Sarai Walker - Dietland

In the house on Harper Lane we were under constant surveillance. Sitting at the breakfast table, I’d look up from my oatmeal to see a figure outside the front window, which would bolt away like a frightened mouse when my slipper hit the glass. In my bedroom I kept the curtains closed, but I knew they were out there. Delia and my mother didn’t seem to mind the strangers’ stares and camera lenses. When they were away from home they could escape—for them it was only temporary.

At school, there was nowhere for me to hide. I was surrounded. There were so many of them that I never knew for certain who was looking. All day I felt the urge to turn away, to close up like a flower in the shade.

I kept what happened at school to myself. Sometimes at the end of the day I would find spit in my hair or a note taped to my back that read DO ME A FAVOR, POP ME! My first year of high school, after an older classmate was raped in the vacant lot behind Von’s, the school offered self-defense classes for girls. When I showed up, two girls snickered and said, loudly enough for everyone else to hear, “Who’d want to rape her?”

On the telephone to Idaho, I said: “Daddy, do you think I’m pretty?” I knew he would say yes because he was my father.

During my sophomore year of high school, a boy asked me to the homecoming dance. I was suspicious of boys, since they never paid me any attention unless it was for name-calling or worse, but my mother insisted that I go. She dropped me off outside the school gym and I waited for the boy in the parking lot for more than an hour, the wispy ends of my homemade lavender gown dragging in pools of motor oil. The boy never came and everyone knew. They had seen.

I wanted to become smaller so I wouldn’t be seen.

If I was smaller they wouldn’t stare. They wouldn’t be mean.

AT CARMEN’S CAFé, my laptop opened before me, I couldn’t concentrate on the messages from Kitty’s readers. I’d set Verena Baptist’s book on the empty chair next to me, having read a few chapters the day before. I kept glancing at it: Adventures in Dietland. It wasn’t the type of book I’d normally read, but I had the urge to go home and devour its pages. I didn’t know why the girl had left the book for me or why she’d been in the Austen Tower. It seemed impossible that she could be part of Kitty’s world and yet she’d been in Kitty’s office. I hadn’t seen her since then, so I wondered if her little game was finished.

Ever since I’d laid my eyes on the book, and the name Verena Baptist, I’d been transported to Harper Lane. The girl couldn’t have known anything about my past, or that I’d been a Baptist, but thanks to her I couldn’t stop thinking about that time, when I was the age of Kitty’s girls. I pushed my laptop aside and began to read again. The memories weren’t welcome, but the book pulled me back.

I became a Baptist during the spring of my junior year of high school. I was sick with the flu and stayed home from school for three days, doing nothing but watching television. The personalities that populated the daytime airwaves were unfamiliar to me, particularly the smiling spokespeople advertising products I hadn’t known existed. I had never heard the name Eulayla Baptist before, but she appeared in a series of commercials for Baptist Weight Loss. I had never heard of that, either.

In each commercial, an old photograph of Eulayla Baptist filled the screen. She was enormous in a pair of faded jeans, trying to shield her face from the camera. In a voiceover, she said: “That was me, Eulayla Baptist. Back then I was so fat, I couldn’t even play with my daughter.” Sad violins swelled in the background, reaching a crescendo as thin Eulayla burst through the photograph, ripping it to shreds. She stood in a ta-da! pose, her arms extended toward the heavens.

Cut to Eulayla sitting at a sun-dappled kitchen table covered with a red-checkered tablecloth: “By choosing to eat the Baptist way, you’ll never have to starve yourself again. For breakfast and lunch, enjoy a Baptist Shake, flavored with real Georgia peaches. For dinner, the possibilities are endless. Right now, I’m enjoying chicken ’n’ dumplings.” Eulayla, her blond hair in a tight French twist, her ever-present gold cross around her neck, set down her fork and stared into the camera, which moved in for a close-up. “On the Baptist Plan, there’s no need to grocery shop or cook. My program provides you with everything you need, except for willpower. That special ingredient has to come from you.”

Every twenty minutes or so this woman appeared on the screen, bursting through her enormous jeans. She was accompanied in the ads by other successful photo-bursters. There was Rosa, age twenty-three: “If I had to look fat in my wedding dress, then I’d rather die an old maid.” Sad violins, then Burst! Rosa was thin. Marcy, age fifty-seven: “My husband wanted to take a cruise, but I said ‘No way, buster! These thighs aren’t getting into a pair of shorts.’” Sad violins, then Burst! Marcy was thin. Cynthia, age forty-one: “After my husband was killed on American Airlines Flight 191, I ate at least ten thousand calories a day. If Rodney were still alive, he would have been so ashamed of me.” Sad violins, then Burst! Cynthia was thin.

For hours I watched TV, waiting for the ads, mesmerized. I dug out my yearbook from tenth grade, looking at a snapshot of me on page 42. The caption read: “Alicia Kettle works on her science project in the library.” I imagined seeing that photo on TV, me in my ever-present black dress, the roll of fat under my chin. Burst! I’d obliterate that hideous girl.

I wrote down the toll-free number, determined to become a Baptist, though I knew my mother would try to stop me. She had a play-the-cards-you’re-dealt mentality when it came to matters of the body, be it height or weight or hair color. She saw these things as fixed, for the most part. “You’re beautiful the way you are,” she would always say, and it seemed as if she meant it. Once when we argued about dieting, she said, “You look like Grandma,” meaning: “You look like Grandma and there’s nothing you can do about it. ”

No matter how much I had pleaded, she would never let me diet. My friend Nicolette’s mother was a member of Waist Watchers, and I photocopied her materials, keeping them hidden. I tried to follow the diet on my own, but I didn’t know how many calories were in the dishes that Delia brought home from the restaurant, whether it was lasagna or chicken potpie. There were too many ingredients to count. I took smaller portions and sometimes skipped lunch at school, but I didn’t like being hungry. There were girls at school who starved themselves, but I didn’t know how they did it. When I was hungry I couldn’t concentrate, and I needed to concentrate so I could get good grades.

The ads on television said: A Baptist is never hungry! That was part of the appeal. I didn’t know how I would pay for the Baptist Plan, but I would find a way. I was high on my secret plan. On the night of the junior prom my mother took me out for dinner. When we arrived home, we found a man kneeling in the front yard, paying homage to Myrna Jade. When he saw me he snapped a photo. “ Preeeetty girl,” he said. No one except my parents and Delia had ever called me pretty. I was pleased. Since I had decided to become a Baptist there was a change in me. Just the thought of it had made me lighter.

I didn’t care that I wasn’t at the prom that night. I didn’t need proms or the boys at my school. Summer vacation was approaching and then my senior year, at the end of which I would go to college in Vermont. Thanks to the Baptist Plan I would be thin when I arrived at college. No one would know that fat Plum had existed. I wouldn’t even call myself Plum. I would be Alicia, since that was my real name.