Dietland (35 page)

Are you crazy?
a voice inside my head said. It sounded like Sana's lilt.

The man stood up from his bike and swung his leg over it. This is it, I thought. He lowered his bike to the pavement. He was wearing shiny black bike shorts and a tank top, his arms muscled and tattooed. Still I didn't budge. I was willing to see this through, even if he punched me in the face and bashed my head into the concrete. Bring it on. I'd been punched in the face before during the New Baptist Plan and survived, but that time I hadn't fought back. A fight is what I'd wanted these past few weeks. Maybe now I was going to get it. It'll hurt, but it'll feel good too.

A Baptist isn't afraid of a little pain.

I gripped the brick, steeling myself. If there were butterflies in my stomach, some had broken free and were fluttering through me, pumping me up, urging me on. I wanted to open my mouth and release them in a roar. I pulled the brick from my satchel, but an arm came in between the bike messenger and me, the arm of a large black man.

“That's enough,” said the man, who was wearing a security guard uniform. He seemed to be about my father's age. A crowd surrounded the messenger and me on the crosswalk, which I hadn't noticed from within my bubble of fury. The bubble popped.

The messenger held up his hands as if the police had told him to freeze. Big black guy trumped big white girl. He picked up his bike and got on it. “Crazy bitch,” he said as he rode away. He'd backed down, but I hadn't.

I turned to the security guard, irritated. I hadn't asked to be rescued.

“I've been watching you,” he said. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“That guy tried to insult me.”

“Better to just ignore him.”

“Says who?”

“Says somebody who doesn't want to see you get your ass kicked.”

I was going to put the brick back in my satchel, but decided to carry it home in my hand. “I appreciate your concern,” I said in a petulant daughter voice.

“You better watch yourself,” the man called after me, but I ignored him and hurried along toward Calliope House, high on my encounter with the guy on the bike. When I opened the door, I was anxious to tell someone what had happened.

“Where've you been?” Sana asked, coming down the stairs. I was breathless, my face flushed.

“I almost just got into a fight with a bike messenger.”

“What are you doing with that brick?”

“I've been carrying it around with me.”

“Give me that,” she said, snatching the brick away. She was still being prickly, just as she had been during the bomb threat, so I moved past her and went into the kitchen. I lifted a carton of apple juice from the top shelf of the fridge and poured myself a glass. Sana had followed me and watched me gulp it down.

“Nice eye makeup,” she said.

“Thanks. I had a makeover.”

“Have you
seen
yourself?”

I bent over and looked at my reflection in the microwave. The black eyeliner had bled beyond its borders. “Raccoon eyes,” I said. Kitty had written a whole column about it once. I used my fingers to wipe off some of the greasy makeup, as black as a tire's skid mark.

“Do I need to worry about you, Plum?”

“I've never felt better in my life.” It was the truth.

“Plum—” she started. I held up my hand, knowing what was coming, but Sana wasn't deterred. I knew she'd been saving this up and now it was flooding out: “You've been through a lot . . . You're not used to living without Y—— . . . You're upset about Leeta . . .” and on it went.

“I feel alive now in a way I never have before. I thought you were happy for me?”

“We're all happy for you, but how many times could you have been arrested in recent weeks?”

“Several.”

“What were you doing with that brick?”

“I fantasized about smashing someone with it, but in reality it's not so easy, I guess.”

“Are you even listening to yourself right now?”

“People count on us to be passive. They deserve to be punished.”

“The haters outnumber us by a large margin. Are you going to smash them all?”

This wasn't what I wanted to hear. I'd been enjoying my high, but Sana had extinguished it with her incessant scolding. I missed feeling high. In its place was agitation.

I excused myself to go to my room before our exchange could escalate. I'd save my anger for those who deserved it. I still wanted a fight, but not with her.

In my room, I took off my heavy boots and tossed them into the corner. My tights were dirty from touching the bike, so I brushed them off, moving my hands along the curves of my calves, feeling their bulk. It felt good to touch my body. It centered and calmed me.

