by Sarai Walker
“You can’t let go of pain. It’s not a balloon that can float into the sky.”
“Okay, but imagine for a minute that it is. You put your pain into a balloon and you let go of it. It floats away. How do you feel?”
If I let go of my pain, there would be a hole inside me that was so vast I would cease to exist. I would be the balloon floating into the sky, not the other way around. There would be nothing pulling me down, nothing keeping my feet on the ground. My pain was my gravity.
“Without my pain, I wouldn’t be me anymore.”
“Pain takes up a lot of space,” Verena said. “You could fill that space with other things. Love, perhaps? In our first session together, you said you wanted to be loved.”
“I can’t imagine anyone loving me while I look like this.”
“That’s only because you’ve never allowed yourself to imagine it. How can anyone love you if you hate yourself?”
“I know what you want, Verena. You want me to cancel the surgery, to stay like this.” I ran my hands down the front of my body. “You’re asking me to live a life that I don’t know how to live.”
“Calliope House is full of women who’ve chosen another path. It’s possible.”
“So I would have to live at Calliope House for the rest of my life?”
“Of course not. Think of Calliope House as a way station.”
I picked up the notebook from where I’d set it on the bed next to me and skimmed the pages of Leeta’s observations, the men taking photos of me in the grocery store and laughing, the teenage boys taunting me.
“I think there might be something good about being fat,” I said. It felt good to say the word fat. I had always avoided it, but it had the same thrust as fuck and the same power—an illicit f-word, the top teeth digging into the bottom lip, spewing the single syllable: fat.
“Because I’m fat, I know how horrible everyone is. If I looked like a normal woman, if I looked like you, then I’d never know how cruel and shallow people are. I see a different side of humanity. Those guys I went on the blind dates with treated me like I was subhuman. If I were thin and pretty, they would have shown me a different side, a fake one, but since I look like this, I know what they’re truly like.”
“Explain why this is a good thing.”
“It’s a special power. I see past the mask to the real person underneath. I’m not living a lie like so many other women. I’m not a fool.”
“Is Alicia a fool?”
“Alicia wants the approval of all the horrid people in the world.”
“What does Plum want?”
“Don’t talk about me in the third person anymore. This is my real life. I’m already living it, remember?”
“Okay, what do you want?”
“I don’t want their approval.”
“You wanted their approval before.”
“Well, I don’t want it now. Fuck them.”
“You sound very angry.”
“I am angry.” That was the word that was missing from my journal. “But wasn’t the purpose of the New Baptist Plan to make me angry? That’s what the confrontations and the blind dates were all about.”
“I didn’t know how you were going to react to the New Baptist Plan. It might have strengthened your resolve to have surgery.”
“It didn’t.”
“You’ve always been angry, Plum. I just want you to direct that anger where it belongs, not at yourself.”
Verena was trying to help me, even more than she already had, and I was grateful, but I couldn’t help feeling annoyed at her sometimes. She didn’t know what it was like to be me, no matter how empathetic she was. There was a line between us, the line that existed between me and most people.
“I’d like to be alone now,” I said. I moved from my sitting position onto my side, resting my head on the pillow, curling up under the sheets.
Verena didn’t argue. She stood up and collected her belongings. On her way out, she placed a slip of paper on the nightstand in front of my nose. It was a check for $20,000.
“Why are you giving this to me now?”
“It’s time,” she said. “You made it to the final task of the New Baptist Plan. No matter what you decide to do with your life, we had a deal. A Baptist always keeps her word.”
I picked up the check, noting all those zeroes. “If I don’t have the surgery, I’ll have to say goodbye to Alicia. I’ll miss her. Is that silly?”
“You’ll grieve for her,” Verena said, “and then you’ll move on.”
When she left, I pulled the sheet over my head and began to cry, welcoming the release. Crying existed beyond thinking, beyond words. It felt good. When I couldn’t cry anymore, I thought about what Verena had said. In my mind the balloon was red, like the walls of Calliope House. I thought about the painful things I might put into it. I imagined letting go.
