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  To Jeff, who makes my dreams come true every day

  If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies and eaten alive.

  —AUDRE LORDE

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Everyone hated a fat woman, but none more than she hated herself.

  Alice knew this to be true. Today’s proof? She, along with six other substantial women, stood in the parking lot avoiding each other, as though their abundance of flesh might transfer from body to body, despite all waiting to board the bus for the same reason: “the unique opportunity to spend an entire month exploring ways to bring yourself into balance.”

  Balance, as written in the Waisted brochure, implied weighing less. The virtually memorized pamphlet tucked in Alice’s jeans pocket promised a new life. The women scuffled in the leaves in the parking lot of a designated Dunkin’ Donuts—a meeting place Alice suspected, for no good reason, had been chosen with deliberate irony. She pushed away thoughts of mean-spirited motivation, chalking up her suspicion to nerves and rising hints of buyer’s remorse.

  The thick smell of donuts blew around with the scent of fall leaves. As Alice shuffled from her right to left foot, pulling her suede jacket tight against the wind, a redheaded white woman approached with an outstretched hand.

  “I’m Daphne.” Being much shorter, she had to look up at Alice. “And nervous as hell.”

  Before Alice could do more than shake Daphne’s hand, a uniformed woman came into view, self-importance emanating from her stiff shoulders to the black pen she clicked on and off.

  “No talking, ladies. Line up, tell me who you are, and then march on board.” She checked names against a paper fastened to a red clipboard. One at a time, the women climbed the steps of a repurposed school bus. After the last participant dragged her crazy-wide thighs up the stairs as though this ascension were an Olympian event, the woman in charge marched aboard.

  “Listen up. I’m the driver. Here are your rules.” Though she wore no cap, an invisible one seemed perched on her head. “You will have five minutes for any last texts or emails that you wish to send. After that, you will give me your cell phones and wallets. Tell your loved ones you’ll speak to them in four weeks. Until that time—”

  Daphne, her voice breaking, raised her hand. “What if—”

  The stern woman held up a hand. “No exceptions will be made. Every one of you signed agreements containing this information. You will be allowed to write letters. This is not meant as punishment; it’s your first step in freedom from your past. From this moment on, you concentrate on yourselves and no one else.”

  Alice stared at her phone, pulled up the keyboard, and then closed the screen. She repeated the exercise three times until shutting off the device. She’d already sent all the explanations to her husband that she could muster. To her parents as well. Additional messages wouldn’t help justify her actions.

  The driver walked down the aisle, hand out. When receiving each phone, she peeled off a sticker—a small name tag, it turned out—and placed it on the back of the device. “To ensure you get the right phone back,” she explained.

  After handing over her phone, Alice unfolded the creased and much-read brochure.

  “Waisted: Where You Discover You Can,” the luminous cover announced.

  A photo of a sprawling mansion, rays of sun shining through clouds and dappling the windows with sparkling promise, covered the front. Adirondack chairs dotted the green lawn. Giant sunflowers waved from a garden in the distance. Muscular women with strong-looking legs lay on straw mats.

  An avalanche of fancy words for slimming down drew her, once again, like a magic potion. Idealized photos revealed attractive, plump women in yoga positions, diving into a pool, and sitting cross-legged in circles. Alice read again the quote she’d highlighted in yellow. “ ‘If there is no struggle, there is no progress.’—Frederick Douglass.”

  She pushed away thoughts about the brief paragraph regarding filming for educational purposes.

  None of the women sat far from the front of the bus, though nobody shared any of the bench seats. They only darted covert glances at one another. As though imitating the brochure, they formed a virtual UNICEF poster of heavy women: white, black, Hispanic, Korean, and Indian. And then there was Alice, representing mixed race, though who knew into which category they’d slotted her.

  Alice tried to ignore her period cramps and the nausea brought on by exhaust fumes. Perhaps the first test of fortitude “as you embark upon a journey of inner exploration to reevaluate your lives and learn how the mind-body connection affects your body,” was this bumpy ride to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. After traveling for hours, Alice wanted to separate from both her outer and inner explorers. Sleep threatened to overtake her, the day having begun with an early train ride from Boston to Springfield.

  Alice needed food, water, and ibuprofen.

  The women surrounding her were dressed as though they were headed to a brunch attended by friends they wanted to impress. Without phones, zoning out with headphones and a playlist was impossible. A dark-skinned woman with red glasses clutched an unread paperback, but most of them simply gazed out the window.

  After three hours, they left the highway and turned onto a two-lane state road. Neither homes nor businesses appeared on either side. The area seemed deserted.

  The driver made a sharp left, though no identifying marker beckoned from anywhere, and steered the bus up a narrow paved road. After driving up as though on the ascent of a roller coaster, the ride evened out as the road gave way to tamped-down dirt. They slowed to a crawl along a single-lane road bordered by a low rock wall until reaching an open area fenced in by barbed wire. Here the bus entered a road bisecting a magnificent field strewn with fiery maple leaves until resuming its journey to the top of a long circular driveway.

