You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (10 page)

If you were a person, you were supposed to want to be a better person. Better people had a surplus of themselves that they were willing to give away, something they could separate out and detach. In me the portions only separated, pulling apart and waiting there for something to happen. I could see what it was that I could give B, but I couldn’t really give it. In fact, I wanted to keep it for myself, to take it and run. All around me, people were giving feelings and help to one another all the time, as if it were the only thing to do. And I watched these exchanges like a dead thing, a thing sealed off perfectly, a room with no holes in or out.

“You’ll look great,” I said. The light from the living room lamps felt warm and prickly next to me. “You look great,” I said.

She seemed like she wanted to smile. Her face bunched and crinkled around the eyes. I looked back at the window where the screen sat open to the night air, and I saw nothing, heard nothing.

THE MIRROR IN MY BEDROOM
showed the two of us side by side. All I said was that I didn’t want to talk. “I don’t want to get distracted,” I said, and she nodded the way I was sure she would have nodded to anything I said then — worried, but with some potential for happiness hidden within. I did the foundation for her skin, which was the same color as mine. It was a color called bisque, the word for clay in its first stage of firing, hard, dry, unglazed, unfinished. It was also the word for a kind of soup made from the roasted husks of things. The makeup changed the face without changing it at all, it seemed only to restore to it an evenness that it had always held underneath, an even surface without pock or worry. The better person hidden inside the real person.

I wanted to be gone, to be by myself, to be with C, but instead I held still and reminded myself that this impression of uncovering a face was exactly as real as the fact that I was covering up a face at the same time. It was like the optical illusion where you see the vase and the two faces in the same image, but you can’t see them both at once.

The single image splits into two, which occupy the same space without sharing it. Or maybe it’s the opposite: the two objects find themselves in shared space, and the thought of one after the other in the mind of the viewer’s eye, vase face vase face vase face vase face, makes them grow together. The two words even begin to sound alike, like the same words spoken in the mouths of two people from different, distant places. I poured makeup on a white foam sponge so that it looked like a little puddle of skin suspended on nothingness, and then I dabbed it against her cheek over and over again. I dabbed it against her cheek, and then I did smooth, long strokes. I left skin-colored streaks that vanished a little more with every stroke. She was disappearing, or reappearing, or appearing for the first time, whatever.

I had covered all the spots, and now, when I looked at it, her face had the texture of a piece of pottery. I saw pores only when I leaned in close to the nose, where they appeared as tiny skin-colored mounds rising out of little sloping craters. People were such fragile things: they existed only from a certain angle, at a certain scale and spacing. Forget where to stand and you’d lose them completely. From this distance she didn’t resemble me much, though she didn’t exactly resemble herself, either. I rubbed at the edge of her jaw to blend the makeup. Then I did the lips. I used the things I had around, without wiping them off: my own lip balm, gooey and flavored like an orange Creamsicle, a lipstick that I wore a lot and had worn down to a flat, wet-sheened plateau with half a rim on it. I dabbed the color on with my fingertip, the padded part, poking at her lower lip and watching it spring back up. It was just like painting a portrait of myself, I thought, onto the face of another person.

I remembered one summer that I spent at my aunt’s house when I was younger, middle school, maybe. My aunt spent most of her day doing embroidery while her husband was at work, sitting in front of the TV and watching movies on mute. The movies were action films, thrillers, things that she and my uncle had originally bought for their son to watch. She didn’t pay much attention to the story line; the movies were a type of home decor, a device casting light and movement. I would walk through the living room on the way to somewhere else and see the warm yellow glow of an on-screen explosion playing off her smooth, serene face.

One of the movies she put on involved two men who were hardly ever pictured in the same frame. One was squarish and broad, the other angular and hawklike. The squarish man was seen in an office and then in a sort of hospital room. The angular man was pacing around a tarmac. Then the angular man was waking up and walking around. Then the square-jawed man was waking up. They both seemed to chase something, separately, using many different kinds of vehicles — planes, cars, boats. I understood it as some sort of story where two men competed to be the first to capture some unspecified thing they both wanted. Years later, C told me that it was actually a movie about identity theft. One of the men had swapped appearances with the other, then the other swapped appearances with the first. Then they worked to undo each other. C said that I should have picked up on the identity swap by noticing that the square man’s body language was initially heroic and then became sneaky and aggressive, while the angular man’s body language began sneaky and turned heroic. I told him that it would be nice if we could all think that way, but in actual life we were supposed to recognize a person in spite of their mannerisms rather than because of them. We were supposed to trust the similarity of their face in the moment to the face we remembered. “Otherwise,” I said, “I would treat you like a stranger every time your mood changed.” C had just looked at me for a while, seeming confused, not saying anything at all.

I held B’s smallish face in my hands and I gripped her chin a little harder than I had to because I could get away with it, I was making her so happy right now. Before there were mirrors or cameras to allow you to face yourself, you had to see yourself through other people. I tried to think that I was painting a picture of my face on hers so that I could see myself better. See myself filled out rather than flattened, see myself as C saw me. I wasn’t losing anything or giving myself away, I was just expanding, becoming more, many, like the television image and its occupation of all those otherwise empty screens. The image I thought of as mine sitting on the surface of her skin would absorb her to me and I might know what it was like to be myself outside of myself, for once. To see a part of myself that I could observe and recognize, but which transmitted no feelings. A numbed-out limb that could do what it did without me.

