Sarai Walker - Dietland

A few minutes later I received Julia’s reply:

From: JuliaCole

To: PlumK

Subject: Re: spreadsheet

Thank you for the spreadsheet. I’ll be in touch again soon.

In the meantime, Verena Baptist wants to meet you.

J.

VERENA BAPTIST WELCOMED ME into her cluttered, blood-colored home. “Welcome to Calliope House,” she said, but who Calliope was or what the name meant wasn’t explained. You’re Eulayla Baptist’s daughter, I wanted to say.

Calliope House was actually two townhouses joined together, sitting on a leafy stretch of Thirteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in the West Village. I stepped into the entryway and was enclosed in a womb of red wallpaper. To my left and right there were ruby-hued rooms, one a living room, the other filled with desks, where women sat, working and talking to one another. Chandeliers hung from the ceilings, and on most flat surfaces were stacks of books and papers.

Verena didn’t fit into her surroundings, being an entirely vanilla creature with blond skin and hair, a beam of light in the dark. She was tall and slender. When she reached for my hand, I could feel the bones in her fingers, as fragile as matchsticks. I had expected some resemblance to Eulayla Baptist, who’d had that plasticine, middle-American look of the beauty queen, but no one would have guessed they were mother and daughter. When Verena spoke there was a light undercoat of southernness, just enough to set her apart from the average New Yorker.

“The house is a little overwhelming,” she said, almost apologetically. “It was this color when I moved in and I didn’t want to change it.” I scanned the room with the desks, but the women took no notice of me.

“Is this a house or an office?” I asked, still looking around, noticing something different every time I turned my head. On top of a cabinet, a large orchid was trapped under a bell jar.

“It’s both.” Verena explained that she lived in the house, but it also served as her office. Most of the women came and went each day, but a few of them lived there with her.

She explained that from the 1920s through the 1970s, the townhouse had been owned by a Catholic charity that used it as a home for unwed pregnant teenagers. The girls had either run away or been cast out by their families. With nowhere else to go, they moved into the house for the duration of their pregnancies. When their babies were born, the infants were adopted by religious families and the girls never saw them again. The young baby-less mothers left the house on Thirteenth Street and reentered the world as if nothing had happened to them—nothing they could talk about, anyway.

When Verena heard about the history of the house on her visit with the real estate agent, she knew she had to have it. There had been other inhabitants between the 1970s, when the charity closed, and when Verena bought it ten years ago, but the walls had always been red. I wondered if the girls had looked at the walls and thought of the periods that had not come: the absence of red, a foreshadowing of doom.

I followed Verena through the living room. A floral-patterned scarf was tied around her head like a headband, its knot and tail disappearing beneath her long hair. She wore a knee-length dress of blue canvas material, with gaping pockets at the front filled with pens and scraps of paper; beneath the blue smock she wore a white T-shirt. The ensemble smelled of laundry detergent, that chemical floral scent not found in nature. She was simple and clean, the type of breezy girl you might see playing tennis in a tampon commercial, only she wasn’t a girl. I knew from reading her book that she was close to forty.

As I walked behind her, seeing her hips sway beneath the blue canvas dress, watching her bare calves constrict and release, it was difficult to believe she had sprung from the loins of Eulayla Baptist. Verena’s body had destroyed her mother’s figure; it was where Baptist Weight Loss had begun, that tiny seed that turned into “a bomb that took nine months to blow up.” Verena’s body could have been displayed in a museum, a part of American history.

We arrived in the kitchen at the back of the house, which was also red. A round oak dining table filled most of the empty space in the kitchen, with chairs circled tightly around it. On the wall behind the table was a framed pair of old jeans, folded at the knees and pinned to a white silk background. “Is that . . . ?” I pointed, unsure if I should mention the dead mother.

“Yeah, those are Mama’s fat jeans, the ones made famous in the TV commercials.” I placed my hand on the glass, imagining Eulayla bursting through the pants. She had never been as big as she seemed. Her fat jeans certainly wouldn’t have fit me. I leaned over to examine them more closely. I had known that Eulayla Baptist was a real woman, but she had always seemed more mythic than human. Now there were her pants, and here was her daughter. I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

Verena poured me a glass of sweetened iced tea (105) from a pitcher and invited me to sit down at the table. “I was a Baptist once,” I said, still eyeing the legendary jeans.

“It was hell, wasn’t it?”

“Worse.” I shared the story of my time as a Baptist, about joining after I saw her mother on television and about my group leader, Gladys, and how she cried when she told me Eulayla had died.

“You must have hated me,” Verena said. “I still get hate mail more than a decade later. You took away my dream of being thin! That’s what all the haters say. I got a death threat just last week.”

Verena explained that in the first few years after she closed Baptist Weight Loss, there were disgruntled former Baptists who stalked her and even threatened her life. They held meet-ups across the country. There were Baptist Shakes for sale on an online auction website years past their expiration dates, as if they’d aged like a fine wine. Some former Baptists collected old meals and any memorabilia connected to Eulayla. Some went so far as vandalizing Eulayla Baptist’s grave with chisels, scratching out the words “Beloved Mother” on the headstone in an attempt to obliterate any link to Verena, even posthumously. Verena had replaced the headstone three times already.

I asked Verena if she had ever followed the diet. Given her slim figure, I doubted it.

“No, I can eat whatever I want and never gain weight,” she said. “I take after Daddy. When I was a kid I wanted to be fat, just as a fuck-you to Mama. Fat as a form of subversion. My nanny was fat. She had such a lovely roundness about her. Mama was all bones and hard angles. You couldn’t cuddle with her; it would have been like cuddling with a pile of tent poles.”

“If you’ve never been—” I couldn’t say the f-word, I couldn’t say fat; I never said it out loud, hating the way it sounded. I preferred a variety of euphemisms: overweight, curvy, chubby, zaftig, even obese. I had once described myself as having a dress size in the double digits, but never as fat. “If you’ve never been—”

“ Fat, ” Verena said.

“Then why do you care so much about dieting? Why did you write the book?”

“To tell the truth and undo some of the damage that Mama did, if that’s possible. My family made a fortune exploiting vulnerable people and now that fortune is mine. It’s ill gotten, of course, and it weighs on me. Sometimes at night when I think of it I can’t breathe.”

The fortune, I’d read online, was rumored to be close to $200 million. I wanted to joke that at least one brick of the townhouse—maybe more—belonged to me, but I didn’t. She seemed pained. She said her extended family had been outraged by the book and most of them had shunned her. “The truth is a lonely place, but it doesn’t matter. I have a new family now. A better one.”