Chapter 9 #2
The tiny reception room, with its mirrored back panel full of Killer Body bars, shakes and jars of supplements, has room for only one chair.
On the wall behind the chair is a floor-to-ceiling poster of Julie Larimore against a glossy red background.
She’s wearing the red-enamel pendant, the black dress, with the slit and the perfect legs.
Above her is the slogan, printed in black against all that red: You have to want the body.
I turn my back to it, wait for my turn.
The receptionist must have wanted the body, because she has it.
“Welcome,” she says, then frowns, as if trying to remember my face. “I’m filling in for Joyce today, going to be your counselor.” She reaches for a large file. “What’s your number?”
That’s a new one. How could Lisa have paid for membership in an organization where she was a number? What could have made her that desperate, that self-demeaning?
The girl does everything but drum her fingers, waiting for my reply.
They’re nice fingers, too, with shell-pink polish that matches the stripe on her navy tank top and pants.
Her face, in dimmer light, might be attractive.
Here, with sun streaming through the window, she’s no Julie Larimore, but she does have a killer body.
“Your number?” She strains for a smile, just about makes it.
“I can’t remember.”
“That’s okay. What’s your name?”
“Lisa Tilton.” I say it before I can reconsider this biggest of lies. In my wildest dreams, I could never be Lisa Tilton.
She surveys me for a moment, taking me in, and I’m scared. I’ve just pretended to be my cousin, and I’m scared.
“Oh, Lisa. Here you are.” She pulls out a plastic-clad green card. “You’re eighteen forty-five, just so you know. Let’s go back to a private office where we can chat. Want me to weigh you in first?”
I’m not sure how to answer that. Finally, clutching the card, I say, “Sure.”
We go into a private room off the reception area.
She motions to the scale, a flat, black bed on the floor, a digital device on the table beside it.
I experience immediate recall of everything I’ve eaten in the past week, maybe longer.
That salmon at Bobby Warren’s party collides with the cheeseburger I ate yesterday, the Heineken I had with it.
Immediately, I step out of my clogs. Not enough. I remove my watch, too clunky, really. I ought to get rid of it. Damn, I need to get rid of everything except the fillings in my teeth.
She witnesses my frantic removal in silence, as if she sees it every day, which she probably does. Then it’s just the two of us, the piped-in music and the scale.
I drank a beer last night, I want to say. Ate a burger. Instead, I suck it up and climb on that big, black teller of truth. Digital numbers flash all over the place. I look to her for guidance. How the hell long should I keep standing here?
She touches my arm in answer to that unspoken question. I all but leap off the scale.
“You’re up a little bit.” She whispers it, although there is no one to hear.
“How much?”
“Just a couple of pounds. Fine for your height, really.” She grins. “Your goals are even more ambitious than mine. Makes it tough sometimes. But you’ve done great, amazing, really, especially considering where you started.”
“Which was?”
“How soon we forget.” She taps the plastic-shrouded paper. “We’re looking at some serious weight loss here.”
I study this revealing sheet of statistics, see the dropping numbers and get angry all over again. How could any professional think this kind of loss could be normal?
At the end of each week, someone had scrawled time, date and initials next to Lisa’s stats. I don’t want to give away anything, but I have to know.
“I’d like to talk to my regular counselor,” I say. “Could you set me up with an appointment?”
“Joyce? Sure thing.” She takes the card once more. “Let’s see. You started about a year ago, right?” Before I can answer, confusion clouds her eyes. “What are you trying to pull on me?”
Sweat breaks out on my neck. I’m caught, and I know it. “What do you mean?”
“Tell me.” She slams her hands on her hips. “Are you from Corporate, one of Mr. Warren’s spies? ’Cause if you are, lady, you can tell him I do Killer Body by the book. I’m a good employee, a great employee. You tell Corporate how good I am, and you’d better not lie.”
“I’m not a spy for Mr. Warren,” I say. “What could possibly make you think that?”
“This.” She shakes Lisa’s chart in my face. “We always initial the forms after every meeting. Your last five were stamped in by Corporate. Explain that, why don’t you?”
I’m angry by the time I get to the newspaper.
I don’t care that I’m wearing only sweats and a T-shirt.
Or that my unruly hair is sticking up like feathers.
