by Sarai Walker
The death of Dr. Brown’s daughter, United States Army private Shonda Brown, had been ruled a suicide. She was the first African American woman from Texas to die in the Iraq War, a distinction her father would rather she didn’t have. On her death certificate, the cause of death was listed as gunshot wound, self-inflicted. In the three years since she died, this had not been amended.
Shonda had been stationed at Camp Mojave in Iraq. In her letters and calls home, she seemed untroubled, yet army investigators said she had shot herself in the head with an M16, leaving no note behind. After her body was shipped home, Dr. Brown examined her at the local mortuary, where she was in full military dress. The white gloves she wore on her hands were glued to her skin. That was the first sign that something was wrong. Upon close inspection, Dr. Brown saw that his daughter’s face was bruised and her teeth broken. The exit wound at the back of her head was small, too; not from an M16, her father reasoned, but from a pistol.
He asked the funeral home to remove his daughter’s clothing and to cut the gloves from her skin. Her hands were found to be scraped and burned. There were bruises all over her arms and legs. When he received the autopsy report, he read that her genitals were burned with bleach. Shonda’s father had known all along that his daughter hadn’t committed suicide. He couldn’t understand how such a conclusion was ever reached.
For three years, through their congressional representative and the Freedom of Information Act, Shonda’s parents collected evidence about their daughter’s rape and murder. In his investigations, Dr. Brown learned of other American servicewomen who had “committed suicide” in Iraq by seemingly impossible means, such as multiple fatal gunshot wounds or being run over by a truck. Talking to the women’s families made him feel as if he was doing something, even if he was powerless in Shonda’s case.
Near the third anniversary of Shonda’s death, her parents received an unexpected break in their investigation. After he was discharged, Sergeant Lance Pederson committed suicide by asphyxiation in his brother’s garage. Before his death, he wrote a letter to the Browns, telling them that their daughter had been raped by two of their fellow soldiers stationed at Camp Mojave—Michael Simmons and Davis Green. He didn’t know if they had murdered her, but they had raped her. Everyone knew it.
Shonda’s parents turned the letter over to army investigators. Simmons and Green, by this time both private citizens in Los Angeles, were interviewed, but there was no evidence that Shonda had ever been raped, and no rape kit was ever done. Officially: gunshot wound, self-inflicted.
In an act of desperation, Shonda’s parents put the names and photos of Simmons and Green on the website they’d set up for Shonda. What if they rape someone else? Shonda’s mother had asked. What if they commit another murder? Simmons and Green threatened to sue and even hired a lawyer, but now it would never come to that.
Dr. Brown sat in his living room, watching the reports that showed aerial footage of the Harbor Freeway interchange, the brown canvas bags, and the videos of Jayson Fox vomiting. Dr. Brown knew who was in those bags, he just knew. The night before, he had received an email with a file attached. On the file were video confessions, one by Simmons, one by Green, admitting what they had done to Shonda in the kind of detail that left no doubt they were telling the truth. The footage was reminiscent of the videos made by suicide bombers. The men sat in front of an American flag and spoke directly into the camera, knowing that death was upon them.
• • •
MORE THAN A WEEK HAD PASSED since my encounter with Julia in the Beauty Closet. She wanted the email addresses of every girl who’d written to Kitty since I’d started my job. There were at least 50,000 of them. When I asked Julia why she wanted them, she said she had her reasons. “It’s for a good and noble cause,” she said, “but it’s better that you don’t know the particulars. Then you’ll never have to lie.”
I knew I could get in trouble if I gave her the addresses, which I couldn’t afford, since losing my job and my health insurance before the surgery would derail my plans. I had tried to stop thinking about Julia’s request. There was nothing in it for me and it was reckless to even consider it, yet I’d been turning it over, unable to forget our meeting. Julia, Leeta, and Verena’s book had disrupted the rhythm of my days.
