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Chapters (55)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Cast of Characters
  7. Part One
  8. One
  9. Two
  10. Three
  11. Four
  12. Five
  13. Six
  14. Seven
  15. Eight
  16. Nine
  17. Ten
  18. Eleven
  19. Twelve
  20. Thirteen
  21. Fourteen
  22. Fifteen
  23. Sixteen
  24. Seventeen
  25. Eighteen
  26. Nineteen
  27. Part Two
  28. Twenty
  29. Twenty-one
  30. Twenty-two
  31. Twenty-three
  32. Twenty-four
  33. Twenty-five
  34. Twenty-six
  35. Twenty-seven
  36. Twenty-eight
  37. Twenty-nine
  38. Thirty
  39. Thirty-one
  40. Thirty-two
  41. Thirty-three
  42. Thirty-four
  43. Thirty-five
  44. Thirty-six
  45. Thirty-seven
  46. Thirty-eight
  47. Thirty-nine
  48. Forty
  49. Forty-one
  50. Forty-two
  51. Forty-three
  52. Forty-four
  53. Forty-five
  54. Forty-six
  55. A note on the Author

She didn’t ask Rachel if she wanted her to, or if that were okay. It was the night before Christmas and she had nowhere else. Rachel was supposed to be going to dinner at the home of another secular Jew. Like her, she was a woman who celebrated by buying gifts and drinking champagne and fighting and having make up sex. There would be no make up sex for Rachel this time around and, more regrettably, not even any fighting, which she secretly believed was what kept her invigorated and slim.

Ruby was much smaller than she had any right to be, soft and curvy with no hint of muscle at all beneath her milky white skin.

Rachel, in contrast, was tall, slender, with long legs and taut arms. The extreme New York cold made her hair shinier than ever. Ruby’s hair was starting to grow in from the nail scissor disguise she had given herself when she walked out on Scott, and it fell in waves around her eyebrows, which were plucked in silent-film-star semicircles. They were the only manicured part of her body, and these she had had attended to only because there had been a friendly makeup artist at the photo shoot three days before.

The magazine stylist was not so kind. She had been unable to hide her disgust at Ruby’s inability to fit into a size four. Angrily tearing at the racks of beautiful clothes, she picked out a gold lamé sheath that fit, but made Ruby look like a Las Vegas hooker. As soon as the editor saw the contacts, the pictures were killed.

Rachel pulled her turtleneck past her chin as she took in the extent of Ruby’s blotches and bloating. She couldn’t imagine Scott wanting her. She couldn’t imagine him having any patience with her. And then, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she couldn’t imagine him, period. Not what he looked like, or smelled like, or how his voice sounded. He was gone from her memory bank after barely three months apart. And she didn’t feel sad about it. Not about that. But she did feel sad, unutterably so, because she knew what wasn’t making her unhappy. “Knowing what doesn’t make you unhappy,” she sulked, “is more painful than knowing what does make you unhappy. It leaves you with greater responsibility toward your own state of mind.” She could tell that Ruby fell into the former category.

Ruby shifted from shoe to shoe outside Rachel’s apartment. “So, Scott’s ex, can I come up?”

Rachel, liking the sound of “Scott’s ex,” decided she could.

Twenty-three

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Appraisal

They looked at each other for a while.