Alexandra Kleeman: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“I was sleeping,” I said.

“Do you want this,” she responded.

Her voice angled down as though it weren’t a question but a fact that she was only repeating. She thrust her hands forward slightly.

“What is it?” I asked.

What I saw in her grip as I looked closer was a two-foot-long cord of human hair: dark, thick, and braided. The braid traveled from her hands to mine, and then there was a sudden softness against my skin that I hadn’t prepared for. She had given it over the way you’d hand off a baby, supporting both ends with cupped hands, shifting it gently into my grasp. I was confused, I still didn’t understand what was happening, and I couldn’t tell whether the thing I saw in my hands was dense or light, dry or moist. In my hands the braid lay soft and motile, limp and invertebrate. I looked down. It hung heavy, but with an active tension, a nervous cord sagging slightly in its middle where there was nothing to support it. The hair had a sad look, naked and lonely, gleaming with oily light. It was tied off at both ends with two pink rubber bands.

“It’s yours,” she said. “I mean, it’s yours now. I just did it.”

“You did this. .,” I said, trailing off.

“I did it for you,” B said, smiling the beautiful smile of a deaf child. “What I mean is, I wanted to do it and I didn’t know why until I thought of you. You always look so okay. You don’t have pounds of hair hanging from the top of you. I’m already feeling better, clearer. My thoughts are louder.”

I looked at her head.

Hair had always been our way of telling ourselves apart. Mine went down to the shoulders, dark like hers, but finer and softer. Hers went feet farther, brushing the small of her back. B used to have Disney princess hair, hair with a life and directionality of its own, separate from the movements of its host body. She used to sling it over her shoulder and pet it like a cat, her face shrunken underneath. Now she stood in my doorway giving off a weird confidence, eyes blunt. With hair cropped to her shoulders, she reminded me of times when I had seen myself reflected in imperfect surfaces, in the windows of shops or cars.

“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 OUTabout 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.