You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (7 page)

My conversations with other people about B always ended with something like this:
You should meet her. You two would get along. You have a lot in common.
But then I would ask what it was we had in common, and the person would say one thing, something B and I shared, that was true of me but didn’t really seem central to who I was or believed myself to be. The person would tell me that B and I were both single, or we had the same color hair, or we both liked to read, or we had the same name. And then they would just leave it there, with that single trait dangling before me as if hung from the ceiling on a very long thread, turning and turning around slowly, making me wonder if it could be true that this trait constituted me and, if so, how fragile might it be, how solid?

But I met B only when she came to look at the empty bedroom in my apartment. My summer sublettor had worked at a moped repair shop and spent all his time at home locked in his room with his computer, his microwave, and a case of instant ramen, and I was looking for someone who was more like me. I knew from what other people had told me that B was looking for a room only because her boyfriend had broken up with her. I was worried that there’d be emotional spillage, maybe even some tears, and comforting strangers always made me feel like a pervert. She seemed so fragile when I had first opened the door, startlingly small in an overlarge dress and bare face. But she wasn’t really any smaller than me — I just couldn’t see myself from the outside. She looked at the room that was for rent, empty except for a mattress and a basic desk, and then she asked to see mine.

I watched from the doorway as she drifted between items of furniture. She moved like someone in convenience store surveillance footage, someone who hopes they are being watched. She would stop and stare someplace downward and ahead, then look around, then down again, dragging her gaze somewhere new, to some other piece of floor or fabric. She touched my books, rubbing the tops where hundreds of pages blended into some single surface, and she touched the glass of water by my bedside, and she picked up the broken snow globe that C had given me and the small painted wood box on my mantel. She handled them, turning them around to see each of the sides. B sat down on the bed and put her palms on the quilt. She was angled like a drawing, a form in two dimensions set into a world of three. She seemed to hover, holding herself just above the bed’s surface so that she’d leave no mark on it with her weight.

Then she gazed up at me and said:
I wish I could wear makeup on my eyes, like you.
Then she said:
You have so many things.

In second grade, I had a friend named Danielle who used to say the same thing whenever she came over for the playdates our parents arranged.
You have so many things,
she’d say.
What’s this?
And I would answer her, where it came from, what its name was, whatever, while she looked it over. If she liked it enough, she would try to trade me for it, using whatever was in her pockets at the time. She always had something strange in the pockets of her bedazzled overalls, something crushed and shadowy that resembled nothing. Once she wanted my favorite stuffed animal, a dog I called Pinky.
Can I have him?
she had said.
I’ll give you this, it’ll be a best friend trade.
“This” was a wadded-up washcloth with a picture of a reindeer on it and something spreading grayly at the left corner. I didn’t know exactly what happened, but then I was holding this washcloth, and Pinky was no longer mine. Looking down into my hands, it looked as though something awful had happened to my stuffed dog. He had been flattened out, creased deep, warped. He had these weird things pushing out through his skull.

I STOOD THERE IN THE
living room, still waiting for B to say something to me. I knew she might be upset that I had left her home alone. It was early evening, and the sky through the windows was a deep, darkening blue. They must have sprayed the neighborhood for insects because I heard nothing but the trees, their leaves twitching in the warm night air. A heavy, calm feeling suffused the room, but I knew that was temporary and about to end. Lit up by the TV, B’s face was a mess of shadows. It reminded me of that first day, waiting for her mouth to move, standing in the doorway of my own bedroom wondering if she’d ever put her teeth in me.

“So you’re back now,” she said.

The word
now
sounded like an accusation.

“I’m back now,” I said.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“With C. You know. Watching sharks on TV, mostly,” I said, trying to shift the conversation a foot or two to my right.

“It was
Shark Week,
or still is, I guess. C knows everything about them. Did you know that you can tell the age of a shark by counting the rings on its vertebrae? Like a tree,” I said.

There was no reply.

“What are you watching?” I asked.

“I’m watching channel seek,” she replied.

Watching channel seek was when we pushed the button on the remote that made the TV automatically cycle through all of its stations one by one. You’d see a politician and he’d say the word
institutions
and then suddenly he’d be a tractor pushing through tall grass and then the tractor would be a bucket of steaming hot fried chicken being emptied onto a plate, et cetera. We watched channel seek when we were upset, because it was like experiencing several dozen small attachments and losses that you could maybe prevent but definitely would not do anything about.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I looked at the side table. There were a few oranges with little gouges in them, as if someone had started to peel them and given up. From over here they looked like faces, with the eyes and mouths all misplaced.

“Have you eaten anything?” I asked. “We should have dinner.”

“It’s past dinner,” she said.

“Okay, a snack,” I said.

“I’m not hungry,” she said. She had turned the volume way up on channel seek.

“It’s past a snack,” she said softly, as if to herself.

With the television turned up so high, I saw the outline of her words but couldn’t hear them. The television speakers rattled softly with the force of their own output.

I went to the bathroom to see if there was anything going on with my face. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and registered the discrepancy between how I had looked last afternoon and how I looked now. In this way I measured the amount of life that had been extracted from me by loving someone, in person, face-to-face. I gauged the minus value by the dullness of my skin, the streaky, patchy black around my left eye, the miscellaneous redness that came from rubbing my face against C’s stubble as it increased in length and bristliness hour after hour. My skin felt looser from where he had squished it, playfully or in clumsy love. I had a swollen spot on my lip where I had gotten bitten or sucked. My face in the mirror looked like someone else’s staring back at me through an open window in her own bathroom, and all I could think was that hers looked very much my own, only much more tired.

