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.
“But it’s not like that for me,” she continued. “I’m less when nobody’s around. I do less, I move less, I eat less.”
The ooze of the peel burned at the edges of my lips as I bit in. A bitter, oily orange film slicked my lips and teeth. There were little grains of something sliding in the oil and I bit harder. I tongued the flaps of rind, dry as felt, and tore them from the flesh with my teeth. I bit into the sweet wedges, and the wound filled with juice around my lips. As I worked my tongue farther in, I felt the tips of seeds near the center.
“I think I even think less,” she said. “I don’t remember what happens when I’m alone. It’s like all that time just happens without me. It’s like being a chair or a table.”
B paused expectantly.
“Is there any way I can help?” I asked, hoping there wasn’t. But instead she looked eager, even happy.
“Can we have a slumber party?” she asked. “Where you give me a makeover?”
“Would that really help?” I asked.
Now she sat back, as if I had already agreed.
“Definitely,” she said. “Definitely.”
“Okay,” I said. “Do you want to go to the store to get makeup?” I asked.
“I’ll just use yours,” she said. Then she turned her face back to the TV and flipped a page of the magazine in her lap. The magazine was called Women Tomorrow. She reached over to the coffee table and primly picked up a paper cup. A lemon scent trailed from the paper cup, strong enough to sting your eyes.
I stood there feeling irrelevant. It was as though B had forgotten all about me the second I gave in. Usually B hung on me whenever I was in the common space, asking me what I thought about different TV shows, outfits, different kinds of food. Now she was acting more like I did when I wanted to remind her that this had been my apartment first, silence hardening up around her bony body as she watched her own things, as if I were the one with something I wanted from her. I wanted her to return me to the way I had been when I was confident, when each inch of this apartment was familiar to me, rather than a couple of steps removed, like a photograph of a drawing of a place you had once loved. I wanted her to act like herself, insofar as the B I had known always wanted to be like me, act like me, but was never quite able to do it. I wanted her to side with me on the weirdness of the house across the street, I wanted her to worry about what happened over there the other day and let me try to comfort her.
“Hey,” I said, “do you remember that family driving away the other day? Wearing sheets?”
“Duh,” said B, glancing at me for a second or two.
“What do you think that was?” I asked.
B shrugged. Her face had taken on a slurred look, drooping at the corners.
“Have they been back?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “And I don’t care. That family was all assholes anyway. The way they used to look at me. I mean, they wouldn’t look at me. Like if they saw me smoking out on the roof, they’d just stare straight ahead like robots, like they thought watching me doing it would give them lung cancer. People in this neighborhood don’t pay any attention to me, so I don’t pay any attention to them.
“It’s a matter of principle,” she added, taking a dainty sip from her paper cup.
The magazine lay open on her lap, revealing a photo of a famous actress astride a terrified-looking horse. The actress leaned forward, cuddling the horse with one arm, the other raised in a gesture of triumph. “Do you think I could do that?” B asked, pointing at the page. I looked at the photo. I honestly didn’t know.
I felt like gagging. I went to my room and closed the door. B and C would make a great couple, I realized. They’d get along like crazy. I could imagine them now facing the TV as noise poured from its wide glass eye, happy and content as the rampant weirdness unfolded outside, their hands clasped together like a single, monstrously large heart. He wouldn’t mind the way B drank—he’d love it, in fact, the novelty of it, the sweet deadness of her breath after disgorging, the sense her body gave off that living was a wet and collapsing struggle.
May we eat as one, I thought to myself, because I had no idea what else to think. I closed the door to my bedroom and lay belly-down on my bed, pressing my face up to the open window. Through the black mesh screen, the house across the street was dark and impossibly still. The yellow glow from the streetlights stopped just short of the lawn, leaving a large blue-black expanse leading toward the house, opaque as an ocean. I pressed up to the mesh screen and smelled the thick green growth of summer writhing in the night. I felt the dark air on my face. I angled my head around, trying to see into their windows. The door was still ajar, windows illegible. Someone had propped some sheets of particleboard against the garage door, blotting out several of the scrawled words, and there was debris on the driveway, dark clods of vegetative matter that could have been lawn related. It was possible that they had come back while I was out with C, that they had snuck their sedan silently in, leaned the boards up against the garage to fake disuse. But I doubted myself. The words that man had scrawled on the door were meant to be seen. If they had been covered, it had been by someone else.
I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. C and I went away on a long road trip once. On our way north we stopped at a quarry where people paid a fee to drive their cars in, park them in the little public lot, and spend a few hours lying on thin towels spread out on rocks beside the cloudy water. There was a sun-bleached diving board at the water’s edge that you weren’t supposed to use; a doughy man in yellow swim trunks lay dozing on it. At the other end of the quarry the water was supposed to be fifteen feet deep, and you could jump off into it from the rock cliff above. C wanted to do this with such great enthusiasm that it couldn’t even occur to him that I might not. He took my hand and was leading me up this path, both of our towels wadded up under his arm, and when I asked him where we were going, he just said, “The top,” in a cheery way.
