You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (9 page)

They might have thought, to use a stock phrase, that somewhere out there was a way to “have their cake and eat it, too.” That many of them returned to their homes months later, malnourished, dehydrated, and amnesiac could be interpreted as evidence that there is no cake anywhere in the world to be had or eaten.

THE LIGHT WAS EBBING INTO
my room from the west, a swath of rose coating the surfaces before dying off for the night. Without my contacts, things bled into each other, the differences between them middled. The first day that I ever understood my eyes were imperfect, my second-grade teacher had called on me to read what was written on the board at the front of the classroom. “What am I supposed to read?” I asked over and over. The board was a flat green, marked only by a smear of chalk dust. The teacher threatened to send me to the principal’s office, but I was brought to the nurse instead. There I was made to understand that there were things I didn’t see, things I very likely hadn’t seen for some time. There were messages embedded in the blur. In my room, the late light evaporated the bookshelf and mantel, retreating into the dusk.

At the corner where I kept some of my cosmetics, I imagined myself standing there, my body small in the space surrounding. From the times I had seen my reflection without preparing myself, I knew how bad my posture was, how I let my shoulders fall forward, making the chest look caved in and weak. But the self I projected in front of me looked alert. My neck looked long. I was looking through the clear resin box that held the little makeup boxes and tins as though I had not seen them in a long time. I felt pleased with myself. I felt that I was a girl I would enjoy watching as she went about doing the little, dull things that make up a day. That’s why it was so alarming when I realized that instead of pretending to watch myself, I actually was watching B.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked. “Didn’t you see I was sleeping?”

She turned her blur of a face around toward me. I was trying to get my contacts in as quickly as possible, to decrease the resemblance between us by increasing the number of details I could discern.

“You were sleeping. And I already asked you if I could use your makeup,” she responded.

No, you didn’t,
I wanted to say.
You didn’t
ask.

Instead I groaned and pressed the covers to my eyes, which hurt for some reason.

“Can you just get out?” I said. “I need to wake up.”

B left, letting the door swing halfway shut. Without my contact lenses I couldn’t tell how she had meant it, whether her exit was guilty or reproachful. I rolled back into a sleeping position with the covers bunched in front of me like another person, which I held in my arms from behind. I missed C, but I was weighing the possibility of getting caught if I tried to leave to go see him. I thought about staying here in my bedroom for weeks, until she forgot about the whole makeover idea and moved on to something else I would have to do for her. I could wait it out.

With the two and a half packs of cookies I had in my desk drawer, the three oranges in my dresser, and that bottle of wine I could make it two days, maybe three. But if C brought me groceries and hoisted them up through some sort of basket-and-rope rigging, I could make it for weeks, conceivably. Maybe three weeks, if C didn’t forget about me or find someone new. B would give up long before that. She would find someone else to get close to, someone like me with an open room in their apartment, or maybe she would move out and get a job. It could be exactly the push she needed to step out into the world and take her place as a productive member of society. And I could walk out years later, fresh and rested, into an apartment that had been occupied and abandoned again and again, occupied and abandoned enough times that my name and story would have become legendary and then been forgotten several times over.

But if I was in here alone for weeks, C would forget about me, too. I could sneak him in through the window for visits: there was a fire ladder to the roof on one side and a large tree on another. My last boyfriend used to come up like that sometimes to be cute. The noise he made when he knocked on the loose panes of the window was terrifying. But C wouldn’t climb the tree because he wouldn’t support my desire to stay forever, together, in my room. He’d argue with me, probably, from his spot on the ground, and in doing so, he’d completely give away my hiding spot. I’d have to do without him. I’d send him naked photos of myself in Photoshop-ready positions. He could use his graphic design skills to copy-and-paste himself in there next to me, behind me, whatever. We could have evidence of our congress even if we couldn’t have the congress itself. But C wouldn’t bother with the photos: his desire was a spotlight, shining with impressive intensity and focus, but only on the thing right in front of him. I was barely able to get him to return a text message, even the dirty ones.

I thought of sending him something explicit. Something I’d like to do with him. But in all honesty all I really wanted to do was stay here in bed until everything changed around me. Besides which, it was a challenge for me to compose erotic messages. I always got lost in the parts of speech: if I wanted something involving one particular part of his body, I had trouble not using the preposition “with,” telling him to do something “with” it, or else I would be telling him to “put” it someplace. Both structures made the part eerily passive, something he could pick up and set down and use or not use, like a hammer or a telephone. The same thing happened when he talked about things he would do to a particular part of my body: the body that emerged from his description seemed to have only three or four parts, linked hazily by what I would assume was more body. Talking about my body in any way took me apart. Afterward I would lie still and try to put myself back together, naming the parts one by one silently, in order, beginning with the small bones of the foot.

Then there was describing the deixis of the thing through prepositions and directionality: inside me was in, up, deep, down, farther, through — contradicting directions that didn’t seem to add up to one whole person operating in space, much less two. I always had to think about the planar orientation of my body — was I vertical or horizontal? “Put it all the way across.”

In watching porn and listening carefully to what the people on-screen were saying as they did the things they were doing, I had come to understand that the only stable point of orientation was the stomach. Even though they never mentioned it explicitly in their porn talk, all the ins and ups and downs and deeps seemed to indicate a line cutting through the vagina, through the uterus, and right into the center of the body, which also happened to be the center of digestion. This center seemed to be where everyone wanted things to go, deeper and deeper to the innermost point, where they could finally rest.

I rolled over in bed and sent C a text message:
I’m starving!

