Dietland (17 page)

“Trust in the process. Besides, it might be fun for Plum as well. You've imagined yourself as Alicia for so long that you don't give Plum a chance to be everything she can be.”

“I've been Plum my whole life. She's had plenty of chances.” I thought about the makeover. Shopping for cosmetics and new shoes, I supposed that's what she had in mind. I could handle that. “And the fourth task?”

“A week of blind dates.”

An invisible hand punched me in the gut. “Verena—”

“My dentist, Gina, always tries to fix me up with men, which is annoying and offensive for a variety of reasons. She knows plenty of single men—they're in and out of her office all day long. So yesterday I called her and asked her to arrange a string of dates for a young friend of mine. She practically cackled with joy.” I pictured Gina with a wart on her chin, clasping a broomstick.

“What did you tell her about me?”

“That you work for Kitty, that you're smart and pretty, that you live in Brooklyn.”

“The men won't be expecting someone like me.”

“These are blind dates. They won't know what to expect.”

“Verena,” I said in a tone that let her know I was tired of this game, “you know what I mean. I'm not a generic female. I cannot be set up on dates.”

“Trust in the process, Plum. That's all I ask.”

“I'll be humiliated,” I said. “You know that. That's what you want to happen, isn't it?”

“You make me sound like a monster.”

“I can't understand why you're doing this. I thought you wanted to change my mind about the surgery? So far you're not doing a very good job.”

“I just want you to experience being Alicia. She wants to meet men. She wants to fall in love, get married, have babies, the whole predictable triumvirate. That's what you said you wanted.”

“But I'm not Alicia yet.”

“We're just going to pretend that you're Alicia. I want to move the present and the future closer together. It's an experiment.”

“Okay, send the men over, I don't care. I hope they do humiliate me. It'll confirm what I already know but what you can't accept: Plum shouldn't exist.” Plum was moving into the past, like someone on the platform as the train pulled away, slipping from view. I wouldn't even bother to wave goodbye.

I didn't bother to ask about the fifth task. Verena said the makeover would begin the next morning. I was supposed to meet her friend Marlowe Buchanan at Café Rose in Union Square. The name Marlowe Buchanan was instantly familiar, but I couldn't recall why. I turned it over in my mind several times, and then it came to me. “Marlowe Buchanan . . . the actress?”

“Yes, I guess she was an actress. I don't think of her that way. She's just Marlowe to me.”

I should have known it wouldn't be a normal kind of friend.

“Is there a problem?” Verena asked innocently.

The New Baptist Plan was becoming stranger by the day.

 

• • •

The
New Baptist Plan,
Task Three:

Makeover

When I was a girl living on Harper Lane, I watched Marlowe Buchanan in the sitcom
Ellie
every Thursday night. She played the title character, Ellie Waters, a young woman who had moved from Ohio to New York City to become a TV weathergirl. It was a fish-out-of-Midwest story, with beautiful small-town Ellie trying to make it in the big city.

The actress Marlowe Buchanan, and by extension her character Ellie, was most famous for her
Birth of Venus
hair, which was long and thick and honey colored. It was mesmerizing to watch her every week, her hair falling over her shoulders and down her back, swishing behind her like a hula skirt as she walked. Marlowe appeared in a series of shampoo commercials with a Rapunzel theme, and she posed for the cover of
Vanity Fair
naked, with only her hair to shield her. Her hair was her trademark. Before
Ellie,
she'd been a teenage model, appearing on the covers of
Daisy Chain
and
Seventeen.

I watched
Ellie
for years, but when the show went off the air I became obsessed with something else and I hadn't thought of Marlowe again until Verena mentioned her. I couldn't recall ever seeing Marlowe on TV after
Ellie.
She seemed to have disappeared.

The night before I was supposed to meet Marlowe, I lay paralyzed on the sofa with electric shocks and nausea thanks to my continuing withdrawal from Y——. I found episodes of
Ellie
online, and while I went in and out of sleep, the show played in the background, a happy memory from my life on Harper Lane.

