150 Pounds (10 page)

“What was the problem with her, exactly? Wait. First things first. Tell me where you ate,” Shoshana asked.

Greg smiled from his bed in the Shipyard, an upscale lifestyle building built in uptown Hoboken along the waterfront with stunning views of the Manhattan skyline. His building had a doorman, elevator, pool, and workout center. Shoshana made fun of him for living in what she called “Yuppie Paradise,” but at the same time would force Greg to hand over his pool pass to her when the mood struck. He joked that he was “roughing it” when he walked the nine blocks downtown to Shoshana’s prewar walk-up.

When he took women out, which was pretty much every night, Shoshana needed to know what restaurant he ate in and what they ordered for dinner—food was always on her mind. Just one of the many things about her that amused him. He appreciated her friendship and held her opinion above his buddies’—she always told it like it is.

“We went to Strip House in the city,” he said.

“Oh, my god, I think I just came,” Shoshana said. “Keep going.” Andrea came back into the room, shot Shoshana an odd look, and walked back out.

Greg laughed. “We started with sides of buttered spinach and potatoes, and then we both had the ribeye.”

Shoshana was a vegetarian (she thought it was mean to eat something that had dreams), but she appreciated a finely made meal when she heard about one.

“And did she eat?” she asked.

She always asked him this, weeding out dates that ordered only salads and picked nervously at them. She didn’t care how thin the women were that he took out, but they had to have a healthy appetite if they were to earn Shoshana’s approval.

“She ate everything on her plate. Oh! And she licked the knife at the end,” he said.

“Promising! And for dessert?”

“I told her I was stuffed, so she went ahead and ordered a chocolate mousse for herself and finished it off solo.”

“I love her already!” Shoshana squealed. “When is the second date? Wait, I know. We’ll do it here! We’ll throw a party, you can bring her, and then I can meet her all casual-like.”

“Okay, but don’t get your hopes up. There were a few red flags.”

Shoshana got out of bed and started searching around her room for her towel and the new Malin+Goetz facewash she’d recently emptied the last of her checking account out to buy.

“What red flags? I swear if you say one of her toes was longer than the big toe, or that she had lettuce stuck between her front teeth, I am hanging up the phone.”

“Would you just listen? After dinner we went back to her place.”

“This is getting good. Get to the juicy parts.”

Andrea came back into the room for the third time and held her palms up, mouthing,
Did you call my work yet?
She placed a plate with a bagel and cream cheese on Shoshana’s bedside table on top of a pile of beach read novels. Shoshana shook her head and shooed her away, slamming the door. She heard a sharp kick sound from the other side.

“So she opens a bottle of red wine—”

“I love red wine!” Shoshana interrupted.

Greg laughed. “You love any kind of wine, as long as it has alcohol in it. Would you let me finish?”

“Sorry. Please continue,” she said. She opened her door and walked in her pretty Hanes plus-size pink cotton bra and underwear past Andrea, ignored her glare, opened the door to the bathroom, and sat down on the toilet. “By the way, I’m peeing while I’m talking to you.”

“Of course you are,” Greg said. “Okay, so
anyway,
we’re making out on her bed—”

“Greg, no one says
making out
anymore. That’s so dorky.” Greg sometimes was too serious and lawyerish. Shoshana saw it as her duty to shake him up. She went to wipe and discovered there was no toilet paper. Again.

“Agh!” she shouted. “Is it really that hard to refill the toilet paper? How many times is a girl expected to drip-dry?”

“Gross,” Greg said.

“Aggie used it all up for a sculpture,” Karen said calmly from inside the shower two feet from where Shoshana was peeing.

Shoshana screamed. “Karen, I didn’t know you were in there! What the hell are you doing?” She dropped the phone from her ear and fished around on the floor for it, Greg’s voice calling out, “Hello? Hello?”

Karen stepped out. “Just drying myself off. You’re the one who came barging in here to pee, lady, without checking the shower to see if there was anyone in it.”

Shoshana giggled. “And do you check the shower every single time you come in the bathroom?”

