Eating Ice Cream With My Dog Read Online Free PDF

support via the daily early morning phone calls we made while working on our writing commitments. Lindsay was the most cautious interviewee I had. She, like Mimi, is an old soul. It is hard to remember that she is nearly twenty years my junior. She is fresh-faced and wears her dark hair long and straight, owning the prerogative of a jock and graduate student’s exemption from primping.
    Despite her managerial talents, Lindsay has a streak of naïveté, partly because of her age. She had been to her grandmother’s hometown in Italy and to Boston when we started Angry Fat Girlz, but had lived in Ohio her entire life and married straight out of college. There was an apparent safety net as she dabbled around trying to figure out what to do with her English degree. When I compared her to us other Girls, I didn’t have the same sense of walking a tightrope with little training for the stunt. Was it because her weight had never achieved superobesity? Was it because her family was near at hand? Or was it that, in a crisis, Lindsay’s practicality and self-protection take over? There is little spillage when she is in duress and she looks doggedly for answers to painful problems. Joining the Spiritualist Church may not appear to be a practical way to mend a marriage that is in trouble and yet Lindsay found a deep sense of connection there that helped give her the strength to seek out remedies for the specific problems she and her husband faced.
    Over time, I saw us assuming roles in our small circle. Mimi’s empathy and genius for listening gave her the role of a mother, while Katie, with whom I share a raunchy, vicious sense of humor and a history of intensive therapy and daily antidepressant cocktails, was my twin. Lindsay vacillated between being my older or my kid sister. In complicated, infuriating ways, I feel like Wendy was my daughter.
    This is our story—mine, Katie’s, Lindsay’s, Mimi’s, and Wendy’s. Though not completely factual, it is the truth as we lived it.
    I hope that you will learn something of the extreme effort of living fat and of dieting from our year of struggle. I hope that you will come away with more compassion or with self-forgiveness when nature wins out over intention. Most of all, I hope that more friendships come out of this book. When women come together in order to tell their stories and their truths, they become collectively strong in their individual weaknesses. That is the positive power of anger. It can open a me-too that we so rarely feel in the horrible loneliness of being fat or diffident dieting. We are none of us either the only one or alone.

ONE
April
     
    Déjà Vu All Over Again
     
    H ere is the truth: one night I got into bed with Daisy, my yellow Labrador retriever, and Malachi, a goofy black Lab who was staying with us for a couple of cramped and restless nights. I had a pint of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I took a spoonful of the dough part for myself, then a spoon of the vanilla for Daisy and Mally. Mally made a mess of my quilt, but it was time to wash it anyway.
    Two nights later I bought another pint of ice cream and shared it with my bedmates. After the second lick or so, Mally scraped the ice cream off the spoon with his front teeth.
    No more melted ice cream dripping on the quilt.
    I hadn’t realized that Daisy ate ice cream by scraping it off the spoon, the way humans do, until our visiting galoot learned to do the same. I ran into Mally’s owner a few days later and told him the story. A lightbulb floated over his head. “So that’s why Mally went berserkers last night when I took a spoon out of the drawer!”
    There were rules I lived by but couldn’t say out loud. Like any functioning alcoholic or closet baser, I kept my addiction in check. One of my rules was not eating sugar during the day. It makes me drowsy and lazy, and because I walk dogs for a living, I need to be alert. Until I had a dog of my own and then three or four