by Star Jones
Douglas Stein was a smart, handsome, brilliant doctor who swept Molly off her feet at a time when she had resigned herself to the possibility that marriage and children might never be a part of her life. Doug was a dermatologist whom Molly had met at a dinner party thrown by a mutual friend. He was so popular among the wealthy ladies who lunch that you had to wait three months for an appointment, even if you were married to the mayor. Doug had invented some newfangled dermabrasion treatment that his devotees claimed could take ten years off your face. Of course, anything in youth-obsessed Manhattan that had the makings of a fountain of youth would be pursued with the zeal of gold prospectors in 1840s California. Molly thought he was terribly cute at the party, but she had long ago ceased to have romantic thoughts about men as good-looking as Doug Stein. She was a fat girl in Manhattan; that meant she had to adopt certain survival instincts, one being to divorce yourself from the brutal singles market.
But something strange happened at the dinner party: Doug behaved as if he thought Molly was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He flirted shamelessly and followed her around the party, even when she had decided that the guy must be some sort of psycho killer who wanted to take her home and turn her into hamburger meat. She asked him what his deal was and, in a line she would never forget, he leaned into her ear and said, “You ever hear of Rubens? Well, like him, I think big women are beautiful and unbelievably sexy. If you had been born a few hundred years earlier, you would have been on a Rubens canvas.”
With that line, Doug had won her heart—or at least the chance to make a bid for her heart. It took months of hard work on his part for Molly to believe that this gorgeous man actually desired her. Within a year, they had become husband and wife. Raised as a devout Irish Catholic, Molly even converted to Judaism because it was important to Doug that their future children be raised Jewish. For about nine months, everything was perfect, like a fat-girl fairy tale. Molly even stopped taking birth control pills, hoping that she might still be able to conceive at forty-one. But little by little Molly noticed that they weren’t having sex as much. They’d go a week without doing it, then two weeks, then three. Doug, after being ravenous for her body in the beginning, started coming up with a million excuses why he couldn’t make love to her. For a woman as insecure as Molly about her body and desirability, this was the worst thing that could happen in her marriage.
Actually, it wasn’t the worst thing—that came one night when Molly returned early from a gig. Doug didn’t expect her back until the next morning, but Molly had decided to surprise him by coming right home after the show instead of spending the night in the Poconos, which was only about ninety minutes from the city. When she came into the apartment, she heard Doug in the bedroom, talking loudly to someone on the phone. Just as she was about to burst in the room and surprise him, she heard him say her name. So she lingered outside the door to listen a little longer. What she heard on the other side horrified her so profoundly that she still hadn’t recovered years later.
“But I just don’t know if I can do it anymore, man,” she heard Doug say, apparently to one of his male friends. “I mean, at first I thought, well, I can kind of hold my breath and stick my dick in there if it’s going to mean I get a flood of new patients. The broad knows everybody, in Hollywood and in New York. Already I’ve seen like dozens of new patients through her. She’s like a big, fat gold mine. But now it’s really starting to make me nauseous, the idea of having to fuck that cow. And I think she’s even getting fatter, believe it or not. I’ve been trying to avoid her, but I don’t know how much longer I can do it. I don’t think she can even get my dick hard anymore.”
Molly fell apart after that. Well, after she kicked his scheming ass out. Realizing that your husband pimped you for access can cause some serious trauma. In Molly’s case, she started doing heavy-duty eating. Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese, heavy ketchup, and heavy mayo were her drug of choice. Soon, before she knew it, she was morbidly obese, tipping the scales at 250 pounds. In the midst of her depressed binge, Molly was contacted by actress-turned-fitness-guru Karen Collins and offered the chance to take the Collins Challenge—lose fifty pounds in six months and make a ton of money in the process. For a short period, the challenge was good because it gave her something else to concentrate on besides her depression. In fact, the stinging words of her evil soon-to-be ex-husband became a motivating tool for her on those days when she desperately craved a Quarter Pounder. When she dropped all the weight and graced the cover of People in a swimsuit, Doug even had the gall to call her and claim that he wanted them to try to “work it out.” Molly barely let him get the sentence out before she hung up the phone.
But soon the pressures of trying to keep off the weight caught up to her. She began eating again—in one infamous tabloid shot, a paparazzo snagged a picture of her sitting in a McDonald’s, wolfing down a cheeseburger. By the time Karen Collins fired her, Molly’s stomach was protruding again and she was well into her pill addiction.
With all that drama, Molly hadn’t had sex since her marriage to Doug. She had used food and pills to purge those urges, to become virtually asexual. That three-hundred-dollar-an-hour therapist helped for a while, but she stopped going several months back. When she started getting intimate with Roger, the urges had come roaring back with a vengeance—as did her anxiety about her body and about sex. Perhaps she stopped going to the therapist too soon.
Molly decided she needed a distraction, something to take her mind off her disastrous weekend. So she called Garrett, who was her closest male friend. In actuality, Garrett was her own personal “gay.” All the fat girls in Manhattan had one; it was sort of a rite of passage. You know you’re not going to get a real man to fuck you, so you find a queen to hang out with so at least you look like you’re having a good time—even if you’re slowly dying inside.
