For some people, it’s more orgasmic to study the orgy than it is to take part in it. We’re just weird that way.

Mary

“You’re a summer,” said Mary Duffy, a septuagenarian former plus-size model, as we sat down to eat (allegedly) the best hamburgers in New York City in a diner the size of a modest Subaru. But first, she wanted to do my colors. “Summer has medium-brown to blond hair, fair skin without a lot of yellow, and light eyes. If you had a hot date, if you put on a seafoam jacket, or a seafoam dress, and a pale-yellow scarf, you would knock them off their socks.”

I thanked her, pondered where I could get a seafoam jacket in 2019, and gently tried to pivot the conversation to learning more about her past as one of the first-ever plus-size models and the owner of the first plus-size modeling agency.

But no.

“We have to finish you,” Mary insisted. There are three things every woman should know: her colors (mine is the aforementioned summer), her shape, and her style “personality.”

“You’re an H!” Mary cried, drawing a letter “H” in the air. By this, I take it, she’s describing my sturdy Slavic policewoman’s torso. “That’s the easiest figure to dress,” she assured me. “You look great in pants that are narrow as hell.”

Mary leapt up, pointed to her butt, and explained something about tapered jeans that I didn’t quite understand. Behind us, raw beef sizzled on a grill.

She sat down and continued my analysis. “I would say personality, you’re a classic. You’re happier looking appropriate than being totally comfortable or dramatic. I’m dramatic. The dramatic has to take off the last piece of jewelry and the cuckoo clock before leaving the house.”

“So you’re a classic, H, summer,” she said, contentedly. “Congratulations! Avoid beige.”

She turned to the waiter and, finally, ordered a cheeseburger. No bun, she was doing Atkins.

Mary had recently received a notification from Classmates.com telling her that the number one word that her classmates used to describe her was “ambitious.” She wishes she wasn’t so transparent, but as her father always said, “Mary, you’re about as obvious as a sledgehammer over the head.”

Her mother, meanwhile, thought the young Mary should funnel her ambitions toward weight loss. She slipped seven-year-old Mary little pieces of her amphetamine diet pills, and by the time Mary was eleven, she had her own prescription. When Mary’s mother said, “Don’t come home till you lose weight,” Mary left and stayed away for ten years.

Mary went to college, but afterward she rejected the idea, predominant at the time, that a woman should focus on buffing up her looks so she can marry well. I’m not going to stay thin so I can marry rich and live in a colonial house like everyone else, she thought to herself.