I'm Glad About You(22)

It was a hideous prospect. The night her episode aired, while Alison was off having a one-night stand with a guy she didn’t really like all that much, Rose had called and left a tearful message on her cell about how much her father had liked the show and how he “didn’t really understand” what Alison was doing but he was “relieved” to see that she really might be able to make a go of this acting thing. Alison knew that her mother had meant it as some kind of apology but in it she heard all the negative assumptions her parents had been trading between themselves for her entire life. Her father had never been terribly subtle about the fact that he didn’t think much of her career choice and that he believed she would never be able to support herself; he also had articulated—publicly—more than once that he doubted she would ever find someone who would actually want to marry her. She had to put up with this crap on a regular basis, and then everybody got mad at her when she talked back to him! Whatever. After she and Kyle had finally broken up for good, the sniping had just gotten worse. And now this apologetic message, through Mom, that he was “relieved.” He might as well just come out and say that he sure didn’t want to be on the financial hook for the rest of his life for his least favorite kid with the lousy rotten attitude who nobody would marry, so it was a good thing somebody finally put her on television. And now she had to ask him for money.

On top of all that she was starving. This on the unflinching orders of Ryan: She had to lose fifteen pounds, and keep it off. He was very clear when he signed her about the demands of the marketplace. She was by no means fat, he was not saying that at all, but it was his job to be straight with her about what people were looking for, and the fact was that the curvaceous nature of her physical package would not be well received. He didn’t want her to get all feminist on him and think that because she looked great that would be enough. He wanted her to be a realist: Theater audiences maybe wouldn’t care so much if she looked like an actual woman, but all you had to do was watch one night of television to see what the score was there. Inwardly, Alison flinched when she heard the words “actual woman.” It was hard not to read that as a euphemism; he may just as well have called her “chunky.” An “actual woman”? The directness of his approach did the job. In November and December she had managed to take off nine pounds with relatively little trouble by reducing her lunch and dinner to virtually nothing while adding three extra four-mile runs to her weekly workout schedule. But she was starting to feel hungry all the time now, and the last six pounds seemed to be just stubborn as hell. And now here she was at Christmas in Cincinnati, where every table was loaded down with homemade cookies and chocolates and pies and cakes, and every meal included bread and mashed potatoes and gravy, and anything healthy—like the occasional vegetable—was drowned in cheese sauce and cream of mushroom soup. She was starving amid a sea of fattening plenty, and it was making her cranky.

But even though she was positively light-headed with hunger all the time now, she had to admit it—when you got extra skinny, you did look great. Her cheeks were defined and chiseled, which accentuated her eyes, and it was kind of fun to feel how loose her jeans had become. Her breasts were no longer as luscious as they had been, which gave her a pang of regret, but this was more than offset by the thrill of actually seeing her ribs when she lifted her arms and looked at her slender new self naked in the mirror. The new clothes and the rail-thin new figure which wore them got her a kind of attention she had never had before. When Andrew picked her up at the airport just two days ago, he had noted, “Well, looks like somebody’s been living in the big city,” but his tone was not as effortlessly dismissive as she had known it to be growing up. There was no mistaking it: He was impressed. Rose was impressed as well. As Alison shrugged off her winter jacket, her mother actually exclaimed, “Alison! You’re beautiful!” Which frankly didn’t suck to hear.

“Alison! Hey, Alison, the phone’s for you,” Andrew called to her. He held out the beige receiver, which was still attached by a curlicue cord to the functionally ugly phone screwed into the wall at the other end of the kitchen. It took Alison a moment to realize that he was speaking to her; the kitchen was hot, everyone was talking at once, as usual, and recently she had noticed that she was so hungry all the time it made her a little slow on the uptake, like her blood sugar levels were really just too low.

“For me?” That seemed unlikely. “Who is it?”

“I think it’s Dennis? Dennis, is that you?” He asked the receiver. A moment later he held it out to her. “It’s Dennis.”

“Dennis?” she asked.

“Ho ho ho,” the voice on the phone informed her with a dry, sarcastic edge. “Merry Christmas, Miss Television Star.”

“Hey!” she said. “Dennis, hi, Merry Christmas!” No one in New York ever allowed themselves this degree of unabashed enthusiasm and she sounded idiotic to herself, but it had been a long time since she’d heard from any of her old friends, who, since high school, had drifted irrevocably apart. Parents she couldn’t talk to, siblings who thought she was weird, old friends who didn’t stay in touch, new friends who came and went too quickly: The past few months she had gone on some major crying jags. But here was Dennis, calling her on the phone. It was fantastic. “I heard you were in town, my brother bumped into your sister at the mall this morning,” he informed her. “Gotta love Cincinnati. Two million people, but everybody still bumps into each other at the mall.”