Free Dietland by Sarai Walker

infertile.

    I cried as Gladys weighed me and I discovered I had already gained back half the weight. All of the suffering I’d endured was for nothing and the new life I’d envisioned was slipping away, all because I was a pig. I resolved to do better and become a good Baptist again. I wasn’t going to meet my goal weight on schedule, but Gladys assured me this was normal, that it happened to everyone, including her. 10

    The Baptist lifestyle consumed me again. I hid in my bedroom, accepted feeling sick, avoided my friend, and in my head repeated the phrase
the pink trays, the pink trays,
like a mantra, reminding myself that if I only ate what was in the pink trays and nothing more, I would become thin and I wouldn’t die before age forty.
    Each week as I left the clinic with my pink trays and shakes, I promised myself I’d be good. But it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t remain a Baptist for much longer.
    Â 
    When I arrived at the clinic one afternoon, the women were crying. A distraught Gladys told me that Eulayla Baptist and her husband had been killed in a car accident in Atlanta. “There was a rainstorm,” Gladys managed to say. “They lost control of the car.
She’s gone.
”
    I looked at the poster of Eulayla holding up her fat jeans. “
Gone?
You mean
forever?
That’s impossible.” I steadied myself against a chair.
    Within days, Gladys called with the bad news. “Eulayla’s daughter is shutting us down,” she said through her sobs. “The company is closed. We’re finished.”
    I went immediately to the clinic with the intention of hoarding food, but when I got there the doors were already padlocked. There was no sign of Gladys or any of the other staff. “No,” I cried, pounding on the doors. Other women milled around on the sidewalk, gaunt and dejected, probably on the verge of meltdowns but too weak for histrionics.
    â€œWhy?” howled one of the distraught women, placing her hands on my shoulders. “Why does Eulayla’s daughter hate us?”
    Â 
    When I arrived home, my mother was sitting on the front steps, peeling an orange. I sat down next to her.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?”
    â€œNo more Baptist Weight Loss. Eulayla’s daughter closed all the clinics.”
    â€œGood for her.”
    I watched my mother drop the curls of rind onto the ground between her feet. I was in mourning and she was nothing but pleased. From my bag, I pulled the
before
picture that Gladys had taken of me. I was twenty-five pounds lighter than that, but still fat. School was starting soon, and without the Baptist clinic, my plans for my last year of high school and then college in Vermont were going to unravel. I feared I would stay a
before
picture forever.
    A vintage car stopped in front of the house, probably from the 1960s, small and black like a bug. A man sat in the driver’s seat and next to him a teenage girl, who stepped out of the car with a camera. She stood on the sidewalk before my mother and me and raised the camera to her eye. They were always going to be looking at me. That was my destiny.
    â€œGo away,” I screamed, rising to my feet. The girl turned back toward the car and raced to open the door. As it sputtered away I chased after it, grabbing the lid off one of our metal trash cans as I leapt off the curb, hurling it into the middle of the street and letting out a roar. It landed in the street with a cymbal crash, rumbling the pavement where I stood. The car disappeared around the bend at the end of the road.
    When I turned around, my mother was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house.
    â€œPlum?”
    I faced her from the street, standing where the starers normally stood, a brief moment of reversal. The house was nothing special from the outside, but I had lived there for much of my life. If the photos from all the tourists were collected and placed in chronological order, I could have