The next morning I was early to meet Marlowe at Café Rose. Before I left home, Verena had called and asked me to bring one of Alicia's dresses. I chose a white poplin shirtdress with purple trim, now folded in a bag at my feet. The opening credits of Marlowe's sitcom played in my head, with Marlowe in her raincoat, running around Manhattan in the drizzle, never mussing her glorious hair.

I expected her to look different in person, not only because she was older. Celebrities usually looked different in real life—I knew that from my days at Delia's restaurant, which sat at the edge of West Hollywood. Whenever a famous actress walked through the door it was usually a disappointment. I expected the women to radiate light like they did on the screen, where a tiny movement—the brush of lashes against a cheek—was exquisite and beautiful, a raven batting its wing. In person they were ghostlike, their normally bold features faint, as if their likenesses had been reproduced so many times that they were becoming faded.

This wasn't the case with Marlowe. When she arrived at the café, she didn't look like a dialed-down version of her former self, but like an entirely different person. I guessed that no one ever recognized her in public. She must have weighed around two hundred pounds, maybe more. Her long hair was gone, replaced by a short crop, which was still honey colored but threaded with gray. Wayward strands were pinned back with a tiny red barrette. She was wearing a white sundress, her skin tanned, the muscles in her arms and legs defined despite the roundness. There was a baby strapped to her chest, who was facing outward and smiling. He was a gyrating mass of bare arms and legs, a demi octopus.

“I feel like I know you already!” Marlowe said, settling into the chair across from me, having had no trouble picking me out of a crowd. “I'm Marlowe, this is Huck.” I managed a startled hello.

She said she wanted to meet away from Calliope House so we could be alone and talk. As she settled in, disentangling her things and finding places for them on the empty chairs, I looked at her face, examining it for traces of Ellie, but I couldn't see any. The voice was the same, though, honeyed to match her hair, and it was funny to hear its tones directed at me in conversation rather than coming from a TV.

I went to the counter to fetch Marlowe a coffee and a cruller, which I offered to do to save her the trouble, given the baby. I couldn't imagine what kind of makeover she had in mind. Perhaps it was a reverse makeover, where she was going to make me look worse than I already did. I felt bad for thinking this, but beautiful Ellie was gone and in her place was this chunky, short-haired woman with a baby.

When I returned to the table, Marlowe had taken the baby out of his carrier and was bouncing him on her lap. While she ate the cruller she fixed her eyes through the massive plate-glass window next to our table and said, “You know, it's been about fifteen years since I left Hollywood, but sometimes those British tabloids send a pap to long-lens me eating a taco or something.” With her mouth full of pastry, she held up her baby-free hand to the café window and extended her middle finger. “You never know if one of them is watching.”

I decided to tell her about growing up in Myrna Jade's house, where I was watched. This was something I'd been unwilling to share with Verena, but Marlowe and I had more in common. I never thought I'd have anything in common with a TV star.

“I remember that little house on . . . what was it, Hanover Street?”

“Harper Lane.”

“Harper Lane! I can't believe you lived there. I drove by that house once when my aunt visited me out in L.A. She was ancient and wanted to reminisce about the stars of old. When she spotted Myrna Jade's name on the star map we just
had
to go.”

“Was that when you were playing Ellie?”

Marlowe nodded. When I was watching
Ellie
on TV, Marlowe was driving by my house, watching me.

“I loved Ellie,” I said, cringing at the way I sounded, but I couldn't help it. “I really wanted to look like you. I begged my mom to buy the shampoo.”

“Sugar, the shampoo wouldn't have helped you look like me. I wasn't entirely au naturel back then. It took a committee to make me look the way I did. But those days are behind me.” She cupped her breasts and gave them a squeeze. “I can assure you there's nothing inside this body with a serial number now.”

Marlowe said that even her name hadn't been real. Her birth name was Marlowe Salazar, Marlowe being her mother's maiden name and Salazar her father's surname. Her management company thought Salazar sounded too brown, so they poked around in the family tree until they found the name Buchanan. “I was ethnically cleansed. I never changed the name back because it's my brand now.”

On Marlowe's left bicep there was a message, black script on flesh, but I couldn't read it. As she fed the baby bits of pastry, I leaned closer:
women don't want to be me, men don't want to fuck me.

“Is that a tattoo? A permanent one?”

