Dietland
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Whether she ran or turned herself in, she was headed for a life of confinement. I wanted to reach out to her, to say it would be all right, but that would be a lie.
“Almost ready?” Julia said. Leeta struggled to stand up and so did I.
“I understand if you don’t want to give me the money, Louise B.”
“You need the money,” Julia said.
“It’s her choice. I don’t want her to do anything she’s uncomfortable with. She could get into trouble.”
I knew I could get into trouble, but I wanted Leeta to see the sun. “This money was given to me for a reason, but that reason no longer exists. You helped me,” I said. I wanted to say, You saved me. “Now it’s my turn to help you.”
She took the paper bag and stuffed it under her jacket. “I was right about you. You’re not like them.” She nodded upward toward the fifty-two stories on top of us.
“No, not like them.”
She pushed back the hood so I could see her face more clearly. She grabbed my hands, grasping them hard. “That time I spent spying on you was the last happy time in my life,” she said. “I’ve thought of you often while I’ve been down here. Julia has given me updates on how your life has changed, and that’s offered some rare moments of joy. Wherever I end up, just know that I’m on your side.”
She looked at me for several seconds more and then she walked away, inserting the earbuds and pulling the hood back up. Music blasted, muffled to me but deafening for her. I stared at the back of her, at the outline of her body against the hole in the wall and the light from the Beauty Closet. I’d imagined her for so long. In reality, I didn’t know her, but we lived in each other’s memories, each of us what the other needed us to be.
Julia removed the lamps from the hiding space, so the only light was coming from the other side of the hole in the wall. We helped Leeta into the crate. Once inside, she stepped into her sleeping bag and pulled it up so it rested under her arms like a strapless dress. She lowered herself into the crate and lay on the bottom in the fetal position, her face positioned near one of the air holes. Julia and I dropped eyebrow pencils on top of her and she didn’t flinch. We filled the crate with pencils, all the way to the top, until there was no sign of a person underneath. Julia attached the lid.
After we wheeled the crate out of the hiding space, Julia sealed the hole shut, pushing the boxes back in front of it. We moved down the Blush corridor toward the exit.
“Am I allowed to ask where you’re taking her?”
“New Mexico,” Julia said. “I’ll hand her off to someone there. She has to keep moving.”
We took the service elevator to the parking level and pushed the brown crate to the back of a small white delivery van that Julia had rented. I looked over my shoulders, exposed and scared. “Act normal,” Julia whispered. “There might be cameras.”
There were no windows on the sides of the van or in the back doors. With great effort, we lifted the crate and wrestled it into the hold. Once it was secure, Julia locked the doors. I wanted to say Be careful or Good luck, but nothing I could say would have been adequate.
“Write the book,” Julia said, and I told her I would. When she was in the driver’s seat with the door closed, I placed my palm against the glass and Julia did the same on her side. That’s how we said goodbye.
I followed the signs back to the lobby and rushed to get away before I ran into someone like Kitty. When I stepped outside I wanted to cry or scream or beat my fists against the Austen Tower, but I couldn’t. Other people would see. Wherever I went, I was seen.
After being in the hiding space, I found everything outside to be beautiful, even the concrete barricades and the neon lights. I headed toward Broadway. The white van was out there somewhere, but I didn’t see it. As I walked I stripped off my jacket and scarf and dragged them behind me. I pushed my way through the masses of tourists and began to run faster than I had ever run before.
Leeta was right. It felt good to be free. With unexpected power in my legs, I kept going, racing ahead with the wind and the sun on my face, taking a leap into the wide world, which now seemed too small to contain me.
Burst!
Acknowledgments
Alice Tasman, one of my lucky Alices, was the only literary agent in New York brave enough to take on Dietland. I am grateful for that every day. I am also tremendously lucky to have the other women at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, and all my international co-agents and publishers, in my corner. I cannot possibly thank all these lovely people enough.
Lauren Wein, my editor (and admirer of my Dietland spreadsheets), shared my vision for the novel from our first phone call. Heartfelt thanks to her for helping me give Plum and company the editorial makeover they needed while always remaining true to them. Thanks also to Nina Barnett and Alison Kerr Miller for their help with improving the manuscript, and to the whole team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I am so appreciative of their efforts, I could just burst.
The generous and talented writers I met in the Bennington College MFA program continue to inspire me all these years later and will always be my writing community. In particular, I would like to thank William Vandegrift for his friendship, and Alice Mattison, my original lucky Alice, who encouraged me in the beginning and helped me reach the end.
For their valuable editorial feedback, I would like to thank Susanna Jones, Michelle Walker, and my French editor, Aurélien Masson.
During my London years, which were equal parts exhilarating and traumatizing, three scribbling women—Lindsay Catt, Theresa Lee, and Carol McGrath—provided friendship and support when I needed it the most. I would also like to thank the Fat Studies community in the U.K., whose ideas and fellowship enriched my life and work immeasurably.
Callie Khouri used the term “crossed over” in her brilliant screenplay for Thelma & Louise, which I shamelessly adapted for my own purposes in the spirit of sisterhood and consciousness-raising.
The Virginia Woolf line “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality” appears in her essay “Professions for Women.”
This book owes a debt to second-wave feminists, those women who changed the world in such a profound way. I don’t have space to list the writers who have been so important to me, since that would require pages and pages, but I would like to make two acknowledgments: Sandra Lee Bartky, whose essays completely altered my reality, and the feminist novelists from the 1970s and early 1980s, whose work I turned to when I feared I might lose my nerve.
An early and important source of inspiration for Dietland was Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s novel and the film adaptation directed by David Fincher. I would like to think that Dietland would exist even if Fight Club hadn’t provided that initial spark of an idea, but I’ll never know.
