by Sarai Walker
“Jesus, how fat were you?”
“Over three hundred pounds. I was a real blimp.”
“Really? How did you lose the weight?” He held a bone in midair.
“I tried dieting, but that didn’t work. Then I had surgery. My stomach is now the size of a walnut, hence the salad.”
“Does your body look, uh, normal?”
I saw the black marker, the arrows, the dotted lines. “With clothes on, yes. Naked it’s another matter. I have scars all over my body. I’ve been reconstructed, you see. Imagine Frankenstein.”
Alexander set down his bone and looked as if he was fighting off a belch.
“It’s not a pretty sight, Alexander, but what does it matter to you?”
He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “The thought of it is unappealing, I must admit, but I appreciate your honesty, Alice.”
“Alicia,” I said. I am Alicia. I am Alicia. I repeated it to myself, but that didn’t make it true. I was not Alicia and I feared I never would be.
“I’m not feeling well,” I said, setting down my fork and scooting my chair back. The Y——-related symptoms returned. It felt as though there was a sparkler inside my mouth. “I think I should leave.”
“Don’t let me keep you. I’ll just stay here and order dessert.”
I left him alone at the table. Alicia’s first date was over and it hadn’t gone well.
Aidan
It was Sunday night, my last date. Aidan had been described to me as a human rights lawyer and drinker of fair-trade coffee. I put on my dress and the Thinz and the makeup. Aidan knocked on the door, and a few moments later a generic white guy with brown hair stood before me.
“You’re my date?” he asked.
“That’s me.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Screw you,” I said, and slammed the door.
After Aidan left, I washed my face while still wearing my dress; the front of it was splashed with water and stained with makeup. I took off the control-top tights and the Thinz so I could breathe, then crawled into bed on my stomach, still wearing the dress. I had completed four tasks of the New Baptist Plan, with only one left to go, and then the money would be mine. The date of my surgery was still a couple of months away. Before meeting Verena I’d been moving toward it in a straight line, but now there was movement in another direction, a subtle drift.
I thought back to the winter, when I’d decided to have the surgery. I’d undergone my annual physical exam, and though everything appeared normal, the doctor wanted me to have an ultrasound done, to make sure everything was “okay inside.” I had never had an ultrasound and was nervous. That afternoon I reported to the hospital and a young technician named Pooja placed a condom on a probe and stuck it inside me. She flicked a switch and a screen on the wall revealed an ultrasound image of my reproductive organs.
“There are your ovaries,” she said, and I squinted to see them. They were a whitish blur against a gray background, slightly alien-looking. “And that’s the entrance to your womb.”
It was such an odd word, womb. I had never thought of myself as having one. A uterus, yes, but not a womb. A womb was a place for something small to curl up in and sleep. For the first time, I realized such a place existed inside me. It didn’t look like anything nice on the screen, just a dusty balloon waiting to be inflated.
“I have a womb,” I said.
“Of course you do. You’re a woman.” The technician stared at me as if she thought I wasn’t quite right in the head. “Are you okay?”
I didn’t answer, but stared at my womb until I couldn’t anymore. I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to look at it. Why did she have to call it that? Womb.
“You’ll be ovulating from your left ovary next month,” she said. “See that follicle?”
“Yes, I see it,” I said, still with my eyes closed.
Pooja spoke to me as she spoke to her other patients, the women who had things going in and out of them, like trains in a station. On the screen I was like them, the sum of my parts. Underneath my bulky exterior I was like every other woman, even if I had never been allowed to feel that way.
After my appointment, I walked home in a daze. I had never liked to call myself a woman. I knew I was one, but the word never sounded right when applied to me. For days I thought of nothing but the womb on the screen. It haunted me.
Over the years I had considered weight-loss surgery, but the thought of knives and incisions and complications had always scared me, so I had never done anything more than think about it. But in the days after seeing my womb, I finally made an appointment with a doctor and scheduled the surgery, knowing it was time to act. Verena had said the surgery was about becoming smaller, but it was about more than that. That’s what I hadn’t been able to tell her.
