“Alicia,” I said. I am Alicia. I am Alicia. I repeated it to myself, but that didn’t make it true. I was not Alicia and I feared I never would be.
“I’m not feeling well,” I said, setting down my fork and scooting my chair back. The Y——-related symptoms returned. It felt as though there was a sparkler inside my mouth. “I think I should leave.”
“Don’t let me keep you. I’ll just stay here and order dessert.”
I left him alone at the table. Alicia’s first date was over and it hadn’t gone well.
Aidan
It was Sunday night, my last date. Aidan had been described to me as a human rights lawyer and drinker of fair-trade coffee. I put on my dress and the Thinz and the makeup. Aidan knocked on the door, and a few moments later a generic white guy with brown hair stood before me.
“You’re my date?” he asked.
“That’s me.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Screw you,” I said, and slammed the door.
After Aidan left, I washed my face while still wearing my dress; the front of it was splashed with water and stained with makeup. I took off the control-top tights and the Thinz so I could breathe, then crawled into bed on my stomach, still wearing the dress. I had completed four tasks of the New Baptist Plan, with only one left to go, and then the money would be mine. The date of my surgery was still a couple of months away. Before meeting Verena I’d been moving toward it in a straight line, but now there was movement in another direction, a subtle drift.
I thought back to the winter, when I’d decided to have the surgery. I’d undergone my annual physical exam, and though everything appeared normal, the doctor wanted me to have an ultrasound done, to make sure everything was “okay inside.” I had never had an ultrasound and was nervous. That afternoon I reported to the hospital and a young technician named Pooja placed a condom on a probe and stuck it inside me. She flicked a switch and a screen on the wall revealed an ultrasound image of my reproductive organs.
“There are your ovaries,” she said, and I squinted to see them. They were a whitish blur against a gray background, slightly alien-looking. “And that’s the entrance to your womb.”
It was such an odd word, womb. I had never thought of myself as having one. A uterus, yes, but not a womb. A womb was a place for something small to curl up in and sleep. For the first time, I realized such a place existed inside me. It didn’t look like anything nice on the screen, just a dusty balloon waiting to be inflated.
“I have a womb,” I said.
“Of course you do. You’re a woman.” The technician stared at me as if she thought I wasn’t quite right in the head. “Are you okay?”
I didn’t answer, but stared at my womb until I couldn’t anymore. I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to look at it. Why did she have to call it that? Womb.
“You’ll be ovulating from your left ovary next month,” she said. “See that follicle?”
“Yes, I see it,” I said, still with my eyes closed.
Pooja spoke to me as she spoke to her other patients, the women who had things going in and out of them, like trains in a station. On the screen I was like them, the sum of my parts. Underneath my bulky exterior I was like every other woman, even if I had never been allowed to feel that way.
After my appointment, I walked home in a daze. I had never liked to call myself a woman. I knew I was one, but the word never sounded right when applied to me. For days I thought of nothing but the womb on the screen. It haunted me.
Over the years I had considered weight-loss surgery, but the thought of knives and incisions and complications had always scared me, so I had never done anything more than think about it. But in the days after seeing my womb, I finally made an appointment with a doctor and scheduled the surgery, knowing it was time to act. Verena had said the surgery was about becoming smaller, but it was about more than that. That’s what I hadn’t been able to tell her.
Now in the wake of the New Baptist Plan, the dream of the surgery had been tarnished. I could still have it, and the $20,000 would help, but there would always be scars, not just on the outside, but on the inside too. Verena had been intent on reminding me just how much everyone hates me. Alicia would never be able to forget the horrible things that had happened to Plum. The surgeon’s knife couldn’t cut that away. Alicia would always be marked.