Eating With the Angels by Sarah-Kate Lynch Read Free Book Online Page A

work out what scratched at my innards, so instead, I walked. I would go to the famous Rialto food market, I decided, the pounding of my feet on the cobbled pavements calming my inner turmoil.
    Venice is the perfect city for walking, almost as good as New York, and I was a big walker then as I am now. I had learned long ago that if you had breakfast too early in the day you could squeeze an extra meal in somewhere along the line and this must at all costs be avoided. Like I say, I can eat a lot, definitely more than average, but I still can’t eat as much as I want to. Not without relying entirely on elasticised waistbands and comfort gussets anyway. When I first hooked up with Tom in high school and we started to eat our way around Manhattan, my butt pretty much ballooned to very non-Cindy Crawford proportions and I found myself veering towards stretch fabrics in dark colours on discount clothing racks.
    Those last extra pounds, I eventually admitted, were doing me no favours and I had to lose them, but how? Eating less was out of the question. It was a hobby. So I knew I had to introduce some form of exercise. I had the hand-eye coordination of a snake so that counted out most sports. I sprained my ankle the first time I tried aerobics (and that was just walking up the stairs to the gym) so that wasn’t an option. I hated running because, well, only thin pert people with shiny ponytails ran, so that left only the preferred weight-loss method of the day, bulimia. But as someone who had spent most of her mealtimes trying hard not to barf up what had been cooked for her, I just could not contemplate barfing on purpose.
    I was lamenting this sorry state of affairs to Tom one day as we were about to get on the subway when he stopped me, plucked the token out of my hand, grabbed my arm, and pulled me back up the stairs.
    ‘Walk it off,’ he said, and from that day on I walked it off. I far preferred seeing New York from the sidewalk anyway, and most places I’ve been to since, I start off on foot. That way you get to check out the local faces before the tourist attractions plus you see who is going where to eat and what it looks like in real life, as opposed to just reading the blurb in various (usually hopelessly inaccurate) guidebooks.
    That morning — it had just gone eight — Venice took my breath away as I sloughed off all thoughts of my nebulous marital status and negotiated the narrow streets behind the hotel, hitting only a dozen or so dead ends before happening upon an arrow pointing to the Piazza di San Marco. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, on the way to the Rialto markets, but then in Venice nothing is, strictly speaking, on the way to anything else so it hardly mattered.
    I hit the square from the west side popping out into its huge expanse without realising how far I had come. The basilica rose in front of me, its domes and spires gleaming in the sunlight. It looked like something in which a crazed James Bond villain would live while plotting to take over the universe. The campanile loomed straight-forwardly next to it. The sky seemed too blue, the scene too colourful. I felt wobbly all of a sudden. Alone. Mind you, there was practically nobody in the square, which is not what I was expecting. Everything I’d heard about Venice suggested I prepare for crowds. My friend Roberta, who was a fledgling (that means unpublished) author and trust-fund kid of moderate proportions, had come back from Venice the previous summer determined to dampen my enthusiasm for the place, saying it was packed to the gills with sock-and-sandal-wearing eastern Europeans. It smelled funny, she said. It was falling down. Everything was so old. Enough with that water already. Now I’d beenon vacation with Roberta before and knew that what she really liked in a holiday destination was a colourful cocktail bar with lighting so bad that she could still appeal to men 10 years her junior, so I took what she said about Venice with a grain of