To distract myself, I heated up a slice of my turkey lasagna (230), then turned on the television, placing my plate on the coffee table in front of me. The Cheryl Crane-Murphy Report was on. She was discussing the murders of Simmons and Green, as every news channel had been doing for days. The Harbor Freeway interchange was a familiar sight.
“Do I think they deserved to be murdered? Well, as a committed Christian I believe murder is wrong, but at the end of the day I’m not shedding any tears over these thugs. Sue me.” Cheryl Crane-Murphy was like a middle-aged male politician with a comb-over, except that she was a woman and the comb-over was more of a metaphorical one. Her actual hair was short and dark blond, teased and sprayed into place, stiff like whipped meringue. She spoke with faux folksy charm, the camera lens in front of her a peephole to America that she peered through from her desk in New York as if to say, I can see you, I’m one of you.
I scrolled through the channels, looking for something else, and landed on one of the Austen stations, catching sight of Kitty being interviewed.
There was no escaping Kitty.
“Earlier, I showed you how to pose for photographs so that your hips will appear slimmer,” she said. “Now we’re going to camouflage . . .” I clicked back to Cheryl Crane-Murphy, who said, “We should pass a law stating that any serviceman who rapes a servicewoman should be castrated—without anesthesia. I swear, I should run for Congress.” I ate my lasagna and watched Cheryl pounding her desk, her eyes wild.
A yellow BREAKING NEWS banner appeared at the bottom of the screen. Cheryl adjusted her earpiece and announced that preliminary autopsy results on Simmons and Green had revealed that each man had a wadded-up piece of paper stuck down his throat with the name Jennifer written on it.
“Who is Jennifer?” Cheryl Crane-Murphy wanted to know.
The thought of the paper in the dead men’s throats made me queasy, and I pushed my plate aside. I switched off the TV and reached for the phone to call my mother. We spoke every couple of days. If I didn’t call, she worried.
“Who is Jennifer?” she asked upon answering the phone, knowing it was me. My mother never missed Cheryl Crane-Murphy’s show. “Did I ever tell you that your father wanted to name you Jennifer? Practically every girl was named Jennifer back then.” She went on discussing the crime and how she’d been delayed in traffic on the day the bodies had been found.
I let her talk. Since Delia had moved to a retirement home, she was lonely in the house on Harper Lane. I had encouraged her and Delia to sell the house, to rid our family of that horrible place, but they were both too attached to it. No matter how much I emphasized its value as the former home of Myrna Jade, neither of them was persuaded. To them it was home. I had visited Harper Lane so many times in my mind while reading Verena’s book that I felt as if I had just been there, but I hadn’t set foot in that house for four years.
“I have my own mystery,” I said, cutting off her chatter about the murders. I offered her an edited version of recent events in my life. I needed to say it out loud to another person to make sure I wasn’t going crazy. I kept the beginning of the story to myself—the story of Leeta was too odd—but I told my mother about the Beauty Closet, Julia Cole, and her request.
There was silence on her end, and then she said, “Are you making this up?”
“Which part?”
“All of it. Is this Beauty Closet for real?”
“Imagine Madison Square Garden filled with cosmetics. That’s how big it was.”
“I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in.”
“I didn’t mix myself up in it. They just . . . found me.”
“What’s the worst that could happen if you give th
is Julia person the email addresses?”
“I could get fired.”
“I said the worst thing. Getting fired wouldn’t be bad at all.” My mother had been against the Dear Kitty job. She wanted me to pursue my writing. “That silly old Kitty” is what she always called her. Having accidentally opened the door to a discussion of my career, or lack of one, I moved to close it. I told her I would decide what to do and let her know.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Every word with her was filled with hidden meaning. Feeling okay. She meant the pink pills. Was I depressed? She always worried. It’s why she wanted to talk on the phone so frequently.
“You’re leaving the apartment regularly, right?”
“Ma, I go to the café every day.”
