Sarai Walker - Dietland

My instinct was to flee. I initially refused Helen’s offer to meet with Kitty, but both of them were insistent. When I finally met Kitty in her office, she suggested I could work from home. “It was human resources’ idea,” she said. “As you can see, my assistant has his desk out in the hallway. We’re a bit tight for space.” Working from home made the job more appealing, but I said I would need to think about it. I had never been the type to offer advice, and I wasn’t sure I had the right qualifications for the job. Kitty thought my reluctance meant I was playing hard-to-get, so she began to pursue me with heartfelt emails, flowers, even a scented candle that was delivered via messenger. I was not used to being courted and sought-after. The feeling was mildly intoxicating.

It had been three years since I’d taken the job, three years of responding to messages in the café. I arrived for my monthly meeting with Kitty, stepping off the elevator onto the thirtieth floor, where I was greeted by massive Daisy Chain covers, which might have been meant to intimidate enemies, like the buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C. I sat on the lip-shaped loveseat outside Kitty’s office and waited. Our meetings rarely lasted more than ten minutes, but I never managed to leave the Austen Tower in fewer than two hours, thanks to Kitty’s frenetic schedule. I would have preferred to catch up by phone, but Kitty demanded that we meet.

As I waited on the sofa, her assistant, Eladio, played video games on his computer. The first time I visited the office, he took me to the conference room with the panoramic windows and pointed to the stickpin people on the sidewalk below. “What I love about working here,” he’d said, “is that we get to look down on everyone.”

He was the only male on a staff of twenty-one white women; he was also Latino and gay, a triple hit of diversity. He told me once that he became irritable and moody at certain times of the month, prone to outbursts of unprovoked rage, caught up in the synchronized menstrual cycles of the women in the office and pulled along for the hormonal ride by mistake. He kept a box of Midol Menstrual Complete on his desk, but it was filled with jelly beans. Kitty once told her readers that the cycles of the women in the office were linked by the moon. She claimed the mass bloodletting each month left the trash receptacles in the ladies’ room filled to overflowing.

While I waited, I browsed the latest issue of Daisy Chain, checking the masthead for my name, which would be printed over a million times and distributed across North America: Special Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief: Alicia Kettle. Alicia was my real name, but no one ever called me that.

Kitty finally appeared, rushing into her office and dropping a pile of magazines and files onto her desk. “Plum, come in!” She was wearing black slacks and a cropped T-shirt that revealed part of her midriff. There was a red crystal nestled in her bellybutton, like a misplaced bindi. I sat across from her as she moved the clutter around on her desk. “Be with you in a minute,” she said, studying a green Post-it note intently.

A traffic helicopter hovered outside her office window, black and buglike, a giant fly. I closed my eyes. In the Austen Tower I always felt uneasy, sometimes even dizzy and nauseated. I didn’t like being so high off the ground, suspended in the air by nothing more than concrete and steel. With my eyes closed, I imagined the floor beneath my feet giving way, sending me sailing back to earth.

“Plum?” Kitty was standing behind her desk, looking at me, her brow pinched in confusion. She was a mesmerizing presence, probably better viewed from afar. With the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows, casting her mostly in silhouette, the sight of her—Medusa-like red curls atop a slender body—made me think I was hallucinating or looking at something drawn by Edward Gorey.

She launched into chatter about the September issue, handing me a packet of information about the articles, columns, and fashion spreads. It was the back-to-school issue, the biggest of the year. She always shared these details with me even though none of my work appeared in the magazine. I had pitched ideas for articles, hoping to jump-start a writing career, but Kitty had never assigned me anything.

When it was finally time to discuss her correspondence, she sat behind her desk, ready to take notes. I described the tenor of the messages over the past month. I didn’t keep formal records but gave her my general impression.

“We’ve had a lot of cutters.”

“Cutters,” Kitty repeated, writing something down.

“Purging,” I said.

Kitty wrote on the pad again. “Purging,” she repeated, and nodded for me to continue.

“Confusion about female anatomy.”

Kitty waved her hand, as if what I’d said could be swatted away. “There’s nothing I can do about that. Those parental groups said they’ll target us if we use the word vagina. Better just to avoid it. Of course, it makes our article on tampons difficult to write. I just remembered that.” Kitty leaned back in her chair, appearing overwhelmed. “Euphemisms, that’s what we need.” She looked through the doorway to where Eladio sat.

“Think of some euphemisms for vagina, ” she shouted to him.

“Poontang?”

“No, nothing sexual. Medicalized terms. Come up with a list and send them to the author of the tampon article. Tell her she can’t say vagina. Send the list to Plum, too, in case she wants to use it.”

It was difficult to believe we were all engaged in real work, for which we were paid. I would have to tell Carmen about this later.

Kitty turned back to me. “Good, glad that’s done,” she said, even though I hadn’t finished going through my mental list. “Between you and me, I know parts of the magazine are silly, but my readers are real girls with real problems. I truly believe we can help them. I like to think the work that you and I do is an anecdote to all the bad things in the world. Wait, I mean antidote. ”

When she said that, I imagined a bite on a girl’s ankle, as if from a snake, its fangs having penetrated deep into her flesh.

Kitty always made the girls seem like real people, whereas for me they were too often an army of annoying and persistent ants. “I always say, ‘Plum is our link to the girls,’ and your work is just as important as everyone else’s, even though it’s not in the magazine.” She continued on with these sentiments for another thirty seconds. They flowed from her mouth in a stream of spun sugar.

“Now, there’s something else we need to discuss and then I’ll let you go,” she said. “For an upcoming issue the staff is testing all sorts of beauty stuff like razors, deodorant, lip-gloss, hairspray, whatever. We’ll tell the girls what works best. I want to include you in this.”

“You don’t have to include me.”

“Oh, no, we have to! Just because you work at home doesn’t mean you aren’t one of us. You know, the strangest thing happened to me last night when I was testing out some shaving gel. I’m sitting on the edge of the tub and I have my leg stretched out so that my foot is resting on the sink. Are you picturing it?” Kitty was nearly six feet tall and I imagined her white leg stretched over the expanse from tub to sink, like an ivory bridge.

“I’m shaving my leg and I don’t realize that I nicked a tiny scab I had on my calf. So I’m shaving and this tiny droplet of blood falls from my leg and splashes onto the white tile floor. My bathroom is totally white and this tiny drop of red is, like, the only color. And I’m staring at it and it’s just so—now, don’t laugh—but it’s just so beautiful. I just sat there staring at the blood. I thought, That’s my blood. As women we see our own blood every month, but this wasn’t gross like that, you know? So I ran the razor along the little scab again and there were more drops of blood on the floor and some of it ran down my calf. If my boyfriend hadn’t knocked on the door, I would’ve kept doing it all night.”