At the top there was some random trash, plastic soda pop bottles, and a set of keys that looked like they had been there a long time. You could see a long way, all over the quarry, all the way to the skinny preteens putting each other in fake wrestling holds down by the ice cream stand. Far below us, the water looked milky and frothy at the same time. “Are you ready!” C shouted in a way that wasn’t a question. Then he grabbed me around the middle from behind, his crotch soft against my ass, and leapt us over the edge. Because I hadn’t intended to jump, had no plan to jump, it didn’t really feel like I was falling as I fell. I just felt the movement al
l around me, like a gust of wind coming from the bottom up. Nevertheless, a ragged scream tore from me, one that sounded as if it had been cut out of me by a steak knife, and when I hit the water I was still going, swallowing some of the water by accident, which tasted like blackboard chalk. When we had paddled over to land again, C was excited, laughing. He held me and said that it seemed like I wasn’t afraid of strong feelings, and I let him keep thinking that even though I knew it was nearly the opposite of how I actually was.
I lay there. Think this through, I said to myself. Just because you weren’t the person he thought you were doesn’t mean that you won’t be that person at some other time, someday. It doesn’t mean that B is that person, or could be that person if she tried. It doesn’t mean you’re not you. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love you. I had enumerated the doesn’ts.
By then I was tired or maybe sad, so I turned the TV on.
On-screen there was another Kandy Kakes commercial. In this one, Kandy Kat has become a scientist so that he can crack the problem of Kandy Kakes, find out what makes their matter so disastrously incompatible with his own. Kandy Kat guides us through a series of diagrams on the chalkboard that elucidate the basic structure of a Kandy Kake: outer coating of crispy candy shell sprinkled with crushed nuts and a patented candy substance known only as “Choco Shrapnel,” then a layer of gooey caramel followed by two layers of rich chocolate of slightly different consistencies. Then a layer of fluffy cake, kept moist by the four layers of airtight, watertight substances surrounding it, then a layer of crisp chocolate cookie. At the center is the top-secret “Kandy Kore,” a dense, sugary substance whose chemical composition is known to only a few privileged individuals within the Kandy Kakes empire. Rumor has it the Kandy Kore is not strictly edible per se, in the sense that the special materials that give it its unique flavor are not thought to be made of food, specifically. No food that I’ve ever eaten shimmers with such beautiful, rich shades of green and pink. It’s like eating a gasoline rainbow, if gasoline tasted good. Dressed in a white coat, Kandy Kat rubs his hands together eagerly near a gigantic machine that promises to do something scientific to the lone Kake sitting on a pedestal directly beneath its beam. Even in the coat his ribs show through; it’s painful to see them. He pulls a lever and a beam of sizzling green light envelops the Kandy Kake, which Kandy Kat approaches reverently, his eyes growing wider and wider behind his professorial glasses.
Suddenly I had a thought, and I muted the TV.
What I heard was unmistakably the sounds of the same commercial playing in the living room, where B was still presumably sitting. It was muffled, yes, as if it were wrapped in a blanket, but I could make out the terrible grinding and cracking sounds that happen when Kandy Kat tries unsuccessfully to bite down on a Kandy Kake. It sounded as if someone were trying to repair a car, but with tools all made of bone and meat. I tried to picture her sitting there on the couch and watching, but all I could picture was myself, sitting on my bed, trying hard to picture something. I stared at the screen, at Kandy Kat trying to eat. He was biting so hard that his teeth cracked.
WHAT WAS AT THE ROOT of Disappearing Dad Disorder? Sociologists said it was social, psychologists said it was psychological, and some religious nut said they had heard a call from God to leave behind their wicked lives. Biologists compared it with migration and with songbirds that become confused in the presence of skyscrapers. They compared them with honeybees who abandon their hives: maybe the fathers had been misled by cell phone signals, by highways, by toxins in the water supply. An American studies professor from Cornell argued that it had to do with the breakdown of the single-earner family model upon which our common baseline for masculine worth was founded; a comedian said that all husbands were on the verge of disappearing, only there was still such a thing as a football season, and then a basketball season, and then a baseball season. And a minority voice pointed out that this had been happening forever in minority communities, but it wasn’t called a disorder until it started happening to well-off white people.
Possible explanations for the self-napping impulse were offered up in interviews with abandoned wives. Their husband was a sneaky rat and had been since the earliest days, the days when they were courting and he often “forgot” his wallet, forcing her to pay for the entirety of their meal, which, though it was only diner food—fast food, really—nevertheless added up. Their husband was well intentioned but also a doofus, he had trouble with navigation even in their own moderately sized gated community; his absence was surely an exaggerated case of the many instances in which his sense of direction failed completely even as he continued to insist upon its “pinpoint precision.” Their husband had loved them very much, particularly in the beginning, but in recent years she had noticed that he had noticed that the backs of her arms jiggled when she waved hello, that there were spots that were not freckles distributed among her freckles, that her joints made loud cracking sounds when they made love, which sometimes caused him to ask her if she was all right.
