Dietland (7 page)

At home, my mother looked on coolly as I put my food away. The six-packs of shakes and the pale pink trays of frozen food filled most of the space in our fridge and freezer. I also had a packet of Baptist Supplements.

“Why do you need these?” My mother examined the pebble-colored tablets.

“Gladys said I have to take one each day.” She'd been emphatic.
⁴

At breakfast and lunch, I drank a foamy peach shake from a can. At dinner, I microwaved my designated meal, then peeled back the silver plastic to reveal beef stew, its chunks of meat and peas floating in a lukewarm bath of brown gravy, or a turkey meatball, like a crusty planet surrounded by red rings of pasta. The meals were small, merely a scoop or two of food, and they seemed to lack a connection to actual foodstuffs; I thought it was possible the “food” was constructed of other elements, like paper and Styrofoam, but I didn't care, as long as eating it led to thinness.
⁵

My first week as a Baptist, I was filled with energy and motivation. I'd been instructed to avoid people who were eating, those unruly mobs with their knives and forks, but given my job at the restaurant this was impossible. It didn't matter. I was experiencing transcendence from the grotesque world of mastication and grazing. The sight of people eating made me sick.

Before my shift at the restaurant, I would stop by the Baptist clinic to do aerobics. At work I moved faster than ever. One night I chopped twenty-five onions in record time, leaving Chef Elsa to marvel at my speed. Red peppers, celery, and garlic lay in colorful heaps on my chopping boards. I'd finish early and take on extra projects, such as reorganizing the grain cupboard and alphabetizing the spices.

When I returned home from work one night I was greeted by ten Italian pilgrims sitting in our yard, lighting candles and playing the guitar. I opened the curtains in my bedroom to listen to them sing. They waved and smiled, and I didn't mind that they were looking at me. Nothing could dampen my mood. I was a jailed girl about to be released from a long sentence.

By the end of the week, I was twelve pounds lighter. Gladys and the other women clucked around me, admiring my shrinking figure.
⁶

In nine months, you'll be looking foxy!

Like most highs, mine was not to last; as I entered week two, I crashed. If school had been in session, I wouldn't have made it. I skipped aerobics class and had to force myself to leave the house to go to the restaurant, which I had to do to pay for the Baptist Plan. In Chef Elsa's kitchen, I became prone to staring off into space without blinking. “Are you sick?” she asked me. The week before I'd been a wind-up toy spinning around furiously; now I had fallen over, silent and still.

I called Gladys. “What's wrong with me?” I whispered into the phone, too weak to even speak.

“It's sugar withdrawal. You're an addict, honey. That poison is leaving your system.”

“But I'm so hungry.”

“I know, sweetie,” said Gladys.
Sugar.
Honey.
Sweetie.
Gladys wasn't helping.

I kept waiting for the horrible feeling to go away, but it didn't. At night I dreamed about éclairs. Hunger pangs woke me, traveling through my body like the reverberations of a bell. I held my hands over my ears and rolled back and forth in bed, hoping the sensations would go away.

Between meals, I dealt with my hunger by dipping lettuce leaves into mustard (a tip from Gladys), which was practically a zero-calorie snack, about as effective as eating air. Still, it gave me something to chew and swallow. Gladys's other tips for fighting hunger included doing jumping jacks, even in public places, drinking liters of water, and writing in my food journal:

On the Baptist Plan, I nearly passed out from hunger. Once in the kitchen, I was slicing a bell pepper, but then there were two on my cutting board, then three. They were multiplying. I set down my knife and stumbled backwards, bumping the handle of a skillet on the stove, sending hot oil and scallops crashing to the floor. Elsa insisted I go home, but I went back to my peppers, trying to chop while my hands shook.
⁷

I wanted to stuff myself with the food that surrounded me in the restaurant, but in my mind I pleaded with my hungry self to be sensible. Nicolette's mother, a Waist Watchers obsessive and borderline anorexic, had a bumper sticker on her car that read
NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS
. I didn't know how it felt to be skinny, but if I ate the pink trays of food and the packaged snacks and nothing more, I would find out in only nine months. The fact that my misery had an end date, a parole date, kept me going. Once or twice I thought about jumping off the roof of the restaurant, but I kept these fantasies to myself.

