Dietland (13 page)

An image in my mind: Eulayla Baptist's fat jeans, consumed with flame.

She set down the newspaper and saw that I hadn't unwrapped my sandwich. “You're not going to eat that, are you?”

“It's not on my plan.”

“Must I remind you that you're on the New Baptist Plan now? Repeat after me: No calorie counting and no weighing.”

For $20,000 I'd say whatever she wanted. “No calorie counting and no weighing.”

“That's right. On the New Baptist Plan, absolutely
everything
is on your plan.”

“You won't stay in business for long with that strategy.”

“The weight-loss industry is the most profitable failed industry in history, did you know that?”

“I read it in your book.”

I watched as she got up and went to the newsstand on the corner to buy a candy bar. She wore a faded minidress over a pair of jeans, her hair in a straggly braid down her back. Crowds of Austen employees milled around on the sidewalks, having descended from their heights to graze for food at earth level. I didn't like being in their vicinity and I certainly didn't want to run into Kitty. As I inspected the crowds, searching for her, a woman sat down next to me on the bench. She was wearing a beige trench coat despite the weather: hot with no sign of clouds. Most of her face was covered by black sunglasses, and she held a silver phone to her ear.

“I'm talking to you but I'm not talking to you,” the woman said.

“Wh . . . ? Are you . . . talking to me?”

“Of course I'm talking to you.” The woman lifted up her sunglasses and it was Julia. She put the sunglasses back down and looked in the opposite direction, still holding the phone to her ear. “Do you have any gossip about Kitty?”

It was startling to see Julia in the light of day. “Why would I have gossip?”

“You're a source now. I need gossip about Kitty. It's for a good cause.”

I didn't mention that Verena had told me about the exposé of Austen. I liked that I knew a secret about Julia—and that she didn't know that I knew. “I have her list of article ideas for upcoming issues.”

“Aces,” said Julia. “Email that to me.”

It wasn't a request so much as a command. “How's Leeta?” I asked. I thought of Julia and Leeta as a pair, though I had never seen them together.

“She's finally back at work. She's a bit of a loose cannon, you know.” In a weird way, I missed Leeta. She had sprung up from nowhere, haunted my daily life, and then disappeared. I wanted to see her again, but not really.

Verena returned with her chocolate and put her arm around Julia, who wriggled away and stood up, still with the phone to her ear, looking blank and unexcitable. “I should not be seen talking to the two of you, especially not you,” she said, pointing at Verena with her foot. She pretended to talk on her phone, moving her lips and laughing, though no sound was coming out. Finally she said, “I have a conference call about lip liner with the West Coast now,” and drifted away into the crowd.

“Poor thing, her paranoia must be off the charts,” Verena said, motioning to the barricades. When I asked her about Julia, she said there were five Cole sisters, all of their names beginning with
J:
Julia, Josette, Jillian, Jacintha, and Jessamine. Their surname was Coleman, but they had deleted the
man.
The sisters all worked in the media or the fashion and beauty industry, and were all spying like Julia. “They're like a cabal,” Verena said. “They live in a massive loft in Tribeca, the Weird Sisters.”

I felt a twinge of panic regarding the email addresses, but I tried to push the thoughts from my mind. It was better that I didn't know why she wanted them.
Then you'll never have to lie.

“I shouldn't tell you this,” Verena said, “but none of the Cole sisters have breasts. Their mother died of breast cancer when the youngest sister was only two. All of them have the gene, so when they turned twenty-one, one by one they had preventative double mastectomies.” I remembered looking down Julia's shirt in the Beauty Closet and seeing the roses and thorns tattooed on her chest. She'd been wearing a bra, so I'd assumed there were breasts there too.

