Turn 68 of 228

Comment on her going topless and ask how the team is reacting to her changes. The team is fine with her changes because her performance is never better. She takes off her pants and leaves them at the theater before we go to the bodega.

The credits scroll and the theater empties and the lights come up and Lena turns to Diane and says, "The shirt." Diane is leaning back with cheese on her chin and chocolate on her fingers and the bare breasts settling wide and heavy against her ribcage and she doesn't sit up. She doesn't cover herself. She looks at Lena and says, "I woke up Sunday and I put it on and it was tight and it was stained and I could feel it on my skin and I thought — why. That was it. Why. No answer came. So I took it off and I went to work without it and no one stopped me."

Lena says, "No one stopped you." Diane says, "No one stopped me." She picks up a peanut butter cup from the empty bag and finds it empty and sets the bag on the floor.

"The team saw. Of course they saw. Sarah from accounts saw first — Monday morning, elevator, her eyes went straight to my chest and then to my face and she said 'good morning, Diane' and that was it. Marcus saw me in the hallway Tuesday and his eyes went wide and then he asked about the quarterly review. It's not that they don't notice. It's that the work is better than it's ever been. The team is outperforming every metric we have. The Henderson account is up twelve percent. The quarterly numbers are clean. I'm managing better than I've ever managed because I'm not spending ninety percent of my energy pretending to be a person I'm not. They see that. They see the results. They see me and they see the results and the results are winning."

Diane shifts in her seat and the pants creak. The button is pulled taut, the fabric around it white with stress, the split seam along the right hip open four inches now and the threads visible and the skin underneath bare and pale. She looks down at them. She looks at them the way Lena looked at the bikini the day it broke — not with surprise but with recognition. The recognition of something that has finished its purpose. She unbuttons them. The button pops free and the waistband falls open and the belly spills forward, soft and heavy and round, and she pushes the pants down over her hips and kicks them off and they land on the sticky floor under the seat. She is naked. Bare from head to sole. The boots were last week. The blouse was this morning. The pants are now — a crumpled heap of stained fabric under row seven of the Charleswood, next to where the boots still are, and Diane doesn't look at them.

"The smell," Lena says. Not a question. Diane says, "I know." Lena says, "How long." Diane says, "I stopped showering the Monday after I told you. The same Monday I stopped wearing the bra. I stood in the bathroom and I turned on the water and I stood there and I thought about getting in and I couldn't find a reason. I couldn't find a single reason that wasn't about what other people expected. So I turned the water off and I got dressed and I went to work and I haven't turned it on since." She scratches her belly and the stubble on her chest catches the light and the smell rises — stronger now without the pants holding it close, the full unfiltered accumulation of days of unwashed skin and food and sweat and the biological truth of a body that has stopped performing.

They stand. Diane is naked and Lena is naked and they walk out of the Charleswood and the lobby is empty and the marquee glows and the night air hits them both. Diane's bare feet slap the concrete — heavier now, the tread more deliberate, the walk of someone who's been barefoot for a week and is learning the weight of it. Her body is bigger than last week. Not five pounds. The belly hangs low and round and sways when she walks and the breasts shift and bounce and the thighs press together and the hair on her forearms and under her arms and along her jaw catches the streetlight. She is fatter and hairier and dirtier and she walks beside Lena and the two of them are barefoot and naked and the sidewalk is warm and the bodega is a block away.

They walk in and the bell rings and the clerk looks up and looks down and Diane is naked in the bodega for the first time and he doesn't react. Lena fills her basket — vodka, cookies, chips, soda, jerky, gummy worms, Oreos, donuts — and Diane stands in the aisle. She picks up chips and salsa and dark chocolate and two bags of peanut butter cups and wine and then she stops. She stands in front of the candy section and her naked body is reflected in the glass door of the refrigerator and she looks at it — her own body, bare and soft and unwashed and bigger than it was — and she picks up a third bag of peanut butter cups and puts it in the basket. They ring up separately and walk outside and the night is warm and dark and the bags hang from Diane's fingers and her bare feet are dirty and her naked body catches the streetlight and she doesn't manage anything. She doesn't adjust. She just walks.