"Tell me about it."

"You don't seem very comfortable with how you look."

"Show me a woman who is," I shot back. "It's just that not all of us get to enjoy having our insecurities exploited for millions of Moxie readers."

"And I wish..." She looked ruefully toward the tables at the center of the market, where families were gathered, having sandwiches or coffee, pa.s.sing sections of the Examiner back and forth. "I wish you believed in yourself more. Like with... romantic stuff."

Yet another conversation I didn't want to be having with my late-in-life-lesbian mother.

"You'll find the right guy," she said.

"I've been underwhelmed by the choices so far."

"You stayed with Bruce too long"

"Ma, please!"

"He was a nice guy. But I knew you didn't love him that way."

"I thought you were out of the heteros.e.xual advice-giving arena."

"I'm making a special guest appearance on an as-needed basis," she said cheerfully. Outside, by the car, she gave me a rough hug- a big step for her, I knew. My mother is a great cook, a sympathetic listener, and a good judge of character, but she's never been big on touchy-feely stuff. "I love you," she said, which was also out of character for her. But I wasn't going to object. I needed all the love I could get.

THREE.

On Monday morning I sat in a waiting room full of women too big to cross their legs, all of us wedged into inadequate armchairs on the seventh floor of the University of Philadelphia Weight and Eating Disorders Center, thinking that if I ran the place I'd make sure to have couches.

"A few surveys," the smiling, skinny secretary behind the desk had said, handing me a half-inch thick slab of forms, a clipboard, and a pen. "There's breakfast," she added chirpily, pointing at a stack of desiccated bagels, a tub of fat-free cream cheese, and a pitcher of orange juice with a thick film of pulp floating on the top. Like anyone would eat in here, I thought, bypa.s.sing the bagels and sitting down with my forms beneath a poster that read "Taking it off... one day at a time!" and depicted a model in a leotard romping through a field full of flowers, which was not something I planned on doing, no matter how skinny I got.

Name. That was easy. Height. No problem. Current weight. Ack. Lowest weight maintained as an adult. Did fourteen count as an adult? Reason for wanting to lose weight. I thought for a minute, than scribbled, Was humiliated in national publication. I thought for a minute, than added, Would like to feel better about myself.

Next page. Diet history. Highest weights, lowest weights, programs I'd enrolled in, how much I'd lost, how long I'd kept it off. "Please use reverse side if more s.p.a.ce is needed," read the form. I needed. In fact, judging from a quick glance around the room, everybody needed. One woman even had to ask for extra paper.

Page three. Parents' weights. Grandparents' weights. Siblings' weights. I took guesses for all of them. These weren't things that were discussed around the table at family gatherings. Did I binge and purge, fast, abuse laxatives, exercise compulsively? If I did, I thought, would I look like this?

Please list your five favorite restaurants. Well, this would be easy. I could just walk down my street and pa.s.s five fabulous places to eat- everything from spring rolls to tiramisu before I'd gone three blocks. Philadelphia still lived in the shadow of New York City and often had the character of a sulky second sister who'd never made the honor roll or the homecoming court. But our restaurant renaissance was for real, and I lived in the neighborhood that boasted the first creperie, the first soba noodle shop, and the first drag show dinner theater (so-so female impersonators, divine calamari). We also had the obligatory two coffee shops per block, which had hooked me on three-dollar lattes and chocolate-chip scones. Not, I knew, the breakfast of champions, but what was a girl to do, except try to compensate by avoiding the cheesesteak shops on every corner? Plus which, Andy, the one real friend I'd made at the paper, was the food critic, whom I often accompanied on review meals, eating foie gras and rabbit rillettes and veal and venison and pan-seared sea ba.s.s at the finest restaurants in town while Andy murmured into the microphone wire running through his collar.

Five favorite foods. Now this was getting tricky. Desserts, in my opinion, were an entirely separate category from main dishes, and breakfast was another thing altogether, and the five best things I could cook bore no relation to the five best things I could buy. Mashed potatoes and roast chicken were my go-to comfort foods, but could I really compare them to the chocolate tarts and creme brulee from the Parisian bakery on Lombard Street? Or the grilled stuffed grape leaves at Viet Nam, the fried chicken at Delilah's, and the brownies from Le Bus? I scribbled, crossed out, remembered the chocolate bread pudding at the Silk City Diner, heated and with fresh whipped cream, and had to start again.

Seven pages of physical history. Did I have a heart murmur, high blood pressure, glaucoma? Was I pregnant? No, no, and a thousand times no. Six pages of emotional history. Did I eat when I was upset? Yes. Did I eat when I was happy? Yes. Would I be tearing through those bagels and that funky-looking cream cheese at this very moment, were it not for the present company? You betcha.

