Sarai Walker - Dietland

We arrived at Calliope House, and as I walked through the door I felt a stab of electricity in my head. Even with my eyes closed I could sense that people were staring at me, but I needed to wait for the sensations to pass. When I opened my eyes, Julia was standing before me in the entryway, seemingly on her way out. She was wearing the beige trench coat, this time with the collar up.

“I dropped by to say hello. I trust that you are well,” she said, nibbling the arm of her sunglasses.

“I’ve been better. How are you? How’s Leeta?”

“Leeta doesn’t work for me anymore. Don’t ask about her.”

“What happened?”

“I’d rather not talk about it. By the way, thank you for sending Kitty’s list of upcoming articles. It’s the usual sewage, but keep feeding me information. I like to know what’s going on.”

“I’m the last person on Kitty’s staff to know what’s going on,” I said, not adding that I wasn’t even doing my job anymore.

“Yes, but you’re the only one I can trust, so I’ll have to make do.” She smiled primly and moved toward me, aiming for a kiss on the cheek but landing in the spot behind my ear, near my hairline. She lingered for a moment, her arm wrapped around my waist, her breath on my neck. She seemed to be inhaling me. When her head resurfaced, she said, “It was lovely bumping into you, as always,” and walked out the door.

Marlowe, who had observed our interaction, said, “No comment.” I was left to wonder what had happened to Leeta. Julia wanted information from me but rarely shared any herself.

I followed Marlowe into the living room. It was redder and brighter than I had remembered, like the inside of a cherry lozenge. She set a dozing Huck on the sofa, where he curled into a ball. In the middle of the room was an overturned plastic crate, and she asked me to stand on it.

“Let’s see what you brought,” she said, picking up the bag and pulling out the white poplin shirtdress. “This should be no problem. Do you mind if we measure you?”

A woman with a tape measure and a pad of paper appeared. “This is Rubí Ramirez,” said Marlowe. I recalled the name Rubí from one of my conversations with Verena. She was the one who’d gone to Paris to get the diet drug she called Dabsitaf.

“Hello,” Rubí said, and I returned the greeting. She began to wrap the tape around me, making me feel like a prize pig. She and I probably weighed the same, but she was short. Her black hair was nearly shaved on one side, shoulder length on the other, the tips of her spiky bangs bright blue. She wore shorts and a tank top, her olive limbs ringed with rolls of fat—an image of the Michelin Man came to mind. I would have never worn an outfit like that.

Rubí hadn’t explained why she was measuring me, but if she was going to remake the white poplin shirtdress in my size, she’d be wasting her time. I had no intention of wearing any such dress in my size, but I didn’t say so. I just needed to get through the makeover. It would be over soon and then the $20,000 would be mine.

“Rubí has made several dresses for me,” Marlowe said. “DIY. Or what I like to call FFI—Fuck the Fashion Industry.” I had never heard anyone say the word fuck in such a variety of ways. There was little doubt what Huck’s first word would be. It couldn’t be a coincidence that his name rhymed with it.

Rubí chatted as she measured me, explaining that she was campaigning against Dabsitaf with Verena. Before becoming an activist, she said she had been a headless plus-size model. Her modeling agency had made a fortune selling photos and film footage of Rubí to the major news organizations. From the neck down, Rubí appeared in magazines and especially on news programs, where she was featured walking down the street in slow motion, an ice cream cone or hot dog in her hand, while the voice of the reporter gave scary statistics about expanding waistlines and type 2 diabetes and said things like, “The obesity epidemic is America’s looming holocaust.” Rubí was filmed struggling to stand up from park benches and restaurant booths and airline seats. Dieting tips were flashed on the screen over a freeze-frame of her ass, which she said looked to be covered in acres of denim. Her head was never shown. Rubí was so successful as an “obesity epidemic” headless model that she earned a nickname in the industry: Marie Fatoinette.

