Dietland E-Book

Sarai Walker

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A wickedly funny, feminist revenge fantasy novel of one fat woman's fight against sexism and the beauty industry. Dietland will be adapted into AMC's 10-episode straight-to-series starring Julianna Margulies and Joy Nash. Wow... ferocious and hilarious - Margaret Atwood A book with a message, loud and clear - Guardian Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you're fat, to be noticed is to be judged. Or mocked. Or worse. But when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself involved with an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. At the same time, a dangerous guerrilla group called "Jennifer" begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women. As Plum grapples with her personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot, the consequences of which are explosive. Part coming-of-age story, part revenge fantasy, Dietland is a bold, original and funny debut that takes on the beauty industry, gender equality and our weight loss obsession - from the inside out, and with fists flying.

Leseprobe

To my parents,

for believing in me

and to my foremothers,

who didn’t always have a voice

She waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

RABBIT HOLE

• • •

• • •

IT WAS LATE IN THE SPRING when I noticed that a girl was following me, nearly the end of May, a month that means perhaps or might be. She crept into the edges of my consciousness like something blurry coming into focus. She was an odd girl, tramping around in black boots with the laces undone, her legs covered in bright fruit-hued tights, like the colors in a roll of Life Savers. I didn’t know why she was following me. People stared at me wherever I went, but this was different. To the girl I was not an object of ridicule but a creature of interest. She would observe me and then write things in her red spiral-bound notebook.

The first time I noticed the girl in a conscious way was at the café. On most days I did my work there, sitting at a table in the back with my laptop, responding to messages from teenage girls. Dear Kitty, I have stretch marks on my boobs, please help. There was never any end to the messages and I usually sat at my table for hours, sipping cups of coffee and peppermint tea as I gave out the advice I wasn’t qualified to give. For three years the café had been my world. I couldn’t face working at home, trapped in my apartment all day with nothing to distract me from the drumbeat of Dear Kitty, Dear Kitty, please help me.

One afternoon I looked up from a message I was typing and saw the girl sitting at a table nearby, restlessly tapping her lime green leg, her canvas bag slouched in the chair across from her. I realized that I’d seen her before. She’d been sitting on the stoop of my building that morning. She had long dark hair and I remembered how she turned to look at me. Our eyes met and it was this look that I would remember in the months to come, when her face was in the newspapers and on TV—the glance over the shoulder, the eyes peeking out from the thick black liner that framed them.

After I noticed her at the café that day, I began to see her in other places. When I emerged from my Waist Watchers meeting, the girl was across the street, leaning against a tree. At the supermarket I spotted her reading the nutrition label on a can of navy beans. I made my way around the cramped aisles of Key Food, down the canyons of colorful cardboard and tin, and the girl trailed me, tossing random things into her shopping basket (cinnamon, lighter fluid) whenever I turned to look at her.

I was used to being stared at, but that was by people who looked at me with disgust as I went about my business in the neighborhood. They didn’t study me closely, not like this girl did. I spent most of my time trying to blend in, which wasn’t easy, but with the girl following me it was like someone had pulled the covers off my bed, leaving me in my underpants, shivering and exposed.

Walking home one evening, I could sense that the girl was behind me, so I turned to face her. “Are you following me?”

She removed tiny white buds from her ears. “I’m sorry? I didn’t hear you.” I had never heard her speak before. I had expected a flimsy voice, but what I heard was a confident tone.

“Are you following me?” I asked again, not as bold as the first time.

“Am I following you?” The girl looked amused. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She brushed past me and continued on down the sidewalk, being careful not to trip on the tree roots that had burst through the concrete.

As I watched the girl walk away, I didn’t yet see her for who she was: a messenger from another world, come to wake me from my sleep.

• • •

WHEN I THINK OF MY LIFE at that time, back then, I imagine looking down on it as if it were contained in a box, like a diorama—there are the neighborhood streets and I am a figurine dressed in black. My daily activities kept me within a five-block radius and had done so for years: I moved between my apartment, the café, Waist Watchers. My life had narrow parameters, which is how I preferred it. I saw myself as an outline then, waiting to be filled in.

From the outside, to someone like the girl, I might have seemed sad, but I wasn’t. Each day I took thirty milligrams of the antidepressant Y ——. I had taken Y —— since my senior year of college. That year there had been a situation with a boy. In the weeks after the Christmas break I slipped into a dark spiral, spending most of my time in the library, pretending to study. The library was on the seventh floor and I stood at the window one afternoon and imagined jumping out of it and landing in the snow, where it wouldn’t hurt as much. A librarian saw me—later I found out I had been crying—and she called the campus doctor. Soon after that pharmaceuticals became inevitable. My mother flew to Vermont. She and Dr. Willoughby (an old gray man, with gray hair, tinted glasses, a discolored front tooth) decided it was best for me to see a therapist and take Y ——. The medication took away my sadness and replaced it with something else—not happiness, but more like a low dull hum, a weak radio frequency of feeling that couldn’t be turned up or down.