I peeled off my tights and unbuttoned my dress, which was sweaty under the arms and down the back. I took off everything else and climbed into bed naked, enjoying the chill of the sheets. I breathed slowly through my mouth, placing my hands on my stomach to experience the movement of air through my body, keeping a rhythm. My thoughts were zipping around in my brain. Unable to corral them, I kept focused on my breath.

Sana didn't know what it was like to be numb for so many years and then to feel again. Before quitting Y——, I'd been like a lamp that was broken, but now I was switched on, emanating heat and light. There was pleasure in feeling strongly. Even an emotion like rage could feel good—it was almost cleansing, the way it made me feel alive.

I ran my hands over my body, playing with my nipples, placing my hands between my legs, exploring. I wasn't like those women on the screens in the underground apartment, who had sanitized slits between their legs. Between my legs was a handful of flesh and hair. While on Y——, I had masturbated a couple times a year, but it was never worth the effort—all that stroking for a tiny pop at the end. Now merely rubbing my fingertips together aroused me. Without the drugs, my body was alert to touch.

Since I didn't want to be fuckable anymore, I focused on how I felt inside, not how I might have looked to an imaginary someone. I was anchored in the sensations of my body rather than living outside of it, judging it. Sometimes I thought about sex with a partner. Rubí went out all the time and offered to fix me up, but I wasn't ready. That step would come in time. I was content to be alone for now, to become acquainted with the body I had never liked to touch. I rubbed myself, the whole messy handful between my legs, my hand bringing me closer to what I wanted: pleasure and release.

I slept for a little while, then went downstairs to make dinner, feeling mellow and balanced for the first time that day. Rubí was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass and a bottle of tequila.

“Bad day?” I said.

“The worst.” She told me that Dabsitaf had been approved by the FDA despite how hard she and Verena had worked to stop it. “They said the dangers of obesity outweigh the potential dangers of the drug.”

I placed my cutting board on the table across from her so I could chop vegetables and we could talk. “This isn't over. You'll raise awareness. I'll help you,” I said, but she remained quiet. I sliced an eggplant as she finished her drink and poured another. After she set the bottle back on the table, she pointed to the television behind me, the sound muted. “Look at that,” she said.

A breaking news banner appeared at the bottom of the screen, announcing
JENNIFER REVEALED
.

I dropped my knife on the cutting board and reached to turn up the volume.

“Thank the Lord on high,” said Cheryl Crane-Murphy. “Yes, it's true. We finally know who Jennifer is.”

 

• • •

Soledad

United States Army specialist Soledad Ayala was traveling in the Khost province of southeastern Afghanistan, riding in a convoy of Humvees to FOB Salerno, which they called Rocket City. She and another medic were the only two women in the unit, riding in the back of the last Humvee, dressed in dust-colored clothes and armed with M4 carbines.

The helmet strap circling her chin was going to cause a breakout; Soledad could feel the oil and sweat there, and so she reached up to wipe her skin. Outside the window it looked like Nevada or Arizona, which is what she wrote to Luz in her letters, hoping it would make them seem less far apart. Soledad told Luz about the monkeys and the sounds they made. These were details a child would enjoy, but Soledad feared Luz wasn't a child anymore, that she'd changed. There were warnings from school about truancy and smoking. It'd been a mistake to join the reserves—Soledad had learned that too late—but after Luz's father died she was desperate for money and wanted to go to college. She'd earned two degrees, a bachelor's in sociology and a master's in women's studies, and now she was paying for them.

For hours the Humvee traveled the barren terrain and Soledad thought of Luz. She held her gun to her body, which was constricted by the uniform and the pounds of equipment strapped around her. She dreamed of taking it all off and letting cool water splash over her skin. Agnes, who was sitting next to her, remained silent, looking out the tiny window without a hint to what she was thinking. Soledad was grateful for the quiet, which she expected to continue until they arrived, but then there was a boom.