“I gave up modeling to become an activist,” she said. “We all do things we regret when we’re young, right?” I supposed that question was directed at me, but I remained silent, my arms outstretched, waiting for the inventory of my body to be finished. A dark-haired woman poked her head into the living room, glancing at me in my scarecrow pose. She didn’t say anything, but bit into a green apple. Half her face was scarred. It looked melted and pink. I turned away from her and from Rubí, looking up at the ceiling. Verena’s house was some kind of freak show.

When the measuring was over, Marlowe asked Verena to take care of Huck until her husband could pick him up. Verena was wearing a top that looked like a remnant of an old prom dress.

Before the makeover began in earnest, I felt compelled to check with her one last time: “You’re going to give me the twenty thousand at the end of this, right?”

“Of course. A Baptist never lies.”

I looked at her skeptically.

“Correction. This Baptist never lies.”

Marlowe and I left Calliope House to begin what she called “a few days of fabulous fuckability fun.”

“Why don’t you just call it attractiveness? I prefer that.”

“ Attractive is too benign. Quaint. In our mothers’ day, it used to be enough to have a pretty face or a nice figure, which was bad enough, but now you must be the perfect fuck-doll too.”

“What’s a fuck-doll?”

Marlowe, oblivious to my question, spoke a language I didn’t understand. She pulled a copy of Fuckability Theory from her bag and began to read from it: “Page two: We all want to be attractive to our partner, but being fuckable is about more than that. It’s about having a high fuckability quotient on the open market, as if we’re stocks with a value that rises and falls.”

Our first stop was a salon with a pink awning. “My friend here has an appointment for a waxing,” Marlowe said to the woman who greeted us at the door. The woman was wearing a coat like a doctor might wear, except hers was pink.

“What am I having waxed?” I whispered to Marlowe.

“Everything, including the downstairs area.” When I began to protest, she said, “Fuckable women are hairless and smooth, like little girls.” I felt shocks in my fingers and toes as I followed the pink-coated woman through the salon and down a flight of stairs at the back.

The esthetician spoke English with an unidentified Latin American accent. “I’m Liliana,” she said, looking me over. “Take it all off, except the bra.” She turned her back, as if privacy were going to be possible. I realized I hadn’t shaved my legs or armpits in months. The hair was dark and baby fine. I didn’t want Liliana to see, but there was nothing I could do. I lay down on the table. She waxed my legs and underarms, my upper lip and eyebrows, then took a pair of scissors from a drawer. “Don’t move,” she said as she began cutting the hair between my legs. She cut from the top all the way down to my ass. “You want a little Hitler?” she asked me. Had she said Hitler? “You want a little Hitler here?” she said again, putting her fingers on my mons. “Little strip, like Hitler mustache?” I said no.

Liliana dusted me with white powder, as if I were an enormous baby. She spread hot wax into every crevice and fold, all over my vulva and the sides of my legs, ripping off the wax with strips of cloth as she went. I gritted my teeth and held on to the table as what felt like a thousand ants bit me in the crotch at once. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” I mumbled when I saw the silver cross flailing around Liliana’s neck. She lifted my left leg up, bending it at the knee and pressing it back toward my chest. She asked me to hold it there while she grunted and smeared the wax around. “Hold it! Hold it!” This part of my body was a wild expanse of uncharted territory, unknown to man, but Liliana wasn’t deterred, attacking the thicket with gusto. She wiped off the blood with cotton pads, then slathered me with antiseptic ointment. I rolled over onto my stomach and she continued her work, spreading my butt apart and smearing wax in the crease, ripping it off with the strips. She asked me to get up on my hands and knees so she could have a better view, and pulled stray hairs with a tweezer. I was so embarrassed, I nearly left my body and floated to the ceiling. I wondered what it was like for the tiny Latina immigrant to spend her days in this basement room, her face in women’s vulvas and asses, making perfect Hitler mustaches. The American dream, I thought.