But maybe the fathers were just seeking a perfect life, which when you think about it is a completely reasonable thing to do. They wanted the good things: the popcorn, the corn dogs, the plush industrial mall carpeting with its friendly geometric patterns screaming themselves in green, pink, and brick red, stretching across the concourse like a little, comprehensible fragment of infinity. They didn’t want the bad things: the pressure, the stress, the weekly division of chores by chore wheel, the homework that they thought they had done away with when they graduated elementary school or middle school or high school or business school. They didn’t want the gift-curse of recognition by those they loved and who loved them back, one consequence of that love’s durability being that they would be recognized and loved aggressively even on days when they couldn’t stand to recognize themselves in the mirror, even on days when merely remembering themselves made them sad and want to sleep. Love that made every day a day that they had to live in a handcrafted, artisanal fashion, rather than being outsourced to someone who could do it happily and efficiently for a third of the price.
They might have thought, to use a stock phrase, that somewhere out there was a way to “have their cake and eat it, too.” That many of them returned to their homes months later, malnourished, dehydrated, and amnesiac could be interpreted as evidence that there is no cake anywhere in the world to be had or eaten.
THE LIGHT WAS EBBING INTO my room from the west, a swath of rose coating the surfaces before dying off for the night. Without my contacts, things bled into each other, the differences between them middled. The first day that I ever understood my eyes were imperfect, my second-grade teacher had called on me to read what was written on the board at the front of the classroom. “What am I supposed to read?” I asked over and over. The board was a flat green, marked only by a smear of chalk dust. The teacher threatened to send me to the principal’s office, but I was brought to the nurse instead. There I was made to understand that there were things I didn’t see, things I very likely hadn’t seen for some time. There were messages embedded in the blur. In my room, the late light evaporated the bookshelf and mantel, retreating into the dusk.
At the corner where I kept some of my cosmetics, I imagined myself standing there, my body small in the space surrounding. From the times I had seen my reflection without preparing myself, I knew how bad my posture was, how I let my shoulders fall forward, making the chest look caved in and weak. But the self I projected in front of me looked alert. My neck looked long. I was looking through the clear resin box that held the little makeup boxes and tins as though I had not seen them in a long time. I felt pleased with myself. I felt that I was a girl I would enjoy watching as she went about doing the little, dull things that make up a day. That’s why it was so alarming when I realized that instead of pretending to watch myself, I actually was watching B.
“What are you doing in here?” I asked. “Didn’t you see I was sleeping?”
She turned her blur of a fa
ce around toward me. I was trying to get my contacts in as quickly as possible, to decrease the resemblance between us by increasing the number of details I could discern.
“You were sleeping. And I already asked you if I could use your makeup,” she responded.
No, you didn’t, I wanted to say. You didn’t ask.
Instead I groaned and pressed the covers to my eyes, which hurt for some reason.
“Can you just get out?” I said. “I need to wake up.”
B left, letting the door swing halfway shut. Without my contact lenses I couldn’t tell how she had meant it, whether her exit was guilty or reproachful. I rolled back into a sleeping position with the covers bunched in front of me like another person, which I held in my arms from behind. I missed C, but I was weighing the possibility of getting caught if I tried to leave to go see him. I thought about staying here in my bedroom for weeks, until she forgot about the whole makeover idea and moved on to something else I would have to do for her. I could wait it out.
With the two and a half packs of cookies I had in my desk drawer, the three oranges in my dresser, and that bottle of wine I could make it two days, maybe three. But if C brought me groceries and hoisted them up through some sort of basket-and-rope rigging, I could make it for weeks, conceivably. Maybe three weeks, if C didn’t forget about me or find someone new. B would give up long before that. She would find someone else to get close to, someone like me with an open room in their apartment, or maybe she would move out and get a job. It could be exactly the push she needed to step out into the world and take her place as a productive member of society. And I could walk out years later, fresh and rested, into an apartment that had been occupied and abandoned again and again, occupied and abandoned enough times that my name and story would have become legendary and then been forgotten several times over.
But if I was in here alone for weeks, C would forget about me, too. I could sneak him in through the window for visits: there was a fire ladder to the roof on one side and a large tree on another. My last boyfriend used to come up like that sometimes to be cute. The noise he made when he knocked on the loose panes of the window was terrifying. But C wouldn’t climb the tree because he wouldn’t support my desire to stay forever, together, in my room. He’d argue with me, probably, from his spot on the ground, and in doing so, he’d completely give away my hiding spot. I’d have to do without him. I’d send him naked photos of myself in Photoshop-ready positions. He could use his graphic design skills to copy-and-paste himself in there next to me, behind me, whatever. We could have evidence of our congress even if we couldn’t have the congress itself. But C wouldn’t bother with the photos: his desire was a spotlight, shining with impressive intensity and focus, but only on the thing right in front of him. I was barely able to get him to return a text message, even the dirty ones.
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine Page 6
