by Kit Reed
“Getting fat?”
“Being beautiful.”
Amazing. Sitting opposite her designated feeder, Annie Abercrombie nods. “Way.”
“Exactly. Way.” For the first time today, Darva relaxes. She has gotten her patient inside the tent. “See, in the ultimate scheme of us in the world and the world in the universe, the whole God thing is pretty much a crapshoot, so why not give ourselves to something we can see, that we already know about? Why not devote ourselves to something we can control?”
Staggered by the resonance, Annie murmurs, “Our bodies.”
“Pretty much.”
Annie smiles. Control! She says, “So you see where I’m coming from,” and pushes the spoon away.
But instead of nodding in comprehension and agreement, Darva is shaking her head. “Not bodies,” she says slowly.
“Um, souls?”
“Body image,” Darva finishes triumphantly, and when Annie’s jaw drops in astonishment she slips in the heavily laden, dripping spoon. Validated, she closes in to stroke the throat of the stubborn, emaciated girl because now that she has brought her patient this far on the path to conversion, she knows she can make her swallow.
Inhaling the fumes, Annie shivers, excited and disgusted and then because she can’t help herself, she lets all that macaroni into her body in a single gulp. Dedicated Darva covers the tray and with a jubilant smile wipes her hands on her brown habit and leaves the room.
Oh God, oh, God! What am I going to do?
Alone in her pain and confusion, Annie struggles to get out of the Jeri chair, but in her excitement, Darva has forgotten to undo the straps. She can’t get up which means she can’t go to the bathroom and yack it up and she can’t start running in place to burn it off either. She is trapped for now, drunk on solid food and completely helpless here. What are the Dedicated Sisters trying to do here, murder her? They are.
Calories race into her. They roar around inside her body, shaking her concentration and threatening the last vestiges of control. Tears come in spite of her, but trapped as she is, Annie Abercrombie is strong. She will get out of here, she will! But how?
7
Journal Entry, Sylphania, AZ
Something funny’s going on.
In this place the road to heaven starts with torture. Oatmeal at five, take seconds and they multiply and deduct every ounce times three from your dinner plate; it’s pathetic, grown man like me reduced to stealing food. This place is all about atonement, like it’s got to be good because it’s so hard. After eating brush your teeth but never use toothpaste you can eat. Scrub your mess tray with sand and do a mile on the track before you fall in for the 7 a.m. sermon, which is followed by step aerobics, a half hour of running in place and encounter group after which you fall in for work detail. Tiger’s milk for lunch, laced with the Reverend’s special Herbal Compound, without which none of this privation would work. I don’t know what all they blenderize to make the secret, magic formula you are paying through the nose for, but you end up starved. So this is question one. Why do you end up starved?
Meanwhile the Rev’s handpicked favorites lounge up there in the clubhouse, scarfing mai tais and lobster salads before the day’s evango-mercial session, greasing each other’s lats and triceps in preparation for the shoot. The special chosen put on gold thongs and parade for the digicorders daily while I pull duty in the silo or in the hundred-degree heat down at the herb-processing shed, followed by another one of those special diet dinners that would make a rabbit puke.
I will spare you the details of the daily humiliations—huge mirror, naked you, one of the Reverend’s trusties running a ruler down your back as you step on the scale, with everybody lined up to watch. But why the humiliation? That’s question two. When I asked, the company doctor said, “It’s part of the program, are you going to get with the program or what?” Then he shoved me back in line.
We have to make food diaries, where you list every bite you planned to eat against what you actually stuffed in your mouth. Naturally the humiliation leads to you making rash promises that you can’t keep. Next you list every meager scrap you plan to eat between this Atonement Saturday and the next. Then everybody cries with you before the group hug, but God help you if you stray. Oh yes, no matter how badly you underestimated because you were embarrassed, they hold you to it, with confessions and public shamings if you slip.
