“Who cares about Kitty? Once I have the surgery I’m not even going to work for her. She’s unimportant.”
“I disagree. You spend your days pretending to be her and writing in her voice. I’d say she’s very important. I want you to articulate how she really feels about you.”
Looking up at the Austen Tower, I imagined Kitty in her office on the thirtieth floor. Despite how friendly she acted, I had always suspected she was disgusted by me, but it was easier not to think about it.
“Come on,” Verena said, continuing to prod me. “Let loose, dig deep. If I can trash my own mother in print, you can do this.”
I ran my thumb across the top of my sandwich, feeling the coldness of tuna beneath the bread. I wanted it badly. Instead I channeled my energy into the conversation, directing my crankiness toward Kitty. “If Kitty or any of the women on her staff were given the choice between looking like me and losing an arm or a kidney or even dying, they’d probably choose death or dismemberment,” I said. “There. Are you satisfied?”
“This is good. Keep going.”
“The Austen Tower is there ascending into the sky, filled with magazines and TV shows that tell women how they can avoid looking like me. I’m every American woman’s worst nightmare. It’s what they spend their lives fighting against, it’s why they diet and exercise and have plastic surgery—because they don’t want to look like me.”
“Keep going.”
“Kitty doesn’t want me working in her office. I’m the embodiment of everything she hates.” It hurt to say it, but it felt good, too.
“You’re Kitty’s inner fat girl. She leeches off your pain. It’s a resource that she’s exploiting, like some big oil tanker parked in the Gulf of Mexico. She’s sucking you dry.”
“I’d rather not think about it. It’s easier to just ignore her.” If I ignore it then it isn’t real.
“You ignore a lot of things. Say fat.”
“I don’t like saying that word.”
“I know you don’t. That’s why you need to say it.”
I tossed my sandwich into the garbage can next to the bench, where it landed with a thud. “Fat, fat, fat,” I said. “Having lunch with you isn’t fun.”
“Being a Baptist is never fun.”
Verena wanted to see where I lived, so we took the subway to Brooklyn. I didn’t want her in my apartment, but it was better than sitting on a bench outside the Austen Tower, worrying about being blown up.
She wasn’t expecting me to have such a large apartment. I told her it belonged to my mother’s cousin Jeremy and that he was a journalist permanently away on assignment. I explained that I had grown up living in his mother’s house on Harper Lane. The name Harper Lane made it sound quaint even though it was in Los Angeles. I made no mention of Myrna Jade, the ghost of my childhood. Verena was a therapist and I wasn’t willing to offer up that delicious detail.
I assumed this was the official start of the New Baptist Plan and Verena was preparing to analyze me. The psych evaluation form from the insurance company was sitting on my desk, but I knew Verena wouldn’t sign that right away. I waited for the grilling to begin, but she wanted to look around first. My eyes surveyed the apartment, searching for any hidden details that might reveal something unintended. No one besides the super had been inside my apartment for more than six months. My apartment was a secret place, only for me, so intimate that it was full of my scent. I resented Verena for inviting herself over.
She asked if she could peek inside my bedroom and I agreed, believing I had put away my secret clothes, but as soon as I followed her through the doorway I saw a belt on the dresser. I had no use for a belt. Even worse, there was a scarlet dress lying crosswise on my bed, like a gash cut into the white comforter. It had arrived that morning when I was on my way out; I’d opened the package quickly, placed the dress on my bed, and forgotten about it.
Verena had seen the dress—it was impossible to avoid, splashed there on the bed, a slender column. She didn’t say anything, but bent over to examine the framed photographs on my dresser. “That woman looks like you,” she said, pointing to the photo of my grandmother and her sister on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.
Verena straightened up. “If you have the surgery you won’t look like her anymore.”
“She died before I was born,” I said, hoping Verena would feel bad.