You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “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.

  That fall we moved to a new school district forty-five minutes from our old house, and our new neighborhood was greener and wetter than the last one, with more space between the houses. Everyone was a stranger, and in the afternoons I’d go out to the woods behind our house and upend rocks and logs to see what was underneath. Underneath there was a basement smell and the wood blackly wet had a softer texture, like damp velvet. I’d flip the log over and watch what was underneath scatter: black beetles with a permanent shellac to their hard casings, ants of different shades of brown and red, earthworms and shortened white worms with no eyes or faces. With a twig or long blade of stiff grass I prodded at them, rolling the worms in the rich dirt, herding a beetle over to a dark divot into which large black ants disappeared into the earth. I tried to feed the small insects to the larger ones. I wanted them all to mix, to struggle, to show me in real time what it meant to live and die.

  I found an earthworm half-submerged in watery soil, where it was being eaten by a larval dragonfly. The worm was larger and stronger, its body a single muscle twisting out of the water and flopping back, failing. It struggled, pulling its long body into small arcs and spirals, and this meant nothing to the larva that worked calmly to chew a hole into one of its ends, releasing a thin, cloudy white trail hovering in puddle water.

  I left my room and went into the kitchen, where B sat looking at the fridge.

  “I don’t know what I feel like eating,” she said to me.

  “Maybe you want a sandwich?” I suggested. “I can make you a sandwich.”

  The sandwiches I made B were white bread, condiments, deli cheese, no meat. B claimed meat was hard to digest, but I think she just didn’t want the calories inside her. Instead of cutting off the crusts, I squished the sandwich down with my palm to make of it a sort of edible coaster. This was a way of tricking B into thinking there was less food in it. Then I slid it on a plate, cut it diagonally, and handed it over to her. I’d make my own sandwich while, out of the corner of my eye, I watched her pull it apart, remove the cheese, scrape out the fat white center of the bread, and throw it away, leaving only the mayonnaised crusts to chew on.

  “No, too much,” she said. “I don’t want to overeat when it’s so hot out. What were you going to have?”

  “A sandwich,” I said.

  B stared straight forward, che
wing on her lip as she thought it through. Finally she announced: “Let’s have Popsicles.”

  Popsicles came in a fifty-pack and were bright with artificial coloring, though there were only three flavors: red, pink, and orange. B loved them, this stuff that was more like a color than a food, loved to eat them day or night as she drank the lemon-scented vodka from the freezer. Since she had moved in, I had been eating more Popsicles and less of everything else. Her habits were contagious. I could only guess at how many boxes she went through each week from the plastic cups full of Popsicle sticks, cigarette butts, and sunset-colored liquid that I found in the living room when I returned home. One time I asked her why she ate so many of these when she wouldn’t eat even a scoop of ice cream. She brought the box and explained that even though they tasted like juice, they were made of something better. Each Popsicle contained about fifteen calories, and you could burn almost that many just by eating them with vigor. “They erase themselves from your body,” she said as I pulled the box closer to my face to peer into the fine print.

  B came from the kitchen and handed me a Popsicle, the waxy wrapper caked with frost, and we crawled out the window onto the roof the way we were used to and sat out there with the summer heat pressing down on our arms and legs from above. Sweat beaded on the surface of our skin and felt creaturely, like many legs ready to be set in motion.

  Our Popsicles were identical orange, and each was a conjoined twin, bound in the center with sticks projecting from both halves. A navel orange is something similar, the navel another separate fruit attempting to grow within the base of the first, impacted on all sides, turning dry, infertile, and tasteless as a result. The fruits are seedless, and new plants grow only through cutting and grafting, which means that all are essentially clones of one another. I had just maneuvered myself over to the spot on the roof where I liked to sit, where I could see into my room and also into the kitchen next door and the living room across the street where they had the crazy dog, but B had already stripped hers down and was digging in, biting at it first and then holding its peak in her mouth to soften. Sucking sounds came from her mouth as the orange slick pooled around her teeth. She was working at it as though she hadn’t eaten for days. Except for the Popsicles, tea, cigarettes, and sloppy cocktails made out of the lemon-flavored vodka that someone had left in our freezer after a party, B didn’t really eat. Maybe she was saving her stomach for something that didn’t yet exist. I looked over at the house across the street and tried to spot the dog as I tore at my Popsicle wrapper, gummy on the inside from Popsicle juice, juice coloring my hands as I tried to pull the Popsicle from its skin.

  A bright heat trembled all around us as we ate them, our faces sheening with sweat. Sounds of lawn mowers and birds hung like chains in the quiet air. I favored one side of the Popsicle over the other so that I could finish it first and have a normal, single-stick Popsicle to work on. Sweat ran down my forehead and into my eye. Then there was the sound of an engine growing louder, harsh in the heavy afternoon, and we saw the neighbor’s car coming slowly up the street. The man was driving, and his wife and daughter were in the car, too. B stopped licking to watch the car pull into the driveway across the street, and when she looked down again and noticed her Popsicle dripping, she crawled all over the roof looking for ants to drown in the sticky bright syrup. She hunched over them, dangling the last nub of it above, turning the stick in her fingers to make it drip more evenly. The ants struggled for a bit, and when they had stopped, others came to feed minusculely on the orange slick.

  I shuffled over on my knees to see them more closely, the dying ones and the ones not yet dying, many trying to eat up the stuff that had killed the others. The live ants looked like they might be distressed, or maybe just excited: I wanted to know which. I hung close above one group, casting my shadow over their swarming, and I waited to see some sign that would tell me whether they were caring for one another or just eating. B had lost interest in the ants, but she was looking at me now with intensity.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “The ants,” I said. “They’re dying. Then I thought some of them were coming to help, but actually I think they’re trying to eat the syrup.”