Sundays we get the motivational bikini trunk show, like any of those mink thongs are ever going to fit, and just when you’re feeling inferior they make you strip to your billowing boxers and parade in all your quivering flab. You aren’t just humiliated, you are mortified. Is this what they used to mean when they talked about mortifying the flesh? To say nothing of the random cavity searches before they march us down to the herb-processing sheds where inspirational hymns play nonstop while we slaves to body image prepare the raw ingredients for the Reverend’s Herbal Compound.
They promised me happiness, and look.
Thinner, but at what cost? And how come I’m stuck in my rusty trailer while Nigel is on the fast track and the chosen are up there in the clubhouse cavorting and plotting God knows what?
Another thing. Why, when he comes down for the weekly inspection, why does the Reverend Earl look at me like a piece of phlegm he coughed up and forgot? Virtue and sacrifice, we’re taught, will be rewarded, but if thin is the true religion, are appearances everything? I’m trying, OK? The special precious chosen weigh in and then they fly up to the Afterfat, and one morning—today?—one of us will get the golden key. I’ve never seen this happen, but everybody knows. It could happen to Nigel Peters, who is standing next to me with his chest muscles flexed to extinction. It could happen to me. We are lined up in the mess hall, holding our breath.
There is a communal ripple as he comes in.
Look at him, inspecting the ranks, look at that taut, tanned body in the flowing silk shirt and white tennis shorts. The Reverend Earl preaches perfect because perfect is what he is. See the imperious glare as he surveys us, the glacial eyes, the flowing gold hair. He studies us, looking for signs of improvement. He murmurs to his accompanying angel, unassailable in the bikini and fishnet T-shirt, and she writes something on a clipboard.
Me, I think. I can’t stand much more of this. Take me.
He walks the length of the uneven line we make, shoulders squared, OK, but some of our bellies are still convex in spite of the weight loss, while some lucky few, like Nigel’s, are almost flat. He sweeps us with those cold eyes. Reverend, I’ve lost twelve pounds this week alone. I am dying for some sign that I am doing well, a faint smile—eye contact, I have been trying, I am losing, he promised so much!—but when I raise my hand his lip curls and he looks away.
“Reverend Earl.”
“Good work, men. Any questions?”
“Reverend Earl, I have a question.”
His eyes have already left the room. He is fixed on the next thing. Twelve pounds lighter and not even a blip! I’m standing there dying and the Reverend Earl is saying in that remote, onward voice of his, “Now if that’s all …”
Why, when I try so hard! “Reverend …”
“That’s enough.” He turns back. Those glacial eyes light on the next man in line. “Oh, Nigel. Nigel Peters.”
“Excuse me, Reverend, I …”
“Come with me, Nigel. I need to have a word with you.” Nigel’s eyes flicker with triumph. I hate him. I have to try. “I just wondered if you saw any—”
“Go.” The Rev turns sharply, dismissing me. “Whoever you are.”
Improvement. “Devlin.”
Annoyed, he snaps, turning on his heel as Nigel follows. “You may go, Devlin. See you in the Afterfat.”
Product, I have paid everything to everybody and done everything he said and yet I am passed over while Nigel, whom I wouldn’t buy a used car from in the real world, flashes a look of triumph over his shoulder—what is your game, Nigel?—as he goes. Put as much as I have into a pro
ject and you expect product, and now … Now here I am out in the wilderness with my belly tight and my skin hanging like a loose coverall—I’m fucking losing!—while up at the clubhouse, the Reverend Earl and his special chosen are … Oh, never mind. To make it worse, there are no women here. Correction, there are women, but there’s a half mile of desert between us. There are no saving graces in this place, no sweet touches, no woman’s hand like a scented scarf trailing across your face. Nothing but hunger and the discipline and the Reverend Earl’s promises that we sold everything to pay for, the glamour of life in the Afterfat.
And all I can think about is food.
Did you ever get exactly what you want and find out it’s not what you wanted at all?
Journal Entry, Sylphania, AZ
Today was visiting day. Don’t ask me why I was hoping for Nina. Do I miss Nina, or do I just miss … Mother brought brownies. I couldn’t look at them. I couldn’t not look at them.