Or that makeup hasn’t touched my face. I can only see the Killer Body woman’s know-it-all sneer, her smug indifference at the information on the card that should have screamed danger to anyone who can think.
Through the roaring in my ears, I keep hearing that damning word. “Corporate.”
Dennis Hamilton’s office door is closed, meaning he’d prefer not to be disturbed.
I storm in. He’s working on his computer, back to the door, but whirls around when he hears me.
I know how it feels to be taken by surprise and know in that flash of his pale eyes that he hasn’t gotten over what happened with us that night any more than I have.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“What’s wrong?”
Only now do I realize my hand is shaking, and that I am clutching Lisa’s Killer Body card.
“I yanked it out of her hands,” I say. “It was my cousin’s. I just took it.”
“Sit down. Tell me.”
The simple commands, his raspy voice, connect with the sane part of me, the part that feels buried. I let them guide me out of the pitch-black cave where I’ve been lost since my visit to Killer Body.
I do as he says. I sit. But my hands still tremble.
Trying to explain them away, I say, “I am so damned pissed.”
“Can I look at that?” He gets up and comes around the desk, closes the door.
Standing next to me, he waits. I hand over the card, and he sits in the chair beside me.
He doesn’t just look at the card; he reads it, both sides.
Then he glances up at me, his pale-green, bloodshot eyes almost the same color as his faded khaki shirt. “How’d you get this?”
“I went back to that place. Didn’t say I was press this time.” I force myself to say the rest of it. “Said I was Lisa.”
“Shit.”
“I know. But look at the last five entries, Den.”
“Quite a drop.”
“Not just the weight, the signature.”
“It’s not a signature. It’s a stamp.”
“Exactly. Killer Body Corporate, the counselor said. She was pissed, thought I was some kind of spy for Bobby Warren.”
“It doesn’t surprise me that he has spies.”
I take the card from him, look at the KB stamp again. I can’t sit still. I want to confront Bobby Warren, make him tell me what he and his people did to my cousin.
“Come on.” Hamilton nudges me. “You want some coffee?”
“One more ounce of caffeine, and I’ll be swinging from this acoustical fake ceiling.”
“A walk, then?”
His face is too close, his smile too decent. He stiffens and removes both.
“Den.”
“I know. Just trust me on this one.” He opens the office door, and somehow, we’re moving down the polished floor to the stairs. He goes first, and I follow, watching his khaki back as his scuffed shoes take the stairs ahead of me.
The front office is relatively quiet. Since management installed an automated teller in the lunch room, employees no longer line up in the front lobby to get cash at the classified counter.
One of the classified reps, a pretty, prematurely silver-haired woman, gives me one of her brilliant smiles as we pass. I know that she’s heard about my cousin’s death. I try to smile back.
A security guard barely looks up as Den and I head through the gate and out the front door.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” I say. “I ought to have waited Until I thought it out a little better.”
He frowns and tells me what I need to hear. “You did exactly what you should have done. You know that.”
Yes, I do.
In spite of the hundreds of employees who occupy this building, there is a feeling of family at the newspaper.
The kind of family whose members donate their sick time to a circulation department employee when her husband is dying of cancer.
The kind of family that adopts a school in an at-risk district, and backs up the commitment with both hands-on time reading to kids, and with money.
The kind of family that, in this age of corporate cutbacks, has an annual holiday lunch for employees and retirees so crowded it has to be served in two shifts—that produces its own corny talent show, on company time, to raise money for United Way.
Often dysfunctional, always connected, this family of almost eight hundred who work here share more than a job.
I know that’s why I came back here, to Hamilton, to the paper.
Because going through the motions in this building of otherwise-occupied co-workers is somehow more healing than spending time with my aunt or Pete, whose hell of tears and guilt is as fierce as mine.
And, yes, because being here—pretending that I’m still part of this buzz of motion and commotion—telling myself that I matter, is a little bit better than being alone.
A joit of cold air hits as we walk out onto the steps, and I realize I am not dressed for the weather. I also realize my face must be flushed with heat.
“I’m still so pissed, Den.”
“I know.” He walks down the steps beside me. “After what happened, my divorce, some other stuff, I saw the company shrink.”
I feel the guilt warming my face. I did the same thing when I heard about his promotion—on the day after my first and only night in his bed. “You, too?”