by Sarai Walker
On the night of a retirement party, I worked extra hours to help Chef Elsa prep. The woman who did the baking in the restaurant had prepared macaroons earlier in the day, which Elsa asked me to arrange on platters. Alone in the kitchen, my hands sheathed in crinkly plastic gloves, I stacked the macaroons in a pyramid formation. Six weeks of systematic starvation had weakened me. For every macaroon that made it onto the platters, another went into my apron pocket. When I finished, Delia took the macaroons into the dining room, noticing neither the slightness of the pyramids nor the bulges in my pockets.
I went to the bathroom, but two waitresses were there, styling their hair and putting on makeup, so I went into the back alley and sat down on the concrete steps next to the trash cans. When my hand first grazed the macaroons in my pocket, I could have stopped for a moment and used my training; I could have written in my food journal or done jumping jacks, but I didn’t. One macaroon slipped into my mouth, and then two, and then as many as would fit. I consumed them so hurriedly that at first I didn’t enjoy the shock of creamy coconut against my tongue. I stuffed three macaroons into my mouth before stopping to catch my breath, and then I made room for two more. My face flushed and burned and I began to cry. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I couldn’t eat the macaroons fast enough. A ball of coconut formed in my throat. I paused to swallow, then continued working through my stash, wiping my nose with my sleeve as I chewed. I was still wearing plastic gloves. I felt like a criminal.
As I swallowed the last cookie, my face stained with tears and mascara, I saw Luis and Eduardo nearby in the alley, smoking. I didn’t know how long they had been there. They were looking at me—they had seen.
After so many weeks without much food, my stomach, shriveled like a raisin, was struggling to absorb the explosion of calories. I felt a sharp pain at my center as I made my way home. I expected to be sick, but once the pain was gone, I felt better than I had in ages. My headache disappeared. I had grown so accustomed to having a headache that not having one felt strange; there was a feeling of release, as if a belt that had been fastened tightly around my head was suddenly loosened. I slept through the night for the first time since becoming a Baptist.
The next day when I awoke, the hunger was there again. I had slept late and missed breakfast, so I drank two Baptist Shakes, but they didn’t satisfy my hunger beast, and when he wasn’t satisfied he gnawed at me. I couldn’t bear being trapped in the house with him and decided to eat my dinner, though it was only one o’clock. Then I ate a second dinner, then drank another shake; then I heated up a Baptist pizza, which was just shavings of plastic cheese on a crust as thin as matzo. The kitchen counter was littered with empty pink trays and bottles and pieces of silver plastic, which were gummy and stuck to the countertops. I gathered up the evidence and took it outside to the garbage can so that no one would find out. As I made my way back into the house, I saw a woman with a camera pointed at me. She had seen.
I didn’t feel full or happy after my binge. With the macaroons, I’d had a taste of real food, and now I wanted more. I called Nicolette. “I thought you were dead,” she said. That’s what people had said about Eulayla Baptist, too.
“I’m not dead, I’ve just been removed from the world of food.” We went to the mall, Nicolette’s mother driving us in her gold Mercedes with her bumper sticker: NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS. Nicolette could eat whatever she wanted and never gain weight—that’s why her mother hated her, she said. At the mall, we ate chili dogs and nachos with extra jalapeños and washed it all down with sugary cherry lemonade. We bought soft pretzels and funnel cakes dusted with powdered sugar and ate it all. We made a point of browsing CDs and shoes, but we were only at the mall for the food.
Before leaving, I bought half a dozen donuts from Winchell’s to take home, topped with white icing and rainbow sprinkles.
After bingeing on donuts at 2 a.m., I feel: euphoric
At my next meeting with Gladys, filled with guilt, I confessed everything. She held my hand, urging me to find the strength to transcend my bodily cravings. “A Baptist isn’t afraid to admit she failed,” Gladys said, “but a Baptist never loses faith in herself either.” As I listened to her, it almost seemed possible. She gave me a pamphlet with Eulayla on the cover, entitled “I Don’t Want to Be Thin—I Choose Health!”9 There were sections on high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. Gladys said I was at risk for all these diseases if I quit the Baptist Plan. “Do you want to die before you’re forty, hon?” She told me about her sister who was the same size as me and infertile.
