150 Pounds (37 page)

Noah approached her gingerly. He put his arms out, and she ran to him, keeping her round belly to the side so as to not squish the baby, but hugging him as hard as she could. His waist felt so narrow, the gray cashmere sweater he wore under a green Patagonia coat soft as fur beneath her hands.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, still crying.

“No. I’m the one who is sorry,” Noah said. His brown eyes were liquid chocolate. Warm, deep. He wiped away her tears with his big thumbs. “I never should have called
Skinny Chick
stupid. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I’ve been reading all the past blog posts, articles, and message boards. It’s really a work of art. The writing is excellent.”

“You know what?” Alexis said, laughing. “It is a little stupid, sometimes. A little shallow.
I
acted a little shallow. And I really am happy without that fancy phone.”

Noah grinned widely, his teeth very white against the twilight, and placed his hands around the small ball of her belly. “You kept the baby,” he said, pleased. Behind him, she saw a woman crouching down, placing flowers on the ground in the distance. The graves were muted, gray and silver half-moons in the dark green grass. She thought of the years she still had left with Noah. She didn’t want to waste any more time.

“I did,” Alexis breathed. “I thought about what you said. We’re not kids. This baby is a surprise, not unwanted. We messed up, but it can turn into a
good
mess-up, can’t it?”

God, the man had a sexy grin. “Definitely.”

He touched her face tenderly. “I kept begging Billy for news, but he said it was up to you to tell me. He can be really fucking stubborn.”

Alexis laughed. It felt good. “He can be,” she said. “But I love him so much.”

“Me, too,” Noah said.

She reached up to where his famous ’fro had been. “Your hair—it’s all gone.” She’d seen his new haircut when she watched him from the window of her bedroom, but up close it was even more startling.

He ran his hand over his scalp. His head was beautifully shaped, round. “Shaved it when Billy lost his,” he said. “Couldn’t let a homeboy go through that alone, you know?”

Alexis stared at him. “Did he tell you I was here?”

“Yup. I bribed him with a Guinness beer muffin, you know those are his favorite. And I got your message. I’d been down in Philly, meeting this guy who is interested in canning my famous chili and distributing it, which would be insanely awesome. I drove here at, like, a million miles an hour.” He looked around. “Pretty town. Preppy.”

Alexis laughed. “Very.” A look of sadness passed over her face. “I just remembered what a weird day I’ve had,” she said.

Noah sat down cross-legged, pulling her onto his lap. He cradled her. “Tell me about it,” he whispered.

So they sat there for over an hour, and Alexis talked and talked. Noah listened calmly, wrapping his jacket around her and putting his hands on her belly like it was a crystal ball that could reveal their future. The dirt and grass must have been wet and cold beneath Noah’s legs, but he never budged.

She told him everything, every last ugly bit. The governor’s wife with snow on her eyelashes who cried during Mark’s funeral. His dust-free football medals standing silently on the shelf in his bedroom. Her mother’s fading beauty and shaking hands. Her father’s grief, and how it had manifested itself, making him hard as stone. The inheritance she’d once turned down. Billy’s unpaid medical bills in her pillowcase, which crunched under her head as she slept at night. She sat near her beloved brother’s body and talked until she was hoarse.

“What do you think? Am I screwed up or what?” she asked him when she was finished.

“Well, for starters, I think you’re very brave,” Noah said. Behind him, small birds flew from tree to tree, black against the sky.

Alexis laughed. People had called her a lot of things, Queen of All Media, Skinny Chick, shallow. A bitch. But no one had ever said she was brave.

“I think you’ve been shouldering a lot of things by yourself, and it’s time for me to step up and be the man you need. Your best friend has been very sick. You’re pregnant. Your parents are … difficult. You’re not alone anymore, Alexis. You have me now. We’re family.”

She stared at him. And then a brand-new feeling swept over Alexis. Joy. Pure, undiluted joy. Their baby nudged again, and her stomach did a flip-flop.

“The baby just moved,” she told him, laughing and crying at the same time.

Noah’s eyes were bright. He squeezed her hand gently.

“I want to be with you, too, Noah. And I promise I won’t look like this forever, someday I’ll be my skinny self again.”

He smiled. In it, she saw a warm, amused, indulgent expression—an appreciation of her transparent passions and insecurities.

“Not too skinny,” he said. “I kind of like you with boobs.”

She laughed, punching him on the shoulder. “Perv! But okay. Not too skinny.”

“You look hotter to me right now with those curves than ever before, Alexis. I’m serious.”

Since their fight, she’d imagined many different scenarios of running into Noah, but this was perfect. Mark, whom she had loved so much, was part of this special day. And as the wind picked up again, and the moon rose in the sky, she realized that she had a family again: Billy, Noah, and that cute little bump.

Fat and Fabulous

Dear Fellow Fats and Non-Fats Posse: I apologize for the lack of posts lately, but I think once I explain what the heck has been going on around here it will all start to make sense.

Okay, all you out there. Listen up. Put the chocolate bar down (I’m talking to you, Mom) and turn up the volume in your ears. Well, okay. You can pick up your chocolate again, who am I to say no? I’m just a girl wearing sweatpants with unwashed hair and a plate of cookies on my lap who writes her blog in bed. But I do have something completely crazy to tell you. Pinch shut your nose. Peel open your eyeballs. Shut the door, and close the curtains: I have been going braless here at the farm.

For someone who was forced to answer to the name “Blimp Boobs” in junior high, you can imagine what a triumph this is. Like carrying the torch in the Olympics. I think it’s quite possible each of my boobs weighed something like thirty pounds, which, when put together, makes up one Jonas brother.

The
reason
I am able to go braless is the matter at hand here, the big enchilada in the room. Wait, now I’m just craving Mexican food. Yum.

