On the Baptist Plan, I nearly passed out from hunger. Once in the kitchen, I was slicing a bell pepper, but then there were two on my cutting board, then three. They were multiplying. I set down my knife and stumbled backwards, bumping the handle of a skillet on the stove, sending hot oil and scallops crashing to the floor. Elsa insisted I go home, but I went back to my peppers, trying to chop while my hands shook.7
I wanted to stuff myself with the food that surrounded me in the restaurant, but in my mind I pleaded with my hungry self to be sensible. Nicolette’s mother, a Waist Watchers obsessive and borderline anorexic, had a bumper sticker on her car that read NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS. I didn’t know how it felt to be skinny, but if I ate the pink trays of food and the packaged snacks and nothing more, I would find out in only nine months. The fact that my misery had an end date, a parole date, kept me going. Once or twice I thought about jumping off the roof of the restaurant, but I kept these fantasies to myself.
When I returned to the house on Harper Lane after work, I ate my dinner quickly and crawled into bed, since being awake was torturous. In the morning I would try to soothe myself with a hot shower, but I grew increasingly worried as the drain filled with clumps of my hair.
At the Baptist clinic, Gladys would say, “You must have been good this week!”8 She and the other women were interested in my progress, pulling up my shirt to get a better look at my hips and tummy. The weigh-in was the highlight of my week. I was good for a whole month and lost twenty-nine pounds.
When July came, my father sent my yearly airline ticket, Los Angeles to Boise, but I told him I couldn’t visit. There was no way for me to transport my Baptist frozen meals, and I couldn’t eat normal food. “You’re not coming to visit me because of a diet?”
“I can’t, Daddy. You’ll be proud of me when this is finished, I promise.” I was his only child. He had married again, but his new wife couldn’t have children, so I was his only hope for grandkids. If I was fat, no one would want to marry me. I wanted to tell him this, to explain that this wasn’t just a diet, that everything in my future and his depended on it, but I couldn’t say the words.
With my summer cleared of all obligations except for my job at the restaurant, I spent most of my time alone at home. When I went out, I didn’t have the energy to care if people took photographs of me. Nicolette invited me to the mall and to movies, but I couldn’t be surrounded by such fattening food. Every evening at the restaurant I was exposed to non-Baptist food, and those were the worst two hours of my day.
In our weekly meetings, Gladys expressed her worries about my job. “You need to separate yourself from temptation, Miss Kettle.”
“If I don’t work at the restaurant I can’t afford to be a Baptist.”
“Well, we don’t want that,” Gladys said. There was a newspaper on her desk and she began to look through the classifieds to help me find a job that didn’t involve food. “Here’s an ad for a dog walker.”
“I don’t have the energy to walk.”
“Babysitting?”
I imagined being passed out from hunger on the kitchen floor and a toddler with a phone, trying to dial 911.
“No, I’m better off at the restaurant. I can handle it.”
Except that I couldn’t. One evening I had to stir a massive pot of macaroni and cheese, then serve it up on plates for thirty-four children celebrating a birthday. There must have been thousands of pasta tubes in the pot, glistening in the gluey cheese. The intoxicating smell filled my nose and my mouth, even penetrating my brain and wrapping its orange tentacles around every conscious thought. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, that’s what I told myself. I wondered how many calories were in the pot. A hundred thousand? A million? The thought was repulsive.
When the plates came back to the kitchen, a few of them were scraped clean, but there were many with lumps of macaroni and cheese stuck to them. A few of the plates looked as if they hadn’t been touched. The dishes were lined on the counter, waiting for Luis to clean them, but he had gone out back for a smoke.