I peeled a mayonnaise-free strip of crust off my sandwich and put it in my mouth, then slid one of the tomatoes out from underneath the wedge of lettuce, careful to avoid the tuna. I ate tuna all the time at home, but with fat-free mayonnaise. Real mayonnaise was different. Once I had a taste of real food, I always wanted more. I spent my days tiptoeing around food, the way one might tiptoe into a baby's room while it's sleeping. One wrong move and the baby wakes up and screams. That's how it was with hunger, too. Once it awakes, it screams and screams and there's only one way to quiet it.

“Since you're planning on having surgery, why not just eat everything in sight?” Verena asked. “Pretty soon you'll only be able to eat baby food. You might as well enjoy yourself before doomsday strikes.”

“My doctor said I have to stay on my plan now, otherwise the adjustment will be too difficult later—Oh God, there's Kitty,” I said, spotting the red bushel of curls. I turned sideways on the bench, covering my face with my hands. It was impossible for a three-hundred-pound woman to blend into a crowd, but I tried.

Verena told me Kitty was gone and I looked up to see the back of her head gliding through the glass doors. “How do you think Kitty feels about you?” she asked, but I told her I didn't want to talk about Kitty.

“A Baptist isn't afraid to confront hard truths.”

“Who cares about Kitty? Once I have the surgery I'm not even going to work for her. She's unimportant.”

“I disagree. You spend your days pretending to be her and writing in her voice. I'd say she's very important. I want you to articulate how she really feels about you.”

Looking up at the Austen Tower, I imagined Kitty in her office on the thirtieth floor. Despite how friendly she acted, I had always suspected she was disgusted by me, but it was easier not to think about it.

“Come on,” Verena said, continuing to prod me. “Let loose, dig deep. If I can trash my own mother in print, you can do this.”

I ran my thumb across the top of my sandwich, feeling the coldness of tuna beneath the bread. I wanted it badly. Instead I channeled my energy into the conversation, directing my crankiness toward Kitty. “If Kitty or any of the women on her staff were given the choice between looking like me and losing an arm or a kidney or even
dying,
they'd probably choose death or dismemberment,” I said. “There. Are you satisfied?”

“This is good. Keep going.”

“The Austen Tower is there ascending into the sky, filled with magazines and TV shows that tell women how they can avoid looking like me. I'm every American woman's worst nightmare. It's what they spend their lives fighting against, it's why they diet and exercise and have plastic surgery—
because they don't want to look like me.
”

“Keep going.”

“Kitty doesn't want me working in her office. I'm the embodiment of everything she hates.” It hurt to say it, but it felt good, too.

“You're Kitty's inner fat girl. She leeches off your pain. It's a resource that she's exploiting, like some big oil tanker parked in the Gulf of Mexico. She's sucking you dry.”

“I'd rather not think about it. It's easier to just ignore her.” If I ignore it then it isn't real.

“You ignore a lot of things. Say
fat.
”

“I don't like saying that word.”

“I know you don't. That's why you need to say it.”

I tossed my sandwich into the garbage can next to the bench, where it landed with a thud. “Fat, fat, fat,” I said. “Having lunch with you isn't fun.”

“Being a Baptist is never fun.”

Verena wanted to see where I lived, so we took the subway to Brooklyn. I didn't want her in my apartment, but it was better than sitting on a bench outside the Austen Tower, worrying about being blown up.

She wasn't expecting me to have such a large apartment. I told her it belonged to my mother's cousin Jeremy and that he was a journalist permanently away on assignment. I explained that I had grown up living in his mother's house on Harper Lane. The name Harper Lane made it sound quaint even though it was in Los Angeles. I made no mention of Myrna Jade, the ghost of my childhood. Verena was a therapist and I wasn't willing to offer up that delicious detail.

I assumed this was the official start of the New Baptist Plan and Verena was preparing to analyze me. The psych evaluation form from the insurance company was sitting on my desk, but I knew Verena wouldn't sign that right away. I waited for the grilling to begin, but she wanted to look around first. My eyes surveyed the apartment, searching for any hidden details that might reveal something unintended. No one besides the super had been inside my apartment for more than six months. My apartment was a secret place, only for me, so intimate that it was full of my scent. I resented Verena for inviting herself over.

