Jennifer Weiner - Good in Bed

“Look,” he said. “Realistically, given your heredity, and your frame, it may be that you were just never meant to be a thin person. And that’s not the worst thing in the world.”

I didn’t lift my head. “Oh, no?”

“You’re not sick. You’re not in any pain”

I bit my lip. He had no idea. I remember when I was fourteen or so, on summer vacation somewhere by the beach, walking down a sidewalk with my sister, my slender sister, Lucy. We were wearing baseball caps and shorts and bathing suits and flip-flops. We were eating ice-cream cones. I could close my eyes and see the way my tanned legs looked against my white shorts, the sensation of the ice cream melting on my tongue. A kindly-looking white-haired lady had approached us with a smile. I thought she’d say something like how we reminded her of her granddaughters, or made her miss her own sister and the fun they’d had together. Instead, she nodded at my sister, walked up to me, and pointed at the ice cream cone. “You don’t need that, dearie,” she’d said. “You should be on a diet.” I remembered things like that. A lifetime’s accretion of unkindnesses, all of those little lingering hurts that I carried around like stones sewn into my pockets. The price you paid for being a Larger Woman. You don’t need that. Not in pain, he’d said. What a joke.

The doctor cleared his throat. “Let’s talk about motivation for a minute.”

“Oh, I’m very motivated.” I lifted my head, managed a small, crooked smile. “Can’t you tell?”

He smiled back. “We’re also looking for people who have the right kind of motivation.” He shut my folder and crossed his hands over his nonexistent belly. “You probably know this already, but people who have the best long-term success with weight management decide to lose weight for themselves. Not for their spouses, or their parents, or because their high-school reunion’s coming up, or they’re embarrassed over something that somebody wrote.”

We stared at each other silently.

“I’d like to see,” he said, “if you can come up with some reasons to lose weight, other than the fact that you’re angry and upset right now.”

“I’m not angry,” I said angrily.

He didn’t smile. “Can you think of other reasons?”

“I’m miserable,” I blurted. “I’m lonely. Nobody’s going to date me looking like this. I’m going to die alone, and my dog’s going to eat my face, and no one will find us until the smell seeps out under the door.”

“I find that highly unlikely,” he said with a smile.

“You don’t know my dog,” I said. “So am I in? Do I get drugs? Can I have some now?”

He smiled at me. “We’ll be in touch.” I stood up. He pulled a stethoscope around his neck and patted the examining table. “They’ll draw some blood on your way out. I just need to listen to your heart for a minute. Hop up here for me, please.”

I sat up straight on the crinkly white paper on top of the table and closed my eyes as his hands moved against my back. The first time a man had touched me with any regard or kindness since Bruce. The thought made my eyes fill. Don’t do it, I thought fiercely, don’t cry now.

“Breathe in,” Dr. K. said calmly. If he had any idea what was going on, he didn’t let on. “Nice deep breath… and hold it… and let it out.”

“Is it still there?” I asked, staring at his head, bent over, as he wedged the stethoscope beneath my left breast. And then, before I could stop myself, “Does it sound broken?”

He straightened up, smiling. “Still there. Not broken. In fact, it sounds like you have a strong and healthy heart.” He offered his hand. “I think you’re going to be fine,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

Out in the lobby, Lily the daisy-shirt woman was still wedged into her chair, half of a plain bagel balanced on one knee. “So?” she asked.

“They’re going to let me know,” I said. There was a piece of paper in her hand. I was unsurprised to see that it was a Xeroxed copy of “Loving a Larger Woman” by Bruce Guberman. “You seen this?” she asked me.

I nodded.

“This is great,” she said. “This guy really gets it.” She shifted as much as her seat would allow her and looked me right in the eye. “Can you imagine the idiot who’d let someone like this get away?”

I think every person who is single should have a dog. I think the governmen t should step in and intervene: If you’re not married or coupled up, whether you’ve been dumped or divorced or widowed or whatever, they should require you to proceed immediately to the pound nearest you and select an animal companion.

Dogs give your days a rhythm and a purpose. You can’t sleep ridiculously late, or stay out all day and all night, when there’s a dog depending on you.

Every morning, no matter what I’d drunk, what I’d done, or whether or not my heart had been broken, Nifkin woke me up by gently applying his nose to my eyelids. He is a remarkably understanding little dog, willing to sit patiently on the couch with his paws crossed gracefully in front of him while I sang along to My Fair Lady or clipped recipes from Family Circle, which I subscribed to even though, as I liked to joke, I had neither family nor circle.

Nifkin is a small and neatly made rat terrier, white with black spots and brown markings on his long, spindly legs. He weighs precisely ten pounds and looks like an anorexic and extremely high-strung Jack Russell, with a Doberman pinscher’s ears, pointing permanently upright, tacked onto his head. He’s a secondhand dog. I inherited him from three sportswriters I knew at my first paper. They were renting a house, and they decided that a house required a dog. So they got Nifkin from the pound believing that he was actually a Doberman pinscher puppy. Of course, he was no such thing… just a full-grown rat terrier with oversized ears. Truthfully, he looks like pieces of a few different dogs that someone put together as a joke. And he’s got a permanent, Elvis-like sneer on his face – the result, the story goes, from when his mother bit him when he was a puppy. But I refrain from remarking on his shortcomings when he’s within earshot. He’s also very sensitive about his looks. Just like his mother.

The sportswriters spent six months alternately showering him with attention, letting him lap beer out of his water bowl, or leaving him penned up in their kitchen, completely ignored, all the while waiting for him to grow into his Doberman pinscher-hood. Then one of them got a job at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and the other two decided to split up and move to their own apartments. Neither one wanted to take along anxious little Nifkin, who did not in any way resemble a Doberman pinscher.

Employees could run free classified ads in the paper, and their ad, “One dog, small, spotted, free to a good home” ran for two weeks with no takers. Desperate, with their bags packed and security deposits already paid on their new places, the sportswriters double-teamed me in the company cafeteria. “It’s you or the pound again,” they said.

“Is he housebroken?”

They exchanged an uneasy look. “Kind of,” said one. “For the most part,” said the other.

“Does he chew things?”

Another uneasy look. “He likes rawhide,” said one. The other one kept his mouth shut, from which I inferred that Nifkin probably also enjoyed shoes, belts, wallets, and anything else that came his way.

“And has he learned to walk on a leash, or is he still pulling all the time? And do you think he’d answer to something other than Nifkin?”

The guys looked at each other. “Look, Cannie,” one of them finally said, “you know what happens to dogs in the pound… unless they can convince somebody else that he’s a Doberman pinscher. And that’s unlikely.”