Eating With the Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

myself enjoying minor notoriety as fill-in and ultimately full-time restaurant critic for the
Village Voice
. Now this made sense of everything about me. Tom and I loved the Village. We had escaped there permanently as soon as we could afford it and loathed the return trips to the Upper East Side. Our new neighbourhood seemed so eclectic in comparison. You never knew who was going to jump out of a cab on Bleecker Street: a starving artist, a supermodel, a bum, a broker. Everyone fitted in down there, no matter how much they failed to do so elsewhere, and I loved being associated with the famous
Village Voice.
    ‘You know, with your looks, you could end up being a news anchor on a TV station,’ Fleur insisted once. ‘They love that pretty all-American thing you have going, sweetie. Or you could end up sitting there with Regis, crossing those legs and smiling that smile.’
    ‘Yeah, right,’ I laughed and changed the subject, embarrassed. At one level, I knew I was not bad-looking, I really did. But my mother had been onto this pretty early in my life and made it her mission to make sure I never got too big for my boots. Sure enough, I never did. I got too big for pretty much everything else, mind you. While Mom is only just five feet two, I grew to a whopping five nine by age 12, a sin she found hard to forgive.
    ‘Who else is this gigantic?’ she would ask, pulling at sweater sleeves that were too short, tugging at the hem on my skirt. ‘Who elsedoesn’t know when to stop growing?’ She acted like my height was something I had asked for just to spite her and I found myself compensating by curling my shoulders towards my stomach, trying to take up less space.
    ‘She’s such a shiksa,’ my mother would say to my father’s newspaper as she pulled at my hair. You would think this would make her happy but it didn’t, nothing I did could make her happy. I could never work out why not looking Jewish didn’t thrill her to the core given that she converted from Judaism to Catholicism when she married my dad and has been holier than the Pope ever since. Of course, her main motivation in life has seemed to be pissing off my grandmother. Never mind nose and face, Mom would cut off her entire head to spite her body if given half the chance. It started with marrying the doorman’s son, extended into moving into a rent-controlled tenement right next door to the white-glove building where she grew up, continued when she had a daughter and called her Mary-Constance, and progressed further when she sent me to Catholic school in my cute little uniform knowing that my grandmother would look out her window and see this every weekday of her life and presumably wish herself dead so she could spin in her grave.
    Although I’d never spoken to her, I knew what my grandmother looked like. My dad had pointed her out to me in a rare moment of not-toeing-the-Estelle line. She was petite and dark and perfectly turned out and had a nose that pointed upwards as if anything below 10 feet was disgusting. She had a dog, a butt-ugly British bulldog, which must have been replaced every few years like Frankie because every now and again it got smaller, and her preferred method of transport was a limousine service. I tried to talk to her once even though I was born knowing this was the only cardinal sin not mentioned in catechism. I must have been six or seven and was walking home from school, skipping along minding my own business, trying not to step on a crack, break my mother’s back, whenmy eyes happened upon a pair of tiny black patent-leather pumps with a delicate set of ankles above them. I lifted my eyes and there she was, my grandmother, staring at me with a look I took to be horror. I started to say something, hello I guess, but one of her hands flew up to shield her eyes and the other shot straight out in front of her. I took it to be a shutting-up gesture and obliged. So much for having no intuition, huh? She was dressed in black and