I smiled at him, turning so I could look him in the eye. The sun was setting over us, and seagulls swooped and squawked above the waves.

“But I did come home,” I said. “See? No shinsplints necessary.”

“I’m glad,” he said, and I leaned against him, letting him support me, with the setting sun glowing in his hair and the warm sand cradling my feet, and my baby, my Joy, safe in my arms.

“So I guess the question is,” I began, in his car on the way home, “what do I do with my life now?”

He smiled at me quickly before turning his eyes back to the road. “I was actually thinking more along the lines of whether you wanted to stop for dinner.”

“Sure,” I said. Joy was asleep in her infant seat. We’d lost her pink ribbon somewhere, but I could see sand glittering on her bare feet. “So now that we’ve got that settled…”

“Do you want to go back to work?” he asked me.

I thought about it. “I think so,” I said. “Eventually. I miss it,” I said. Knowing, as soon as I said it, that it was the truth. “I don’t think I’ve ever gone this long without writing something. God help me, I even miss my brides.”

“So what do you want to write?” he asked. “What do you want to write about?”

I considered the question.

“Newspaper articles?” he prompted. “Another screenplay? A book?”

“A book,” I scoffed. “As if!”

“It could happen,” he said.

“I don’t think I’ve got a book in me,” I said.

“If you did,” he said seriously, “I’d devote all of my medical training to getting it out.”

I laughed. Joy woke up and made a questioning noise. I looked back and waved at her. She stared at me, then yawned and went back to sleep.

“Maybe not a book,” I said, “but I would like to write something about this.”

“Magazine article?” he suggested.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Good,” he said, sounding like it had been settled once and for all. “I can’t wait to see it.”

The next morning, after I’d walked with Joy, had breakfast with Tanya, talked to Samantha on the phone, and made plans to see Peter the next night, I went down to the basement and fetched the dusty little Apple that had gotten me through four years of Princeton. I wasn’t expecting much, but when I plugged it in it chugged and bleeped and lit up obligingly. And even though the keyboard felt strange under my hands, I took a deep breath, wiped the dust from the screen, and started writing.

Loving a Larger Woman

by Candace Shapiro

When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me – white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I’ll go and whom I’ll meet inside.

When I was eight I learned to ride a bike. And this, too, opened my eyes to a new world that I could explore on my own – the brook that burbled through a vacant lot two streets over, the ice-cream store that sold homemade cones for a dollar, the orchard that bordered a golf course and that smelled tangy, like cider, from the apples that rolled to the ground in the fall.

When I was twelve I learned that I was fat. My father told me, pointing at the insides of my thighs and the undersides of my arms with the handle of his tennis racquet. We’d been playing, I remember, and I was flushed and sweaty, glowing with the joy of movement. You’ll need to watch that, he told me, poking me with the handle so that the extra flesh jiggled. Men don’t like fat women.

And even though this would turn out not to be absolutely true – there would be men who would love me, and there would be people who’d respect me – I carried his words into my adulthood like a prophecy, viewing the world through the prism of my body, and my father’s prediction.

I learned how to diet – and, of course, how to cheat on diets. I learned how to feel miserable and ashamed, how to cringe away from mirrors and men’s glances, how to tense myself for the insults that I always thought were coming: the Girl Scout troop leader who’d offer me carrot sticks while the other girls got milk and cookies; the well-meaning teacher who’d ask if I’d thought about aerobics. I learned a dozen tricks for making myself invisible – how to keep a towel wrapped around my midsection at the beach (but never swim), how to fade to the back row of any group photograph (and never smile), how to dress in shades of gray, black, and brown, how to avoid seeing my own reflection in windows or in mirrors, how to think of myself exclusively as a body – more than that, as a body that had fallen short of the mark, that had become something horrifying, unlovely, unlovable.

There were a thousand words that could have described me – smart, funny, kind, generous. But the word I picked – the word that I believed the world had picked for me – was fat.

When I was twenty-two I went out into the world in a suit of invisible armor, fully expecting to be shot at, but determined that I wouldn’t get shot down. I got a wonderful job, and eventually fell in love with a man I thought would love me for the rest of my life. He didn’t. And then – by accident – I got pregnant. And when my daughter was born almost two months too soon I learned that there are worse things than not liking your thighs or your butt. There are more terryifing things than trying on bathing suits in front of three-way department-store mirrors. There is the fear of watching your child struggling for breath, in the center of a glass crib where you can’t touch her. There is the terror of imagining a future where she won’t be healthy or strong.

And, ultimately, I learned, there is comfort. Comfort in reaching out to the people who love you, comfort in asking for help, and in realizing, finally, that I am valued, treasured, loved, even if I am never going to be smaller than a size sixteen, even if my story doesn’t have the Hollywood-perfect happy ending where I lose sixty pounds and Prince Charming decides that he loves me after all.

The truth is this – I’m all right the way I am. I was all right, all along. I will never be thin, but I will be happy. I will love myself, and my body, for what it can do – because it is strong enough to lift, to walk, to ride a bicycle up a hill, to embrace the people I love and hold them fully, and to nurture a new life. I will love myself because I am sturdy. Because I did not – will not – break.

I will savor the taste of my food and I will savor my life, and if Prince Charming never shows up – or, worse yet, if he drives by, casts a cool and appraising glance at me, and tells me I’ve got a beautiful face and have I ever considered Optifast? – I will make my peace with that.

And most importantly, I will love my daughter whether she’s big or little. I will tell her that she’s beautiful. I will teach her to swim and read and ride a bike. And I will tell her that whether she’s a size eight or a size eighteen, that she can be happy, and strong, and secure that she will find friends, and success, and even love. I will whisper it in her ear when she’s sleeping. I will say, Our lives – your life – will be extraordinary.

I read through it twice, cleaning up the punctuation, fixing the numerous typos. Then I stood up and stretched, placing my palms flat against the small of my back. I looked at my baby, who was beginning to resemble an actual infant of the human species, rather than some miniaturized, prickly fruit-human hybrid. And I looked at myself: hips, breasts, butt, belly, all of the problem areas I’d once despaired of, the body that had caused me such shame, and smiled. In spite of everything, I was going to be fine.

“We both are,” I said to Joy, who did not stir.

I called information, then dialed the number in New York. “Hello; Moxie,” said a chirpy subteen-sounding secretary. My voice didn’t tremble even slightly when I asked for the managing editor.