Long after college ended, and the therapy ended, and I’d moved to New York, I continued to take Y ——. I lived in an apartment on Swann Street in Brooklyn, on the second floor of a brownstone. It was a long and skinny place that stretched from the front of the building to the back, with polished blond floorboards and a bay window that overlooked the street at the front. Such an apartment, on a coveted block, was beyond my means, but my mother’s cousin Jeremy owned it and reduced the rent for me. He would have let me live there rent free if my mother hadn’t nosed in and demanded I pay something, but what I paid was a small amount. Jeremy worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. After his wife died he was desperate to leave New York and especially Brooklyn, the borough of his unhappiness. His bosses sent him to Buenos Aires, then Cairo. There were two bedrooms in the apartment and one of them was filled with his things, but it didn’t seem as if he would ever come back for them.

There were few visitors to the apartment on Swann Street. My mother came to see me once a year. My friend Carmen visited sometimes, but I mostly saw her at the café. In my real life I would have more friends, and dinner parties and overnight guests, but my life wasn’t real yet.

The day after my confrontation with the girl, I looked up and down the street but I didn’t see her, so I set off, relieved not to be followed. A day of work at the café awaited me, but first I would stop at my Waist Watchers meeting, taking the long route so I could bypass the boys who congregated at the end of my block and often made rude comments.

My Waist Watchers meetings were held in the basement of a church on Second Street. The gray-rock church sat between a dry cleaner and a health club, the outline of its stained-glass window a daisy shape. Inside the church I walked down the circular steps to the basement, where I was greeted at the door by the usual woman with the clipboard. “Hello, Plum,” she said, and directed me to stand on the scale. “Three hundred and four pounds,” she whispered, and I was pleased that I was two pounds lighter than last week.

At the table by the door I signed the register and collected the weekly recipes, moving quickly so I could leave before the meeting began. I had been a Waist Watcher for years and didn’t need to attend the meetings; if I never attended another one I would still be able to recite the tenets of the program on my deathbed.

There were only women at these morning meetings, and most of them were slightly older than me, with babies or toddlers they bounced on their laps. They were doughy from past pregnancies, but not big. Around them I felt much larger, as well as much younger. I was more like one of Kitty’s teenage girls compared to them, even though I was almost thirty. When I was around women who had grown-up lives, the kind of life I thought I should have, I felt suspended in time, like an animal floating in a jar of formaldehyde.

I made my way back up the stairs and put the recipes, which were printed on thick card stock, into my laptop bag. At home I had a collection of more than a thousand Waist Watchers recipes, which I arranged by snacks, main courses, desserts, and so on. After I cooked a dish, I rated it on the back with a star. Five stars was the best.

I tried to be a good Waist Watcher, but it was difficult. I would start off each day with the right breakfast and snacks, but sometimes I would grow so hungry that my hands would shake and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Then I’d eat something bad. I couldn’t stand hunger. Hunger is what death must feel like.

Given my failure at dieting, my plan was to trade Waist Watchers for weight-loss surgery. The surgery was scheduled for October, little more than four months away. I was excited about it, but also terrified at the thought of having my internal organs cut up and rearranged and of the possible complications that might follow. The surgery would make my stomach the size of a walnut; afterward I’d only be able to eat spoonfuls of food each day for the rest of my life. That was the horrible part, but the miraculous part was that I would lose between ten and twenty pounds a month. In one year it would be possible to lose more than two hundred pounds, but I wouldn’t go that far. I wanted to weigh 125 pounds, and then I would be happy. Waist Watchers could never give me that. I’d been devoted to the program for years and I was bigger than ever.

When I exited the dark church, blinking into the sunshine, I expected to see the girl leaning against the tree, but she wasn’t there. I hurried across the street so I didn’t have to pass in front of the health club windows, where the smug spinners could have gawked at me.

Since I hadn’t seen the girl that day, I assumed I had scared her away, but when I arrived at the café she was there. Rather than follow me, she had begun to precede me. Perhaps she could claim that I was following her.

