Dietland (37 page)

“How did you know?”

“I know every shade of lip-gloss.”

“Julia, you're changing the subject.”

“Please don't ask me any more questions. Just know I never wanted to be involved in any of this. She came to me for help and I couldn't turn her away.” There was a tremor in her, which left a tiny crack in the barricade. “I'm scared, Plum.” She struggled to say this, her voice sticking, unaccustomed to emotion, to truth.

I worried she was going to cry. I'd seen her lose control before, and I was afraid of it happening again, of her becoming unhinged in the bathroom stall. “It's okay,” I said. I brushed her hair back, looping it behind her ears. “I'm sure you're scared.” I thought of the men with their guns, the helicopters, the dogs. I was scared just listening to her.

“Is Darkest Plum going to help us, or not?”
Us.
I had always thought of Julia and Leeta as a pair.

“I'll think about it,” I said. This seemed to calm her. Her face was in front of mine; we were sharing breath. She moved in closer, placing her lips on mine, a soft, lingering kiss, so that Darkest Plum was now on both of us.

“Forgive me,” she said, “but if something happens to me, I would always regret not doing that.”

I felt my skin burn. “Soft Rose,” she whispered. “I know every color of blush, too.”

She unlocked the stall door. “Think it over,” she said, and then she was gone.

 

• • •

EXITING THE CAFé
, I welcomed the rush of night air, a splash of cold to my face. Julia had left me reeling, as always, but this time she had really outdone herself. Leeta was hiding and needed my help. I wondered whether Julia and her sisters might be sheltering Leeta in their apartment, but that would be too risky. Leeta was probably nowhere near New York.

I walked distractedly through the dark, looking down at my black boots as they hit the concrete, blocking out everything else. The taste of Julia lingered on my lips and I wiped it away, staining my hand with Darkest Plum. I could still wash my hands of Julia and Leeta. I could still extricate myself, since I hadn't done anything wrong or irrevocable, not yet. I had agreed to write Julia's book, but that wasn't a crime, unlike giving money to Leeta, which could land me in jail, my name plastered in the headlines, forever linked with Leeta's notoriety. I'd thought that I wanted to be an outlaw, but now I wasn't so sure.

I wished I could discuss this with Sana despite the risks of telling anyone else about it. She and Verena were having dinner with potential donors for the clinic, but I texted her and asked if she could meet me afterward at a bar near Calliope House. I didn't want to talk to her at home, where she'd be more likely to react loudly. She responded right away and agreed to meet me in an hour.

The bar was packed with college students, but I appreciated the buzz and the noise. I ordered a glass of wine and grabbed a good spot just as two women were leaving, squeezing myself into the narrow space between the tables. A copy of the
New York Daily
lay abandoned on the floor near my feet. The cover featured the usual photo of Soledad in her uniform, as well as Leeta and Missy.
ARE MEN REALLY SO BAD? JENNIFER'S OVARY-ACTION
, the headline read. I wouldn't bother reading the article, but I would save the paper for Marlowe, in case she hadn't seen it.

As I sipped my wine, I thought about Sana and how she would try to talk me out of helping Leeta. Maybe that's what I wanted, someone else to make the decision for me. I knew it wouldn't be fair to place this burden on Sana, just as Julia had placed her burden on me, but I worried that the decision was too big for me alone.

The bar was growing more crowded with students, who bumped into each other, spilling drinks and stepping on toes. Turning back to the newspaper and its ridiculous headline, I heard a disembodied male voice.

“Hey,” the voice said.

I looked up from my glass and soon the voice had a face. “What are you doing here alone?” He was a generic white guy in his early twenties, holding a bottle of beer.

“I'm waiting for a friend,” I said, meaning,
Go away, you're not getting my table.

“Mind if I wait with you?” Before I could answer, he slid into the empty chair across from me, uninvited. “My name's Mason.” He had the firmness of body and brightness of skin that only men who were recently boys had; he was like a flower that had just pushed its way up through the dirt. I wasn't attracted to him, but he had a glow.

