Dietland (22 page)

Alexander's brown eyes were vacant and slightly shrunken, but he looked in my direction when he spoke, as if he could see me. I didn't know if this was for his benefit or mine. I took my seat and looked at the menu. Alexander ordered a platter of ribs, but I wasn't hungry and ordered a salad. He probably thought I was one of those girls who didn't eat.

When the waiter left, Alexander began to talk without pause. I could tell he didn't like silence in conversation. I wondered how many dates he went on and how he could decide whether he liked a woman. He must have been sizing me up for my potential as a sexual partner, but there wasn't a hint in his questions to let me know what he was looking for. He told me about himself and his work as a session musician. He asked me about my job with Kitty. His blindness didn't seem to imbue him with any special qualities. Nothing about Alexander interested me, but I played my part. I was sitting across from a man on a date in a restaurant, just as Alicia would do. Alexander didn't know I was an impostor. He talked about musicians I had never heard of and I was glad I didn't have to hide the bored expression on my face.

When our food came, Alexander navigated his plate, the ribs and sauces and side dishes, with remarkable skill. He cleaned each bone of meat and then dropped it onto his plate. My salad was modest and I picked my way through the tangle of lettuce leaves, radish slices, and tomato wedges. The sight of Alexander feasting on the bones, with the red sauce on his lips, was unpleasant. His eyebrows jutted out from his forehead as if on a ledge, almost prehistoric; he had the profile of a Neanderthal.

“Are you enjoying your salad, Alice? Are you sure you don't want something more?”

“It's Alicia,” I said. “And no thanks, I don't have much of an appetite.”

“You're not on a diet, are you?” he said, somewhat playfully.

“I like to watch my figure. It's not easy maintaining a size two.” It was difficult to say this without laughing. I nearly choked on a lettuce leaf.

“Don't want to get fat?” he said, and smiled.

I laughed, a deep-bellied guffaw, too big for my imaginary thin self. He continued eating, cleaning one bone and dropping it onto his plate, then doing the same with another. There was a growing pile of bones in front of him, stripped clean of meat, the sauce sucked off.

“I used to be fat,” I said. “
Enormously
fat. Morbidly obese, in fact. On the insurance company weight charts, there's only one level after morbidly obese and that's death. It goes
underweight,
average,
overweight,
obese,
morbidly obese,
and then
certain death.
When you reach certain death, they ask you to write your will and special-order your coffin. I was nearly at
certain death,
Alexander. I was browsing the coffin brochures.”

“Jesus, how fat were you?”

“Over three hundred pounds. I was a real blimp.”

“
Really?
How did you lose the weight?” He held a bone in midair.

“I tried dieting, but that didn't work. Then I had surgery. My stomach is now the size of a walnut, hence the salad.”

“Does your body look, uh,
normal?
”

I saw the black marker, the arrows, the dotted lines. “With clothes on, yes. Naked it's another matter. I have scars all over my body. I've been reconstructed, you see. Imagine Frankenstein.”

Alexander set down his bone and looked as if he was fighting off a belch.

“It's not a pretty sight, Alexander, but what does it matter to you?”

He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “The thought of it is unappealing, I must admit, but I appreciate your honesty, Alice.”

“Alicia,” I said.
I am Alicia.
I am Alicia.
I repeated it to myself, but that didn't make it true. I was not Alicia and I feared I never would be.

“I'm not feeling well,” I said, setting down my fork and scooting my chair back. The Y——-related symptoms returned. It felt as though there was a sparkler inside my mouth. “I think I should leave.”

“Don't let me keep you. I'll just stay here and order dessert.”

I left him alone at the table. Alicia's first date was over and it hadn't gone well.

Aidan

It was Sunday night, my last date. Aidan had been described to me as a human rights lawyer and drinker of fair-trade coffee. I put on my dress and the Thinz and the makeup. Aidan knocked on the door, and a few moments later a generic white guy with brown hair stood before me.

“You're my date?” he asked.

“That's me.”

“You've got to be kidding.”

“Screw you,” I said, and slammed the door.

After Aidan left, I washed my face while still wearing my dress; the front of it was splashed with water and stained with makeup. I took off the control-top tights and the Thinz so I could breathe, then crawled into bed on my stomach, still wearing the dress. I had completed four tasks of the New Baptist Plan, with only one left to go, and then the money would be mine. The date of my surgery was still a couple of months away. Before meeting Verena I'd been moving toward it in a straight line, but now there was movement in another direction, a subtle drift.

I thought back to the winter, when I'd decided to have the surgery. I'd undergone my annual physical exam, and though everything appeared normal, the doctor wanted me to have an ultrasound done, to make sure everything was “okay inside.” I had never had an ultrasound and was nervous. That afternoon I reported to the hospital and a young technician named Pooja placed a condom on a probe and stuck it inside me. She flicked a switch and a screen on the wall revealed an ultrasound image of my reproductive organs.

“There are your ovaries,” she said, and I squinted to see them. They were a whitish blur against a gray background, slightly alien-looking. “And that's the entrance to your womb.”

It was such an odd word,
womb.
I had never thought of myself as having one. A uterus, yes, but not a womb. A womb was a place for something small to curl up in and sleep. For the first time, I realized such a place existed inside me. It didn't look like anything nice on the screen, just a dusty balloon waiting to be inflated.

“I have a womb,” I said.

“Of course you do. You're a woman.” The technician stared at me as if she thought I wasn't quite right in the head. “Are you okay?”

I didn't answer, but stared at my womb until I couldn't anymore. I closed my eyes so I didn't have to look at it. Why did she have to call it that?
Womb.

“You'll be ovulating from your left ovary next month,” she said. “See that follicle?”

“Yes, I see it,” I said, still with my eyes closed.

