Dietland (15 page)

In the end, he didn't give it to me. Tristan said we shouldn't be friends anymore, that it was “impossible.” We'd been on the verge of what I'd wanted, that place of wanting and touching, but he pulled back at the last moment. “You're not right for me,” he'd said, and then he refused to talk to me.

When our friendship ended he began to date a girl from my history class. After months of being friends with me, of building up to something that never happened, he began to date her and instantly they were holding hands and kissing as they walked together on campus, and doing other things behind closed doors that I could only imagine. That was the start of the unraveling that would culminate several weeks later with my mother's arrival on campus and Dr. Willoughby prescribing Y——, but I didn't know that at the time.

At the beginning of the new semester in January, I walked to the campus health center in a snowstorm. I felt that something bad was going to happen to me. “I need help,” I said to the disinterested receptionist behind the desk. She asked what was wrong but I didn't have words for it. “Well?” she asked; there was a line forming behind me. “I'm bleeding,” I said. It wasn't true, but it seemed to sum up my defectiveness as a female more than anything else I could say.

As I sat in the waiting area, I thought about leaving, but I didn't know where else to go. My friends had tried to be helpful, but I didn't share with them the depths of my pain; they might have laughed. There had never been anything between me and Tristan besides friendship, so they would have thought me foolish. That there had only been friendship between us made it worse. There had been a line between us. It was the line I grieved over, more than I grieved for Tristan. The line would always be there, even after Tristan was gone.

In the examining room I put on a gown and the nurse weighed me and took my blood pressure. The doctor arrived and listened to my heartbeat and then helped me recline on the examining table. He felt around on my breasts, where I had imagined Tristan might have touched me. Then he said something about my cervix and moved my legs apart. I had always avoided gynecological exams, too embarrassed at the thought of exposing my body in such a way. I lifted up my head. “Wait.”

“Just lie back and relax,” he said in a tone he must have thought would soothe me. He touched me down there with a cold, gloved hand. I had never been touched there before and my knee moved involuntarily and bumped his head. “Are you sexually active?”

I could see the top of his blond head over the curve of my stomach. “No.”

“I'm going to insert the speculum now. You might feel a pinch.” I looked up at the ceiling tiles, cloudy and white like the surface of the moon, and held the sides of the table as he pushed something hard into me, opening up what felt like a new space. I had never had anything put inside me before, not a penis, a tampon, or a finger. It felt as if he were stabbing me. With Tristan, and then with the doctor, I felt pain in places I hadn't known existed.

“Relax,” the doctor said. “Don't clench.”

When the doctor finished, he said he'd leave me alone to get dressed. After he was gone, I couldn't move except to put my legs together. I felt pinned down. Tears ran down the sides of my face and into my hair. There was a poster on the wall, an illustration of a see-through pregnant woman standing in profile, her guts like the inside of an aquarium. I had imagined having a baby with Tristan, had fantasized about all sorts of things happening between us, even though I had known it was impossible, that there was a line.

I tried to maneuver myself up from the table, wanting to leave before anyone saw that I was crying. When I stood, blood ran down my legs and into my socks. I hobbled to the counter where there was a roll of blue paper towels, and tried to wipe myself down. Once I got back to my dorm room, I stood in the shower and watched the blood circle the drain. There was a wound somewhere, deep inside of me. It never healed, but after I began to take Y——, I could no longer feel it.

 

• • •

The First Couple

The world's most famous porn star was shot in the head outside a Times Square hotel. A photograph of her corpse appeared in all the morning papers, even the respectable ones. After being shot she rolled into the gutter, a fact that the tabloids chose not to exploit. If not for the wound in her forehead, it would not have been obvious she was dead. She was lying with her eyes fixed in space, her lips slightly parted, which is how she often looked in her films.