On to the psychology pages. Was I frequently depressed? I circled sometimes. Did I have thoughts of suicide? I winced, then circled rarely. Insomnia? No. Feelings of worthlessness? Yes, even though I knew I wasn't worthless. Did I ever fantasize about cutting off fleshy or flabby areas of my body? What, doesn't everyone? Please add any additional thoughts. I wrote, I am happy with every aspect of my life except my appearance. Then I added, And my love life.

I laughed a little bit. The woman stuffed into the seat next to mine gave me a tentative smile. She was wearing one of those outfits I always thought of as fat-lady chic: leggings and a tunic top in a soft, periwinkle blue, with silk-screened daisies across her chest. A beautiful outfit, and not cheap, either, but play clothes. It's as if the fashion designers decided that once a woman hit a certain weight, she'd have no need for business suits, for skirts and blazers, for anything except glorified sweatsuits, and they tried to apologize for dressing us like overaged Teletubbies by silk-screening daisies on the tops.

"I'm laughing to keep from crying," I explained.

"Gotcha," she said. "I'm Lily."

"I'm Candace. Cannie."

"Not Candy?"

"I think my parents decided not to give the kids on the playground any extra ammunition," I said. She smiled. She had glossy black hair twisted back with lacquered chopstick-y things, and diamond studs the size of c.o.c.ktail peanuts in her ears.

"Do you think this will work?" I asked. She shrugged her thick shoulders.

"I was on phen-fen," she said. "I lost eighty pounds." She reached into her purse. I knew what was coming. Regular women carry pictures of their babies, their husbands, their summer houses. Fat ladies carry pictures of themselves at their skinniest. Lily showed me the full-figure view, in a black suit, and then the side profile, in a miniskirt and sweater. Sure enough, she looked terrific. "Phen-fen," she said, and sighed gigantically. Her bosom looked like something governed by tides and gravity, not mere human will. "I was doing so great," she said. Her eyes took on a faraway look. "I was never hungry. It was like flying."

"Speed'll do that to you," I observed.

Lily wasn't listening. "I cried the day they took it off the market. I tried and tried, but I gained everything back in, like, ten minutes." She narrowed her eyes. "I would kill to get more phen-fen."

"But...," I said hesitantly. "Wasn't it supposed to cause heart problems?"

Lily snorted. "Given a choice between being this big and being dead, I swear I'd have to think about it. It's ridiculous! I could walk down two blocks and buy crack cocaine on the corner, but I can't get phen-fen for love or money."

"Oh." I couldn't think of anything else to say.

"You never tried phen-fen?"

"No. Just Weight Watchers."

That brought a chorus of complaints and rolled eyes from the women sitting around me.

"Weight Watchers!"

"That's a crock."

"Expensive crock."

"Standing in line so some skinny thing can weigh you"

"And those scales were never right," said Lily, to a chorus of enthusiastic uh-huhs! The size six behind the desk was looking worried. Fat lady insurrection! I grinned, imagining us surging down the hall, a righteous, stretch-pant-wearing army, tipping over the scales, toppling the blood-pressure machine, tearing the height-weight charts off the walls and making all the skinny clinicians eat them, while we feasted on bagels and fat-free cream cheese.

"Candace Shapiro?"

A tall doctor with an extremely deep voice was calling my name. Lily squeezed my hand.

"Good luck," she whispered. "And if he's got any samples of phen-fen in there, grab 'em!"

The doctor was fortyish, thin (of course), and going gray at the temples, with a warm handshake and big brown eyes. He was also extremely tall. Even in my thick-soled Doc Martens I barely came up to his shoulders, which meant he had to be at least six and a half feet. His name sounded like Dr. Krushelevsky, only with more syllables. "You can call me Dr. K," he said, in his absurdly deep, absurdly slow voice. I kept waiting for him to drop what I took for a misguided Barry White impression and talk normally, but he didn't, so I guessed that ba.s.so profundo was the way he did talk. I sat, holding my purse against my chest, while he flipped through my forms, squinting at a few answers, laughing out loud at others. I looked around, trying to relax. His office was nice. Leather couches, a comfortably cluttered desk, a real-looking Oriental rug covered with piles of books, papers, magazines, and a television/VCR in one corner, a small refrigerator with a coffee machine perched on top in another. I wondered if he'd ever slept there... if maybe the couch unfolded into a bed. It looked like the kind of place you'd want to stay in.

"Humiliated in national publication?" he read out loud. "What happened?"

"Ugh," I said. "You don't want to know."