  Alice put a hand to her heart as the vehicle shuddered to a stop. From this vantage point, high up a mountain, she beheld the breathtaking view: multiple valleys colored by a riot of October colors.

  “You’ve arrived.” The driver’s sardonic grin unnerved Alice. “Enjoy.”

  Across two football fields’ worth of grass loomed a yellow mansion, topped with a copper-topped cupolaed roof. A vast white porch curved around the building.

  The women exited the bus and walked the long brick path leading to a set of broad perfectly painted brown stairs.

  Hanging from a porch beam swung a cryptic wooden sign.

  Welcome to Privation.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  ALICE

  Seven Years Previously

  When Alice Regina Thompson arrived at her parents’ home in Boston, she could only be described as emaciated by love. Broken love. Although she was twenty-eight, and although she’d lived in New York City since college, the rambling Victorian still epitomized home to her.

  Her jutting clavicles and razored cheekbones panicked her parents. Despite having been early enrollees in the war against sugar, Alice’s mother and father raced to the kitchen and prepared butter-soaked, syrup-drenched stacks of pancakes.

  Alice wanted to please them, but she couldn’t take a single bite. She apologized, left the table, and climbed the stairs to her still-intact girlish bedroo
m. Tears fell as she tortured herself with images of the man from whom she had wrenched herself; the man who had lied to her for four straight years. Still, hope trickled even as she wept, thrilled that she could feel her hip bones poking through her jeans, excited by the newly concave bowl of her stomach.

  The crazy white boy her parents called him—which made more sense coming from her black father than from her white mother. Patrick had reeled her in with a patchwork of menace and musical genius, with his buzz-cut hair, his scruffy leather jacket, his boyish-tough ways. Dope dealing (minor, she assured herself) and gun carrying (just for show) had excited her at twenty-four—Alice being the child of her parents’ straight-laced love, spiked with politics and doing the right thing. Her parents’ goodness somehow brought on her bad-boy habit.

  Perhaps having sensed that Alice was wising up, Patrick gave her an engagement ring—an oversized marble of emerald that flashed each time she moved her hand. A coke-deal-fueled piece of bling, a ring even a girl as unschooled in jewels as Alice would know to be worth multiple thousands of dollars.

  And then Alice found out about the not-exciting wife back in Louisiana. Soon that gumball of a ring was financing her return to Boston.

  Whispered parental conferences culminated in convincing her that a regular job, a well-paying job, a do-gooder job, using that public policy degree for which they were still paying New York University, would cure her of Patrick.

  The underused Cobb Community Center needed a manager, a perfect position for Alice. There she stumbled into a long-won neighborhood war, played out through basketball games so intense the multihued crowds of spectators resembled West Side Story. Alice, born and raised in the Mission Hill section of Boston where the Cobb was situated, understood this cast implicitly. The community was mixed enough to fight Boston’s past as a racist city—and mixed enough to confront the reality of the present.

  Alice inherited two staff members: a dedicated custodian and an apathetic athletic director, Dave, who earned his check by reading the Boston Herald, flirting with the neighborhood girls, and inflating the balls piled in his office. Neither a slower reader nor a less successful flirt had ever existed.

  By her second day at the Cobb, Alice noticed the sad girls halfheartedly jumping rope in a corner and boys throwing deflated volleyballs short distances, appearing hopeless about the chances of escaping the room’s perimeter.

  “Give the little kids some time,” she told Dave. “Tell the guys to take a break.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” he asked. Then he chuckled, unaware how laughing marked his possible future collecting unemployment.

  Alice marched from his office into the cavernous gym, forcing her way through the crowd of sweaty bodies.

  “Give me a moment!” she yelled at full volume. The young men running on the court continued passing and throwing balls as she stood on the parquet flooring. The smell of rubber assaulted her as the basketballs whizzed by.

  The young men on the court that day were black. Dave was white. Alice appeared both or neither, depending on the eyes of the beholder. Being overlooked by any culture came as no shock to her.

  Patient and expressionless, she waited. The boys continued running around her as though she were a prop.

  The ball flew over her head. When they ran by, their skin brushed hers.

  Alice had learned endurance from her father, along with sports, manners, and the gift of analyzing situations. Her mother had passed on the gene for righteousness. Both parents taught her the benefits of determination.

  Alice, who stood five foot ten and change, darted out and up and caught the ball while Dave, slack-jawed, stared from the entrance.

  “Give me your whistle,” she said.

  Dave ignored her, though whether from disrespect or disbelief, Alice didn’t know. He gaped as he took in the scene, turning his head from her to the guys as though weighing odds and betting on the boys.

  She threw him the kind of stare that her father would have thrown. Zeke had been one of the first black basketball players from his hometown of Madison, a small city outside Atlanta, to receive a college scholarship. Her father took no shit, whether as a tenacious point guard or during his tenure coaching basketball and teaching history at Boston’s venerable English High School.

