Sarai Walker - Dietland

Next he asked me to hold my arms straight out. “Your batwings are pretty significant, so there will be a lot of hanging skin we’ll need to remove.” He drew on the flab hanging down from my upper arms. “We’ll do an arm lift. The scar will be in your armpit, so no one will see it.” I stood frozen with my arms outstretched as the doctor drew on me. He moved behind me and placed his hands on my butt. “The last big thing you’ll need is a complete lower body lift. We’ll remove the sagging skin from your thighs and your behind and then lift everything, giving you a smoother, tighter appearance.” He turned me around and gave me a handheld mirror so I could see my reflection in the larger mirror behind me. He bent over and continued to draw on my skin with the marker, long smooth lines and smaller dotted lines all over the back of me. I pictured him with a pair of scissors, cutting my flesh as if it were cloth.

He stood up and told me to put my arms down. He maneuvered me back slightly so my face was directly under the bright light above the mirror. “You’re probably too young for a facelift, but we’ll see how it goes with the surgery. Be prepared for the fact that you’ll look older when you’re thinner. Fat is like a natural collagen, so without it you’ll wrinkle more.” He turned my face to one side. “Your nose is a bit big. I could fix that.” Big compared to what? I wanted to ask. Not compared to a Volkswagen.

Dr. Ahmad put the cap back on the marker and smiled at me. “That’s it,” he said. “You may need some lipo if you have small pockets of fat here and there, but we won’t know that until you’ve had the bypass. You look worried. Don’t worry. You’re in good hands. I do this all the time. Several times a week, in fact. In about a year from now, you could be a whole new person.”

He left me to get dressed and I looked at myself in the mirror, full on. There was Plum’s body with black lines showing how Alicia would be carved out. I’d look like Frankenstein by the time it was over. I turned full circle, trying to take in all the black marks. No matter what I did, there was no escaping the body that trapped me. I could see that now.

In the taxi on the way back to Calliope House, I didn’t say anything to Marlowe. She congratulated me on finishing the makeover and handed me a copy of Fuckability Theory, which she’d signed For PlumAlicia, love Marlowe xo. I noticed the book’s dedication: To the 3 Stus and Sharlene.

“What’s wrong?” Verena asked when we walked into Calliope House.

“Nothing, I’m just tired.”

“Making yourself fuckable is a lot of work,” said Marlowe.

“I’m not fuckable,” I said. I’m Frankenstein.

Verena told me to go to her office at the top of the stairs, that there was a present for me. Hanging on the back of the door was a new version of the white poplin shirtdress with purple trim, along with a pair of purple tights. More than double the size of the original, this duplicate dress was like a cartoon. I set down my bag and Marlowe’s book and held the dress in my hands. For some reason, I wanted to put it on.

I locked myself in the bathroom, where there was a pubic hair on the toilet seat, as black and spindly as a spider’s leg. I took off my clothes and replaced the black control-top tights with the purple ones. There was a brief flash in my mind of Leeta, she of the colorful tights. I stepped into the dress and then stood before the mirror. Seeing Plum wearing Alicia’s dress was like looking in a funhouse mirror. Alicia, blown up twice the size she should have been. The dress was sleeveless, so my upper arms were visible, with the pattern outlined by the doctor’s black marker. The pattern of Alicia.

Thankfully I couldn’t see my whole body in the bathroom mirror, but what I saw reminded me of Janine, the outcast from the Baptist clinic, with her bright and colorful wardrobe. What if it were my fate to look like Janine forever? What if this is your real life? What if you’re already living it? Only a month earlier that had seemed impossible.

“Plum, are you all right?” Verena called up the stairs.

“Coming,” I said. I turned away from the Plum-Alicia hybrid in the mirror and returned to Verena’s office to collect my things. I didn’t bother to change into my regular clothes—I wanted to leave the red-walled house as quickly as possible. As I was about to walk out of Verena’s office, I saw the bottle of so-called Dabsitaf, the French diet pills, on her desk. I stuffed the bottle into my bra, in the space between my breasts. I was downstairs and out the door before Verena and Marlowe realized it, heading toward the subway in the dress, my legs bulbous and grapelike in the purple tights, which didn’t press in my stomach.

In the subway station at Fourteenth Street, I waited on the platform for the train, conscious that people were staring at me in my costume. I concentrated on the blackness of the tunnel, but from the din of the station, a male voice cut through.

“Can you imagine doing that? ” the man said, loudly enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear. He was about thirty, wearing a polished gray suit, standing between two other young men in suits. The trio was unshaven-on-purpose, wearing white shirts and ties in different colors, the only way to tell them apart. They laughed at the woman in the white and purple dress, knowing she could hear them, but not caring.

Not today, I thought. Please don’t do this today.

I turned to face them. The shame and embarrassment I felt made me want to keep quiet, as always, but then I remembered:

A Baptist isn’t afraid to take risks.

I looked at the man who’d made the comment and said, “I’m too much woman for you. From the looks of you, you probably like to diddle little boys.” The two guys next to him, the friends, his white-guy posse, laughed.

They shouldn’t have laughed.

The fist of the man who’d made the comment came flying at me. I saw it coming—the white paw, the hairy knuckles, the ring finger wrapped in a thin gold band. I opened my mouth as if to yell but his fist hit me before I could, the gold band smashing my lip into my incisor. I stumbled backwards, past the white line, near the edge of the subway platform. Someone screamed, but it sounded far away. I turned my head and saw the train approaching, the silver bullet, its white light heading toward me. My arms moved propeller-like as I fought for balance. Blood filled my mouth. I didn’t want to die this way, not with these people watching, but the white light was moving closer. I braced for impact, but then I felt hands pulling at me.

I fell to my knees on the platform as the train blew past. “He tried to push her onto the tracks. Did you see that? He tried to push her.”

The doors of the train opened and the passengers stampeded out, knocking me from side to side. When the crowd thinned and the train closed its doors, a woman knelt down next to me. “Are you all right?” She helped me to my feet. Another woman handed me a wad of tissue from her purse, which I held to my lip. The man and his two friends were gone.

When the police came, they asked me to describe what had happened. “He said something rude to me,” I told them, but I couldn’t repeat what he’d said. “I confronted him and he punched me.”

“He tried to push her,” said the woman who’d offered me the tissue. “I saw the whole thing.”

The officer said they would review the closed-circuit television and then contact me. I wrote my name and address on the form, as requested, and so did the witnesses.

The officer asked me, for the second time, if I needed the paramedics.

“I just want to go home.”