Authors: Laurel Doud
This Body (39 page)
Perhaps, but she realizes she can't cut herself off completely from them any more than she was able to cut herself off completely
from her own family. Yes, she is going to have to live her own life, just as Ben should — but not as selfishly as Thisby did,
and truer to one's self than Katharine did.
She had given Goodfellow the gray tones; perhaps now she's found them herself. The yin-yang was a nice concept, but it was
only a concept. Nothing is so definite, so separate, so defined in life. And Katharine was beginning to think there was a
certain strength in that.
“Come on in, Quince. I'm wide awake.”
As you grow older, you'll find that the only things you regret are the things you didn't do.
— Z
ACHARY
S
COTT
,
Mildred Pierce
(1945)
“
Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice
.
“
That depends on where you want to get to,” said the Cat
.
“
I don't much care where,” said Alice
.
“
Then it doesn't matter which way you go,” said the Cat
.
She's taking the feline's advice; she's hitting the road and it doesn't matter which way she goes.
The Chinaman was right. A plethora of paths. A phantasm of forks. A congestion of crossroads
.
Katharine realized she had tried to parent Thisby herself, but it hadn't worked. She was going to have to let go of Thisby
as a parent. As any parent would. Growing up, letting go, and moving on. Wasn't that the way it was with everyone? Why had
she forgotten that?
She could stay, the Bennets would have her, Quince would have her, but this is the price she will have to pay — for sanity,
for a life forged for Katharine and Thisby, in all their strengths and their weaknesses.
Letting go to survive. But surviving didn't mean reinventing herself, it didn't mean rediscovering herself. It meant opening
herself up enough to be able to embrace Thisby. It meant integration and then, ultimately, invention, for wasn't she creating
something — somebody — entirely new? For neither extreme — Thisby/Katharine, black/white, yin/yang — was healthy or honest.
It's somewhere in between. It's in searching for the balance
.
She traded in the Porsche and bought a Jeep Renegade with a detachable hardtop. Yes, she'll admit it. She half bought it because
of its name.
Assume a virtue
…
Don't fuck with me, bubba, I've got a dog, two gas tanks, a tattoo, and a fifth gear that will turn you into roadkill
.
She adopted a dog from Quince's veterinary clinic, an attack-trained German shepherd she named Moriarty. He takes his role
as the bodyguard very seriously. She is now loved enough to die for.
She had the tattoo of the two-faced woman permanently inked above her heart. The artist explained to her that it was in actuality
a Janus symbol, one face looking back at the past, the other looking forward into the future. Janus is also the god of beginnings,
of gates, doorways, and entrances, so her tattoo is now the portal into her new heart.
She has money. She sold off most of Thisby's possessions to the pawnbroker. If she's frugal, she can go a long way before
she gets down to the seeds and stems.
Seeds and stems. Drug lingo. From the Woodstock generation
. Maybe they'll go north toward Ashland. She hears there are communes in Oregon. The same ones that were started during the
sixties. Maybe she'll drop in.
But she hopes they have grown up too, because the Woodstock generation didn't have it right either. “If it feels good, do
it.” “Love the one you're with.”
All of that disregarded the connections you have, must have, with the people around you. If you can defy those connections,
then that only erects the wall that separates you from everyone else, including yourself
.
She may not know which way she's going to go exactly, but another thing she's discovered on this excellent adventure of hers
is that
you cannot do everything you want to just because you put your mind to it. You can't have everything you want just because
you want it. You do not always get what you deserve
.
Katharine wanted to go back to her family, but she found out there are just some things she couldn't change and had to let
go of the idea that she could.
You learn what you're supposed to learn, but you don't get to go back — not always. No matter how much you wish it
.
But she also realized that she couldn't give up, let the winds of life batter her back and forth. She began to understand
that people are reactive creatures, but if they're not careful, they'll live in reaction, as characters in a play within a
play, never taking over and commanding a starring role in their own lives.
My starring role now, so to speak, is to live — and to connect
.
Quince will be going to the Ashland summer seminar for high school students in a few weeks. Katharine will drop by and say
hello, and then she'll go on to Wyoming. Ben's got a summer job there, mucking out horse stables and mending fence posts.
Just what he asked for. Marion is planning on visiting him too.
She'll see the both of them.
Harrison Ford is his neighbor, and maybe she'll meet him, him and his second wife and their couple of kids. By his first wife,
he has two grown sons — Ben and Willard.
Yes, like the horror movie rat, Ben, and his twitchy human master, Willard. Ford didn't name his kids after characters from
a movie any more than I did. But it makes for a good story, doesn't it?
Hidden stories. Hidden lives. Hidden pictures. The MacGuffin. Kitchen appliances drawn into the scene of a forest. The knot
in the tree trunk is also the lid of a pot. Things are hardly ever what they seem.
And that's okay because I'm making this up as I go.
Please you to see the epilogue …?
