Rubí hadn’t explained why she was measuring me, but if she was going to remake the white poplin shirtdress in my size, she’d be wasting her time. I had no intention of wearing any such dress in my size, but I didn’t say so. I just needed to get through the makeover. It would be over soon and then the $20,000 would be mine.
“Rubí has made several dresses for me,” Marlowe said. “DIY. Or what I like to call FFI—Fuck the Fashion Industry.” I had never heard anyone say the word fuck in such a variety of ways. There was little doubt what Huck’s first word would be. It couldn’t be a coincidence that his name rhymed with it.
Rubí chatted as she measured me, explaining that she was campaigning against Dabsitaf with Verena. Before becoming an activist, she said she had been a headless plus-size model. Her modeling agency had made a fortune selling photos and film footage of Rubí to the major news organizations. From the neck down, Rubí appeared in magazines and especially on news programs, where she was featured walking down the street in slow motion, an ice cream cone or hot dog in her hand, while the voice of the reporter gave scary statistics about expanding waistlines and type 2 diabetes and said things like, “The obesity epidemic is America’s looming holocaust.” Rubí was filmed struggling to stand up from park benches and restaurant booths and airline seats. Dieting tips were flashed on the screen over a freeze-frame of her ass, which she said looked to be covered in acres of denim. Her head was never shown. Rubí was so successful as an “obesity epidemic” headless model that she earned a nickname in the industry: Marie Fatoinette.
“I gave up modeling to become an activist,” she said. “We all do things we regret when we’re young, right?” I supposed that question was directed at me, but I remained silent, my arms outstretched, waiting for the inventory of my body to be finished. A dark-haired woman poked her head into the living room, glancing at me in my scarecrow pose. She didn’t say anything, but bit into a green apple. Half her face was scarred. It looked melted and pink. I turned away from her and from Rubí, looking up at the ceiling. Verena’s house was some kind of freak show.
When the measuring was over, Marlowe asked Verena to take care of Huck until her husband could pick him up. Verena was wearing a top that looked like a remnant of an old prom dress.
Before the makeover began in earnest, I felt compelled to check with her one last time: “You’re going to give me the twenty thousand at the end of this, right?”
“Of course. A Baptist never lies.”
I looked at her skeptically.
“Correction. This Baptist never lies.”
Marlowe and I left Calliope House to begin what she called “a few days of fabulous fuckability fun.”
“Why don’t you just call it attractiveness? I prefer that.”
“Attractive is too benign. Quaint. In our mothers’ day, it used to be enough to have a pretty face or a nice figure, which was bad enough, but now you must be the perfect fuck-doll too.”
“What’s a fuck-doll?”
Marlowe, oblivious to my question, spoke a language I didn’t understand. She pulled a copy of Fuckability Theory from her bag and began to read from it: “Page two: We all want to be attractive to our partner, but being fuckable is about more than that. It’s about having a high fuckability quotient on the open market, as if we’re stocks with a value that rises and falls.”
Our first stop was a salon with a pink awning. “My friend here has an appointment for a waxing,” Marlowe said to the woman who greeted us at the door. The woman was wearing a coat like a doctor might wear, except hers was pink.
“What am I having waxed?” I whispered to Marlowe.
“Everything, including the downstairs area.” When I began to protest, she said, “Fuckable women are hairless and smooth, like little girls.” I felt shocks in my fingers and toes as I followed the pink-coated woman through the salon and down a flight of stairs at the back.