You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2 page)

THERE’S A COMMERCIAL ON TV
where a woman using this new citrus-based facial scrub begins to scratch at the side of her face, discovering that it has edges, shriveled and curling slightly like old paper. Eyeing the camera, she grasps these edges and lifts up on them until she is peeling the whole surface of her face off with a filmy sound like plastic wrap unsticking from itself. Underneath is another face exactly like hers, but prettier. It’s younger and wearing better makeup. You’d think that she might want to stop here and start being happy with herself the way she newly is. But she doesn’t stop: instead, she clutches at the side of her face and begins to peel again, and this time the face underneath is even prettier and she’s smiling wildly at the camera, she’s so pleased. And she peels again, but this time what’s underneath is a video of the seashore crashing against a sandy beach, and her hand peels it all off again, and we stare into a deciduous forest filtered through by little blades of light and sunshine.

Then she turns straight toward the camera and peels her face off from the opposite direction, and the face that’s underneath belongs to the company’s famous actress spokesperson. It’s been her voice all along telling us about the hydrating effects and natural ingredients, the way you’ll love yourself remade. She doesn’t ask what happened to the other woman, the woman who came before her. She smiles beautifully with her hard white teeth.

Words appear on the screen: TRUBEAUTY. TRUSKIN. YOUR REAL SKIN IS WITHIN.

B wanted to try the product out, she said you could buy it anywhere. But B hated to buy anything herself. She preferred to borrow from someone else, even though her parents had three cars and a horse and sent her checks every month for the rent. If I asked her why she was always trying to need more than she needed, she’d say that borrowing brought you closer to other people, while buying mostly made you lonelier. That was how I ended up going out with B to the all-night Wally’s Supermarket fifteen minutes away on a night when dozens of teenagers hung inexplicably around the parking lot, posed darkly like crows, staring and not saying a thing.

There was no one inside the store except Wally employees in their weird uniforms: red polo shirt, khakis, and oversize foam head in the shape of the store’s teenage mascot. They seemed curious about us, or wary, or bored. As we wandered the aisles, I started to feel watched. There was a Wally about twenty feet behind me every time I looked back, sometimes rearranging product in the shelves, but sometimes just looking at me. I told B, but she was unfazed.

“Sure they’re watching. They probably think you’re going to steal something,” she said.

“Really?” I asked. I hadn’t known I was the type of person who could steal something.

“It’s what they do,” she said. “But they’re dumb. I’m much more likely to steal than you.” She smiled sweetly at me: this was my best friend. Then I bought the face scrub for B to borrow, even though I was nervous about what it might do to me.

When we got home I rubbed product all over my face and neck in the bathroom, feeling it froth away at my skin as B sat on the edge of the tub, taut and unblinking. When it was done I went to the mirror to see what I had become. I didn’t see the promised biotransformative subexfoliation, but I knew something had happened because my lips stung and I smelled like lemon-lime soda. B came over and placed a palm experimentally against one of my scrubbed cheeks, then the other, and asked me if I felt any different. I was in the middle of answering when I realized suddenly that she was not listening to me, was not even looking, was staring past me into the medicine cabinet mirror instead and touching the sides of her face, petting her cheek vacantly. She had something on her face that could be mistaken for a smile.

FOUR DAYS A WEEK I
went to work as a proofreader for a local company that produced several magazines and newsletters. I could choose any four days that I liked, but everything else was chosen for me. Although proofreader implies reading, what was expected of me was somewhat less: see that everything was punctuated, see that words were in a sensical place, but avoid trying to make sense of them — meaning was an obstacle to efficient proofing that my supervisors hoped I would avoid. I proofed everything that came through the office, so if there were errors in
Marine Hobbyist
or
New Age Plastics,
it was my fault for letting them through.

