Eating Ice Cream With My Dog Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t occur to her that taking a class or finding a church or taking bridge lessons—i.e., not filling the ex-boyfriend hole by finding another boyfriend who’s really meant to make the ex-boyfriend jealous—was a permanent way of filling a hole.
    Wendy is the only Angry Fat Girl who has never been thin in her adult life. Among the many and complicated feelings I have for her is a physical retraction in her presence, and this demonstrates how well I lie to myself. I’m five feet eight inches, not a shrimp, but Wendy is a couple of inches taller and she seems so big despite our being closest in clothing size among the AFGs. She is rawboned and lantern-jawed, and she has a long stride and keeps her head down when she walks as though her destination was clear and near, giving a sense of hurry that takes up yet more metaphorical room.
    Her favorite thing about herself is her red hair. She is prettiest when she is grinning; it softens her face.
    As the instigator of Angry Fat Girlz and a compulsive reader of other blogs, Wendy had the scoop on what the respondents’ real names were on Amazon and on our shared blog, what each did for a living, if they were married, if they were happily married, what method they were using to lose weight, and how well it was working. Every holiday merited a card, every bout of blues was a summons to leave her desk and call the person in crisis, every item of clothing that became too big was passed on to someone a size beyond her. She was and is underemployed and bored, generous and sympathetic, eager to learn and devoid of the innate talent for self-study, and starving for love. Such a personality could be dazzling and overwhelming.
    I loved Mimi from the start. She is fact oriented and pragmatic. Her email signature never varied: “Sometimes men are just stupid,” and it was a philosophy for her rather than an accusation. It meant, “Pull yourself together. Learn to stand on your own two feet. Depend on no one for free help or sympathy. Trust your own kind.”
    Mimi is irreproachable. That was her ironic summary of what it meant to be the oldest child and a girl in her family. “You’re right, I guess,” I conceded to her admonition that I couldn’t afford to bid on a mink coat on eBay.
    “Of course I am,” she chirped in her smug Mary Poppins voice that is saved by a combination of irony and girlishness. “I’m perfect.”
    Also part of being the oldest was how hard she worked in one profession, making her the most tenured and stable of the five of us. She has moved around all her life, living in Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and while she has some close professional friends, she has few personal friends, preferring her own company so that she can cook, garden, work on her blogs and website, and pursue her many interests. Mimi and I get excited about Chinatown and the Qi Gong massage joint on Grant Street, share a love of Christmas festivities, and have similar tastes in movies. I consider her my closest all-round friend. There are friends who might know me better, but they weren’t present for me in the way that Mimi was—my best friend from first grade and I rarely touch base, for example, and B.J. is my best bud on the streets of Brooklyn Heights but is mercurial and prone to grudges. Yet Mimi, who probably has fewer friends than I, would not say the same of me.
    Mimi is the prettiest of the AFGs. She has the looks of a Victorian German doll—a lustrous, porcelain complexion, blonde hair, blue eyes, and a pensive sweetness. She has a sexy voice, smooth as maple syrup, girlish, but backed up by intelligence and confidence.
    I liked and admired Lindsay from our first conversation. She is a perpetual student, simultaneously seeing herself as a slacker and the lifeblood of practicality in her marriage and in her Italian family. She was working on a doctorate during the time I wrote this book and was an invaluable resource for literary theory and a