“My friend will be here soon,” I said, but my phone vibrated and made me a liar. A message from Sana:
running late, can we talk at home instead?
I sighed with annoyance.

“Stood up?” Mason said, putting the amber bottle of beer to his mouth and sucking on it.

“I have to go. You can have the table.”

“Don't go. I didn't even catch your name.”

“I didn't offer it.” I picked up my things. As I was about to leave, two large men moved away from the bar and I could see a table in a corner on the other side of the room. Three women and two men were crowded around it. They were looking in our direction, rising out of their chairs and straining to see, their merry brown and blond heads bobbing with laughter. When they noticed me looking, their smiling faces turned serious.

I asked Mason if the group on the other side of the bar were his friends. “Yeah, but they don't mind if I ditch them for someone as pretty as you.”

I blushed for the second time that night—
Soft Rose
—but not because I was flattered. I sat back down. I had an important decision to make, but I couldn't let this pass.

“Tell me your name,” Mason said again.

“My name's Jennifer.” From the front page of the newspaper, Leeta's eyes were fixed on me. Mason had no reaction. “I'm Jennifer,” I said again, but there was no alarm in his eyes.
Jennifers are our daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers.

“You seem nervous,” he said, sipping his beer. “Just relax, babe.”

I didn't know his game, but I decided to play along. I wanted to see what he planned to do. He launched into casual conversation, as if we were old friends, as if I had wanted to talk to him, as if he were fascinating. He spoke about random things, like his love of baseball and his studies at law school. A chunk of his peanut-colored hair fell over his eyes regularly, requiring him to brush it away. It seemed like an inconvenient haircut, but I imagined it had its uses, allowing him to appear shy and cute around girls.

“So who's this friend you were waiting for?” he said, finishing his beer and sliding the bottle to the middle of the table.

“She dumped me. She must have met a guy. Men find her irresistible.”

“I think you're irresistible.”

“You don't mean that,” I said, coquettishly. I wanted to maintain my pleasant demeanor, but I was growing angrier inside. I had left home that night in my brown and violet dress feeling confident and happy in my appearance, but Mason and his friends seemed to think I was a joke.
This is how it's going to be,
I thought. I had changed so much in the past few months, but the world hadn't changed along with me. Plum would always be a target. Giving up the hope of Alicia meant giving up the hope of ever blending in.

“I live not too far from here,” Mason said. “My roommates are out. Maybe we could go back to my place and, I don't know, hang out?” He put his hand beneath the table and gently touched my knee, trying to signal something, perhaps that he was harmless, like a dog rolling over onto his back. When I didn't answer, he used his other hand to brush his finger along my arm at the border of bare skin and sleeve. He leaned across the table and whispered: “I like you.”

There were murderous women about, slayings, kidnappings, castrations, but he wasn't deterred from his deviant plan, whatever it was. His was the face of a boy you'd see smiling back at you from a framed photograph on the desk of a doctor or insurance executive—the nonthreatening son, as bland as a vanilla cupcake.

Mason was waiting for an answer, and I wondered how hard he would work to win me over. He didn't expect me to be hard work. I was supposed to be grateful for his attention—that's what he was expecting: a round-faced girl desperate for male attention, brightening under the beam of his unexpected lust. Such a girl would do anything he wanted. He looked at me expectantly and I pretended for a moment that I was a generic woman. This is how it was, I thought. This is what people did. They went to bars and chatted with strangers and then went home and had sex with them. All those nights when I locked myself in my apartment, watching television and eating my Waist Watchers dinners, this is what people my age were doing.

“Come on, baby,” he said. The lock of hair moved down into place. From the sound of his voice and the way he said
baby,
I didn't think he was from New York. Virginia, maybe, or a point farther south. Wherever he was from, it wasn't these parts. They didn't grow boys like him around here.

I finished my glass of wine in two gulps. “All right,” I said. “I'm going to the ladies' room. You can tell your friends we're leaving.” I picked up my satchel and the newspaper and brushed past him, moving toward the stairs that led down to the bathroom. Several people turned to look, more than usual. Were they all in on the joke? A feeling I used to know well but hadn't experienced for a while crept up on me: humiliation.

