Sarai Walker - Dietland

“I don’t want to go home with you,” I said to Mason in front of his friends. “I think you’re ugly.”

It took him a moment to register what I was saying. “Huh?”

“You’re fucking ugly,” I said. “Hideous, in fact.”

Mason’s friends, the three women and two men, looked at each other. This hadn’t been part of the plan.

“ I’m ugly?” Mason tried to laugh for his friends. “I’m fucking ugly? Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror, fatty? You’re disgusting. No man in his right mind would ever lay a hand on you.” No more baby for me.

It felt good to hear him say this, to know the charade was over. “You laid a hand on me. You seemed to be enjoying it.”

“Because I wanted to win a bet.” He laughed again, glancing around the table for support, but the men and women at the table were silent and expressionless, unsure how to react. The big blob had spoken. It could speak. They had always relied on the blob to be quiet, to absorb their taunts and snide remarks and slip quietly through the cracks of life. Now the blob was angry.

Uh-oh.

“You say I’m disgusting, Mason, but I think we both know what gets you off: a nice big fat girl like me. You just don’t want your friends to know.”

Before he could reply, I reached for their table and lifted it, sending bottles of beer spilling everywhere. They leapt from their seats to escape the splashing liquid and crashing amber glass. “You stupid cow,” one of the women said. They scrambled to get clear of the table, but Mason slipped on the wet floor and hit the back of his head against the wall on the way down. He was dazed, lying on his back in a pool of beer, blinking his eyes slowly. His friends didn’t help him.

I placed my foot on his chest so he couldn’t move. My black boots. My colorful tights. I could do this.

“You need to learn some fucking manners!” I shouted.

“Hey, come on,” Mason said. There was a crowd gathering. “I’m sorry, okay? I think you’re pretty, Jennifer. I do.”

“What?” I asked loudly over the clatter of the bar, wanting him to repeat it.

“I think you’re pretty.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “You think I’m pretty? ” Of all the things he could have said, this was the least expected. A deep roar came up from my diaphragm. The laugh was so sudden, so vast, that I feared it might rip me apart.

“Say it again.”

“You’re pretty, Jennifer. I mean it.”

I continued to laugh. The laugh was long enough to stretch from the earliest days of my childhood till now, like a shooting star leaving a long trail of light. The trail wrapped itself around all the kids who’d tormented me when I was a girl and all the boys who’d ignored me when I was a teenager and all the young men who’d withheld their affections from me as an adult and all the women who’d excluded and harassed me until now, when Mason told me he thought I was pretty. Finally, I had what I wanted! When the laugh caught up to the present moment, the tail slipped out of my mouth.

Silence.

Mason thought he could throw a crumb in the direction of the fat girl and it would make up for everything that had happened to her in her life, most of all what had happened that night. Telling her she’s pretty was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the winning lottery number, the healing hand of Christ on top of her head. He had been made to believe he had such power. It had been given to him by women like her.

I leaned over and looked at him closely. He wasn’t Mason anymore; he was them. Looking at him, looking at them, the behavior of my whole life was suddenly inexplicable. The years of Waist Watchers, Baptist Weight Loss and plans for surgery, the hours and hours that added up to years of my life spent sitting at home afraid to go outside, afraid to be laughed at and shunned and rejected and stared at by faces like the one looking up at me now, one of the generic, mass-produced, ordinary, follow-the-crowd, hateful faces. At another time, at home alone, I would have wept to think about it. I wished I could go back to the beginning of my life and start again.

I removed my foot from his chest. I didn’t want to fight with him. He didn’t matter. I turned to leave, pushing my way through the onlookers. No one tried to stop me. The police hadn’t been called. Mason’s friends seemed to have disappeared.

As I walked away from the bar, the sky above was clear and black. Somewhere up there was the laugh that had escaped from me, the long trail of light that was now part of the universe. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there. I would only have to look up to remember it.

MY BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING was a poached egg, rye toast with butter, melon, and tea. I didn’t spend my morning in the kitchen making omelets and stacks of waffles for myself and everyone else. A normal breakfast satisfied me.

When I finished eating, I remained at the table, fixated on Eulayla’s fat jeans hanging on the red wall. I still hadn’t deposited the $20,000 check from Verena. I had also never canceled my surgery. I called Dr. Shearer’s secretary to make it official. After hanging up the phone I didn’t feel a sense of loss. I felt proud.

Sana had asked why I’d wanted to talk the night before, but I told her I had been bored and thought going to the bar would be fun. She didn’t seem to suspect anything. I had decided not to tell her about Julia’s request for money. I’d been relying on the women of Calliope House, particularly Sana, for support and community, but this was a decision I needed to make alone. It wouldn’t be fair to implicate them. Leeta had never been part of their lives, and they didn’t understand my connection to her. She was my problem.

While I considered what to do about Leeta, I decided it was time to return to Swann Street. I’d abandoned my apartment in Brooklyn months before and needed to face it again. On my way there I mailed about fifty books to my girls, as the requests kept coming in. After the post office I went to my bank and deposited the $20,000.

On the subway to Brooklyn, descending into the dark tunnel, traveling back to my own netherworld, I prepared to see my old home again. I arrived at the brownstone, opening the familiar street door and stopping at the wall of copper-colored mailboxes in the entryway before going upstairs to my apartment. Mail was stuffed into my box, and there was a notice from the post office saying they’d stopped delivering it. I shuffled through the bills and junk mail, throwing most of it in the recycling bin. One letter was from Austen Media, dated from the summer. It stated that I’d been fired for gross misconduct for deleting Kitty’s email and was not allowed back in the slim chrome tower. I was about to throw the letter away, but then decided I might frame it instead.

I inserted the key into the front door of my apartment, and when I opened it, I saw my living room, my desk, the kitchen, just the way I’d left them. At the sight of my old home I felt a twinge, a plucked guitar string of memory that reverberated from head to toe. I flicked the light switch and was relieved the electricity was still on. My coffee mug, still half full, sat on the kitchen counter. Everything was covered in dust, a gray powder like time made manifest, the time that had passed since I’d left this life.

There was barely any food inside the refrigerator. The cupboards were mostly empty, aside from a box of crackers and a few cans of soup. In the freezer there was the stack of Waist Watchers entrées that I’d made, wrapped neatly in foil, the two-star and three-star meals. I recalled my empty belly and the lethargy, sometimes even paralysis, that had resulted from existing on those meals. I’d moved slowly back then, when I’d moved at all.