I cried as Gladys weighed me and I discovered I had already gained back half the weight. All of the suffering I’d endured was for nothing and the new life I’d envisioned was slipping away, all because I was a pig. I resolved to do better and become a good Baptist again. I wasn’t going to meet my goal weight on schedule, but Gladys assured me this was normal, that it happened to everyone, including her.10
The Baptist lifestyle consumed me again. I hid in my bedroom, accepted feeling sick, avoided my friend, and in my head repeated the phrase the pink trays, the pink trays, like a mantra, reminding myself that if I only ate what was in the pink trays and nothing more, I would become thin and I wouldn’t die before age forty.
Each week as I left the clinic with my pink trays and shakes, I promised myself I’d be good. But it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t remain a Baptist for much longer.
When I arrived at the clinic one afternoon, the women were crying. A distraught Gladys told me that Eulayla Baptist and her husband had been killed in a car accident in Atlanta. “There was a rainstorm,” Gladys managed to say. “They lost control of the car. She’s gone.”
I looked at the poster of Eulayla holding up her fat jeans. “Gone? You mean forever? That’s impossible.” I steadied myself against a chair.
Within days, Gladys called with the bad news. “Eulayla’s daughter is shutting us down,” she said through her sobs. “The company is closed. We’re finished.”
I went immediately to the clinic with the intention of hoarding food, but when I got there the doors were already padlocked. There was no sign of Gladys or any of the other staff. “No,” I cried, pounding on the doors. Other women milled around on the sidewalk, gaunt and dejected, probably on the verge of meltdowns but too weak for histrionics.
“Why?” howled one of the distraught women, placing her hands on my shoulders. “Why does Eulayla’s daughter hate us?”
When I arrived home, my mother was sitting on the front steps, peeling an orange. I sat down next to her.
“What’s wrong?”
“No more Baptist Weight Loss. Eulayla’s daughter closed all the clinics.”
“Good for her.”
I watched my mother drop the curls of rind onto the ground between her feet. I was in mourning and she was nothing but pleased. From my bag, I pulled the before picture that Gladys had taken of me. I was twenty-five pounds lighter than that, but still fat. School was starting soon, and without the Baptist clinic, my plans for my last year of high school and then college in Vermont were going to unravel. I feared I would stay a before picture forever.
A vintage car stopped in front of the house, probably from the 1960s, small and black like a bug. A man sat in the driver’s seat and next to him a teenage girl, who stepped out of the car with a camera. She stood on the sidewalk before my mother and me and raised the camera to her eye. They were always going to be looking at me. That was my destiny.
“Go away,” I screamed, rising to my feet. The girl turned back toward the car and raced to open the door. As it sputtered away I chased after it, grabbing the lid off one of our metal trash cans as I leapt off the curb, hurling it into the middle of the street and letting out a roar. It landed in the street with a cymbal crash, rumbling the pavement where I stood. The car disappeared around the bend at the end of the road.
When I turned around, my mother was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house.
�
�Plum?”
I faced her from the street, standing where the starers normally stood, a brief moment of reversal. The house was nothing special from the outside, but I had lived there for much of my life. If the photos from all the tourists were collected and placed in chronological order, I could have flipped through them to see the girl under the tree become a young woman, one who grew larger and larger, moving into the house, standing behind the curtain—half in the frame, then nothing but shadow.
DRINK ME
• • •
• • •
TWO DAYS AFTER FINDING Adventures in Dietland at Kitty’s office, I had nearly finished reading it. I should have been at the café answering messages, but I’d abandoned my work for the book. I soaked in a bath while reading, careful not to dampen the custard-colored pages.
