutted chicken soup with a note, “Get Well Soon.”

So there we are, sitting on opposite sides of the desk, working our way to the bottom of the mountains of greenery.

“Damn this chomping. We sound like machetes cutting through jungle grass,” Tamara says.

“At least it’s high fiber. High-fiber foods are supposed to have high satiety value.”

Tamara gives me a blank look. “Like the movie, High Society?”

“They fill you up, keep you satisfied.”

She grimaces then smiles conspiratorially. “I have a bag of Doritos in my drawer. Want some?”

“Desperately, so would you please throw them out immediately.” Suddenly, I have this wellspring of self-control. But how long can it last?

“An unopened bag of Doritos, are you nuts?”

“Closet eating is not part of the plan.” Right.

“And what about this great potato salad?” Tamara asks.

From the corner of my eye I see the Gestapo. Justine, dressed head to toe in a bias-cut Donna Karan dress in navy blue velvet. Now I’m glad I ordered it. For camouflage.

“Cover the greens with it, quick.”

“Not MORE German potato salad. GIRLS, I swear you’re going to develop waistlines like the Hindenberg,” Justine says in her high-pitched, painful whine. She shakes her Frederic Fekkai–coiffed head. “Well, since no one’s going out, I guess I’ll head over to the park for a power walk. See y’all later.”

“Y’all? God, I hate her,” Tamara says. “I’d like to put fat pellets in her food.”

“She’s insufferable thin, can you imagine her fat?”

“What’s a power walk, anyway?” Tamara says.

“Something masochists do. Not bad enough they go on marathon walks, they shlep weights.” I consider stealing the running shoes she hides in her closet, so she’ll have to walk in stilettos, but decide against it.

“Never mind her, let’s dump this potato salad. It’s time to do the video.”

“Video?”

“Lose It with Lisa. For forty-five minutes, we’re going to work out in here.”

“Ugh, I’m getting indigestion already. We’re working out here?”

“Should I put on a thong leotard and breeze on over to New York Sports?”

“Maggie, how are you going to hide this whole thing anyway? It’s bound to come out.”

“I’ll cook up something. As you know by now, I’m a whiz at putting my spin on reality.”

She closes the door, and we turn on the video. The face that greets us looks like Britney Spears—three decades down the road. What should I expect when I pick up a fitness tape from the giveaway table at the used bookstore? I’m surprised I don’t have to crank up an RCA Victrola to hear it.

“Hi, I’m Lisa and I feel sooo good about exercising, sooo good about mySELF. That’s why I made this video. I used to be forty pounds heavier, imagine? I ate everything in sight. UGH! I felt down, depressed, all I wanted to do was sleep. Then someone told me about a system of doing aerobics with light weights. I tried it, adapted it to my own special needs and, girls, it forever changed my LIFE. I’m a CONVERT. Now I’m going to share my success with you, because YOU deserve it. Are you ready to work with me? Ready to develop the beautiful body that beautiful you deserve? You can do it, you know. All you have to do is stay with me. Give me a little itty bitty bit of time each day. Just forty-five minutes. Okay? LET’S EXERCISE!” The sound of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” pulsates throughout the room.

“I do not like her,” Tamara says, shuddering. “Something about her hits me wrong. Bitch,” she mouths at the TV screen.

“She’s thin, she did it,” I say, suddenly jumping to the defense of this baby-boomer Barbie. “That’s what’s so obnoxious. We have to show some tolerance, Tamara. We can’t victimize thin women. In their own way, they suffer as much as we do, maybe more. At least I hope so.”

“Right on,” Tamara says. “We’ll be PC. Equal opportunity haters.”

“Amen.” I wrap a pair of weighted cuffs around my ankles and wrists, then toss some to Tamara. We both start moving to the beat, ignoring the fact that outside the office door, someone is calling my name. There’s a lock on the door but I, of course, didn’t take the time to turn the brass knob, and already I’m regretting my carelessness.

five

I had this horrible nightmare last night. All about Jolie Bonjour. She was lying on a coffin-shaped tanning bed, her body slick with Chanel bronzing oil.

“Seulement cinq minutes,” she was mumbling. “Le tanning bed” wasn’t a good idea, “mais non,” she was telling Mike Taylor over and over, but she couldn’t resist “un peu” so that her skin looked, not bronze, mais non, but just “ze beige” to set off her white teeth, golden hair and sparkling blue eyes. She was the type, of course, that didn’t get freckles or mottling. She got tan. Just tan. A moment later, she jumped out of the tanning bed and headed for a quick swim, her leopard-patterned beach towel knotted smartly, sarong-style, around her hips.