“Knock, knock.” Sana entered my bedroom, a white box in her hands. I had fallen asleep, but now lifted my head from the pillow. “What time is it?”
“About four o’clock in the afternoon.” She came into the room and set the box on the desk. I struggled to sit up, worried that my face was red from crying. My eyes still felt swollen.
Sana was wearing loose gray slacks and a white T-shirt, with Keds on her feet. Her body wasn’t thin or fat, but a slightly curvy place in between, and solid as well, as if she had strength. She smelled like the outside, like fresh air and sunshine.
“You need to eat,” she said, not as a suggestion. From the box she removed a platter of small pastries and cakes, as well as a dish of what she said was saffron-infused cream. To make room, she pushed aside the books, including Verena’s Adventures in Dietland. “If you don’t eat you’re going to get sick.”
“Did you make all that?”
“You’re kidding, right?” She placed a knife, a fork, and a tiny spoon on top of a napkin. “There’s a Persian bakery on Seventh Avenue that I like. I thought I’d buy you a treat.”
I appreciated her kindness, but I also felt exposed. “I need to wash my face. I feel like a mess.”
“Take your time.”
In the bathroom, I felt the urgent need to shower, wanting to wash from head to toes. Under the stream of water, in the steam and heat, I stood for much longer than was necessary. I didn’t have access to the summer sunshine, so this was the next best thing.
When I returned to my room, the pastries and cakes, the dish of cream, were all spread on my desk, but Sana wasn’t there. I picked up a slice of cake with my fingers—white sponge with icing and a sprinkling of crushed pistachio nuts on top. Once I bit into it, I tasted cardamom and rosewater. The bliss inside my mouth soon reached my stomach, filling the empty space, and I finished the cake in three rapid bites. I was so close to heaven, there were angels all around me.
I ate and ate. I thought of the baby birds and how their mouths were filled, but this wasn’t the same. I didn’t bother to count calories. There was no time for math. I had always hated math. Into my mouth I placed the leaves of phyllo, honey, and nuts, the deep-fried pastry sweetened with syrup, the soft cookies flavored with coconut and almond, dipped into the saffron cream. Vibrations of pleasure ran through me. My lethargy ebbed with every bite and I began to feel human again.
When I was finished, I placed my hand on my belly, unable to stop smiling. After several minutes I was thirsty, so I went to the kitchenette and drank two glasses of water. On my way out, I heard the sounds from Marlowe’s room growing louder, then stopping suddenly.
“Sana, are you still here?” I called out.
“Yes!”
For the last time, I walked down the dark corridors to the circular room, feeling full and satisfied. Sana was there, sitting in one of the chairs in the center of the screens.
“I don’t know how you can stand this place,” I said.
“Sometimes I think of it as my church.”
“You’ve lost me.” I found that this often happened when I was talking to the w
omen of Calliope House.
“You know how Christians believe Jesus died for their sins? And they go like this?” She made the sign of the cross. “For me this room is like that. It reminds me of a central truth about my life. Sometimes you need to be reminded of that.”
I didn’t reply, but looked at her quizzically, letting her know I needed assistance. She rose from the chair and came toward me. “You and I can never look the way women are supposed to look.” You and I. Only weeks before, such a comparison would have plunged me into despair, but now I could see her point.
“Do you think we’re the same?”
“In the ways that matter, yes. We’re different in a way that everyone can see. We can’t hide it or fake it. We’ll never fit society’s idea for how women should look and behave, but why is that a tragedy? We’re free to live how we want. It’s liberating, if you choose to see it that way.”
The line that existed between me and most people didn’t exist with her. I wanted to touch her face. I didn’t ask if it was all right, I just placed my hands on either side, touching the burned place, feeling the smooth, pearly flesh. My hands were filled with the warmth from her skin. In her pupils were tiny reflections of the screens, like white flecks. She blinked them away.