“Besides that. You go out, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
We both knew I was lying.
When I hung up the phone, it took a few minutes to fully inhabit my New York life again. I went to my desk and turned on the computer. The responsible choice would be to forget Julia’s request, but I had a vague sense that she might lead me someplace interesting, away from this apartment and this life.
I downloaded the addresses into a spreadsheet, all 52,407 of them. I was stunned at the number, thinking of the thousands of pages I’d written over the years and how that writing could have been put to better use. As the spreadsheet filled, I waited, drumming my fingers on the trackpad, a nervous tap tap. I clicked send and off it went to Julia’s personal account. Once it was gone there was no taking it back.
A few minutes later I received Julia’s reply:
From: JuliaCole
To: PlumK
Subject: Re: spreadsheet
Thank you for the spreadsheet. I’ll be in touch again soon.
In the meantime, Verena Baptist wants to meet you.
J.
• • •
VERENA BAPTIST WELCOMED ME into her cluttered, blood-colored home. “Welcome to Calliope House,” she said, but who Calliope was or what the name meant wasn’t explained. You’re Eulayla Baptist’s daughter, I wanted to say.
Calliope House was actually two townhouses joined together, sitting on a leafy stretch of Thirteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in the West Village. I stepped into the entryway and was enclosed in a womb of red wallpaper. To my left and right there were ruby-hued rooms, one a living room, the other filled with desks, where women sat, working and talking to one another. Chandeliers hung from the ceilings, and on most flat surfaces were stacks of books and papers.
Verena didn’t fit into her surroundings, being an entirely vanilla creature with blond skin and hair, a beam of light in the dark. She was tall and slender. When she reached for my hand, I could feel the bones in her fingers, as fragile as matchsticks. I had expected some resemblance to Eulayla Baptist, who’d had that plasticine, middle-American look of the beauty queen, but no one would have guessed they were mother and daughter. When Verena spoke there was a light undercoat of southernness, just enough to set her apart from the average New Yorker.
“The house is a little overwhelming,” she said, almost apologetically. “It was this color when I moved in and I didn’t want to change it.” I scanned the room with the desks, but the women took no notice of me.
“Is this a house or an office?” I asked, still looking around, noticing something different every time I turned my head. On top of a cabinet, a large orchid was trapped under a bell jar.
“It’s both.” Verena explained that she lived in the house, but it also served as her office. Most of the women came and went each day, but a few of them lived there with her.
She explained that from the 1920s through the 1970s, the townhouse had been owned by a Catholic charity that used it as a home for unwed pregnant teenagers. The girls had either run away or been cast out by their families. With nowhere else to go, they moved into the house for the duration of their pregnancies. When their babies were born, the infants were adopted by religious families and the girls never saw them again. The young baby-less mothers left the house on Thirteenth Street and reentered the world as if nothing had happened to them—nothing they could talk about, anyway.
When Verena heard about the history of the house on her visit with the real estate agent, she knew she had to have it. There had been other inhabitants between the 1970s, when the charity closed, and when Verena bought it ten years ago, but the walls had always been red. I wondered if the girls had looked at the walls and thought of the periods that had not come: the absence of red, a foreshadowing of doom.
I followed Verena through the living room. A floral-patterned scarf was tied around her head like a headband, its knot and tail disappearing beneath her long hair. She wore a knee-length dress of blue canvas material, with gaping pockets at the front filled with pens and scraps of paper; beneath the blue smock she wore a white T-shirt. The ensemble smelled of laundry detergent, that chemical floral scent not found in nature. She was simple and clean, the type of breezy girl you might see playing tennis in a tampon commercial, only she wasn’t a girl. I knew from reading her book that she was close to forty.
As I walked behind her, seeing her hips sway beneath the blue canvas dress, watching her bare calves constrict and release, it was difficult to believe she had sprung from the loins of Eulayla Baptist. Verena’s body had destroyed her mother’s figure; it was where Baptist Weight Loss had begun, that tiny seed that turned into “a bomb that took nine months to blow up.” Verena’s body could have been displayed in a museum, a part of American history.
