Skinny Read Online Free PDF

I went back to New York and made silent deals with my father: If you switch off my appetite, I will stop booking comedy clubs. I will tithe to Jewish charities. I will wear long skirts. I will leave Mikey. Please. Please. Please.
    But he only laughed and laughed—a deep, echoing, dead-person laugh—and turned up the volume on my hunger.
    I shut down my business anyway. Laughter sounded dark and desperate; I no longer wished to sell it. A friend got me a job tending bar on the Lower East Side, at Little Mermaid Grill, land of the maritime kitsch wall decorations, of the clam rolls and fish-and-chips and popcorn shrimp (the greasy, fetid aromas of which seeped into my hair, soaked my clothing, followed me home); where I had to wear an androgynous blue polo shirt like a cabana boy, where the weekend crowd consisted of loud, hair-gelled Jersey guys who demanded Jägerbombs, and whose girlfriends wore stilettos that matched their dresses and ordered Malibu Bay Breezes or Vodka Red Bulls.
    At Little Mermaid, I indulged in self-pity, silently narrating my life in the third person, past tense: This was the night a man from Long Island reached across the bar and grabbed for her breast.
    This was the shift that was so slow, she sat in the alley on an overturned bucket, smoking the fry cook’s Parliament Lights.
    Were she to die just before a Friday rush, Little Mermaid would have to close for the evening.
    This was the month she split the seams on two pairs of pants.
    I ignored the voice mails that clogged my cell phone—comedians who hadn’t heard the news, creditors after my father’s money, daily warnings from Saul Weiss.
    I had no energy for any of it. I had energy only for food: egg rolls that burned the roof of my mouth, pizza with crusts that scraped my throat, Cheetos that left indelible stains on my hands, and nameless birthday cakes from the bakery counter. At a friend’s apartment one day, catching sight of her bottle of prescription muscle relaxers, I shoved my hands into my pockets to keep from grabbing it, tipping my head back, opening my mouth, and bingeing.
    Six months passed like this. It occurred to me that I should ask for help, that I should sit down with someone who cared about me and confess what I’d done to my father, confess that I couldn’t stop eating. I knew I had a problem. Happy people didn’t spend their days eating; they ate when their bodies required it.
    But bingeing on food is not like binge drinking. I was not the sad, mysterious girl at the bar. I had no stories about waking up in a duck pond or making a ruckus with a tambourine. I was no skinny, tortured smoker, wearing a nicotine patch like a badge on my arm. There is no sexiness in a family-size bag of Bugles, no trophy for speed-eating fettuccine Alfredo, or for missing, day after day, the ding-ding-ding in the brain that says “full.”
    In the apartment, I would wait until Mikey was gone before running down to the corner bodega. Or I would order Chinese delivery—so many menu items, the bag would arrive with three sets of chopsticks, as if I were having a dinner party. I would make pasta and cover it in cheese. I would buy jumbo-size packages of Chips Ahoy! cookies, two for the price of one. I would eat the second package of Chips Ahoy! cookies. I began to recognize other bingers. Their clothes were ill-fitting. Their foreheads looked worried. In the snack aisle of Duane Reade, among the processed, chemical-filled, cheerily wrapped foodlike things, we avoided one another’s eyes.
    It occurred to me that my father had had secrets, too.
    •  •  •
    In mid-December, my mother called me. “You didn’t take care of the will! You said you did. Months ago! Saul just called me. Who do you think has to bail you out if you get hauled off to jail? You want to put me through that? You want to burden Mikey?”
    I made the call to Saul Weiss, an old law school friend of my father’s.
    “I know this is unpleasant,” he said, “but