As I passed her table, she chewed the cap of her ballpoint pen, feigning thought. I ignored her, heaving my laptop bag up onto my usual table. With her nearby it was going to be difficult to concentrate on my work, but I logged into my account and downloaded the new messages, then opened the first one:

From: LuLu6

To: DaisyChain

Subject: step brother

Dear Kitty,

I’m 14 and a half. I hope u can help me. My mom got married last year to this guy Larry. My real dad is dead. Larry has two sons they are my step brothers Evan and Troy. I’m rilly scarred and I don’t know what to do. So many times I have woke up in the middle of the nite and Troy is in my room watching me sleeping. When he sees me awake he leaves. He’s 19. I think maybe he touches me but I don’t know. One time he came in to the bathroom when I was taking a shower naked and he saw me. He said he likes my boobs. I told my mom and she says I’m making this up so she will get divorced from Larry (cuz I hate him). What should I do?

Luv,

LuAnne from Ohio

LuAnne was my first girl of the day, so I wasn’t yet working at the height of my powers. I stared out the window to avoid the anxiety brought by the blinking cursor and started my response in my head. Dear LuAnne, I’m sorry your mother doesn’t believe you. Your mother shouldn’t be allowed to call herself a mother. The mothers of Kitty’s readers often chose men over their daughters, the desire for romance overwhelming the need to protect their child. I was tempted to respond to LuAnne by asking for her telephone number so I could call her mother and tell her that she was a horrible person. I’m glad you came to me for help, LuAnne. Contact your school guidance counselor immediately. He or she will be able to help you with your problem. No, that wouldn’t do. LuAnne deserved better than to be passed off like a baton.

With the strange girl in my peripheral vision, like a tiny bug, I placed my hands on the keyboard and began to type, channeling Kitty’s voice:

From: DaisyChain

To: LuLu6

Subject: Re: step brother

Dear LuAnne,

I’m *very* upset that your mom doesn’t believe you. I believe you! I would definitely lock your door before going to bed at night. If your door doesn’t have a lock, then put a chair or a piece of furniture in front of it. Pile books or other heavy items on top of the furniture. If Troy still gets into your room, scream as loud as you can when you see him. It wouldn’t hurt to keep a baseball bat or other such weapon with you at night. Do you have a cell phone? If so, call 911 in an emergency like this.

The next thing I want you to do is tell a trusted adult (your best friend’s mom or your favorite teacher) what’s going on and she will be able to help you with your problem. If you can’t find someone like this to help you, you will need to contact the police. Do you know where the police station is in your town? You could go there and explain what’s happening to one of the officers. Ask to speak to a woman.

I’m glad you reached out to me, LuAnne. I’m sending you courage through this email.

Love,

Kitty xo

I read through my response and sent it off. I would try not to think of LuAnne again, of her bedroom door with the chair in front of it, of her stepbrother slipping under the covers with her and sentencing her to a lifetime of therapy or worse. I needed to put her out of my mind, and the Internet was convenient in that way—people could be deleted, switched off. I responded to each girl only once, and if she wrote again, I usually ignored her; with the volume of messages I received each day, I didn’t have time to become a pen pal. To survive my job I needed the callousness of an emergency room doctor.

Next.

There were hundreds of messages in my inbox. Before continuing on, I wanted to order my lunch, the usual low-fat hummus and sprouts on oatmeal bread (300), but the girl was standing at the counter, paying for her fruit smoothie. Carmen served her without knowing there was an invisible tether connecting the girl to me; wherever I went, so went she.

Carmen’s café looked like a 1950s kitchen, with walls painted turquoise, and vintage jadeite teacups on display. The front of it was entirely glass, presenting a view of Violet Avenue that was a moving tableau of people and cars. Carmen needed extra help occasionally and I would work behind the counter or bake for her, arriving before dawn to make cupcakes and banana bread. Despite the temptations, I loved to bake, but I didn’t allow myself to do it often.

I met Carmen in college, and although we were merely acquaintances then, we connected again in New York. She allowed me to use the café as an office. We were friends, since our relationship extended beyond the café to phone calls and occasional outings, but with Carmen pregnant, I couldn’t help but worry that things were going to change.

The girl returned to her table with the smoothie and sat down. She didn’t write in her notebook, which sat unopened in front of her. Instead, she twisted the silver rings she wore on each of her fingers, moving from one finger to the next, looking bored. I had bored her.

Was the girl actually following me? She had seemed genuinely surprised when I confronted her. I couldn’t think of a reason why she’d want to follow me, unless Kitty had sent her to spy on me, to make sure I was doing my work. The girl didn’t seem like the type of person who would work for Kitty, but then neither did I.

