Dietland (18 page)

Marlowe knew she had to go home and face the consequences. On her last afternoon in Rome, she returned to her favorite church near the Pantheon, Santa Maria sopra Minerva. She sat there for an hour, mentally preparing for what was to come. Before she left the church she took the braid out of her backpack. There was a statue of Mary, surrounded by pots of flowers, with votive candles flickering at her feet. Marlowe nestled the braid among the candles that were the hopes and prayers of fellow travelers, and then she walked away, leaving a piece of herself behind.

The next day, Marlowe was greeted by paparazzi at LAX. The studio sent two bodyguards to meet her at the airport, as well as a dark car with tinted windows. Photos of her with her short hair were on the covers of celebrity magazines; Barbara Walters mentioned it on
20/20;
a late-night talk show host made jokes about it, holding up a picture and saying, “Who's this fat lesbian who's eaten Marlowe Buchanan?”

“The whole country thought I was ugly, which was a horrible feeling. It was a miracle no one found me hanging from a rope,” Marlowe said. “You're probably too young to remember. When people I knew in L.A. saw me, they gasped. My family didn't want to speak to me. Even my agent wouldn't talk to me. ‘My twins are starting Columbia in the fall. Do you have any fucking clue how much Columbia costs?' She was furious.”

The head of NBC's entertainment division cut short a trip to Cape Cod and flew to L.A. Marlowe was put on a crash diet. Losing the twenty-five pounds was easy; she was under so much stress, she couldn't eat. But her hair was a different matter. The producers decided to tape a scene of the show with Marlowe wearing a wig, but test audiences gave it low ratings. They filmed new episodes without the wig, but the ratings sank and so did the show.

“I never knew why
Ellie
went off the air,” I said. “I loved the show, but then you just—”

“Disappeared,” she said.

NBC executives scheduled a meeting with Marlowe to tell her the show was canceled. “In the conference room I met with three balding men, all named Stu, and a woman named Sharlene. They laid out photos of me with my shorn hair. One of the Stus leaned across the table and said, ‘We're sorry, Marlowe, but since you cut your hair, women don't want to
be
you, men don't want to
fuck
you. The show is canceled.' I can still see his face,” Marlowe said, imitating the gravity of his expression. “I started laughing. How could I not? They probably thought I was having a nervous breakdown. Sharlene leaned forward and said, ‘Unless you figure out a way to up your fuckability quotient, your career in Hollywood is finished.' Can you imagine? She was serious! She had an MBA! I just kept laughing. Suddenly it all seemed like such bullshit. I'd been paraded in front of the cameras since the age of six like a trained monkey whoring for attention and cash. That day was the end of it. I never wanted to forget it, hence the tattoo. It was the best day of my life.” Marlowe slapped her arm where the writing was, then the baby copied her, slapping her in the same place.

“But how could . . .” I hesitated, afraid of offending her.

“How could that be the best day of my life? When a bunch of executives in a conference room told me I was unfuckable?”

I nodded. She drank the rest of her coffee and set the cup down on the table with a clatter.

“Stick with me, kid,” she said, and winked.

When Marlowe's acting career ended, she earned a bachelor's degree and then a Ph.D. She wrote a book called
Fuckability Theory,
which took concepts from Hollywood and applied them to the rest of society. After Verena read the book she invited Marlowe to Calliope House for lunch. That was four years ago. Since then, Verena had been funding Marlowe's projects, which included touring university campuses to give talks and workshops about fuckability, and also writing another book. Marlowe's office was on the third floor of Calliope House.

As we walked there, Marlowe holding her baby, me holding the bag with my dress in it, I realized I hadn't been registering the electric shocks and other unpleasant symptoms. Of all the women in Verena's orbit, I liked Marlowe the best so far, even though I knew she was part of the New Baptist Plan, the purpose of which was to change my mind about what I wanted so badly.

“What exactly
is
Calliope House?” I asked.

“If you want to be old school about it, you could call it a feminist collective. Verena has this massive house and more money than God, and she provides living space or office space for women who interest her for the work they do or the potential they have. Women come and go, as they need her. She's a good egg.”

A collector of women.

