She didn’t comment, but walked back into the living room. We sat down and she removed a pad of paper from her bag and asked if she could take notes. She reminded me of Leeta, poised there with her pen and paper, ready to observe me. All of these new people in my life seemed to find me fascinating. I pointed out the psych evaluation form that needed to be signed before the surgery, but Verena stuffed it in the back of her pad without even looking at it.
Saying she wanted to show me something, she reached into her bag. She pulled out a bottle of pills and placed it on the coffee table between us. She explained that her colleague Rubí had just returned from a trip to Paris, where she had obtained them. Rubí called the pills Dabsitaf, but that wasn’t their real name. Dabsitaf was a diet drug, more specifically an appetite suppressant. It had been available in France for two years.
“I’ve tried diet drugs. They don’t work,” I said.
“This one does. When Rubí was in France she talked to people who’ve taken it and lost vast amounts of weight. They’re not hungry at all.” She said it was manufactured by an American company, but they released it in France first because they knew they couldn’t get FDA approval right away.
“It really works?” I examined the bottle with French writing on the label.
“The complete lack of hunger, that’s what it gives you. The absence of want. The eradication of desire. Would you want to take it?”
“I’d try it.”
Verena said there was evidence from France to suggest that some of the people who’d taken the drug had developed life-threatening complications. Their blood vessels tightened until they couldn’t breathe, suffocating them from the inside. The drug company denied any link to their product, and clinical trials in the United States had already concluded. “If it becomes available here, and if you weren’t having the surgery, would you take it, knowing the risks?”
If I thought the pills worked, I’d be on the next plane to France, but I kept this to myself. “I’d consider it.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like being hungry. I wish my hunger would go away.”
Verena wrote something on her pad. When she finished, she took back the bottle of pills. She crossed her legs and looked at me, saying nothing more. She wanted me to take the lead now—I knew what therapists were like.
By way of introduction, I said: “I wasn’t molested.” I thought it was important to get that out of the way. “Doctors always assume I was molested and that’s why I’m . . . this way. I wasn’t molested or raped, I just want you to know.” In my ears I heard those girls from high school: Who’d want to rape her?
“I get it,” said Verena. “Your fat body isn’t the result of some deep psychological trauma. This is me you’re talking to, remember? I was at a conference recently and an acclaimed psychotherapist said that women become fat because fat protects them from unwanted male attention, like a suit of armor.”
I pictured myself as Joan of Arc, whom I had portrayed in a third grade play. “But I’ve always been this way, from the beginning.”
“Like your grandmother, I know. Let’s move on.”
There was silence again. She was waiting for me to say something more. I thought of the scarlet dress on my bed. I knew she’d seen it. I thought it was best if I brought it up first.
“The dress on the bed is mine.” I was like a nervous criminal, blurting out a confession. “What I mean is that it’s for me.” There was no point in saying the dress was a gift for someone else.
“You’re buying clothes for your post-surgery self?”
I nodded. “I have a closet full.”
“I’m not surprised. You believe there’s a thin woman inside you, waiting to be set free.”
“You sound like Eulayla now.”
“You’ve internalized her ideology, haven’t you?”
An image in my mind: Eulayla Baptist holding up her fat jeans. Burst!
“What’s the name of the thin woman who lives inside you, imprisoned under all those layers of fat?”
“She’s not a separate person; she’s me. Or who I’ll be eventually.”
“All right, but let’s give her a name.”
I wanted to scoff, but then I remembered that when I was a teenager on the Baptist Plan I had thought of my thin self as Alicia.
Alicia is me but not me.
“I guess we can call her Alicia,” I said. “That’s my real name.”
“Your real name for the real you.” Verena turned to a fresh page of her notepad. “What will Alicia be able to do that Plum can’t?”
I immediately thought of the “When I’m Thin . . .?” booklet from my first day as a Baptist member. Ever since meeting Verena and reading her book, these flashes from my past kept coming back. They didn’t belong here in my present life. I wished they would go away.
Verena pushed me to answer, so I told her that Alicia would be able to walk down the street and no one would look at her in a bad way or say something mean.
“What do people say to Plum?”
I liked this, thinking of Plum as a separate person, one who would soon be consigned to the past. “They say, Go on a diet. They make oink and moo sounds. A few weeks ago I crossed the street in front of a car and the guy shouted out the window, ‘I’m glad I didn’t hit you, girl!’ Everyone turned to look. People laughed.”