The Pink Ghetto. Liz Ireland

himself as exceptional. Aside from his bearing, he has these steely blue-gray eyes—they can seem intense, or full of humor. They are mesmerizing.

      On many an occasion those eyes have been my undoing.

      I knew better now than to get tripped up by those eyes now. I knew my limits. Both of our limits. I was well aware of what all the sparking and smoldering could lead to: Wild abandon chased quickly by abject regret.

      “Well, c’mon,” he said impatiently when I broke eye contact. “Let’s see what the old dame brung you.”

      Say this for her, Natasha Fleishman did not skimp on charity. From those shopping bags, which still had a perfumey smell lingering on them, we pulled out a wealth of stuff. Twinset cashmere sweaters, fabulous lightweight wool outfits in rich tweeds and checks, silk shirts, and so-called casual wear that would only be casual to people who actually wore formal wear on a regular basis. Putting on Natasha Fleishman’s casual chic, I would feel like a kid playing dress up.

      Yet after a few minutes I was pawing over garments bearing tags with Prada and Dior with a critical eye. The trouble was size. Natasha Fleishman was both taller and smaller than I was. That ruled out pants. I could, however, squeeze into most of the skirts and tops if I was careful to keep my breath sucked in.

      Fleishman, who had begun to look like he was losing interest, dug out a vintage dress. “Wow—I think this was my grandmother’s.” It was a fitted turquoise and deep purple houndstooth shift. “I think you should wear this on your first day.”

      I took the dress from him and frowned as I looked it over. The tag read Mainbocher, whom I thought was a really big designer at some point. “I’m not sure…”

      Fleishman looked hurt. “Why not?”

      “Because it’s not the kind of thing you wear on your first day to a job. Unless your job is as a guest star on The Doris Day Show. It’s loud.”

      “You need to be louder,” he grumbled, putting the dress aside.

      I wasn’t so sure. It was both loud and fitted, and things that were so fitted played right into my paranoia about body issues. Growing up, I had been fat. The kind of girl to whom people would say things like, “You have the loveliest brown eyes!” Or, “You look just like Winona Ryder!” Meaning, Winona Ryder, but fat. I had brown hair and brown eyes, and there our similarities ended.

      When I lost weight, I actually did look a little more like Winona Ryder, but by then she was more known for shoplifting than good box office, so the resemblance was no longer in my favor.

      “Do you think this is too tight?” I asked Fleishman as I stepped out a few minutes later to model a newer black scoop-neck dress with a Prada tag. I couldn’t believe this stuff was from someone’s discard pile.

      Fleishman eyed me critically. “Sit-ups,” he said. “A week of sit-ups xand you’ll look like a million dollars.”

      “I don’t have a week,” I reminded him. “Besides, I haven’t done a sit-up since P.E. in seventh grade.”

      “Okay, we just won’t eat for the next three days.”

      I nodded. If it meant fitting into a free wardrobe, that sounded like a reasonable suggestion.

      That was the other thing about Fleishman. We’d known each other so long, he knew my history. He knew that growing up I was the little girl other kids had called Shamu in swim class. My weight had been a torment, but in a perverse way it had also seemed like my security blanket. Fat was who I was. The idea of losing weight and showing up at school thin (I always dreamed that it would happen overnight or something), which according to everyone was supposed to be my dream, made me feel even more self-conscious. I would be like the bald guy who suddenly shows up at work with a toupee.

      The summer after high school, though, I took the plunge. I dropped forty-five pounds, and not by a method I would recommend to anyone. But by the time I got to college, I was average size. No one there knew I was only masquerading as a normal person.

      At first, Fleishman was the only one at college I told about my deep dark secret. He knew all about me, and understood the yo-yo diet mentality and why I would panic when my size ten jeans started to feel tight. I have developed discipline over the years, but it’s the cockeyed kind of discipline that says that it’s fine to inhale a Krispy Kreme donut (or two!) for breakfast as long as you don’t eat again for the rest of the day.

      It’s the kind of discipline Fleishman understood.

      “Okay, modeling time’s over,” Fleishman said, two outfits later. “I’m taking you out.”

      I tilted my head. “Out where?”

      He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. “Natasha made a generous donation to the Fleishman fund, too, so I’m treating us both to haircuts.”

      Fleishman and I had been so tight knit for so long that we tended to treat financial windfalls as community property. We were so close we sometimes acted like twins with an extra set of parents. The fact that we had actually been an item—and that we had weathered not only a breakup but also a romantic lapse since—only made us that much more inseparable.

      Wendy was always telling me that I should be more cautious; if Fleishman considered me his scold, Wendy was mine. Typically, she would wait until Fleishman and I had one of our periodic dust-ups to swoop down on me with advice.

      “Someday you might want to put a little distance between yourself and the boy wonder,” she would warn. “I like him, too, but I’ve never been in love with him.”

      “I’m not in love with him! We’re friends.”

      That was her cue for the piercing stare. “Works out great, too. You get a Svengali, and he gets an entourage.”

      I think the old college ties were beginning to grow frayed for Wendy. Luckily, she was in the middle of graduate school now and didn’t have a lot of time for conversations like these anymore. She was too busy working on lighting designs for Waiting for Godot. She was up to her armpits in lighting gels and asbestos cables and didn’t have as much time to devote to our ongoing domestic drama.

      It was a beautiful winter day and Fleishman and I larked off into the city like two teenagers playing hooky. First we headed to Soho, where we were coiffed, and then we flitted down busy streets, in and out of stores, buying shoes and little trinkets and basically depleting the Fleishman fund to its previous shaky state. I charged a few things I shouldn’t have, and accepted a few freebies from Fleishman, including the haircut, without much protest. After all, I was usually the big breadwinner.

      When we had worked our way all the way up to Union Square, Fleishman sighed contentedly. I’ll say this for him—you’ll never meet a man happier to be down to his last dime. Maybe that was because he was always assured that it never really was his last dime. Another dime was always around the corner. Poverty was just a temporary mix-up to him. “I have just enough for dinner and train fare back to Brooklyn.”

      “I thought we weren’t eating until Monday,” I reminded him.

      “But all this shopping—I’m starved!” he whined.

      Fleishman was never big on deprivation.

      “Okay,” I said, “but after this…”

      Let’s face it. I wasn’t big on deprivation, either.

      We ambled over to an Indian place we liked.

      Once he and I were settled in our booth soaking in the comforting scent of curry, with our respective beverages of wine and tea, we both took what seemed like our first deep breaths since we had started our retail debauch.

      Fleishman slipped down in the booth until his torso formed a leisurely C. He sipped his wine. “You know what? Your big success at finding work has given me a shot of ambition myself.”

      I tilted my head. “You mean you’re going to look for a job?”

      His