The Cinderella Pact (3 page)

 
I stare at the article. Total fiction. One hundred percent whopping lies.
A few simple, painless steps
?
Without ever feeling deprived
? Puhleeze. What kind of ditz would buy that?

“I totally buy that,” Deb says. “I've heard that walking five miles a day and cutting out a couple hundred calories can take off the weight.”

I slap my forehead. OK. So Deb's a pea brain, but not Nancy. Surely she's too smart to agree.

“I completely agree. Don't you, Nola?” Nancy says, folding up the article.

My jaw drops. “No. I don't think you can lose a ton of weight by walking and cutting out two hundred and fifty calories a day. I think that's more Belinda spin.”

“Then why did you print it if it's spin?” Nancy asks.

Have to admit, she has me there. “Because it was saleable spin?”

Nancy gives me a look. “Anyway, what I propose is that we follow Belinda's example and just do it.”

“Diet?” Deb asks. “But I hate diets. I've been on so many diets I've given up. They don't work. You just gain the weight right back. And now that we're in our thirties, it'll be doubly impossible to lose.”

Deb's right. I despise diets too, especially any diet involving gelatin. As for exercise, I just don't have the time, not with my commute. That's another problem, sitting. I do a lot of it. Forty-five minutes in the car to work. Then at my desk all day. Forty-five minutes back. By the time I get home, I've been sitting so much that I'm exhausted.

“I don't know,” I say unenthusiastically. “I can't summon the energy for another weight-loss thing.”

Nancy regards us with disappointment. “Look at us. Are we dead yet? No. We're in our thirties. We're young. I, for one, have plenty of living to do.” She takes a deep breath. “My goal is to get down to what I was in college. I'd like to be able to wear anything I want and do anything I want without worrying about my size. Especially now that I'm about to get a divorce. I need a better body if I ever hope to have sex again.”

Aha, so that's her motivation. Now I get it. Last year Nancy's super husband, Ron—at least, I always thought of him as super—ran off to Cozumel with a fresh, young law clerk for a long weekend. Though he begged and pleaded for Nancy's forgiveness, she refused to take him back. A mistake, in my opinion. They don't get much better than Ron—er, when he's not running off to Cozumel with twenty-five-year-old law clerks, that is.

“It'll be easy,” Nancy says. “Two hundred and fifty calories a day. Let's try it. For six months. And if it doesn't work, we scrap everything and go back to our old ways.”

I study Deb. Nancy's preaching is wearing her down. I can tell she's seriously considering this ridiculous diet business.

“Actually,” Deb ventures, “I've been looking into weight-loss surgery . . .”

“Weight-loss surgery!” Nancy snaps. “Are you kidding? Do you know that mortality rate? Weight-loss surgery is obscene.”

“It was just a thought,” says Deb, who is easily cowed. “Anyway, Paul's not keen on it either. He says he likes me fat and happy, so I guess I don't have a real reason to lose.”

“Except your son, whose graduation you're not going to tomorrow because you don't want to embarrass him.”

Deb bristles. “OK. I'll do it. But only for six months.”

Nancy pats her hand. “That's a good girl. How about you, Nola? Are you ready to get down to the weight your driver's license says you are?”

“Is this some kind of legal threat?” I ask.

“I do happen to be on a first-name basis with several state police, and lying to the Department of Motor Vehicles is a punishable offense.”

Unfortunately, I am not up to speed on New Jersey motor vehicle code, so I'm not sure if claiming that I am 128 pounds will get me thrown in the slammer. But I do know that Nancy will give me no peace unless I concur.

“All right. Count me in. On one condition.”

Nancy raises an eyebrow.

“That in December we come back here and get the table by the window and shame Chester until he grovels at our feet.”

“It's a deal. And now a toast.” Nancy lifts her glass of water. “To the Cinderella Pact. If we don't lose it now, we never will. So here's to one last try.”

“To one last try,” we chime. And clink our waters enthusiastically.

I give us exactly forty-eight hours to cave.

Chapter Two

Being overweight hasn't been all bad. Being overweight has made me more tolerant of other people's foibles because I know that as humans we can't help who we are or what we do one hundred percent of the time.

And if I hadn't been overweight, I'd never have become thin and famous—as Belinda Apple.

Last year Managing Editor Lori DiGrigio decided what
Sass!
needed to distinguish itself from other gossip sheets was an ethics columnist. Not any ethics columnist. One who “could answer the personal, occasionally embarrassing, and always unique ethical issues facing women today. Someone edgy and biting.”

At the time I had been editing columns at
Sass!
for four years, so I had a pretty good handle on what worked and what didn't when it came to biting ethics columnists. Wait. That doesn't sound right. . . .