Now in the wake of the New Baptist Plan, the dream of the surgery had been tarnished. I could still have it, and the $20,000 would help, but there would always be scars, not just on the outside, but on the inside too. Verena had been intent on reminding me just how much everyone hates me. Alicia would never be able to forget the horrible things that had happened to Plum. The surgeon’s knife couldn’t cut that away. Alicia would always be marked.
My bottle of Y—— was on the nightstand. I’d been taking the half tablets for a month; there was only one left and I worried about what would happen when I ran out completely. Maybe Y—— was the glue holding my life together—not a life so much as pieces of cracked china that had been fit together haphazardly. I took the last half tablet and then opened my nightstand drawer to find the bottle of Dabsitaf. I swallowed one, then another, then a few more.
I wanted to hear another person’s voice, a kind voice. I considered calling my mother, but she would have been able to tell something was wrong. She was alert to even the slightest shift in my tone of voice, the length of silence between words. I didn’t want to worry her, so I called my father. It was eight o’clock in New York, but it was only six where my father lived, in a place where life was slower and everything lagged.
His wife answered the phone. She told me he was mowing the lawn and set the phone down to get him. I thought of my father as I always thought of him, in the chair on the deck where he liked to sit after work, listening to birdsong. Through the phone I heard the lawnmower stop and imagined the smell of fresh grass clippings, a whiff of the heartland.
When my father picked up the phone, out of breath, I didn’t tell him about the dates or Verena or the other women at Calliope House. He didn’t know much about my daily life, so we talked about what he was doing in the yard, that after he cut the grass he would read the newspaper. On his end of the phone, unlike mine, it was quiet. In the suburbs there was an absence of noise.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Maybe I’m not having such a good day.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
He said nothing else, giving me time, allowing the silence. My mother would have asked questions and demanded to know what was wrong. I liked that my father was quiet on the other end of the phone, simply breathing, letting his yard work wait until I no longer needed him.
I listened to his breathing and wished that I could touch him. I wished that he could see the bruise on my lip, but he couldn’t.
“Are you there?” Dad said.
“Plum, are you there?”
• • •
Verena called to explain about a series of blind dates. She said there would be four men: Preston, Jack, Alexander, Aidan. These names sounded familiar. Hadn’t we done this before?
After six months on Dabsitaf, perhaps I was ready to date. Dr. Ahmad had been wrong about my body. After such rapid weight loss there was no sagging skin, no need to cut and stitch. I had simply shrunk, my flesh vacuumed in, with no evidence of a void left by my fat. I was Alicia. That’s who people saw when they looked at me.
On Dabsitaf I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t starve and binge. I simp
ly had no appetite. Many people skipped breakfast, but I skipped lunch and dinner, too. Eating a slice of bread would have made as much sense as eating a book or a shoe. I didn’t want food. I didn’t want water. I didn’t want to get out of bed or go outside. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to buy anything, not even clothes or shoes. I didn’t want love or friendship or sex. I didn’t want to listen to music or read or watch TV.
I didn’t want.
Without food, I didn’t have energy or mental focus. I didn’t want to work, but I needed the money. Kitty had forgiven me for deleting her messages, and when she saw how I’d been transformed she invited me to work in the Austen Tower in the office next to her. Reading and forming sentences was beyond my ability, given the lack of nutrients, so I sat at my computer and typed gibberish words that looked vaguely Norwegian—lsjfslkf jslkfjsl kfjalkjfla kjdflsk jflasjflsakjf—until it was time to go home. No one seemed to notice.
In my natural state, after my factory settings had been restored thanks to Dabsitaf, I was lovely. On the way home from work, men whistled at me. I couldn’t walk by a construction site without causing a commotion. On the subway men pinched my ass, they followed me, they asked for my phone number and gyrated their pelvises as if they were pronging me. I was supposed to find this charming, so I acted flattered. I was supposed to want this kind of attention, but I didn’t want anything. Not anymore. Thank you, I said when they gave me flowers, but I didn’t feel thankful. The inside of my head was blank.
