There was a short author bio on the back of the book: “Verena Baptist lives in New York City, where she manages Calliope House, a feminist organization.” That was it. There was no photograph of her, no way to put a face to the name of the woman whom I had once hated so much for ruining my dream.
I closed the book and tossed it onto the bathroom floor, not wanting to think of my Baptist days any longer. After I was forced off the Baptist Plan, I spent most of my senior year of high school eating. I couldn’t stop. At Delia’s restaurant I served as an apprentice to the woman who did the baking, and I gorged on cakes and cookies and pies. By the time I started college I had gained back all the pounds I’d lost and added many more. In college I joined Waist Watchers, since they held meetings right on campus. When I became disillusioned with their program I followed the diet plans outlined in books and magazines. I took diet pills, including one that was later recalled by the FDA after several people died. I took a supplement from a company in Mexico, but gave it up after it caused violent stomach pains. For all of my junior year, I drank a chocolate diet shake for breakfast and lunch, which turned my bowel movements into stones, causing hemorrhoids, and which tasted even worse than the Baptist Shakes had tasted. I was too squeamish for bulimia and lacked the masochism needed for anorexia, so once I had cycled through every diet I could find, I went back to Waist Watchers.
In the years that had passed since I’d joined Baptist Weight Loss, I’d gained nearly a hundred pounds. After reading Adventures in Dietland, I felt certain that surgery was the right option for me. Verena would have been horrified by this response, since she railed against weight-loss surgery except in life-threatening situations, but her intentions in writing the book didn’t matter. She had proven that dieting doesn’t work. I was grateful to her for that.
The memories exhausted me, and I relaxed for a while in the tub, the water lukewarm but not unpleasant. I no longer thought the girl was trying to be mean by giving me Verena’s book, but I still didn’t know what she wanted. When the phone started ringing, I didn’t want to get out of the water. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message, but a few minutes later the ringing started again. Annoyed, I left the bath and stomped naked down the hallway, leaving pools of water behind me on the floor.
“Is this Ms. Kettle?”
“Yes.”
“Is this Plum?”
“Who is this?”
“This is Erica calling from Austen Human Resources. We need you to come to the office on Monday at ten a.m. to sign a form.”
“What form?”
“A form you need to sign. There’s a problem with your health insurance.”
“All right,” I said, irritated at the thought of another trip to Manhattan.
“Please come to the Human Resources office on the twenty-seventh floor. Thank you, goodbye.”
Austen Media was the furthest thing from my mind. Since starting Verena’s book I had ignored Kitty’s girls. They were trapped inside my laptop—a Pandora’s box I refused to open.
? ? ?
ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH FLOOR of the Austen Tower, I stepped off the elevator and walked down a long carpeted corridor. At the end was a floor-to-ceiling window, revealing the breadth of midtown Manhattan in a blaze of sunlight. The corridor was like a diving board perched above a sea of buildings. I placed my toes and forehead against the glass and looked down at the streets below.
Erica, the woman who’d pestered me on the phone, greeted me in the Human Resources office. She produced a clipboard with a form that had the logo of Tri-State Health at the top. “Please read this and sign,” she said, sitting next to me in the waiting area. The form contained little content and only asked me to confirm the insurance plan I’d chosen when I began working for Kitty.
“Terrific,” Erica said when I handed the clipboard back to her. “I’ll walk you to the elevator.”
“That’s it? I came all the way from Brooklyn.”
“You don’t want your insurance to expire, do you?”
I wanted to reply to her in the same snotty tone, but it wasn’t worth it. I gathered my things and she escorted me out of the office, which I thought was unnecessary.
As we waited for the elevator, I looked out the window and thought of the diving board again. The idea of lifting off, of diving into midtown, absorbed me until I heard a crinkling sound. The corridor was so bright that I had to strain to see that Erica had removed my insurance form from the clipboard and was stuffing it into the mouth of a trash can.
“Hey, that’s my form.”
“Go to Basement Two,” she whispered. “B-Two. You’ll have to change elevators at the lobby.”
“What’s going on?”
She held her arm between the elevator doors, preventing them from closing. “Go on, hurry up. I have to get back to work.”