Each morning I walked forty minutes to work along the side of the road, miles that could be driven in a few minutes. I passed eight gas stations and two different Wally’s Supermarkets, identical except for the garden center appended to the second one, a cordoned-off section of parking lot asphalt filled with pots of identically colored marigolds. On days when almost everyone was sick, I could have any cubicle I wanted, but I always chose my usual one, the one for freelancers. In the quiet of the empty office I could hear the slight hiss of air-conditioning coming through the vents. I felt that I was experiencing the world as only someone who did not exist in it could. There were three kinds of errors: of duplication, of substitution, of omission. By the time I got home, work seemed like a long, flat dream whose details I could not remember. I peeled the damp and dusty pants from my legs and lay on top of the bed, sweating. All I wanted to do was sleep.

Last Thursday had passed like every other, except that I had taken a nap during my lunch break, crawling beneath the desk to sleep for thirty minutes on short, stiff, office carpeting. I came home still sleepy and collapsed on top of my bedding to take a second nap. I had been there only a few minutes when I heard a knocking at my door. Standing there was B with an excited look on her face, eyes big and wet, mouth drawn up at the corners. She looked like a person who had betrayed a secret. Her hands clutched something dark. Against her thin white fingers, it looked like a coil of chain or a greased-down railroad spike — something old and exacting, designed to keep a thing in place.

“I was sleeping,” I said.

“Do you want this,” she responded.

Her voice angled down as though it weren’t a question but a fact that she was only repeating. She thrust her hands forward slightly.

“What is it?” I asked.

What I saw in her grip as I looked closer was a two-foot-long cord of human hair: dark, thick, and braided. The braid traveled from her hands to mine, and then there was a sudden softness against my skin that I hadn’t prepared for. She had given it over the way you’d hand off a baby, supporting both ends with cupped hands, shifting it gently into my grasp. I was confused, I still didn’t understand what was happening, and I couldn’t tell whether the thing I saw in my hands was dense or light, dry or moist. In my hands the braid lay soft and motile, limp and invertebrate. I looked down. It hung heavy, but with an active tension, a nervous cord sagging slightly in its middle where there was nothing to support it. The hair had a sad look, naked and lonely, gleaming with oily light. It was tied off at both ends with two pink rubber bands.

“It’s yours,” she said. “I mean, it’s yours now. I just did it.”

“You did this. .,” I said, trailing off.

“I did it for you,” B said, smiling the beautiful smile of a deaf child. “What I mean is, I wanted to do it and I didn’t know why until I thought of you. You always look so okay. You don’t have pounds of hair hanging from the top of you. I’m already feeling better, clearer. My thoughts are louder.”

I looked at her head.

Hair had always been our way of telling ourselves apart. Mine went down to the shoulders, dark like hers, but finer and softer. Hers went feet farther, brushing the small of her back. B used to have Disney princess hair, hair with a life and directionality of its own, separate from the movements of its host body. She used to sling it over her shoulder and pet it like a cat, her face shrunken underneath. Now she stood in my doorway giving off a weird confidence, eyes blunt. With hair cropped to her shoulders, she reminded me of times when I had seen myself reflected in imperfect surfaces, in the windows of shops or cars.

“I think you should keep this,” I said.

“You might need it,” I said. I was struggling for something more to say.

“But I don’t
want
it,” B replied. “That stuff was driving me crazy. It was like, you know, when you think that you’re sick and there’s something really wrong with you, like lupus or heart disease or chronic fatigue syndrome, and then you just realize that you’re hung over. That hair was making me feel un-myself. I think it was muffling my thoughts. That’s why I cut it off. And gave it to you.”

She used the past tense to talk about what was happening as though it had already happened, as though I had already accepted her unwanted gift.

“Now you have a part of me forever,” she added.

Someday I would think back on this moment in light of how badly it would turn out. I didn’t know where to look, and I looked off to the side of her, down at the twist of hair I held in my hands, and then up at my body in the mirror to my left. Hair like this could choke a person. I didn’t want to have so much of it there in the room where I slept, where my mind and body went hazy in the dark.