“Garrett! I don’t care what you’re doing tonight, dear. I need for you to take me somewhere fabulous!” Molly said loudly into the phone.
“Molly! You crazy whore! I just saw you on TMZ, flashing your tits! I was just about to call you!” Garrett was practically yelling at her.
Molly was sure she hadn’t heard him correctly—did he say he saw her on television flashing her tits?
“Excuse me, what did you say?” Molly asked.
“I was watching TMZ, and they did a story about someone who they said appeared to possibly be Molly McCarthy Stein, flashing her breasts to drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike from the back window of a black limo!” Garrett said breathlessly, sounding about as excited as Molly had ever heard him.
Molly felt a jolt of nerves and embarrassment. “Wow, really?” she said softly. “Could you, uh, see my face?”
“No, not really,” Garrett said. “It looked like somebody took the video with a camera phone. It wouldn’t work in a court of law or anything. But that was really you?! What the hell were you thinking?”
Molly sighed. “I was thinking with my little alcoholic brain, as opposed to my full-sized regular brain,” she said. “Wow, I can’t believe somebody recorded that.”
“They sure as hell did, girl! And who were you with? There was another woman flashing her tits too. I figured that it was probably Rain. At least they looked like I would imagine Rain’s tits look—not that I’ve ever seen them. And there was another woman. She actually showed her naked ass! Like a real moon. They had the images kinda like blurred out, but you could tell that she had a pretty nice ass. It looked very round!”
Molly was mortified. So much for living on the wild side. In this age of video phones and TMZ, a celebrity had to be vigilant every minute of the day. No room for stupid pranks. Thank God they could only guess it was she. “It was Rain and Dara with me.”
“Dara! I should have figured, with that perfect round Latin ass of hers! Look at y’all, acting like some silly-ass teenagers! But it looked like fun! I wish I was there. I would have flashed my skinny little white ass.”
Molly grimaced at the im
age. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Garrett,” she said. “I just want you to take me out.”
“But it’s a Monday, darling,” Garrett said. “Nothing fabulous happens on Monday.” It sounded like he might have been yawning now. Garrett was all about the radical mood swings. “But then again, we could go to the Box and hang with the trannies,” he added.
“The trannies are some funny motherfuckers!” Molly said. “I always get some material from them.”
But as she hung up the phone and headed toward her bedroom to figure out what to wear to a tranny club, Molly felt embarrassed and more than a bit gloomy. This was what her life had been reduced to—telling jokes, taking pills, and trolling for trannies. And flashing strangers on the turnpike for kicks.
“Good God, no wonder I’m trying to kill myself,” she said.
Maxine had an idea. It came to her like a thunderbolt—she needed to have a dinner party. Instead of playing these games with Lizette and her slow-ass minions, it was time for her to put the Maxine Robinson name into action. Her plan was to invite a mind-boggling lineup of media, Hollywood, and publishing movers and shakers, the kind of folks who could greenlight a picture, a book, or a new show with a nod of their heads. Of course, the big fish here was Bill Murphy, the president of Patterson and White. Ideally she’d like to get him alone at a private dinner at her place, but naturally he’d see right through that and turn it down. He’d be much more likely to come if he knew he was going to be in a room with people whose stories in print could potentially make him a lot of money. She also knew that, even though Murph was publishing a book that might make Maxine look bad, he’d have no particular allegiance in a pissing match between Missy and Maxine. All he cared about was moving copies. He might even want to follow up Missy’s book with a Maxine Robinson memoir. Keep the pissing match going. She’d have to be sure to dangle that possibility in front of him—even as she tried to lure information out of him about whether the contents of Missy’s book should cause her worry. Maxine was confident in her powers of persuasion; she had been using them for forty years to get her way. She saw no reason why that would end now.
Maxine picked up the phone and made a few quick calls. Within minutes, she was surrounded in her office by her two assistants and by Lizette, her publicist.
“Okay, I need your help,” she said, looking around the room. “I’m going to hold a dinner party at my house. All the bigwigs from media, publishing, and Hollywood, from Kissinger to Koppel, Seinfeld to De Niro. I have to have enough moguls there to make it enticing to my main target, Bill Murphy from Patterson and White. I will personally make the phone calls to our guests, but I need the three of you to do the rest of the planning—food, alcohol, servers, bartenders, decor. But we don’t have much time—I want to hold the party on Saturday.”
“This Saturday?” Lizette said, her voice rising in shock. She didn’t mean for it to come out so loud and so challenging. Actually, maybe she did.
Maxine stared at her without speaking. Lizette didn’t stare back; she averted her eyes.
“Do you have something to say, Lizette?” Maxine asked her.
“Uh, no. I was just surprised when you said Saturday. I thought you were going to say like a month from now, that’s all. Saturday doesn’t give us much time.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Maxine said. “So ticktock . . . don’t you think?”
Lizette and the two assistants, both recently graduated twentysomethings who were still suffering from Maxine awe, exchanged worried looks. They all knew that the next five days for them would be living hell—not only did they have to plan a major dinner party, they had to do it with the notoriously hard-to-please Maxine breathing down their necks the whole time.
