Читать книгу Fat Chance - Deborah Blumenthal - Страница 10

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!”