I explained to Marlowe about the surgery. I wasn't sure what she knew already, but I explained about the thin woman living inside me. It seemed ridiculous when I said it out loud, but Marlowe had shared her story with me. She was fat too, though not as fat as I was. Maybe she would understand. “Verena wants me to practice being Alicia. She wants me to have this makeover and go on dates, since that's what Alicia would do.”

“Let's not call it a makeover,” said Marlowe. “We're going to up your fuckability quotient.”

That didn't sound pleasant. A simple manicure and haircut was likely not what Marlowe had in mind.

We arrived at Calliope House, and as I walked through the door I felt a stab of electricity in my head. Even with my eyes closed I could sense that people were staring at me, but I needed to wait for the sensations to pass. When I opened my eyes, Julia was standing before me in the entryway, seemingly on her way out. She was wearing the beige trench coat, this time with the collar up.

“I dropped by to say hello. I trust that you are well,” she said, nibbling the arm of her sunglasses.

“I've been better. How are you? How's Leeta?”

“Leeta doesn't work for me anymore. Don't ask about her.”

“What happened?”

“I'd rather not talk about it. By the way, thank you for sending Kitty's list of upcoming articles. It's the usual sewage, but keep feeding me information. I like to know what's going on.”

“I'm the last person on Kitty's staff to know what's going on,” I said, not adding that I wasn't even doing my job anymore.

“Yes, but you're the only one I can trust, so I'll have to make do.” She smiled primly and moved toward me, aiming for a kiss on the cheek but landing in the spot behind my ear, near my hairline. She lingered for a moment, her arm wrapped around my waist, her breath on my neck. She seemed to be inhaling me. When her head resurfaced, she said, “It was lovely bumping into you, as always,” and walked out the door.

Marlowe, who had observed our interaction, said, “No comment.” I was left to wonder what had happened to Leeta. Julia wanted information from me but rarely shared any herself.

I followed Marlowe into the living room. It was redder and brighter than I had remembered, like the inside of a cherry lozenge. She set a dozing Huck on the sofa, where he curled into a ball. In the middle of the room was an overturned plastic crate, and she asked me to stand on it.

“Let's see what you brought,” she said, picking up the bag and pulling out the white poplin shirtdress. “This should be no problem. Do you mind if we measure you?”

A woman with a tape measure and a pad of paper appeared. “This is Rubí Ramirez,” said Marlowe. I recalled the name Rubí from one of my conversations with Verena. She was the one who'd gone to Paris to get the diet drug she called Dabsitaf.

“Hello,” Rubí said, and I returned the greeting. She began to wrap the tape around me, making me feel like a prize pig. She and I probably weighed the same, but she was short. Her black hair was nearly shaved on one side, shoulder length on the other, the tips of her spiky bangs bright blue. She wore shorts and a tank top, her olive limbs ringed with rolls of fat—an image of the Michelin Man came to mind. I would have never worn an outfit like that.

Rubí hadn't explained why she was measuring me, but if she was going to remake the white poplin shirtdress in my size, she'd be wasting her time. I had no intention of wearing any such dress in my size, but I didn't say so. I just needed to get through the makeover. It would be over soon and then the $20,000 would be mine.

“Rubí has made several dresses for me,” Marlowe said. “DIY. Or what I like to call FFI—Fuck the Fashion Industry.” I had never heard anyone say the word
fuck
in such a variety of ways. There was little doubt what Huck's first word would be. It couldn't be a coincidence that his name rhymed with it.

Rubí chatted as she measured me, explaining that she was campaigning against Dabsitaf with Verena. Before becoming an activist, she said she had been a headless plus-size model. Her modeling agency had made a fortune selling photos and film footage of Rubí to the major news organizations. From the neck down, Rubí appeared in magazines and especially on news programs, where she was featured walking down the street in slow motion, an ice cream cone or hot dog in her hand, while the voice of the reporter gave scary statistics about expanding waistlines and type 2 diabetes and said things like, “The obesity epidemic is America's looming holocaust.” Rubí was filmed struggling to stand up from park benches and restaurant booths and airline seats. Dieting tips were flashed on the screen over a freeze-frame of her ass, which she said looked to be covered in acres of denim. Her head was never shown. Rubí was so successful as an “obesity epidemic” headless model that she earned a nickname in the industry: Marie Fatoinette.

