Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

I was still hungry, and the tips of my fingers trembled against her skin as I did the thick black line on the eyelid. I hoped that I’d mess it up, but I had no practice doing anything other than trying to make it perfect and the same each time, so it was the same. And as I saw the face take shape, I felt less and less bothered on my own behalf. I felt more like some entirely other person, a casual spectator. There was a flat pleasure in seeing it unfold from this angle, this image that was pleasing to me, so pleasing to me that I had chosen it ten years ago and repeated it upon myself pretty much ever since. As I worked, I tried to find every one of the ways in which our faces differed: the slight cleft in her chin, the widening of her nose at its tip, the mole on her lower lip that looked like a small wart. Now I just sort of let go, and I thought about how different it was to see this image so clearly, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It felt like it used to feel to watch myself put on makeup, before it became a thing my hands did almost without me. When I did the dot of silvery stuff at the inner corners, I was done. I turned around to look at us in the mirror.

“It looks so good,” B said, her eyes opening wide.

It did look good. Her eyes looked huge, her mouth smaller and more precise. I had buffed away the dark circles and the random mole. The dark around the eyes distracted from their anxious expression and made her less like prey, more like a predator. She was smiling now, and this changed her face dramatically. It put shadows under her cheekbones and lines around her mouth. She looked like the girls on TV commercials, thrilled at the condition of their outsides.

“You look beautiful,” I said. “You’re a babe.”

I was feeling like I had a surplus, B blinked at me, silent.

“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

I didn’t know what she was going to do there, and I didn’t really care. I picked at a loose thread on my comforter to pass the time. I felt light on the inside, like a balloon, and I was incredibly sleepy. When Kandy Kat appears on two television screens at once, does he split in two? Two bodies with two minds pointed out at identical cartoon scenes? Two bodies responding identically, like twin machines? Or is there still one cartoon body, ribby and drained, with a doubled hunger for its double image? I needed some air. I walked to the door and stepped outside. When I looked back, I had a clear view into the bathroom: B had left the door wide open, and even from a distance I could see her standing there in front of the mirror, brushing her fingertips gently against the skin of her nose, cheeks, chin, tracing it with reverence, caressing it like an infant, newly born.

I crossed the lawn in the dark, drawing closer to the house across the street, darkened and uninviting and empty. I looked back behind me, but nobody in the neighborhood was watching, not even B through the skinny kitchen window where she usually stood when I left the house. Nobody was watching me, nobody was thinking about me, I was truly alone. I pushed my way through the unclosed door using my shoulder instead of my hands, arms wrapped around myself like someone with a stomachache or someone who had just been punched in the gut. The door swung slowly back in, shutting out most of the light.

Inside the house across the street it was soundless and clean, free of dust and voices. Everywhere was white with draped cloth, and the moon shone down on the muffled things and gave them an incredibly lonely color. There was a living room to my right filled with hulking white mounds that must once have been a sofa, love seat, armchair, upright piano. To my left was a dining room with three shrouded white chairs and a shrouded white table. From the lumps on its surface, nobody had bothered to clear away dinner before covering it over. I poked at one of the lumps through the pallid sheeting, and it gave way beneath my fingertip with a squish.

There was no family. There was no dog. There weren’t even any insects that had crept in through the open door, the door that released a soft squeal behind me as the wind blew through our street. What had once been a family’s life, still vaguely life shaped, now resembled an arctic scene: white and smooth and cold to the eye. The sofa and love seat vague under sheeting, the obscure shapes of hidden toys. I stood there waiting for something to happen, but nothing was going to happen. It was like watching the body at a wake. My breath slowed and I felt like I might lie down and never get up.

I realized that I was feeling happy.

In the stillness of this dead house, I felt a sudden sense of belonging. It was partial, but still better than nothing. I belonged to this family whom I didn’t know and who didn’t know me either. This family that had left me behind. And though they didn’t know they were missing me, I knew. And that was something. I could still come in here and spend time, conjure them into their domestic spaces, miss them, remember all the things we never did together. I could imagine their voices, imagine finding those voices familiar. I felt as if I knew the entire layout of this house, knew exactly what was under each of these crisp white sheets, even though I didn’t.

Outside, sparse crickets called back and forth. I went into the living room and sat down on the floor behind the ghosted couch. I stared at their white wall and then I lay down on my side. I lay there not thinking about B or C or my job or my parents. I didn’t think about how I looked or how good my skin was today. I didn’t think about food or water or the things that had happened. My breathing slowed. This house with its weird white covers over everything was telling me to do Nothing, and I knew exactly how to do that. I felt like snow, I thought, like snow feels: cold and quiet and close to vanishing. A temporary covering on a small piece of ground. I lay like snow for a long while, as occasionally a car drove past and made the white briefly whiter.

Then I realized that if I stayed here too long, B might try to find me. I stood up and left right away. I closed the front door behind me but left it unlocked.

BACK IN MY BEDROOM, THEtelevision was telling me about a new edible beauty cream. A beautiful woman with black hair is smiling at a midsize jar that she holds in her hands, turning it slightly from right to left as if to admire its label. The woman is already so beautiful that it’s hard to see what she could possibly need inside that jar. Nevertheless she is so excited to open it up, the smile on her face just gets larger and larger as she unscrews the lid, tilts the jar delicately toward her, and then gasps in surprise. A white dove is struggling its way out of the smallish jar, straining its neck against the rim, trying to use its neck and beak as a lever to wrench its downy white breast through the opening. It tries to unfurl a wing, but it’s still too much trapped within the jar, so it looks left and right and then pecks at the parts of the jar that are within its reach. In terms of its experience as an animal, the dove is obviously distressed. Its black beady eyes are still, but its head jerks back and forth, back and forth. As a part of the commercial, however, the dove looks elegant and soft, its feathers fluffy as it twists around, trying to free its wings.

The jar topples over and the dove kind of spills out, taking flight gracefully. As it flies, the voice-over tells us what sorts of things are in TruBeauty’s new interior-exterior skin-perfecting cream. Some of the things are vitamins, antioxidants, moisturizers. The dove is looking great with its wings flapping in slow motion and therefore appearing extra glamorous. When it completes one lap around the room, it circles back toward the beautiful woman, her mouth open in amazement, and it heads straight for her mouth, full throttle. The impact makes a soft thwack sound, and then it’s just the back half of the dove that’s visible sticking out of her mouth and trying hard to wriggle its whole body inside. The voice-over speaks: Most beauty creams stop at the epidermal level, treating only those minor flaws and imperfections that are the easiest to reach. Competing treatments only go skin deep. As it forces itself down her throat, she tilts her chin up gracefully and you can see some muscles at the sides of her neck clenching and releasing, working to help the dove get itself swallowed. When the last claw-tipped foot goes down, she tilts her chin low and smiles radiantly for the camera. Only one beauty cream attacks signs of aging and damage from the inside and out, making sure that threats to your beauty have no place to hide. The beautiful woman dips a spoon into the now dove-free jar of cream and lifts out a creamy mouthful. She dabs a little on her face, and brings the rest of the spoonful to her lips, thrusting it inside luxuriantly. It looks like yogurt, but it’s not. She licks the front and then the back, and then she reclines, closing her eyes and smiling in the sunny glow of her beautiful living room. And the voice-over says: Trust TruBeauty. We know that true beauty begins on the inside.