Pulse of light. Heat. Shattered glass.

Boom.

It seemed to be hours long, the boom, and she was trapped inside it, rolling around in it, feeling it echo and vibrate through her.

The boom finally stopped and in its place there was silence, a pause; outside the window she saw nothing but sand and smoke. Then she heard shouting, and men's voices, and the jackhammer sound of guns firing. She reached for Agnes's hands, which were trying to free her from the wreckage.

Outside the vehicle there were bodies in the dirt, and parts of bodies. Soledad left a trail of blood behind her in the sand as she looked for the wounded; she was wounded too, but walking. There was a soldier on the ground, his thigh cut to the bone. Agnes was fastening a black band above the wound as the man screamed. Soledad pinned his shoulders to the ground with her knees, her hands on his head, trying to still him as Agnes worked. They were engulfed in a cloud of choking black smoke and sand. The guns were firing, but she couldn't see them; she could only hear them. The dying soldier looked up at Soledad. Her face would be the last thing he would see in this world, but her face was nothing special.

“Mama,” he said. He was only a boy.

Soledad wiped the sand and sweat from his forehead. She feared she was going to black out soon. The blood from the wound in her left shoulder had soaked the arm of her uniform into a deep scarlet. She returned to the truck for supplies, taking a moment to rest her head against the side of it. When she turned around a man was heading in the direction of Agnes, screaming in his nonsense language, the sounds flying from his mouth. Soledad's gun was strapped around her and she positioned it in front of her and shot at the man as he ran through the cloud. She missed and shot again, hitting him in the back. He fell to the ground, the enemy man, silent and still. Dead.

Look out!
A voice in the cloud, an American voice, one on her side, was trying to warn her. Another enemy man was moving toward her, and she shot him in the chest.

When she awoke in the hospital three days later, she didn't remember much, but she could see the man in the cloud, falling into the dirt and landing on his back, his legs twisted beneath him. She had never killed anyone before, but it had been easy. That's what she remembered about it more than any other detail: how easy it had been.

In the hospital in Kandahar, Soledad was treated for a deep wound to the shoulder, blood loss, and infection. Her mind returned to the cloud, the choking black smoke and sand, the Taliban fighters she had killed. Several days passed before the doctors decided she was stable enough to learn about her daughter's rape. Luz was still alive then, but it would be more than a week before Soledad was allowed to travel, and by that time Luz would have jumped in front of the train. Soledad feared that Luz had been angry with her for leaving her with her grandmother, for not being there to make everything all right.

Where was this girl's mother?
the people at home had said.

Until her weeping trio of sisters met her at the airport, Soledad didn't fully believe that Luz's suicide was real. When she arrived home, a photographer took a photo that ran across the wires:
Army reservist Soledad Ayala arrives home in Santa Mariana, north of Los Angeles.
Soledad went into the house and closed the door. Her mother was in bed, sedated and barely conscious, being tended to by relatives from out of town. She didn't want to see her mother, who had failed Luz.

Soledad sat in the living room, feeling unattached to her surroundings, as if she were viewing the scene from afar. She'd traveled back from the war, moving through time and space, but she hadn't completely crossed over. Her body was at home, but some part of her, some essential part, had been left behind.

She experienced the cloud of sand and smoke, the sound of gunfire, the killing of the Taliban men, the days she was unconscious in the hospital, and the news of Luz, raped and dead. It had all happened at once, in a flash; it was a big jumble, a black cloud, and she was caught inside it. She hadn't been due to go home for another four weeks; she hadn't prepared herself for the transition from that world of violence and death to her home in California. She learned after her first deployment that leaving the war meant crossing over from one state of mind to another, that there was a shift from soldier back to mother. Now she was only the mother of a dead girl.

Why wasn't this girl's mother supervising her?
the people in town had said.