After she dismissed them, Maxine sat down with a pen and pad and started making a guest list. A dinner party guest list was a delicate science—it had to be balanced, mixed with people who were interesting, people who were powerful, people who were smart, people who were beautiful, people who were single, people who were married. If your balance was off, you either had a party full of guests looking to flee immediately after dessert because of extreme boredom, or you had two drunken drama queens coming to blows in the midst of some passionate debate about religion or politics. Maxine had seen both scenarios—and everything in between—so after four decades she considered herself an expert on the science of guest lists. But she couldn’t finalize the list until she got home and consulted her diaries. She might need to call in some favors—or, more accurately, make some threats.
“DARA? ES SU MADRE . Necesito hablar contigo, niña.”
Dara took a deep breath. Her mother was on the phone, saying she needed to speak with her. This couldn’t be good.
“Hello, Mommy,” Dara said. “Why are you calling so late? Is something wrong?”
“No, it’s not late, Dara. It’s only nine thirty,” her mother answered. But Dara knew her parents well—they didn’t want to have anything to do with the telephone after eight o’clock. All of their friends and family knew that too, and respected it. So for Magdalena Cruz to pick up a phone at nine thirty, it must be a matter of national security.
“Tell her I said hi too, Lena!” Dara could hear her father in the background. Her father never answered or dialed the phone himself, but he was always hovering in the background, trying to give directions.
“Tell Daddy I said hi. So what’s wrong, Mommy?”
“Why does something have to be wrong for me to call my daughter?” her mother said, trying but failing to sound insulted.
“Nothing has to be wrong, Mommy. But I talked to you earlier this afternoon, so I know you’re not just calling to talk.”
She heard her mother suck her teeth. “My daughter the doctor and the lawyer is so smart, she just knows everything.”
The words were sarcastic, but Dara could hear the joy in her mother’s voice, right below the surface, as if Magdalena truly did believe that Dara knew everything. Manuel and Magdalena were so aggressive in promoting Dara that they should be on The Lunch Club payroll, getting some of Lizette’s publicist salary. It was one of the reasons Dara sometimes dreaded going up to Spanish Harlem to see them. She could never trust where the trip would end up—Magdalena might decide that she just had to have her daughter accompany her to the grocery store, where she would proceed to practically get on the store intercom to announce that the famous Dara Cruz was in the store. Her father was just as bad—he once even dragged Dara into the neighborhood bar, where she was forced to endure the painful entreaties of about a dozen old, drunk Puerto Rican men, who would make their clumsy moves whenever Manuel turned his back. It was sometimes uncomfortable, but it still made Dara proud to see the pleasure her success brought to her parents’ lives.
“Are you busy on Wednesday night?” Magdalena asked. “We’re having a little get-together and we want you to be here.”
Dara was immediately suspicious. First of all, her parents never did anything on Wednesday night because her mother never missed Wednesday services at Church of the Holy Rosary—the same church whose grammar school Dara and her sister Lisa attended from kindergarten to eighth grade. Second of all, a get-together? Magdalena and Manuel didn’t do get-togethers—primarily because there were only a handful of people that her father would trust to have up in his home.
“What kind of get-together, Mommy?” Dara somehow managed through the phone line to convey her air quotes around “get-together.”
“Nothing fancy, niña. Just a few people here for dinner, that’s all.”
“What people? Who else is coming?”
She heard her mother’s pause, about as pregnant and suspicious as a pause could get. She heard her whisper something to her father.
“I don’t think you know them, Dara. We just thought it might be nice for our daughters to spend some time with us,” her mother said.
“Lisa’s gonna be there?” Dara asked.
“Yes, I’m going to invite her. But I haven’t called
her yet. I called you first. So don’t you go calling your sister and starting trouble, trying to make her jealous.”
“Mommy! You know I don’t do that! I don’t have to do anything to make Lisa jealous. That’s just the way she is, whether I say anything to her or not.”
She heard her mother suck her teeth again. The feuding between Dara and Lisa was a constant source of heartache for Magdalena and Manuel. Lisa was a schoolteacher with a husband and two great kids who tried to use her familial bliss as a defense shield whenever she got too sick of everyone cooing over her ultrasuccessful younger sister. The result was that whenever the two girls happened to be in their parents’ home at the same time, usually during holidays and birthdays, at some point a nasty argument wound ensue—usually over something silly.
Dara sighed. “Okay, Mommy, I’ll be there. What time?”
“That’s great, baby! I think seven thirty would be good. Maybe you could bring a bottle of good wine? You know better than us which one to pick.”
Even before Dara hung up the phone, her stomach felt unsettled, like there was something going on, something right in front of her face, that she was failing to see.
“Your parents inviting you to some kind of party?”
It was Rain, who was lounging next to her on the bed, clearly hanging on every word. They had been halfway through an episode of Law and Order: SVU, their favorite show. They were always at least four or five episodes behind, so every couple of weeks they would have a marathon and knock them off the DVR, one by one.
“Yeah, they say they’re having a ‘get-together,’” Dara said, using the air quotes again. “But they’re acting all suspicious. I think they have something up their sleeve, like a blind date or something.”