We arrived in the kitchen at the back of the house, which was also red. A round oak dining table filled most of the empty space in the kitchen, with chairs circled tightly around it. On the wall behind the table was a framed pair of old jeans, folded at the knees and pinned to a white silk background. “Is that . . . ?” I pointed, unsure if I should mention the dead mother.
“Yeah, those are Mama’s fat jeans, the ones made famous in the TV commercials.” I placed my hand on the glass, imagining Eulayla bursting through the pants. She had never been as big as she seemed. Her fat jeans certainly wouldn’t have fit me. I leaned over to examine them more closely. I had known that Eulayla Baptist was a real woman, but she had always seemed more mythic than human. Now there were her pants, and here was her daughter. I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
Verena poured me a glass of sweetened iced tea (105) from a pitcher and invited me to sit down at the table. “I was a Baptist once,” I said, still eyeing the legendary jeans.
“It was hell, wasn’t it?”
“Worse.” I shared the story of my time as a Baptist, about joining after I saw her mother on television and about my group leader, Gladys, and how she cried when she told me Eulayla had died.
“You must have hated me,” Verena said. “I still get hate mail more than a decade later. You took away my dream of being thin! That’s what all the haters say. I got a death threat just last week.”
Verena explained that in the first few years after she closed Baptist Weight Loss, there were disgruntled former Baptists who stalked her and even threatened her life. They held meet-ups across the country. There were Baptist Shakes for sale on an online auction website years past their expiration dates, as if they’d aged like a fine wine. Some former Baptists collected old meals and any memorabilia connected to Eulayla. Some went so far as vandalizing Eulayla Baptist’s grave with chisels, scratching out the words “Beloved Mother” on the headstone in an attempt to obliterate any link to Verena, even posthumously. Verena had replaced the headstone three times already.
I asked Verena if she had ever followed the diet. Given her slim figure, I doubted it.
“No, I can eat whatever I want and never gain weight,” she said. “I take after Daddy. When I was a kid I wanted to be fat, just as a fuck-you to Mama. Fat as a form of subversion. My nanny was fat. She had such a lovely roundness about her. Mama was all bones and hard an
gles. You couldn’t cuddle with her; it would have been like cuddling with a pile of tent poles.”
“If you’ve never been—” I couldn’t say the f-word, I couldn’t say fat; I never said it out loud, hating the way it sounded. I preferred a variety of euphemisms: overweight, curvy, chubby, zaftig, even obese. I had once described myself as having a dress size in the double digits, but never as fat. “If you’ve never been—”
“Fat,” Verena said.
“Then why do you care so much about dieting? Why did you write the book?”
“To tell the truth and undo some of the damage that Mama did, if that’s possible. My family made a fortune exploiting vulnerable people and now that fortune is mine. It’s ill gotten, of course, and it weighs on me. Sometimes at night when I think of it I can’t breathe.”
The fortune, I’d read online, was rumored to be close to $200 million. I wanted to joke that at least one brick of the townhouse—maybe more—belonged to me, but I didn’t. She seemed pained. She said her extended family had been outraged by the book and most of them had shunned her. “The truth is a lonely place, but it doesn’t matter. I have a new family now. A better one.”
Verena said she had no intention of writing another book, that Adventures in Dietland was her one and only. She said she wasn’t a writer, but a philanthropist, an activist. She had also trained as a therapist, but she didn’t practice anymore.
I wondered if she was analyzing me. I kept waiting for her to explain why she had invited me over. “Do you work with Julia?”
“Heavens no. Julia and I met at a conference a few years ago. She’s interested in my work and stops by the house once in a while for a chat. The last time was just a few days ago. She said that her intern—Lena, is it?”
“Leeta.” It was the first time I said her name out loud.