Before long I weighed one hundred pounds. I hadn’t weighed that little since elementary school. One day when I came home from work there was a note taped to my back that said, FEED ME! Women came up to me in the street and asked me what my secret was. “I don’t eat anything, ever,” I said, but this wasn’t entirely true. I swallowed my Dabsitaf tablet once a day. I could see the oblong pill descend through my body, down my neck, between my breasts, heading toward my bellybutton. It looked like a bug inching along beneath my skin.
When I reached ninety pounds, chunks of my hair began to fall out, my fingernails became brittle, my cheeks sunken and hollow. “What’s your secret?” a woman in the park asked me.
I was a size zero, but only for a few weeks, and then I was less than zero. At the department store, the saleswoman said, “We don’t have clothes in your size,” and I seemed to remember that people said things like that to me in my previous life, but they would laugh and snicker. Now they were jealous. “Bitch,” a woman whispered to her friend. I was sent to the children’s section, but even that was difficult. I was taller than most children, and whereas children were round, I was as slender and pointy as a garden rake.
On the night of my first blind date, I had taken to wearing pink gingham overalls that I cinched around my waist with an extra-large rubber band. Preston asked if I’d like to go to dinner at Christo’s, but I said I didn’t eat anything, ever, so we sat on my sofa and talked. Well, Preston talked. The inside of my head was blank.
By the end of the evening, predictably, Preston was thrusting on top of me, filling me with his juices, injecting me with calories, nothing by mouth. I didn’t try to stop him. I didn’t want to. When he finished, I thought I felt one of my bones crack.
“I’ll call you,” he said on his way out.
“If that’s what you want.”
The next night, a man named Jack was at my door. “Are you Plum?” he asked.
“Plum? She doesn’t exist.” Burst! “I prefer to be called Alicia.”
Jack said he was a professor of literature and asked me what kinds of books I liked to read. I told him I had thrown my books away, that I no longer wanted them. “You’re not one for conversation,” he said, so he took me dancing. During the slow dances, he nibbled my ear. Later on, in the ladies’ room, I saw that one of my earlobes was perforated. Now I was even lighter.
Back at the bar, I stirred Jack’s martini with my finger. He licked my finger clean and then bit off the top, chewing the tip and the nail along with his olive. “You taste so good,” he said.
My next blind date was with Alexander, who was a blind date, literally. He was fond of ribs and slathered my torso with BBQ sauce. There wasn’t much meat on my bones, but he contented himself with the gristle, and by the time he left I weighed fifty pounds. This is too low, I thought. At some point I’ll disappear.
It wasn’t Aidan who came next, as I had expected, but the man who had punched me in the subway. “No, not you!” I screamed, but he chewed my tongue and took a bite out of my neck. When the others came back for seconds, I couldn’t object. They were all in my bed at once, devouring my pieces. This had gone too far. I wanted to scream but no sound came out. I wanted to hit them with my arms but I didn’t have any. I wanted to cry, but they’d taken my eyes. Soon they finished me off.
I was the flame of a candle, blown out.
The telephone rang. It sounded as loud as a church bell in my quiet apartment. I opened my eyes and began to reach for it, but then I saw my hand in a strip of gray light coming in through the window.
My hand. It was pudgy and white.
I tossed back the covers and looked down at my body, patting my breasts and my thighs through the white and purple dress. At the end of the bed I saw my ten toes. This little piggy.
I was still me.
There was the bottle of Dabsitaf on my nightstand and the aftertaste of medication on my tongue. I wasn’t sure what was real, besides the ringing telephone. I picked it up.
“Plum?” a woman said.
I tried to place the voice. “Is this Kitty?”
“Plum, I need to see you right away.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Did I forget about our meeting?”
“This isn’t about our meeting. I’m at home right now but leaving for the office soon. Come see me as soon as you can.” She hung up the phone without saying goodbye.