There was Mike stretched out in the sun alongside his Olympic-size pool, scripts everywhere. He was contemplating a lead role as a marine biologist working out of a laboratory in Bora Bora. The biologist finds the embryo of a unique sea monster that has a mutant strain of DNA, giving it the potential to grow larger than any marine creature that had ever lived. The dilemma: Destroy it and safeguard the world, or keep the fascinating specimen in the lab, running the risk that if it escaped it could wreak world destruction.

His concentration was broken by the sight of Jolie strolling out of the house. She untied the sarong to reveal a scarlet thong bikini and red patent-leather high-heeled mules. She stopped behind Mike’s chair and draped her arms around his neck, her nipples tickling his back, her perfume pricking his senses.

“Swim avec moi,” she whispered, caressing his ear.

He told her to wait, he had to read more scripts. Moments later, he was on the phone with his shrink, confessing, “She says she loves me…I told her I love her. She’s good in bed, we’re compatible…”

“But?”

“…something’s missing.”

Then I walked in, my head on her body, wearing the same bikini. He was mesmerized…. Okay, so I’ll never look like Jolie, but after two weeks, I’ve already lost ten pounds.

But then I wake up in a sweat, sheets tangled around me. I am sick. So sick. Along with the weight, I’m losing my grounding.

If it isn’t bad enough that I’m involved in an underground makeover, the phone rings and it’s a call from a local gourmet store that asked me many months ago if I would help them taste-test a new line of pasta sauces from a famed Italian importer. Who was I to say no, especially since the free-lance change would help pay for the maintenance surcharge that my East-side co-op had just tacked on to cover waterproofing the aging bricks.

But now, who needs this? As if it weren’t hard enough to resist temptation, I now have to deal with a team of white-clad Italian chefs who walk in promptly at eleven o’clock on the dot, bearing steaming pans of penne, rigatoni, linguini and farfalle, each covered with a mound of rich sauce. Instantly, the air is perfumed with the scents of garlic, onion, sun-dried tomatoes and olives, and my “friends” from the news department, who have noses as keen as bomb-sniffing dogs, come flocking to my door, ready to pounce.

Tex, who is usually glued to the computer screen, leads the parade, working hard to pretend that he’s surprised to find food.

“Hey, what’s this?” he says, acting like it’s the first time he’s come upon Italian food.

“Pasta,” I answer dryly. “You know the starchy stuff they serve in Italian restaurants?”

“You wouldn’t happen to have an extra bowl for a man who’s had nothing the entire day except bacon and eggs for breakfast and a meager muffin and coffee, over an hour ago, would you?” he says, ignoring my sarcasm, and trying to get on my good side by coming up behind me and massaging my shoulders. I’m tempted to close my eyes and promise him anything if he continues since it’s been so long since I had a pair of hands working on me, but I snap to.

“It’s barely eleven-thirty, Tex.”

“Exactly my point,” he says, sliding the bowl out of my hand. “My blood-sugar level’s starting to go south.” He lifts a giant forkful to his mouth and tastes.

“Definitely respectable, if you don’t count the fact that it really needs a little more garlic and maybe some dill,” he says, continuing to eat.

“But that’s not stopping you.”

He shakes his head and continues. “Not terrible. About equal to Ragu. Not close to Rao’s.”

How would I know? I haven’t had a forkful yet. “If you’re going to eat my portion, you might as well fill out the questionnaire,” I say.

“I’d love to, sugar, but I’ve got a mountain of work waiting for me,” he says. “I just came by looking for a stapler.” He waves a piece of paper in the air as if that explains it. Tex starts to leave and then comes back and hands me the bowl. He pivots only to face a stack of garlic bread. In a nanosecond, his hand clamps down over a piece.

Tamara stares at him, saying nothing.

“Now this is good,” Tex says, reaching for a second. As he turns, Larry makes his entrance and they nearly collide.

“I knew I wasn’t crazy. I knew that I smelled garlic.” He laughs hysterically. “How ’bout sharing the wealth?”

Tamara looks at me and shakes her head. “Are we running a soup kitchen here?”

“What?” Larry says, holding his hands out helplessly. “We’re helping Maggie.”

“Do you think you could find room in your heart to leave just a little behind so that I can get just a forkful and fill out the survey that they’re paying me thousands of dollars to complete?” I ask.

