Autobiography of a Fat Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

grew hawklike talons—it might take my nails up to a week to reach their full, puncture-level maturity. I was not a shiny, gleaming, firm Red Delicious or a fuzzy, blushing Georgia peach. My fruit was bruised and came with its own colony of Med flies.
    I embarked on the only option open to me, considering the limitations of my talents and skills. Plan A involved taking him to the bar and plying him with alcohol, keeping the man as inebriated and befuddled for as long as humanly possible. By the time he sobered up, it would be time to send him off to work, where he would be too consumed with dehydration and alcohol poisoning to realize there was a gap between my two front teeth. Or that they were slightly bucked, given the four years of relentless lying on my behalf when documenting the usage on my headgear chart. Or that they were the color of butter. Or that I had a mole under my lip, which by the time I reached middle age would be mistaken for an M&M, and by the time I had gone gray and my ass was slapping the back of my knees when I walked would effloresce into the size of a giant gumdrop, undoubtedly knocking my nose into second place in the pecking order for the largest feature of my face.
    Oh yeah. I had problems, all right, and they were about to get worse.
    He mentioned that he wanted me to meet his family over the Christmas holiday, and that was when I felt the possibility of the love balloon deflate. What was I going to do then? How could I possibly intoxicate all of his kin, including the children? Nyquil would probably work for any of them in the featherweight category, but for the full-size adults, I’d have to inject commercial-grade heroin into the Butterball. My cover would be blown, and I would be revealed for the day-old fruit that I was. Besides, I didn’t want to meet his family so soon—we had only been dating for a couple of months, and frankly, that’s not even enough time for a primate to bond with its mother, let alone try to get the Catch of the Century attached to me. I had visions of myself walking through the door and meeting his mother for the first time, as she looked at me as if she had just seen me slide down a brass pole wearing nothing but a string of fake pearls.
    So I was forced to stop getting my boyfriend drunk, which was probably a good thing, I figured, since sobriety may have given him the opportunity to learn my last name. I started trying to prepare myself for the family introduction, telling myself, “How bad could it be? There’s bound to be an introduction in the history of the world that had more horrific consequences; President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Rush Limbaugh and a microphone.” I had miles to go before I reached that level of disaster, and the time had come to call in my reinforcement talents now that I could no longer turn my boyfriend into a blithering alcoholic. Aside from getting a bartender’s attention quickly and ordering drinks at the bar, I only had one talent left: frying cutlets.
    Certainly, in some areas of the world, frying cutlets is a menial task, but in the land of the Italian-American-Catholic hierarchy, cutlet frying could easily take the place of beauty and could even forgive a sin as ugly as infertility, especially in a marriage-aged woman with an above-average number of moles. Now, in this specific culture, frying a perfect cutlet, comparatively speaking, is equal to the ability of a woman of Germanic stock to plow a field by herself without even assistance from livestock, of an Englishwoman for keeping most of her teeth a variation of the color “pale,” or the duty of a Mormon woman to pop out a baby every birthing season for a decade straight without missing even one year.
    And it just so happens, I can fry a mean cutlet.
    I’m sure it’s no mistake, either. I’m nearly positive that when I was five and the baby freckle under my lip began to assert itself as a