Dietland (27 page)

“Here she is,” said a voice. It took me a moment to recognize that it was Marlowe's.

“She made it.” That was Sana.

“What took you so long?” asked Verena.

Through the sunlight they appeared before me, swathed in light. “I'm here now,” I said.

I had made my escape.

EAT ME

 • • • 

 

• • •

I'D BEEN LIVING ABOVEGROUND
in Calliope House for more than a week, sleeping peacefully every night. Then the bomb threat came. I was awakened by pounding on the doors, which began with the front door downstairs and then spread throughout the house, far away at first but moving closer—an outbreak of thunder, an approaching storm.

My bedroom door opened and Sana's face appeared through a strip of light. “Bomb threat,” she said, as if I knew what this meant. Before I could ask a question she was gone. I heard scurrying on the floors above and below me and rolled out of bed, then changed from my pajamas into my clothes. If there was a bomb, it might have exploded while I was wasting time putting on my bra and shoes.

The young policeman standing on the stoop as we trailed outside was probably wondering why so many women were living together in the same house, without any men. He held the door open and, once Verena was out, asked, “Is that it?”

We were cordoned at the end of the block with the rest of the neighbors. The clusters of red and blue police lights made our genteel street look like a disco, but we shuffled along slowly, barely awake. On Sixth Avenue, Verena claimed two benches. There were eight of us: Verena, me, Sana, Rubí, and four women who were staying as guests. We looked like we had fled a slumber party. There wasn't much traffic at three a.m., but the cars that did pass slowed down to stare at us.

Sana yawned and set her head on my shoulder, resting her arm across my back. “Are you wearing a
bra?
” she asked.

“I put it on before coming outside.”

“In the face of possible death by explosion, you put on a bra?” Rubí said.

“That's not proper bomb threat etiquette,” Verena said.

“Ha ha.” I let them tease me. No one bothered to tell me what was happening and I assumed someone wanted to blow up Verena—an old disgruntled Baptist, perhaps, or someone else she'd angered with her rants against the diet industry. As I sat on a bench in the black hours of night, it made sense. But then a man in pajamas and leather slippers walked toward us. The pajamas were patterned with tiny cowboys lassoing tiny steers. He stepped over a passed-out homeless man, whom I hadn't noticed. “We've got to do something about this,” the man said. “Do you like being woken up in the middle of the night?”

Verena looked up at the man. “I'm not going to help you throw out the Jews,” she said. She was marmoreal under the streetlight, in her white gown, with her light hair.

“This has nothing to do with the fact that they're
Jews,
” the man said. “Don't say it that way.”

“If they weren't Jews, terrorists wouldn't be terrorizing them,” Verena replied.

The man waved his hand at her in disgust. “We're going to act with or without you,” he said. “Don't forget—if they go down, you go down.”

As the man stalked away, Verena explained that the Jews in question were our next-door neighbors, the Bessie Cantor Foundation for Peace and Understanding, a nonprofit organization that occupied the townhouse next to Calliope House, which was in fact attached to it.
If they go down, you go down.
For years the foundation had been the target of frequent bomb threats by unknown terrorists, who claimed that Bessie Cantor was a front for the Mossad. The businesses and residential neighbors wanted to evict the foundation from the block for all the trouble the bomb threats caused, for the evacuations and police presence and potential for mass casualties. Verena refused to take part in the growing campaign. “First the Jews, then us,” she said.

The man in the cowboy pajamas approached another group of neighbors, and it was clear they were talking about us. They stared and pointed at us, the women on the benches, as if on an island.

We were the outcasts.

At dawn, we were allowed back into the house. The other women returned to their beds, hoping to sleep for an hour or two, but I went directly to the kitchen. Since leaving the underground apartment and moving upstairs, I had spent most of my time in the red kitchen. Verena maintained a well-stocked pantry and in a frenzied few days I had worked my way through it, cooking and eating under the shadow of Eulayla Baptist's fat jeans. I couldn't remember when I'd spent such a happy, carefree time. I loved to bake most of all, making cakes and breads and fruit pies from scratch. Baking was restorative. I was soothed by the jeweled berries, the yellow of an egg yolk punctured with my fork, and I liked the texture, too, placing my hands in the soft flour, cutting into the white flesh of a bright green apple and feeling its juices on my fingers. After being underground, I now found an apple to be wholesome and pure.

