You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (6 page)

“Can we do something?” I asked.

C looked at me mildly.

“Like what?” he said.

I looked around us.

I went to C’s kitchen and stood staring at the open cupboards that held his library of canned goods. He had cooked beans flavored with pig fat, different soups and stews, vegetables — corn off the cob, chopped green beans, carrots sliced into bright orange circles. There were peaches and pears in syrup and, toward the back of the cupboard, canned meats with labels obscured by shadow. Blocky squares of skin-colored food on their printed labels were visible through gaps between the small towers of cans. I was impressed by how well the cans stacked together: they fit to each other the way I wished I fit to the things around me. And there were cans of fruit cocktail with peeled grapes, canned peas, Porkpot Chili, and an off-brand noodle-and-meat-sauce product that had a picture of tomatoes on its label, but no tomatoes listed in the ingredients. There were cans of tuna and cans of olives and pineapple and also mandarin oranges suspended in sugary water, the little naked pieces jostling up together in the perfect dark of the can, curled fetally against one another.

“Do you have anything fresh?” I called out to C, who was already sitting in front of the TV in the other room.

“All that stuff is fresh,” C said. “And it lasts for one to five years,” he added.

I didn’t think I could stand to eat any of it. I imagined opening a can and putting a forkful into my mouth, and I knew, whatever it was, it would be soft and yielding and would disintegrate as I pushed it around with my tongue. I wanted to eat something real and living, something tough with life. I wanted to destroy it with my teeth. I wanted it to be veal. I wished that I had eaten one of the gross hot dogs earlier, but it was too late for that. I heard a smattering of crunching sounds from the TV over in the other room.

“You’re missing
Shark Week,
” C shouted.

I went over and got under the blanket with him. I tucked my feet in under his thighs and looked where he was looking.

On TV, the sharks ate through a goose and a school of sardines. They ate a belly-up humpback whale that had died partway through its migration, and when it died it had rolled over and slid up to the surface of the sea, a glistening red exposure rising toward the sun and quick spoilage. Under the rows of sharp teeth, the whale came apart as if it were made of wet paper, sloughing wads of sodden crimson that slid into the water with a liquid sound. The sharks ate seals, and other things by accident — driftwood, garbage, people. The lesson was that sharks were made to eat things. Nothing else had the immense hunger of a shark, and nothing else could back that hunger up with such efficient action. It was so beautiful that I felt like I wanted to be a part of it, though I knew it would be impossible for me to ever become a shark.

At the commercial break, there was an ad for Kandy Kakes. In this commercial, Kandy Kat faces off against his longtime nemesis Kandy Klown, a bulbous, Santa-shaped figure who consumes Kandy Kakes like it’s the simplest thing in the world, like it’s all he can do. He makes it look easy. The Klown is walking around, left leg, then right leg, slowly articulating full circles in the air, the two round hemispheres of his belly bobbing up and down alternatingly, bobbing in rhythm with the smooth fall of his feet. As he walks, the little Kandy Kakes on their tiny legs trot over to him and form a patient little queue scurrying alongside. Now the first one runs forward with a sudden burst of speed and hops straight into the Klown’s mouth. Its body is a cheery little lump visible in the Klown’s profile. Then the next one runs up and hops in, then another. Slack-jawed and dark, the Klown’s mouth is the exact shape and dimension of the Kandy Kakes that slide through it so smoothly.

All of a sudden we see Kandy Kat some distance away, watching this scene unfold through binoculars. His jaw hangs open, and out comes some drooly fluid. He turns away from the scene and grabs his head in anguish, then his stomach in anguish, the stomach distended and throbbing through the thin cover of skin. Suddenly he has an idea and rushes off-screen. We hear the sound of metal, rubber, cloth in motion, and when he runs back on-screen, he’s dressed like a Klown. He’s got the white face painted on, the ridiculous red nose, the floppy polka-dotted hat pulled over his ragged ears. With the sharp nozzle of a bicycle pump through his belly, he inflates himself until he rolls, lolling like a moored boat. He runs to the Kandy Kakes gathering and strikes a Klownish pose, arms out and swaying, listing slightly from side to side. The Kandy Kakes turn and for a moment they seem to be considering it. Kandy Kat’s big eyes grow wet and you can see he is full of hope, you can see it like you see the heart pounding inside the little cage of his body. A dry red tongue slowly rolls out of his mouth.

Then they decide. As if they are a single body, a single mind, they fall upon him. They fall upon him with their small, sharp mouths, swarming his bony frame, covering it completely, bending it beneath their weight as the Klown watches a few feet over. They tear at his costume, little bits of it are flying everywhere, and we hear a dozen wacky sproingy noises while the voice-over announces:

KANDY KAKES. WE KNOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

I noticed that I had been sitting with my nails pressing into my knee, and as I pulled the hands away I saw ten little semicircular segments dug in, each one a purply blue. It was like discovering that I was filled with something totally different from everyone else, a dark and dislikable substance, and I had let a bit of it seep up for the first time. So I turned to C and asked, experimentally:

“Do you think we look alike? B and me?”

“Well, if I had to describe you and her with words,” he began cautiously, “I guess they might be the same words.” He frowned at the screen, which was now advertising toilet paper, miles and miles of toilet paper wrapping all around a cartoon world. “If I had to use words,” he added.

He was still looking at the screen, looking as if he were waiting for something to show up on it and save him from whatever my next question might be.

“Do you know she cut her hair?” I asked.

“Well, it’s summer. It’s terrible,” he said, toggling the volume on the TV set up and down and then up again.

“It looks just like mine now from behind,” I said.