“Thank you for feeding me.”
“You’re welcome, Sugar Plum. Do you mind if I call you that?”
“I don’t mind.”
“I hope to see you aboveground soon,” she said. She left me alone with the screens. My impulse was to turn away, but she had warned me not to do that. The sanitized slits, these entrances to the world, filled the room.
The slits disappeared, making way for a naked young woman kneeling in a patch of grass. She was outside in a yard or a park, surrounded by a pack of men. The men were only visible from the waist down, their voices muffled like the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. They took turns shoving their penises into the young woman’s mouth. They grabbed at her body, pulling her hair and jerking her head back. She was soaked with their fluids, but still she smiled, this causer of mass erections, her naked body beamed around the world to subscribers of Porn Hub U.S.A. The scene went on and on, until the men were spent, and when it was finished, the young woman wiped the semen from her eyes.
Sana would have been pleased that I didn’t look away. What I’d seen was a surprise. I couldn’t recoil from the young woman on her knees in the grass, even though I wanted to, because we had something in common. If there was a spectrum, the young woman was on it and I was on it and so was every other woman I knew. Eulayla Baptist was there, bursting through her jeans. In nine months, you’ll be looking foxy! That’s what Gladys had said at my first Baptist Weight Loss meeting. Foxy, hot, fuckable. Whatever it was called, that’s what I’d wanted—to be hot, to elicit desire in men and envy in women. But I realized I didn’t want that anymore. That required living in Dietland, which meant control, constriction—paralysis, even—but above all it meant obedience. I was tired of being obedient.
I left the circular room, passing through the archway, walking briskly through the dark corridors to the front door of the underground apartment. I turned the handle and there was a click—the door swung open, revealing a tiny vestibule and the red door that led to the outside. I tried the handle of the red door and it opened. For the first time in days I felt sunshine and fresh air on my face. I snapped off the head of a rose that was dangling from a vine near the door and rubbed its petals against my cheek.
Shutting the door behind me, I walked up the steep concrete steps, which were warm beneath my bare feet. Outside there was no thrusting, no back-and-forth rhythm, and I steadied myself as I climbed. At the top I was awash in sunlight. The brightness of the sun burned through everything before me, and I saw nothing but shadows and shapes at first.
“Here she is,” said a voice. It took me a moment to recognize that it was Marlowe’s.
“She made it.” That was Sana.
“What took you so long?” asked Verena.
Through the sunlight they appeared before me, swathed in light. “I’m here now,” I said.
I had made my escape.
EAT ME
• • •
• • •
I’D BEEN LIVING ABOVEGROUND in Calliope House for more than a week, sleeping peacefully every night. Then the bomb threat came. I was awakened by pounding on the doors, which began with the front door downstairs and then spread throughout the house, far away at first but moving closer—an outbreak of thunder, an approaching storm.
My bedroom door opened and Sana’s face appeared through a strip of light. “Bomb threat,” she said, as if I knew what this meant. Before I could ask a question she was gone. I heard scurrying on the floors above and below me and rolled out of bed, then changed from my pajamas into my clothes. If there was a bomb, it might have exploded while I was wasting time putting on my bra and shoes.
The young policeman standing on the stoop as we trailed outside was probably wondering why so many women were living together in the same house, without any men. He held the door open and, once Verena was out, asked, “Is that it?”
We were cordoned at the end of the block with the rest of the neighbors. The clusters of red and blue police lights made our genteel street look like a disco, but we shuffled along slowly, barely awake. On Sixth Avenue, Verena claimed two benches. There were eight of us: Verena, me, Sana, Rubí, and four women who were staying as guests. We looked like we had fled a slumber party. There wasn’t much traffic at three a.m., but the cars that did pass slowed down to stare at us.
Sana yawned and set her head on my shoulder, resting her arm across my back. “Are you wearing a bra?” she asked.
“I put it on before coming outside.”
“In the face of possible death by explosion, you put on a bra?” Rubí said.