Stella Cross was a major star, not some anonymous girl from the Midwest who was plucked before she was ripe, fucked in every orifice, and tossed into the compost heap. Stella Cross, her name a tangle of allusions to Jesus or just being nailed, had sealed her pornographic fame with a series of seven films called
A Cum-Sucking Slut Named Stella,
1 through 7; the series was halted after the tissue between Stella's vagina and anus was torn from so much “double anal” and “double vag,” as she put it, which she had endured for days on end for the seventh film; she was left with a gaping wound that needed reconstructive surgery. “I nearly had to retire my cooch!” she told a radio interviewer, likening it to a baseball player's jersey.

The new vagina was revealed in her comeback film,
Stella De-Flowered,
a reenactment of her rape by a neighbor at the age of fifteen, which was directed by her husband and awarded Best Anal (nonconsensual) by
Adult Film Digest.
A mold of her new vagina was mass-reproduced by a factory in Manila and sold on her website as a sex toy. Stella had a framed photograph of the hair-netted Filipino factory women holding the molds of her ladyparts and smiling.

Stella Cross was an international star whose fame transcended the pornographic world. She was the subject of a documentary that won a prize at Cannes. She was the face of Kiss Me jeans, bought in shopping malls across America by preteen girls. A charity called Help These Children flew her to Guatemala after a mudslide, where she handed out stuffed toys to the kids and cheered everyone up. The name Stella had even been number one in Ghana among baby-girl names, two years running. People who had no idea that Stella Cross made her living on her back and on all fours like a dog knew her name, even if they were not entirely sure how they knew it.

After Stella Cross was shot, her husband was gunned down too. He had been talking on his cell phone at the end of the block, unnoticed by anyone. When the bullet entered his head, he crumpled to the ground with far less attendant excitement. Everyone always said he was a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. At the time of his death he was being investigated for using underage girls in his series of films called
Barely Legal Slumber Party: Daddy's Cumming.

“Waves of grief for Stella Cross and her husband, Travis, rolled over Silicone Valley yesterday,” said an article in the
New York Daily.
“Cross and her husband were known in the industry as the First Couple of Porn. ‘They were our Camelot,' said performer Reginald C*********.”

Witnesses said Stella had been shot by a woman on a motorcycle. “A crack shot,” said a witness when interviewed on TV. The man, wearing a Jets ball cap, was interviewed outside the hotel, which was still festooned with yellow police tape, like a sad sort of Christmas garland.

“She was just shot—
bam!
—like that,” he said. It seemed that he wanted to add “awesome” or a similar exclamation.

Before she was murdered, the appearance of Stella Cross on the sidewalk outside the hotel had caused an outbreak of excitement among the tourists in Times Square. Such was the crush of autograph seekers and photograph takers that ten minutes before the shooting, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, after receiving an award in the hotel ballroom, walked out the front door and into a waiting car, unnoticed.

“Do you think the assassin was actually aiming for the Supreme Court justice?” the television interviewer asked the man.

“No way,” the man said. “No way. I don't know nothin' about this justice or whatever, but I'm telling ya, this motorcycle pulled up outside the hotel and this woman just aimed right at Stella and shot. It was totally a woman who did it, too.”

The blond Stella was shot as she walked away from the crowd of fans, sandwiched between two large black men who were her bodyguards. By the next evening, there were tribute videos posted online by Stella's fans, with clips of Stella having sex spliced together with photos of her dead body—or perhaps they were just stills from her film
Fuck Me Till I'm Dead.

 

• • •

The
New Baptist Plan,
Task One:

Withdrawal

The Nola and Nedra Show
played on the radio, broadcasting live from Minneapolis. I listened while lying naked on the sofa, running my fingers through the sweaty curls of my pubic hair.

“My eleven-year-old nephew has a Stella Cross poster on his wall,” said Nedra Feldstein-Delaney.

“No!” said her cohost, Nola Larson King.

“Yes. My sister said all of his friends have it and she didn't want him to be left out.”

“Oh, Nedra, I'm just sick about this.” I could hear the pain in Nola's middle-aged, midwestern voice. She was always the more emotional of the two.