Then I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. I had at least one eye, pointing straight upward. From this perspective it was easy to pretend that all things were in a state of perfect stillness. If something in the world had moved or acted, then its action would have affected something else, which in turn would be compelled to react. Its reaction, an action upon things other than itself, would cause other reactions that would change the states of other things, a domino effect that would eventually topple something in my visual field, which consisted solely of ceiling. As the ceiling remained the same, so must everything else. That, or the ceiling was shifting but my eyes were not, would never be, sharp enough to perceive it.

I got C’s reply after a few minutes.
Eat something from the kitchen,
it read.

B would be out in the kitchen or just near it, maybe watching for me, maybe waiting to make me do something. I didn’t know how to tell C that I was afraid to leave this room and step out into the other parts of the house. I didn’t know how to say I was afraid of diluting myself if I encountered B in this fuzzy state, where she resembled me more than I did myself. A woman’s body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother’s, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went in and out of it, and as I grew up I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself. Then there was sex, and a succession of years in which I trawled my body along behind me like a drift net, hoping that I wouldn’t catch anything in it by accident, like a baby or a disease. I had kept myself free of these things only through clumsy accident and luck. At rare and specific moments when my body was truly my own, I never knew what to do with it.

I picked at a patch of loose skin on my foot, a whitish patch lifting up from the substrate. It must have loosened while I was walking. Tugging on it, I felt the skin pull on my foot, but nothing from the patch itself. It was already leaving me. If I could look into my insides and poke at them, see them day after day, have control over their color and texture, maybe then I’d feel close to the pounds and pounds of matter that lived within me, in my blind spot. Until then, the outer layer would be the innermost part of me, the thing that would evacuate me if stolen, the absolute core.

HOURS LATER, MY PHONE BUZZED.
It was C. His message read:
Did you eat something yet?

The eggy white of the ceiling was growing grayer all the time. Its nullness was more difficult to see, though there was as much of it. Ted Hartwell, Matt Skofield, Dennis Galp. Had they felt like this before they felt like disappearing; had they stared at their walls for hours, hoping for something to change? A span in my stomach registered discomfort: it ached first like an absence, next like a stone. It read as a trembling, a shiver without the cold, and then as a solid, a sluggish setting of the soft squish in my middle. It was hunger, I thought. It changed in quality as it changed in quantity: it seemed hunger was a tiered thing, a mountain rising to a peak, and each new altitude would be different from the last. Even though a portion of myself was interested in this, interested in climbing to the top of this hunger and discovering what it felt like at its end, it was a normal human life that I was living, and that meant continuing to eat, eating with no end in sight. I got up to go quickly to the kitchen and grab something whole and bring it back to my room to eat it there, alone. If I moved quickly and quietly, B might miss me entirely.

In the kitchen I grabbed an orange and a piece of string cheese and two energy bars specially formulated for women to eat; they were full of folic acid and had a round, feminine shape. Then I heard a noise from behind me. It was a small urgency, like the sputter of a motor the size of someone’s pocket, but it was so close. I expected to see B standing there with something aimed at my head, an electric toothbrush, maybe, or a drill. But there was nobody behind me and nothing really except a window with the curtain still hanging before it, and from the curtain the sound of that little motor going and going and stopping and then going and going. I walked toward it, still thinking of that blank space behind the back of my head that I couldn’t see or protect. When I moved the curtain, there was a pause. And then a dragonfly, beating itself against the screen over and over, whirring like a thing made of feathery gears. Musical sounds came from the surface as it struck the screen, buzzing and chiming, close enough to my face that I could see the smooth panels of its body.

The dragonflies I knew lived only for a few weeks out of the summer and were lazy, hanging still in the air four or five feet above anybody’s head before gliding to the next stopping point. This one was desperate, and though it looked sturdy, something so small and living couldn’t be designed to outlast that sort of wear, repetitive and dumb. I put my finger on the screen where it seemed to be aiming and the sounds paused. I heard the breeze rush around in the quiet. Then the small crashes began again, a few inches below my fingertip. It was easier to watch insects trapped indoors, on their way to a frantic death, than it was to watch this one killing itself to get in. There was nothing for it in here. In here it would die. As soon as it was inside, it would understand it had to get out.

Feet shuffled across the kitchen tile. I turned around and it was B standing there with a cup in her hand, the prettiest one we had, made of thick blue glass. Her face was stark without makeup on, full of peaks and valleys. Her eyes had a hungry look.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“This dragonfly is beating itself against the window,” I said.

She looked at it blankly.

“I think it’s going to die,” I explained.

“Then we should do it in another room, I guess?” she said.

I stood there looking at the window and then at the food in my hands. The orange was sweating condensation from the refrigerator. Oranges “breathe” even after they are picked. Torn from their branch, they continue to take in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide through their skin like small, hard, naked lungs.

“I don’t feel very well,” I said.

B looked at me and then she sat down. She seemed to collapse slightly as I watched her, her shoulders slouching forward, caving her chest.

“Look,” she said. “I know it’s not going to look perfect. I’m not going to be mad at you if it doesn’t look right or if I don’t look exactly the way you look. I know it’s not easy to do things with my face. I know that I have weird proportions, and a big nose, and a big forehead. It’s irreparable. That’s why I’ve always been so scared of putting makeup on, that I’d do all that work and end up looking like myself, exactly like myself but with things smeared on me. I just want to try it this once and I don’t know how to do it myself. I’ll probably look awful,” she said.

She was rubbing her thumb hard against the side of the cup like someone trying to rub the prints off her own fingertips.