“That’s in the press packet,” Jane said suddenly. I knew that, but I’d decided to be polite, take the quote, and get the hell out of Dodge before I found out what a woman who ate six lettuce leaves for lunch did when they asked if she wanted dessert.
“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “The girl in the flower shop? She’s my daughter.”
“Really?”
“Her first role,” Jane said, sounding almost proud, almost shy. Almost real. “I’ve been discouraging her… she’s already obsessing over the way she looks”
Wonder where she gets that, I thought, but said nothing.
“I haven’t told anyone else that,” Jane said. The corners of her lips twitched. “But I like you.”
Heaven help the reporters you don’t like, I thought, and was trying to construct a reasonable response when she suddenly stood up, taking Nicholas along with her. “Good luck,” she murmured, and they swept out the door. Just as the dessert cart arrived.
“Something for mademoiselle?” said the waiter sympathetically.
Can you blame me if I said yes?
“So?” asked Samantha, on the phone that afternoon.
“She ate lettuce for lunch,” I moaned.
“A salad?”
“Lettuce. Plain lettuce. With vinegar on the side. I almost died.”
“Just lettuce?”
“Lettuce,” I repeated. “Red leaf lettuce. She specified a variety. And she kept squirting her face with Evian.”
“Cannie, you’re making this up.”
“I’m not! I swear! My Hollywood idol, and she’s this lettuce-eating freak, this, this miniature Elvira with tattooed eyeliner”
Samantha listened dispassionately. “You’re crying.”
“I am not,” I lied. “I’m just disappointed. I thought… you know… I had this idea that we’d hit it off. And I’d send her the screenplay, but I’m never going to get to give anyone the screenplay, because I didn’t go to college with a single cast member of Saturday Night!, and those are the guys who get their scripts read.” I glanced down at myself. More bad news. “Also I got osso bucco on my jacket.”
Samantha sighed. “I think you need an agent.”
“I can’t get an agent! Believe me, I’ve tried! They won’t even look at your stuff unless you’ve had something produced, and you can’t get producers to look at something unless it comes from an agent.” I wiped my eyes viciously. “This week sucks.”
“Mail call!” said Gabby gleefully. She dropped a stack of papers on my desk and waddled off. I said good-bye to Sam, and turned to my correspondence. Press release. Press release. Fax, fax, fax. Envelope with my name carefully lettered in the handwriting I had long since learned to identify as Old Person, Angry. I ripped the envelope open.
“Dear Miss Shapiro,” read the shaky letters. “Your article on Celine Dion’s special was the filthiest, nastiest smear piece of garbage I have seen in my fifty-seven years as a loyal Examiner reader. Bad enough that you mocked Celine’s music as “bombastic, overblown ballads,” but then you had to go and make fun of her looks! I’ll bet you’re no Cindy Crawford yourself. Sincerely, Mr. E. P. Deiffinger.”
“Hey, Cannie.”
Jesus Christ. Gabby was forever sneaking up behind me. For being massive, and old, and deaf, she could be quiet as a cat when it suited her. I turned around and there she was, squinting over my shoulder at the letter in my lap.
“Did you get something wrong?” she asked, her voice full of sympathy as thick, and fake, as Cheez Whiz. “Do we need to run a correction?”
“No, Gabby,” I said, trying not to scream. “Just a little opposing viewpoint.”
I tossed the letter in the trash can and shoved my chair back so fast I almost ran over Gabby’s toes.
“Jeez!” she hissed and retreated.
“Dear Mr. Deiffinger,” I composed in my head. “I may not be a supermodel, but at least I’ve got enough working brain cells to know what sucks when I hear it.”
“Dear Mr. Deiffinger,” I thought, walking the mile and a half from work to the Weight and Eating Disorders office where my first Fat Class was meeting. “Sorry you took offense at my description of Celine Dion’s work, but I actually thought I was being charitable.”
I stomped into the conference room, seated myself at the table, and looked around. There was Lily, from the waiting room, and an older black woman, about my size, with a bulging briefcase beside her, poking away at one of those hand-held e-mail readers. There was a blond teenager, her long hair swept off her face in a hairband, her body hidden beneath a bulky oversized sweatshirt and gigantic droopy jeans. And there was a woman of perhaps sixty who had to weigh at least four hundred pounds. She followed me into the room, walking with the aid of a cane, and surveyed the seats carefully, measuring her bulk against their parameters, before easing herself down.
“Hey, Cannie,” said Lily.
“Hey,” I grumbled. The words Portion Control were written on a white wipable message board, and there was a poster of the food pyramid on one wall. This shit again, I thought, wondering if I could place out of the class. I’d been to Weight Watchers, after all. I knew all about portion control.
The skinny nurse I remembered from the waiting room walked through the door, her hands full of bowls, measuring cups, a small plastic replica of a four-ounce pork chop.
“Good evening, everyone,” she said, and wrote her name – Sarah Pritchard, R.N. – on the board. We went around the table, introducing ourselves. The blond girl was Bonnie, the black woman was Anita, and the very large woman was Esther from West Oak Lane.
“I’m having a flashback of college,” whispered Lily, as Nurse Sarah distributed booklets full of calorie counts, and packets of printouts on behavior modification.
“I’m having a flashback of Weight Watchers,” I whispered back.
“Did you try that?” asked Bonnie the blond girl, edging closer to us.
“Last year,” I said.
“Was that the One Two Three Success program?”
“Fat and Fiber,” I whispered back.
“Isn’t that a cereal?” asked Esther, who had a surprisingly lovely voice – very low, and warm, and free of the dread Philadelphia accent that causes natives to swallow their consonants like they’re made of warm taffy.
“That’s Fruit and Fiber,” the blond girl said.
“Fat and Fiber was where you had to count the grams of fat and the grams of fiber in every food, and you were supposed to eat a certain number of grams of fiber, and not go over a certain number of grams of fat,” I explained.
“Did it work?” asked Anita, setting down her Palm Pilot.
“Nah,” I said. “But that was probably my fault. I kept mixing up which number I was supposed to stay below and which one I was supposed to go above… and then I found, like, these really high-fiber brownies that were made with iron filings or something”
Lily cracked up.
“They had a zillion calories apiece but I figured it didn’t matter because they were very low in fat and very high in fiber”
“A common mistake,” said Nurse Sarah cheerfully. “Fat and fiber are
