Dietland

by Sarai Walker

  “What’s going on?” Verena said, coming into the living room and taking the brick from me. She read the messages and frowned, seeming resigned rather than surprised. “This happens sometimes,” she said. “Former Baptists. So many of them hate me.” She handed me the brick and asked me to unwrap the rubber band and save the piece of paper.

  “If they’d added a T, it could have said DIET BITCH,” I said. “That would have been far more clever.”

  Verena didn’t laugh. She collected the broom and dustpan and began to sweep up the broken glass. I unwrapped the paper and flattened it on the coffee table. I figured I’d leave the brick out back, but when Verena wasn’t looking, I slipped it into my satchel, enjoying the heft of it.

  I headed out of the house, a bit shaken but determined to carry on with my plan for the day. I was working my way through the many V— S— stores in the city, returning home with the frilly stolen goods. This afternoon, I decided to venture farther afield to a shopping mall in Queens. I visited the bathroom in the food court first—it seemed sensible to pee now, in case I was arrested—but I wasn’t arrested, and as I left the mall, lingerie hidden in my satchel, the phone in my purse vibrated. The number looked familiar, but I couldn’t immediately place it.

  “Ms. Kettle? This is Deborah from Dr. Shearer’s office. We haven’t heard from you in months. Your surgery is approaching—can we expect to see you at your appointment?”

  I stopped between a set of double doors. Other shoppers bumped into me from both directions, but I didn’t move.

  “Hello, Ms. Kettle?” I turned off my phone. The call was an unwelcome interruption to an otherwise perfect trip to the mall, a hand reaching out from my past, trying to knock me over.

  • • •

  I SHOULD HAVE TOLD THE DOCTOR’S SECRETARY that I no longer wanted surgery, but instead I’d said nothing. For a good part of the next day, I tried to write through the confusion in my notebook. Killing the thin woman inside me, the perfect woman, my shadow self—but how could I know if she was truly gone?

  I decided to get out of the house, to go to a café and write, like old times. I visited Sana downstairs and asked if she wanted to join me. “I’ll need a caffeine break soon,” she said, sitting on the edge of her desk. She wore jeans and a billowy sleeveless top in midnight blue, her hair in the usual ponytail. She’d be free in half an hour, so I went ahead of her. Since I had nearly filled up my notebook, I brought my laptop along as well.

  At Night & Day Café, I settled at a table near the window and ordered a lemonade and a mocha brownie. I reviewed the pages I’d written in my notebook during the previous weeks, Leeta’s messy blue ballpoint giving way to my careful black printing. I was glad I’d brought my laptop—it was time to impose some kind of order on my writing. Maybe, like some of the other women at Calliope House, I would write a book one day. When I was working for Kitty, spending all those days in front of my laptop at Carmen’s café, I’d wanted to write articles and essays, but maybe now I could write something longer. I had something more to say, despite the confusion I currently felt.

  The Dear Kitty mailbox was positioned at the bottom of my screen. I’d never bothered to delete it, so I clicked it, intending to drag it to the trash can. Somehow it popped open, so suddenly and unexpectedly that I held my right hand in front of my eyes, as if a flash of light had blinded me. When I dared to look, I saw that fifteen new messages had trickled in before it was severed from the Austen mothership months ago. They’d languished in my inbox, their cries ignored. For fun, I opened one of them: Dear Kitty, My boyfriend says I have a fupa. How can I—

  I was interrupted by a familiar voice. “Hey, lady!” Sana was coming in my direction, in time to rescue me. Her shout elicited stares from all corners of the café, but she wasn’t afraid to call attention to herself, knowing that people were going to stare at her burned face anyway. I pushed my laptop aside. I’d already finished the brownie and sucked up the last of my lemonade, so Sana went to the counter for more, returning a few minutes later with Cokes and a plate of soft macaroons crisscrossed with chocolate stripes.

  “What’s Sugar Plum been up to today?” she said, popping open her Coke, her silver bangles sliding down her arms. “More underwear?”