"No, really. I do. I think that's the most unusual answer anyone's ever given."

"Well, my boyfriend..." I winced. "Ex-boyfriend. Excuse me. He's writing this column for Moxie "

"Good in Bed?" asked the doctor.

"Why, yes, I like to think so."

The doctor blushed. "No... I mean..."

"Yeah, that's the column Bruce writes. Don't tell me you read it," I said, thinking, if some fortysomething diet doctor had seen it, I could pretty much a.s.sume that everyone else in my life had, too.

"I actually clipped it out," he told me. "I thought our patients might enjoy it."

"What? Why?"

"Well, it was actually a fairly sensitive appreciation of... of..."

"A fat lady?" The doctor smiled. "He never called you that."

"Just everything but."

"So you're in here because of the article?"

"Partly."

The doctor looked at me.

"Okay, mostly. It's just, I don't... I never thought of myself... that way. As a larger woman. I mean, I know I am... larger... and I know I should lose weight. I mean, it's not like I'm blind, or oblivious to the culture, and how Americans expect women to look..."

So you're here because of America's expectations?"

"I want to be thin." He looked at me, waiting. "Well, thinner, anyhow."

He flipped through my forms. "Your parents are overweight," he said.

"Well... kind of. My mom's a little heavy. My father, I haven't seen in years. He had kind of a belly when he left, but..." I paused. The truth was, I didn't know where my father was living, and it was always awkward when it came up. "I have no idea what he looks like now."

The doctor looked up. "You don't see him?"

"No."

He scribbled a note. "How about your siblings?"

"Both skinny." I sighed. "I'm the only one who got hit with the fat stick."

The doctor laughed. "Hit with the fat stick. I've never heard it put quite that way."

"Yeah, well, I got a million more of 'em."

He flipped some more. "You're a reporter?"

I nodded. He flipped back. "Candace Shapiro... I've seen your byline."

"Really?" This was a surprise. Most civilians skipped right over the bylines.

"You write about television sometimes." I nodded. "You're very funny. Do you like your job?"

"I love my job," I said, and meant it. When I wasn't obsessing over the high-pressure, in-the-public-eye nature of being a reporter, or sc.r.a.pping for good a.s.signments with territorial coworkers, and entertaining dreams of the m.u.f.fin shop, I managed to have a good time. "It's really fun. Interesting, challenging... all those things."

He wrote something down in the folder. "And do you feel like your weight affects your job performance... how much money you make, how far you've advanced?"

I thought for a minute. "Not really. I mean, sometimes, some of the people I interview... you know, they're thin, I'm not, I get a little jealous, maybe, or wonder if they think I'm lazy or whatever, and then I have to be careful when I write the articles, not to let the way I'm feeling affect what I say about them. But I'm good at my job. People respect me. Some of them even fear me. And it's a union paper, so financially I'm okay."

He laughed, and kept flipping, slowing at the psychology page.

"You were in therapy last year?"

"For about eight weeks," I said.

"May I ask what for?"

I thought for a minute. There is no easy way to say to someone you'd just met that your mother had announced, at fifty-six, that she was gay. Especially not to someone who sounded like a thin, white James Earl Jones, and would probably be so tickled he'd repeat it out loud. Possibly even more than once.

"Family things," I finally said.

He just looked at me.

"My mother was... in a new relationship, that was moving very quickly, and it kind of freaked me out."

"And did the therapy help?"

I thought of the woman my HMO a.s.signed me to, a mousy woman with Little Orphan Annie curls who wore her gla.s.ses chained around her neck and seemed a little bit afraid of me. Maybe hearing about the newly lesbian mother and my absent father within the first five minutes of taking my history was more than she'd planned on. She always had this vaguely cringing look, as if she feared that at any moment I would charge across her desk, knock her box of Kleenex to the floor, and try to throttle her.

"I guess so. The therapist's main point was that I can't change things other people in my family do, but I can change how I react to them."

He scratched something in my folder. I tried to do a subtle lean so I could make some of it out, but he had the page tilted at a difficult angle. "Was that good advice?"

I shuddered inwardly, remembering how Tanya moved in six weeks after she and my mother had started dating, and her first act of residence was to move all of the furniture out of what had been my bedroom and replace it with her rainbow-striped sun catchers and self-help books, plus her two-ton loom. By way of saying thanks, she wove Nifkin a small striped sweater. Nifkin wore it once, then ate it.

"I guess so. I mean, the situation's not perfect, but I'm sort of getting used to it."

"Well, good," he said, and flipped my folder closed. "Here's the thing, Candace."

"Cannie," I said. "They only call me Candace when I'm in trouble."