Sarai Walker - Dietland

When our friendship ended he began to date a girl from my history class. After months of being friends with me, of building up to something that never happened, he began to date her and instantly they were holding hands and kissing as they walked together on campus, and doing other things behind closed doors that I could only imagine. That was the start of the unraveling that would culminate several weeks later with my mother’s arrival on campus and Dr. Willoughby prescribing Y——, but I didn’t know that at the time.

At the beginning of the new semester in January, I walked to the campus health center in a snowstorm. I felt that something bad was going to happen to me. “I need help,” I said to the disinterested receptionist behind the desk. She asked what was wrong but I didn’t have words for it. “Well?” she asked; there was a line forming behind me. “I’m bleeding,” I said. It wasn’t true, but it seemed to sum up my defectiveness as a female more than anything else I could say.

As I sat in the waiting area, I thought about leaving, but I didn’t know where else to go. My friends had tried to be helpful, but I didn’t share with them the depths of my pain; they might have laughed. There had never been anything between me and Tristan besides friendship, so they would have thought me foolish. That there had only been friendship between us made it worse. There had been a line between us. It was the line I grieved over, more than I grieved for Tristan. The line would always be there, even after Tristan was gone.

In the examining room I put on a gown and the nurse weighed me and took my blood pressure. The doctor arrived and listened to my heartbeat and then helped me recline on the examining table. He felt around on my breasts, where I had imagined Tristan might have touched me. Then he said something about my cervix and moved my legs apart. I had always avoided gynecological exams, too embarrassed at the thought of exposing my body in such a way. I lifted up my head. “Wait.”

“Just lie back and relax,” he said in a tone he must have thought would soothe me. He touched me down there with a cold, gloved hand. I had never been touched there before and my knee moved involuntarily and bumped his head. “Are you sexually active?”

I could see the top of his blond head over the curve of my stomach. “No.”

“I’m going to insert the speculum now. You might feel a pinch.” I looked up at the ceiling tiles, cloudy and white like the surface of the moon, and held the sides of the table as he pushed something hard into me, opening up what felt like a new space. I had never had anything put inside me before, not a penis, a tampon, or a finger. It felt as if he were stabbing me. With Tristan, and then with the doctor, I felt pain in places I hadn’t known existed.

“Relax,” the doctor said. “Don’t clench.”

When the doctor finished, he said he’d leave me alone to get dressed. After he was gone, I couldn’t move except to put my legs together. I felt pinned down. Tears ran down the sides of my face and into my hair. There was a poster on the wall, an illustration of a see-through pregnant woman standing in profile, her guts like the inside of an aquarium. I had imagined having a baby with Tristan, had fantasized about all sorts of things happening between us, even though I had known it was impossible, that there was a line.

I tried to maneuver myself up from the table, wanting to leave before anyone saw that I was crying. When I stood, blood ran down my legs and into my socks. I hobbled to the counter where there was a roll of blue paper towels, and tried to wipe myself down. Once I got back to my dorm room, I stood in the shower and watched the blood circle the drain. There was a wound somewhere, deep inside of me. It never healed, but after I began to take Y——, I could no longer feel it.

The First Couple

The world’s most famous porn star was shot in the head outside a Times Square hotel. A photograph of her corpse appeared in all the morning papers, even the respectable ones. After being shot she rolled into the gutter, a fact that the tabloids chose not to exploit. If not for the wound in her forehead, it would not have been obvious she was dead. She was lying with her eyes fixed in space, her lips slightly parted, which is how she often looked in her films.

Stella Cross was a major star, not some anonymous girl from the Midwest who was plucked before she was ripe, fucked in every orifice, and tossed into the compost heap. Stella Cross, her name a tangle of allusions to Jesus or just being nailed, had sealed her pornographic fame with a series of seven films called A Cum-Sucking Slut Named Stella, 1 through 7; the series was halted after the tissue between Stella’s vagina and anus was torn from so much “double anal” and “double vag,” as she put it, which she had endured for days on end for the seventh film; she was left with a gaping wound that needed reconstructive surgery. “I nearly had to retire my cooch!” she told a radio interviewer, likening it to a baseball player’s jersey.

The new vagina was revealed in her comeback film, Stella De-Flowered, a reenactment of her rape by a neighbor at the age of fifteen, which was directed by her husband and awarded Best Anal (nonconsensual) by Adult Film Digest. A mold of her new vagina was mass-reproduced by a factory in Manila and sold on her website as a sex toy. Stella had a framed photograph of the hair-netted Filipino factory women holding the molds of her ladyparts and smiling.

Stella Cross was an international star whose fame transcended the pornographic world. She was the subject of a documentary that won a prize at Cannes. She was the face of Kiss Me jeans, bought in shopping malls across America by preteen girls. A charity called Help These Children flew her to Guatemala after a mudslide, where she handed out stuffed toys to the kids and cheered everyone up. The name Stella had even been number one in Ghana among baby-girl names, two years running. People who had no idea that Stella Cross made her living on her back and on all fours like a dog knew her name, even if they were not entirely sure how they knew it.

After Stella Cross was shot, her husband was gunned down too. He had been talking on his cell phone at the end of the block, unnoticed by anyone. When the bullet entered his head, he crumpled to the ground with far less attendant excitement. Everyone always said he was a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. At the time of his death he was being investigated for using underage girls in his series of films called Barely Legal Slumber Party: Daddy’s Cumming.

“Waves of grief for Stella Cross and her husband, Travis, rolled over Silicone Valley yesterday,” said an article in the New York Daily. “Cross and her husband were known in the industry as the First Couple of Porn. ‘They were our Camelot,’ said performer Reginald C*********.”

Witnesses said Stella had been shot by a woman on a motorcycle. “A crack shot,” said a witness when interviewed on TV. The man, wearing a Jets ball cap, was interviewed outside the hotel, which was still festooned with yellow police tape, like a sad sort of Christmas garland.

“She was just shot— bam! —like that,” he said. It seemed that he wanted to add “awesome” or a similar exclamation.

Before she was murdered, the appearance of Stella Cross on the sidewalk outside the hotel had caused an outbreak of excitement among the tourists in Times Square. Such was the crush of autograph seekers and photograph takers that ten minutes before the shooting, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, after receiving an award in the hotel ballroom, walked out the front door and into a waiting car, unnoticed.