A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body Read Online Free PDF

quite a bit since that day. “Somebody will pay a price for this ...” “Four score and seven years ago ...” He either talks to me in a rapid series of war cliches, or he talks about myriad topics that I judge as far too shallow considering the post-9/11 world we are now living in.
    But just as I decide to make an effort and explain the details of what it would take for him to come with me to the Emmys, Mathew grabs his lighter and his cigarettes, chains his wallet to his belt, and whisks out of our tiny punishment of a New York apartment.

    â€œI’ll be back around 6:00 a.m.,” he says, as he kisses the air just above my angry, abandoned, Emmys-bound face.
    Â 
    Â 
    After weeks of shopping, I grow tired of store owners never believing that I’m going to the Emmys. Not one minor designer or random salesperson offers to donate a dress to the cause, despite my assurances that if we win—and we always do!—I’d be getting major camera time.
    Â 
    Â 
    The dress I end up with is one that has been hanging in my closet for years and is appropriate for no occasion except something like the Emmys. I got it from Goodwill—but from their annual Glitter Sale, not the free bin. There wasn’t any dried throw-up and wig hairs stuck to it (at least not before I got it). It was a lovely black Tinkerbell dress from the ’50s that looked a bit like it had been hand-sewn for a high school play. (A private high school.)
    I try the dress on for Mathew. Which I realize after the fact is a little cruel—sort of like the cameraman enjoying a sandwich as he photographs a child dying of starvation. Mathew likes the dress but asks me if it feels a little tight. I would answer but I can’t get enough air into my squashed lungs to say “yes.”
    Undeterred, I figure what post-traumatic stress failed to do for me, Dr. Atkins will. This year, Atkins is the weight loss plan of choice for most city folk. There is this constant
parade of people in a state of ketosis, running by with platters stacked with cheeses and ham and steak, and cubes of fat and gristle and oil muffins with hot oil filling. They breathe their blue-cheese breath on me as they gush, “God, and all this energy! I don’t know what to do with it!” (Maybe have your tongue scraped?)
    Before joining the ketosis brigade, my main concern about Atkins was digestive. “Will I poop?” I asked his constituents. (“Oh yes, this diet is perfect for that! I can’t stop! Look at that—just talking about it, whoops, gotta go!”)
    I haven’t pooped to my satisfaction in twenty years. Maybe thirty. Growing up, my mom made a chart next to the toilet where I was supposed to monitor my poops. Happy faces for good ones, sad faces for painful ones, faces with no features at all—just a round circle—for when I thought I had to go and nothing happened. Over the years people have tried to help me, giving me advice about getting it going. My friend Gay Jay once bought me a very expensive gift of colon cleansers that were supposed to unstick that bean burrito from 1974.
    So I’ve been doing Atkins for three weeks now and I feel sick and shaky all the time. But all the women in Manhattan—who treat any waiter coming toward them with a bread basket like a date rapist: “NO! NO MEANS NO!”—tell me not to give up and to give it at least two months.
    At the end of a very sad, weak workout at the gym I hop on the scale in the dressing room. You’d think after witnessing so much in the past year I would have gained some life
perspective, but when I see what that fucking scale is telling me I scream and hit it with both of my hands, which causes my towel to fall off. Then I burst into tears and end my workout on the floor of the shower sobbing like Glenn Close in The Big Chill . The only difference is that she was crying because her friend had died and I am crying because