Sarai Walker - Dietland

“Do you think the assassin was actually aiming for the Supreme Court justice?” the television interviewer asked the man.

“No way,” the man said. “No way. I don’t know nothin’ about this justice or whatever, but I’m telling ya, this motorcycle pulled up outside the hotel and this woman just aimed right at Stella and shot. It was totally a woman who did it, too.”

The blond Stella was shot as she walked away from the crowd of fans, sandwiched between two large black men who were her bodyguards. By the next evening, there were tribute videos posted online by Stella’s fans, with clips of Stella having sex spliced together with photos of her dead body—or perhaps they were just stills from her film Fuck Me Till I’m Dead.

The New Baptist Plan, Task One:

Withdrawal

The Nola and Nedra Show played on the radio, broadcasting live from Minneapolis. I listened while lying naked on the sofa, running my fingers through the sweaty curls of my pubic hair.

“My eleven-year-old nephew has a Stella Cross poster on his wall,” said Nedra Feldstein-Delaney.

“No!” said her cohost, Nola Larson King.

“Yes. My sister said all of his friends have it and she didn’t want him to be left out.”

“Oh, Nedra, I’m just sick about this.” I could hear the pain in Nola’s middle-aged, midwestern voice. She was always the more emotional of the two.

I picked up my glass of water (FREE FOOD) from the coffee table; after taking a drink, I set it over my bellybutton, the black hole amid the swirling stretch marks and deep crevices. Outside it was a boiling July day, and inside my body it felt like July as well. I was baking from the inside. I had the air conditioner running, but it wasn’t helping.

The day after meeting with Verena I had begun to cut my tablets of Y—— in half. She was right. Alicia wouldn’t be strung out on antidepressants, and if I was serious about becoming her, I needed to start taking more steps in that direction. Within days I began to experience flu-like symptoms and thought I had caught a bug, but Verena told me over the phone that I was suffering from “Y—— flu” and that this was a normal symptom of withdrawal.

She made me sound like a drug addict.

“Y—— won’t give up its grip on you easily, but your willingness to change is impressive, hon. This is an important step.” She encouraged me to endure the symptoms but said if they became too much I should call my doctor and ask for a low dose of Prozac, which could make Y—— withdrawal easier. I thought another pill was the last thing I needed.

For days I had a high fever and was marooned in my bed, wrapped in the sheets. I was nearly delirious for some of the time and saw things that weren’t there, like my dead grandmother sitting at the end of my bed. I began to sweat and experience chills and aches. This went on for days. When the worst of it was over I left my bed and went to the living room to lie on the sofa and watch TV or listen to the radio, feeling leaden and exhausted, sensitive to touch and light. I couldn’t recall ever feeling such misery, and yet in a strange way I welcomed the symptoms. They were unpleasant, but they were evidence of the change I was going through, my metamorphosis from Plum to Alicia.

Despite the humiliation of my session with Verena, I was grateful that she’d moved me one step closer to my new life, though I knew she had other intentions. Speaking with her had been painful and embarrassing, but in a way it was a relief to say those things. Afterward I felt as if I were carrying one less burden.

“Stella Cross’s father is being released from prison early so he can attend her funeral,” said Nedra Feldstein-Delaney.

I wasn’t answering Kitty’s messages. It’d been at least a week since I’d even opened the Dear Kitty account. In the three years I’d been working for Kitty I had been obsessively disciplined about my job, only taking weekends off, almost never missing a day, even working when I was sick. I had suspected that if I stepped out of Dear Kitty completely, I’d never want to go back.

I had a sudden fear that Kitty might find out I had been slacking off. She didn’t have the password to the account, but the IT department could surely find a way in. My anxiety was enough to send me to the computer. I sat on my wooden chair without wearing any clothes, my bottom sticking to the seat, my breasts sagging down to the level of the keyboard. In the computer I saw myself reflected back, but I was too numb to muster disgust.

“In a poll conducted last year, more seven-year-olds had heard of Stella Cross than Martha Washington,” said Nola Larson King.

As always, the Austen system was slow to log me in. An hourglass on the screen turned cartwheels while I waited. This ritual always gave me time to brace myself for what would flow into my inbox, like the moment on a cop show before a sheet is pulled back from a mutilated corpse in the morgue. Sharp intake of breath and then . . . the horror.

The messages poured in. There were more than a thousand of them. The sight of the massive list was like a collective cry in my ears. I opened the first letter but couldn’t summon the mental powers to concentrate. Kitty. Abortion. Blah. Blah. Blah. I wanted to write back to the girl, HaleyBailey80, and say, “Why are you asking me, Kitty Montgomery, whether or not to have an abortion? I flunked out of Brown!” Only after a break did the absurdity of anyone writing to Kitty for advice, and thus the absurdity of my job, become clear.

Nedra Feldstein-Delaney said, “Last Christmas my eight-year-old niece asked Santa Claus for a G-string.”

I looked at the next ten messages in the queue and I couldn’t face them. Not the next ten, not the next two hundred. I dragged my cursor down the list, highlighted them all, and clicked delete. I waited a few seconds to see if I’d feel any guilt, but I didn’t feel anything.

The New Baptist Plan, Task Two:

Confrontation

With the Y—— flu subsiding, I soon developed new symptoms, such as the feeling of shocks in my extremities, tiny pinpricks of electricity. I was zapped throughout the day on the bottoms of my feet and my fingertips. Overall I didn’t feel right; I was at a remove from life, as if there were a pane of glass between me and everything else.

My apartment was stale with sweat and the remnants of fever—it was like living inside a jar with the lid screwed shut. I was in the middle of washing clothes and linens and preparing to open all the windows when Verena called to explain about the second task of the New Baptist Plan. She wanted me to confront people who made rude comments or stared at me. “Don’t ignore them,” she said. “Respond.”

I was still in the middle of the first hellish task, and now she was giving me another. “Why bother? I won’t look like this for much longer.”

“I think you need to stand up for Plum, don’t you? Once she’s gone, you may regret that you never defended her.” Verena spoke about Plum as if she was going to be annihilated. I saw a watermelon dropped from the roof, its remains reddening the sidewalk.

“If you’re trying to talk me out of the surgery, then reminding me how much everyone hates me isn’t going to achieve that.”

“Trust in the process. A Baptist isn’t afraid to take risks.”

I was glad we were talking on the phone so she couldn’t see me roll my eyes. I had no intention of confronting anyone. The only way I could survive my life was to exist in a fog of denial. Acknowledging what happened around me was almost unimaginable. In nearly thirty years of life I’d rarely done it. If I ignored it, then it wasn’t real. Still, I told Verena that I would. She’d never know. I’d make up a story, something filled with pathos, like a message from one of Kitty’s girls.