Dietland (11 page)

“Besides that. You go
out,
don't you?”

“Sure.”

We both knew I was lying.

When I hung up the phone, it took a few minutes to fully inhabit my New York life again. I went to my desk and turned on the computer. The responsible choice would be to forget Julia's request, but I had a vague sense that she might lead me someplace interesting, away from this apartment and this life.

I downloaded the addresses into a spreadsheet, all 52,407 of them. I was stunned at the number, thinking of the thousands of pages I'd written over the years and how that writing could have been put to better use. As the spreadsheet filled, I waited, drumming my fingers on the trackpad, a nervous
tap tap.
I clicked
send
and off it went to Julia's personal account. Once it was gone there was no taking it back.

A few minutes later I received Julia's reply:

From: JuliaCole

To: PlumK

Subject: Re: spreadsheet

Thank you for the spreadsheet. I'll be in touch again soon.

In the meantime, Verena Baptist wants to meet you.

J.

 

• • •

VERENA BAPTIST WELCOMED ME
into her cluttered, blood-colored home. “Welcome to Calliope House,” she said, but who Calliope was or what the name meant wasn't explained.
You're Eulayla Baptist's daughter,
I wanted to say.

Calliope House was actually two townhouses joined together, sitting on a leafy stretch of Thirteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in the West Village. I stepped into the entryway and was enclosed in a womb of red wallpaper. To my left and right there were ruby-hued rooms, one a living room, the other filled with desks, where women sat, working and talking to one another. Chandeliers hung from the ceilings, and on most flat surfaces were stacks of books and papers.

Verena didn't fit into her surroundings, being an entirely vanilla creature with blond skin and hair, a beam of light in the dark. She was tall and slender. When she reached for my hand, I could feel the bones in her fingers, as fragile as matchsticks. I had expected some resemblance to Eulayla Baptist, who'd had that plasticine, middle-American look of the beauty queen, but no one would have guessed they were mother and daughter. When Verena spoke there was a light undercoat of southernness, just enough to set her apart from the average New Yorker.

“The house is a little overwhelming,” she said, almost apologetically. “It was this color when I moved in and I didn't want to change it.” I scanned the room with the desks, but the women took no notice of me.

“Is this a house or an office?” I asked, still looking around, noticing something different every time I turned my head. On top of a cabinet, a large orchid was trapped under a bell jar.

“It's both.” Verena explained that she lived in the house, but it also served as her office. Most of the women came and went each day, but a few of them lived there with her.

She explained that from the 1920s through the 1970s, the townhouse had been owned by a Catholic charity that used it as a home for unwed pregnant teenagers. The girls had either run away or been cast out by their families. With nowhere else to go, they moved into the house for the duration of their pregnancies. When their babies were born, the infants were adopted by religious families and the girls never saw them again. The young baby-less mothers left the house on Thirteenth Street and reentered the world as if nothing had happened to them—nothing they could talk about, anyway.

When Verena heard about the history of the house on her visit with the real estate agent, she knew she had to have it. There had been other inhabitants between the 1970s, when the charity closed, and when Verena bought it ten years ago, but the walls had always been red. I wondered if the girls had looked at the walls and thought of the periods that had not come: the absence of red, a foreshadowing of doom.

I followed Verena through the living room. A floral-patterned scarf was tied around her head like a headband, its knot and tail disappearing beneath her long hair. She wore a knee-length dress of blue canvas material, with gaping pockets at the front filled with pens and scraps of paper; beneath the blue smock she wore a white T-shirt. The ensemble smelled of laundry detergent, that chemical floral scent not found in nature. She was simple and clean, the type of breezy girl you might see playing tennis in a tampon commercial, only she wasn't a girl. I knew from reading her book that she was close to forty.

As I walked behind her, seeing her hips sway beneath the blue canvas dress, watching her bare calves constrict and release, it was difficult to believe she had sprung from the loins of Eulayla Baptist. Verena's body had destroyed her mother's figure; it was where Baptist Weight Loss had begun, that tiny seed that turned into “a bomb that took nine months to blow up.” Verena's body could have been displayed in a museum, a part of American history.

We arrived in the kitchen at the back of the house, which was also red. A round oak dining table filled most of the empty space in the kitchen, with chairs circled tightly around it. On the wall behind the table was a framed pair of old jeans, folded at the knees and pinned to a white silk background. “Is that . . . ?” I pointed, unsure if I should mention the dead mother.

“Yeah, those are Mama's
fat jeans,
the ones made famous in the TV commercials.” I placed my hand on the glass, imagining Eulayla bursting through the pants. She had never been as big as she seemed. Her fat jeans certainly wouldn't have fit me. I leaned over to examine them more closely. I had known that Eulayla Baptist was a real woman, but she had always seemed more mythic than human. Now there were her pants, and here was her daughter. I laughed. I couldn't help it.

Verena poured me a glass of sweetened iced tea (105) from a pitcher and invited me to sit down at the table. “I was a Baptist once,” I said, still eyeing the legendary jeans.

“It was hell, wasn't it?”

“Worse.” I shared the story of my time as a Baptist, about joining after I saw her mother on television and about my group leader, Gladys, and how she cried when she told me Eulayla had died.

“You must have hated me,” Verena said. “I still get hate mail more than a decade later.
You took away my dream of being thin!
That's what all the haters say. I got a death threat just last week.”

Verena explained that in the first few years after she closed Baptist Weight Loss, there were disgruntled former Baptists who stalked her and even threatened her life. They held meet-ups across the country. There were Baptist Shakes for sale on an online auction website years past their expiration dates, as if they'd aged like a fine wine. Some former Baptists collected old meals and any memorabilia connected to Eulayla. Some went so far as vandalizing Eulayla Baptist's grave with chisels, scratching out the words “Beloved Mother” on the headstone in an attempt to obliterate any link to Verena, even posthumously. Verena had replaced the headstone three times already.