  “That’s kind of morbid,” said B.

  “I don’t understand why you try to kill them,” I said. “They never come into the house. And when you kill them this way, it leaves sticky spots all over the roof. We’ll have to clean it someday.”

  “They die in sugar,” she replied matter-of-factly. “It’s the best possible death for an ant.”

  A strange noise came from nearby, and we both stood up to see better. From the house across the street with the expensive-looking hydrangeas and the novelty mailbox shaped like a barn, the house where they had the crazy dog and the daughter who took ballet lessons on Tuesday and Thursday and Friday, three figures were filing out through the front door. Each one wore a large plain white sheet over its body, with holes cut out where the eyes would be. The largest figure helped the second-largest down the front steps, while the smallest struggled out on its own, stepping all over the dragging corners of its oversize veil.

  B and I watched our neighbors shuffle in sheets toward the family sedan. The husband opened the passenger’s-side door for the wife, then walked all the way around the car to open the driver’s-side rear for the little girl, tiny under her white covering. Then he walked back up the front steps and into the house. We watched the door for what must have been a long time. Birds fought in the dark interior of the juniper bushes over things that we did not comprehend. The smaller body fidgeted in the backseat of the sedan. The father returned, carrying an aerosol can that turned out to be spray paint, cherry red. He stood in front of the garage door and in large sagging block letters he spelled out:

  HE WHO SITS NEXT TO ME,

  MAY WE EAT AS ONE

  The ghost man looked down at his can of spray paint like someone wondering what he had just done and whether he had done it all correctly. Then he set it down on the driveway and got into the car. There was the sound of the engine starting up, the tires grinding against stray rocks, and then they were gone. They had left the front door open.

  B and I stared at the emptied house for a while, then she turned and climbed back inside, stepping over the puddles of Popsicle juice and dead ants. I squinted at their house, a drop of sweat settling onto my eyelashes and making me blink. Through the front windows I could see corners of their furniture, covered over in still more swaths of white fabric. It looked like a room about to be professionally fumigated or painted, some mundane sort of transformation. I sat there for maybe a half hour watching the empty house for whatever might happen next. But nothing happened next. When the ants started crawling over me, I brushed my body off and went back in through the window. I was still hungry when I got back to my room. I stared at the knot of hair for a while before I turned on the smaller TV in my bedroom, the one I watched when I didn’t want to watch near B.

  The TV was showing another commercial for Kandy Kakes. This commercial was one of the newer series of ads that mixed animated and live-action components. In this new series, Kandy Kat would often successfully chase down or otherwise achieve contact with the snack cakes, but the cakes were pictured as live-action, three-dimensional objects while the cat was always a flat cartoon. The gag each time was that no matter how hard he tried, Kandy Kat could never put a Kandy Kake down his throat: the two types of matter were fundamentally incompatible. This went along with an advertising campaign centered around the point that Kandy Kakes were made of Real Stuff. Maybe not natural stuff, but definitely genuine three-dimensional material from our physical universe that was similar to us in ways that it might not be to bodies from a cartoon world.

  In this commercial, Kandy Kat walks wobbily through a cartoon landscape full of dancing trees. The trees are shaking their middles and singing the Kandy Kakes jingle, as little birds play bells and maracas in their branches. You can see every rib on Kandy Kat�
�s brownish body as he wobble-skips through the woods, having what appears to be a pleasant day. He looks fairly carefree, oblivious to his hunger and to the words being chanted all around him by the living trees—when suddenly he happens upon a plate of Kandy Kakes sitting in a clearing in the middle of the forest, three-dimensional and super-real among the painted foliage, glowing with a sparkly light that is not real, not cartoon, but something in between. In rapid sequence, he spasms through shock, surprise, delight, disbelief, delight again, and then crippling hunger. His ribs throb. And when he reaches out for the platter, you actually see his emaciation in motion: the skin sags a little off the forearm, the bones and tendons of the arm show starkly with a little drop shadow under them to heighten the effect. His eyes grow larger and whiter in their huge cartoon sockets. At this moment, I want so badly for him to just take one of those revolting Kakes and shove it all the way into his belly, anything, anything to anchor his body a little bit.

  But when his hand finally reaches the plate and grabs for a Kandy Kake, none of the Kakes will budge. It’s hard to describe. It looks like Kandy Kat’s hand is touching them through the glow, but they aren’t affected at all. It’s not like they’re a photo, but more like they’re impossibly heavy so he’ll need something else to move them. So Kandy Kat runs out of the frame and gets a comically large fork and he aims it at the plate and stabs down, but the fork seems to just pass through them as though they’re made of nothing, and Kandy Kat stabs more slowly and then picks the fork up and looks at it, confused. Then he runs back out of the frame and returns with an ax, which just does the same thing—nothing—no matter how many times he hacks away at the plate. Meanwhile the forest is getting pretty torn up. And when he runs back out of the frame and comes back he’s got tons of dynamite, which he sets up all around the Kakes and detonates in a huge explosion that turns all the trees and birds black, with little white eyes blinking in stunned disbelief. The platter of Kakes glows more handsomely than ever against this scorched background, and finally Kandy Kat just yanks his mouth open with his two hands, painfully wide with a cracking sound, and jumps mouth-first onto the plate and the Kakes, trapping their glow inside his mouth as he lies on the forest floor.