She asked if she could peek inside my bedroom and I agreed, believing I had put away my secret clothes, but as soon as I followed her through the doorway I saw a belt on the dresser. I had no use for a belt. Even worse, there was a scarlet dress lying crosswise on my bed, like a gash cut into the white comforter. It had arrived that morning when I was on my way out; I'd opened the package quickly, placed the dress on my bed, and forgotten about it.

Verena had seen the dress—it was impossible to avoid, splashed there on the bed, a slender column. She didn't say anything, but bent over to examine the framed photographs on my dresser. “That woman looks like you,” she said, pointing to the photo of my grandmother and her sister on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.

Verena straightened up. “If you have the surgery you won't look like her anymore.”

“She died before I was born,” I said, hoping Verena would feel bad.

She didn't comment, but walked back into the living room. We sat down and she removed a pad of paper from her bag and asked if she could take notes. She reminded me of Leeta, poised there with her pen and paper, ready to observe me. All of these new people in my life seemed to find me fascinating. I pointed out the psych evaluation form that needed to be signed before the surgery, but Verena stuffed it in the back of her pad without even looking at it.

Saying she wanted to show me something, she reached into her bag. She pulled out a bottle of pills and placed it on the coffee table between us. She explained that her colleague Rubí had just returned from a trip to Paris, where she had obtained them. Rubí called the pills
Dabsitaf, but that wasn't their real name. Dabsitaf was a diet drug, more specifically an appetite suppressant. It had been available in France for two years.

“I've tried diet drugs. They don't work,” I said.

“This one does. When Rubí was in France she talked to people who've taken it and lost vast amounts of weight. They're not hungry at all.” She said it was manufactured by an American company, but they released it in France first because they knew they couldn't get FDA approval right away.

“It really works?” I examined the bottle with French writing on the label.

“The complete lack of hunger, that's what it gives you. The absence of want. The eradication of desire. Would you want to take it?”

“I'd try it.”

Verena said there was evidence from France to suggest that some of the people who'd taken the drug had developed life-threatening complications. Their blood vessels tightened until they couldn't breathe, suffocating them from the inside. The drug company denied any link to their product, and clinical trials in the United States had already concluded. “If it becomes available here, and if you weren't having the surgery, would you take it, knowing the risks?”

If I thought the pills worked, I'd be on the next plane to France, but I kept this to myself. “I'd consider it.”

“Why?”

“Because I don't like being hungry. I wish my hunger would go away.”

Verena wrote something on her pad. When she finished, she took back the bottle of pills. She crossed her legs and looked at me, saying nothing more. She wanted me to take the lead now—I knew what therapists were like.

By way of introduction, I said: “I wasn't molested.” I thought it was important to get that out of the way. “Doctors always assume I was molested and that's why I'm . . . this way. I wasn't molested or raped, I just want you to know.” In my ears I heard those girls from high school:
Who'd want to rape her?

“I get it,” said Verena. “Your fat body isn't the result of some deep psychological trauma. This is
me
you're talking to, remember? I was at a conference recently and an acclaimed psychotherapist said that women become fat because fat protects them from unwanted male attention, like a suit of armor.”

I pictured myself as Joan of Arc, whom I had portrayed in a third grade play. “But I've always been this way, from the beginning.”

“Like your grandmother, I know. Let's move on.”

There was silence again. She was waiting for me to say something more. I thought of the scarlet dress on my bed. I knew she'd seen it. I thought it was best if I brought it up first.

“The dress on the bed is mine.” I was like a nervous criminal, blurting out a confession. “What I mean is that it's for me.” There was no point in saying the dress was a gift for someone else.

“You're buying clothes for your post-surgery self?”

I nodded. “I have a closet full.”

“I'm not surprised. You believe there's a thin woman inside you, waiting to be set free.”

“You sound like Eulayla now.”

“You've internalized her ideology, haven't you?”