Dietland (21 page)

“Tying up a girl and [bleep]ing in her face while screaming that she's a dirty [bleep]ing whore?” Cheryl Crane-Murphy asked.

“It's called freedom of speech, Cheryl. It's in the Constitution,” Monika T. said.

In Los Angeles, the mother of Luz Ayala, the girl who'd jumped in front of the train, was about to appear in a televised press conference. Soledad Ayala had been blamed for her daughter's rape, for being away in Afghanistan when it happened. She stepped forward to the podium now. Her head was ringed with a black braid, secured tightly in the way of military women, with no wayward strands, no hint of whimsy. She wore an ankle-length dark blue dress and no makeup or jewelry, her only adornment a badge on her chest that bore her daughter's smiling face.

“It's been a month since Luz's suicide,” Soledad began. “I admit I've taken comfort in the deaths of two of my daughter's rapists, knowing they won't be able to attack anyone else. I'm not ashamed of this.” She was looking down at a piece of paper, eyes hidden behind her lids, head tilted gently to the side, displaying the muted solemnity of a Madonna. “I've come here today at the request of the FBI. We don't know if you're a real person, Jennifer, but I would like to speak to you as if you are, woman to woman. I served as a medic in Afghanistan and I saw death, too much death. When you take a life, you lose part of yourself. I don't want this to happen to you. Tell us, Jennifer: When will the violence end? You want change, we can all see that, but let's find a way to work together.” Soledad's voice cracked at the end. With her statement finished, the insect sound of the clicking cameras intensified. She waved away reporters' questions and disappeared into a group of dark-suited federal agents.

“That woman is the epitome of bravery,” said Cheryl Crane-Murphy, dabbing a tissue at her crusty lower lids. “She served her country honorably in Afghanistan, and while she was gone, a pack of wild animals ripped her daughter apart.”

I switched off the television, having seen enough for one afternoon. Luz was even younger than most of Kitty's girls, the girls I had been deleting. I wondered if something so terrible had ever happened to one of them.

For a moment it was silent in my apartment, but then the phone began ringing. I knew it was Verena or Marlowe and didn't answer it. Since the makeover, they'd left many messages for me, but I had no intention of talking to them. I wished that I had never gone to Verena's house and had never gotten involved with her and the so-called New Baptist Plan. As with the original Baptist Plan, by the end of it I was fat and unhappy. I'd been replaying everything that'd happened during the makeover with Marlowe, and what happened after—the visit to the plastic surgeon, the man's fist coming at me. At night when I was trying to fall asleep I saw his fist.

The bottle of Dabsitaf I'd stolen from Verena was sitting on the coffee table. I reached for it and shook it, listening to the pills rattle like dead bugs in the amber plastic. If I decided against surgery, I could use the $20,000 to fly to Paris several times and stock up on the drug. Verena said there could be deadly side effects, but the same was true of the surgery. And besides, even crossing the street carried risks.

I considered taking one of the pills, but I didn't have an appetite so there was no point. No matter where my thoughts wandered, they kept returning to the man on the subway platform. Would he have hit Alicia? Maybe he would have flirted with her and she would have been flattered. The thought of it made me hate Alicia, and I didn't want to hate her.

There was a knock at the door, and through the peephole I saw that it was a deliveryman with a brown parcel. I told him to set it outside the door, and when he was gone I took it inside, knowing what it was before I opened it—one of Alicia's new dresses, a pool of silky emerald fabric. Alicia didn't deserve such a nice dress, not after her flirtation with the nasty man on the subway platform, but then, Alicia didn't know he was nasty. Only Plum could see that side of him.

The telephone rang again but I didn't answer it. When I listened to the message, I expected to hear the voice of my mother or Verena, but it was a man named Preston, reminding me of our date.

The blind dates. Somehow I had forgotten it was time for the first one. Dates with four men awaited me, for which I had Verena's dentist, Gina, to thank.

“Well, hello there,” Preston said when I called him back to cancel. I rested on the sofa, holding Alicia's new emerald dress. Preston told me that he had made a reservation at a restaurant called Christo's and asked if that was okay.