  Dave lifted the lanyard from his neck. Alice put it on. She wiped the mouthpiece, blew once, twice, and then, when she realized she needed to blow it a third time, she continued until every one of them stopped running around screaming at her to hand over the ball.

  “Out. Under your own power, please. Calling the cops is the last thing I want to do today.” Alice had learned the art of talking tough without a bit of screech from her mother, who barely topped five feet. Bebe, a delicately pretty girl who had no interest in sleeping with the local hoods, needed backbone growing up in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

  The young men shuffled out with sneers and narrowed eyes, sucking their teeth and muttering. The little kids, wide-eyed at seeing their heroes/bullies vanquished, tiptoed out after them.

  “Lock it up, Dave,” Alice instructed.

  He shook his head and cocked an eyebrow, maybe wondering why God sent this stupid woman to mess up his perfect setup. Then he locked the doors.

  “They’re gonna be real mad.” Clearly, Dave believed the toughs would win the war.

  Ten minutes later, Alice taped up an oversized rectangle of cardboard. Scrawled in thick black Magic Marker was the following:

  Gym Closed Due to Lack of Respect. Will Reopen in One Week.

  Rules and Schedules Will Be Posted at That Time.

  When the gym reopened, the problems disappeared. There was an understanding now: the guys needed the basketball court; Alice required policies. They called her Miss Alice. She treated them well, helping them find jobs, get back in school, and advising them on how to fill out tax forms and open bank accounts. Memories of Patrick-the-crazy-white-boy-married-musician faded as she worked on changing this one corner of the world.

  Soon she met Clancy Rivera. The tall column of confidence, a filmmaker as shiningly groomed as the musician had been deliberately ragged, captured Alice’s heart. He appeared outlined in truth.

  Once again she began to eat.

  • • •

  Seven years later, the Cobb boasted a preschool program, senior exercise classes, an after-school center, a ceramic workshop, and adult education ranging from graphic design to online literacy. Alice and her board of directors hunted for funds weekly. Today, for example, she was laboring on a small grant for a new stage curtain, which she hoped to install before winter.

  As Alice leaned toward her computer, her skirt band dug into her ever-expanding waist. Rather than working through lunch, she should have been downstairs lifting weights. Jumping rope. Walking the treadmill. Instead, Alice slipped a handful of orange Goldfish from the box she supposedly kept for the kids who ran in and out of her office.

  Calm reigned at the Cobb at two o’clock, before the onslaught that occurred when school let out. The library, art room, and dance studio waited, empty. A few lonesome old-timers walked in circles around the gym, relaxed in their no-name sneakers. During these sacred hours, they stretched or threw a ball without fear of the neighborhood hotshots—who were sleeping off the previous night’s high—or school kids hogging all the space.

  By three, the place would fill up as though Alice were giving away candy. For now, though, she enjoyed silence as the staff prepared for the day, or, more likely, hid from her to gossip, flirt, or text unseen. They hated her “no cell phones turned on while working” rule, always trying to circumvent it by swearing to sick children, about-to-die fathers, and at-death’s-door grandmothers. Each time, she reminded them that the Cobb had a phone and someone who answered it.

  The front door opened with a screech, a warning sound she appreciated. Too often she was alone in her office, and over the years, there’d been incidents. Addicts shot up in the bathroom on a regular basis—as did women in business s
uits who worked at the nearby insurance company. Hidden caches of stolen computers and phones would be sold in the basement unless Alice remained vigilant.

  Footsteps sounded. “Hello? Anyone here?” a woman called.

  Alice recognized the voice. Her assistant director’s ex-wife. She rose and pulled at the constricting waistband of her skirt rolled into a bent circle of sweaty agony. She shrugged on the light cotton cardigan to cover her sleeveless top, stuffed her feet back into her low-heeled pumps, and walked to the lobby.

  “Evie,” Alice said. “Long time.”

  “Yup. Pretty long. Ken here?” Evie’s sour expression didn’t presage a friendly visit. Before Ken and Evie’s bitter split, she visited often, kidding around with Alice. Now, with Alice on Ken’s side, their interactions were frosty. Ken had cheated on Evie and lied, but he had also been Alice’s second in command from year one. It killed Alice, but she counted on Ken too much to carry Evie’s water, so she remained on Team Ken.

  “Where is he?” Evie asked. “The boys are outside. He’s missed the last two visits.”

  Alice tried to think of a proper walk-the-line response that was sisterly to Evie while also loyal to Ken. “How are they?”

  “How are who?”

  “The twins. JD and Bennie. I’d love to see them.”

  “Well, that makes one of you who works here.” Evie tipped her head to the side. “He owes me September child support. It was due on the first.” She peered down her glasses and nodded, in total agreement with herself. “So, where is he?”

  “He’s not coming in for another two hours.”

  Evie stayed silent, as though sweating information out of Alice.

  “Tonight he’ll work late. There’s a game. Ken has to lock up.” The quiet became uncomfortable. “Looking good, by the way. Great.”

  “I lost weight.” Evie swept her eyes up and down Alice. “Meanwhile, you went and got even fatter. You pregnant again?”