When I returned to the house on Harper Lane after work, I ate my dinner quickly and crawled into bed, since being awake was torturous. In the morning I would try to soothe myself with a hot shower, but I grew increasingly worried as the drain filled with clumps of my hair.

At the Baptist clinic, Gladys would say, “You must have been good this week!”
⁸
She and the other women were interested in my progress, pulling up my shirt to get a better look at my hips and tummy. The weigh-in was the highlight of my week. I was good for a whole month and lost twenty-nine pounds.

When July came, my father sent my yearly airline ticket, Los Angeles to Boise, but I told him I couldn't visit. There was no way for me to transport my Baptist frozen meals, and I couldn't eat normal food. “You're not coming to visit me because of a
diet?
”

“I can't, Daddy. You'll be proud of me when this is finished, I promise.” I was his only child. He had married again, but his new wife couldn't have children, so I was his only hope for grandkids. If I was fat, no one would want to marry me. I wanted to tell him this, to explain that this wasn't just a
diet,
that everything in my future and his depended on it, but I couldn't say the words.

With my summer cleared of all obligations except for my job at the restaurant, I spent most of my time alone at home. When I went out, I didn't have the energy to care if people took photographs of me. Nicolette invited me to the mall and to movies, but I couldn't be surrounded by such fattening food. Every evening at the restaurant I was exposed to non-Baptist food, and those were the worst two hours of my day.

In our weekly meetings, Gladys expressed her worries about my job. “You need to separate yourself from temptation, Miss Kettle.”

“If I don't work at the restaurant I can't afford to be a Baptist.”

“Well, we don't want
that,
” Gladys said. There was a newspaper on her desk and she began to look through the classifieds to help me find a job that didn't involve food. “Here's an ad for a dog walker.”

“I don't have the energy to walk.”

“Babysitting?”

I imagined being passed out from hunger on the kitchen floor and a toddler with a phone, trying to dial 911.

“No, I'm better off at the restaurant. I can handle it.”

Except that I couldn't. One evening I had to stir a massive pot of macaroni and cheese, then serve it up on plates for thirty-four children celebrating a birthday. There must have been thousands of pasta tubes in the pot, glistening in the gluey cheese. The intoxicating smell filled my nose and my mouth, even penetrating my brain and wrapping its orange tentacles around every conscious thought.
Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,
that's what I told myself. I wondered how many calories were in the pot. A hundred thousand? A million? The thought was repulsive.

When the plates came back to the kitchen, a few of them were scraped clean, but there were many with lumps of macaroni and cheese stuck to them. A few of the plates looked as if they hadn't been touched. The dishes were lined on the counter, waiting for Luis to clean them, but he had gone out back for a smoke.

I paced in front of the plates, looking around to see if anyone was watching me. With my fingers I scooped up some of the pasta tubes and placed them on my tongue. It was the first real food I'd had in more than a month. The texture was different, like cashmere instead of a scratchy polyester.

After the initial moments of bliss, the gravity of what I was doing began to spread over me in a feverish heat. I ran to the bathroom and spit the glob of food into the toilet, my eyes filling with tears. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Gladys had given me pamphlets on every eventuality:
Dieting After the Death of a Loved One
and
The Dangers of Carnivals, Circuses, and Fairs.
I had piles of these pamphlets, but they hadn't been powerful enough to restrain me against the siren song of pasta and melted cheese. In the face of that, I decided I'd done well. I hadn't even swallowed.