She laughed. “Of course.”

“But what does it mean?”

Marlowe said she would tell me the story of the tattoo, but first I went to order her another coffee.

During the break between the fourth and fifth seasons of
Ellie,
Marlowe traveled to Italy for an extended vacation. Her handlers and her parents were pressuring her to accept a film role, but Marlowe wanted a break. She was exhausted from the pressures of carrying her own show and wanted to spend the summer out of the spotlight and on her own. “In L.A., so many people wanted a piece of me. I needed to get away.”

Ellie
was not broadcast in Italy and Marlowe could enjoy anonymity there, as much as was possible for any beautiful woman in Italy. She pinned her hair to her head and wore a ball cap and frumpy, loose-fitting clothes. Nobody on the plane recognized her. In Rome, she went sightseeing like every other tourist and ate whatever she wanted. The producers of
Ellie
had her on a strict diet, so Italy was like a giant all-you-can-eat buffet. “Breakfast at the hotel was bread smeared with chocolate. Did you know that's actually a thing in Italy? I went for gelato at Giolitti's, sampled pasta dishes at two different trattorias, ate pizza rustica while walking around the market at Campo de' Fiori and then I took a picnic to the Villa Borghese gardens, where I ate olives and cheese and drank wine while sitting under a tree. That was Day One.” Marlowe said that the food combined with anonymity was like a narcotic.

I didn't know what it was like to be a celebrity, but the thought of walking the streets with no one watching me, and eating whatever I wanted, was exhilarating. When she said it felt as if her feet never touched the ground, I could practically feel it myself.

One afternoon she was walking through Trastevere taking photos when she passed a barbershop filled with old men. She peeked in the window, planning to take a photo. On the counters were jars filled with blue Barbicide and black combs; the men smoked and read newspapers; a dog slept in the doorway. She put her camera away and went inside. “I decided right then and there, on what was essentially a whim, to cut off my hair.
All of it.
I sat down in the chair and took off my cap. My hair tumbled out. I tried to explain to the barber what I wanted, but he didn't understand. He had probably never seen that much hair in his life.” Marlowe braided her hair, from the nape of her neck down to the ends, and then she took the barber's scissors and cut the braid off. Her description of it was like a scene from a horror movie.

She said the men in the barbershop had gathered around to watch. She rolled the braid into a coil and put it in her backpack, then pointed to a teenage boy who was sweeping the floor. The barber understood that she wanted her hair like the boy's. The men were aghast at what this pretty young woman was doing to herself.

Marlowe paused the story to tend to her baby, who had become fussy. She looked in her bag for a bottle and slipped the rubber nipple into his mouth. “I was aware that my contract forbade me to alter my appearance in any way without permission from NBC. On some level I knew I was deliberately sabotaging myself and my career, but I wasn't really conscious of it at the time. I got up in the morning and didn't have to worry about washing and drying my hair—I just leapt out of bed and went on my way. I had a simple face buried under all that hair, pretty but more androgynous than I'd ever realized. I was almost unrecognizable, even to myself.”

Marlowe left Rome to travel the hill towns of Tuscany and Umbria. While she was browsing an open-air market in San Gimignano, an American tourist somehow recognized her, pointed his camera at her, and snapped. Marlowe was startled by the clicking sound of the shutter opening and closing, as loud as a clap of thunder. She dropped the bunch of grapes she was holding and ran to her hotel, racing through the medieval streets. In her hotel room she shut the curtains and took deep, steady breaths. For the rest of the afternoon she remained in the darkened room.

In the late 1990s, before the Web ruled the world, the news cycle was slower—two weeks passed before the photo surfaced in the media. the
National Enquirer
ran it under the headline
WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?
In the photo, Marlowe was at the market in San Gimignano, standing in front of the fruit stand with her shorn hair and twenty-five extra pounds.
Entertainment Tonight
and the
New York Daily
made Marlowe's transformation their top story. The producers of
Ellie
called an urgent meeting in L.A., but Marlowe found out about what was happening only when she called her mother from a payphone to say hello. “
What have you done?
” her mother shrieked, shattering the peace of an afternoon in Cortona. Birds in the Piazza della Repubblica took flight.