Sarai Walker - Dietland

In the years that had passed since I’d joined Baptist Weight Loss, I’d gained nearly a hundred pounds. After reading Adventures in Dietland, I felt certain that surgery was the right option for me. Verena would have been horrified by this response, since she railed against weight-loss surgery except in life-threatening situations, but her intentions in writing the book didn’t matter. She had proven that dieting doesn’t work. I was grateful to her for that.

The memories exhausted me, and I relaxed for a while in the tub, the water lukewarm but not unpleasant. I no longer thought the girl was trying to be mean by giving me Verena’s book, but I still didn’t know what she wanted. When the phone started ringing, I didn’t want to get out of the water. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message, but a few minutes later the ringing started again. Annoyed, I left the bath and stomped naked down the hallway, leaving pools of water behind me on the floor.

“Is this Ms. Kettle?”

“Yes.”

“Is this Plum?”

“Who is this?”

“This is Erica calling from Austen Human Resources. We need you to come to the office on Monday at ten a.m. to sign a form.”

“What form?”

“A form you need to sign. There’s a problem with your health insurance.”

“All right,” I said, irritated at the thought of another trip to Manhattan.

“Please come to the Human Resources office on the twenty-seventh floor. Thank you, goodbye.”

Austen Media was the furthest thing from my mind. Since starting Verena’s book I had ignored Kitty’s girls. They were trapped inside my laptop—a Pandora’s box I refused to open.

ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH FLOOR of the Austen Tower, I stepped off the elevator and walked down a long carpeted corridor. At the end was a floor-to-ceiling window, revealing the breadth of midtown Manhattan in a blaze of sunlight. The corridor was like a diving board perched above a sea of buildings. I placed my toes and forehead against the glass and looked down at the streets below.

Erica, the woman who’d pestered me on the phone, greeted me in the Human Resources office. She produced a clipboard with a form that had the logo of Tri-State Health at the top. “Please read this and sign,” she said, sitting next to me in the waiting area. The form contained little content and only asked me to confirm the insurance plan I’d chosen when I began working for Kitty.

“Terrific,” Erica said when I handed the clipboard back to her. “I’ll walk you to the elevator.”

“That’s it? I came all the way from Brooklyn.”

“You don’t want your insurance to expire, do you?”

I wanted to reply to her in the same snotty tone, but it wasn’t worth it. I gathered my things and she escorted me out of the office, which I thought was unnecessary.

As we waited for the elevator, I looked out the window and thought of the diving board again. The idea of lifting off, of diving into midtown, absorbed me until I heard a crinkling sound. The corridor was so bright that I had to strain to see that Erica had removed my insurance form from the clipboard and was stuffing it into the mouth of a trash can.

“Hey, that’s my form.”

“Go to Basement Two,” she whispered. “B-Two. You’ll have to change elevators at the lobby.”

“What’s going on?”

She held her arm between the elevator doors, preventing them from closing. “Go on, hurry up. I have to get back to work.”

I was in the elevator and descending, my vision splotchy from the sunlight, when only one thing came to mind: the girl.

In the lobby, I hesitated, but then couldn’t resist finding out what was going to happen if I followed Erica’s directions. I looked for the bank of elevators that would take me to B2. When I reached the basement, two floors beneath the Austen Tower, I was standing before a set of double doors, a tarnished silver portal with a sign attached to it that read BEAUTY CLOSET. There was a keypad to the right of the doors, and a button, like a doorbell.

The elevator doors closed behind me. I stepped to the silver doors and rang the bell. A number of seconds passed, but there was no sound or hint of a human being on the other side.

I was about to ring the bell again when I heard the faintest noise. I pressed my ear to the door. Click-clop, click-clop. The sound grew steadily louder. Click-clop, click-clop, like a horse in a Western film. Click-clop. I listened for a minute longer and realized it was the sound of someone wearing high heels, approaching from a great distance. Click-clop.

“Coming,” a voice called, and then one of the doors opened slightly and a head popped out. “I am Julia Cole, manager of the Beauty Closet. How may I help you?”

“I’m Plum. I don’t know why I’m here.”

The woman opened the door, allowing me entry, but she didn’t speak. I stepped inside and what I saw made me gasp. The Beauty Closet was hardly a closet. You could easily fit a 747 inside it, perhaps two. For as far as I could see were steel shelves reaching to unknown heights, with blinding lights overhead; it was like a supermarket on the grand scale of a temple constructed by the Babylonians. Ladders on wheels were positioned in each aisle, extending so high that the tops of them were whited out by the lights, as if they were ascending into the sky. There were signs at the end of each aisle—LIPS, LIDS, LASHES, HAIR, and so on—and each shelf was lined with black lacquered trays filled with products.

“You call this a closet? ”

The woman stood before me, wearing a silky mauve blouse and cream-colored slacks that ended just above her ankles, with heels on her feet. Around her slender waist was a black canvas tool belt, filled with brushes and tubes of lipstick.

“For you,” she said, handing me a metallic tube. On the bottom it said, “Juicy Plum.”

Julia motioned for me to follow her. We walked down the Lips aisle, which was subdivided into sections for lipstick, gloss, liner, and balm; each of these sections was subdivided by color, with swatches on display, like the inside of a paint store. Taped to one of the shelves was a handwritten sign: LIPS: MINORA AND MAJORA, with an explicit illustration of a vulva. “Just a little humor,” Julia said when she saw me looking.

In the middle of the aisle were two stools on wheels, where Julia and I sat. “To answer your question, we call this the Beauty Closet for old times’ sake. When the Austen Corporation was founded on this site in 1928, Cornelius Austen’s daughter was put in charge of organizing the cosmetics for the two fashion magazines Austen published at that time. It was just a way to keep her busy until she found a husband. She was well liked, always offering tea to those who visited her in the closet. The Beauty Closet became an Austen tradition.”

Julia adjusted her tool belt to prevent some makeup brushes from slipping out. Above her head was a shelf labeled LIPSTICK/MATTE/BURGUNDY.003LMB. I wondered if Julia had devised this Dewey Decimal System for cosmetics.

“What’s all this makeup for?”

“There are fifty-two stories on top of us. We publish nine fashion magazines, known collectively as the Nine Muses, as you know, and we also produce many television programs and all sorts of other things. There are a lot of women on our pages and on our air, and all of them need makeup. That’s what we provide here.”

I glanced around, trying to take it in, and shivering slightly.

“It’s chilly in here so the makeup doesn’t melt. I’m used to it by now,” she said. “Before we go any further, you must agree that what I say to you here is confidential.”

I nodded.