I shared what I made with the other women but always kept enough back for myself. I could eat half a dozen cupcakes at once, followed by great gulps of cold milk. I could eat a peach pie in the afternoon with a pot of coffee and a can of whipped cream. No matter how much I ate, I didn't feel full. In the past, after I binged, I'd rein myself in. I'd been doing that for years—diet-binge, diet-binge, the old two-step—but this was different. I never felt full, no matter how much I ate. It was as if the hunger from a decade of dieting was stored up inside me and the chains that had been wrapped around it were beginning to break.

That morning, while the other women slept, I made breakfast in the blue light at the back of the house. I put quiches in the oven and warmed the waffle iron. I hadn't known about the bomb threats, but even with this new information, and the realization that we could all be blown to smithereens at any moment, I had never felt safer. Calliope House was filled with the scarred and the wounded, like me. Some scars were visible, some not.

Only a few of us actually lived in Calliope House. Each morning around nine a.m., the other women who worked with Verena arrived, filling the house with hivelike noise and energy. With me in the house, the kitchen became a gathering place, my homemade food devoured instead of the usual takeout and deliveries. The morning of the bomb threat was no different. I set out the quiches and piles of waffles, pitchers of orange juice. The smells filled the house like warm, fragrant breath. Soon I had company.

Rubí was the first to fill her plate. I had admitted to her that I'd ruined the poplin shirtdress she'd made for me during Marlowe's makeover, but she said she still had the pattern and some of the fabric, if I decided I wanted another one. Sana was next in the breakfast line. When we first met, I didn't know how to look at her, but I no longer saw a
scarred
face, just a face. This allowed me to notice her beauty, especially her eyes. They'd been spared any damage and were deep brown with a touch of gold, like two polished stones.

As the women took their places around the table, Marlowe arrived with baby Huck. “Ooh, is Plum cooking again?” She rubbed her hands together in delight.

“Plum is always cooking,” I said, sliding a platter of bacon onto the table and catching sight of her tattoo:
women don't want to be me, men don't want to fuck me.
I finally understood what it meant.

“You all look tired,” Marlowe said. “Let me guess—bomb threat?”

The answer was confirmed by groans, and I put on another pot of coffee. We ate and talked about the bomb threat, then moved on to the far more interesting topic: Jennifer. We talked about Jennifer every day. The morning papers were scattered around the kitchen. The television in the corner was switched on. Leeta remained missing, which heightened suspicion that what she'd told her roommate was true: She knew who Jennifer was and had done something wrong. The news of the day was that Leeta had been spotted in Alaska. The day before she'd been sighted in El Salvador, and before that it was Kentucky. Whenever I saw her face, flattened in newsprint or flashing on the television screen, I felt a jolt. It didn't seem possible—and yet it was true.

“These people seem convinced they've spotted her,” Sana said, digging into the quiche. “It's a mass delusion.”

“She gets into your head and she haunts you,” I said. She had done that to me, and now she was doing it to everybody. The women at Calliope House knew about my history with Leeta, but I had never shown them the red spiral-bound notebook. Only Verena and Julia had seen that.

“I tried to call Julia again last night,” I said, buttering a waffle. Since leaving the underground apartment, I'd been trying to contact her. “She's incommunicado.”

“Not surprising,” Rubí said. “Look at this.” She held up one of the newspapers, smeared with greasy bacon fingerprints. The headline read:
DOES JULIA COLE KNOW LEETA'S SECRETS?
Julia's job working for Austen Media made her an irresistible target for the New York tabloids, which were already obsessed with Stanley Austen and his editors.