I said, “Mother, what are you trying to do to me?”
“Eat,” she said. “I baked all night.”
“I’m not supposed to.” Mother, how could you, just when I’ve been doing so well. I was brave. I pushed them away.
She pushed back. “It’s practically your birthday. Go ahead.”
“I can’t.”
“You’ve been so good.” Mother as Satan, unless it was Eve, going, “One little taste won’t hurt.”
So now we were up against it. The fact that pursues every overeater like a heat-seeking missile that won’t quit. This is not your ordinary detox. With food, there is no going cold turkey. When food is your drug of choice, temptation is every day.
I was processing all this as I contemplated the brownie tin. I know what the Reverend Earl would say, he would quote what some fool academic said about money, but with a flip. In the men’s compound it was the Thursday-morning motivational lecture. Every Thursday, kind of aversion therapy of the soul. Food is shit.
But it isn’t.
I shook the tin. I could tell by the absence of rattle that the brownies were perfect, moist and dense. Mom’s best. The bastard, especially now, in the presence of temptation, I could hear the chocolate sermon, every word.
“Look at that. Chocolate. It’s shit. It even looks like shit. That’s Nature’s warning. It may look good to you right now, you know what it really is. Eat it and you know what you are eating, and when you digest it will turn into …” Shut up, Earl. What was I supposed to do, throw them back in Mother’s face?
“I made them special.” Mom’s chin was quivering. “Just one bite.”
She stared at me until I opened the tin. It didn’t look like shit. It looked like chocolate.
I didn’t care if the trusties turned me in, I tore right through the tin of brownies, three dozen in all, chocolaty, gooey, rich, I was shaking with excitement and shame. Mom said, “I miss you, honey.” She thought I didn’t see the look of contempt sliding down her face like the act curtain at a bad play.
I wiped my mouth. All gone, and so soon! I tried to stare her down. “But this is all worth it, right? I lost ninety pounds! I mean, I do look thinner, right, Mom?” She didn’t say anything. “Right?”
“I don’t know, Jerry.” She shoved another tin across the table. “You look about the same to me.”
“Bye Ma. Gotta go.”
She called after me. “You forgot your present.”
God help me, it was fudge.
8
She doesn’t want to think about it, she tries not to think about it but she can’t stop thinking about it. She thinks about it all the time. How can she think about something this superficial, with her twins lost in the wild blue and poor Annie in the clutches of those dismal women—Ralph swore they’d help! But she is. Marg Abercrombie catches her reflection in the glass door as she enters the police station and, like that! she raises her chin, preparing a face to meet the faces that she meets.
What’s wrong with me, that even with my family a shambles, all I can think about is the ruination of my face?
There is a face-lift in Marg’s future and she is scared shit. The appointment is tomorrow. Should she go or should she wait? Start now and she’ll need another every five years, like clockwork, face-lifts following her all the way to the grave. She’ll die with her face stretched to oblivion and her skin so tight that she can’t eat in public because food keeps falling out of her mouth. But what if she waits? Time undos faces. Wait too long and it can’t be done. Ralph says now that Annie’s taken care of—I wish!—its time for them to get their ducks in a row, which means he made her an appointment tomorrow at The Time Has Come. Just when she needs to give her heart to her imploding family, she’s mad with anxiety.
Outside the Missing Persons Bureau she checks her face once more and adjusts it to her satisfaction before going in. When the sergeant quits doing whatever he’s doing and looks up he will see Marg Abercrombie’s best smile, developed over time because close study has taught her that smiling masks the creases and takes people’s minds off what’s happening to your face. This isn’t vanity, it’s protective coloration. In a way, it is a privilege to watch the unconscious gallantry of a once beautiful woman who will never again be what she was.
The sergeant moves hairy paws over the litter on his desk. Odd, in a society when even missing persons’ particulars are available at a single mouse-click, he is buried in paper here. Busying himself, he moves colored folders around like the cups in a shell game, too absorbed to look up even when she clears her throat.