Karen wrapped the towel around herself. She was tall, five-eleven, and in her second year of Columbia Law School. She had short wavy brown hair, bright green eyes, and played volleyball at Chelsea Piers on a competitive women’s team throughout the year. At Princeton, she and Shoshana would often work out at the gym together, Karen cheering Shoshana on. Despite being a large girl, Shoshana loved working out at the gym (if only to stare at the cute butts of the boys in the weight room).

“What kind of sculpture is she making that she needs toilet paper?” Shoshana asked, doing a little shake sitting down. “Hold your horses,” she bellowed to Greg, who was emitting loud, annoyed sighs.

“I don’t know. Last week she’d stolen my Kashi cereal to sculpt with. I made her give me five bucks for it.”

Their roommate Aggie, short for Agatha (named for a very dead grandmother on her mother’s side), was a sculptor. She often used various odd things from around the apartment in her work. One time she’d asked Shoshana for three tampons and made dreadlocks out of them for a self-portrait and displayed it at PS1 in Queens. She was always late on the rent, but the rest of the girls forgave her out of love. Once, Aggie paid rent in change, all $400 of it. Shoshana had to drive her to their landlord’s office on Adams Street, Aggie hauling into the backseat large zip-lock bags filled with quarters and dimes.

“Do you want to hear the story or not?” Greg shouted, his voice sounding small and tinny through the phone.

Shoshana rolled her eyes at Karen and mouthed,
Gregory,
to her as Karen slipped gracefully out of the room to continue getting ready for class.

“I do, I do,” Shoshana reassured Greg. She did one last shimmy, kicked off her undergarments, and hung them on the back of the door. She felt an immediate pinch in her back as her breasts swung forward. Her bra looked like a parachute next to her roommate Karen’s size-34A bras, all hanging on a nearby hook to dry after she’d washed them in the sink. She turned on the water.

“Shosh, are you still there?” Greg’s voice came through to her on the phone.

“Yes, Greg! Did your fragile ego take a blow because I wasn’t paying attention to you for five seconds?”

He laughed. “It did, actually.”

She rolled her eyes.

“So we’re starting to kind of dry-hump on her bed—”

“Wait,
what
? You said you were only kissing! You have to fill in the good parts!”

“Shoshana, I’m hanging up the phone. I am not telling you about the sex! You’re supposed to be giving me advice!”

“Was there sex? Greg, you whore!”

Silence on the other end.

Shoshana groaned. “Fine. Be that way. I’m listening.”

“Anyway, we’re doing whatever, and lo and behold, in her closet are a whole row of her little expensive jeans, all carefully hung on hangers with little clips.”

“What size were they?” She always liked to know what size clothing people wore.

“I don’t know, maybe six? Eight? Anyway, don’t you find it pretentious?”

“What, that she wears a size eight? Certainly not. She’s my new hero, what with the licking of the knife and ordering dessert and all that. I can’t wait to meet her.”

“No!” he said, laughing. “I mean that she hangs up her jeans. I mean, who does that? I feel like it’s a talisman of bad things to come.”

“Okay, Greg, seriously, you’re not Harry Potter. Don’t say ‘talisman.’ It will turn girls off.”

“Whatever. All I’m saying is that I feel like most nice, normal American girls fold their jeans and put them in a
dresser
. Anyone who hangs up their jeans probably votes for Nader and litters.”

Shoshana stuck her tongue out at the phone.

“See? This is exactly why we broke up. You are so crazy! You go out with this girl once, and you’re coming up with all these wild assumptions about her. Go out with her again. Let her pick the restaurant. Stop nitpicking every girl you go out with. You’re such a mathlete.” Greg had been on the math team in high school, and she’d never let him live it down.

“You know you loved my mathematic self,” Greg teased. “That’s how I got you to sleep with me in the first place.”

“More like I was fifteen and desperate to lose my virginity. Besides, you served up that ‘mystery punch’ at your parents’ house,” Shoshana said, examining her toes. “I would have slept with anyone after drinking that. I sincerely hope you’ve come up with better tactics to get laid since then.” She needed a pedicure badly. One big toe’s pink polish was chipped.

