Chapters (55)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Cast of Characters
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Part Two
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- A note on the Author
I was so shocked that I did. When she got it into the apartment she opened it on the trundle bed I had pulled out for her and I saw that it contained almost exclusively underwear and hair accessories. “But where are your clothes?” I gasped and she frowned, “You know, I’m really not sure. But you won’t mind my borrowing yours until I get myself organized.” She flung open my closet and started picking through it. I was extremely relieved to see that very little fit her and assessed that she was a good fifteen pounds heavier than I was.
“Hmm,” she pouted, “this won’t do. Right. I’ll be back in a minute.”
And she was back in not much longer than that, laden down with bags from Jeffrey’s and Barney’s. She spread her purchases out on the floor and shuffled them like tarot cards, arranging them over and over until she could see a meaning. “Okay!” she clapped her hands and selected a gray cashmere skirt, diamanté appliquéd Duran Duran T-shirt, leopard-print tights and Fendi high heels.
As she totaled up her purchases she said she was really embarrassed, that she wasn’t usually like this.
“You’re embarrassed that you spent so much?” I asked.
“No, I’m embarrassed that I spent anything at all.”
What she meant was that usually all her clothes were stolen. She steals from Jeffrey’s. She steals from Barney’s. She steals from Saks. “I am so rich,” she cheerfully confessed, “that I feel I shouldn’t have to pay for anything.” At her WASP houses—a compound on Martha’s Vineyard, a mansion in Malibu, a London pied-à-terre, and a retreat in Connecticut—she has to wear dresses and use the correct knife and fork. She loves dressing up, wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of jeans, so the rigidity of a family dress code is not a problem for her. The knife and fork business is more problematic, since she is likely to dip her fingers in a bowl of ice cream she finds particularly enticing, rather than bothering with a spoon. At other people’s dinner parties, she puts her heeled shoes on the chair-seats, not realizing that they are her host’s best chairs, because to her they’re really nothing.
I know she sounds unbearable. She sounds like she would have inspired Princess Margaret to class war, but her saving grace is a big one: she is fat. It sounds ridiculous, but in a world of ADBs (anorexic dumb bitches—shorthand the twins came up with) she is something of a minor heroine. Put her next to a Vogue cover girl, Revlon spokeswoman, ballet dancer, and Playboy centerfold, and she’ll outshine them all. The guys love her. In a sea of ADBs, her uncontainably real DD fat-girl tits are like buoys to a drowning man.