Sarai Walker - Dietland

Before long I weighed one hundred pounds. I hadn’t weighed that little since elementary school. One day when I came home from work there was a note taped to my back that said, FEED ME! Women came up to me in the street and asked me what my secret was. “I don’t eat anything, ever,” I said, but this wasn’t entirely true. I swallowed my Dabsitaf tablet once a day. I could see the oblong pill descend through my body, down my neck, between my breasts, heading toward my bellybutton. It looked like a bug inching along beneath my skin.

When I reached ninety pounds, chunks of my hair began to fall out, my fingernails became brittle, my cheeks sunken and hollow. “What’s your secret?” a woman in the park asked me.

I was a size zero, but only for a few weeks, and then I was less than zero. At the department store, the saleswoman said, “We don’t have clothes in your size,” and I seemed to remember that people said things like that to me in my previous life, but they would laugh and snicker. Now they were jealous. “Bitch,” a woman whispered to her friend. I was sent to the children’s section, but even that was difficult. I was taller than most children, and whereas children were round, I was as slender and pointy as a garden rake.

On the night of my first blind date, I had taken to wearing pink gingham overalls that I cinched around my waist with an extra-large rubber band. Preston asked if I’d like to go to dinner at Christo’s, but I said I didn’t eat anything, ever, so we sat on my sofa and talked. Well, Preston talked. The inside of my head was blank.

By the end of the evening, predictably, Preston was thrusting on top of me, filling me with his juices, injecting me with calories, nothing by mouth. I didn’t try to stop him. I didn’t want to. When he finished, I thought I felt one of my bones crack.

“I’ll call you,” he said on his way out.

“If that’s what you want.”

The next night, a man named Jack was at my door. “Are you Plum?” he asked.

“Plum? She doesn’t exist.” Burst! “I prefer to be called Alicia.”

Jack said he was a professor of literature and asked me what kinds of books I liked to read. I told him I had thrown my books away, that I no longer wanted them. “You’re not one for conversation,” he said, so he took me dancing. During the slow dances, he nibbled my ear. Later on, in the ladies’ room, I saw that one of my earlobes was perforated. Now I was even lighter.

Back at the bar, I stirred Jack’s martini with my finger. He licked my finger clean and then bit off the top, chewing the tip and the nail along with his olive. “You taste so good,” he said.

My next blind date was with Alexander, who was a blind date, literally. He was fond of ribs and slathered my torso with BBQ sauce. There wasn’t much meat on my bones, but he contented himself with the gristle, and by the time he left I weighed fifty pounds. This is too low, I thought. At some point I’ll disappear.

It wasn’t Aidan who came next, as I had expected, but the man who had punched me in the subway. “No, not you!” I screamed, but he chewed my tongue and took a bite out of my neck. When the others came back for seconds, I couldn’t object. They were all in my bed at once, devouring my pieces. This had gone too far. I wanted to scream but no sound came out. I wanted to hit them with my arms but I didn’t have any. I wanted to cry, but they’d taken my eyes. Soon they finished me off.

I was the flame of a candle, blown out.

The telephone rang. It sounded as loud as a church bell in my quiet apartment. I opened my eyes and began to reach for it, but then I saw my hand in a strip of gray light coming in through the window.

My hand. It was pudgy and white.

I tossed back the covers and looked down at my body, patting my breasts and my thighs through the white and purple dress. At the end of the bed I saw my ten toes. This little piggy.

I was still me.

There was the bottle of Dabsitaf on my nightstand and the aftertaste of medication on my tongue. I wasn’t sure what was real, besides the ringing telephone. I picked it up.

“Plum?” a woman said.

I tried to place the voice. “Is this Kitty?”

“Plum, I need to see you right away.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Did I forget about our meeting?”

“This isn’t about our meeting. I’m at home right now but leaving for the office soon. Come see me as soon as you can.” She hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

Kitty rarely called me. Something was wrong. My bladder ached, so I rushed to the bathroom. As I sat on the toilet, I looked at the rippled white of my inner thighs. In the dream I’d had perfect thighs and breasts and legs.

Thighs, breasts, legs —an order of fried chicken.

As I brushed my teeth, I stared in the mirror at my bloated face, at my chin and the chin beneath that. In my dream the men had taken bites of me, crunching my eyeballs and fingers like crudités. The memory of it made me wretch in the sink. I hadn’t eaten anything substantial in days, and there was nothing in my throat but the lingering taste of Dabsitaf.

After drinking some coffee, I dressed quickly and left my apartment, not knowing that I wouldn’t return for a long time.

It was raining. I was awake, not dreaming, I was sure of it. Men didn’t look at me. A woman in a business suit was doing butt clenches at a bus stop and eyed me warily as I passed. I was wearing a clear raincoat printed with colorful flower buds that in my size looked like a bedspread.

Storm clouds grew darker overhead and I decided to skip the subway and take a taxi instead. I didn’t want to see other people. I didn’t want them to see me.

As we drove through the rain, it occurred to me that Kitty was going to fire me. She must have found out I’d been deleting her email, or maybe she knew I’d given the addresses to Julia. No matter what the reason, I knew it was over.

The taxi driver was eating sunflower seeds. The sight of his stubbled jaw moving up and down, his Adam’s apple jutting outward when he swallowed, was disgusting. The sight of a man eating anything was something I couldn’t bear. I wanted to roll down the window, but it was raining too hard, so I wiped the fog from the glass and peered outside. We were crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, heading into Manhattan.

The driver turned up the radio. “We know Jennifer cannot be a single person. She has to be a group,” said Nola Larson King.

He dropped me off near Times Square, as close as he could get to the Austen Tower given the barricades. As I walked toward the building, my feet plunging into deep puddles, I heard someone call my name from behind. It was Kitty.

I turned to face her, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. She’d been caught in the downpour. Her hair was wet and flat, the ends of it resting against her white blouse in sharp points, like snakes’ tongues. I had only ever seen her with her red curls in their trademark formation, the carefully formed ringlets like a great strawberry bush.

“Kitty?” She was barely recognizable, a superhero without her cape.

“Let’s go down the street,” she said, motioning to a coffeehouse. She didn’t want me in the office in case I made a scene when I was fired. I followed behind her and noticed she wasn’t carrying an umbrella. She was glum and I wondered if her mood, and her indifference to the rain, and most of all her hair, were because of me. She must have felt betrayed. I didn’t know what I would say when she confronted me about the deleted messages. I looked at the sidewalk. Julia was down there beneath the wet concrete of Times Square, which now reflected a pretty pattern of neon light.