From: AshliMcB

To: DaisyChain

Subject: big problems

Dear Kitty,

This is going to sound strange, but I like to cut my breasts with a razor. It’s something I started doing last month, but I don’t know why I do it. I like to trace around my nipples and watch the blood seep through my bra. It’s an embarrassing problem and there’s no one else I can tell it to. I hate my breasts, so I don’t care if they’re scarred. They’re small and mismatched. I’ve seen porn websites and I know I’m not normal but I can’t keep cutting myself because I might bleed to death or get infected. Please help. I can’t stop. I know it’s weird, but I do it because it feels good. It hurts, but it feels good too.

Your friend Ashli (17 years old)

A cutter. I felt a momentary blip of dismay at the thought of such troubled girls writing to a magazine editor for help, but if they didn’t I’d be out of a job. I looked through my computer files and copied and pasted my standard response about cutting, adding a few personalized tweaks.

From: DaisyChain

To: AshliMcB

Subject: Re: big problems

Dear Ashli,

I’m very worried that you’re cutting yourself. Many girls do this, so please don’t feel that you’re weird, but as your friend Kitty, I ask that you stop doing this immediately. I’m not legally qualified to give you advice on this topic, but at the bottom of this message there is a web address that will give you a lot of information and options for getting help from professionals in your local area.

The next paragraph of my message would focus on breasts and porn. I looked through my files: My Documents/Kitty/Breasts/Porn.

Many of us have breasts that don’t match. Please remember that women in porn aren’t normal. You are normal!

To make her feel better, I could have told her that I dared not show my own breasts, nipples pointed toward the floor, to anyone. I hated to even show them to the doctor, though when I was lying down on the examining table it wasn’t so bad; only when standing up could one see the full, hideous effect. I couldn’t tell Ashli this because I was pretending to be Kitty, whose perfectly symmetrical breasts stood at full salute, I was sure.

For most of the afternoon, the messages I answered fit into predictable categories (dieting, boys, razor blades and their various uses). There was also a string of complaints from Canadian readers of the magazine. (Dear Tania: Now, let’s be reasonable here, I didn’t refer to Quebec as a country on purpose.) There were a few more difficult letters (Dear Kitty: Have you ever fantasized about being raped?) but nothing I couldn’t handle. As fast as I answered the messages, more of them flooded in, so I rarely felt a sense of accomplishment. While girls in far-off lands had their genitals trussed like Thanksgiving turkeys, Kitty’s girls had their own urgent problems. (If Matt doesn’t call me, I’LL DIE.) I wasn’t good with questions about boys.

There was no end to these pleas. They came from the heartland, from north and south and east and west. It seemed there was no part of the American landscape that was not soggy with the tears of so many girls. After writing an email that explained the difference between a vulva and a vagina (Your vagina is the passage to your cervix. It provides an opening for menstrual blood. To answer your question, no, you cannot shave a vagina. There is no hair there!), I looked up and noticed that the girl was gone. Relieved, I opened the next message, not expecting something of interest or anything to restore my faith in girl-kind. (Every night after dinner I go into the bathroom and throw up.) Before I could slip into despair, which usually happened every afternoon around three o’clock, Carmen surprised me with a cup of black coffee (FREE FOOD) and an oatmeal cookie (195).

She was wearing a maternity top in a pastel shade; her enormous belly looked like an Easter egg. She sat down across from me, letting out a huff of air, running her fingers through her clipped black hair. “Go on, read me one.” The messages from Kitty’s girls had a car-crash allure.

I looked down at my computer screen. “Dear Kitty, is it always wrong to have sex with your father?”

“You’re making that up. Please, God.” She was unsure and waiting for a sign from me. When I started to laugh, she laughed too, and I felt wicked, like a therapist mocking her patients. Carmen rubbed her belly and said, “We used to want a girl, but now I’m not so sure. You’ve scared me. Girls are scary.”

“Not on the surface,” I said. “Only when you dig deep.”

“That’s even scarier.”

While I had Carmen’s attention, I decided to ask her about the strange girl. I hadn’t mentioned her before, not wanting to seem paranoid. “Did you see that girl sitting over there?” I said, pointing to the empty chair.

“The one with the eyeliner? She’s been coming in a lot lately. Why, was she bothering you?”

“She seems a bit strange, don’t you think?”

Carmen shrugged. “Not particularly. You see the people who come in here.” She paused, and I hoped she was recalling something important about the girl. Instead, she asked if I would cover a shift for her next week while she went to the doctor. I hesitated. I was trying to be good on my diet. Sitting at my normal table wasn’t bad if I blocked out the sights and smells around me and drank my coffee and tea, but behind the counter was another matter.