Kitty rarely called me. Something was wrong. My bladder ached, so I rushed to the bathroom. As I sat on the toilet, I looked at the rippled white of my inner thighs. In the dream I’d had perfect thighs and breasts and legs.
Thighs, breasts, legs—an order of fried chicken.
As I brushed my teeth, I stared in the mirror at my bloated face, at my chin and the chin beneath that. In my dream the men had taken bites of me, crunching my eyeballs and fingers like crudités. The memory of it made me wretch in the sink. I hadn’t eaten anything substantial in days, and there was nothing in my throat but the lingering taste of Dabsitaf.
After drinking some coffee, I dressed quickly and left my apartment, not knowing that I wouldn’t return for a long time.
It was raining. I was awake, not dreaming, I was sure of it. Men didn’t look at me. A woman in a business suit was doing butt clenches at a bus stop and eyed me warily as I passed. I was wearing a clear raincoat printed with colorful flower buds that in my size looked like a bedspread.
Storm clouds grew darker overhead and I decided to skip the subway and take a taxi instead. I didn’t want to see other people. I didn’t want them to see me.
As we drove through the rain, it occurred to me that Kitty was going to fire me. She must have found out I’d been deleting her email, or maybe she knew I’d given the addresses to Julia. No matter what the reason, I knew it was over.
The taxi driver was eating sunflower seeds. The sight of his stubbled jaw moving up and down, his Adam’s apple jutting outward when he swallowed, was disgusting. The sight of a man eating anything was something I couldn’t bear. I wanted to roll down the window, but it was raining too hard, so I wiped the fog from the glass and peered outside. We were crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, heading into Manhattan.
The driver turned up the radio. “We know Jennifer cannot be a single person. She has to be a group,” said Nola Larson King.
He dropped me off near Times Square, as close as he could get to the Austen Tower given the barricades. As I walked toward the building, my feet plunging into deep puddles, I h
eard someone call my name from behind. It was Kitty.
I turned to face her, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. She’d been caught in the downpour. Her hair was wet and flat, the ends of it resting against her white blouse in sharp points, like snakes’ tongues. I had only ever seen her with her red curls in their trademark formation, the carefully formed ringlets like a great strawberry bush.
“Kitty?” She was barely recognizable, a superhero without her cape.
“Let’s go down the street,” she said, motioning to a coffeehouse. She didn’t want me in the office in case I made a scene when I was fired. I followed behind her and noticed she wasn’t carrying an umbrella. She was glum and I wondered if her mood, and her indifference to the rain, and most of all her hair, were because of me. She must have felt betrayed. I didn’t know what I would say when she confronted me about the deleted messages. I looked at the sidewalk. Julia was down there beneath the wet concrete of Times Square, which now reflected a pretty pattern of neon light.
Kitty was far ahead of me down the sidewalk, and I considered turning around and running away. I hadn’t committed a crime, after all, and maybe it was better to go home and send her a letter of resignation in the mail. Then I wouldn’t have to face her. I slowed my pace, about to change direction and blend into the crowd, when I saw something ahead that made me stop and suck in my breath.
Leeta’s face was on the side of a building.
I lifted the hood of my raincoat and wiped the wet hair from my face. The rain continued to splatter, but even through the water and the fog I could see Leeta’s face.
Kitty noticed I wasn’t beside her and started walking back toward me. “Hurry up, it’s pouring,” she said, but I was frozen in place. It was really Leeta.
“Plum?” Kitty said. “What’s wrong with you?”
I pointed to Leeta on the screen. “Do you see that?”
There was her face, then the faces of the Dirty Dozen, then the faces of Stella Cross and her husband, then the other faces associated with Jennifer, all flashing on the jumbo screen in Times Square. Leeta, with her thick black eyeliner and long dark hair, was staring out at the New York masses the way she’d stared at me in the café. It was her face on the screen, and now everyone was looking at it.