I picked up my glass of water (
FREE FOOD
) from the coffee table; after taking a drink, I set it over my bellybutton, the black hole amid the swirling stretch marks and deep crevices. Outside it was a boiling July day, and inside my body it felt like July as well. I was baking from the inside. I had the air conditioner running, but it wasn't helping.

The day after meeting with Verena I had begun to cut my tablets of Y—— in half. She was right. Alicia wouldn't be strung out on antidepressants, and if I was serious about becoming her, I needed to start taking more steps in that direction. Within days I began to experience flu-like symptoms and thought I had caught a bug, but Verena told me over the phone that I was suffering from “Y—— flu” and that this was a normal symptom of withdrawal.

She made me sound like a drug addict.

“Y—— won't give up its grip on you easily, but your willingness to change is impressive, hon. This is an important step.” She encouraged me to endure the symptoms but said if they became too much I should call my doctor and ask for a low dose of Prozac, which could make Y—— withdrawal easier. I thought another pill was the last thing I needed.

For days I had a high fever and was marooned in my bed, wrapped in the sheets. I was nearly delirious for some of the time and saw things that weren't there, like my dead grandmother sitting at the end of my bed. I began to sweat and experience chills and aches. This went on for days. When the worst of it was over I left my bed and went to the living room to lie on the sofa and watch TV or listen to the radio, feeling leaden and exhausted, sensitive to touch and light. I couldn't recall ever feeling such misery, and yet in a strange way I welcomed the symptoms. They were unpleasant, but they were evidence of the change I was going through, my metamorphosis from Plum to Alicia.

Despite the humiliation of my session with Verena, I was grateful that she'd moved me one step closer to my new life, though I knew she had other intentions. Speaking with her had been painful and embarrassing, but in a way it was a relief to say those things. Afterward I felt as if I were carrying one less burden.

“Stella Cross's father is being released from prison early so he can attend her funeral,” said Nedra Feldstein-Delaney.

I wasn't answering Kitty's messages. It'd been at least a week since I'd even opened the Dear Kitty account. In the three years I'd been working for Kitty I had been obsessively disciplined about my job, only taking weekends off, almost never missing a day, even working when I was sick. I had suspected that if I stepped out of Dear Kitty completely, I'd never want to go back.

I had a sudden fear that Kitty might find out I had been slacking off. She didn't have the password to the account, but the IT department could surely find a way in. My anxiety was enough to send me to the computer. I sat on my wooden chair without wearing any clothes, my bottom sticking to the seat, my breasts sagging down to the level of the keyboard. In the computer I saw myself reflected back, but I was too numb to muster disgust.

“In a poll conducted last year, more seven-year-olds had heard of Stella Cross than Martha Washington,” said Nola Larson King.

As always, the Austen system was slow to log me in. An hourglass on the screen turned cartwheels while I waited. This ritual always gave me time to brace myself for what would flow into my inbox, like the moment on a cop show before a sheet is pulled back from a mutilated corpse in the morgue. Sharp intake of breath and then . . .
the horror.

The messages poured in. There were more than a thousand of them. The sight of the massive list was like a collective cry in my ears. I opened the first letter but couldn't summon the mental powers to concentrate. Kitty. Abortion. Blah. Blah. Blah. I wanted to write back to the girl, HaleyBailey80, and say, “Why are you asking me, Kitty Montgomery, whether or not to have an abortion? I flunked out of Brown!” Only after a break did the absurdity of anyone writing to Kitty for advice, and thus the absurdity of my job, become clear.

Nedra Feldstein-Delaney said, “Last Christmas my eight-year-old niece asked Santa Claus for a G-string.”

I looked at the next ten messages in the queue and I couldn't face them. Not the next ten, not the next two hundred. I dragged my cursor down the list, highlighted them all, and clicked
delete.
I waited a few seconds to see if I'd feel any guilt, but I didn't feel anything.