“Nobody can judge food after just one tasting,” Tex says. “Tell them to bring a new round of plates over the course of the next few days,” he says, trying to wipe a red spaghetti stain from the front of his shirt that resembles blood oozing from a chest wound.

“I think you’d better get back to Metro,” I say softly. “I just heard that the stock market took a nosedive and the Dow slid to a record-low level.”

Tex and Larry look at each other, drop their plates and go running out of my office.

“Is that true?” Tamara says after they’re gone.

“So, I heard wrong,” I say, helping myself to just a strand of spaghetti with each of the different sauces.

I fill out the survey, and then, don’t ask me how, put the leftovers out into the newsroom, then write my column as the sharks attack.

Diet Foods: High in Calories, Low in Taste

America’s obsession with losing weight is to blame for the food industry’s outpouring of “low-fat” and “no-fat” versions of virtually all the foods we love: low and no-fat ice cream, yogurt, cookies, pudding, whipped cream, mayo, cream cheese, cottage cheese, milk, cake, chips, and my—ugh—favorite, fat-free salad dressings that are gluey-tasting syrups made up basically of sugar.

The truth is: Not only doesn’t the low-fat stuff taste good, it’s finally being unmasked for the fraud that it is. The idea behind low-fat foods is that they’re supposed to save you fat and calories, make you healthier and help you lose weight.

The truth is: America is getting fatter because of low-fat products. Guilt-free goodies, people think, give them license to eat more, and eat with impunity.

The truth is: Not only don’t low-fat and no-fat NOT mean low in calories, these poor imitations are often HIGHER in calories than the original, because they have added amounts of sugar in an attempt to mask flavor that is lost when fat is reduced.

When I go to the grocery story, I look for food-food. What does that mean? The real McCoy. Plain butter. Not air pumped. Plain milk. Not the kind where the fat is removed. Nothing added. Nothing taken away. Nothing genetically engineered. Do I have to buy a farm? Raise my own animals? Grow my own crops? It may come to that. Stay tuned.

It’s almost become a routine now. Every month or so, Bill Wharton takes me to lunch. Very simply, I’m his cash cow, and his goal in life is to keep the paper a success, something he’s done for over twenty years by vigilantly watching the bottom line. The Daily Record is having a banner fourth quarter, and Bill is particularly proud of “Fat Chance.” But also, he likes me. Somewhere in that enlarged, underexercised heart of his, he has a soft spot for my loud mouth and pleasing plumpness, I think, not to mention my irreverent wit and occasionally off-color jokes. He’s got five boys, and, well, you get the picture.

Of course, not all of Wharton’s innovations at the paper are as successful as the column. The style section’s recent cover stories make him wonder if he’s getting too old for all this stuff.

“Cross-dressing birthday parties; Upper East Siders who color-scheme their homes to coordinate with their dog’s fur; and hair stylists who are buzz-cutting customers’ astrological signs onto the backs of their heads. The editor is a moron,” he hisses. “But I’ll keep mum and give her more rope to hang herself before I pounce and obliterate her authority.” He gulps down some Maalox and scratches his head.

“I used to have a handle on the news, a gut feeling about what was fresh,” he said, one day over an osso bucco lunch at Carmine’s. “Now that part of the job is in the hands of a bunch of kids who think that Charlotte Russe was a star of film noir.”

So why, on this day, a full week after he called me, did I still not return his phone call?

“The fourth-quarter numbers look great,” his message said. “Your column continues to be a smash, why don’t we break out some champagne over lunch, restaurant of your choice.”

In hindsight, I now realize what a mistake it was to ignore him. Just as Tamara and I were—for the tenth time—cranking up the volume of our nauseating fitness tape, we saw the door of my office open and who should stand before us, a horrified look on his face, but old Wharton. Shit. Double shit. And what did I do? Wave. He closed the door as quietly as he opened it.

Next thing I know, a messenger is delivering a Bailey’s Irish cream cheesecake, to me, from, guess who? That was followed by a voice-mail message—“When your dancing fever subsides, call your publisher about lunch.”

“Tex might be on to you,” Tamara tells me after lunch one day.

This is not a particularly welcome development. “What did he say?”

I get the whole conversation verbatim.

“Something’s up with Maggie,” Tamara says he told her one day while she was sitting with him and Larry. “But I don’t know what.”

“I looked at him straight-faced,” Tamara says. “I asked him what he meant.”

“She hasn’t been herself lately.”

“Probably something you said.”

