Читать книгу The Pink Ghetto - Liz Ireland - Страница 6

For a certain type of man—and I plead guilty to being that type to a T—Renata Abner was like catnip to a lean, hungry Siamese tom.

When we met in college, she was frisky and eager for new experiences as only a recently slimmed-down co-ed can be. Unbeknownst to those around her, her first eighteen years had been as Renata Abner, chubbette; her highest social attainment had been co-captain of the pep choir. Due to a graduation night trauma, she had spent her postgraduate summer on a potent regimen of Jenny Craig meals and Ex-Lax, and was at last a slender shadow of her former self. Now, in her new size-ten incarnation and self-schooled in the Sex and the City Tao of high heels and cleavage, she was eager for those dating experiences her cohort had all been having since crawling out of the post-pubescent ooze.

She certainly had me fooled. But after three beers purchased with our just-hatched fake I.D.’s, the newly acquired sophistication fell away like her resistance to the cheese straws in the bowl at her elbow, and the real story came spilling out: the rowdy houseful of siblings that a pudgy middle child could get lost in; the taunts of classmates from preschool onward; the playground depredations that led to her finding solace in imaginative but not physical play; the lack of social life in high school, the only compensations of which were an encyclopedic knowledge of old movies and a very respectable 3.6 GPA.

So what was the big attraction, you ask?

Simple. Some men go for the geisha types (harder to find these days, but still out there). Others inexplicably veer to those domineering, she-who-must-be-obeyed fright dolls. What’s my poison? She who has been overlooked.