Anyway, I walked into Lori's office with my application in hand, her “sample questions” answered with a fresh and original voice (mine), at which point Lori looked up at me and—I am not making this up—laughed out loud. She even snorted.

“You?” she said.

Seriously. That's what she said. “
You?
”

I was still naive, so I didn't quite catch what she was implying. Stupid, silly me. I assumed she was referring to the fact that I was an editor, not a writer.

“Actually,” I remember saying, “I've always wanted to be a writer here. If you look at my résumé, it says that my five-year goal is to become a columnist and, well, this is my fourth year so here I am.”

Lori didn't know how to respond. In retrospect, I realize her top concern was probably a legal one: How can I tell this frump that I'd no more have her writing ethics columns than resurrect John Candy to critique fashion?

To that end, she shoved my application into a file and said with as straight a face as she could muster, “I'll give it a thoughtful review.”

“She's not going to give it a thoughtful review,” Joel scoffed when I returned to my desk, blue and confused.

“That's what she said.” I tried not to sound defensive. But, really, she did say that.

“Lori is a ruthlessly ambitious shrew who doesn't give a gnat's ass about you or anyone except herself. She wants to present Stanton with a new columnist who's candy for the eye, because that's what we turn out here at
Sass!
Readable eye candy.” Joel bit into his turkey sandwich and licked mustard from the corner of his mouth. “And, besides, she doesn't like nice girls.”

“Are you calling me nice? Take it back.”

“Nice. Nice. Nice.”

I punched him on the shoulder. If Joel and I were in grade school, they'd have to separate us even though he's old enough to be my father and has the fashion sense of a high school janitor.

Underneath the jokes, I knew the harsh reality of what he was saying. Lori didn't want the picture of a fat chick accompanying a column that was supposed to appeal to hip, trendy twentysomethings with “personal, occasionally embarrassing, and always unique” ethical questions. She wanted Carrie Bradshaw.

So I decided to test his theory. I dug out an old photo of me sans glasses taken for my college yearbook. In it I am leaning against a building on the Rutgers main campus, one cowboy-footed boot against the wall, my brown hair hanging across half my face (to hide my chin—fat-girl trick). I was at my thinnest then—relatively speaking—and, to be honest, I didn't look bad at all.

I scanned the photo into my home computer and then dug in.

Three hours with Photoshop (O, that we could Photoshop our real lives) and Belinda was born—a much slimmer, red-headed version of me. For fun, I colored my brown cowboy boots pink and superimposed a bony chest on mine, but otherwise kept everything the same. I am still waiting for the day when a bored student in the Rutgers yearbook room comes across my picture and puts two and two together.

Belinda's résumé was trickier. I had hoped that, being foreign, Belinda's background would be harder to check. I made sure that she had written for British publications that couldn't be traced, because they were invented. For example, Belinda enjoyed an immensely popular stint as an advice columnist at the short-lived and totally fictional
Go Fab!
(The more British-sounding, the better, I figured.) As for her personal reference? None other than
moi
, followed by my home phone number.

In a last-minute stroke of brilliance, I printed out the original answers from my application, photocopied them on cheap paper to look grainy, and included them in the package as Belinda's. Surely this would set off bells in personnel when they saw my same answers and my name as a reference.

But no one from
Sass!
ever called.

Not even after Belinda's application made it through the first round of cuts. Not even after Lori cruised by my desk one day and said casually, “Nola, I wonder if you could find a number for that applicant you recommended, Belinda Apple. The one on her résumé seems to be out of service.”

Finally, I thought, Lori is going to call Belinda and offer her the job. At which point I would come clean and we'd have a little discussion about judging people according to their qualifications, not their jeans size.

On my lunch hour I ran out and signed up for a new cell phone. I registered it under the name Belinda Apple.

“Apparently, Belinda has an American cell,” I said, handing Lori a slip of paper on which the number was written. “You wouldn't believe what I had to go through to find it.”

Lori snatched the number out of my hand.

Ten minutes later “Belinda's” phone rang “Rule Britannia.”

“New ring tone?” Joel asked casually.

Yipes! How could I talk to Lori in a British accent with Joel sitting right next to me overhearing every word? Grabbing the phone, I found a vacant, dark conference room, shut the door, and locked it. Then I tried to channel my best Brit—I thought of teatime at Harrods and the Ministry of Silly Walks, and the entire cast of
Love Actually
. What the hell? If Renée Zellweger could pull it off as Bridget Jones, why couldn't I?

“ 'Ellooo?”

Lori seemed confused. “Oh, I'm looking for a Belinda Apple. Is this she?”

Editors are so mindful of using the right pronoun. “This is she.”

After a few niceties Lori got right down to business. “We've read your columns and reviewed your application thoroughly, Belinda. And, well, let me just say that we found your answers to be exceptional. Such an original voice.”