“Sure,” I said. On some days, Carmen was the only person I spoke to. It was only small talk, but at the right moments, she brought me out of my head. For that, I owed her.

Carmen went back to work, and since I was being good, I took only a small bite of the oatmeal cookie. Two teenage girls at the next table smirked as they watched me. I set the cookie down and decided to work more quickly so I could leave. The best way to work was to dive headlong into the water, feeling my way in the darkness, not letting anything stick to me, just letting the current carry me along:

Why are all the models in your magazine so skinny girls are so lucky I’ll never be anything but fat ass bitch he said to me after class but I still like him and I know that is crazy cuz he is so mean to me and my friend want to get rid of these gross red bumps on our arms can you help me please cuz my legs look so fat in a swimsuit so should I quit the swim team or what should I do if no guy asks me to the dance cuz my cousin asked me to go with him but is that incest or not every guy likes girls with red hair on my vagina is not sexy tits my history teacher said to me when I wore my purple shirt so he is a perv and now I’m afraid I’m going to gain weight on vacation what can I do if I can’t afford a nose job no guy will ever like me with this nose I am sure of it is a mystery to me how you can sleep at night you fucking bitch but why did he say that to me I am not a bitch so I don’t understand why my mom won’t let me use tampons because I told her I would still be a virgin if I use a tampon will you email her for me and my boyfriend had sex because he made me do it but then he said he was sorry so does that count as rape cuz I still love him but I am confused about why every time I wear red lipstick it gets stuck to my front teeth.

And one last message, from a man in prison: I like to masturbate while looking at pictures of you. Will you send me a pair of your panties?

Delete.

At home there was a package. I sat on my bed, the straps of my purse and laptop bag still tangled around me, and ripped open the puffy brown parcel. Inside was a knee-length poplin shirtdress, white with purple trim. It was even prettier than the photographs in the catalog had been.

In the corner of my bedroom was a floor-length mirror in a brass frame. I kept it covered by a white sheet, which I tossed aside so I could hold the dress in front of me, imagining what it would look like when it fit. When I was done I put it in the closet with the other too-small clothes.

My regular clothes, the ones I wore on a daily basis, were stuffed into the dresser or flung on the floor. Stretchy and shapeless, threaded with what must have been miles of elastic banding, they were not in fashion or out of fashion; they were not fashion at all. I always wore black and rarely deviated from the uniform of ankle-length skirts and long-sleeved cotton tops, even in the summer. My hair was nearly black too. For years it had been shaped into a shiny chin-skimming bob, with blunt bangs cut straight across my forehead. I liked this style, but it made my head look like a ball that could be twisted from my round body, the way a cap is removed from a bottle of perfume.

Inside the closet, there was nothing black, only color and light. For months I had been shopping for clothes that I would wear after my surgery. Two or three times a week the packages arrived—blouses in lavender and tangerine, pencil skirts, dresses, a selection of belts. (I had never worn a belt.) I didn’t shop in person; when someone my size went into a regular clothing store, people stared. I had done it once after I’d spotted a dress in a store window that I couldn’t resist. I went inside and paid for it, then had it gift-wrapped as though it were for someone else.

No one knew about the clothes, not even Carmen or my mother. Carmen didn’t even know about the surgery, but my mother did and she was against it. She was worried about the potential complications. She sent me articles that outlined the dangers of the procedure, as well as a tragic story about children who were orphaned when their mother died post-surgery. “But I don’t have any children,” I said to her on the phone, unwilling to indulge her.

“That’s not the point,” she said. “What about me?”

This isn’t about you, I had wanted to say, and refused to discuss the surgery with her again after that.

After straightening and rearranging the clothes, I shut the closet door. I knew it was foolish to buy clothes I couldn’t try on. They might not fit right when the time came, but I bought them anyway. I needed to open the closet door and look at them and know this wasn’t like the other times. Change was inevitable now. The real me, the woman I was supposed to be, was within my reach. I had caught her like a fish on a hook and was about to reel her in. She wasn’t going to get away this time.

• • •

Carmen called to ask if I wanted to join her and her girlfriend at a pizzeria for dinner, but I didn’t like to eat at restaurants when I was following my program, so I said no. From one of the new Waist Watchers recipe cards, I made lasagna, which used ground turkey instead of beef and fat-free cheese and whole-wheat pasta. While it was cooking it smelled like real lasagna, but it didn’t taste like it. I gave it three stars. After I ate a small portion (230) with a green salad (150), I cut the rest into squares and put them in the freezer. My hands were still slightly trembly from hunger, but I would be good and not eat anything more.