  “Not today.”

  “Good. One of these days I’m going to have to bail you out of jail. You know that, don’t you?”

  “They’ll never catch me. I’m as quick as a cat.”

  She smiled but said, “Seriously, do I need to worry about you? As your friend and as a social worker, I’m required by law to ask.”

  “I like doing it,” I said, shrugging. She backed off. I didn’t tell her about the other things I’d done recently, such as swearing at the yoga mat–carrying woman in the supermarket who’d scoffed loudly upon seeing the contents of my shopping basket, and hiding a brick in my satchel.

  “I’d like to ask you about something,” I said, “if you’re willing to play social worker for a moment?” I told her that the doctor’s office had called and that I hadn’t canceled the surgery. “I’m wondering how I can be sure that Alicia, the thin woman inside me, is truly gone. What if she comes back to life?”

  “Do you mean like a zombie? To kill a zombie you have to shoot it in the head.”

  I played along. “That won’t work. She lived inside me, remember? If I shoot her, I’ll have to shoot myself.” In a serious tone, I tried to explain that I was worried my new life could be a novelty, one that might lose its appeal. This seemed impossible while sitting at the café with Sana, but I couldn’t predict the future.

  “It’s a lifelong process and it’s never going to be easy, Plum,” Sana said, “but there comes a moment when you realize you’ve changed in some irrevocable way and you’ll never go back to the way you were before. Think of it as crossing over to a new place.”

  I liked the idea of crossing over. “But how will I know for sure that it’s happened?”

  “If you’re not sure, then it hasn’t happened yet. You’re still in flux.”

  In flux—that’s how I felt. She had helped me understand what I was feeling, as I knew she would.

  She noticed my laptop and I explained that I was going to type up what I’d written in my notebook, but I didn’t mention the possibility of writing a book. That idea was too new to be shared. She told me about her day raising funds for her clinic. She planned to run the New York clinic for a few years, then return to Iran to open one there. I hated the prospect of her leaving.

  Sana talked about the teen girls she was going to help at the clinic. Much of what she was saying about the girls sounded familiar to me.

  “I feel a kinship with girls, don’t you?” she said.

  I hadn’t thought about my job like that. I’d seen my girls as a burden. Sometimes I had resented them, perhaps because I had been in a state of suspended adolescence myself.

  “I was burned at thirteen, around the time that puberty set in,” Sana said. “I had always been a tomboy—is that what you call it? My friends and I were starting our periods and growing breasts—you know the awkwardness of that age—and here this horrible thing happened to me at the same time. I’ve always connected the two in my mind: being scarred and becoming a woman, both traumatic processes in their own way. An attack on my sense of self.”

  The trauma of becoming a woman—that’s what all those Dear Kitty letters had been about at their core. I had responded to the girls’ fears and tried to soothe them, but I had never felt like a woman myself.

  Sana returned to Calliope House for a meeting, but I chose to stay behind. Thanks to our conversation, I decided to read through the Dear Kitty messages that remained in my inbox before deleting them. I ordered a sandwich and soup, and opened one at random:

  From: dolcevita95

  To: DaisyChain

  Subject: **confidential**

  Dear Kitty,

  I have really small breasts. They aren’t even really breasts. I mean, I have nipples, two pin
k buds, but there is virtually nothing underneath them. I might as well be a boy. My grandmother is giving me $5,000 when I graduate from high school in June. I want to study art history at Stanwyck College next year, so I plan to take the $5,000 and go to Italy in the summer to look at art. But maybe with the money I could get breast implants instead. What do you think? I know I seem shallow, but even though I’m smart, I think having bigger breasts would make me feel more normal.

  Love,

  Alexis J. in L.A.

  How had I done this job for three whole years? If I’d printed out all my responses, they would have been as thick as a pile of books—books that I had written, but not in my own voice.