He is making her wait.
“Excuse me,” Marg says. She ratchets up the smile. Although it’s after midnight she has dressed carefully for this encounter. The perfect outfit, the right shoes, crap hair that will never be perfect but you have to try—back-comb it carefully so the roots won’t show because what with the distractions, poor Annie and now this, she hasn’t had time to wash away the gray. Pressed as she is now, with her twins gone and Annie in that dreadful place—my God, what if they hurt her?—Marg Abercrombie does what you do. She checks her look. She knows as well as anybody that the worse you feel, the better you have to look.
“Hang on.” The sergeant sees at a glance what Marg Abercrombie knows too well. If she was ever beautiful, that’s over. She is a dumpy, middle-aged woman, which in this society puts her pretty much beyond the pale.
She clears her throat. “I. Um, I phoned?”
The hairy sergeant shrugs and messes with his folders. By the time he remembers her, Marg is off on her own train of thought, a helpless passenger being carried into another state of mind.
When do you realize that the face you are watching is really the face of the clock measuring off your life? Marg doesn’t know. Some time between adolescent obsession with complexion flaws and the descent into midlife, the penny drops. Men don’t get this, with their resilient, coarse faces and the whiskers that keep them in shape, but Marg knows. Like a time bomb, every woman’s face is jiggered to destruct, skin first. When the job’s complete, your life is done. You may hang on for another forty years but in life in the world out there, you might as well be dead. You are no longer a viable, a.k.a. sexy woman. You are an old person, relegated to the corner of any room. It is terrible but inevitable, and all Marg can do is check daily for signs of deterioration and do everything within her power to keep it at bay.
Lady, do us all a favor. Get it done.
“Ma’am.”
For the first few years she saw no disintegration. Then she did. It wasn’t much—subtle scoring at the corners of the mouth, a slight blurring under the chin; at a dead run nobody would know, but somewhere in the back of Marg’s mind the thought unfolded and scuttled forward like a self-perpetuating hairball. Now it’s so big that it fills the room: Got to do something about this some day. All her life since then has been a holding action. Over time, she has developed techniques. The grin. Sparkle, and at first glance nobody will know. Any dentist can give you brilliant teeth but remember, smiling does
n’t stop the clock, it only slows it down. You are going to have to take measures. Put your hands on your temples and pull up. You are previewing your face-lift, although you can’t quite figure out what they’ll do with the leftover skin. You remember lifted women you’ve seen with their astonished eyebrows and telltale pleats in the cheeks. Less anxious-looking, but they still look old. Never mind. Americans believe that there’s no problem medicine can’t solve. Yank your hair back and it tightens the skin above your eyes; hold it there and you have your face-lift preview. Let go and your everything goes to hell, pouches in the cheeks and beginning bags under the eyes, fleshy junk collecting under the chin. In spite of the Botox and the collagen injections you can afford, in spite of the light lasering that of necessity followed the first chemical peel; in spite of the eye exercises and the Mouth Gym you use twice a day and in spite of all your hormone shots and royal jelly and Retin-A, the face you have picked at and creamed and tended ever since you were a kid has begun its inexorable slide down the front of your skull.
And if you can’t solve your problems, the Reverend Earl promises Solutions. What kind of solutions? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know!
“Ma’am?”
But listen, what if you go ahead with the first lift? Forget the horror stories and the tabloid photos of botched face jobs, lady, you’ll look a hell of a lot better than you will if you let it go!
“I said, Ma’am!”
Friends say, “Wow, you look so rested.” Boss asks, “Have you lost weight?”
Ralph tells her, “People will treat you differently, baby, so go for it.” Tick tick tick, Marg Abercrombie. Your appointment is tomorrow, are you going to keep it or chicken out? How can you think about face-lifts at a time like this?
“Ma’am!”
“Oh,” she says vaguely. Mind you, this surgery is a necessary distraction. When your kids are out of control, it helps to focus on the one thing you can maybe improve. “I’m sorry. I came in to report a missing person. People.”