After changing into my nightgown and brushing my teeth, I took my daily dose of Y —— from the bottle, the pink pill. It was my ritual before bed, like saying a prayer. As I finished my glass of water, I went to the window in the front room and pulled back the curtain, looking to see if the girl was sitting on the stoop, listening to her music, but she wasn’t there.

• • •

I STAYED HOME for most of the holiday weekend, the unofficial start of summer, leaving only to go to the library and to see a movie. The girl was nowhere around. On Tuesday morning I walked to the café, and as I turned the corner onto Violet Avenue, I wasn’t looking where I was going and bumped into someone—or maybe she bumped into me. “Sorry,” we both said at the same time, and then to my surprise, I saw the girl standing before me, with her Halloween eyes and cherry-red legs.

“It’s you,” I said. My heart was a moth flapping around a lampshade.

The girl smiled and said good morning, then opened the door and held it for me as I followed her inside. “Plum,” Carmen said, rushing past the girl, waving her hands at me. As she approached, her massive belly covered in yellow and pink polka dots, I remembered I was supposed to cover for her while she went for her checkup. “I won’t be gone long,” she assured me as she hurried out the door.

The girl walked ahead of me and I watched as she sat at my table. I was annoyed but didn’t show it and went behind the counter to help Carmen’s assistant. When I set my laptop bag down I felt the tension release from my shoulder as I rid myself of the computer and its endless cries for help. Surrounding me in the kitchen were flour and butter and eggs, the stuff of life; there wasn’t a line of text in sight. I breathed in the sugared air and savored it, then felt a twinge of hunger. My Waist Watchers granola bar (90), like sawdust mixed with glue, hadn’t provided much sustenance.

It had been a while since I’d helped out at the café, but I soon remembered how things were done. I poured cups of tea and sliced carrot cake. I set delicate cupcakes into pink cardboard boxes, licking the icing and sprinkles from my fingers when no one was looking. It was a relief to engage in work that didn’t involve angst, that allowed me to speak with three-dimensional people who asked for simple things like coffee and a slice of pie, not how to fix their cellulite or decipher the behavior of an emotionally stunted boy.

While I was working I glanced at the girl, who was sitting at my table with a makeup bag in front of her. She pulled a silver clamshell compact and a lip pencil from the shimmery pouch. I watched through the glass lid of a cake stand, blurrily, as she lined her lips and smacked them in the mirror.

Distracted by an order, I turned around and busied myself with the espresso machine and three tiny cups. When I returned to the counter I saw the girl in line behind the woman who’d ordered the espressos. My coworker had gone into the kitchen, so I would have to serve the girl. We would have to speak.

The girl stepped forward when it was her turn and we stood faceto-face. “Give me your hand,” she said. Startled, I did what she asked. She took the cap off a lip pencil and turned my right hand so that my palm was facing her, my thumb at the top. Then she began to write. I couldn’t see what she was writing, but I felt the point of the pencil digging into my skin.

When she finished, I pulled my hand back. “DIETLAND,” I read aloud.

“DIETLAND,” the girl repeated.

I stared at the penciled letters on my palm. Was the girl telling me to go on a diet? So much mystery, and there it was: she simply wanted to make fun of me.

In the absence of any comment from me, for at this point I was too embarrassed to speak, the girl quickly gathered her belongings from the table and left the café. Just then my coworker reappeared. I wiped my hand on my apron and excused myself to go to the kitchen. The bottom of the white sink filled with a faint pink color as I put my hand under the cold water and tried to rinse the lettering off.

When I emerged from the kitchen, I saw that the girl had left the lip pencil sitting on the table. I went to collect it. It was a Chanel pencil in a shade called “Pretty Plum.”

• • •

IN THE AFTERMATH of my encounter with the girl, I needed to prepare for a visit to Kitty. The visit only came once a month, like my period, and I greeted it with the same level of enthusiasm.

On the subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I retraced the word DIETLAND on my palm, using my fingertip. What did it mean? I had thought the girl was ridiculing me, but she didn’t seem cruel. What I knew for certain was that she was weird. If she bothered me again, I would have to go to the police, but I feared that in a city full of murderers and terrorists they weren’t likely to care that a girl in colorful tights was trailing me.

I exited the subway station in Times Square, stopping at the top of the stairs to catch my breath in the heat. With my employee badge I entered the Austen Tower, a glistening silver tree trunk. Austen Media was an empire, publishing magazines and books, running a range of websites, and broadcasting two lifestyle channels. If someone had flown a 747 into the Austen Tower and it crumbled to the ground, American women would have had far fewer entertainment options.

