I wasn’t answering Kitty’s messages. It’d been at least a week since I’d even opened the Dear Kitty account. In the three years I’d been working for Kitty I had been obsessively disciplined about my job, only taking weekends off, almost never missing a day, even working when I was sick. I had suspected that if I stepped out of Dear Kitty completely, I’d never want to go back.
I had a sudden fear that Kitty might find out I had been slacking off. She didn’t have the password to the account, but the IT department could surely find a way in. My anxiety was enough to send me to the computer. I sat on my wooden chair without wearing any clothes, my bottom sticking to the seat, my breasts sagging down to the level of the keyboard. In the computer I saw myself reflected back, but I was too numb to muster disgust.
“In a poll conducted last year, more seven-year-olds had heard of Stella Cross than Martha Washington,” said Nola Larson King.
As always, the Austen system was slow to log me in. An hourglass on the screen turned cartwheels while I waited. This ritual always gave me time to brace myself for what would flow into my inbox, like the moment on a cop show before a sheet is pulled back from a mutilated corpse in the morgue. Sharp intake of breath and then . . . the horror.
The messages poured in. There were more than a thousand of them. The sight of the massive list was like a collective cry in my ears. I opened the first letter but couldn’t summon the mental powers to concentrate. Kitty. Abortion. Blah. Blah. Blah. I wanted to write back to the girl, HaleyBailey80, and say, “Why are you asking me, Kitty Montgomery, whether or not to have an abortion? I flunked out of Brown!” Only after a break did the absurdity of anyone writing to Kitty for advice, and thus the absurdity of my job, become clear.
Nedra Feldstein-Delaney said, “Last Christmas my eight-year-old niece asked Santa Claus for a G-string.”
I looked at the next ten messages in the queue and I couldn’t face them. Not the next ten, not the next two hundred. I dragged my cursor down the list, highlighted them all, and clicked delete. I waited a few seconds to see if I’d feel any guilt, but I didn’t feel anything.
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The New Baptist Plan, Task Two:
Confrontation
With the Y—— flu subsiding, I soon developed new symptoms, such as the feeling of shocks in my extremities, tiny pinpricks of electricity. I was zapped throughout the day on the bottoms of my feet and my fingertips. Overall I didn’t feel right; I was at a remove from life, as if there were a pane of glass between me and everything else.
My apartment was stale with sweat and the remnants of fever—it was like living inside a jar with the lid screwed shut. I was in the middle of washing clothes and linens and preparing to open all the windows when Verena called to explain about the second task of the New Baptist Plan. She wanted me to confront people who made rude comments or stared at me. “Don’t ignore them,” she said. “Respond.”
I was still in the middle of the first hellish task, and now she was giving me another. “Why bother? I won’t look like this for much longer.”
“I think you need to stand up for Plum, don’t you? Once she’s gone, you may regret that you never defended her.” Verena spoke about Plum as if she was going to be annihilated. I saw a watermelon dropped from the roof, its remains reddening the sidewalk.
“If you’re trying to talk me out of the surgery, then reminding me how much everyone hates me isn’t going to achieve that.”
“Trust in the process. A Baptist isn’t afraid to take risks.”
I was glad we were talking on the phone so she couldn’t see me roll my eyes. I had no intention of confronting anyone. The only way I could survive my life was to exist in a fog of denial. Acknowledging what happened around me was almost unimaginable. In nearly thirty years of life I’d rarely done it. If I ignored it, then it wasn’t real. Still, I told Verena that I would. She’d never know. I’d make up a story, something filled with pathos, like a message from one of Kitty’s girls.
The $20,000 would soon be mine. After hanging up the phone, I looked through all my catalogs and ordered more clothes.
Verena had said the process of weaning off Y—— would take more than a month. I couldn’t hide in my apartment for all that time. I decided that returning to my normal routine would offer stability and help me deal with the disorienting symptoms. I packed my laptop bag and headed to the café for the first time in weeks. On my way there I thought more about the second task. If I had wanted to confront someone I wouldn’t have had to search for opportunities. I thought about what I’d say to the mean boys who hung out on the corner. Nothing came to mind, no witty, zinging statement to put them in their place. Words were insufficient. Instead I imagined them being dropped from the Harbor Freeway interchange, like those men on the news, or maybe a bus could swerve onto the sidewalk, splattering the five of them and sending their heads rolling down the street like bowling balls.
“In an ideal world, what would happen?” Verena had asked during our first session.
In an ideal world, they would bleed.