I started wanting to call in sick to work. I
was
sick, or at least I felt that way practically every moment of the day, but I couldn't admit it. That would have given my mother a sense of satisfaction. If I told her how I felt she would try to ban me from Baptist Weight Loss. I began to worry about what would happen when school started and whether my grades would suffer, but I decided that I wouldn't think that far ahead.

At work I continued to pick scraps off plates, delighting in the taste and then spitting the food out in the toilet or into a paper towel. Sometimes, though, when Luis was in the alley, I'd eat a few french fries off dirty plates, chewing and then swallowing. Just a few in my belly eased the pain in my head.

On the night of a retirement party, I worked extra hours to help Chef Elsa prep. The woman who did the baking in the restaurant had prepared macaroons earlier in the day, which Elsa asked me to arrange on platters. Alone in the kitchen, my hands sheathed in crinkly plastic gloves, I stacked the macaroons in a pyramid formation. Six weeks of systematic starvation had weakened me. For every macaroon that made it onto the platters, another went into my apron pocket. When I finished, Delia took the macaroons into the dining room, noticing neither the slightness of the pyramids nor the bulges in my pockets.

I went to the bathroom, but two waitresses were there, styling their hair and putting on makeup, so I went into the back alley and sat down on the concrete steps next to the trash cans. When my hand first grazed the macaroons in my pocket, I could have stopped for a moment and used my training; I could have written in my food journal or done jumping jacks, but I didn't. One macaroon slipped into my mouth, and then two, and then as many as would fit. I consumed them so hurriedly that at first I didn't enjoy the shock of creamy coconut against my tongue. I stuffed three macaroons into my mouth before stopping to catch my breath, and then I made room for two more. My face flushed and burned and I began to cry. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I couldn't eat the macaroons fast enough. A ball of coconut formed in my throat. I paused to swallow, then continued working through my stash, wiping my nose with my sleeve as I chewed. I was still wearing plastic gloves. I felt like a criminal.

As I swallowed the last cookie, my face stained with tears and mascara, I saw Luis and Eduardo nearby in the alley, smoking. I didn't know how long they had been there. They were looking at me—they had seen.

After so many weeks without much food, my stomach, shriveled like a raisin, was struggling to absorb the explosion of calories. I felt a sharp pain at my center as I made my way home. I expected to be sick, but once the pain was gone, I felt better than I had in ages. My headache disappeared. I had grown so accustomed to having a headache that not having one felt strange; there was a feeling of release, as if a belt that had been fastened tightly around my head was suddenly loosened. I slept through the night for the first time since becoming a Baptist.

The next day when I awoke, the hunger was there again. I had slept late and missed breakfast, so I drank two Baptist Shakes, but they didn't satisfy my hunger beast, and when he wasn't satisfied he gnawed at me. I couldn't bear being trapped in the house with him and decided to eat my dinner, though it was only one o'clock. Then I ate a second dinner, then drank another shake; then I heated up a Baptist pizza, which was just shavings of plastic cheese on a crust as thin as matzo. The kitchen counter was littered with empty pink trays and bottles and pieces of silver plastic, which were gummy and stuck to the countertops. I gathered up the evidence and took it outside to the garbage can so that no one would find out. As I made my way back into the house, I saw a woman with a camera pointed at me. She had seen.

I didn't feel full or happy after my binge. With the macaroons, I'd had a taste of real food, and now I wanted more. I called Nicolette. “I thought you were dead,” she said. That's what people had said about Eulayla Baptist, too.

“I'm not dead, I've just been removed from the world of food.” We went to the mall, Nicolette's mother driving us in her gold Mercedes with her bumper sticker:
NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS
. Nicolette could eat whatever she wanted and never gain weight—that's why her mother hated her, she said. At the mall, we ate chili dogs and nachos with extra jalapeños and washed it all down with sugary cherry lemonade. We bought soft pretzels and funnel cakes dusted with powdered sugar and ate it all. We made a point of browsing CDs and shoes, but we were only at the mall for the food.