Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

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 UPbefore 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?