Sarai Walker - Dietland

Within days, Gladys called with the bad news. “Eulayla’s daughter is shutting us down,” she said through her sobs. “The company is closed. We’re finished.”

I went immediately to the clinic with the intention of hoarding food, but when I got there the doors were already padlocked. There was no sign of Gladys or any of the other staff. “No,” I cried, pounding on the doors. Other women milled around on the sidewalk, gaunt and dejected, probably on the verge of meltdowns but too weak for histrionics.

“Why?” howled one of the distraught women, placing her hands on my shoulders. “Why does Eulayla’s daughter hate us?”

When I arrived home, my mother was sitting on the front steps, peeling an orange. I sat down next to her.

“What’s wrong?”

“No more Baptist Weight Loss. Eulayla’s daughter closed all the clinics.”

“Good for her.”

I watched my mother drop the curls of rind onto the ground between her feet. I was in mourning and she was nothing but pleased. From my bag, I pulled the before picture that Gladys had taken of me. I was twenty-five pounds lighter than that, but still fat. School was starting soon, and without the Baptist clinic, my plans for my last year of high school and then college in Vermont were going to unravel. I feared I would stay a before picture forever.

A vintage car stopped in front of the house, probably from the 1960s, small and black like a bug. A man sat in the driver’s seat and next to him a teenage girl, who stepped out of the car with a camera. She stood on the sidewalk before my mother and me and raised the camera to her eye. They were always going to be looking at me. That was my destiny.

“Go away,” I screamed, rising to my feet. The girl turned back toward the car and raced to open the door. As it sputtered away I chased after it, grabbing the lid off one of our metal trash cans as I leapt off the curb, hurling it into the middle of the street and letting out a roar. It landed in the street with a cymbal crash, rumbling the pavement where I stood. The car disappeared around the bend at the end of the road.

When I turned around, my mother was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house.

“Plum?”

I faced her from the street, standing where the starers normally stood, a brief moment of reversal. The house was nothing special from the outside, but I had lived there for much of my life. If the photos from all the tourists were collected and placed in chronological order, I could have flipped through them to see the girl under the tree become a young woman, one who grew larger and larger, moving into the house, standing behind the curtain—half in the frame, then nothing but shadow.

TWO DAYS AFTER FINDING Adventures in Dietland at Kitty’s office, I had nearly finished reading it. I should have been at the café answering messages, but I’d abandoned my work for the book. I soaked in a bath while reading, careful not to dampen the custard-colored pages.

Twelve years had passed since I was a Baptist. I had rarely thought of that time over the years, but as I read, the memories of the Baptist Plan came alive in my mind. I could taste the food: the metallic, watered-down tomato of the pizza and pasta, the casseroles that tasted the way carpet cleaner smells. I remembered the Baptist Shakes, their chalky texture, their medicinal, sour aftertaste. When the company closed, I knew only the most superficial details: Verena Baptist inherited the company and as the sole shareholder she had the power to shut it down, which she did within days of her parents’ fiery car crash. I had hated Eulayla Baptist’s daughter then, but I had never known her name. Now, thanks to the girl, I held her words in my hands.

Verena wrote that after she closed the company, she was left with “gallons of Baptist Shakes, vats of beef stew, and truckloads of chicken breasts slathered in a mysterious goo,” all of which were given to soup kitchens and homeless shelters, “to people who were starving by no choice of their own.” Verena described this as an act of charity, and I supposed the Baptist meals were slightly better than nothing.

I couldn’t help but feel disgusted and angry while reading about Eulayla Baptist. Like all Baptists, I’d been destined to fail, but I blamed myself when I did. I may have hated Eulayla’s daughter once, but as I read the book I was glad that she’d exposed her mother. I knew my failure as a Baptist wasn’t my fault.

I did wonder why Verena turned on her mother so publicly. Verena slipped through the pages of the book for the most part, but in the first paragraph she was there, most tellingly: “Before my birth, Mama was a slim young bride. She and Daddy set up house in Atlanta and for one shining year things couldn’t have been better. Then one tipsy night after martinis on the veranda with the Ambersons from across the street, Daddy impregnated Mama with a bomb that took nine months to blow up, leaving her fat and scarred, with stretch marks and a waistline that looked like an inner tube.”

That bomb was Verena. She had ruined her mother’s figure, which led to an obsession with dieting, which led to the horror of Baptist Weight Loss being inflicted on the world. I wondered if this was why Verena had decided to disgrace her dead mother in print and reveal her secrets: She’d been made to feel guilty for being born.

The book wasn’t only about Baptist Weight Loss. Verena attempted to expose the entire weight-loss industry. She wrote extensively about the many weight-loss authors and gurus, diet drugs, even the surgery I was planning to have. She devoted a whole chapter to liberating oneself from what she called Dietland. “Dietland is about making women small,” Verena wrote. I thought my mother would enjoy her book. I was sure she would have sent me a copy if she knew of its existence.

Inside the book were photographs of Eulayla, one from her beauty queen days and another from her fat years, as well as the famous photo of thin Eulayla holding up her fat jeans. In one photo, her face was taut and her legs were slim, but she was still slightly roomy in the hips. I looked at the photo and thought that in death, Eulayla had finally achieved what had eluded her in life. As a corpse she was as thin as she could ever hope to be. Just skin and bones, I imagined.

There was a short author bio on the back of the book: “Verena Baptist lives in New York City, where she manages Calliope House, a feminist organization.” That was it. There was no photograph of her, no way to put a face to the name of the woman whom I had once hated so much for ruining my dream.

I closed the book and tossed it onto the bathroom floor, not wanting to think of my Baptist days any longer. After I was forced off the Baptist Plan, I spent most of my senior year of high school eating. I couldn’t stop. At Delia’s restaurant I served as an apprentice to the woman who did the baking, and I gorged on cakes and cookies and pies. By the time I started college I had gained back all the pounds I’d lost and added many more. In college I joined Waist Watchers, since they held meetings right on campus. When I became disillusioned with their program I followed the diet plans outlined in books and magazines. I took diet pills, including one that was later recalled by the FDA after several people died. I took a supplement from a company in Mexico, but gave it up after it caused violent stomach pains. For all of my junior year, I drank a chocolate diet shake for breakfast and lunch, which turned my bowel movements into stones, causing hemorrhoids, and which tasted even worse than the Baptist Shakes had tasted. I was too squeamish for bulimia and lacked the masochism needed for anorexia, so once I had cycled through every diet I could find, I went back to Waist Watchers.