I didn't need to use the bathroom, but I needed a few moments to myself. When I went back upstairs, Mason and his friends might reveal the joke and laugh at me. I needed to be prepared for that. But there were other possibilities. Perhaps Mason would continue the charade, thinking he could take me back to his place for a free blowjob. After all, I was supposed to be desperate. Or perhaps he was attracted to fat women and used the joke as a cover so his friends wouldn't laugh at him. Picking up fat women for an ulterior purpose was a fairly common phenomenon, Rubí had told me. It was called
hogging,
which was a sport. Mason had decided to play, but he was going to lose.

For some reason, locked in my second bathroom stall of the night, I imagined Mason trying to pick up Alicia in a bar, not as a joke but because he liked her. She might have been flattered by Mason's attention. She might have gone back to his apartment and had sex with him. She couldn't see his true self. Stupid Alicia.

I left my stall and stood in front of the sinks, the newspaper still wedged under my arm. I held it in front of me and stared at Leeta on the front page. Her eyes were fixed on me, as they'd always been. She was out there somewhere, thinking about me, in need of my help. “I've been chasing you,” I said, running my hands over the newsprint. This was my moment.

I went back upstairs and found Mason sitting at his friends' table. None of them were laughing now. Sana would have advised me to go home, arguing that I couldn't confront all the shitty people in the world. She was right, but I forged ahead. Mason deserved to pay. I would be swift and brutal.

“I don't want to go home with you,” I said to Mason in front of his friends. “I think you're ugly.”

It took him a moment to register what I was saying. “Huh?”

“You're fucking ugly,” I said. “Hideous, in fact.”

Mason's friends, the three women and two men, looked at each other. This hadn't been part of the plan.

“
I'm
ugly?” Mason tried to laugh for his friends. “I'm fucking ugly? Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror, fatty? You're disgusting. No man in his right mind would ever lay a hand on you.” No more
baby
for me.

It felt good to hear him say this, to know the charade was over. “You laid a hand on me. You seemed to be enjoying it.”

“Because I wanted to win a bet.” He laughed again, glancing around the table for support, but the men and women at the table were silent and expressionless, unsure how to react. The big blob had spoken. It could speak. They had always relied on the blob to be quiet, to absorb their taunts and snide remarks and slip quietly through the cracks of life. Now the blob was angry.

Uh-oh.

“You say I'm disgusting, Mason, but I think we both know what gets you off: a nice big fat girl like me. You just don't want your friends to know.”

Before he could reply, I reached for their table and lifted it, sending bottles of beer spilling everywhere. They leapt from their seats to escape the splashing liquid and crashing amber glass. “You stupid cow,” one of the women said. They scrambled to get clear of the table, but Mason slipped on the wet floor and hit the back of his head against the wall on the way down. He was dazed, lying on his back in a pool of beer, blinking his eyes slowly. His friends didn't help him.

I placed my foot on his chest so he couldn't move. My black boots. My colorful tights. I could do this.

“You need to learn some fucking manners!” I shouted.

“Hey, come on,” Mason said. There was a crowd gathering. “I'm sorry, okay? I think you're pretty, Jennifer. I do.”

“What?” I asked loudly over the clatter of the bar, wanting him to repeat it.

“I think you're pretty.”

I couldn't help but laugh. “You think I'm
pretty?
” Of all the things he could have said, this was the least expected. A deep roar came up from my diaphragm. The laugh was so sudden, so
vast,
that I feared it might rip me apart.

“Say it again.”

“You're pretty, Jennifer. I mean it.”

I continued to laugh. The laugh was long enough to stretch from the earliest days of my childhood till now, like a shooting star leaving a long trail of light. The trail wrapped itself around all the kids who'd tormented me when I was a girl and all the boys who'd ignored me when I was a teenager and all the young men who'd withheld their affections from me as an adult and all the women who'd excluded and harassed me until now, when Mason told me he thought I was pretty. Finally, I had what I wanted! When the laugh caught up to the present moment, the tail slipped out of my mouth.