Dietland (16 page)

 

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The
New Baptist Plan,
Task Two:

Confrontation

With the Y—— flu subsiding, I soon developed new symptoms, such as the feeling of shocks in my extremities, tiny pinpricks of electricity. I was zapped throughout the day on the bottoms of my feet and my fingertips. Overall I didn't feel right; I was at a remove from life, as if there were a pane of glass between me and everything else.

My apartment was stale with sweat and the remnants of fever—it was like living inside a jar with the lid screwed shut. I was in the middle of washing clothes and linens and preparing to open all the windows when Verena called to explain about the second task of the New Baptist Plan. She wanted me to confront people who made rude comments or stared at me. “Don't ignore them,” she said. “Respond.”

I was still in the middle of the first hellish task, and now she was giving me another. “Why bother? I won't look like this for much longer.”

“I think you need to stand up for Plum, don't you? Once she's gone, you may regret that you never defended her.” Verena spoke about Plum as if she was going to be annihilated. I saw a watermelon dropped from the roof, its remains reddening the sidewalk.

“If you're trying to talk me out of the surgery, then reminding me how much everyone hates me isn't going to achieve that.”

“Trust in the process. A Baptist isn't afraid to take risks.”

I was glad we were talking on the phone so she couldn't see me roll my eyes. I had no intention of confronting anyone. The only way I could survive my life was to exist in a fog of denial. Acknowledging what happened around me was almost unimaginable. In nearly thirty years of life I'd rarely done it. If I ignored it, then it wasn't real. Still, I told Verena that I would. She'd never know. I'd make up a story, something filled with pathos, like a message from one of Kitty's girls.

The $20,000 would soon be mine. After hanging up the phone, I looked through all my catalogs and ordered more clothes.

Verena had said the process of weaning off Y—— would take more than a month. I couldn't hide in my apartment for all that time. I decided that returning to my normal routine would offer stability and help me deal with the disorienting symptoms. I packed my laptop bag and headed to the café for the first time in weeks. On my way there I thought more about the second task. If I had wanted to confront someone I wouldn't have had to search for opportunities. I thought about what I'd say to the mean boys who hung out on the corner. Nothing came to mind, no witty, zinging statement to put them in their place. Words were insufficient. Instead I imagined them being dropped from the Harbor Freeway interchange, like those men on the news, or maybe a bus could swerve onto the sidewalk, splattering the five of them and sending their heads rolling down the street like bowling balls.

“In an ideal world, what would happen?” Verena had asked during our first session.

In an ideal world, they would bleed.

At the café, I settled at my usual place. At the table where Leeta had sat, two elderly women shared a slice of cheesecake.

After being at home for so long, I felt the café's onslaught of sensations—the abundance of light through the many windows, the noises from people and machines. I was like a cave-dweller thrust into brightness. My hands fumbled with the clasps on my laptop bag, the electric shocks becoming more bothersome. I felt feeble and fragile, unfit to be in a world of normal people.

On the café radio, Nedra Feldstein-Delaney said: “Stella Cross's real name was Jennifer Rose Smith.”

Carmen was pleased to see me, but she was busy with customers and couldn't talk, so I went to work. I'd deleted the backlog of messages, but there were new ones every day. I opened the first one:
deer kittey, i think i have hpv do u know if this is deadley?
I stared at the message the way one stares at a painting: straight on, rather than reading it from left to right. The words were symbols, but I wasn't sure what they meant.
hpv.
Oh, I recognized that. I could have opened my file and copied the relevant material, but deleting the girl was easier.

With great effort, I opened another message:
Dear Kitty, Is it bad that I cut my arms with a razor?
I leaned over, placing my face in front of the screen:
cut. arms. razor.
A cutter. I used to hear from cutters every day, but had never really thought about what it meant to cut one's flesh with a steel blade. Now it seemed such a bizarre thing to do.
Yes, of course it's bad,
I wanted to write.
What a stupid question.
But it was too much effort, so I deleted the girl. I skimmed the next twenty messages and deleted them, too. I wondered what was happening to me. I had been like an athlete before, speeding through the messages no matter how trivial or annoying, but after being sidelined for a couple weeks, the Kitty part of my brain had atrophied. I had no idea what to say to these girls and I wished they would go away.

Carmen was the only part of the café I had missed, and I wanted her to visit with me. She finally stopped at my table, bringing with her a cranberry orange scone (480). She was always bringing me things I couldn't eat.
A saboteur,
Eulayla Baptist would have called her, but it wasn't intentional. I picked at the corner of the scone, not feeling any desire for it. One result of Y—— withdrawal was a loss of appetite—the only positive side effect.

As Carmen spoke about what had been happening in the café, I felt pulses of heat in my fingertips, which soon spread up my arms.

“Are you all right?”

“I'm still sick. Go on, tell me more.” I listened to her words as if they were background music. In my mind all I could think about was the New Baptist Plan, about the two versions of me, Plum and Alicia, and about Verena and all the things we had discussed. This café life didn't fit me anymore. Being there was like hobbling around in too-tight shoes.

As she spoke, I wondered what Carmen thought of me. She was quick and light, even while pregnant. The boys on the corner wouldn't have laughed at her. She would never know what that was like. I was aware of the line that existed between us, the line that existed between me and most people. I had never liked to acknowledge the line, but there it was. Now I was too aware of it.

Carmen returned to work and I was alone at the table. With my fingernail, I dug a cranberry out of the scone and sucked it off my finger. As I did, I noticed that the woman at the next table was staring at me in a way I didn't like. Could I say something to her?

