by Sarai Walker
“Let’s talk about men,” Verena said. “Or are you interested in women? Or both?”
“Men,” I said. “And what about them?”
“Do you want to be in a relationship with a man?”
“One day.”
“When you’re Alicia?”
“Yes.”
“Do you hope to marry?”
“One day.”
“What about babies?”
“One day.”
“When one day finally arrives, it’ll be an exciting time for you.”
I looked at her pale, delicate face and felt scorn. She thought she could judge me, but she couldn’t last five minutes living in my skin. I remained silent. Sulky.
“I want you to consider something, hon. What if it’s not possible for you to ever become thin? What if there is no one day? What if this is your real life right now? What if you’re already living it?”
“I’m not.”
“But what if you are? What if this is your real life and you’re fat and that’s that?”
“Then I wouldn’t want to live anymore.” As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I knew I shouldn’t have said them. “I’m not suicidal.”
“I didn’t say you were,” she said, and then after a few seconds she asked if I took any prescription medication. She was looking for evidence. I told her that I took thirty milligrams of Y—— every night and had done so since college.
“That’s a powerful drug. Who prescribes it for you?”
“Just my regular doctor.”
“A general practitioner?”
I nodded and Verena frowned. She wanted to know why I had started taking Y——and I told her it was because of depression, obviously, but she asked if there was a “precipitating event.” I told her I didn’t want to relive the drama, that it was too long ago. I gave her the short version. “There was a boy in college. It was just silly.”
“It couldn’t have been silly if it caused you such pain. What did he do?”
“He rejected me,” I said. She wanted to know why. I bent over and played with the strap on my sandals, looking at the floorboards. “He liked me but he was afraid to get involved with me.”
“Why was he afraid? You don’t seem scary to me.”
“I think he thought his friends would laugh at him.”
“He sounds like an asshole.”
“I had a breakdown over it.” I thought about the library window and the librarian and the days afterward when I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t tell Verena any of these things.
“Why not just find another boy, one who wasn’t an asshole?”
“There were no other boys for me.”
“There are plenty of boys.”
“Maybe for someone like you, but not for me. There wasn’t the possibility of another boy.”
“Ah.” Verena sat back in the chair. She asked if I still cared about him.
“His name is Tristan,” I said. “And, no, I don’t care about him anymore.”
“Then why have you continued taking Y——?”
“I don’t want those feelings to come back again.”
She wanted to know what my love life had been like since Tristan, but I told her I hadn’t had one.
“What if you were to get a boyfriend now?”
“I don’t want a boyfriend now.”
Verena wanted to know if Alicia would take Y——. She sometimes asked such obvious questions. “Alicia won’t need Y——,” I said.
I was hoping that Verena was ready to leave. I had never admitted such things to anyone. I wouldn’t be able to look at her the next time I saw her.
Instead of leaving, she asked for a glass of water. I was a bad hostess, unused to guests. Once her throat was wetted, she started with the questions again, only this time she had my psych evaluation form in her hand. Finally, I thought. She wanted to know why I’d decided on the surgery. I remembered the day I called the doctor, and what had prompted me to call him, but I wasn’t willing to share that, so I spoke more generally. I told her that I’d tried everything else, but nothing worked.
“The surgery can change me,” I said.
“You’ll be malnourished. There could be other major side effects too. You could even die.”
“I could die from being fat.”
“If you eat healthy food and exercise, then it doesn’t really matter what size you are.”
“I’ve heard all of this from my mother. I know you’re against the surgery, but I’m going to have it regardless of what you say. I’m not going to let you take away my dream.” She had already taken away my Baptist dream as a teenager and now all these years later she was trying to take away my dream of the surgery. “If you don’t sign my form, I’ll just have someone else sign it. I don’t need your twenty thousand dollars, either, even though you promised it to me.”
“You’ll have it,” she said. “I’m not a dasher of dreams, Plum. Your dream, as it were, is to look different. To be smaller.”
“I want to look normal.”
“You live on the hope of becoming Alicia, don’t you? Without the possibility of this transformation, you’d rather die than live, you said.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“You didn’t hesitate when I asked you.”
“It just came out.”
“But where did it come from?”
She left the question dangling and stood up from her chair. She walked to the front window, then back again, considering something intently.
“It’s time to discuss the first task of the New Baptist Plan.”
“I thought today was the first task?”
“I was getting to know you today. Now that I know you better, I want you to consider reducing your dosage of Y——and then quitting it all together. You said Alicia wouldn’t take Y——.”
“I’m not Alicia yet.”
“One day I’ll do this, one day I’ll do that. That’s what I’ve heard from you all day. Let’s start bringing the future and the present together, just a little bit. Alicia wouldn’t take Y—— and so neither should Plum.”
“I don’t know if I’m ready for this.”
“If you don’t think you’re ready to become Alicia, then maybe you shouldn’t have the surgery. The weight will come off quickly. You need to be prepared.”
