Free Through Thick and Thin by Alison Pace Page B

who has a job in which there is always something to do, always more to be done, can think of herself as athletic in some respect, and surely, can handle the challenges of a diet. This is what she tells herself, this is what she wants to believe.
    Ever since her fifteenth year, when her mother first took her to the Diet Center in Chevy Chase—she can still remember the parking lot, the waiting room, the bran muffins and the vitamin tins she received, Mom looking nervous and worried but trying not to show it—she’d never been able to see dieting as anything but certain failure. But if Stephanie is going to do this, in her cheerful, optimistic, and ever-sporting way, if Stephanie is going to succeed at this, then she wants to as well. Meredith has always suspected that Stephanie has been better at running her own life, what with the perfect husband and the perfect baby and the perfect house. Though it isn’t Stephanie who is perfectly poised for the New York Times to call (thus usurping Douglas Harris, editor in chief of The NY , as her employer but also as the placer of the best phone call she ever answered), and then what? A three-book deal? Film rights? Her own television show?
    Meredith closes The Zone, puts the book aside, and makes an effort to focus her attention on the more immediate future. She reaches for the phone to call and confirm her reservation for the night. She takes a few deep breaths as she listens to the ringing, but trying to calm herself while listening to a phone not being picked up is impossible, she stops. And then they pick up.
    “Thank you for calling Ouest. How may we help you?”
    “Hi, it’s Abby Gilbertson calling. I’d like to confirm my reservation for tonight.”
    Meredith always confirms, she doesn’t like to leave anything to chance; she’s certain she’s simply far too busy to leave anything to chance. The moment she flips her phone shut, all in one motion, Meredith looks at her watch. She needs to start getting ready. Getting into her disguises is a lot more involved than the run-of-the-mill getting ready for work, or dinner, or some other sort of outing. She will, by the way, not say the word date. Not right now.
    If she can manage it, Meredith always tries to get ready at home. It requires a lot of stuff, a lot of makeup, outfits, wigs. And while, of course, it is a necessity of her job, to make herself into someone else, to call herself by another name, she feels that holing up in the bathroom at work with wigs and makeup and outfits might seem unserious, too theatrical, and The NY is a serious place. And while she has always thought of makeup as important, for any number of reasons, she doesn’t want to spend all the time applying it at work.
    In addition to her own credit card, which she so rarely uses, she has four other credit cards with four different names: Abby Gilbertson, Emily Shea, Sarah Marin, May Williams. Meredith has found that it’s best to repeat; four names, she thinks, are enough. More than four and she might start to lose track, get tripped up, the way that it’s so much harder to remember a lie than it is to remember the truth.
    Meredith has a vanity, an antique desk with a mirror attached to it and a deceptively large drawer in which she has all the makeup, a collection matched in its vastness and impressive-ness only by the beauty products that line the shelves of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. If asked what she liked best about being a restaurant critic, no matter who asked, Meredith would say it was, of course, the restaurants, getting to go to every last one she ever dreamed of, the inventive food, the theater of it all, the celebration. And then, on top of that, writing about it and sharing it with readers. She won’t admit to anyone how much she enjoys the makeup, and the disguises. But she actually really does.
    Before she sits down, she heads to her closet, and from the row of hatboxes lining one of the upper shelves, she selects one of