Sarai Walker - Dietland

“If they’d added a T, it could have said DIET BITCH,” I said. “That would have been far more clever.”

Verena didn’t laugh. She collected the broom and dustpan and began to sweep up the broken glass. I unwrapped the paper and flattened it on the coffee table. I figured I’d leave the brick out back, but when Verena wasn’t looking, I slipped it into my satchel, enjoying the heft of it.

I headed out of the house, a bit shaken but determined to carry on with my plan for the day. I was working my way through the many V— S— stores in the city, returning home with the frilly stolen goods. This afternoon, I decided to venture farther afield to a shopping mall in Queens. I visited the bathroom in the food court first—it seemed sensible to pee now, in case I was arrested—but I wasn’t arrested, and as I left the mall, lingerie hidden in my satchel, the phone in my purse vibrated. The number looked familiar, but I couldn’t immediately place it.

“Ms. Kettle? This is Deborah from Dr. Shearer’s office. We haven’t heard from you in months. Your surgery is approaching—can we expect to see you at your appointment?”

I stopped between a set of double doors. Other shoppers bumped into me from both directions, but I didn’t move.

“Hello, Ms. Kettle?” I turned off my phone. The call was an unwelcome interruption to an otherwise perfect trip to the mall, a hand reaching out from my past, trying to knock me over.

I SHOULD HAVE TOLD THE DOCTOR’S SECRETARY that I no longer wanted surgery, but instead I’d said nothing. For a good part of the next day, I tried to write through the confusion in my notebook. Killing the thin woman inside me, the perfect woman, my shadow self—but how could I know if she was truly gone?

I decided to get out of the house, to go to a café and write, like old times. I visited Sana downstairs and asked if she wanted to join me. “I’ll need a caffeine break soon,” she said, sitting on the edge of her desk. She wore jeans and a billowy sleeveless top in midnight blue, her hair in the usual ponytail. She’d be free in half an hour, so I went ahead of her. Since I had nearly filled up my notebook, I brought my laptop along as well.

At Night & Day Café, I settled at a table near the window and ordered a lemonade and a mocha brownie. I reviewed the pages I’d written in my notebook during the previous weeks, Leeta’s messy blue ballpoint giving way to my careful black printing. I was glad I’d brought my laptop—it was time to impose some kind of order on my writing. Maybe, like some of the other women at Calliope House, I would write a book one day. When I was working for Kitty, spending all those days in front of my laptop at Carmen’s café, I’d wanted to write articles and essays, but maybe now I could write something longer. I had something more to say, despite the confusion I currently felt.

The Dear Kitty mailbox was positioned at the bottom of my screen. I’d never bothered to delete it, so I clicked it, intending to drag it to the trash can. Somehow it popped open, so suddenly and unexpectedly that I held my right hand in front of my eyes, as if a flash of light had blinded me. When I dared to look, I saw that fifteen new messages had trickled in before it was severed from the Austen mothership months ago. They’d languished in my inbox, their cries ignored. For fun, I opened one of them: Dear Kitty, My boyfriend says I have a fupa. How can I—

I was interrupted by a familiar voice. “Hey, lady!” Sana was coming in my direction, in time to rescue me. Her shout elicited stares from all corners of the café, but she wasn’t afraid to call attention to herself, knowing that people were going to stare at her burned face anyway. I pushed my laptop aside. I’d already finished the brownie and sucked up the last of my lemonade, so Sana went to the counter for more, returning a few minutes later with Cokes and a plate of soft macaroons crisscrossed with chocolate stripes.

“What’s Sugar Plum been up to today?” she said, popping open her Coke, her silver bangles sliding down her arms. “More underwear?”

“Not today.”

“Good. One of these days I’m going to have to bail you out of jail. You know that, don’t you?”

“They’ll never catch me. I’m as quick as a cat.”

She smiled but said, “Seriously, do I need to worry about you? As your friend and as a social worker, I’m required by law to ask.”

“I like doing it,” I said, shrugging. She backed off. I didn’t tell her about the other things I’d done recently, such as swearing at the yoga mat–carrying woman in the supermarket who’d scoffed loudly upon seeing the contents of my shopping basket, and hiding a brick in my satchel.

“I’d like to ask you about something,” I said, “if you’re willing to play social worker for a moment?” I told her that the doctor’s office had called and that I hadn’t canceled the surgery. “I’m wondering how I can be sure that Alicia, the thin woman inside me, is truly gone. What if she comes back to life?”

“Do you mean like a zombie? To kill a zombie you have to shoot it in the head.”

I played along. “That won’t work. She lived inside me, remember? If I shoot her, I’ll have to shoot myself.” In a serious tone, I tried to explain that I was worried my new life could be a novelty, one that might lose its appeal. This seemed impossible while sitting at the café with Sana, but I couldn’t predict the future.

“It’s a lifelong process and it’s never going to be easy, Plum,” Sana said, “but there comes a moment when you realize you’ve changed in some irrevocable way and you’ll never go back to the way you were before. Think of it as crossing over to a new place.”

I liked the idea of crossing over. “But how will I know for sure that it’s happened?”

“If you’re not sure, then it hasn’t happened yet. You’re still in flux.”

In flux—that’s how I felt. She had helped me understand what I was feeling, as I knew she would.

She noticed my laptop and I explained that I was going to type up what I’d written in my notebook, but I didn’t mention the possibility of writing a book. That idea was too new to be shared. She told me about her day raising funds for her clinic. She planned to run the New York clinic for a few years, then return to Iran to open one there. I hated the prospect of her leaving.

Sana talked about the teen girls she was going to help at the clinic. Much of what she was saying about the girls sounded familiar to me.

“I feel a kinship with girls, don’t you?” she said.

I hadn’t thought about my job like that. I’d seen my girls as a burden. Sometimes I had resented them, perhaps because I had been in a state of suspended adolescence myself.

“I was burned at thirteen, around the time that puberty set in,” Sana said. “I had always been a tomboy— is that what you call it? My friends and I were starting our periods and growing breasts—you know the awkwardness of that age—and here this horrible thing happened to me at the same time. I’ve always connected the two in my mind: being scarred and becoming a woman, both traumatic processes in their own way. An attack on my sense of self.”

The trauma of becoming a woman—that’s what all those Dear Kitty letters had been about at their core. I had responded to the girls’ fears and tried to soothe them, but I had never felt like a woman myself.

Sana returned to Calliope House for a meeting, but I chose to stay behind. Thanks to our conversation, I decided to read through the Dear Kitty messages that remained in my inbox before deleting them. I ordered a sandwich and soup, and opened one at random:

From: dolcevita95