I was still hungry, and the tips of my fingers trembled against her skin as I did the thick black line on the eyelid. I hoped that I’d mess it up, but I had no practice doing anything other than trying to make it perfect and the same each time, so it was the same. And as I saw the face take shape, I felt less and less bothered on my own behalf. I felt more like some entirely other person, a casual spectator. There was a flat pleasure in seeing it unfold from this angle, this image that was pleasing to me, so pleasing to me that I had chosen it ten years ago and repeated it upon myself pretty much ever since. As I worked, I tried to find every one of the ways in which our faces differed: the slight cleft in her chin, the widening of her nose at its tip, the mole on her lower lip that looked like a small wart. Now I just sort of let go, and I thought about how different it was to see this image so clearly, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It felt like it used to feel to watch myself put on makeup, before it became a thing my hands did almost without me. When I did the dot of silvery stuff at the inner corners, I was done. I turned around to look at us in the mirror.

“It looks so good,” B said, her eyes opening wide.

It did look good. Her eyes looked huge, her mouth smaller and more precise. I had buffed away the dark circles and the random mole. The dark around the eyes distracted from their anxious expression and made her less like prey, more like a predator. She was smiling now, and this changed her face dramatically. It put shadows under her cheekbones and lines around her mouth. She looked like the girls on TV commercials, thrilled at the condition of their outsides.

“You look beautiful,” I said. “You’re a babe.”

I was feeling like I had a surplus, B blinked at me, silent.

“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t know what she was going to do there, and I didn’t really care. I picked at a loose thread on my comforter to pass the time. I felt light on the inside, like a balloon, and I was incredibly sleepy. When Kandy Kat appears on two television screens at once, does he split in two? Two bodies with two minds pointed out at identical cartoon scenes? Two bodies responding identically, like twin machines? Or is there still one cartoon body, ribby and drained, with a doubled hunger for its double image? I needed some air. I walked to the door and stepped outside. When I looked back, I had a clear view into the bathroom: B had left the door wide open, and even from a distance I could see her standing there in front of the mirror, brushing her fingertips gently against the skin of her nose, cheeks, chin, tracing it with reverence, caressing it like an infant, newly born.

I crossed the lawn in the dark, drawing closer to the house across the street, darkened and uninviting and empty. I looked back behind me, but nobody in the neighborhood was watching, not even B through the skinny kitchen window where she usually stood when I left the house. Nobody was watching me, nobody was thinking about me, I was truly alone. I pushed my way through the unclosed door using my shoulder instead of my hands, arms wrapped around myself like someone with a stomachache or someone who had just been punched in the gut. The door swung slowly back in, shutting out most of the light.

Inside the house across the street it was soundless and clean, free of dust and voices. Everywhere was white with draped cloth, and the moon shone down on the muffled things and gave them an incredibly lonely color. There was a living room to my right filled with hulking white mounds that must once have been a sofa, love seat, armchair, upright piano. To my left was a dining room with three shrouded white chairs and a shrouded white table. From the lumps on its surface, nobody had bothered to clear away dinner before covering it over. I poked at one of the lumps through the pallid sheeting, and it gave way beneath my fingertip with a squish.

There was no family. There was no dog. There weren’t even any insects that had crept in through the open door, the door that released a soft squeal behind me as the wind blew through our street. What had once been a family’s life, still vaguely life shaped, now resembled an arctic scene: white and smooth and cold to the eye. The sofa and love seat vague under sheeting, the obscure shapes of hidden toys. I stood there waiting for something to happen, but nothing was going to happen. It was like watching the body at a wake. My breath slowed and I felt like I might lie down and never get up.

I realized that I was feeling happy.

In the stillness of this dead house, I felt a sudden sense of belonging. It was partial, but still better than nothing. I belonged to this family whom I didn’t know and who didn’t know me either. This family that had left me behind. And though they didn’t know they were missing me, I knew. And that was something. I could still come in here and spend time, conjure them into their domestic spaces, miss them, remember all the things we never did together. I could imagine their voices, imagine finding those voices familiar. I felt as if I knew the entire layout of this house, knew exactly what was under each of these crisp white sheets, even though I didn’t.

Outside, sparse crickets called back and forth. I went into the living room and sat down on the floor behind the ghosted couch. I stared at their white wall and then I lay down on my side. I lay there not thinking about B or C or my job or my parents. I didn’t think about how I looked or how good my skin was today. I didn’t think about food or water or the things that had happened. My breathing slowed. This house with its weird white covers over everything was telling me to do Nothing, and I knew exactly how to do that. I felt like snow, I thought, like snow feels: cold and quiet and close to vanishing. A temporary covering on a small piece of ground. I lay like snow for a long while, as occasionally a car drove past and made the white briefly whiter.

Then I realized that if I stayed here too long, B might try to find me. I stood up and left right away. I closed the front door behind me but left it unlocked.

BACK IN MY BEDROOM, THE
television was telling me about a new edible beauty cream. A beautiful woman with black hair is smiling at a midsize jar that she holds in her hands, turning it slightly from right to left as if to admire its label. The woman is already so beautiful that it’s hard to see what she could possibly need inside that jar. Nevertheless she is so excited to open it up, the smile on her face just gets larger and larger as she unscrews the lid, tilts the jar delicately toward her, and then gasps in surprise. A white dove is struggling its way out of the smallish jar, straining its neck against the rim, trying to use its neck and beak as a lever to wrench its downy white breast through the opening. It tries to unfurl a wing, but it’s still too much trapped within the jar, so it looks left and right and then pecks at the parts of the jar that are within its reach. In terms of its experience as an animal, the dove is obviously distressed. Its black beady eyes are still, but its head jerks back and forth, back and forth. As a part of the commercial, however, the dove looks elegant and soft, its feathers fluffy as it twists around, trying to free its wings.