The truth is, dear and loyal readers, I’ve lost some weight.
Please!
Before you tar, feather, and string me up in the town square, I did not go on a diet or watch what I ate. (That expression always calls to mind people with thick bifocals, holding a magnifying glass to each spoonful of food they place in their mouth, doesn’t it?) Let me repeat what I just wrote in a previous sentence.
I did not diet.
I will go to my grave protesting dieting and the ugly machine that is the weight-loss industry that follows it like a pale and sickly twin. No, I’m not counting food points. The only points a woman should be counting are her bowling league score or how many tubes of lip gloss fit into that tiny pocket on the inside of her purse.

No, dear readers, I lost weight because I inherited this old farm I’ve been blogging about, and I set out on a one-woman crusade to turn it into a real working apple orchard. Since spring I have been weeding, walking strange dogs with Irish names, trimming trees into half their former size, lugging bushels of brown apples across the orchard to make cider, and painting, sweeping, hanging shelves, and learning how to retile a bathroom.

I’ve also been buying my groceries at the local farmers’ market, a habit I strongly recommend if it is available where you live. Walking into town and asking a farmer what vegetables are in season is education, exercise, and also you get to chat up farmers, who know their produce in and out. We’ve had posts about buying in season before, but I have to admit I never actually did it! The richness in flavor of a fresh zucchini or tomato is nothing to sneeze at.

This blog has grown exponentially in the last three and a half years. Without all of your pretty little fingers clicking and navigating onto my site, recommending it to friends and family, I’d be nowhere. I
know
I can give just as good advice chubby instead of Fattie, continue to post great nutritional and funny stories, and be your rock when this crap society we live in tries to make you feel unworthy due to your weight. I am here to accept all your comments and questions. That’s what
Fat and Fabulous
is all about. Plus, when I gain back the weight (which is a very likely possibility) I know you’ll have my back! Shoshana’s Apple Orchard is opening. A lot of you who live in the Tri-State are coming. I can’t wait to welcome you with open arms and free cider! More posts soon. Wish me luck, I’m more nervous than when I lost my virginity. Maybe because I was drunk when I lost my virginity. But, as always, I digress.

XO,

Shoshana

“Oh, my god, have you seen this yet?” Emily sang out, throwing a
New York Post
onto the kitchen table with such unrestrained glee in her voice that Pam looked up from her position by the table where she’d just placed two steaming-hot plates of bacon and scrambled eggs. The table was handmade with a piece of driftwood Shoshana bought on eBay, and propped up with two crates. The eggs were laid that morning up the road at a farm where Shoshana donated a lot of firewood, and in return received free eggs. Things in Chester were done this way, an old-fashioned trading of amenities. There was a trust system here.

As Emily breezed into the kitchen from her trip to town and Andrea brewed a fresh batch of coffee, Greg and Shoshana went over the business plan for her orchard on an Excel sheet that made Shoshana slightly cross-eyed. They weren’t getting much work done. Suddenly she got a pop-up message on her computer that there was a problem. Did she want to send an error message to Dell to report the issue?

“What are you doing?” Greg asked, looking over her shoulder.

“I’m sending an error message to the server so they fix the problem.”

“What, you mean, like, that little message box that pops up when your computer can’t load something on a Web site?”

“Yeah. That.”

“Shoshana. No one actually looks at your error message, you know.”

“Of course they do. I always click the button that says ‘send error message,’ and someone reads it and maybe fixes the problem for other browsers.”

“And who is this person who does it, like, some little old guy with a white beard and silver wand who sits in a cardboard box all day with a laptop, wires running every which way, and he just solves all of the world’s computer problems?”

“Perhaps…”

Greg laughed. “You are such an optimist. I love it.”

“Would you two shut up for one second?” Emily shouted, pointing to the paper. “You gotta read this, Shosh.”

Shoshana picked up the paper. As she skimmed the page, her eyes widened. Page Six held a photograph of Alexis Allbright, looking shocked as she exited a Whole Foods supermarket, a strikingly handsome and built black man carrying grocery bags beside her. They were both midstride, and it appeared her companion was shouting at the photographer, making a fist in the air with his free hand. Andrea, who sat across the table and read the article upside down, let out a gasp in the room, which had grown quiet.

MOO! HAS NEW YORK’S MEDIA QUEEN GONE TO THE COWS?

As this picture shows, blogger and socialite Alexis Allbright has put on weight. One Upper East Side doctor we queried estimates seventy-five pounds. Famous for lambasting in the press everyone and anyone whose BMI wasn’t up to snuff, it’s ironic that the queen of mean is now, well, fat as a cow herself.

“Isn’t that the young woman from
Oprah
?” Pam asked, pouring coffee into several mugs. Then, “Gregory, get your feet off that chair.”

Abashed, Greg said, “Sorry, Mrs. Weiner.”

Shoshana giggled. Pam felt Greg was the son she’d never had, and was known to spit into her palm to fix his cowlick.

“That’s the bitch who tried to show up Shoshana,” Emily said. She smacked her fist down on Alexis’s surprised face, causing the plates on the table to clatter. “And now she’s a Fattie! I love it! Serves her right.” Frank Sinatra, lying underneath the table in the hope of swallowing a bit of dropped food, let a bark in agreement. Andrea snuck him a slice of bacon.

Shoshana still was in Hoboken several times a week, but her pooch had quickly acclimated to country life, chasing rabbits in the orchard and getting spoiled on sleepovers at Greta and Joe’s, where he had oddly enough fallen deeply in love with P-Hen, the peacock, and wouldn’t be deterred, even when she pecked at him constantly. He was also best friends with Patrick O’Leary. Both dogs kept Joe Murphy company on his walks around the hills. Greta bought Sinatra a bed monogrammed with the words
OL’ BLUE EYES
.