Pooja spoke to me as she spoke to her other patients, the women who had things going in and out of them, like trains in a station. On the screen I was like them, the sum of my parts. Underneath my bulky exterior I was like every other woman, even if I had never been allowed to feel that way.

After my appointment, I walked home in a daze. I had never liked to call myself a woman. I knew I was one, but the word never sounded right when applied to me. For days I thought of nothing but the womb on the screen. It haunted me.

Over the years I had considered weight-loss surgery, but the thought of knives and incisions and complications had always scared me, so I had never done anything more than think about it. But in the days after seeing my womb, I finally made an appointment with a doctor and scheduled the surgery, knowing it was time to act. Verena had said the surgery was about becoming
smaller,
but it was about more than that. That's what I hadn't been able to tell her.

Now in the wake of the New Baptist Plan, the dream of the surgery had been tarnished. I could still have it, and the $20,000 would help, but there would always be scars, not just on the outside, but on the inside too. Verena had been intent on reminding me just how much everyone hates me. Alicia would never be able to forget the horrible things that had happened to Plum. The surgeon's knife couldn't cut that away. Alicia would always be marked.

My bottle of Y—— was on the nightstand. I'd been taking the half tablets for a month; there was only one left and I worried about what would happen when I ran out completely. Maybe Y—— was the glue holding my life together—not a life so much as pieces of cracked china that had been fit together haphazardly. I took the last half tablet and then opened my nightstand drawer to find the bottle of Dabsitaf. I swallowed one, then another, then a few more.

I wanted to hear another person's voice, a kind voice. I considered calling my mother, but she would have been able to tell something was wrong. She was alert to even the slightest shift in my tone of voice, the length of silence between words. I didn't want to worry her, so I called my father. It was eight o'clock in New York, but it was only six where my father lived, in a place where life was slower and everything lagged.

His wife answered the phone. She told me he was mowing the lawn and set the phone down to get him. I thought of my father as I always thought of him, in the chair on the deck where he liked to sit after work, listening to birdsong. Through the phone I heard the lawnmower stop and imagined the smell of fresh grass clippings, a whiff of the heartland.

When my father picked up the phone, out of breath, I didn't tell him about the dates or Verena or the other women at Calliope House. He didn't know much about my daily life, so we talked about what he was doing in the yard, that after he cut the grass he would read the newspaper. On his end of the phone, unlike mine, it was quiet. In the suburbs there was an absence of noise.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Maybe I'm not having such a good day.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

He said nothing else, giving me time, allowing the silence. My mother would have asked questions and demanded to know what was wrong. I liked that my father was quiet on the other end of the phone, simply breathing, letting his yard work wait until I no longer needed him.

I listened to his breathing and wished that I could touch him. I wished that he could see the bruise on my lip, but he couldn't.

“Are you there?” Dad said.

“Plum, are you there?”

 

• • •

Verena called to explain about a series of blind dates. She said there would be four men: Preston, Jack, Alexander, Aidan. These names sounded familiar. Hadn't we done this before?

After six months on Dabsitaf, perhaps I was ready to date. Dr. Ahmad had been wrong about my body. After such rapid weight loss there was no sagging skin, no need to cut and stitch. I had simply shrunk, my flesh vacuumed in, with no evidence of a void left by my fat. I was Alicia. That's who people saw when they looked at me.

On Dabsitaf I wasn't hungry. I didn't starve and binge. I simply had no appetite. Many people skipped breakfast, but I skipped lunch and dinner, too. Eating a slice of bread would have made as much sense as eating a book or a shoe. I didn't want food. I didn't want water. I didn't want to get out of bed or go outside. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't want to think. I didn't want to buy anything, not even clothes or shoes. I didn't want love or friendship or sex. I didn't want to listen to music or read or watch TV.

I didn't want.

Without food, I didn't have energy or mental focus. I didn't want to work, but I needed the money. Kitty had forgiven me for deleting her messages, and when she saw how I'd been transformed she invited me to work in the Austen Tower in the office next to her. Reading and forming sentences was beyond my ability, given the lack of nutrients, so I sat at my computer and typed gibberish words that looked vaguely Norwegian—lsjfslkf jslkfjsl kfjalkjfla kjdflsk jflasjflsakjf—until it was time to go home. No one seemed to notice.

In my natural state, after my factory settings had been restored thanks to Dabsitaf, I was lovely. On the way home from work, men whistled at me. I couldn't walk by a construction site without causing a commotion. On the subway men pinched my ass, they followed me, they asked for my phone number and gyrated their pelvises as if they were pronging me. I was supposed to find this charming, so I acted flattered. I was supposed to want this kind of attention, but I didn't want anything. Not anymore. Thank you, I said when they gave me flowers, but I didn't feel thankful. The inside of my head was blank.

Before long I weighed one hundred pounds. I hadn't weighed that little since elementary school. One day when I came home from work there was a note taped to my back that said,
FEED ME
! Women came up to me in the street and asked me what my secret was. “I don't eat anything, ever,” I said, but this wasn't entirely true. I swallowed my Dabsitaf tablet once a day. I could see the oblong pill descend through my body, down my neck, between my breasts, heading toward my bellybutton. It looked like a bug inching along beneath my skin.

When I reached ninety pounds, chunks of my hair began to fall out, my fingernails became brittle, my cheeks sunken and hollow. “What's your secret?” a woman in the park asked me.

I was a size zero, but only for a few weeks, and then I was less than zero. At the department store, the saleswoman said, “We don't have clothes in your size,” and I seemed to remember that people said things like that to me in my previous life, but they would laugh and snicker. Now they were jealous. “Bitch,” a woman whispered to her friend. I was sent to the children's section, but even that was difficult. I was taller than most children, and whereas children were round, I was as slender and pointy as a garden rake.