Sarai Walker - Dietland

“For the scholarship fund,” Julia said. She handed the bag to Marlowe, who explained that Julia stole high-end products from work and they sold them online, using the money to send working-class women to college.

Julia flung her trench coat over a chair and reclined on the sofa, not bothering to say anything else to Marlowe and me. “Don’t go near her,” Marlowe whispered before heading out the door. “It’ll take a while.”

“What will?”

“The transformation. Watch and see.”

Julia took off her heels and massaged her red and swollen feet, wincing as she did. She removed her silver jewelry—earrings, necklace, bracelet, and rings—and set the items on the coffee table. Then she reached into her blouse and removed her breasts. They were pink jellylike mounds that she placed on the table next to her jewelry. She slipped her arms into her blouse and contorted this way and that, removing her bra, a pink V— S— number.

After taking off her shoes, jewelry, breasts, and bra, Julia disappeared upstairs to remove her figure-hugging clothes and the Thinz that compressed her curvy body into a boyish pillar, as well as the rest of her stripper underwear. She washed her face of makeup, then showered. When she came downstairs thirty minutes later in leggings and a tank top, a ball cap on her head, she was someone else.

“It’s me, Julia,” she said when she saw my surprise, but only her voice was the same. Her face had changed from wide-eyed cartoon princess to tired thirty-something.

In the kitchen, she rummaged through the fridge and pulled out a turkey leg and mashed potatoes, as well as the pistachio ice cream and buttery shortbread I’d made earlier in the day. She spread the dishes all over the table and worked her way through them. I had wanted the turkey leg but didn’t say anything. Julia was sucking on the bones.

Normally I would have joined her by eating something myself, but I was too enthralled to do anything but watch her stuff her mouth under Eulayla Baptist’s fat jeans. She was normally so controlled. She finished the mashed potatoes and moved on to the ice cream and shortbread. “How many calories in this?” she asked, holding up a piece of shortbread, globs of grease in the corners of her mouth.

“I’d say a couple hundred each.”

“Oh no.” Julia set it down on her plate, half eaten. No one at Calliope House ever discussed calories, but Julia’s undercover work required it. In order to fit in at Austen, she had to diet.

“I’ve been binge eating lately,” she said.

“That’s what dieting does to you.”

“I can’t do this anymore. The women in my family are not lithe. This is a losing battle. You know why the women at Austen are such bitches? It’s because they’re hungry.”

“Then why don’t you stop dieting?”

“I can’t. I’ve gained weight recently. Thinz can only hold in so much. If they see that I’ve gained, they’ll know I’m not one of them. They won’t confide in me.” Everything about Julia was different here, even the way she talked.

“I’ve never been part of their club, so I don’t know what it’s like,” I said.

“You think I’m part of their club? I’m passing. Passing for thin. Passing for white, too. You know my mother was black, right?”

Julia took off her ball cap to reveal a head of silky ringlets. “It takes two hours to blow this out. And I can’t go out in the sun if I want to maintain this pale shade.” She pulled up her sleeve to reveal flesh with only a light tan. “But not being able to eat is the worst.”

She turned in the direction of a glass cake stand on the counter, as if she’d caught a scent of it, her senses heightened. Half of the chocolate buttercream cake I’d made the day before was left over. “Did you make that? Can I have it?”

She started in on the cake, and in between bites spooned the green pistachio ice cream into her mouth. Soon there was nothing left on the cake stand but a smudge of frosting and some crumbs. After dieting, ravenousness can hit like a violent wave. It’s a force of nature, more powerful than you. I feared Julia had been pulled under; I was watching from the shore.

When she finished, she sat at the table, flushed, rubbing her belly. “I feel sick.”

I wasn’t surprised. “Do you want me to make you some tea?”

She shook her head. “There’s something I need to do. Give me a while.”

Julia left the kitchen and I washed the dishes, which were strewn over the table and countertops. I couldn’t tolerate disorder in my kitchen. When I turned off the sink, I heard Julia retching.

“Julia?” I said through the bathroom door.

“I’ll be out soon,” she said. It seemed as if she was crying. “Leave me alone.”

The sound of her vomiting filled me with sadness. I couldn’t listen.

No one knew the whole story, but Marlowe and Verena had given me enough fragments about Julia to piece together a narrative. Each of the five Cole sisters had her domain: There was Julia at Austen Media; the eldest sister, Jacintha, was powerful in the entertainment division at NBC; the youngest sister, Jillian, was an executive at one of the largest advertising agencies in the country; Jessamine was the New York–based assistant of a legendary Hollywood director; and Josette had worked her way up to a senior position at Calvin Klein. Each sister had a network of spies and informants, small but well selected. Most of the informants were lower-level employees who had never heard of the Cole sisters; they sent their information through intermediaries.

What Julia and her sisters were doing with the information was a matter of debate at Calliope House. Julia had said different things to different people—“You must know your enemy before you can defeat them” and “We’re going to bring them down from the inside.” It was impossible to know whether she was simply delusional.

Thanks to Marlowe, I’d learned more about Julia’s Austen exposé. As the manager of the Beauty Closet, she had her tentacles spread throughout the Austen empire—“the one thing they all need is makeup,” she’d said. The people at Austen were convinced she was one of them. She sat in on meetings with magazine editors and television producers, secretly recording their conversations and meetings, which were often peppered with racist and sexist innuendos. She filmed the secret party where Austen editors fêted the elderly French scientist who’d invented cellulite. She was there when they dreamed up new problems for women to worry about, such as the day they coined the term “tit slide” to refer to the way that women’s breasts move to the side and look flat when they lie on their back. Avoid tit slide with these helpful tips!, the cover of one Austen magazine had announced. She participated in the company-wide meeting at which editors created a fake evolutionary psychologist named Dr. Sapphire Liebermann, who “worked” at the University of Arizona and would be quoted in Austen publications stating that it was natural for men to cheat and for women to be overly emotional and like the color pink. “Dr. Liebermann” was Austen’s top expert for months, but when a New York publishing house offered her a book deal, she tragically “died” in a rock climbing accident. One time, Julia even discovered an editor masturbating with tubes of lipstick in the Beauty Closet, which inspired the title of chapter seven: “Fucked by Revlon.”

Julia said her book would blow them all away. She said it would be like a bomb taking down the Austen Tower.

After recovering from her binge and purge, Julia found me in my bedroom at my desk. She crawled onto my daybed and opened her massive handbag, pulling things out and placing them on the mattress in front of her—a pair of black high-heeled shoes, a hairbrush, and her phone, which she had claimed was in a landfill. Last, she removed a gun. The silver metal caught the reflection of the sunlight through the windows as Julia set it on the bed. She made no mention of it, but kept digging in her bag until she pulled out a roll of breath mints. “Finally,” she said, placing a mint on her tongue. “Would you like one? They’re the bulimic’s friend.”