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Authors: Sarai Walker

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BOOK: Dietland
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“Huh?”

“Just do it.” With her right hand, she rummaged through her tool belt. Soon I felt a pencil tracing around my O-shaped mouth; it was hard at first, then grew softer. I could feel Julia's breath on my neck as she finished by applying lipstick.

“This color suits you. Your skin is white as a rose.” I blushed. “Doesn't anyone ever tell you you're beautiful?” I looked away, but Julia pulled my chin toward her.

“What color are your nipples?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“Your nipples. What color are they?”

No one had ever asked me that before. “Pink.”

Julia pulled a compact from her tool belt and opened it up. I looked at the palette of pink blusher. “Lighter than that.” Julia reached into her tool belt again and showed me another palette, this one of the palest pink. “Like that.”

Julia took a brush and dusted the powder across my cheeks. The brush fell to the floor and she bent over to pick it up. Inside her blouse, I could see she had roses with thorns tattooed all over her chest.

“Now close your eyes,” she said. Something tickly and soft, like the tip of a feather, moved across my eyelids. When she finished, I opened my eyes. Julia stood back to observe me.

“All makeup is drag,” she said, and folded her arms.

“Why am I here?”

Julia paced in her heels, biting on the wooden end of a brush. “You could go to Kitty right now and tell her about me and then I'd be ruined.”

“Tell her what? I don't know anything.”

Julia considered this. “Leeta thinks you can be trusted. I want you to do something.”

 

 
 

• • •

 
 

For Shonda

 

The men were alive when they were placed inside the brown canvas bags. Two men, two bags. During the night, the bags were dropped from the Harbor Freeway interchange, the tallest in Southern California. The bodies fell from the transition road all the way down to the Century Freeway. The drop would have surely killed them, the authorities later said.

Over the next several hours, the bags were hit and dragged by speeding cars and trucks. A highway patrolman spotted one of the bags and called to report a dead animal on the side of the road. Something brown and massive, he said. It wasn't his job to stop.

An hour later a road crew arrived, two crew veterans and a young rap star named Jayson Fox who was doing community service. One night in his Hollywood Hills home, Jayson Fox had beat up his girlfriend, a famous model. The police photos of the battered model's face were leaked online. Jayson Fox's punishment was a short stint in the L.A. County jail followed by this: wearing a khaki jumpsuit and riding around in a dirty City of Los Angeles truck, sitting between two burly men with bad prostates, picking up animal corpses. Two months of this would teach him not to beat up his girlfriend. Or at least not to get caught.

“You're up, Fox,” said the driver of the truck as they stopped on the shoulder of the freeway near one of the brown objects. Jayson Fox, accustomed to riding in a Bugatti Veyron, was relieved to get out of the smelly truck. The two men watched him walk away, eating their Egg McMuffins. A car full of girls was parked behind them on the shoulder. Girls followed them everywhere. One of them held a sign out the window that read
YOU CAN SLAP
ME,
JAYSON!

“That don't look like no animal,” said one of the men as he watched Jayson Fox approach the brown object with a shovel.

“Nope,” said the other man.

As he got closer, Jayson Fox saw that it was a bag, not a mangled animal. He looked back toward the truck in confusion. One of the men, Egg McMuffin in hand, motioned for him to open the bag, which was soaked in what seemed to be blood. Jayson Fox held his breath and opened it. The men in the truck watched as he peered into the bag and then saw the shock spread across his face. He ran to the edge of the road and threw up. The girls filmed him retching with their phones. Within hours the footage was on the Internet.

The second bag was found later, having been dragged by a truck for seven miles. The Century Freeway was temporarily closed in both directions, causing traffic to back up.

Dr. Ormond Brown watched the news coverage at his home in West Texas and wondered if the police would soon be at his door. He had a feeling he knew who was in those bags, and if he was correct, then he was responsible in some way for their deaths. Or lynchings. He and his wife had put the names and photos of Simmons and Green on their website, after the police and the army had refused to act. Now someone had gone and killed them. This made Dr. Brown think of his daughter. He thought of her till he cried.