Greg chortled. “That’s right! I forgot about that. I think it was rum, cranberry juice, and a ground-up lemon peel. I’d just seen
Cocktail
and wanted to be Tom Cruise.”

After a few more parting insults, Shoshana hung up with Greg, only after wrestling out a promise he would go on a second date and bring her home a slice of cake from their dessert. With her love life in the crapper, she had to rely on friends’ dates to bring her home goodies. She made a mental note to work harder on finding a boyfriend.

Shoshana stepped into the shower, letting the steam run over her face to open her pores before exfoliating. She felt weightless under the water. She thought about her friendship with Greg as she rooted through the various bottles of shampoos belonging to her roommates and found her brand, which claimed to use water from a spring in Alaska but was probably actually from the Gowanus Canal.

She thought again about her lack of a love life and realized she hadn’t had sex in over six months, which was depressing. She wanted a boyfriend, but not badly enough to sleep with random people. She had a JDate account Andrea had signed her up for without asking. And put up a picture of Denise Richards. From a still in
Wild Things
. Topless. Needless to say, Shoshana had gotten a lot of e-mails to go through and delete.

The truth was, she was having so much fun with her friends that, although she wanted love and romance, it didn’t feel all that important. She was twenty-six years old, saw her mother and sister daily, lived with four crazy women, and had a wide network of not just friends, but
best
friends.

Shoshana knew eventually she’d meet someone great, but she wasn’t going out every night to the bars to find Mr. Big. She often wondered if there was something wrong with her; it seemed every other woman she knew had been suckered into the
Sex and the City
mentality: that their lives revolved around meeting a man, settling down in a fabulous apartment, and having adorable babies. She was happy with her life, something she knew people like Alexis Allbright had a hard time wrapping their malnourished brains around. She’d always had this mystical, tingling sensation that she was somehow … destined to do something interesting and different. That she had a
life purpose
. It was this glittery future that would swim into her thoughts, when she least expected it. A gut feeling told her this destiny did not have to include a man.

Lately all her dates had been failures, but she wasn’t giving up hope just yet. Aggie had taken an attractive picture of her last week to replace the Denise Richards one. She stood on a chair, claiming Shoshana’s face looked less wide when shot from up above. Shoshana had worn her favorite three-quarter-length pink plaid dress, outlandishly large diamond hoop earrings down to her shoulders, a matching pink and white plaid scarf in her auburn hair, and red lip gloss. Everyone agreed she’d taken a great photo.

If nothing else, JDate provided good material for
Fat and Fabulous.

The first guy had been pretty bland, like eating a rice cracker. Date number two had told her that her feet looked beautiful in her open-toe gold sandals and she’d gone home happy, thinking she’d call the guy again, until Greg said he probably had a foot fetish.

The third, last week, was with a man named Asher, a graduate student at Rutgers, who was in the middle of getting his Ph.D. in American Studies.

The first thing she noticed about him when she met him at a small Italian restaurant in the West Village was that his right eye blinked continuously, open and shut, like a traffic light. She later remembered lights that blink meant “caution,” which she should have paid attention to. He had a flat haircut, like an early Paul McCartney but not nearly as handsome, and when he stood up to shake her hand he was very, very short. Shorter than Greg.

She’d tried to make the most of it. You never knew when Prince Charming might come galloping into your life, perhaps even disguised in wrinkled chinos with too many pockets that looked like they’d been purchased around when the first episode of
Melrose Place
aired.

“You look just like your picture,” she’d told him, to break the ice. She’d read somewhere it was a common compliment for online daters.

“And you look … similar,” he said, taking in her 215 pounds. And she’d put her long hair into a bun and everything for this troll of a man. Hmph.

“So, tell me about your Ph.D. program,” she said, after ordering blueberry pancakes and a mimosa. The booth squeaked when he moved and Shoshana had to stifle a laugh. It sounded kind of like a fart.

He glanced furtively around the restaurant. “Do you think anyone’s listening?” he asked.

Shoshana bit her lip. “What?” Did he mean listening to the fart?

“What about those two men over there? Probably FBI, right?”

She turned to look at two overweight truckers in flannel shirts, their pockets protruding with Marlboro reds.