Big love to my family, especially my parents, J2, and my late maternal grandparents, and to all the friends and mentors I don’t have room to mention here. Thanks to the many kindhearted people—some of whom I have never met—who offered encouragement and research help during the millions of years it took me to complete this novel.
Finally, thanks to Alicia Plum. She never abandoned me.
About the Author
SARAI WALKER received her MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. Her articles have appeared in national publications, including Seventeen and Mademoiselle, and she served as an editor and writer for Our Bodies, Ourselves before moving to London and then Paris to complete a PhD. She currently lives in the New York City area. Dietland is her first novel.
Footnotes
1 Within a year, Mama began to regain the weight she’d lost. Since she had invested our family’s savings in Baptist Weight Loss, Daddy foresaw disaster and agreed that Mama needed her stomach stapled. It was the only answer. After the surgery, Mama developed an anal leakage and had to wear diapers. (Adventures in Dietland, Chapter 1: “The Birth of Verena, the Birth of an Empire,” p. 27.)
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2 Baptist We
ight Loss pioneered the “photo-bursting” technique. See J. Lucas, “Ripped to Shreds: Advances in Weight Loss Advertising,” Adweek, June 9, 1986. See also H. Whelan and M. Burns, “Baptist Weight Loss and the ‘Before and After’ Photograph,” Journal of Female Psychology 4, no. 2 (1993): 42–65. (Adventures in Dietland, Chapter 1: “The Birth of Verena, the Birth of an Empire,” p. 54.)
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3 Memorandum: From senior vice president [name redacted] to Eulayla Baptist (October 24, 1982): “People who only imagine they’re fat are a huge market for us. Fat, thin . . . these are meaningless distinctions, except at the extremes. What is fat? What is thin? Who cares.” (Adventures in Dietland, Baptist Weight Loss Internal Memo Index, p. 329.)
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4 Some Baptists claimed to have suffered kidney problems as a result of the diet, but this was never proven in a court of law. Mama threatened to sue her accusers for slander, but she never did. Under oath she couldn’t have denied that the diet gave some Baptists bad breath and constipation and made their hair fall out. (Adventures in Dietland, Chapter 2: “The Baptist Plan: Not Everyone Is a Believer,” p. 138.)
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5 Mama’s personal assistant, [name redacted], blackmailed her in the summer of 1990. She had recorded a phone conversation between Mama and her, in which Mama said that the Baptist meals “tasted like shit” and “you couldn’t pay me to eat them.” (Adventures in Dietland, Chapter 2: “The Baptist Plan: Not Everyone Is a Believer,” p. 141.)
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6 Memorandum: From senior vice president [name redacted] to Eulayla Baptist (August 1, 1980): “A diet that produces slow and steady weight loss will not hook new customers, Eulayla. How many times do I have to spell this out? People want immediate results, and an 850-calorie-a-day regimen will give them just that. Baptists will lose a significant amount of weight in the first few weaks [sic] and become addicted to the high of dropping pounds. When they fail to keep up this momentum, they’ll only blame themselves. Trust me on this. I worked at [name redacted] for five years, remember? That’s why you hired me!” (Adventures in Dietland, Baptist Weight Loss Internal Memo Index, p. 332.)
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7 Memorandum: From senior vice president [name redacted] to [name redacted] cc: Eulayla Baptist (February 3, 1982): “Pay attention, [name redacted], we’re not going to get sued! (That lady in Tucson notwithstanding.) 850 calories a day is adequate for human survival. Ignore those World Health Organization stats. There’s a big difference between a starving African and a fat American. Besides, our literature says it’s a 1,200 calorie-a-day regimen, which is perfectly safe.” (Adventures in Dietland, Baptist Weight Loss Internal Memo Index, p. 333.)
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8 Memorandum: From senior vice president [name redacted] to Eulayla Baptist (November 12, 1985): “I cannot emphasize enough the importance of using moral terms when talking about dieting to our clients and the media. The Baptist name makes this even more effective. When Baptists lose weight, they’re ‘good’; when they stray from the plan, they’re ‘bad,’ as in: ‘Were you good or bad this week, Rosemary?’ Every clinic must implement this language immediately.” (Adventures in Dietland, Baptist Weight Loss Internal Memo Index, p. 337. N.B. See also D. Montrose, “American Dieting Culture and Its Roots in the Christian Narrative,” Journal of Weight Loss Studies 1, no. 2 [1999]: 124–46.)
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9 Memorandum: From senior vice president [name redacted] to Eulayla Baptist (February 14, 1998): “Pursuant to our last meeting, those fat feminist cunts in Michigan with their ‘Love Your Body’ bullshit are still chanting outside our clinic in Ann Arbor. This movement cannot be allowed to spread. We’ll counter them with our health jargon (did you approve those pamphlets yet?). They won’t be able to refute our death stats with their feel-good crap. We might want to get a couple MD-for-hire types on the payroll to farm out to the media. That cardio guy in Miami would be perfect for this. Can you authorize payment, please?” (Adventures in Dietland, Baptist Weight Loss Internal Memo Index, p. 351. N.B. See also A. Adamson, G. Hoyt, and O. Rodgers, “‘I Don’t Want to Be Thin—I Choose Health!’: Baptist Weight Loss Advertising and the Birth of Obesity Epidemic Rhetoric,” Eating Disorder Quarterly 14, no. 7 [2004]: 97–119.)
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10 Memorandum: From [name redacted] to senior vice president [name redacted], cc: Eulayla Baptist (March 1, 1990): “Did you get that memo from the lawyer? She says the ‘Results Not Typical’ disclaimer on our posters of Eulayla needs to appear in much larger font. Christ, is there any way around this? We don’t want people to notice it.” (Adventures in Dietland, Baptist Weight Loss Internal Memo Index, p. 357.)
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