The death of Dr. Brown's daughter, United States Army private Shonda Brown, had been ruled a suicide. She was the first African American woman from Texas to die in the Iraq War, a distinction her father would rather she didn't have. On her death certificate, the cause of death was listed as
gunshot wound, self-inflicted.
In the three years since she died, this had not been amended.

Shonda had been stationed at Camp Mojave in Iraq. In her letters and calls home, she seemed untroubled, yet army investigators said she had shot herself in the head with an M16, leaving no note behind. After her body was shipped home, Dr. Brown examined her at the local mortuary, where she was in full military dress. The white gloves she wore on her hands were glued to her skin. That was the first sign that something was wrong. Upon close inspection, Dr. Brown saw that his daughter's face was bruised and her teeth broken. The exit wound at the back of her head was small, too; not from an M16, her father reasoned, but from a pistol.

He asked the funeral home to remove his daughter's clothing and to cut the gloves from her skin. Her hands were found to be scraped and burned. There were bruises all over her arms and legs. When he received the autopsy report, he read that her genitals were burned with bleach. Shonda's father had known all along that his daughter hadn't committed suicide. He couldn't understand how such a conclusion was ever reached.

For three years, through their congressional representative and the Freedom of Information Act, Shonda's parents collected evidence about their daughter's rape and murder. In his investigations, Dr. Brown learned of other American servicewomen who had “committed suicide” in Iraq by seemingly impossible means, such as multiple fatal gunshot wounds or being run over by a truck. Talking to the women's families made him feel as if he was doing something, even if he was powerless in Shonda's case.

Near the third anniversary of Shonda's death, her parents received an unexpected break in their investigation. After he was discharged, Sergeant Lance Pederson committed suicide by asphyxiation in his brother's garage. Before his death, he wrote a letter to the Browns, telling them that their daughter had been raped by two of their fellow soldiers stationed at Camp Mojave—Michael Simmons and Davis Green. He didn't know if they had murdered her, but they had raped her. Everyone knew it.

Shonda's parents turned the letter over to army investigators. Simmons and Green, by this time both private citizens in Los Angeles, were interviewed, but there was no evidence that Shonda had ever been raped, and no rape kit was ever done. Officially:
gunshot wound, self-inflicted.

In an act of desperation, Shonda's parents put the names and photos of Simmons and Green on the website they'd set up for Shonda.
What if they rape someone else?
Shonda's mother had asked.
What if they commit another murder?
Simmons and Green threatened to sue and even hired a lawyer, but now it would never come to that.

Dr. Brown sat in his living room, watching the reports that showed aerial footage of the Harbor Freeway interchange, the brown canvas bags, and the videos of Jayson Fox vomiting. Dr. Brown knew who was in those bags, he just knew. The night before, he had received an email with a file attached. On the file were video confessions, one by Simmons, one by Green, admitting what they had done to Shonda in the kind of detail that left no doubt they were telling the truth. The footage was reminiscent of the videos made by suicide bombers. The men sat in front of an American flag and spoke directly into the camera, knowing that death was upon them.

 

 
 

• • •

 
 

MORE THAN A WEEK HAD PASSED
since my encounter with Julia in the Beauty Closet. She wanted the email addresses of every girl who'd written to Kitty since I'd started my job. There were at least 50,000 of them. When I asked Julia why she wanted them, she said she had her reasons. “It's for a good and noble cause,” she said, “but it's better that you don't know the particulars. Then you'll never have to lie.”

I knew I could get in trouble if I gave her the addresses, which I couldn't afford, since losing my job and my health insurance before the surgery would derail my plans. I had tried to stop thinking about Julia's request. There was nothing in it for me and it was reckless to even consider it, yet I'd been turning it over, unable to forget our meeting. Julia, Leeta, and Verena's book had disrupted the rhythm of my days.

