WITHIN ONLY A FEW DAYS of starting my new project, I had numerous requests for copies of Fuckability Theory and Adventures in Dietland. I spent hours each day addressing envelopes and lugging packages to the post office, which left less time for roaming around the city, getting into trouble.
Returning from the post office one afternoon, I turned the corner onto Thirteenth Street and saw Julia teetering down the sidewalk ahead of me, pulling a small suitcase. She was wearing her trench coat, as usual, and when she turned around—paranoid as ever—she noticed me following her. Having been discussed but not seen for so long, Julia had taken on a mythic quality. Seeing her was like spotting a nearly extinct creature; I had the urge to take a photograph or maybe look at her through binoculars.
“I’ve come for the night,” she said when I caught up to her, black streaks on her cheeks.
“What happened to your face?”
“We had a spill at work. Mascara,” she said, trying to wipe it off. “It has not been a good day, if you must know. We were unpacking a shipment. One of the interns—Abigail or Anastasia or something—actually crawled into a crate and was nearly crushed to death by several thousand eyebrow pencils. Now she’s limping. They are completely useless, those girls. Little Kittys, all of them.”
“Kittens.”
She asked me to walk ahead of her and she would follow. I was relieved that Verena and Rubí had gone to Washington, D.C., for the day to attend meetings about Dabsitaf; Verena would not have welcomed Julia’s presence.
Marlowe was startled at the sight of the two of us coming through the door of Calliope House. “She’s alive!” said Marlowe, giving Julia a quick peck on the cheek. Julia’s expression remained blank. She entered the living room, removing a plastic bag from the front pouch of her suitcase. It was filled with cosmetics.
“For the scholarship fund,” Julia said. She handed the bag to Marlowe, who explained that Julia stole high-end products from work and they sold them online, using the money to send working-class women to college.
Julia flung her trench coat over a chair and reclined on the sofa, not bothering to say anything else to Marlowe and me. “Don’t go near her,” Marlowe whispered before heading out the door. “It’ll take a while.”
“What will?”
“The transformation. Watch and see.”
Julia took off her heels and massaged her red and swollen feet, wincing as she did. She removed her silver jewelry—earrings, necklace, bracelet, and rings—and set the items on the coffee table. Then she reached into her blouse and removed her breasts. They were pink jellylike mounds that she placed on the table next to her jewelry. She slipped her arms into her blouse and contorted this way and that, removing her bra, a pink V— S— number.
After taking off her shoes, jewelry, breasts, and bra, Julia disappeared upstairs to remove her figure-hugging clothes and the Thinz that compressed her curvy body into a boyish pillar, as well as the rest of her stripper underwear. She washed her face of makeup, then showered. When she came downstairs thirty minutes later in leggings and a tank top, a ball cap on her head, she was someone else.
“It’s me, Julia,” she said when she saw my surprise, but only her voice was the same. Her face had changed from wide-eyed cartoon princess to tired thirty-something.
In the kitchen, she rummaged through the fridge and pulled out a turkey leg and mashed potatoes, as well as the pistachio ice cream and buttery shortbread I’d made earlier in the day. She spread the dishes all over the table and worked her way through them. I had wanted the turkey leg but didn’t say anything. Julia was sucking on the bones.
Normally I would have joined her by eating something myself, but I was too enthralled to do anything but watch her stuff her mouth under Eulayla Baptist’s fat jeans. She was normally so controlled. She finished the mashed potatoes and moved on to the ice cream and shortbread. “How many calories in this?” she asked, holding up a piece of shortbread, globs of grease in the corners of her mouth.
“I’d say a couple hundred each.”
“Oh no.” Julia set it down on her plate, half eaten. No one at Calliope House ever discussed calories, but Julia’s undercover work required it. In order to fit in at Austen, she had to diet.
“I’ve been binge eating lately,” she said.
“That’s what dieting does to you.”
“I can’t do this anymore. The women in my family are not lithe. This is a losing battle. You know why the women at Austen are such bitches? It’s because they’re hungry.”
“Then why don’t you stop dieting?”
“I can’t. I’ve gained weight recently. Thinz can only hold in so much. If they see that I’ve gained, they’ll know I’m not one of them. They won’t confide in me.” Everything about Julia was different here, even the way she talked.
“I’ve never been part of their club, so I don’t know what it’s like,” I said.