Sarai Walker - Dietland

Julia approached the women around the fire and I followed. “What is this, a party?” she said, announcing her arrival. I took my place on the opposite side of the drum, between Rubí and Sana. Everyone looked at Julia, her mouth so full that she struggled to chew and swallow. “Since you’re all here, I might as well tell you that I’ve quit my job at Austen. Tomorrow is my last day.”

“Whoa! End of era,” said Marlowe.

“What are your plans?” asked Verena.

“I’m going to travel for a while. You won’t be seeing much of me in the near future.” Julia looked at me over the flames. Was she going on the run as well?

“You’re going to travel? ” Verena said in a tone of disbelief. “What about your undercover work?”

“I can’t do it anymore. This charade is too much,” she sputtered, shoving more food into her mouth. Bits of rice fell down her top. “I’m so goddamn hungry all the time, you have no idea what it’s like.” She began to choke on something stuck in her throat. She clasped her neck with one hand, coughing loudly, flinging her dinner plate into the bushes. Rubí handed her a drink, which she downed at once. “I’m a wreck, I apologize,” she said when she recovered, her eyes watery from the curry and the coughing, and perhaps there were tears as well. She looked at me again over the flames, their orange tongues giving her a devilish glow.

Rubí reached into the bag and dropped a few bras into the fire. “So what’s the special occasion?” Marlowe asked me. “We don’t get to burn underwear and eat curry every night. You’re spoiling us.” She handed Huck a pair of lacy pink crotchless panties, which he threw into the drum, giggling with delight.

“My surgery was scheduled for today,” I said, drinking rum and mint from the plastic cup, enjoying the feeling of community. “I wanted to celebrate.”

“I had no idea,” Verena said.

Sana and Rubí put their arms around me, squeezing me between them. “I want you to know she’s gone,” I said to Verena. “The thin woman inside me, the perfect woman, my shadow self.”

“Alicia?”

“No, I’m reclaiming her. That perfect woman, that smaller self, was only ever an idea. She didn’t really exist, so she doesn’t need a name.” Alicia is me, Alicia is me.

Verena blew me a kiss from across the fire. “Virginia Woolf once wrote that it’s more difficult to kill a phantom than a reality,” she said. And so it was, but at last my phantom was gone. I knew my life would never be easy, but this must be what Sana had meant. I had crossed over and would never go back.

I turned my face away from the fire, burying my head in Sana’s shoulder, a moment of escape from the heat of the blaze and my emotions. When I looked up again, Verena was standing on the other side of the drum, holding the framed pair of Eulayla’s fat jeans. She hit the frame against the metal drum, shattering the glass. With the jeans freed from the frame, she hugged them to her body.

“Verena, what are you doing?” Marlowe asked. She spoke for all of us. The jeans had always been a sacred object, untouchable.

“I’ve been inspired by Plum,” she said. “This feels right.”

She held the legendary jeans out in front of her, the jeans that had obsessed me as a teenager, the jeans that had launched a million diets. “The New Baptist Plan really worked,” I said, staring at the iconic denim. “I’m completely transformed. You guaranteed it.”

“Born again,” she said.

“No calorie counting and no weighing,” I said.

“No pain, no gain.”

“Results not typical.”

“Feel the burn.” Verena tossed her mother’s jeans into the fire. “Burst!” she said as they sank into the flames.

Who is Jennifer?

Soledad Ayala was born in Mexico in 1973. When she was eight years old, her family moved to South Dakota for five months, then to Iowa for six months. In each place, the other children made fun of her for being chubby, for having an accent and a weird name: Soledad.

Dad! Daddy! Soleduddy!

When her family moved to Wyoming and she started another new school, she told the teacher her name wasn’t Soledad but Jennifer. The girls named Jennifer whom Soledad had met weren’t like her. They were blond or brunette and pretty. They didn’t have accents or dark skin. They had nicknames like Jenny or Jenna, names that no one laughed at. Soledad didn’t want to be laughed at. She wanted to blend in.

For a few years, every day on the first day of school, the teacher would call out the name Soledad Ayala and Soledad would raise her hand and say, “Everyone calls me Jennifer.” Throughout her elementary school years she was known as Jennifer Ayala. Even her parents called her Jenny, but she knew in her heart she wasn’t a real Jennifer; she wasn’t like the American girls, she was only an impostor. She liked to think that by calling herself Jennifer, Soledad would disappear, but whenever she looked in the mirror Soledad was still there.

When she and her family settled in California, she started junior high; her guidance counselor, Miss Jimenez, told her that she shouldn’t pretend to be someone else. “Soledad is your real name,” she said. “That’s what we should call you.” Soledad was unhappy at the thought of giving up Jennifer, but she didn’t want to disappoint Miss Jimenez. The nickname faded away, consigned to Soledad’s early childhood, but her mother sometimes called her Jenny for fun when they were reminiscing about old times.

“Who’s Jenny?” Luz had asked when she was little and first cognizant that her mother had a name and it was Soledad, not Jenny.

“Jenny is a girl I used to be,” Soledad had told her daughter, but that wasn’t true. She had never been Jenny; she had only been an impostor.

Soledad had a firm alibi for the night that two of her daughter’s rapists, Lamar Wilson and Chris Martinez, disappeared. The police assumed the men had jumped bail, but given the high-profile nature of their crime, a thorough investigation was necessary in order to rule out other possibilities. They began with Soledad, who’d been recorded on CCTV at multiple locations in Santa Mariana on the night in question, including the local shopping mall, where she stayed for several hours, browsing aimlessly and having dinner with friends from church; and the supermarket, where she carefully loaded her cart with a week’s worth of food for herself, now that she was alone. For days afterward she was observed in town by neighbors and police, doing nothing out of the ordinary. The police were confident that neither she nor any members of her family had plotted revenge against Wilson and Martinez—Soledad’s father and husband were dead, she had no brothers; her sisters, mother, and other relatives were back in Texas. The investigation moved on.

Weeks later, after Wilson and Martinez were dropped into the desert along with the rest of the Dirty Dozen, Soledad cooperated with federal authorities, agreeing to speak at a press conference. FBI agents were impressed with the bereaved mother’s courage, but they began to investigate her anyway, lacking confidence in the Santa Mariana police. They soon discovered that Leeta Albridge had been a volunteer at the women’s clinic where Soledad had once worked training rape crisis counselors. The FBI knocked on Soledad’s door again, to address what couldn’t be a coincidence, but there was no answer. A neighbor told them she’d gone to Mexico City to care for a sick aunt.

While Mexican law enforcement officers tried to locate Soledad, FBI agents in Houston visited her mother in the hospital, where the old woman would soon die from pneumonia. In her delirium she was insistent that her daughter was innocent of any wrongdoing and said she wasn’t running from the police but had killed herself. “She had a gun,” her mother said, describing the days before Luz’s funeral. “She was upset. She was drinking.” Soledad’s sisters, who were in the hospital room while their mother was being questioned, pleaded with the agents to leave her alone, but they refused.