She had a point. I had thought of giving up Y—— many times, but whenever I had missed a dose, I’d wake up in the morning feeling as if someone had poured molasses into my head, gumming up all the gears and switches. I explained this phenomenon to Verena.
“That’s why you never quit medication like Y—— cold turkey. You can cut your thirty-milligram tablets in half and we’ll try the half dose for a month. If things go well, after that you can quit completely. Think it over,” she said, gathering up her things. She handed me a card with her contact information, a red card to match the red-walled house.
“Aren’t you going to sign my form?”
“There’s plenty of time for that,” she said. “Today is only the first day of the New Baptist Plan. There are plenty more days to come.”
• • •
WHEN VERENA LEFT, my head throbbed. It was as if she’d been inside my brain, picking through it as if it were a chicken carcass. I lay down on my bed, wrapping the scarlet dress around my neck like a scarf.
I hadn’t expected Verena to suggest that I give up Y——. I didn’t know what I had expected the New Baptist Plan to be. It had seemed like a joke, but now I knew she was serious. She wasn’t going to give me $20,000 for doing nothing. Until our conversation, I hadn’t thought of Y—— as a thread that connected me to Tristan and that difficult time in my past, but that’s what it was. Verena wanted me to sever it.
Tristan and I had never been anything more than friends, but we were close; at the age of twenty-one I had never experienced closeness with a boy. When our senior year of college started, we began to spend so much time together that to others we quickly became “the two
of you.” Wherever one of us went, the other was soon to follow.
I thought we were building up to something during those autumn months. For the first time I thought I understood what love was. I had always thought of myself as outside of things; when others spoke of dates and relationships and sex, I knew it didn’t apply to me. I hadn’t realized the extent of my exclusion until Tristan came along and made me feel included. I was one of them, finally. In the campus bookstore with a friend, I’d point to a funny card with hearts on it and joke that I could buy that for Tristan. As the autumn festival approached, I thought I’d have someone to go with. Tristan was possibility more than anything else; he opened up a world to me that had always been closed. When I saw couples holding hands or kissing, I didn’t feel resentful anymore. Tristan hadn’t kissed me, but we were moving in that direction. The anticipation of him wanting me brought joy that I’d never known. Every day when I awoke, I thought I didn’t deserve to be so happy, that no one did.
I couldn’t have sex with Tristan—I was firm in my mind about that. He could never see me naked, and so there was a line between us, and what was beyond that line was out of my reach. What I wanted was for him to want me, for him to touch me. He held my hand sometimes. Once I fell asleep next to him on the sofa, my cheek resting against his white T-shirt, and he put his arm around me. I wanted more than that—I wanted for him to kiss me. I wanted his want.
In the end, he didn’t give it to me. Tristan said we shouldn’t be friends anymore, that it was “impossible.” We’d been on the verge of what I’d wanted, that place of wanting and touching, but he pulled back at the last moment. “You’re not right for me,” he’d said, and then he refused to talk to me.
When our friendship ended he began to date a girl from my history class. After months of being friends with me, of building up to something that never happened, he began to date her and instantly they were holding hands and kissing as they walked together on campus, and doing other things behind closed doors that I could only imagine. That was the start of the unraveling that would culminate several weeks later with my mother’s arrival on campus and Dr. Willoughby prescribing Y——, but I didn’t know that at the time.
At the beginning of the new semester in January, I walked to the campus health center in a snowstorm. I felt that something bad was going to happen to me. “I need help,” I said to the disinterested receptionist behind the desk. She asked what was wrong but I didn’t have words for it. “Well?” she asked; there was a line forming behind me. “I’m bleeding,” I said. It wasn’t true, but it seemed to sum up my defectiveness as a female more than anything else I could say.
As I sat in the waiting area, I thought about leaving, but I didn’t know where else to go. My friends had tried to be helpful, but I didn’t share with them the depths of my pain; they might have laughed. There had never been anything between me and Tristan besides friendship, so they would have thought me foolish. That there had only been friendship between us made it worse. There had been a line between us. It was the line I grieved over, more than I grieved for Tristan. The line would always be there, even after Tristan was gone.
In the examining room I put on a gown and the nurse weighed me and took my blood pressure. The doctor arrived and listened to my heartbeat and then helped me recline on the examining table. He felt around on my breasts, where I had imagined Tristan might have touched me. Then he said something about my cervix and moved my legs apart. I had always avoided gynecological exams, too embarrassed at the thought of exposing my body in such a way. I lifted up my head. “Wait.”
“Just lie back and relax,” he said in a tone he must have thought would soothe me. He touched me down there with a cold, gloved hand. I had never been touched there before and my knee moved involuntarily and bumped his head. “Are you sexually active?”
I could see the top of his blond head over the curve of my stomach. “No.”
“I’m going to insert the speculum now. You might feel a pinch.” I looked up at the ceiling tiles, cloudy and white like the surface of the moon, and held the sides of the table as he pushed something hard into me, opening up what felt like a new space. I had never had anything put inside me before, not a penis, a tampon, or a finger. It felt as if he were stabbing me. With Tristan, and then with the doctor, I felt pain in places I hadn’t known existed.
