In addition, just before coming to Cincinnati for the holidays she had received an email from Ginger which informed her that their third invisible roommate had decided to leave his tour as of the New Year and needed his room back. Ginger herself was doing some out-of-town tryout in San Francisco, so Alison could sleep in the other bedroom for a couple of weeks, but essentially Alison was going to have to go apartment hunting as of January 1. And she was broke again. Ryan needed her to do new fancy head shots, and he had insisted that she get her hair and makeup done for them. He also pushed her to expand her wardrobe into a more sophisticated and upscale style; there was plenty of work for pretty girls out there but you had to look like money. Looking like money, Alison discovered, cost money, and she had been forced to break her own rule about depleting the bank account and running up those credit cards. It was the worst time possible to be told to move out of that lousy sublet; while she might have the wherewithal to come up with a first month’s rent on a new place, she didn’t have a penny to put down as a security deposit. She was going to have to ask her parents for a loan.
It was a hideous prospect. The night her episode aired, while Alison was off having a one-night stand with a guy she didn’t really like all that much, Rose had called and left a tearful message on her cell about how much her father had liked the show and how he “didn’t really understand” what Alison was doing but he was “relieved” to see that she really might be able to make a go of this acting thing. Alison knew that her mother had meant it as some kind of apology but in it she heard all the negative assumptions her parents had been trading between themselves for her entire life. Her father had never been terribly subtle about the fact that he didn’t think much of her career choice and that he believed she would never be able to support herself; he also had articulated—publicly—more than once that he doubted she would ever find someone who would actually want to marry her. She had to put up with this crap on a regular basis, and then everybody got mad at her when she talked back to him! Whatever. After she and Kyle had finally broken up for good, the sniping had just gotten worse. And now this apologetic message, through Mom, that he was “relieved.” He might as well just come out and say that he sure didn’t want to be on the financial hook for the rest of his life for his least favorite kid with the lousy rotten attitude who nobody would marry, so it was a good thing somebody finally put her on television. And now she had to ask him for money.
On top of all that she was starving. This on the unflinching orders of Ryan: She had to lose fifteen pounds, and keep it off. He was very clear when he signed her about the demands of the marketplace. She was by no means fat, he was not saying that at all, but it was his job to be straight with her about what people were looking for, and the fact was that the curvaceous nature of her physical package would not be well received. He didn’t want her to get all feminist on him and think that because she looked great that would be enough. He wanted her to be a realist: Theater audiences maybe wouldn’t care so much if she looked like an actual woman, but all you had to do was watch one night of television to see what the score was there. Inwardly, Alison flinched when she heard the words “actual woman.” It was hard not to read that as a euphemism; he may just as well have called her “chunky.” An “actual woman”? The directness of his approach did the job. In November and December she had managed to take off nine pounds with relatively little trouble by reducing her lunch and dinner to virtually nothing while adding three extra four-mile runs to her weekly workout schedule. But she was starting to feel hungry all the time now, and the last six pounds seemed to be just stubborn as hell. And now here she was at Christmas in Cincinnati, where every table was loaded down with homemade cookies and chocolates and pies and cakes, and every meal included bread and mashed potatoes and gravy, and anything healthy—like the occasional vegetable—was drowned in cheese sauce and cream of mushroom soup. She was starving amid a sea of fattening plenty, and it was making her cranky.
But even though she was positively light-headed with hunger all the time now, she had to admit it—when you got extra skinny, you did look great. Her cheeks were defined and chiseled, which accentuated her eyes, and it was kind of fun to feel how loose her jeans had become. Her breasts were no longer as luscious as they had been, which gave her a pang of regret, but this was more than offset by the thrill of actually seeing her ribs when she lifted her arms and looked at her slender new self naked in the mirror. The new clothes and the rail-thin new figure which wore them got her a kind of attention she had never had before. When Andrew picked her up at the airport just two days ago, he had noted, “Well, looks like somebody’s been living in the big city,” but his tone was not as effortlessly dismissive as she had known it to be growing up. There was no mistaking it: He was impressed. Rose was impressed as well. As Alison shrugged off her winter jacket, her mother actually exclaimed, “Alison! You’re beautiful!” Which frankly didn’t suck to hear.
“Alison! Hey, Alison, the phone’s for you,” Andrew called to her. He held out the beige receiver, which was still attached by a curlicue cord to the functionally ugly phone screwed into the wall at the other end of the kitchen. It took Alison a moment to realize that he was speaking to her; the kitchen was hot, everyone was talking at once, as usual, and recently she had noticed that she was so hungry all the time it made her a little slow on the uptake, like her blood sugar levels were really just too low.
“For me?” That seemed unlikely. “Who is it?”
“I think it’s Dennis? Dennis, is that you?” He asked the receiver. A moment later he held it out to her. “It’s Dennis.”
“Dennis?” she asked.