Eating Ice Cream With My Dog by Frances Kuffel Read Free Book Online

skip it. I got the okay from the parks department for the run.” Jalen was good at coming up with plans for his running club. He was also good at coming up with basketball and tennis courts, baseball diamonds and swimming lanes. Lindsay was good at coming up with another seven minutes of sleep.
    “Linds, wake up. I’m gonna lance it, and then I want you to bandage it.”
    Lindsay sighed and threw off the covers. He wouldn’t leave her alone, so she might as well get up.
    Jalen saw her emerging from the quilt and stood up.
    “Tell me honestly, hon. Do I look fat?”
    She groaned. He asked the question every morning and every night, and she groaned each time.
    “You weigh less than I do, Jay. Stop it.”
    The thing about weighing thirty— thirty! —pounds more than your husband is that you never get to ask that specific question. You’re stuck with variations on “Does this make me look fat[ter]?” or “Do you love my body?”
    She could hear a jazz combo between segments of the radio program as she went through her morning routine. The music was redolent of smoky little nightclubs and shiny red nail polish, and she clenched her fists thinking of her ragged cuticles. She pulled off her flannel nightgown and scowled at how her tummy flamed over her hips, then stepped on the scale, telling herself that if the readout wasn’t less than the 172 that she’d held on to through the last two weeks of no wine, no popcorn at night, no lattes, and regular workouts, she’d bump her three-mile run up to five for the next couple of days. She took a deep breath as she hesitated. Jalen would notice if she increased her running. He would bite his tongue not to give advice, making the air heavy. There would certainly be an invitation to go along with his club, which meant a choice between hurting his feelings or coming home crazed from watching him run in tandem with Patra Fletch, his partner in Home Fit, their personal trainer company—if two people could be called a company.
    It was one thing to do a leisurely jog around Tinker’s Creek on a cool sunny April Sunday, admiring Jalen’s gorgeousness and the sprinkles of buttercups. It was another thing to join his crew as one of the slower of the dozen.
    Patra Fletch was not slower. She was a prodigy of self-sculpture. With a name like that, just wouldn’t she be? Lindsay asked the mirror. Her red delicious apple cheeks and her ponytail bobbed back at her in agreement. Lindsay had a moment of admiring her ponytail, enough to step on the scale. The numbers flashed and settled on 171.4. Her first fear about Jalen was over for the day.
     
     
    Dieting is scientific and mechanical: fewer calories expended than consumed day after day after goddammed day.
    The semantics of dieting, on the other hand, are about as exacting as playing an étude wearing oven mitts. This concerns me because failure is built into the semantics.
    This linguistic sloppiness starts in the secret of our heart. “I have to do something about my weight,” Mimi was telling herself as she floundered with Weight Watchers. The statement is a stalling tactic, hinged on the words “do something.” Mimi is not stupid. She has a master’s degree in medical library science and holds a prestigious job. If “do something” meant working to get the flab off her body, she’d be speaking in specifics: “I have to go back to the Weight Watchers Core Plan” or “I have to stop eating gelato.” “Do something” can mean anything. I could, for instance, paint my weight in silver and gold glitter or sing about it. The phrase has nothing to do with intention, but as long as we say we have to do something about it, we’re—maybe—fooling ourselves and others that we’re on the brink of, um, a diet.
    Then, of course, there are the questions.
    “How did you lose the weight?”
    The weight? The use of the definite article instead of a pronoun separates fat from the person in question, either as a form of sensitivity