Dietland

by Sarai Walker

Right now there are countless men and boys around the world with their pants around their ankles, masturbating to a dead woman,” Sana said. “In a different age, a great poet would have written a ballad about that.”

“It’s not easy to live in that body, is it? Not in this culture, with so many shitty, hateful people everywhere. You haven’t had an easy time of it. Anyone who can survive that is strong.”

I had always thought of myself as merely existing,

You carry a great deal of pain around with you, Plum. Can you envision ever letting it go?” “You can’t let go of pain. It’s not a balloon that can float into the sky.” “Okay, but imagine for a minute that it is. You put your pain into a balloon and you let go of it. It floats away. How do you feel?” If I let go of my pain, there would be a hole inside me that was so vast I would cease to exist. I would be the balloon floating into the sky, not the other way around. There would be nothing pulling me down, nothing keeping my feet on the ground. My pain was my gravity. “Without my pain, I wouldn’t be me anymore.”

“It’s a special power. I see past the mask to the real person underneath. I’m not living a lie like so many other women. I’m not a fool.”

“You’ve always been angry, Plum. I just want you to direct that anger where it belongs, not at yourself.”

When she left, I pulled the sheet over my head and began to cry, welcoming the release. Crying existed beyond thinking, beyond words. It felt good. When I couldn’t cry anymore, I thought about what Verena had said. In my mind the balloon was red, like the walls of Calliope House. I thought about the painful things I might put into it. I imagined letting go.

The bliss inside my mouth soon reached my stomach, filling the empty space, and I finished the cake in three rapid bites. I was so close to heaven, there were angels all around me.

I didn’t bother to count calories. There was no time for math. I had always hated math.

We’re different in a way that everyone can see. We can’t hide it or fake it. We’ll never fit society’s idea for how women should look and behave, but why is that a tragedy? We’re free to live how we want. It’s liberating, if you choose to see it that way.”

The sanitized slits, these entrances to the world, filled the room.

Foxy, hot, fuckable. Whatever it was called, that’s what I’d wanted—to be hot, to elicit desire in men and envy in women. But I realized I didn’t want that anymore. That required living in Dietland, which meant control, constriction—paralysis, even—but above all it meant obedience. I was tired of being obedient.

It was as if the hunger from a decade of dieting was stored up inside me and the chains that had been wrapped around it were beginning to break.

women don’t want to be me, men don’t want to fuck me. I finally understood what it meant.

In Verena’s house there was never any mention of calories, there was no I shouldn’t eat this, I shouldn’t eat that. Plates were scraped clean, ooohs and ahhhs were abundant, women asked for more. No prayers were offered up to the diet gods: I’ll go to the gym later; I didn’t eat dinner last night. There was pleasure that didn’t have to be bargained for.

“I love that their only defense against Jennifer is to label her unfuckable,” Rubí said.

There was a phantom woman in my mind that I was comparing myself to, and I had to force her from the dressing room. When she was gone, I looked at my body, the body that had kept me alive for nearly thirty years, without any serious health problems, the body that had taken me where I needed to go and protected me. I had never appreciated or loved the body that had done so much for me. I had thought of it as my enemy, as nothing more than a shell that enclosed my real self, but it wasn’t a shell. The body was me. This is your real life. You’re already living it.

People had always insulted me by calling me fat, but they couldn’t hurt me that way, not anymore. I was fat, and if I no longer saw it as a bad thing, then the weapon they had used against me lost its power.

I was wearing bright colors, refusing to apologize for my size. The dress made me feel defiant. For the first time, I didn’t mind taking up space.

In a few weeks, Leeta had become both a symbol of rebellion and a fashion statement. She was the face of a movement.

Soon, what the news media described as the “Jennifer effect” began to spread. At a prestigious Connecticut university, fraternity pledges marched outside the women’s dormitories chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal!” In previous years, this type of misbehavior would have been handled by a tweedy disciplinary committee in a conference room with tea and coffee, but this time the female students took matters into their own hands. They left their dorms en masse and destroyed the fraternity house, breaking all the windows and setting it on fire.

“I think it’s a response to terrorism. From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught to fear the bad man who might get

us. We’re terrified of being raped, abused, even killed by the bad man, but the problem is, you can’t tell the good ones from the bad ones, so you have to be wary of them all.

The fear of men is ingrained in us from girlhood. Isn’t that a form of terrorism?”

After years of not fighting back, I was coiled like a snake.

Back at street level, another familiar sight: a poster of the lilac negligee woman, whose breasts I’d seen sailing around town on the sides of buses. Outside one of the flagship branches of V— S—, the poster was more than two stories high, the woman’s breasts tire-size. If I’d had Jennifer’s powers, I would have

demanded the posters be taken down. They were everywhere, like leaflets dropped on a population during a war. Propaganda.

her breasts conquering Manhattan.

A Baptist isn’t afraid to become an outlaw.

the unfuckable female.

I’ve always connected the two in my mind: being scarred and becoming a woman, both traumatic processes in their own way. An attack on my sense of self.”

The women in my family are not lithe. This is a losing battle. You know why the women at Austen are such bitches? It’s because they’re hungry.”

After dieting, ravenousness can hit like a violent wave. It’s a force of nature, more powerful than you.

“My goal isn’t to look fuckable. The look I want is Don’t fuck with me.”

His little song had been intended as a drive-by, a shot fired into the anonymous fat girl as she crossed the street. It was intended to wound, but I wasn’t wounded. It was the intention that infuriated me.

A Baptist isn’t afraid of a little pain.

There was pleasure in feeling strongly. Even an emotion like rage could feel good—it was almost cleansing, the way it made me feel alive.

Leaving the war meant crossing over. The mind of a soldier wasn’t the mind of a mother, but she wasn’t a mother anymore. When she was in Afghanistan, something had crossed over in her, and when she went home, it didn’t cross back.

There was no reason to lounge by the pool—I dived right in.

I had changed so much in the past few months, but the world hadn’t changed along with me. Plum would always be a target. Giving up the hope of Alicia meant giving up the hope of ever blending in.

She couldn’t see his true self. Stupid Alicia.

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.

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.

I wished I could go back to the beginning of my life and start again.

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.

At the sight of my old home I felt a twinge, a plucked guitar string of memory that reverberated from head to toe.

Everything was covered in dust, a gray powder like time made manifest, the time that had passed since I’d left this life.

On my way out, I took one last look around. The apartment was smaller than I remembered it, in the way that everything looks smaller after you’ve left it behind.

“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.