To distract myself, I heated up a slice of my turkey lasagna (230), then turned on the television, placing my plate on the coffee table in front of me.
The Cheryl Crane-Murphy Report
was on. She was discussing the murders of Simmons and Green, as every news channel had been doing for days. The Harbor Freeway interchange was a familiar sight.

“Do I think they deserved to be murdered? Well, as a committed Christian I believe murder is wrong, but at the end of the day I'm not shedding any tears over these thugs. Sue me.” Cheryl Crane-Murphy was like a middle-aged male politician with a comb-over, except that she was a woman and the comb-over was more of a metaphorical one. Her actual hair was short and dark blond, teased and sprayed into place, stiff like whipped meringue. She spoke with faux folksy charm, the camera lens in front of her a peephole to America that she peered through from her desk in New York as if to say,
I can see you, I'm one of you.

I scrolled through the channels, looking for something else, and landed on one of the Austen stations, catching sight of Kitty being interviewed.

There was no escaping Kitty.

“Earlier, I showed you how to pose for photographs so that your hips will appear slimmer,” she said. “Now we're going to camouflage . . .” I clicked back to Cheryl Crane-Murphy, who said, “We should pass a law stating that any serviceman who rapes a servicewoman should be castrated—
without anesthesia.
I swear, I should run for Congress.” I ate my lasagna and watched Cheryl pounding her desk, her eyes wild.

A yellow
BREAKING NEWS
banner appeared at the bottom of the screen. Cheryl adjusted her earpiece and announced that preliminary autopsy results on Simmons and Green had revealed that each man had a wadded-up piece of paper stuck down his throat with the name
Jennifer
written on it.

“Who is Jennifer?” Cheryl Crane-Murphy wanted to know.

The thought of the paper in the dead men's throats made me queasy, and I pushed my plate aside. I switched off the TV and reached for the phone to call my mother. We spoke every couple of days. If I didn't call, she worried.

“Who is Jennifer?” she asked upon answering the phone, knowing it was me. My mother never missed Cheryl Crane-Murphy's show. “Did I ever tell you that your father wanted to name you Jennifer? Practically every girl was named Jennifer back then.” She went on discussing the crime and how she'd been delayed in traffic on the day the bodies had been found.

I let her talk. Since Delia had moved to a retirement home, she was lonely in the house on Harper Lane. I had encouraged her and Delia to sell the house, to rid our family of that horrible place, but they were both too attached to it. No matter how much I emphasized its value as the former home of Myrna Jade, neither of them was persuaded. To them it was home. I had visited Harper Lane so many times in my mind while reading Verena's book that I felt as if I had just been there, but I hadn't set foot in that house for four years.

“I have my own mystery,” I said, cutting off her chatter about the murders. I offered her an edited version of recent events in my life. I needed to say it out loud to another person to make sure I wasn't going crazy. I kept the beginning of the story to myself—the story of Leeta was too odd—but I told my mother about the Beauty Closet, Julia Cole, and her request.

There was silence on her end, and then she said, “Are you making this up?”

“Which part?”

“All of it. Is this Beauty Closet for real?”

“Imagine Madison Square Garden filled with cosmetics. That's how big it was.”

“I don't know what you've gotten yourself mixed up in.”

“I didn't mix myself up in it. They just . . .
found me.

“What's the worst that could happen if you give this Julia person the email addresses?”

“I could get fired.”

“I said the
worst
thing. Getting fired wouldn't be bad at all.” My mother had been against the Dear Kitty job. She wanted me to pursue my writing. “That silly old Kitty” is what she always called her. Having accidentally opened the door to a discussion of my career, or lack of one, I moved to close it. I told her I would decide what to do and let her know.

“Are you feeling okay?”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Every word with her was filled with hidden meaning.
Feeling okay.
She meant the pink pills. Was I depressed? She always worried. It's why she wanted to talk on the phone so frequently.

“You're leaving the apartment regularly, right?”

“Ma, I go to the café every day.”

BOOK: Dietland
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