“Relax,” the doctor said. “Don’t clench.”
When the doctor finished, he said he’d leave me alone to get dressed. After he was gone, I couldn’t move except to put my legs together. I felt pinned down. Tears ran down the sides of my face and into my hair. There was a poster on the wall, an illustration of a see-through pregnant woman standing in profile, her guts like the inside of an aquarium. I had imagined having a baby with Tristan, had fantasized about all sorts of things happening between us, even though I had known it was impossible, that there was a line.
I tried to maneuver myself up from the table, wanting to leave before anyone saw that I was crying. When I stood, blood ran down my legs and into my socks. I hobbled to the counter where there was a roll of blue paper towels, and tried to wipe myself down. Once I got back to my dorm room, I stood in the shower and watched the blood circle the drain. There was a wound somewhere, deep inside of me. It never healed, but after I began to take Y——, I could no longer feel it.
• • •
The First Couple
The world’s most famous porn star was shot in the head outside a Times Square hotel. A photograph of her corpse appeared in all the morning papers, even the respectable ones. After being shot she rolled into the gutter, a fact that the tabloids chose not to exploit. If not for the wound in her forehead, it would not have been obvious she was dead. She was lying with her eyes fixed in space, her lips slightly parted, which is how she often looked in her films.
Stella Cross was a major star, not some anonymous girl from the Midwest who was plucked before she was ripe, fucked in every orifice, and tossed into the compost heap. Stella Cross, her name a tangle of allusions to Jesus or just being nailed, had sealed her pornographic fame with a series of seven films called A Cum-Sucking Slut Named Stella, 1 through 7; the series was halted after the tissue between Stella’s vagina and anus was torn from so much “double anal” and “double vag,” as she put it, which she had endured for days on end for the seventh film; she was left with a gaping wound that needed reconstructive surgery. “I nearly had to retire my cooch!” she told a radio interviewer, likening it to a baseball player’s jersey.
The new vagina was revealed in her comeback film, Stella De-Flowered, a reenactment of her rape by a neighbor at the age of fifteen, which was directed by her husband and awarded Best Anal (nonconsensual) by Adult Film Digest. A mold of her new vagina was mass-reproduced by a factory in Manila and sold on her website as a sex toy. Stella had a framed photograph of the hair-netted Filipino factory women holding the molds of her ladyparts and smiling.
Stella Cross was an international star whose fame transcended the pornographic world. She was the subject of a documentary that won a prize at Cannes. She was the face of Kiss Me jeans, bought in shopping malls across America by preteen girls. A charity called Help These Children flew her to Guatemala after a mudslide, where she handed out stuffed toys to the kids and cheered everyone up. The name Stella had even been number one in Ghana among baby-girl names, two years running. People who had no idea that Stella Cross made her living on her back and on all fours like a dog knew her name, even if they were not entirely sure how they knew it.
After Stella Cross was shot, her husband was gunned down too. He had been talking on his cell phone at the end of the block, unnoticed by anyone. When the bullet entered his head, he crumpled to the ground with far less attendant excitement. Everyone always said he was a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. At the time of his death he was being investigated for using underage girls in his series of films called Barely Legal Slumber Party: Daddy’s Cumming.
“Waves of grief for Stella Cross
and her husband, Travis, rolled over Silicone Valley yesterday,” said an article in the New York Daily. “Cross and her husband were known in the industry as the First Couple of Porn. ‘They were our Camelot,’ said performer Reginald C*********.”
Witnesses said Stella had been shot by a woman on a motorcycle. “A crack shot,” said a witness when interviewed on TV. The man, wearing a Jets ball cap, was interviewed outside the hotel, which was still festooned with yellow police tape, like a sad sort of Christmas garland.
“She was just shot—bam!—like that,” he said. It seemed that he wanted to add “awesome” or a similar exclamation.
Before she was murdered, the appearance of Stella Cross on the sidewalk outside the hotel had caused an outbreak of excitement among the tourists in Times Square. Such was the crush of autograph seekers and photograph takers that ten minutes before the shooting, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, after receiving an award in the hotel ballroom, walked out the front door and into a waiting car, unnoticed.
“Do you think the assassin was actually aiming for the Supreme Court justice?” the television interviewer asked the man.
“No way,” the man said. “No way. I don’t know nothin’ about this justice or whatever, but I’m telling ya, this motorcycle pulled up outside the hotel and this woman just aimed right at Stella and shot. It was totally a woman who did it, too.”
The blond Stella was shot as she walked away from the crowd of fans, sandwiched between two large black men who were her bodyguards. By the next evening, there were tribute videos posted online by Stella’s fans, with clips of Stella having sex spliced together with photos of her dead body—or perhaps they were just stills from her film Fuck Me Till I’m Dead.
• • •
The New Baptist Plan, Task One:
Withdrawal
The Nola and Nedra Show played on the radio, broadcasting live from Minneapolis. I listened while lying naked on the sofa, running my fingers through the sweaty curls of my pubic hair.