Twelve years had passed since I was a Baptist. I had rarely thought of that time over the years, but as I read, the memories of the Baptist Plan came alive in my mind. I could taste the food: the metallic, watered-down tomato of the pizza and pasta, the casseroles that tasted the way carpet cleaner smells. I remembered the Baptist Shakes, their chalky texture, their medicinal, sour aftertaste. When the company closed, I knew only the most superficial details: Verena Baptist inherited the company and as the sole shareholder she had the power to shut it down, which she did within days of her parents’ fiery car crash. I had hated Eulayla Baptist’s daughter then, but I had never known her name. Now, thanks to the girl, I held her words in my hands.
Verena wrote that after she closed the company, she was left with “gallons of Baptist Shakes, vats of beef stew, and truckloads of chicken breasts slathered in a mysterious goo,” all of which were given to soup kitchens and homeless shelters, “to people who were starving by no choice of their own.” Verena described this as an act of charity, and I supposed the Baptist meals were slightly better than nothing.
I couldn’t help but feel disgusted and angry while reading about Eulayla Baptist. Like all Baptists, I’d been destined to fail, but I blamed myself when I did. I may have hated Eulayla’s daughter once, but as I read the book I was glad that she’d exposed her mother. I knew my failure as a Baptist wasn’t my fault.
I did wonder why Verena turned on her mother so publicly. Verena slipped through the pages of the book for the most part, but in the first paragraph she was there, most tellingly: “Before my birth, Mama was a slim young bride. She and Daddy set up house in Atlanta and for one shining year things couldn’t have been better. Then one tipsy night after martinis on the veranda with the Ambersons from across the street, Daddy impregnated Mama with a bomb that took nine months to blow up, leaving her fat and scarred, with stretch marks and a waistline that looked like an inner tube.”
That bomb was Verena. She had ruined her mother’s figure, which led to an obsession with dieting, which led to the horror of Baptist Weight Loss being inflicted on the world. I wondered if this was why Verena had decided to disgrace her dead mother in print and reveal her secrets: She’d been made to feel guilty for being born.
The book wasn’t only about Baptist Weight Loss. Verena attempted to expose the entire weight-loss industry. She wrote extensively about the many weight-loss authors and gurus, diet drugs, even the surgery I was planning to have. She devoted a whole chapter to liberating oneself from what she called Dietland. “Dietland is about making women small,” Verena wrote. I thought my mother would enjoy her book. I was sure she would have sent me a copy if she knew of its existence.
Inside the book were photographs of Eulayla, one from her beauty queen days and another from her fat years, as well as the famous photo of thin Eulayla holding up her fat jeans. In one photo, her face was taut and her legs were slim, but she was still slightly roomy in the hips. I looked at the photo and thought that in death, Eulayla had finally achieved what had eluded her in life. As a corpse she was as thin as she could ever hope to be. Just skin and bones, I imagined.
There was a short author bio on the back of the book: “Verena Baptist lives in New York City, where she manages Calliope House, a feminist organization.” That was it. There was no photograph of her, no way to put a face to the name of the woman whom I had once hated so much for ruining my dream.
I closed the book and tossed it onto the bathroom floor, not wanting to think of my Baptist days any longer. After I was forced off the Baptist Plan, I spent most of my senior year of high school eating. I couldn’t stop. At Delia’s restaurant I served as an apprentice to the woman who did the baking, and I gorged on cakes and cookies and pies. By the time I started college I had gained back all the pounds I’d lost and added many more. In college I joined Waist Watchers, since they held meetings right on campus. When I became disillusioned with their program I followed the diet plans outlined in books and magazines. I took diet pills, including one that was later recalled by the FDA after several people died. I took a supplement from a company in Mexico, but gave it up after it caused violent stomach pains. For all of my junior year, I drank a chocolate diet shake for breakfast and lunch, which turned my bowel movements into stones, causing hemorrhoids, and which tasted even worse than the Baptist Shakes had tasted. I was too squeamish for bulimia and lacked the masochism needed for anorexia, so once I had cycled through every diet I could find, I went back to Waist Watchers.