“I gave up modeling to become an activist,” she said. “We all do things we regret when we're young, right?” I supposed that question was directed at me, but I remained silent, my arms outstretched, waiting for the inventory of my body to be finished. A dark-haired woman poked her head into the living room, glancing at me in my scarecrow pose. She didn't say anything, but bit into a green apple. Half her face was scarred. It looked melted and pink. I turned away from her and from Rubí, looking up at the ceiling. Verena's house was some kind of freak show.

When the measuring was over, Marlowe asked Verena to take care of Huck until her husband could pick him up. Verena was wearing a top that looked like a remnant of an old prom dress.

Before the makeover began in earnest, I felt compelled to check with her one last time: “You're going to give me the twenty thousand at the end of this, right?”

“Of course. A Baptist never lies.”

I looked at her skeptically.

“Correction.
This
Baptist never lies.”

Marlowe and I left Calliope House to begin what she called “a few days of fabulous fuckability fun.”

“Why don't you just call it attractiveness? I prefer that.”

“
Attractive
is too benign. Quaint. In our mothers' day, it used to be enough to have a pretty face or a nice
figure,
which was bad enough, but now you must be the perfect fuck-doll too.”

“What's a fuck-doll?”

Marlowe, oblivious to my question, spoke a language I didn't understand. She pulled a copy of
Fuckability Theory
from her bag and began to read from it:
“Page two: We all want to be attractive to our partner, but being fuckable is about more than that. It's about having a high fuckability quotient on the open market, as if we're stocks with a value that rises and falls.”

Our first stop was a salon with a pink awning. “My friend here has an appointment for a waxing,” Marlowe said to the woman who greeted us at the door. The woman was wearing a coat like a doctor might wear, except hers was pink.

“What am I having waxed?” I whispered to Marlowe.

“Everything, including the downstairs area.” When I began to protest, she said, “Fuckable women are hairless and smooth, like little girls.” I felt shocks in my fingers and toes as I followed the pink-coated woman through the salon and down a flight of stairs at the back.

The esthetician spoke English with an unidentified Latin American accent. “I'm Liliana,” she said, looking me over. “Take it all off, except the bra.” She turned her back, as if privacy were going to be possible. I realized I hadn't shaved my legs or armpits in months. The hair was dark and baby fine. I didn't want Liliana to see, but there was nothing I could do. I lay down on the table. She waxed my legs and underarms, my upper lip and eyebrows, then took a pair of scissors from a drawer. “Don't move,” she said as she began cutting the hair between my legs. She cut from the top all the way down to my ass. “You want a little Hitler?” she asked me. Had she said
Hitler?
“You want a little Hitler here?” she said again, putting her fingers on my mons. “Little strip, like Hitler mustache?” I said no.

Liliana dusted me with white powder, as if I were an enormous baby. She spread hot wax into every crevice and fold, all over my vulva and the sides of my legs, ripping off the wax with strips of cloth as she went. I gritted my teeth and held on to the table as what felt like a thousand ants bit me in the crotch at once. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” I mumbled when I saw the silver cross flailing around Liliana's neck. She lifted my left leg up, bending it at the knee and pressing it back toward my chest. She asked me to hold it there while she grunted and smeared the wax around. “Hold it! Hold it!” This part of my body was a wild expanse of uncharted territory, unknown to man, but Liliana wasn't deterred, attacking the thicket with gusto. She wiped off the blood with cotton pads, then slathered me with antiseptic ointment. I rolled over onto my stomach and she continued her work, spreading my butt apart and smearing wax in the crease, ripping it off with the strips. She asked me to get up on my hands and knees so she could have a better view, and pulled stray hairs with a tweezer. I was so embarrassed, I nearly left my body and floated to the ceiling. I wondered what it was like for the tiny Latina immigrant to spend her days in this basement room, her face in women's vulvas and asses, making perfect Hitler mustaches.
The American dream,
I thought.