“About that, I don't think—”

“If you don't like Greek food, we can go somewhere else.”

He chattered on. Gina via Verena had sent me notes about each man. Preston was a financial analyst and Gina's cousin. I finally managed to say that I wasn't sure if the date was a good idea.

“I don't like blind dates either,” he said, trying to sound casual, trying to win me over. “But let's just do it. No pressure. At the very least we'll have a nice dinner, right?” He was almost pleading, and I wanted to laugh. He thought he was speaking to a normal woman. He had no reason to assume otherwise; my voice sounded normal.

I had already fulfilled the first three tasks and there was no sense quitting now with only two tasks left, so I agreed to the date. I wanted to see the look on his face when he saw me. Plum would be humiliated, which is what she deserved.

There were several hours till the date, but I began to get ready, knowing it would take a while. My waxed body had begun to sprout hairs, so I lightly shaved my legs and underarms. The sink and the tile floor were littered with short black pieces of hair and drops of blood. I wiped up the blood with a piece of toilet tissue. I didn't shave often and realized I should have done this in the tub. In the mirror I saw that my vulva was still mostly hairless and sleek. I didn't like looking at it. Even the place from where I pissed and bled had needed beautification and improvement.

I bathed and washed my hair, then put on my underpants and Thinz and control-top tights and my push-up bra. The white and purple dress that Rubí had made for me was black at the knees from the subway platform, so I wore one of my usual black dresses. I was like a horse all saddled up. Sitting down at dinner would be difficult, never mind eating, but girls didn't eat on dates. At least I didn't think they did. I'd never really been on a date, so I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I tried to remember what characters in movies did. Deception was part of it. Pretending to be prettier, slimmer, and less hungry.
Being a woman means being a faker.
That's what Marlowe had said.

I fixed my hair in the bathroom mirror, straightening and smoothing the black bob. Next I applied the makeup as the makeover expert had shown me: primer, foundation, concealer. This erased much of my natural face. Then I began to paint with my brushes, applying the blusher and bronzer first, but then wiping them off because I looked burned from the sun, not sun kissed; I was aiming for sun kissed. Next, my eyes. I curled my lashes, what there were of them; I lined my eyes and then daubed a light shadow over my lids and applied mascara. Then I penciled in my brows, saving my lips for last. After looking through my collection of liners and lipsticks, I settled on a pink shade called Statutory.

I stood back to observe. According to Marlowe, the makeup was meant to enhance my fuck-me look, but the face in the mirror didn't say
fuck me,
it said
punch me,
as it had said to the man on the subway platform. The bruise had faded, but I didn't want it to fade. I wanted everyone to see it. I turned away from the mirror and tried to resist what I felt like doing, but I couldn't. I balled my right hand into a fist and then punched myself on the lip, on the spot with the faded bruise. I hit myself once and then again so it would hurt more. Hurt is what I wanted.
It hurts, but it feels good too.

Preston

I heard the street door downstairs open and braced myself for the knock at my apartment door, and then for
the stare.
Preston would be expecting a thin person—people always expect a thin person—and so I knew when he laid eyes on me for the first time, he would react as everyone reacts, by trying to hide his surprise and disappointment, even revulsion. From the inside I felt small and insignificant, but that's not what people saw when they looked at me.

It took a few moments for me to overcome my reluctance to open the door. Once I opened it, I saw standing before me Preston, a generic white guy with brown hair, around thirty years old. And there it was:
the stare.
“Hello. You're . . . uh. Is Plum at home?”

“I'm Plum,” I said, hating the sound of my name.

“No you're not.” Preston laughed.

The door was obscuring half my face, the bruise hidden. Preston reached for my arm. “Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't . . . I mean, sometimes Gina plays these practical jokes on me and I—” He ran his finger around his shirt collar. “Let's have dinner,” he said.

I went inside to get my handbag, letting the door close slowly behind me as Preston stood in the hallway. He made no move to open it or come inside. I collected my bag from the kitchen counter, but when I went back to the door, instead of opening it, I locked it—the double bolt and the chain.