“Well, honestly,” he said. “Lots of girls look the same from behind.

“People, I mean,” he said sheepishly.

I didn’t say anything.

“Like her,” he said, indicating someone on-screen in what looked like a tampon commercial. “I bet she looks like you from behind.”

The slogan to that Kandy Kakes advertisement was off somehow.
We know who you really are.
It failed to sell anything, it wasn’t friendly, it sounded more like a threat than a promise. But then again, maybe it was a promise made to the worthy, that they alone would have all the Kandy Kakes they desired. Or a promise to those eating Kandy Kakes, that they would become good people, worthy of eating the things they had eaten. Either way, I realized I felt hungry. Or to be precise, I wanted to take something into my mouth and destroy it there.

“You know what I want?” I said a little too loudly. “I want a Kandy Kake.”

“They’re gross,” he said.

His face brightened suddenly and he leaned in toward the TV. From the edge of my vision I could see a frenzy of different blues and greens, creatures the color of the sea testing their teeth against one another.

“I know. But I want one anyway,” I said.

I got up to do I don’t know what. Leave?

“There’s a lot of canned stuff in the cupboard,” he said helpfully.

“I don’t want that,” I said.

“I want real food,” I said, not knowing what I meant exactly but remembering the phrase from the commercials. As I said it, I was aware that what I said I wanted wasn’t really what I wanted at all.

“I want to go to Wally’s and buy real food,” I said.

“We need a car for Wally’s,” he said, annoyed.

C was looking at me now, but clearly he wanted to look at something else. He squinted his eyes slightly, as though by looking harder, he could interest himself in what was going on with me. C loved
Shark Week
more than any other week on TV, so I knew it was taking some effort for him to pay attention to what I was saying.

“I worry about you sometimes,” he said. “Everything gets you so bothered. You need something really bad to happen, to put it all in perspective. Or, I guess, for nothing bad to happen for a long time,” he conceded.

I thought about B and whether I looked like the woman from the tampon commercial from behind. I thought about Michael and how it must feel to beat someone senseless with something that you love so very much. I thought about my boring town and the weird events. I thought about stacks on stacks of white sheets with holes cut into them, silent and pristine and waiting. I thought about one of the missing dads from that missing dad TV special they made back when the topic was really trending.

This dad had disappeared from his Fairfield County home while watching a football game. His wife and two young sons came back to find pretzels, Cheez Forms, and mini microwavable cheeseburgers sitting pristine in their plastic serveware, the TV chattering to nobody. Police posted his photo as far as Tibico City in the south and Coxton to the north, but nobody matching his description exactly turned up, although there were many approximate matches. A few months later, they found him living in a town more than three hundred miles away, across state lines. A neighbor had called to report a stranger living in the house next door to them, someone who seemed friendly enough but who had “a weird bent towards underreportage.” When the local police investigated, they found their missing person living in an occupied single-family home with a blond woman who closely resembled his abandoned wife, down to the navy-blue pumps and feathery bangs. The blond woman, whose husband had vanished a year earlier, was the mother of two young children, both male. She preferred not to comment on how this stranger had come to take her husband’s place or where her husband might be now. The missing father was arrested by Pleasanton police and held on suspicion of having kidnapped the woman’s actual husband and assumed his identity. It turned out Pleasanton was also the name of the town from which he had originally disappeared, a town farther north but similar in all other ways, though authorities couldn’t comment on whether this was a coincidence, an accident, or a mistake.

“Look,” C said in a very soothing voice, putting his arms around me and pulling me back down to the couch. He slung himself around me so that I was like a wrapped package, unable to move my arms. He slid his hand up to my jaw and held it there as he kissed me on the cheek.

“You’re okay,” he said, “trust me.”

For C, it was possible to get along with me even if I, for my part, was not getting along with him. It was lonely being the only one who knew how I was feeling, to not be stored in the mind of someone else who could remind you who you were. The image of a skeleton key flashed in my mind, heavy and long, made of antique brass with a wide, flat end for the thumb to push against when turning the key in the lock. The key was normal except at the functional end, where it had no teeth, nothing with which to turn the small gears of an inner lock. This was a key that could fit into any lock, a key that could never unlock anything.

C slid his arm around my back. His body was warm. He pointed to the TV.

“Look, the sharks are back. Just look at the sharks,” he murmured, holding me close.

B AND I PAIRED UP
before we even met. I heard stories about her, mostly stories about her biting people. It seemed like everybody knew somebody she had bitten, a friend of a friend or an ex-lover, most often during a one-on-one conversation. They happened at moments when B felt cornered in the conversation or when something unpleasant came up. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to bite into another person. Usually one of the things I thought about when I bit down into something was how ill-suited my teeth were for biting down into anything.

When I got back to the apartment, the day was already close to ending, the light was growing dim. B sat on the couch in the living room facing the door, staring hard ahead of her with a drink in her hand. When I opened the door to find her there, clutching a plastic cup, she looked like she had been there ever since I had left, just waiting for me to walk back in. I stood at the edge of a room thick with my own absence, wondering whether to stick myself into it gradually or all at once.

I ran the tip of my tongue over my teeth, one by one. At the very back, the molars were short and crooked, angled rearward, pointed toward the throat. Then they were dull, blunt, herbivorous, with deep pits that roughened at the center. Their texture was disarrayed, unfinished. The points of the canines were rounded down, softened up like objects left out in the rain. Then the small white teeth at the front, divots in their backsides, the tiny incisors with their scalloped edges, registering some minor body crisis undergone when I was still a child. I felt sad for B. She seemed misequipped for her desires.