Before my job with Kitty I had worked for a small, not-very-prestigious publishing imprint that was owned by Austen but located in a drab building twenty blocks south. We produced novels about young career women looking for love. The covers of the novels were in springtime shades, like the walls of a baby’s nursery. I didn’t have anything to do with the content, but worked in production, tracking manuscripts, liaising with editors, helping to usher the books into the world. After college, I had wanted to write essays and feature stories for magazines, but I couldn’t find a job doing that, so I settled at the publisher. I loved words and the publisher offered me a chance to work with words all day long, even if they were someone else’s. It was a place to start. A foot wedged in the door of the word industry.

My coworkers at the publisher were middle-aged women who wore tennis shoes to work with their skirts and nylons. I soon became comfortable in their world of Tupperware lunches and trips to the discount shoe mart after work, so I made no effort to move on and find the writing job I had dreamed about. One day, after I’d spent more than four years at the publisher, my boss called me into her office to tell me the bad news. We were going out of business.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t say anything sooner, but you probably heard the rumors.” A vase of hydrangeas sat on her desk, blue pompoms in brown water, dropping their shriveled petals onto her Filofax.

“Well,” I said. The rumors hadn’t reached me.

“It’s not just us. They’re cleaning house. It’s the whole building.” The whole building was a mail-order book club and a few small magazines, one about cats, another about doll collecting. We had gone unnoticed for years, the dregs of the Austen empire, hidden in an annex on Twenty-Fourth Street. At long last, Stanley Austen had looked down from his perch in the silver tower and noticed us in a tiny corner of his kingdom. Then came banishment.

After the publisher closed, I was unemployed except for random shifts at Carmen’s café, but eventually a woman named Helen Rosenblatt from Austen’s Human Resources department called to schedule a meeting with me. I went to the Austen Tower as directed, and rode the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor. Helen was a middle-aged woman with a tumbleweed hairdo and a gummy smile. I followed her to her office, noticing that her linen skirt was wedged between her buttocks.

Helen said that my boss from the publisher had told her all about me. “We’re old friends,” Helen explained, and I wondered what had been said. Helen wanted to talk about Daisy Chain, the magazine for teens. I had read Daisy Chain when I was in high school. Even my mother and her friends had read it when they were that age. It had been published since the 1950s and was such a part of Americana that the first issue was displayed in the Smithsonian, alongside Seventeen and Mademoiselle. I guessed that the old issues of Daisy Chain on display at the museum weren’t like the current issue on Helen’s desk, with a cover that read POPPING YOUR CHERRY—IT’S NOT THAT SCARY!

Helen told me that Kitty Montgomery was the new editor of Daisy Chain. Austen’s other teen magazines had ceased publication, so Kitty was carrying the flag for the teen demographic. “She’s a huge hit,” Helen said. “Mr. Austen’s so pleased, he’s had her up to his place on the Vineyard twice.” Helen explained that in her monthly column, Kitty was fond of sharing photos and tragic stories from her teenage years, when she was a gangly, pebble-chested misfit from the suburbs of New Jersey. As Helen took a phone call, I perused several of Kitty’s columns and read about her being beat up by other girls and shoved into lockers by boys. Her mother compounded her misery by never letting her wear makeup or use a razor. In contrast, at the end of each column there was a photo of Kitty as a glamorous grownup, one who had miraculously shed her hideous adolescent skin and emerged, victorious, like a grand white snake. In her current photos she was perched on the corner of her desk in the Austen Tower; visible behind her were the plains of New Jersey, the land of her former tormentors, so small and insignificant.

“Given Kitty’s popularity, she’s swamped with correspondence from readers,” Helen explained when she finished her call. “They’re inspired by Kitty and how she transformed herself. They desperately want her advice and contact her through the Dear Kitty section of the website. It’s like a flood.” I waited for Helen to explain what any of this had to do with me. I knew there was the prospect of a job, but I assumed it was something tucked away in the subscription department.

“The legal department would prefer that we send out cookie-cutter form responses to the readers, but Kitty won’t hear of it. We’ve decided to indulge her and hire someone to take on the responsibility of responding to her girls, as she calls them, by offering big-sisterly advice and encouragement, that sort of thing. This is private correspondence, so it doesn’t appear in the magazine.” Helen looked at me and paused. “I think you might be perfect for this. I’ve sent others up there and none of them have worked out, but you,” Helen said, putting her glasses on and eyeing me, “you’re different.”

I knew what my former boss had said about me.

“You want someone to respond to these readers while pretending to be Kitty?”