  I stared at Alexis’s message on my screen, my finger hovering over the delete key, but obliterating her didn’t seem like the right thing to do. I knew how I would have responded to her if I’d still been working for Kitty: “You don’t need breast implants, Alexis! You’re beautiful the way you are!” Kitty insisted that I use that last line as much as possible. I told her it wouldn’t ring true, since she had never seen the girls who were writing, but Kitty had said that was irrelevant. All girls are beautiful, she liked to say, but she only featured the usual models in the magazine.

  I decided to respond to Alexis from my personal email account:

  From: PlumK

  To: dolcevita95

  Subject: Re: **confidential**

  Dear Alexis J.,

  Kitty never bothers to reply to these messages herself, but maybe I can help you. You’re at a fork in the road, and for argument’s sake, we’ll imagine you taking the path that begins with two silicone pouches being inserted into your chest. You’ve obtained the breasts of your dreams. You max out two credit cards buying revealing clothes, because hey, what’s the point of having huge breasts if you can’t show them to people? The attention you receive from men is exhilarating, and as such, during your first semester at Stanwyck College, you spend more time at parties than you do studying Frida Kahlo. You meet men at parties who rarely look you in the eye because they’re too enamored with your graduation present. You sleep with a lot of them. You repeatedly turn up late for class, hung over, without having done your homework, and before you know it your grades plummet and you’re kicked out of college. You move out of your dorm and into a Torrance apartment complex called Pacific Gardens with two other women and take a job managing a dental practice. Your boss, Irwin Michaelson, D.D.S., a fifty-one-year-old widower, compliments you when you wear low-cut blouses. In between drilling holes in people’s teeth, Dr. Michaelson likes to drill you in the supply closet. Pretty soon you become Mrs. Irwin Michaelson, D.D.S. You move into his condo in Santa Monica and quit your job because Irwin says that no wife of his needs to work. You learn to have a gourmet dinner ready for Irwin when he gets home from work each night; otherwise, he goes berserk. You begin to wonder whether his first wife died in a scuba-diving accident, as he claims. Your Internet searches for “Gloria Michaelson, scuba death” don’t return any hits. You consider leaving Irwin and returning to school, but he knocks you up and the two of you buy a house in Redondo Beach. Before you know it you’re thirty years old, with a son named Irwin Jr. and twin daughters named Maddison and Maddalyn, driving a Kia Sedona, the inside of which smells like stale french fries and baby shit. Irwin, you suspect, is having an affair. You start to drink. A lot. Irwin says you look a bit baggy, so you get a tummy tuck and lipo, but it doesn’t help. He announces the day before your tenth wedding anniversary that he’s divorcing you to marry Angie, a new dental hygienist in his office. You offer to supersize your breasts and he accuses you of implying that he’s a superficial prick. You threaten to take him to the cleaners in divorce court and he laughs. Ha ha ha! You threaten to accuse him of being a wife beater and he throws the tiki statue you bought on your honeymoon to Oahu; it ricochets off your eye and shatters on the fireplace mantel and you have to wear an eye patch, like a pirate. You don’t say anything else, because you fear you might end up at the bottom of the sea like the first Mrs. Michaelson. Irwin leaves and doesn’t come back for three days. When he returns, the police arrest him for domestic abuse. As they cuff him in the driveway, he screams, “What have I ever done to you, you ugly cow?” The whole neighborhood pretends not to hear. Maddalyn cries. Or is it Maddison? You hire a private detective to take incriminating photographs of Irwin and Angie in flagrante delicto, since it’s the only way you can ensure that after your divorce you can continue living the life of an upper-middle-class mother of three in Southern California. Without half of Irwin’s bank account, you’re screwed.

  Not a pretty picture, is it, Alexis? Do you really want to end up a lonely, bitter housewife with a drinking problem? Be grateful for your A-cup. Go to Italy next summer. Eat lots of gelato.

  Love,

  Plum

  P.S. If you give me your address, I’ll send you a signed copy of Fuckability Theory.