I asked Verena if she had ever followed the diet. Given her slim figure, I doubted it.

“No, I can eat whatever I want and never gain weight,” she said. “I take after Daddy. When I was a kid I wanted to be fat, just as a fuck-you to Mama. Fat as a form of subversion. My nanny was fat. She had such a lovely roundness about her. Mama was all bones and hard angles. You couldn't cuddle with her; it would have been like cuddling with a pile of tent poles.”

“If you've never been—” I couldn't say the f-word, I couldn't say
fat;
I never said it out loud, hating the way it sounded. I preferred a variety of euphemisms:
overweight, curvy, chubby, zaftig,
even
obese.
I had once described myself as having a dress size in the double digits, but never as fat. “If you've never been—”

“
Fat,
” Verena said.

“Then why do you care so much about dieting? Why did you write the book?”

“To tell the truth and undo some of the damage that Mama did, if that's possible. My family made a fortune exploiting vulnerable people and now that fortune is mine. It's ill gotten, of course, and it weighs on me. Sometimes at night when I think of it I can't breathe.”

The fortune, I'd read online, was rumored to be close to $200 million. I wanted to joke that at least one brick of the townhouse—maybe more—belonged to me, but I didn't. She seemed pained. She said her extended family had been outraged by the book and most of them had shunned her. “The truth is a lonely place, but it doesn't matter. I have a new family now. A better one.”

Verena said she had no intention of writing another book, that
Adventures in Dietland
was her one and only. She said she wasn't a writer, but a philanthropist, an activist. She had also trained as a therapist, but she didn't practice anymore.

I wondered if she was analyzing me. I kept waiting for her to explain why she had invited me over. “Do you work with Julia?”

“Heavens no. Julia and I met at a conference a few years ago. She's interested in my work and stops by the house once in a while for a chat. The last time was just a few days ago. She said that her intern—Lena, is it?”

“Leeta.” It was the first time I said her name out loud.

“Oh right,
Leeta.
Julia said Leeta thought we should meet, so here you are.”

“Leeta gave me a copy of your book.”

“I'm glad she did. I never turn down the chance to meet interesting women. You might say I'm a collector of women.” Her house was certainly full of women. She reached across the table and gave my hand an affectionate squeeze. It was rare that someone touched me, but both Julia and Verena had placed their hands on me.

I told Verena about how Leeta had spied on me and how Julia wanted the spreadsheet of email addresses. “What's Julia's story?”

“She inhabits a world of intrigue and secrets that I find exhausting. I do know that she's working on an exposé of Austen Media, among other things. She mentioned something about hoping you could dig up dirt on Kitty.”

So that's what Julia wanted. I wasn't the ideal person to
dig up dirt,
given that I didn't even work in the office.

“When she told me that someone like you answers Kitty's mail, I was intrigued,” Verena said.

“Someone like me?” I knew what she meant, but I was hurt that she said it.

“People probably attack her for only having thin girls on staff and appearing in the magazine, but she can say, ‘Hey, one of my assistants is fat.' It's like the person who says, ‘I'm not racist, my best friend is black.' The really sick thing is that Kitty doesn't even want you working in that office.”

“She said it was Human Resources' idea for me to work from home,” I said.

“Do you really think that's true, hon?”

I stared into the small yard that was ringed with rosebushes and tall trees, hot in the face. I felt like a whale that'd washed up in Verena's red-walled house, a grotesque creature on display. “I don't want to look like this, you know. I hate looking this way. I don't need to be reminded of what everyone else thinks of me.”

“They're the ones that have the problem, not you. There's nothing wrong with you.”

I didn't respond, my lips pressed together tightly, curled into a frown.

Verena looked confused. “Have I said something wrong?”

“I don't like being called
fat.
”

“I see,” Verena said. “I don't think fat is a bad thing, so I didn't realize I had offended you. I thought we were on the same wavelength and that's why Leeta wanted us to meet.”

“I don't know why Leeta wanted us to meet.”

“I can see that now.” Verena apologized, but I was still upset.

“It's easy for you to say that being big isn't a bad thing. You don't have to live this way.” She may have had a fat mother once, but that wasn't the same. I told Verena that I wouldn't be overweight for much longer, that I was having weight-loss surgery in a few months. “Dieting doesn't work, you said so in your book. It's time for me to do something else.”

“That's the message you took away from my book?” If she weren't so pale, the color would have drained from her face. “Oh, Plum, don't do that. Don't butcher yourself. I beg you to reconsider.”

Here we go,
I thought. Another thin woman, like my mother, trying to dissuade me from the surgery.
“
I've already made up my mind.”

“The only difference between my mother and the doctor who will perform your surgery is that my mother didn't have a license to practice medicine. They're all charlatans.” Rose colored her pale cheeks. She was about to say something else, then caught herself. She placed her palms flat on the kitchen table and inhaled deeply, trying to prevent further upset. I could tell she was the type of person who didn't like to lose her cool. As I watched her, I saw the idea register on her face. The news of my surgery had tightened her features, but now her muscles were loosening. She sat up straight and asked me, “How are you going to pay for your surgery?”

I told her that my insurance was paying for part of it, but that I would owe about $7,000, which I would pay with savings and credit cards.

“What about the expenses that come after—new clothes, plastic surgery? You'll need more surgery, you know. If you lose weight that quickly, your skin will hang off your body.”

I had already started buying the clothes, but I knew she was right about needing more surgery. I told her I would find a way to pay for it all.