Autobiography of a Fat Bride Read Online Free PDF

growth, my mother gasped, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, when the time comes to marry her off, that thing will be the size of a brown Volkswagen. Egg, bread crumbs, frying pan, Laurie! Egg, bread crumbs, frying pan, pay attention!” If there had been a fry-off, I would have won it hands down before I even realized this was my only chance at love, but due to the fact that my parents had uprooted my sisters and me from our native Brooklyn to the desolate shit hole known as Phoenix, Arizona, my title as the Cutlet Queen tragically went uncrowned. There was no way my gift could be appreciated, let alone recognized in a land that called a dinner roll a “bagel.” In hindsight, our neighbors were nice to us simply because they were afraid my Italian New Yorker father would, at any minute, start shaking down the block for protection money or insist on selling them fur coats in 118-degree weather that he said fell off a truck (though in Arizona, you’d say “fell offer this here waggin”). After all, they believed we must have been related to the Gambino crime family because our last names ended with the very same letter. Arizona was new territory to New York Italians, evidenced when, on our first day in our new desert home, the unafraid and impeccably tanned leader of the Welcome Wagon ladies brought over a pan of lasagna made of cottage cheese, Ragu, and Velveeta. My mother promptly responded by running out to the front yard, waving her arms and screaming, trying frantically to flag down the disappearing Mayflower moving truck as it turned the corner and was gone forever.
    But it was now apparent to me that my cutlet prowess had not been in vain; now was my time to shine in order to keep my boyfriend hooked. I pounded, I floured, I dipped. I fried. And I fried. And I fried. Veal cutlets. Beef cutlets. Chicken cutlets. If I could hit it with a hammer and it stayed still long enough for me to submerge it in an egg wash then bathe it in bread crumbs, it became a cutlet. Soon, I didn’t own a single piece of clothing that didn’t bear the scars of an exploding oil bubble, my skin was covered with tiny red oil burns that looked disturbingly like the pox, and everything I owned became laminated with a thin, grimy sheen.
    And my poor boyfriend, who had been raised on a steady diet of pressed meats and Dinty Moore stew, didn’t have the first inclination of how to handle it.
    “Wow, I never knew you could do this,” he said the first time I placed a pan of chicken Parmesan in front of him, as he looked at me with a smile that said he thought I was a goddess. “I didn’t know you could cook! You can cook! You never told me you could cook! I haven’t had a home-cooked meal since the last time my mom made . . .
toast
. . . for our chopped ham sandwiches! This is incredible! Wow! You can cook!”
    And then he gobbled the whole pan of chicken Parmesan down like he was a hominid who didn’t know if he would survive long enough for a next meal. It was simply beautiful. I had laid the cutlet trap, and the Good Guy had fallen headfirst into it.
    When I felt that I had securely gotten him hooked on cutlets, that he was now a junkie with a hunger that no other woman could fix or satisfy, I stood above him as he ravaged a casserole dish of veal piccata.
    “Look at this!” I yelled, pointing to my lip. “Look at this mole! Some day, especially if I’m exposed to enough radiation, this thing will be mammoth enough in size to require its own pillow at night! Do you understand that?”
    “That’s a mole?” he said, barely looking up. “I thought that was just a permanent smudge because you eat so much chocolate. I’m glad to know it’s not a food particle, that’s a relief!”
    Then he wolfed down another piece of veal as a caper rolled from his chin.
    I had dared the demon to show itself, and it had.
    It just turned out that it was me.

Dog Girl Bites Back

    W hen the phone rang, the last person I expected to hear on the other end