“Plum?” Preston called from the other side.

“Go away.”

He didn't argue with me. I heard him walk down the stairs and open the door to the street.

Jack

My next date was with Jack. According to Gina's notes, he was an assistant professor of literature at NYU. I readied myself in the same way as I had for my first date, putting on makeup and compression garments, though this time I covered up the bruise on my lip with a bit of concealer. My face was finished, my
fuck me
look complete—except I didn't think Jack would want to fuck me. He would be like Preston.

My wands and brushes were scattered over the shelf in the bathroom, but I didn't put them away. I decided to continue. I applied powder to my face, the lightest powder that I could find in my bag of tricks, covering up the foundation and blusher I had just applied.
Your skin is white as a rose,
Julia had said when we first met, but now it was whiter than that, a shimmery corpse-white. I reached for a lacquered compact with a cake of black powder meant to be wetted and used to line the eyes in a sexy Cleopatra way, but I smeared it over my lids instead, all the way up to my brows and under my eyes as well. I added layers until my eyes were sunken into dark black holes, like the hollow pits in a skull. My lips were already painted with Juicy Plum, the shade that Julia had given to me, but I added some of the black powder so they were purplish and dark, the lips of someone deprived of oxygen. When I stood back to observe, Jack was already knocking.

“Just a minute,” I called, slipping on the white and purple dress with the stained knees.

When I opened the door I saw another generic white guy, this time with blond hair. “Are you . . .”

“Plum, that's me.”

I couldn't be sure, but he didn't seem to notice the makeup. He didn't seem to know where to put his eyes; they jutted every which way but at me, to the door frame, to his watch, to his feet. Finally he scanned my body, trying to take me all in. He swallowed a lot. We made it as far as the bottom of the stairs before he said, “I heard you work at a fashion magazine.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“No offense or anything, but you're not really my type. I'm attracted to a different sort of woman. It's nothing against you personally or anything. I don't like redheads either, not that you're a redhead, but you know what I mean.”

We stood at the bottom of the stairs, on the inside of the street door. He didn't want to be seen with me in public. “Let's forget dinner. Go home,” I said. Then I added, “You're not my type either. You look like a girl.”

He wiped a curl back from his forehead. I walked up the stairs and knew he was watching me from behind, my ass cheeks moving, my hand grasping the rail as I huffed my way to the top. “Fat bitch,” he called after me.

I reached the landing and turned to face him, out of breath. “I'm afraid you'll have to try harder than that to insult me, sweetheart. I'm bulletproof.” Thanks to the New Baptist Plan, my sensitive side was growing a callus.

Once in the apartment, I locked the door and held my breath until I heard the downstairs door shut. I took off my tights and the Thinz and my bra and my dress. I washed off all the Halloween makeup and then rummaged in the cupboards. I didn't have my appetite back, but I pulled out a graham cracker, broke off a corner (15), and popped it in my mouth.

“Fat bitch,” I said.

Alexander

I was going to meet Alexander at a BBQ restaurant in Brooklyn Heights. Once again I was wearing the white and purple dress, which I had washed out in the sink, leaving the knees not black but a dishwater gray. For this date I wore only light makeup and no Thinz. There was no need to go to extremes. Alexander was blind.

When I read Gina's notes I was intrigued. I had often wondered what it would be like to have a blind boyfriend. I thought it might feel nice for a blind person to run his hands over so many soft layers, without the hardness of bones getting in the way.

In the taxi on the way to the restaurant, a wave of nausea hit me. The never-ending symptoms of Y—— withdrawal. I nearly fell over onto the back seat.

“We're here,” the driver said, and I picked up my head.

Inside the restaurant, the hostess, wearing a denim skirt, led me to the middle of the crowded room, forcing me to squeeze between the tables. When I arrived at Alexander's table, there was no
stare.
What a relief, I thought. He took my hand in his, but I pulled it back quickly, worried that my fleshy fingers might give me away. I was playing Alicia tonight.