“I wouldn’t think of it as pretending. You’d be a team.” Helen folded her arms across her chest, which was not two separate breasts but just an enormous shelf. “You’re older than the other girls we’ve considered for the job, and you’re different from them in many ways. Most of them are—Well, you know the type. I hear that you’re smart, but I don’t mind that. You’d write in Kitty’s voice. You wouldn’t have to believe what you’d write; it only matters that Kitty would believe it and write it if she had time. I think you’d have insight into the problems our girls have—that’s what’s important.”

I should have been grateful for the possibility of a job, but I felt defensive and was trying to hide it. “What makes you think I’d have such insight? You don’t even know me.”

“I’m guessing,” she said, and we both knew what she meant. I hated it when others alluded to my size, despite the obviousness of it. It was as if they were confirming that there was something wrong with me when I’d hoped they hadn’t noticed it.

I appreciated Helen’s offer, but the thought of working in the Austen Tower every day was unappealing. I imagined it was like a fiftytwo-story high school, full of cliques and whispers. Helen must have begun working at Austen Media decades before she morphed into the large postmenopausal woman who sat before me.

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.”

Kitty went on talking about the blood on the white tile, and as she spoke, all I could think was: Dear Kitty, I like to cut my breasts with a razor . . . I like to trace around my nipples and watch the blood seep through my bra . . . I know it’s weird, but I do it because it feels good. It hurts, but it feels good too.

Kitty left and I sat on the lip-shaped loveseat again, waiting for the beauty editor. After a while I started to feel dizzy and sick, as I had in Kitty’s office, so I went to the ladies’ room, winding my way through the corridors lined with the huge magazine covers—the models, with their glazed-over looks, like the heads hanging on a hunter’s wall. I stared at the carpet until I made it to the bathroom, where there were several girls standing at the mirrors and sinks. I locked myself into one of the salmon-colored stalls at the end and breathed in and out slowly. The nausea was increasing and I felt something churning inside, tumbling like a lone sock in the dryer. I began to gag and choke and leaned over the toilet bowl, but nothing came out. The girls at the sinks stopped talking, and I felt ashamed of the noises I was making.

When the sick feeling passed, I sat on the floor of the stall, lacking the energy to stand, staring into the pinkness. The girls resumed their conversation, which was punctuated by the sound of water, the spray of sinks. Then the talking stopped.

The door to the bathroom opened and closed.

I rested my head against the side of the stall, taking deep breaths of sour bathroom air, which made me gag again. I ran my hand under the three elastic bands that were around my waist, from my skirt and tights and underpants.

The door to the bathroom opened and closed.

“Are you okay in there?” a voice said from the other side of the stall door. The voice sounded familiar. Under the door I saw legs that were green, like the rind of a watermelon, and black combat boots with the laces undone.

Could it be?

“I left something for you in the kitchen,” she said, and then she was gone.

After I heard the door close, I struggled to my feet and went to the sink to wash my hands, breathless from the shock of encountering the girl in the Austen Tower. I wondered if she might be in the staff kitchen waiting for me, but when I walked over, no one was there. I looked around, at first not knowing what the girl could have left, but then I noticed the freebie table.

What wasn’t used in the magazine was dumped onto a table in the kitchen, available for the taking. I dug through the pile: there was a purse with a broken bamboo handle, a tangle of cheap plastic earrings, tubes of lipstick—nothing that seemed to be for me. Next to the table on the floor was a box filled with books. I bent over to browse through the titles—a few teenage romance novels, the unauthorized biography of a pop star—and then I saw it.

Adventures in Dietland.

It was a book by Verena Baptist. Her name wasn’t familiar to me until I read the description on the back. When I realized who she was, I squeezed my eyes shut. I might have been in the Austen Tower, suspended in the air by nothing more than concrete and steel, but in my mind I traveled to Harper Lane, back in time to my childhood home. I felt a pang, the kind that memories bring. How did the girl know? She couldn’t have known.

I opened the book to see if there was a note from the girl or anything to let me know I’d found the right clue on her treasure hunt, but there was nothing. I had stuffed the book into my bag and was moving toward the door when suddenly it opened.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” The beauty editor’s assistant handed me a bag filled with the products I was supposed to test.

“Do you know if there’s a girl working here who wears combat boots and colorful tights?” I asked, taking the bag. “She uses thick black eyeliner. Maybe she’s an intern?”

The assistant shrugged.

I left the kitchen, hurrying to the elevators. Once I was on the subway headed for home, I opened Adventures in Dietland. As I read Verena’s words for the first time—Before my birth, Mama was a slim young bride—the train pulled away from the platform and nosed into the tunnel, moving me away from the Austen Tower.