Dietland (5 page)

After telephone calls to my father and the promised trip to Disneyland, my mother retreated to the study and rarely left it for the rest of the summer. If I wanted to see her I would tiptoe inside and curl next to her in bed. With the curtains closed it was dark; I couldn't see her but I could feel her hand on my head, playing with my hair. I listened to the tick of the fan in the corner, my nose filled with the smell of her sweat.

Delia managed a restaurant during the day. Herbert was retired and sat on the sofa watching “his shows,” beginning with
The Price Is Right
in the morning and lasting until dinnertime. He wasn't to be disturbed. He'd taken me to Kmart and bought me a stack of books, plus Colorforms, paper dolls, new roller skates, and a jump rope, expecting me to entertain myself.

One afternoon I sat in the front yard under the palm tree and read one of my new books. It was hot in California, much hotter than in Idaho, and I began to fantasize about a cherry Popsicle. As I was about to stand up, a blue car with two women inside stopped in front of the house. One of the women leaned out the passenger window with a bulky black camera and snapped the button several times. When she was finished, she eased back into the car and it sped away, the sound of the women's laughter trailing behind it.

I looked around, searching for something photo worthy, but saw nothing. Had she been taking a picture of me? I went into the house and peeked from behind the living room curtains to see if the women would return.

Herbert didn't register my presence as I sat down next to him on the sofa. On the coffee table, his reading glasses, in their snakeskin tube, rested on top of the open
TV Guide.
I tried to read my book again, but the game-show clapping made it difficult to concentrate. Pushing the curtains aside, I peered into the street but there was no one there. I went out with my Popsicle and sat under the tree, peeling down the sticky plastic wrapper and licking the red drops from my fingers.

A yellow convertible stopped. A girl leaned out the passenger window and snapped several photographs. She looked at me and laughed, then the convertible sped away, the wind blowing the girl's blond hair straight up like a flame.

When the sound of the car disappeared and everything was quiet again, I dumped my Popsicle in the dirt. What had the girl seen? I wanted to run to my mother, but she was inside the dark room.

“Herbert?” I said, stepping into the house. He shooed me away. For the rest of the afternoon I stayed hidden in the backyard, sitting with my books inside the small swimming pool, a concrete shell with no water.

I avoided the front yard for several days, but I didn't like being at the back of the house, which was cramped, with a collection of bamboo stalks in one corner, patio furniture in the other, and a concrete hole in the middle. When I was bored of reading and my crayons became soft in the heat, I strapped on my roller skates, thinking the dimpled concrete of the empty pool could serve as the perfect skating rink. Herbert saw me from the kitchen window and shouted that I would break my leg.

He kept a stash of Twinkies and fried fruit pies hidden behind the breadbox in the kitchen, so I took a Twinkie and went to the front yard in my skates. As I was sailing to the mailbox, my mouth full of yellow sponge and cream, a car stopped and I knew what was going to happen. A man stepped out of the car and took a series of photos, then drove away.

Delia came home that evening and saw me sitting at the kitchen table, reading my book. “Why aren't you outside, doll?” I shrugged. I didn't want to tell her that people were looking at me, that they stared and took photos and some of them even laughed.

On most nights, our dinner came from the restaurant. Delia unloaded Styrofoam containers from a brown paper bag and set them on the table. I ate my Reuben sandwich and coleslaw, weird food my mother never made at home. She didn't join us for dinner and I was left alone with Herbert and Delia, who talked about grown-up things. I looked out the front window from the table, watching for more cars. None came.

After dinner, Delia and Herbert sat on the back patio with wine and I was allowed to watch television in the front room, sitting in the crater left by Herbert on the green sofa. I watched two sitcoms and before the third came on, I went into the kitchen to get a glass of milk. On my way back to the living room, holding the glass to my lips, I saw a man standing outside the front window. He was large and looming. We locked eyes and then he rushed to his car and drove away.

I set my glass down on the coffee table, splashing milk onto Herbert's
TV Guide,
and ran to my bedroom. In my bed, from underneath the covers, I wondered: Who are these people? And why are they staring at me?