— N
ICK
B
OTTOM
,
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, 5.1.360
They called her Katharine that did talk of her, but she lied, in faith, for they also called her plain Kate and bonny Kate
and sometimes Kate the curst, and now they will call her KT. No, not Katie. KT. Katharine/Thisby. An amalgamation. A comingling.
A grafting.
Sometimes she still can't help but wonder whether this other existence is but a three-second dream before she really dies
in that bed of hers next to Philip, her heart exploding in her chest. It's just seconds long as she mounts a short but steep
flight of stairs, almost a ladder, entwined with clusters of bright blue flowers, imagining a lifetime, only to feel the hands
of Death once more.
You may ask, will she try her word again? It's always there in the frontal lobe of her brain. She doesn't know. Two bodies
may be enough. Two lives may be enough.
She doesn't know.
Maybe I should know better, but I don't.
Say the magic word, KT.
Wait
…
FADE OUT
Laurel Doud on writing
This Body
The first question many people ask me is “What is your book about?”
When I tell them it's about Katharine, a working wife and mother of two teenagers who dies suddenly and wakes up a year later
in the body of Thisby, a twenty-two-year-old drug addict who has just overdosed on her Los Angeles bathroom floor, and in
that year Katharine's husband has remarried and her children have seemingly moved on without her,
invariably
the second question people ask is “Good heavens, how did you think of that?”
My stock answer is the honest one: it had been a really bad week.
My children were fifteen and thirteen at the time — difficult ages in anyone's book — and I woke up one morning feeling poor,
unattractive, and unappreciated. I thought that I would just like to die and start all over again. But then I realized that
I didn't want to be reincarnated with a clean slate for a mind and a baby for a body. I also realized I didn't want to do
junior high or high school again. (Shudder.) So I decided I would like to die and come back in the body of a twenty-two-year-old
(and, therefore, perfectly legal;
I'm much more Katharine, I have to admit — sometimes more than I'd like to admit — than Thisby
) with all my memories intact, and I would be thin, rich, and desired by all kinds of new and interesting men.
That's my romantic side.
My pragmatic side said, “Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it. You want to be thin? Okay, we'll make you so
thin you look anorexic. You want to be rich? Well, then we'll make your money come from drug dealing. You want to be desired
by all kinds of new and interesting men? We'll make sure they're
really
interesting.”
And suddenly I had the idea for a story — an idea that could perhaps sustain me through the length of a novel.
In the beginning, my audience consisted of two: my daughter and my son. I thought that if this fantasy/nightmare were really
to happen and my children were left motherless, I'd want them to have something in writing about how I felt about raising
teenagers, growing older and hanging on to youth, about love and lust, longings and addictions, and about knowing “best” yet
letting people make their own mistakes and learn their own truths.
My publisher calls
This Body
“a novel of reincarnation,” but it really isn't. It's a novel of transmigration, which is defined by the
Oxford English Dictionary as
“the passage of the soul at death into another body.” (
I am
a research librarian by profession!)
It's a minor point, and it really doesn't matter whether it's technically reincarnation or transmigration. For me it was a
plot device to explore issues I find much more interesting. If you had a second chance at youth — with all your knowledge,
experience, and “wisdom” intact — would it make a difference? By putting Katharine's brain and soul into Thisby's body, I
could play with all kinds of questions: Where is our love? Our lust? Are they in the mind or the body? What controls our addictions?
If our mind isn't addicted, can it overpower its drug-dependent host, or are there demands of the body that ultimately cannot
be ignored? Does the body hold memory? Are our experiences imprinted into our very synapses? Can we tap into them? Would Thisby's
memory cells start to break down the barriers to Katharine's mind? Would the two separate entities start to merge, or would
they fight — each demanding exclusive control of the body?
I had the first and last words of the novel in my head that morning. I knew generally how it was going to end; I just didn't
know exactly how I was going to get there. I started writing, and the story started to tell itself.
One aspect of the story that just seemed to happen was the incorporation of Shakespeare, and notably his play
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, into the plot. This came about after searching for an appropriate name for my young body and finding it in Thisby, a character
in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. I'm not a Shakespeare scholar, but annually I visit the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, and I have acquired a love
for his work. Rereading
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, I realized there were similarities between the play and the story that I wanted to present: being forced to wear an ass's
head and not knowing it, fighting authority with naïveté and bravado, lovers being mismatched, and, most of all, going into
the forest and coming out changed.
This Body
was my first attempt at writing a novel. After spending a month completing the first draft at a writer's retreat, I decided
I would see how far I could take the publishing process. It took me five years to get the manuscript into good enough shape
to send out to a literary agent. I didn't know anyone in the publishing or creative writing field, and I found my agent the
good old-fashioned way, using
Literary Market Place
to send out sixty cold-query letters over a six-month period. My manuscript was the first one my agent had ever accepted
out of her agency's slush pile of unsolicited material, and she sold it to Little, Brown in two weeks. The system does work,
and I am proof of it.