Dietland (3 page)

Inside the closet, there was nothing black, only color and light. For months I had been shopping for clothes that I would wear after my surgery. Two or three times a week the packages arrived—blouses in lavender and tangerine, pencil skirts, dresses, a selection of belts. (I had never worn a belt.) I didn't shop in person; when someone my size went into a regular clothing store, people stared. I had done it once after I'd spotted a dress in a store window that I couldn't resist. I went inside and paid for it, then had it gift-wrapped as though it were for someone else.

No one knew about the clothes, not even Carmen or my mother. Carmen didn't even know about the surgery, but my mother did and she was against it. She was worried about the potential complications. She sent me articles that outlined the dangers of the procedure, as well as a tragic story about children who were orphaned when their mother died post-surgery. “But I don't have any children,” I said to her on the phone, unwilling to indulge her.

“That's not the point,” she said. “What about me?”

This isn't about you,
I had wanted to say, and refused to discuss the surgery with her again after that.

After straightening and rearranging the clothes, I shut the closet door. I knew it was foolish to buy clothes I couldn't try on. They might not fit right when the time came, but I bought them anyway. I needed to open the closet door and look at them and know this wasn't like the other times. Change was inevitable now. The real me, the woman I was supposed to be, was within my reach. I had caught her like a fish on a hook and was about to reel her in. She wasn't going to get away this time.

Carmen called to ask if I wanted to join her and her girlfriend at a pizzeria for dinner, but I didn't like to eat at restaurants when I was following my program, so I said no. From one of the new Waist Watchers recipe cards, I made lasagna, which used ground turkey instead of beef and fat-free cheese and whole-wheat pasta. While it was cooking it smelled like real lasagna, but it didn't taste like it. I gave it three stars. After I ate a small portion (230) with a green salad (150), I cut the rest into squares and put them in the freezer. My hands were still slightly trembly from hunger, but I would be good and not eat anything more.

After changing into my nightgown and brushing my teeth, I took my daily dose of Y—— from the bottle, the pink pill. It was my ritual before bed, like saying a prayer. As I finished my glass of water, I went to the window in the front room and pulled back the curtain, looking to see if the girl was sitting on the stoop, listening to her music, but she wasn't there.

 

• • •

I STAYED HOME
for most of the holiday weekend, the unofficial start of summer, leaving only to go to the library and to see a movie. The girl was nowhere around. On Tuesday morning I walked to the café, and as I turned the corner onto Violet Avenue, I wasn't looking where I was going and bumped into someone—or maybe she bumped into me. “Sorry,” we both said at the same time, and then to my surprise, I saw the girl standing before me, with her Halloween eyes and cherry-red legs.

“It's you,” I said. My heart was a moth flapping around a lampshade.

The girl smiled and said good morning, then opened the door and held it for me as I followed her inside. “Plum,” Carmen said, rushing past the girl, waving her hands at me. As she approached, her massive belly covered in yellow and pink polka dots, I remembered I was supposed to cover for her while she went for her checkup. “I won't be gone long,” she assured me as she hurried out the door.

The girl walked ahead of me and I watched as she sat at my table. I was annoyed but didn't show it and went behind the counter to help Carmen's assistant. When I set my laptop bag down I felt the tension release from my shoulder as I rid myself of the computer and its endless cries for help. Surrounding me in the kitchen were flour and butter and eggs, the stuff of life; there wasn't a line of text in sight. I breathed in the sugared air and savored it, then felt a twinge of hunger. My Waist Watchers granola bar (90), like sawdust mixed with glue, hadn't provided much sustenance.

It had been a while since I'd helped out at the café, but I soon remembered how things were done. I poured cups of tea and sliced carrot cake. I set delicate cupcakes into pink cardboard boxes, licking the icing and sprinkles from my fingers when no one was looking. It was a relief to engage in work that didn't involve angst, that allowed me to speak with three-dimensional people who asked for simple things like coffee and a slice of pie, not how to fix their cellulite or decipher the behavior of an emotionally stunted boy.

