When I turned around, my mother was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house.
“Plum?”
I faced her from the street, standing where the starers normally stood, a brief moment of reversal. The house was nothing special from the outside, but I had lived there for much of my life. If the photos from all the tourists were collected and placed in chronological order, I could have flipped through them to see the girl under the tree become a young woman, one who grew larger and larger, moving into the house, standing behind the curtain—half in the frame, then nothing but shadow.
DRINK ME
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TWO DAYS AFTER FINDING Adventures in Dietland at Kitty’s office, I had nearly finished reading it. I should have been at the café answering messages, but I’d abandoned my work for the book. I soaked in a bath while reading, careful not to dampen the custard-colored pages.
Twelve years had passed since I was a Baptist. I had rarely thought of that time over the years, but as I read, the memories of the Baptist Plan came alive in my mind. I could taste the food: the metallic, watered-down tomato of the pizza and pasta, the casseroles that tasted the way carpet cleaner smells. I remembered the Baptist Shakes, their chalky texture, their medicinal, sour aftertaste. When the company closed, I knew only the most superficial details: Verena Baptist inherited the company and as the sole shareholder she had the power to shut it down, which she did within days of her parents’ fiery car crash. I had hated Eulayla Baptist’s daughter then, but I had never known her name. Now, thanks to the girl, I held her words in my hands.
Verena wrote that after she closed the company, she was left with “gallons of Baptist Shakes, vats of beef stew, and truckloads of chicken breasts slathered in a mysterious goo,” all of which were given to soup kitchens and homeless shelters, “to people who were starving by no choice of their own.” Verena described this as an act of charity, and I supposed the Baptist meals were slightly better than nothing.
I couldn’t help but feel disgusted and angry while reading about Eulayla Baptist. Like all Baptists, I’d been destined to fail, but I blamed myself when I did. I may have hated Eulayla’s daughter once, but as I read the book I was glad that she’d exposed her mother. I knew my failure as a Baptist wasn’t my fault.
I did wonder why Verena turned on her mother so publicly. Verena slipped through the pages of the book for the most part, but in the first paragraph she was there, most tellingly: “Before my birth, Mama was a slim young bride. She and Daddy set up house in Atlanta and for one shining year things couldn’t have been better. Then one tipsy night after martinis on the veranda with the Ambersons from across the street, Daddy impregnated Mama with a bomb that took nine months to blow up, leaving her fat and scarred, with stretch marks and a waistline that looked like an inner tube.”
That bomb was Verena. She had ruined her mother’s figure, which led to an obsession with dieting, which led to the horror of Baptist Weight Loss being inflicted on the world. I wondered if this was why Verena had decided to disgrace her dead mother in print and reveal her secrets: She’d been made to feel guilty for being born.
The book wasn’t only about Baptist Weight Loss. Verena attempted to expose the entire weight-loss industry. She wrote extensively about the many weight-loss authors and gurus, diet drugs, even the surgery I was planning to have. She devoted a whole chapter to liberating oneself from what she called Dietland. “Dietland is about making women small,” Verena wrote. I thought my mother would enjoy her book. I was sure she would have sent me a copy if she knew of its existence.
Inside the book were photographs of Eulayla, one from her beauty queen days and another from her fat years, as well as the famous photo of thin Eulayla holding up her fat jeans. In one photo, her face was taut and her legs were slim, but she was still slightly roomy in the hips. I looked at the photo and thought that in death, Eulayla had finally achieved what had eluded her in life. As a corpse she was as thin as she could ever hope to be. Just skin and bones, I imagined.