“Julia's feeling the heat,” said Marlowe. “I wouldn't be surprised if she and her loony sisters
do
know something.”

Verena drank her coffee, her normal brightness dimmed by lack of sleep. “If she does have more information, I don't want to know about it. I don't want to risk a connection to this tawdry business, no matter how tenuous.” Verena motioned in the direction of the television, where footage of some of Jennifer's greatest hits was playing: the Harbor Freeway interchange, the bodies in the Nevada desert, Stella Cross and her husband. “It's not Julia's fault that her former intern got mixed up in this, but I'm not upset that she's avoiding us. I'd prefer that she keep away. Is that awful?”

Murmurs of agreement spread around the table. Everyone assured Verena that they agreed with her point of view, that they all worked so hard on their various projects at Calliope House and it wouldn't be fair for Julia's connection to Leeta to taint their good work. Julia wasn't part of Calliope House anyway, only an occasional visitor.

“I can see the headlines,” Verena said. “
BAPTIST HEIRESS CONNECTED TO JULIA COLE, LEETA ALBRIDGE'S FORMER BOSS
. You can imagine the kinds of stories they'd make up about me.”

“And me,” said Marlowe.

I listened to the women try to distance themselves from Julia, and I didn't blame them. With her paranoia and secret projects, and her inability to be forthcoming about anything, it wasn't surprising that Julia hadn't endeared herself to the women of Calliope House. She irritated me as well, but I wasn't so willing to throw her aside. She and I shared a connection to Leeta, which is something the other women couldn't appreciate. They'd never even met Leeta.

As more women arrived, I replenished the table with fresh slices of toast and pots of jam, which were eagerly received. In Verena's house there was never any mention of calories, there was no
I shouldn't eat this,
I shouldn't eat that.
Plates were scraped clean,
oooh
s and
ahhh
s were abundant, women asked for more. No prayers were offered up to the diet gods:
I'll go to the gym later; I didn't eat dinner last night.
There was pleasure that didn't have to be bargained for.

“Did I tell you I talked to my dad in Shiraz yesterday?” Sana said. “He told me that what Jennifer is doing reminds him of the American Westerns he likes to watch—the Wild West.”

“People in Iran are talking about Jennifer?” Rubí said.

“
Everybody
is talking about Jennifer. She's the most famous woman in the world,” Sana said.

Like everyone else, we spoke about Jennifer as if she were a single person, even though we knew that if Jennifer existed, she had a lot of help. For some she was a hero, for others a bogeywoman.

“Did you see the column in the
New York Daily
this morning?” Marlowe asked. “The columnist argued that Jennifer just needs to get laid, and guys in the comments section were writing things like,
I bet Jennifer is fat
and
Jennifer is a ball-busting bitch
and
Who'd want to fuck her.
”

“I love that their only defense against Jennifer is to label her unfuckable,” Rubí said.

“That's how dudes always try to bring us down,” Sana said.

“Jennifer will give herself up and do a nude spread in
Playboy
to make amends,” Marlowe said.

“Maybe she'll do a Waist Watchers commercial,” I said. “She'll say, ‘I was on a killing spree until these guys on the Internet called me fat. That was just the wake-up call I needed. Now I've taken control of my life by losing thirty pounds!'”

“Burst!”
said Verena.

Laughter erupted. Sana and Rubí beat their fists on the table. Even Huck was giggling.

“I don't think anything is going to stop her,” said Verena. “She's an avenger, a Fury. She's in our midst, but at the same time, I think she's left this world behind.”

“After I'm finished with the companion volume to
Fuckability Theory,
I'm going to have to write a whole book about this,” Marlowe said. “Did I tell you that a journalist called me yesterday and asked,
off the record,
if I'd masterminded the whole thing?”

“Did you?” asked Verena, eyebrow arched.

I turned to Marlowe: “Are you Jennifer?”

“I thought you were Jennifer,” she said to me.

“Maybe I'm Jennifer and I don't know it,” said Sana.