While I was working I glanced at the girl, who was sitting at my table with a makeup bag in front of her. She pulled a silver clamshell compact and a lip pencil from the shimmery pouch. I watched through the glass lid of a cake stand, blurrily, as she lined her lips and smacked them in the mirror.

Distracted by an order, I turned around and busied myself with the espresso machine and three tiny cups. When I returned to the counter I saw the girl in line behind the woman who'd ordered the espressos. My coworker had gone into the kitchen, so I would have to serve the girl. We would have to speak.

The girl stepped forward when it was her turn and we stood face-to-face. “Give me your hand,” she said. Startled, I did what she asked. She took the cap off a lip pencil and turned my right hand so that my palm was facing her, my thumb at the top. Then she began to write. I couldn't see what she was writing, but I felt the point of the pencil digging into my skin.

When she finished, I pulled my hand back. “
DIETLAND
,” I read aloud.

“
DIETLAND
,” the girl repeated.

I stared at the penciled letters on my palm. Was the girl telling me to go on a diet? So much mystery, and there it was: she simply wanted to make fun of me.

In the absence of any comment from me, for at this point I was too embarrassed to speak, the girl quickly gathered her belongings from the table and left the café. Just then my coworker reappeared. I wiped my hand on my apron and excused myself to go to the kitchen. The bottom of the white sink filled with a faint pink color as I put my hand under the cold water and tried to rinse the lettering off.

When I emerged from the kitchen, I saw that the girl had left the lip pencil sitting on the table. I went to collect it. It was a Chanel pencil in a shade called “Pretty Plum.”

 

• • •

IN THE AFTERMATH
of my encounter with the girl, I needed to prepare for a visit to Kitty. The visit only came once a month, like my period, and I greeted it with the same level of enthusiasm.

On the subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I retraced the word
DIETLAND
on my palm, using my fingertip. What did it mean? I had thought the girl was ridiculing me, but she didn't seem cruel. What I knew for certain was that she was weird. If she bothered me again, I would have to go to the police, but I feared that in a city full of murderers and terrorists they weren't likely to care that a girl in colorful tights was trailing me.

I exited the subway station in Times Square, stopping at the top of the stairs to catch my breath in the heat. With my employee badge I entered the Austen Tower, a glistening silver tree trunk. Austen Media was an empire, publishing magazines and books, running a range of websites, and broadcasting two lifestyle channels. If someone had flown a 747 into the Austen Tower and it crumbled to the ground, American women would have had far fewer entertainment options.

Before my job with Kitty I had worked for a small, not-very-prestigious publishing imprint that was owned by Austen but located in a drab building twenty blocks south. We produced novels about young career women looking for love. The covers of the novels were in springtime shades, like the walls of a baby's nursery. I didn't have anything to do with the content, but worked in production, tracking manuscripts, liaising with editors, helping to usher the books into the world. After college, I had wanted to write essays and feature stories for magazines, but I couldn't find a job doing that, so I settled at the publisher. I loved words and the publisher offered me a chance to work with words all day long, even if they were someone else's. It was a place to start. A foot wedged in the door of the word industry.

My coworkers at the publisher were middle-aged women who wore tennis shoes to work with their skirts and nylons. I soon became comfortable in their world of Tupperware lunches and trips to the discount shoe mart after work, so I made no effort to move on and find the writing job I had dreamed about. One day, after I'd spent more than four years at the publisher, my boss called me into her office to tell me the bad news. We were going out of business.

“I'm sorry I couldn't say anything sooner, but you probably heard the rumors.” A vase of hydrangeas sat on her desk, blue pompoms in brown water, dropping their shriveled petals onto her Filofax.

“Well,” I said. The rumors hadn't reached me.