“Can’t think of anything,” Tex says, “but yeah, it doesn’t take a lot to get women pissed. Once at a party, I got a drink for myself, but forgot to get my date one.” He nods his head, as if remembering. “I walk back to her and she says, ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that I might want something to drink?’ I said, ‘I didn’t think you wanted one,’ then she pushes right past me and says, ‘Right, you didn’t think.’”

Then Larry chimes in. “Great material, we should write a screenplay. Once, I bought a gift for a woman. This black lace nightgown, great, sexy, I couldn’t wait to see her in it.” He shakes his head. “How was I supposed to know she wasn’t an extralarge?”

“Observant, aren’t you, Larry?” I say. Tex laughs.

“So she takes it back for a small and finds out that it was the last one and came off the clearance rack.” Larry looks down at his drink and mixes it with his finger and then licks his finger. “So she says, ‘The one thing I hate is men who are cheap and stupid!’ So I said, ‘That’s two things.’”

Tex nods his head. “Yeah, the old one-two punch.” His voice trails off. “I think there’s some basic resentment of the opposite sex. It bobs along the surface until one day, propelled by some deep seismic forces, it explodes in your face.”

“PMS,” Larry says.

“No, that’s not it with Maggie. She’s just distant…less eager to eat out. She’s even starting to look different.”

“Different?” I say. “What do you mean by different?”

“I’m enjoying baiting him, Maggie. He is so unbelievably dense sometimes.”

“I’m not sure,” Tex says, as though he’s afraid to divulge what he’s thinking.

So Larry pipes up.

“Better,” he said. “Maybe she’s on a diet.”

“Nah, impossible,” Tex says. “Not old trencher woman Maggie. She never diets or takes off for spas like some of the women I know.” He shakes his head. “She doesn’t think about things like that. That’s the great thing about her.”

“Absolutely right,” I say. “You guys read her stuff. Maggie doesn’t diet.”

“Take her out for ribs,” Larry says. “See what’s up.”

“I looked at them both, trying hard to keep from laughing,” Tamara says. “If these two geniuses were directing the investigative reporting at the paper, then the Times, the Daily News and the Post could rest assured that they had nothing to fear.”

six

FedEx parks the wardrobe-size box in my building lobby with the doorman. No more nights spent cuddled up by the TV. No more evenings sprawled on the bed facing a snack tray with BBQ Pringles, Snyder’s of Hanover homestyle pretzels, Entenmann’s chocolate doughnuts and Diet Coke. From now on I’d be quaffing Fiji Water and snacking on orange wedges. NordicTrack time. The Dominican handyman rolls it up to my apartment door on a dolly and hauls it into the bedroom.

He looks at the box and laughs. “Everybody buy these things, these equipments, but nobody use them.”

“Well, it’s good to stay in shape.” How would I know? He looks at me, shaking his head, laughing, as if I told him a good joke.

After a lightning-quick smile, I double-lock the door behind him. It would probably be fun. I’d make it fun. Sliding, gliding. I’m not the most coordinated person in the world, but I’d get the knack of it. I am a quick study.

I change into my sole pair of cycling shorts, which were secreted in the back of my drawer years ago. I start to tug them on, but when I stretch the waistline apart, it stays that way. I fling them into the garbage. At least my dresser drawers are getting roomier. I pull on a dress-length STOP HUNGER T-shirt, sweat socks and sneakers.

I tuck my feet into the toeholds, reflexively stiffening up as I slide forward, then back. Thighs make up one-quarter of women’s weight. Indeed. The effort brings me back to my first riding lesson and the resistance before it flowed. I was stiff, uncoordinated. Maybe if I try to relax and move a little faster, smoother. The phrase fluid movement comes to mind, whatever that means.

I step up the pace but the machine begins working against me now, like a frisky horse that senses the unease of a new rider and starts to snort and buck. Like Mr. Ed—the first horse I was on at Camp Camelot, a weight-loss camp. When other kids were munching on bags of buttery popcorn at the movies, we walked in with Ziploc bags filled with sour pickles on sticks. Anyway, my Mr. Ed was named after the funny-talking horse on the ’60s TV show. Okay, maybe I’m heavy, and unsteady, but this Scandinavian-style Mr. Ed is starting to list and then lean and then… Ohhhhhhhhh, shit, I inadvertently lose my balance and vrooooooom, never mind riding, I am s-k-i-i-n-g over to the side as if part of a giant slalom.

Mr. Ed crashes down on me with the weight of a work-horse, viciously slamming into my poor dimpled upper thigh.

“JESUS, OH JESUS.” It feels as if I just took a bullet. I can only imagine what my downstairs neighbor is imagining as she hears the deafening crash. She probably expects my couch to come barreling through her ceiling any minute.

