Sarai Walker - Dietland

I avoided the front yard for several days, but I didn’t like being at the back of the house, which was cramped, with a collection of bamboo stalks in one corner, patio furniture in the other, and a concrete hole in the middle. When I was bored of reading and my crayons became soft in the heat, I strapped on my roller skates, thinking the dimpled concrete of the empty pool could serve as the perfect skating rink. Herbert saw me from the kitchen window and shouted that I would break my leg.

He kept a stash of Twinkies and fried fruit pies hidden behind the breadbox in the kitchen, so I took a Twinkie and went to the front yard in my skates. As I was sailing to the mailbox, my mouth full of yellow sponge and cream, a car stopped and I knew what was going to happen. A man stepped out of the car and took a series of photos, then drove away.

Delia came home that evening and saw me sitting at the kitchen table, reading my book. “Why aren’t you outside, doll?” I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell her that people were looking at me, that they stared and took photos and some of them even laughed.

On most nights, our dinner came from the restaurant. Delia unloaded Styrofoam containers from a brown paper bag and set them on the table. I ate my Reuben sandwich and coleslaw, weird food my mother never made at home. She didn’t join us for dinner and I was left alone with Herbert and Delia, who talked about grown-up things. I looked out the front window from the table, watching for more cars. None came.

After dinner, Delia and Herbert sat on the back patio with wine and I was allowed to watch television in the front room, sitting in the crater left by Herbert on the green sofa. I watched two sitcoms and before the third came on, I went into the kitchen to get a glass of milk. On my way back to the living room, holding the glass to my lips, I saw a man standing outside the front window. He was large and looming. We locked eyes and then he rushed to his car and drove away.

I set my glass down on the coffee table, splashing milk onto Herbert’s TV Guide, and ran to my bedroom. In my bed, from underneath the covers, I wondered: Who are these people? And why are they staring at me?

Before we moved into the house on Harper Lane, I had feared there was something wrong with me. Back home when we visited cousins they would laugh and call me Miss Piggy, until a chorus of mothers went Shhhhhh. In first grade, in Mrs. Palmer’s class, the two girls who sat next to me, Melissa H. and Melissa D., told me they weren’t inviting me to their Halloween party because I had fat germs. When I asked my mother what this meant, she said to ignore them.

I didn’t know what other people saw when they looked at me. In the mirror I didn’t see it. Now at Delia’s house, things were even worse. People were taking photos and I didn’t know why. During the day I hid in my bedroom and watched for them. Once when I was making a mess in the kitchen with peanut butter and jelly, two girls climbed over the fence into the backyard. I dropped the knife and screamed for Herbert, who flew out the back doors and chased the girls away. “Goddamn tourists,” he screamed. I looked outside in horror. Herbert came back into the house and tousled my hair. “Just ignore ’em, kiddo.”

Ignore them. That’s what my mother had said.

I stayed away from the windows so that no one could see me. For most of the day I sat on the living room floor, wrapped in a blanket to protect me from the chill of the air conditioner, and watched Herbert’s shows with him. When my mother left her room to go to the kitchen, she said I was spending too much time indoors. “She’s not the only one,” Herbert said.

He and Delia took me to Sears and bought me a bicycle with purple tassels that dangled from the rubber handles. When we got home with the bike, they expected me to ride it up and down the street. I lasted for an hour, until a man and a woman in a silver van stopped outside the house. “Hello, leetle girl,” the man said in a weird voice.

When I went inside the house I was crying.

“What’s wrong, sweet pea?” Delia asked, coming over and running her acrylic nails down my back. “Did you fall off your bike?”

“People are looking at me.”

“Who is?”

“People in cars. They stop in front of the house and take photos of me.”

Delia began to laugh, holding her hand over her mouth, her frosty pink nails hiding a wide smile. “They’re not taking photos of you, doll. They’re taking photos of the house. A famous lady used to live here. I’ve been in the house so long, I don’t notice those crazy people anymore.”

Delia told me about Myrna Jade, a silent film star of the 1920s. Delia said she hadn’t heard of Myrna Jade when she bought the house. “It was an absolute wreck. Completely falling apart. You never would’ve imagined a movie star had lived here.” Myrna Jade had been forgotten, her films out of circulation, until a historian wrote a book about her in the 1970s, which was turned into a popular film in the 1980s. “Myrna mania,” Delia called it. “Now my house is on one of them star maps and people drive by at all hours of the day and night. It’s mostly Europeans. I know it’s annoying, doll—believe me, I know, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so don’t pay ’em any attention.”

I wasn’t sure I believed Delia, thinking a movie star would live in a castle, not a small stone house. I wondered if she was trying to make me feel better. I went to my bedroom for the rest of the evening and when it was time for bed, I put on my pajamas and peeked outside. A flashbulb. Pop. Then two more. Pop. Pop. Electric flowers in the night sky.

THE WOMEN WHO CAME BEFORE ME were black-and-white. My grandmother, mother of my mother, died before I was born, but there are photographs of her. In my favorite one she is a young woman, standing next to her sister on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, the two of them clasping their arms and smiling as they look into the camera lens. I like to think that my grandmother was looking through time toward my mother and me, though she couldn’t have imagined us then. She’s a teenager in the photo, her hair bobbed in the style of the 1920s. She and her sister are wearing polka-dotted dresses and both of them are round all over. Even as a girl I saw myself in them. I knew we were connected, like a string of round white pearls stretching into the past.

When my mother was little she was black-and-white like them, but not round like them. On the day I was born, she looked at me and knew she would call me something other than the name she’d put on my birth certificate. “You had the darkest hair,” she said, “long enough to wrap around my fingers. Your skin was rosy pink. You were so succulent and sweet, my little Plum.”

A pearl, a plum—roundness defined me.

Every year on the first day of school the teacher would take attendance, and when she reached my name, she would say, “Alicia Kettle?” and then I’d have to tell her I was called Plum.

Plum. Plump. Piggy.

Alicia is me but not me.

We lived in the house on Harper Lane for five months and then we moved to our own apartment. My father stayed in Idaho and my parents got divorced. My mother’s salary as a secretary in a university biology department afforded us a place with dark woodwork that sucked up the sunlight, and carpet a vomitous orange. We lived in the apartment for a few years, until Herbert died of a stroke. Delia was so unhappy living alone that she begged us to move back to the house with the starers, the gawkers, the photograph-takers.

The schools near Delia’s house were better for me, my mother said, and she was excited about the possibility of escaping the apartment complex with the dirty diapers floating in the pool. She had made up her mind to go, and so we went.