Sarai Walker - Dietland

I was already fat. I was the worst that could happen.

I didn’t return to the café again. Despite my initial fears, I didn’t think Kitty would find out that I wasn’t doing my work. She barely noticed me. Perhaps I could go on collecting paychecks for weeks or months, even years.

Instead of answering Kitty’s email, I watched television. Stanley Austen appeared on The Cheryl Crane-Murphy Report to discuss what continued to unfold in London, but he refused to acknowledge that he had been threatened. “Even if I were threatened, I wouldn’t worry in the slightest,” he said, his sleek silver hair contrasting unpleasantly with his suntanned skin. “I’m used to crazy, bitter women making threats. They complain incessantly that my fashion magazines exploit women, then on the other hand they complain that the alleged exploitation isn’t spread around equally among the fat ones and the ethnic ones. I gave up listening to them years ago.”

“But what about all the metal detectors and barricades that have suddenly appeared outside the Austen Tower?” asked Cheryl Crane-Murphy.

“That was in the works well before all this Jennifer nonsense,” he said. “Jennifer” was media shorthand for the violent events occurring on two continents and the group assumed to be committing them; even if Jennifer was a real person, she couldn’t have been acting alone.

Cheryl Crane-Murphy moved on to discuss American HipHop, a cable channel that was headquartered near the Austen Tower in Times Square. Earlier in the week, the CEO admitted he had been threatened, but he wouldn’t say how. In response to the threats, he announced that the twenty-four-hour music channel would no longer show videos that degraded women. Commentators wondered what the channel was going to show instead, since all day long it was bitch this, bitch that and there was an endless supply of booty moving through space like smooth brown planets. Cheryl Crane-Murphy and her roundtable of experts wondered if the station would go bankrupt. I turned the channel to American HipHop and saw they were broadcasting a test pattern with a message on the screen reading WE APOLOGIZE FOR THIS INTERRUPTION TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING.

Verena called. I listened to her while staring into the void that was American HipHop. She wanted to know about the second task. I decided not to lie and told her about the woman in the café and how I had responded to her: What are you staring at? I thought this would be enough of a confrontation—for Plum this was progress—but Verena wasn’t satisfied. “It’s a good start,” she said, “but I want you to consider doing more than that.” In response I moaned into the phone, experiencing a burst of shocks in my head. “You’re not well at all,” Verena said, as if she’d had nothing to do with it.

Although the first two tasks were ongoing, Verena wanted to discuss what was next. I demanded to know how many tasks were left in the New Baptist Plan. I was on the verge of quitting, but she said there were only three tasks left. I was nearly halfway to the $20,000.

“Now what do you want me to do?”

“For the next two tasks, I want you to live as Alicia.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I know that Alicia is thin and Plum is fat, but I just want you to pretend to be Alicia. It’s an exercise.”

Verena explained that the third task was a makeover. “You’ve already started buying clothes and accessories, but let’s go further. I have a friend who is an expert at this sort of thing. She’ll take you out for a few days and make you over from head to toe.”

“What’s the point? I don’t look like Alicia. I can’t even fit into the clothes I’ve bought.”

“Trust in the process. Besides, it might be fun for Plum as well. You’ve imagined yourself as Alicia for so long that you don’t give Plum a chance to be everything she can be.”

“I’ve been Plum my whole life. She’s had plenty of chances.” I thought about the makeover. Shopping for cosmetics and new shoes, I supposed that’s what she had in mind. I could handle that. “And the fourth task?”

“A week of blind dates.”

An invisible hand punched me in the gut. “Verena—”

“My dentist, Gina, always tries to fix me up with men, which is annoying and offensive for a variety of reasons. She knows plenty of single men—they’re in and out of her office all day long. So yesterday I called her and asked her to arrange a string of dates for a young friend of mine. She practically cackled with joy.” I pictured Gina with a wart on her chin, clasping a broomstick.

“What did you tell her about me?”

“That you work for Kitty, that you’re smart and pretty, that you live in Brooklyn.”

“The men won’t be expecting someone like me.”

“These are blind dates. They won’t know what to expect.”

“Verena,” I said in a tone that let her know I was tired of this game, “you know what I mean. I’m not a generic female. I cannot be set up on dates.”

“Trust in the process, Plum. That’s all I ask.”

“I’ll be humiliated,” I said. “You know that. That’s what you want to happen, isn’t it?”

“You make me sound like a monster.”

“I can’t understand why you’re doing this. I thought you wanted to change my mind about the surgery? So far you’re not doing a very good job.”

“I just want you to experience being Alicia. She wants to meet men. She wants to fall in love, get married, have babies, the whole predictable triumvirate. That’s what you said you wanted.”

“But I’m not Alicia yet.”

“We’re just going to pretend that you’re Alicia. I want to move the present and the future closer together. It’s an experiment.”

“Okay, send the men over, I don’t care. I hope they do humiliate me. It’ll confirm what I already know but what you can’t accept: Plum shouldn’t exist.” Plum was moving into the past, like someone on the platform as the train pulled away, slipping from view. I wouldn’t even bother to wave goodbye.

I didn’t bother to ask about the fifth task. Verena said the makeover would begin the next morning. I was supposed to meet her friend Marlowe Buchanan at Café Rose in Union Square. The name Marlowe Buchanan was instantly familiar, but I couldn’t recall why. I turned it over in my mind several times, and then it came to me. “Marlowe Buchanan . . . the actress?”

“Yes, I guess she was an actress. I don’t think of her that way. She’s just Marlowe to me.”

I should have known it wouldn’t be a normal kind of friend.

“Is there a problem?” Verena asked innocently.

The New Baptist Plan was becoming stranger by the day.

The New Baptist Plan, Task Three:

Makeover

When I was a girl living on Harper Lane, I watched Marlowe Buchanan in the sitcom Ellie every Thursday night. She played the title character, Ellie Waters, a young woman who had moved from Ohio to New York City to become a TV weathergirl. It was a fish-out-of-Midwest story, with beautiful small-town Ellie trying to make it in the big city.

The actress Marlowe Buchanan, and by extension her character Ellie, was most famous for her Birth of Venus hair, which was long and thick and honey colored. It was mesmerizing to watch her every week, her hair falling over her shoulders and down her back, swishing behind her like a hula skirt as she walked. Marlowe appeared in a series of shampoo commercials with a Rapunzel theme, and she posed for the cover of Vanity Fair naked, with only her hair to shield her. Her hair was her trademark. Before Ellie, she’d been a teenage model, appearing on the covers of Daisy Chain and Seventeen.