I did the toothpaste and the floss, the facial wash and toner and moisturizer. I dabbed something on the dark spots to fade them, and I covered them over with concealer. I did a layer of primer and applied the foundation, rubbing it on in small circles as if I were buffing or sanding. A zone of creamy, skin-colored skin eked away at my own. It ate up the jaw, the chin, the nose, the forehead. I was looking more like myself every second. I did the eyes, drawing an eye-shaped outline around the whole thing. The spots were still there, but now they were putty colored, on their way out or between. They might have been residue on the surface of the mirror, except they moved when I did. I reached for more concealer to cover them up. I was watching the hand in the mirror rather than my own.

From out in the living room I heard the sounds of channel seek.
If you’re looking for. . brrrrrrrrrztztzt. . an open door. . by eight and three-fourths. . kinder or better. . ringdringdring I’m sorry. . get it under. . and then you rolllll your hips, kinda ro. . ckclunk. . I never said you could have her but. . just got better. . unlike the ostrich. . anything, anything. . reminder of our. . If he knew, if he knew what was going to. . a personal pizza for. . lk klk klk klk kriiik. . and then I start right over here, you see, sort of skating along the edge of the eye, just kind of skaaaating my pencil along the edge of the eye. There, you see how easy this is? There, again, just skaaaaate it along the line you’ve already got there, yes. Yes. Now we’re going to do the extensions.
It always felt weird when channel seek started to make sense, like mistaking a real person for a mannequin. That the television made sense again meant that B had found something to stick with, but it did not necessarily mean that she was any happier. I walked back into the living room and found her hunched into a ball, hugging her knees to her chest the way I used to do when I was a child.

“What are you watching?” I asked.

“She’s teaching them how to do eyeliner,” B replied.

“Do you like that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” B said. “You can see the brush tugging on the skin near the eye. The skin bunches up and stretches at the same time. It looks like a balloon being written on. Or something.”

I looked at the screen. The woman who was speaking had her hand wrapped around the jaw of the other woman, holding it from beneath the way someone would hold a dog being force-fed a heartworm pill. She tilted the jaw up so that the eyes listed toward the ceiling, and then she brought the pencil point down toward the socket from above.
It’s so simple,
said the voice of the woman makeup artist.
Just think of it as drawing a picture. You’re drawing a picture of your face, right smack onto your face. Draw the face you’d like to have. Draw your perfect face. Okay, now make sure your pencil’s sharp. I’m going to do little points at the end here, see? Looks just like a little wing. Now we’ll do blush. Right after this break.
The camera pulled back for the first time to show the full view of the woman being made up. She was reasonably pretty, with a heavy nose and chin. A spattering of zits trailed from her temple down toward her ear. She turned her face silently toward the camera, revealing a half-finished face. One side was a uniform beige with a thick, elongated eye that swept up toward her temples. The other was bare. The eye within its socket seemed tiny and underprotected. It looked as though the second half of her face, previously hidden from the camera, were sliding off the side.

“She looks beautiful,” B said.

In the faintly electronic light of the television screen, I could see B’s T-zone pores, her untreated pimples, a small unexplained scar beneath her left eye, unnaturally smooth and white against the weak tissue. Sometimes a face could be so simple: even a couple of dark spots on a lighter surface or a dark oval in the distance might be a face. An electrical socket could be a face, a mailbox or a couple of punctuation marks could congeal suddenly into something with an expression. Our faces, on the other hand, were made of hundreds of different parts, each part separate and tenuous and capable of being ugly, each part waiting for a product designed to isolate and act upon it. Every time I looked at my face, I seemed to find another new piece to it, floating there next to or underneath or inside the others, all the parts together but impossible to connect.

B sat forward, trying to catch every word of the commercials as they unfolded one after another, her eyes darting from the left to the right over and over again as the bluish light played off her face. The two of them were like one now, B and the television. She balanced at the edge of the couch, clutching the remote with both hands. Then she looked right at me.

“You know, I think things would be better if I looked more like you,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling nervous.

“I mean, I feel like if I looked more like you, maybe more people would talk to me. The way they talk to you,” B said.

“I’m sure people talk to you,” I said, though I had no idea if this was true.

“And when I looked in the mirror, maybe I wouldn’t mind so much when you stayed away,” B added, still looking right at me.

She said it with much more certainty than I expected from her. Her lower lip stuck out like a child’s, thick and center creased, with a wart on it that might have been caused by cigarettes or repeated biting.

“It would be like you were still here, so I wouldn’t really be alone,” she continued.

“Or maybe it would be like I wasn’t there as much, so I’d only feel partly as lonely,” she added.

Her eyes were looking much larger than I had remembered.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you could get a pet?”

B looked for a second like she was going to cry or bite me.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You’ve always got yourself to keep you company.”

I wanted to disagree, but I didn’t even understand. The effort of the conversation was making me hungry, hungry for something more substantial than an orange. But when I tried to think it through, think about what I would prefer to eat instead, all I could see was oranges, all I could taste was oranges. It was as if my mind were the exact size of an orange. There was no room to move around it. I could think only of pulp, the soft, warm wad of sweetness on my tongue growing blander as the jaws closed on it, the tiny sacs of juice popping and the ropy bits of rind catching on the teeth. And then there was the amniotic sound, the edgelessness of wet against wet. The sound I imagined shifted into other sounds, related as water is to other water: a sameness displaced and separated, but only temporarily. I heard myself chewing, and it made my mouth water.

“You’re with me or you’re with C or you’re alone, and it doesn’t seem to matter. You’re the same all the time,” B said.

I was thinking of a perfect orange, whole in my palm. It fit there as if it were made for me. I was cupping it in my palm and then I was lifting it toward my mouth. I bit into it like an apple, peel and all.