I didn’t feel full or happy after my binge. With the macaroons, I’d had a taste of real food, and now I wanted more. I called Nicolette. “I thought you were dead,” she said. That’s what people had said about Eulayla Baptist, too.
“I’m not dead, I’ve just been removed from the world of food.” We went to the mall, Nicolette’s mother driving us in her gold Mercedes with her bumper sticker: NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS. Nicolette could eat whatever she wanted and never gain weight—that’s why her mother hated her, she said. At the mall, we ate chili dogs and nachos with extra jalape?os and washed it all down with sugary cherry lemonade. We bought soft pretzels and funnel cakes dusted with powdered sugar and ate it all. We made a point of browsing CDs and shoes, but we were only at the mall for the food.
Before leaving, I bought half a dozen donuts from Winchell’s to take home, topped with white icing and rainbow sprinkles.
After bingeing on donuts at 2 a.m., I feel: euphoric
At my next meeting with Gladys, filled with guilt, I confessed everything. She held my hand, urging me to find the strength to transcend my bodily cravings. “A Baptist isn’t afraid to admit she failed,” Gladys said, “but a Baptist never loses faith in herself either.” As I listened to her, it almost seemed possible. She gave me a pamphlet with Eulayla on the cover, entitled “I Don’t Want to Be Thin—I Choose Health!”9 There were sections on high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. Gladys said I was at risk for all these diseases if I quit the Baptist Plan. “Do you want to die before you’re forty, hon?” She told me about her sister who was the same size as me and infertile.
I cried as Gladys weighed me and I discovered I had already gained back half the weight. All of the suffering I’d endured was for nothing and the new life I’d envisioned was slipping away, all because I was a pig. I resolved to do better and become a good Baptist again. I wasn’t going to meet my goal weight on schedule, but Gladys assured me this was normal, that it happened to everyone, including her.10
The Baptist lifestyle consumed me again. I hid in my bedroom, accepted feeling sick, avoided my friend, and in my head repeated the phrase the pink trays, the pink trays, like a mantra, reminding myself that if I only ate what was in the pink trays and nothing more, I would become thin and I wouldn’t die before age forty.
Each week as I left the clinic with my pink trays and shakes, I promised myself I’d be good. But it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t remain a Baptist for much longer.
When I arrived at the clinic one afternoon, the women were crying. A distraught Gladys told me that Eulayla Baptist and her husband had been killed in a car accident in Atlanta. “There was a rainstorm,” Gladys managed to say. “They lost control of the car. She’s gone.”
I looked at the poster of Eulayla holding up her fat jeans. “Gone? You mean forever? That’s impossible.” I steadied myself against a chair.
Within days, Gladys called with the bad news. “Eulayla’s daughter is shutting us down,” she said through her sobs. “The company is closed. We’re finished.”
I went immediately to the clinic with the intention of hoarding food, but when I got there the doors were already padlocked. There was no sign of Gladys or any of the other staff. “No,” I cried, pounding on the doors. Other women milled around on the sidewalk, gaunt and dejected, probably on the verge of meltdowns but too weak for histrionics.
“Why?” howled one of the distraught women, placing her hands on my shoulders. “Why does Eulayla’s daughter hate us?”
When I arrived home, my mother was sitting on the front steps, peeling an orange. I sat down next to her.
“What’s wrong?”
“No more Baptist Weight Loss. Eulayla’s daughter closed all the clinics.”
“Good for her.”
I watched my mother drop the curls of rind onto the ground between her feet. I was in mourning and she was nothing but pleased. From my bag, I pulled the before picture that Gladys had taken of me. I was twenty-five pounds lighter than that, but still fat. School was starting soon, and without the Baptist clinic, my plans for my last year of high school and then college in Vermont were going to unravel. I feared I would stay a before picture forever.
A vintage car stopped in front of the house, probably from the 1960s, small and black like a bug. A man sat in the driver’s seat and next to him a teenage girl, who stepped out of the car with a camera. She stood on the sidewalk before my mother and me and raised the camera to her eye. They were always going to be looking at me. That was my destiny.
“Go away,” I screamed, rising to my feet. The girl turned back toward the car and raced to open the door. As it sputtered away I chased after it, grabbing the lid off one of our metal trash cans as I leapt off the curb, hurling it into the middle of the street and letting out a roar. It landed in the street with a cymbal crash, rumbling the pavement where I stood. The car disappeared around the bend at the end of the road.