I rub and rub the spot to prevent it from turning blue and magenta, and hobble to the refrigerator for ice. I deserve a Sara Lee cheesecake for this. Or half a carrot cake. It’s not fair. I have the noblest intentions, and it backfires. But I’m not going to be a self-saboteur. I grab a giant bag of frozen corn kernels and wrap it around my thigh like a blood pressure cuff.

I glare at the NordicTrack. I am not having fun. This is not about fitness, it is about pain and suffering. I feel desperately sorry for myself. All around the city, other women are dining out at restaurants, sitting in box seats at the opera, attending Broadway shows, or having marvelous mindless sex, and I’m here sweating like a pig with a black-and-blue mark the size of Texas tattooing my upper thigh. I want candy, a Milky Way. But there’s no way I can even think of going out for one like this. I call Duane Reade.

“Do you deliver?” YES, there is a God. “Good. I’d like a Milky Way.

“A Milky Way. A MILKY WAY, you know the CANDY bar. Haven’t you ever heard of it?” I cannot believe this. Is that such a hard question?

“Sorry? What do you mean, by ‘sorry’? Why can’t you deliver it? I realize that it’s not medicine…okay…okay…but you happen to be wrong, dear heart, it most definitely does serve a biological need.

“So how much do I have to spend before you’ll deliver it? What?” I slam down the phone.

I lie back on the couch and stare up at the ceiling. Why am I doing this? Is it worth it? Maybe I will never get anywhere with the damn makeover anyway. Why am I putting myself through this punitive fitness crap? Am I a masochist? I want candy. I want to be happy. I don’t like fucking cut-up vegetables. I don’t want hot broth without noodles, and I happen to like the crispy chicken skin. It kills me to peel it off and throw it away, especially if it’s sprinkled with salt and garlic.

But then the other voice in my head stops me. Do you like tight clothes? Do you like looking at yourself in the mirror? So stay the way you are. Eat candy and greasy chicken. Don’t change. Don’t pay your dues.

I vow to stop the negativity, the old excuses. No caving in to the self-saboteur. Hard work pays off. I’m going to succeed. The power is in my hands.

If you fall off a horse… I step back on and glide forward and back, steadier now. How dare they smile in the infomercials. Like sports, it looks a lot easier than it is. Bette Midler had it right. “I never do anything I can’t do in high heels.”

Of course there are some women—heels or no—who don’t even need a piece of exercise equipment. They can open up a magazine and follow an exercise plan. They can simply look at a photograph of an exercise and know what to do by reading the instructions. Now, I know I’m not stupid, but when it comes to coordinating body movements and understanding which foot, knee, arm, etc. gets lifted while the other sits on the floor and waits its turn, I’m out of my element. Maybe it’s like map reading. Some people are good at it and others have to ask directions. Left-brain/right-brain kind of thing.

So instead I shell out hundreds on this new roommate. I brace my midsection against the padded center once again and try to coordinate the back-and-forth arm movements, but after only a few tries, I’m gasping for air. My body becomes sheathed in a cocoon of oily sweat and my T-shirt clings like my epidermis. I slow my pace and breathe deeply.

A nun in a Catholic school once chided a girl who complained that she was hot and sweating: “Horses sweat, men perspire and women glow.” So I am the horse. I sling a towel around my neck like a prizefighter in training. If water loss counts, by the end of the night my tightest jeans will billow.

The phone rings, and I hesitate. Should I ignore it and just continue exercising? Of course not, I’m a firm believer in breaks.

“Want to go out for some paella?” Tex says. “There’s a new Spanish joint that we’re reviewing tomorrow. Tonight will probably be the last time that we can get a table before the four-star review comes out.”

Spanish food. Paella. I love the way the sausage is mixed with chicken and the saffron rice. And who doesn’t love a pitcher of icy sangria, the hearty red wine—and white is wonderful, too—lovingly sweetened with oranges and apples?

“Actually, I had an early dinner,” I lie. Can he tell?

“So have another one,” Tex said.

Tex is a man after my own heart, but somehow I summon the energy to keep my resolve. “Can I take a rain check? I’m kind of bushed anyway.”

“Big mistake. Listen to this review—‘The bunyol de bacalla, a mashed salt-cod-and-potato cake is ambrosial, teamed with a cilantro-mint salsa. Another favorite is the tortilla bandera, a frittata of tomatoes, Gruyere cheese and spinach—a party for your mouth.’ Damn,” Tex says, “let me at it.”

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