Just then I felt a stab of electricity in my left eye. I dropped my scone onto the table and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the sensation to pass. When I opened my eyes, the woman was still looking my way.

“What are you staring at?” My voice was deep and growl-like, not my own.

On the radio, Nola Larson King said: “I have a sister named Jennifer.”

For days I didn't feel right, but I went to the café anyway. I skimmed hundreds of messages and deleted them. It wasn't clear to me why I attempted to read them if I was going to delete them. Maybe I was pretending to be God, receiving a prayer. Even with no intention of answering, I could send a comforting vibe into the universe:
I have heard you. Be at peace.

When I was tired of staring at the computer screen, I stared at the people in the café. There was a steady stream of them throughout the day, since no one remained as long as me. I watched them order their coffees and teas, sandwiches and cakes, and felt the electric shocks move across my tongue and down my throat, like a trail of ants.

It was never quiet in the café and I heard snippets of conversation, the general chatter of life. Certain comments began to rise above the others, or maybe I was more attuned to them.

“If you don't eat lunch you're going to be hungry later. Why do you always do this?” At the next table, a young man was speaking to a skinny young woman, maybe his girlfriend. “I know you're hungry.”

“I'm not.” The girl, who had a beakish face, turned toward me. I returned to my laptop.

Dear Kitty, Last summer in Palm Beach I met this guy Ryan. See, Ryan knows my cousin Becky and well, this is a long story, so let me start at the begin—

Delete.

Dear Kitty, My friend Kelsie has a thigh gap and I was wondering how I can also get—

Delete.

Dear Kitty, I'm sending a photograph of me in a bikini. Do I look—

“. . . fat?” A slim teenage girl two tables away stood up and turned around before the gaze of her mother. “Mom, pay attention. Do I look fat in these shorts?”

“You look fine,” the mother reassured her. The mother was as fat as I was. When she saw me looking at her, she turned away.

In college, my roommates, four thin girls, all friends of mine, were fond of saying “Do I look fat?” just like that girl had said. Sometimes they would pose the question to me, not seeing or caring that when they said “Do I look fat?” they were really saying “Do I look like you?” It was assumed that no one wanted to look like me, not even me.

I turned again to steal a glance at the girl's mother, who was looking down at her hands, as if ashamed. If I were really going to confront someone, as Verena wanted, then I would confront that girl. I'd capture her and put her inside my laptop where she'd be trapped with thousands of Kitty's girls in a kind of hell and I'd force her to twirl around in her shorts forever saying, “Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat?”

I was already fat. I was the worst that could happen.

I didn't return to the café again. Despite my initial fears, I didn't think Kitty would find out that I wasn't doing my work. She barely noticed me. Perhaps I could go on collecting paychecks for weeks or months, even years.

Instead of answering Kitty's email, I watched television. Stanley Austen appeared on
The
Cheryl Crane-Murphy Report
to discuss what continued to unfold in London, but he refused to acknowledge that he had been threatened. “Even if I were threatened, I wouldn't worry in the slightest,” he said, his sleek silver hair contrasting unpleasantly with his suntanned skin. “I'm used to crazy, bitter women making threats. They complain incessantly that my fashion magazines exploit women, then on the other hand they complain that the alleged exploitation isn't spread around equally among the fat ones and the ethnic ones. I gave up listening to them years ago.”

“But what about all the metal detectors and barricades that have suddenly appeared outside the Austen Tower?” asked Cheryl Crane-Murphy.

“That was in the works well before all this Jennifer nonsense,” he said. “Jennifer” was media shorthand for the violent events occurring on two continents and the group assumed to be committing them; even if Jennifer was a real person, she couldn't have been acting alone.

Cheryl Crane-Murphy moved on to discuss American HipHop, a cable channel that was headquartered near the Austen Tower in Times Square. Earlier in the week, the CEO admitted he had been threatened, but he wouldn't say how. In response to the threats, he announced that the twenty-four-hour music channel would no longer show videos that degraded women. Commentators wondered what the channel was going to show instead, since all day long it was
bitch this,
bitch that
and there was an endless supply of booty moving through space like smooth brown planets. Cheryl Crane-Murphy and her roundtable of experts wondered if the station would go bankrupt. I turned the channel to American HipHop and saw they were broadcasting a test pattern with a message on the screen reading
WE APOLOGIZE FOR THIS INTERRUPTION TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING
.

Verena called. I listened to her while staring into the void that was American HipHop. She wanted to know about the second task. I decided not to lie and told her about the woman in the café and how I had responded to her:
What are you staring at?
I thought this would be enough of a confrontation—for Plum this was progress—but Verena wasn't satisfied. “It's a good start,” she said, “but I want you to consider doing more than that.” In response I moaned into the phone, experiencing a burst of shocks in my head. “You're not well at all,” Verena said, as if she'd had nothing to do with it.

Although the first two tasks were ongoing, Verena wanted to discuss what was next. I demanded to know how many tasks were left in the New Baptist Plan. I was on the verge of quitting, but she said there were only three tasks left. I was nearly halfway to the $20,000.

“Now what do you want me to do?”

“For the next two tasks, I want you to live as Alicia.”

“That's impossible.”

“I know that Alicia is thin and Plum is fat, but I just want you to pretend to be Alicia. It's an exercise.”

Verena explained that the third task was a makeover. “You've already started buying clothes and accessories, but let's go further. I have a friend who is an expert at this sort of thing. She'll take you out for a few days and make you over from head to toe.”

“What's the point? I don't
look
like Alicia. I can't even fit into the clothes I've bought.”