In the years that had passed since I’d joined Baptist Weight Loss, I’d gained nearly a hundred pounds. After reading Adventures in Dietland, I felt certain that surgery was the right option for me. Verena would have been horrified by this response, since she railed against weight-loss surgery except in life-threatening situations, but her intentions in writing the book didn’t matter. She had proven that dieting doesn’t work. I was grateful to her for that.
The memories exhausted me, and I relaxed for a while in the tub, the water lukewarm but not unpleasant. I no longer thought the girl was trying to be mean by giving me Verena’s book, but I still didn’t know what she wanted. When the phone started ringing, I didn’t want to get out of the water. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message, but a few minutes later the ringing started again. Annoyed, I left the bath and stomped naked down the hallway, leaving pools of water behind me on the floor.
“Is this Ms. Kettle?”
“Yes.”
“Is this Plum?”
“Who is this?”
“This is Erica calling from Austen Human Resources. We need you to come to the office on Monday at ten a.m. to sign a form.”
“What form?”
“A form you need to sign. There’s a problem with your health insurance.”
“All right,” I said, irritated at the thought of another trip to Manhattan.
“Please come to the Human Resources office on the twenty-seventh floor. Thank you, goodbye.”
Austen Media was the furthest thing from my mind. Since starting Verena’s book I had ignored Kitty’s girls. They were trapped inside my laptop—a Pandora’s box I refused to open.
• • •
ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH FLOOR of the Austen Tower, I stepped off the elevator and walked down a long carpeted corridor. At the end was a floor-to-ceiling window, revealing the breadth of midtown Manhattan in a blaze of sunlight. The corridor was like a diving board perched above a sea of buildings. I placed my toes and forehead against the glass and looked down at the streets below.
Erica, the woman who’d pestered me on the phone, greeted me in the Human Resources office. She produced a clipboard with a form that had the logo of Tri-State Health at the top. “Please read this and sign,” she said, sitting next to me in the waiting area. The form contained little content and only asked me to confirm the insurance plan I’d chosen when I began working for Kitty.
“Terrific,” Erica said when I handed the clipboard back to her. “I’ll walk you to the elevator.”
“That’s it? I came all the way from Brooklyn.”
“You don’t want your insurance to expire, do you?”
I wanted to reply to her in the s
ame snotty tone, but it wasn’t worth it. I gathered my things and she escorted me out of the office, which I thought was unnecessary.
As we waited for the elevator, I looked out the window and thought of the diving board again. The idea of lifting off, of diving into midtown, absorbed me until I heard a crinkling sound. The corridor was so bright that I had to strain to see that Erica had removed my insurance form from the clipboard and was stuffing it into the mouth of a trash can.
“Hey, that’s my form.”
“Go to Basement Two,” she whispered. “B-Two. You’ll have to change elevators at the lobby.”
“What’s going on?”
She held her arm between the elevator doors, preventing them from closing. “Go on, hurry up. I have to get back to work.”
I was in the elevator and descending, my vision splotchy from the sunlight, when only one thing came to mind: the girl.
In the lobby, I hesitated, but then couldn’t resist finding out what was going to happen if I followed Erica’s directions. I looked for the bank of elevators that would take me to B2. When I reached the basement, two floors beneath the Austen Tower, I was standing before a set of double doors, a tarnished silver portal with a sign attached to it that read BEAUTY CLOSET. There was a keypad to the right of the doors, and a button, like a doorbell.
The elevator doors closed behind me. I stepped to the silver doors and rang the bell. A number of seconds passed, but there was no sound or hint of a human being on the other side.
I was about to ring the bell again when I heard the faintest noise. I pressed my ear to the door. Click-clop, click-clop. The sound grew steadily louder. Click-clop, click-clop, like a horse in a Western film. Click-clop. I listened for a minute longer and realized it was the sound of someone wearing high heels, approaching from a great distance. Click-clop.