Free 150 Pounds by Kate Rockland Page A

strolled in and said, “Hi, I’m Andrea. I’m here so Princeton can fulfill its affirmative action quota.” They’d been friends ever since, along with the three other girls, all Princeton grads now trying to push and shove their way into success in New York during bad economic times. Andrea really wanted to be an actress, and took the PATH into Manhattan and went on auditions some mornings, other times on Saturdays. She’d been in a deodorant commercial three months ago where she had to apply the deodorant fifty-seven times, and she’d been eaten alive by mosquitoes later that evening at a cookout, finally giving her a real excuse for calling out of work.
    “Do you remember when I told you that someday, and that day may never come, I’ll have to call on you to do a favor for me?” Andrea was asking. She moved closer to Shoshana, snuggling into her back.
    “Are you seriously quoting The Godfather to me?”
    On the wall near her bed was a framed photograph of Lane Bryant, the dress manufacturer. It had gotten knocked askew. (They’d had a few friends over the night before and there’d been an impromptu dance-off in her room.) Shoshana reached out and straightened the picture with her toe. Bryant was the first person to make plus-size clothing on a national scale, with the idea that larger women came in three body types: all-over stout, flat-busted stout, and full-busted stout. Shoshana was definitely in the full-busted stout category.
    “Okay, you caught me. I do need to ask you for a favor. Frankie says it’s okay, don’t you, Frankie?”
    Frank Sinatra, the one-eyed, long-haired mini-dachshund-slash-Chihuahua-slash-unknown mix Shoshana had adopted three years ago, right after her father died, was sprawled out on the pillow next to Andrea’s head. He wore a doggie T-shirt with a tiny picture of Janis Joplin stretched across its front. Hearing his name, he let out what might have been a groan of pleasure as she stroked his lumpy-shaped head. He was very famous in the Church Square Park dog run, and around town, as Hobokenites loved that he was named for one of their own. (He also had a wardrobe to rival The Real Housewives of New Jersey .) The real Frank Sinatra (or shall we say the furless one) had once lived on Monroe Street, just a few blocks away. Shoshana named him after Old Blue Eyes because of an incident on the day she took him home from the animal shelter in Jersey City. After stepping off the light rail, she took him for his first walk about town. The dog was not content to pee anywhere near her apartment, so a frustrated Shoshana walked toward the back of Hoboken, away from the water, to Monroe, and wandered around. Well, wouldn’t you know that as she rounded the corner of Fourth, her tiny little ugly dog wagged his hairless tail and quivered all over like one of those metal detectors on the beach coming into contact with gold. She heard the sound of his tiny toenails scraping against the ground, and when he finally lifted his leg and let out a stream of yellow pee, she looked down and gasped: he was peeing directly on a giant gold star, marking the plot where Sinatra was born! And thus, a tiny runt of a dog was given the macho name.
    “God, this dog is ugly,” Andrea said in a singsong voice. Sinatra licked her nose, not upset over the insult. “But he sure is a sweetie pie.”
    “You’re not ugly, are you, son?” Shoshana asked Sinatra, who promptly licked her across her mouth.
    “Gross!” Andrea exclaimed. “You shouldn’t let him lick you like that. Dogs carry different germs than us.”
    “They do not,” Shoshana said. She laughed. “There aren’t special dog species germs.”
    He was the ugliest dog Shoshana had ever seen when she visited the shelter, but she fell in love with him immediately. She knew all about being judged on appearance. He weighed four pounds (on a good day) and had a long, mostly furless skinny body with black and white spots, like a cow. Where he did have