Before we moved into the house on Harper Lane, I had feared there was something wrong with me. Back home when we visited cousins they would laugh and call me Miss Piggy, until a chorus of mothers went
Shhhhhh.
In first grade, in Mrs. Palmer's class, the two girls who sat next to me, Melissa H. and Melissa D., told me they weren't inviting me to their Halloween party because I had fat germs. When I asked my mother what this meant, she said to ignore them.

I didn't know what other people saw when they looked at me. In the mirror I didn't see it. Now at Delia's house, things were even worse. People were taking photos and I didn't know why. During the day I hid in my bedroom and watched for them. Once when I was making a mess in the kitchen with peanut butter and jelly, two girls climbed over the fence into the backyard. I dropped the knife and screamed for Herbert, who flew out the back doors and chased the girls away. “Goddamn tourists,” he screamed. I looked outside in horror. Herbert came back into the house and tousled my hair. “Just ignore 'em, kiddo.”

Ignore them. That's what my mother had said.

I stayed away from the windows so that no one could see me. For most of the day I sat on the living room floor, wrapped in a blanket to protect me from the chill of the air conditioner, and watched Herbert's shows with him. When my mother left her room to go to the kitchen, she said I was spending too much time indoors. “She's not the only one,” Herbert said.

He and Delia took me to Sears and bought me a bicycle with purple tassels that dangled from the rubber handles. When we got home with the bike, they expected me to ride it up and down the street. I lasted for an hour, until a man and a woman in a silver van stopped outside the house. “Hello,
leetle
girl,” the man said in a weird voice.

When I went inside the house I was crying.

“What's wrong, sweet pea?” Delia asked, coming over and running her acrylic nails down my back. “Did you fall off your bike?”

“People are looking at me.”

“Who is?”

“People in cars. They stop in front of the house and take photos of me.”

Delia began to laugh, holding her hand over her mouth, her frosty pink nails hiding a wide smile. “They're not taking photos of you, doll. They're taking photos of the house. A famous lady used to live here. I've been in the house so long, I don't notice those crazy people anymore.”

Delia told me about Myrna Jade, a silent film star of the 1920s. Delia said she hadn't heard of Myrna Jade when she bought the house. “It was an absolute wreck. Completely falling apart. You never would've imagined a movie star had lived here.” Myrna Jade had been forgotten, her films out of circulation, until a historian wrote a book about her in the 1970s, which was turned into a popular film in the 1980s. “Myrna mania,” Delia called it. “Now my house is on one of them
star maps
and people drive by at all hours of the day and night. It's mostly Europeans. I know it's annoying, doll—believe me, I know, but there's nothing I can do about it, so don't pay 'em any attention.”

I wasn't sure I believed Delia, thinking a movie star would live in a castle, not a small stone house. I wondered if she was trying to make me feel better. I went to my bedroom for the rest of the evening and when it was time for bed, I put on my pajamas and peeked outside. A flashbulb.
Pop.
Then two more.
Pop. Pop.
Electric flowers in the night sky.

 

• • •

THE WOMEN WHO CAME BEFORE ME
were black-and-white. My grandmother, mother of my mother, died before I was born, but there are photographs of her. In my favorite one she is a young woman, standing next to her sister on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, the two of them clasping their arms and smiling as they look into the camera lens. I like to think that my grandmother was looking through time toward my mother and me, though she couldn't have imagined us then. She's a teenager in the photo, her hair bobbed in the style of the 1920s. She and her sister are wearing polka-dotted dresses and both of them are round all over. Even as a girl I saw myself in them. I knew we were connected, like a string of round white pearls stretching into the past.

When my mother was little she was black-and-white like them, but not round like them. On the day I was born, she looked at me and knew she would call me something other than the name she'd put on my birth certificate. “You had the darkest hair,” she said, “long enough to wrap around my fingers. Your skin was rosy pink. You were so succulent and sweet, my little Plum.”

A pearl, a plum—roundness defined me.