  I stayed at the coffeehouse until it closed, responding to the rest of the girls in my inbox, offering them each a signed copy of Marlowe’s book or Verena’s, whichever they preferred. Then I clicked open the spreadsheet of 50,000 email addresses that I had sent to Julia, which was still on my desktop. I would email the girls in batches, offering to send them books, which we could discuss if they were interested. Even if only a handful of them agreed, it would be worth it.

  I had wanted a project of my own. Perhaps this was a better use of my time than stealing underwear. I’d write to Kitty’s girls illicitly, becoming a different type of outlaw.

  • • •

  WITHIN ONLY A FEW DAYS of starting my new project, I had numerous requests for copies of Fuckability Theory and Adventures in Dietland. I spent hours each day addressing envelopes and lugging packages to the post office, which left less time for roaming around the city, getting into trouble.

  Returning from the post office one afternoon, I turned the corner onto Thirteenth Street and saw Julia teetering down the sidewalk ahead of me, pulling a small suitcase. She was wearing her trench coat, as usual, and when she turned around—paranoid as ever—she noticed me following her. Having been discussed but not seen for so long, Julia had taken on a mythic quality. Seeing her was like spotting a nearly extinct creature; I had the urge to take a photograph or maybe look at her through binoculars.

  “I’ve come for the night,” she said when I caught up to her, black streaks on her cheeks.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “We had a spill at work. Mascara,” she said, trying to wipe it off. “It has not been a good day, if you must know. We were unpacking a shipment. One of the interns—Abigail or Anastasia or something—actually crawled into a crate and was nearly crushed to death by several thousand eyebrow pencils. Now she’s limping. They are completely useless, those girls. Little Kittys, all of them.”

  “Kittens.”

  She asked me to walk ahead of her and she would follow. I was relieved that Verena and Rubí had gone to Washington, D.C., for the day to attend meetings about Dabsitaf; Verena would not have welcomed Julia’s presence.

  Marlowe was startled at the sight of the two of us coming through the door of Calliope House. “She’s alive!” said Marlowe, giving Julia a quick peck on the cheek. Julia’s expression remained blank. She entered the living room, removing a plastic bag from the front pouch of her suitcase. It was filled with cosmetics.

  “For the scholarship fund,” Julia said. She handed the bag to Marlowe, who explained that Julia stole high-end products from work and they sold them online, using the money to send working-class women to college.

  Julia flung her trench coat over a chair and reclined on the sofa, not bothering to say anything else to Marlowe and me. “Don’t go near her,” Marlowe whispered before heading out the door. “It’ll take a while.”

  “What will?”

  “The transformation. Watch and see.”

  Julia took off her heels and massaged her red and swollen feet, wincing as she did. She removed her si
lver jewelry—earrings, necklace, bracelet, and rings—and set the items on the coffee table. Then she reached into her blouse and removed her breasts. They were pink jellylike mounds that she placed on the table next to her jewelry. She slipped her arms into her blouse and contorted this way and that, removing her bra, a pink V— S— number.

  After taking off her shoes, jewelry, breasts, and bra, Julia disappeared upstairs to remove her figure-hugging clothes and the Thinz that compressed her curvy body into a boyish pillar, as well as the rest of her stripper underwear. She washed her face of makeup, then showered. When she came downstairs thirty minutes later in leggings and a tank top, a ball cap on her head, she was someone else.

  “It’s me, Julia,” she said when she saw my surprise, but only her voice was the same. Her face had changed from wide-eyed cartoon princess to tired thirty-something.

  In the kitchen, she rummaged through the fridge and pulled out a turkey leg and mashed potatoes, as well as the pistachio ice cream and buttery shortbread I’d made earlier in the day. She spread the dishes all over the table and worked her way through them. I had wanted the turkey leg but didn’t say anything. Julia was sucking on the bones.

  Normally I would have joined her by eating something myself, but I was too enthralled to do anything but watch her stuff her mouth under Eulayla Baptist’s fat jeans. She was normally so controlled. She finished the mashed potatoes and moved on to the ice cream and shortbread. “How many calories in this?” she asked, holding up a piece of shortbread, globs of grease in the corners of her mouth.