I wished that C could be here to tell me as he often did that people were nuts, even the people who you loved, and that therefore it was fair to keep them at a distance, even fairer the more you felt for them. It was C who made sure that we saw each other no more than three days a week, the length of a long weekend trip, a brief vacation into another person. But of course C wouldn’t be here, since I had always managed to keep him and B at a distance from each other, one waiting in the car while I hugged the other one good-bye, one watching from the window as I went off with the other, so that each was just a name to the other one, a name tied loosely around a few vague events and descriptors. I didn’t know what to call my fear of their meeting, but I tried: seepage, contagion, inversion.

B stood there, still looking at me steadily. Patches of light flickered across her face as branches outside shifted in the sun.

“I’ll hold on to it for you,” I said. “You’ll probably want it back soon.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“But not likely,” she added.

“You spent so long growing it,” I said, looking down at the sad heap.

“It just happened on me,” she replied. “It wasn’t hard work.”

The braid bunched under my grip, gleaming. I didn’t know what I was afraid of. Maybe that in accepting this chunk of B’s body, I would be diluting myself further, when already it was taking me minutes each morning to remember who I was, how I had gotten there. I set it on the mantel in my room next to the different objects I had accumulated, snow globes and ceramic cats, stuff that reminded me of myself. Its presence was loud in the otherwise quiet afternoon. From a distance it looked like a length of chain.

I hadn’t wanted it, yet I had taken it anyway. Something was happening and I had the feeling that if I ever came to understand it, I wouldn’t like what I found. But however I felt about it now, there was nothing else that I could have done with B. There’s a kind of pressure that your own life muscles onto you, to do something just like you would do, to behave just like yourself. We had both gotten so used to me being stronger, reasonable, and having the resources to yield that I yielded by default, the idea of my own strength making me the weaker one.

Looking at the braid reminded me of the commercial for Kandy Kakes, where Kandy Kat, the company’s cartoon cat mascot, has been chasing a single, smallish Kandy Kake across a scrolling variety of different cartoon and live-action landscapes, such as the Super Bowl and the Great Wall of China and the North Pole, dodging all sorts of wacky obstacles and running past sign after sign that lists out the various natural and unnatural ingredients that go into Kandy Kakes. They’ve been chasing each other for what we are to understand has been hours or days in cartoon-time, though it all passes by in a matter of seconds, until suddenly they come to a big cliff with a sign marked END OF THE WORLD. At last there is no place for the snack cake to run, and it looks like Kandy Kat may get to eat something for once. So he advances on the little cake and grabs it with both bony hands, he lifts it to his mouth. But at just that moment the little cake opens its own mouth hugely and eats Kandy Kat in one big bite. His tail sticks out of the cake’s mouth a little, wriggling, so the cake suddenly extends a little arm from its round pucky body and with it pushes the last of Kandy Kat into its maw, swallowing hard. There’s a muffled crunch as Kandy Kat’s whole body packs down into what must be a tiny little stomach, and you hear a muffled whimper escape. A moment later, the Kake succumbs to delayed cartoon gravity and falls to the ground, collapsing beneath the burden of its new weight.

THE SUMMER I FOUND OUT
about the food chain, I was eight years old. I became obsessed with it in a way that made me outgoing, explaining it to any adult or child who would listen. I drew maps of predator-prey relations on all my binders and notebooks, big webs in which I was always pictured in some topmost corner, near all of my favorite foods. I told my parents that I was going to become an ecologist so I could find out which animals living in entirely different continents or habitats, on land or in water or caves, could eat each other if put in the same place. I would fill in the gaps, and every animal would be linked to every other by a one-way arrow leading from the prey animal to the mouth of its predator. It was an orderly system, like rainwater becoming seawater that dissolves again into little droplets of rain. It was a meat cycle, and when I ate spaghetti with meatballs or chicken noodle soup for dinner, I went to bed certain that participating in the meat economy meant that I would be eaten, too, someday, by something larger than me or maybe by many things much smaller.