Another day and night passed, or at least that’s how it seemed. I lived by my body’s rhythms, sleeping when I was tired, drinking when I was thirsty, and experiencing the stirrings of hunger. Since I hadn’t been eating, I was weak from lack of nutrients and I had to drag myself from my bedroom to the bathroom. Without a mirror I couldn’t see myself, but I knew my hair was straggly and matted in places. I had only the essentials—toothpaste and soap, a hairbrush. I didn’t have deodorant or a blow dryer or a razor or tweezers or makeup. Running my tongue over my upper lip, I could feel the prickly hairs there. I was slowly reverting to nature.
I spent most of my time writing in Leeta’s notebook, which I was making my own. The New Baptist Plan replayed in my mind: the doctor and his black marker, the man in the subway station, the blind dates, my Dabsitaf-induced dream. I felt humiliation and sadness, but also something else, an emotion I couldn’t yet describe.
When Verena finally arrived, I had been writing in the journal for most of the day. “Are you ready to talk?” she asked, sitting in the desk chair.
I was ready. Verena asked if I had read Leeta’s journal and I told her that I had. poor louise b. always looks like she’s on her way to a funeral. There were lines that I’d never forget.
“What did Leeta see when she looked at you?” Verena asked.
“She saw a woman in pain.”
“That’s what I see too. You carry a great deal of pain around with you, Plum. Can you envision ever letting it go?”
“You can’t let go of pain. It’s not a balloon that can float into the sky.”
“Okay, but imagine for a minute that it is. You put your pain into a balloon and you let go of it. It floats away. How do you feel?”
If I let go of my pain, there would be a hole inside me that was so vast I would cease to exist. I would be the balloon floating into the sky, not the other way around. There would be nothing pulling me down, nothing keeping my feet on the ground. My pain was my gravity.
“Without my pain, I wouldn’t be me anymore.”
“Pain takes up a lot of space,” Verena said. “You could fill that space with other things. Love, perhaps? In our first session together, you said you wanted to be loved.”
“I can’t imagine anyone loving me while I look like this.”
“That’s only because you’ve never allowed yourself to imagine it. How can anyone love you if you hate yourself?”
“I know what you want, Verena. You want me to cancel the surgery, to stay like this.” I ran my hands down the front of my body. “You’re asking me to live a life that I don’t know how to live.”
“Calliope House is full of women who’ve chosen another path. It’s possible.”
“So I would have to live at Calliope House for the rest of my life?”
“Of course not. Think of Calliope House as a way station.”
I picked up the notebook from where I’d set it on the bed next to me and skimmed the pages of Leeta’s observations, the men taking photos of me in the grocery store and laughing, the teenage boys taunting me.
“I think there might be something good about being fat,” I said. It felt good to say the word fat. I had always avoided it, but it had the same thrust as fuck and the same power—an illicit f-word, the top teeth digging into the bottom lip, spewing the single syllable: fat.
“Because I’m fat, I know how horrible everyone is. If I looked like a normal woman, if I looked like you, then I’d never know how cruel and shallow people are. I see a different side of humanity. Those guys I went on the blind dates with treated me like I was subhuman. If I were thin and pretty, they would have shown me a different side, a fake one, but since I look like this, I know what they’re truly like.”
“Explain why this is a good thing.”
“It’s a special power. I see past the mask to the real person underneath. I’m not living a lie like so many other women. I’m not a fool.”
“Is Alicia a fool?”
“Alicia wants the approval of all the horrid people in the world.”
“What does Plum want?”
“Don’t talk about me in the third person anymore. This is my real life. I’m already living it, remember?”
“Okay, what do you want?”
“I don’t want their approval.”
“You wanted their approval before.”
“Well, I don’t want it now. Fuck them.”
“You sound very angry.”
“I am angry.” That was the word that was missing from my journal. “But wasn’t the purpose of the New Baptist Plan to make me angry? That’s what the confrontations and the blind dates were all about.”
“I didn’t know how you were going to react to the New Baptist Plan. It might have strengthened your resolve to have surgery.”
“It didn’t.”