“It's not just us. They're cleaning house. It's the whole building.” The whole building was a mail-order book club and a few small magazines, one about cats, another about doll collecting. We had gone unnoticed for years, the dregs of the Austen empire, hidden in an annex on Twenty-Fourth Street. At long last, Stanley Austen had looked down from his perch in the silver tower and noticed us in a tiny corner of his kingdom. Then came banishment.

After the publisher closed, I was unemployed except for random shifts at Carmen's café, but eventually a woman named Helen Rosenblatt from Austen's Human Resources department called to schedule a meeting with me. I went to the Austen Tower as directed, and rode the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor. Helen was a middle-aged woman with a tumbleweed hairdo and a gummy smile. I followed her to her office, noticing that her linen skirt was wedged between her buttocks.

Helen said that my boss from the publisher had told her all about me. “We're old friends,” Helen explained, and I wondered what had been said. Helen wanted to talk about
Daisy Chain,
the magazine for teens. I had read
Daisy Chain
when I was in high school. Even my mother and her friends had read it when they were that age. It had been published since the 1950s and was such a part of Americana that the first issue was displayed in the Smithsonian, alongside
Seventeen
and
Mademoiselle.
I guessed that the old issues of
Daisy Chain
on display at the museum weren't like the current issue on Helen's desk, with a cover that read
POPPING YOUR CHERRY—IT'S NOT THAT SCARY!

Helen told me that Kitty Montgomery was the new editor of
Daisy Chain.
Austen's other teen magazines had ceased publication, so Kitty was carrying the flag for the teen demographic. “She's a huge hit,” Helen said. “Mr. Austen's so pleased, he's had her up to his place on the Vineyard twice.” Helen explained that in her monthly column, Kitty was fond of sharing photos and tragic stories from her teenage years, when she was a gangly, pebble-chested misfit from the suburbs of New Jersey. As Helen took a phone call, I perused several of Kitty's columns and read about her being beat up by other girls and shoved into lockers by boys. Her mother compounded her misery by never letting her wear makeup or use a razor. In contrast, at the end of each column there was a photo of Kitty as a glamorous grownup, one who had miraculously shed her hideous adolescent skin and emerged, victorious, like a grand white snake. In her current photos she was perched on the corner of her desk in the Austen Tower; visible behind her were the plains of New Jersey, the land of her former tormentors, so small and insignificant.

“Given Kitty's popularity, she's swamped with correspondence from readers,” Helen explained when she finished her call. “They're inspired by Kitty and how she transformed herself. They desperately want her advice and contact her through the Dear Kitty section of the website. It's like a flood.” I waited for Helen to explain what any of this had to do with me. I knew there was the prospect of a job, but I assumed it was something tucked away in the subscription department.

“The legal department would prefer that we send out cookie-cutter form responses to the readers, but Kitty won't hear of it. We've decided to indulge her and hire someone to take on the responsibility of responding to her
girls,
as she calls them, by offering big-sisterly advice and encouragement, that sort of thing. This is private correspondence, so it doesn't appear in the magazine.” Helen looked at me and paused. “I think you might be perfect for this. I've sent others up there and none of them have worked out, but you,” Helen said, putting her glasses on and eyeing me, “you're different.”

I knew what my former boss had said about me.

“You want someone to respond to these readers while pretending to be Kitty?”

“I wouldn't think of it as
pretending.
You'd be a team.” Helen folded her arms across her chest, which was not two separate breasts but just an enormous shelf. “You're older than the other girls we've considered for the job, and you're different from them in many ways. Most of them are—Well, you know the type. I hear that you're smart, but I don't mind that. You'd write in Kitty's voice. You wouldn't have to believe what you'd write; it only matters that Kitty would believe it and write it if she had time. I think you'd have insight into the problems our girls have—that's what's important.”

I should have been grateful for the possibility of a job, but I felt defensive and was trying to hide it. “What makes you think I'd have such insight? You don't even know me.”