Dietland by Sarai Walker Read Free Book Online

stretching into the past.
    When my mother was little she was black-and-white like them, but not round like them. On the day I was born, she looked at me and knew she would call me something other than the name she’d put on my birth certificate. “You had the darkest hair,” she said, “long enough to wrap around my fingers. Your skin was rosy pink. You were so succulent and sweet, my little Plum.”
    A pearl, a plum—roundness defined me.
    Every year on the first day of school the teacher would take attendance, and when she reached my name, she would say, “Alicia Kettle?” and then I’d have to tell her I was called Plum.
    Plum. Plump. Piggy.
    Alicia is me but not me.
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    We lived in the house on Harper Lane for five months and then we moved to our own apartment. My father stayed in Idaho and my parents got divorced. My mother’s salary as a secretary in a university biology department afforded us a place with dark woodwork that sucked up the sunlight, and carpet a vomitous orange. We lived in the apartment for a few years, until Herbert died of a stroke. Delia was so unhappy living alone that she begged us to move back to the house with the starers, the gawkers, the photograph-takers.
    The schools near Delia’s house were better for me, my mother said, and she was excited about the possibility of escaping the apartment complex with the dirty diapers floating in the pool. She had made up her mind to go, and so we went.
    In the house on Harper Lane we were under constant surveillance. Sitting at the breakfast table, I’d look up from my oatmeal to see a figure outside the front window, which would bolt away like a frightened mouse when my slipper hit the glass. In my bedroom I kept the curtains closed, but I knew they were out there. Delia and my mother didn’t seem to mind the strangers’ stares and camera lenses. When they were away from home they could escape—for them it was only temporary.
    At school, there was nowhere for me to hide. I was surrounded. There were so many of them that I never knew for certain who was looking. All day I felt the urge to turn away, to close up like a flower in the shade.
    I kept what happened at school to myself. Sometimes at the end of the day I would find spit in my hair or a note taped to my back that read DO ME A FAVOR, POP ME! My first year of high school, after an older classmate was raped in the vacant lot behind Von’s, the school offered self-defense classes for girls. When I showed up, two girls snickered and said, loudly enough for everyone else to hear, “Who’d want to rape her?”
    On the telephone to Idaho, I said: “Daddy, do you think I’m pretty?” I knew he would say yes because he was my father.
    During my sophomore year of high school, a boy asked me to the homecoming dance. I was suspicious of boys, since they never paid me any attention unless it was for name-calling or worse, but my mother insisted that I go. She dropped me off outside the school gym and I waited for the boy in the parking lot for more than an hour, the wispy ends of my homemade lavender gown dragging in pools of motor oil. The boy never came and everyone knew. They had seen.
    I wanted to become smaller so I wouldn’t be seen.
    If I was smaller they wouldn’t stare. They wouldn’t be mean.
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    AT CARMEN’S CAFé , my laptop opened before me, I couldn’t concentrate on the messages from Kitty’s readers. I’d set Verena Baptist’s book on the empty chair next to me, having read a few chapters the day before. I kept glancing at it:
Adventures in Dietland.
It wasn’t the type of book I’d normally read, but I had the urge to go home and devour its pages. I didn’t know why the girl had left the book for me or why she’d been in the Austen Tower. It seemed impossible that she could be part of Kitty’s world