Free All Fall Down: A Novel by Jennifer Weiner Page B

Dave, from one [email protected]. Happy birthday!
    Okay, I thought. Totally benign. Except that when another e-mail arrived, I clicked it open again, almost without thinking. This one was from Dave, asking, We still on for lunch?
    Absolutely, wrote back L. McIntyre. I ran through lists of male names that began with “L.” Larry. Luke. Lawton. Lonnie. Then I scrolled to the next line. I wouldn’t miss it!
    Hmm. Possibly still innocuous. Dave’s reply, See you soon, was also perfectly proper. But, in addition to his usual e-mail signature— David Weiss, Reporter —he’d used an emoji, a winking yellow smiley face, the kind that subliterate fourteen-year-old girls would text to their crushes, the kind Dave and I rolled our eyes at and had vowed to never use. “We’re word people,” Dave had said, and even though I was more of a picture personmyself, I’d agreed with him that these silly symbols were the height of the ridiculous, turning adult conversations into puppet shows and ruining the English language. Except, if I could believe what I was seeing, here was my husband, using emojis, with someone named L. McIntyre.
    Don’t do it, a voice in my brain mourned. The computer chimed again, and here was L’s reply, another smiley-face emoji, only hers had lipstick and long eyelashes.
    “Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” I cried.
    First things first. I pulled my hair into a ponytail and literally rolled up my sleeves. I’d never acquired the ninja-level Googling skills that Examiner reporters took for granted, but I didn’t need them. A quick search revealed that L. McIntyre was Lindsay McIntyre, and she was an assistant United States attorney, and she had gone to UPenn and law school at Temple and she looked—I would ask Janet to confirm this—like a younger, paler, mousier version of me. We both had shoulder-length hair, and similar features, only my face was rounder and her complexion was lighter. But there was a definite resemblance. Except she was single. And young.
    It was just after ten o’clock in the morning, but it felt like my wet-the-bed wake-up call had happened to a different person, possibly a century ago. I was considering another pill but decided that I didn’t have the luxury. No matter what was going on with my husband, I had work to do.
    I sat in front of the laptop. I opened a new window and typed a single word: Exposed. The word seemed to expand and contract, throbbing like an infected tooth at the top of the page. I think my husband is having an affair, I wrote, then, as if typing them might make it real, I erased the words, then wrapped my arms around my shoulders, sitting in front of the computer and rocking. I thought about calling Sarah and asking for a sick day,but I knew that, today of all days, with traffic probably at an all-time high, there was no way I could afford to go dark.
    I squeezed my eyes shut, hearing the percussion of my fingers coming down harder than they had to on the keys as I typed: Hey, commenters, I’m sorry. I’m sorry my disgusting, blobbity body (which is, after all, no bigger than the average American woman’s, but who’s counting) offends you. I’m sorry I was foolish enough to pose for a photograph, and let that photograph appear in the world, instead of hiding behind an avatar of an actress or insisting on being air-brushed into acceptability. I’m sorry my mere existence has forced you to actually consider the reality of a woman who is neither a model nor an actress and does not feel compelled to starve herself, or binge and purge, or spend hours engaged in rigorous workouts so that she scrapes into “acceptable” territory and can thus be seen in public.
    I’m sorry I’m not skinny. I’m sorry I haven’t had my fat sucked, my face plumped, my nose bobbed, my skin peeled, and my brows plucked. I’m sorry that I forced you into the unwelcome realization that MOST WOMEN DO NOT LOOK LIKE THE WOMEN YOU SEE ON TV. I’m sorry that even the