“That’s not proper bomb threat etiquette,” Verena said.
“Ha ha.” I let them tease me. No one bothered to tell me what was happening and I assumed someone wanted to blow up Verena—an old disgruntled Baptist, perhaps, or someone else she’d angered with her rants against the diet industry. As I sat on a bench in the black hours of night, it made sense. But then a man in pajamas and leather slippers walked toward us. The pajamas were patterned with tiny cowboys lassoing tiny steers. He stepped over a passed-out homeless man, whom I hadn’t noticed. “We’ve got to do something about this,” the man said. “Do you like being woken up in the middle of the night?”
Verena looked up at the man. “I’m not going to help you throw out the Jews,” she said. She was marmoreal under the streetlight, in her white gown, with her light hair.
“This has nothing to do with the fact that they’re Jews,” the man said. “Don’t say it that way.”
“If they weren’t Jews, terrorists wouldn’t be terrorizing them,” Verena replied.
The man waved his hand at her in disgust. “We’re going to act with or without you,” he said. “Don’t forget—if they go down, you go down.”
As the man stalked away, Verena explained that the Jews in question were our next-door neighbors, the Bessie Cantor Foundation for Peace and Understanding, a nonprofit organization that occupied the townhouse next to Calliope House, which was in fact attached to it. If they go down, you go down. For years the foundation had been the target of frequent bomb threats by unknown terrorists, who claimed that Bessie Cantor was a front for the Mossad. The businesses and residential neighbors wanted to evict the foundation from the block for all the trouble the bomb threats caused, for the evacuations and police presence and potential for mass casualties. Verena refused to take part in the growing campaign. “First the Jews, then us,” she said.
The man in the cowboy pajamas approached another group of neighbors, and it was clear they were talking about us. They stared and pointed at us, the women on the benches, as if on an island.
We were the outcasts.
At dawn, we were allowed back into the house. The other women returned to t
heir beds, hoping to sleep for an hour or two, but I went directly to the kitchen. Since leaving the underground apartment and moving upstairs, I had spent most of my time in the red kitchen. Verena maintained a well-stocked pantry and in a frenzied few days I had worked my way through it, cooking and eating under the shadow of Eulayla Baptist’s fat jeans. I couldn’t remember when I’d spent such a happy, carefree time. I loved to bake most of all, making cakes and breads and fruit pies from scratch. Baking was restorative. I was soothed by the jeweled berries, the yellow of an egg yolk punctured with my fork, and I liked the texture, too, placing my hands in the soft flour, cutting into the white flesh of a bright green apple and feeling its juices on my fingers. After being underground, I now found an apple to be wholesome and pure.
I shared what I made with the other women but always kept enough back for myself. I could eat half a dozen cupcakes at once, followed by great gulps of cold milk. I could eat a peach pie in the afternoon with a pot of coffee and a can of whipped cream. No matter how much I ate, I didn’t feel full. In the past, after I binged, I’d rein myself in. I’d been doing that for years—diet-binge, diet-binge, the old two-step—but this was different. I never felt full, no matter how much I ate. It was as if the hunger from a decade of dieting was stored up inside me and the chains that had been wrapped around it were beginning to break.
That morning, while the other women slept, I made breakfast in the blue light at the back of the house. I put quiches in the oven and warmed the waffle iron. I hadn’t known about the bomb threats, but even with this new information, and the realization that we could all be blown to smithereens at any moment, I had never felt safer. Calliope House was filled with the scarred and the wounded, like me. Some scars were visible, some not.
Only a few of us actually lived in Calliope House. Each morning around nine a.m., the other women who worked with Verena arrived, filling the house with hivelike noise and energy. With me in the house, the kitchen became a gathering place, my homemade food devoured instead of the usual takeout and deliveries. The morning of the bomb threat was no different. I set out the quiches and piles of waffles, pitchers of orange juice. The smells filled the house like warm, fragrant breath. Soon I had company.