Every year on the first day of school the teacher would take attendance, and when she reached my name, she would say, “Alicia Kettle?” and then I'd have to tell her I was called Plum.

Plum. Plump. Piggy.

Alicia is me but not me.

We lived in the house on Harper Lane for five months and then we moved to our own apartment. My father stayed in Idaho and my parents got divorced. My mother's salary as a secretary in a university biology department afforded us a place with dark woodwork that sucked up the sunlight, and carpet a vomitous orange. We lived in the apartment for a few years, until Herbert died of a stroke. Delia was so unhappy living alone that she begged us to move back to the house with the starers, the gawkers, the photograph-takers.

The schools near Delia's house were better for me, my mother said, and she was excited about the possibility of escaping the apartment complex with the dirty diapers floating in the pool. She had made up her mind to go, and so we went.

In the house on Harper Lane we were under constant surveillance. Sitting at the breakfast table, I'd look up from my oatmeal to see a figure outside the front window, which would bolt away like a frightened mouse when my slipper hit the glass. In my bedroom I kept the curtains closed, but I knew they were out there. Delia and my mother didn't seem to mind the strangers' stares and camera lenses. When they were away from home they could escape—for them it was only temporary.

At school, there was nowhere for me to hide. I was surrounded. There were so many of them that I never knew for certain who was looking. All day I felt the urge to turn away, to close up like a flower in the shade.

I kept what happened at school to myself. Sometimes at the end of the day I would find spit in my hair or a note taped to my back that read
DO ME A FAVOR, POP ME!
My first year of high school, after an older classmate was raped in the vacant lot behind Von's, the school offered self-defense classes for girls. When I showed up, two girls snickered and said, loudly enough for everyone else to hear, “Who'd want to rape her?”

On the telephone to Idaho, I said: “Daddy, do you think I'm pretty?” I knew he would say yes because he was my father.

During my sophomore year of high school, a boy asked me to the homecoming dance. I was suspicious of boys, since they never paid me any attention unless it was for name-calling or worse, but my mother insisted that I go. She dropped me off outside the school gym and I waited for the boy in the parking lot for more than an hour, the wispy ends of my homemade lavender gown dragging in pools of motor oil. The boy never came and everyone knew. They had seen.

I wanted to become smaller so I wouldn't be seen.

If I was smaller they wouldn't stare. They wouldn't be mean.

 

• • •

AT CARMEN'S CAFé
, my laptop opened before me, I couldn't concentrate on the messages from Kitty's readers. I'd set Verena Baptist's book on the empty chair next to me, having read a few chapters the day before. I kept glancing at it:
Adventures in Dietland.
It wasn't the type of book I'd normally read, but I had the urge to go home and devour its pages. I didn't know why the girl had left the book for me or why she'd been in the Austen Tower. It seemed impossible that she could be part of Kitty's world and yet she'd been in Kitty's office. I hadn't seen her since then, so I wondered if her little game was finished.

Ever since I'd laid my eyes on the book, and the name Verena Baptist, I'd been transported to Harper Lane. The girl couldn't have known anything about my past, or that I'd been a Baptist, but thanks to her I couldn't stop thinking about that time, when I was the age of Kitty's girls. I pushed my laptop aside and began to read again. The memories weren't welcome, but the book pulled me back.

I became a Baptist during the spring of my junior year of high school. I was sick with the flu and stayed home from school for three days, doing nothing but watching television. The personalities that populated the daytime airwaves were unfamiliar to me, particularly the smiling spokespeople advertising products I hadn't known existed. I had never heard the name Eulayla Baptist before, but she appeared in a series of commercials for Baptist Weight Loss. I had never heard of that, either.

In each commercial, an old photograph of Eulayla Baptist filled the screen. She was enormous in a pair of faded jeans, trying to shield her face from the camera. In a voiceover, she said: “That was me, Eulayla Baptist. Back then I was so fat, I couldn't even play with my daughter.” Sad violins swelled in the background, reaching a crescendo as thin Eulayla burst through the photograph, ripping it to shreds. She stood in a
ta-da!
pose, her arms extended toward the heavens.