“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.
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 smo
oth 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.
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine Page 5
