Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

When I finally reached home, slick with sweat and covered all over in dull gray dust, I had no plan. I started to head around to the staircase that led back to our apartment, but I stopped myself. It was dusk, and the darkening sky made the indoor spaces glow brighter by contrast. I stood in the driveway before my house and looked up into it from outside. I saw the visible fragments of my bedroom furniture, the unmade bed, the empty mirror. I saw the kitchen counter from a strange new angle, the Formica peeling off the side in a way I had never noticed when I was up there living. From the outside, the inside of our house looked like a stranger’s. It looked like any house I might peer into with B, sitting on our roof and making fun of the stupid things they owned, the stupid things they were doing.

I didn’t realize that I had been backing away until I stumbled over a jut of asphalt at the end of our neighbor’s driveway. I turned around. I was back at the house across the street, the still-abandoned house. My safe house.

I walked across the lawn to the front door and eased it open gently. I walked over to the sheeted-up couch and lay down on its lumpy white surface. In my mind I said a silent good-night to each of my absent family members, only I didn’t know their names so I called them Father, Mother, Daughter Who Does Ballet. I rolled onto my side and pulled my knees up toward my chest for slumber. But before I fell asleep, I texted C:

Am I seeing you tomorrow?

Are you mad at me?

Are you okay?

I haven’t heard from you in a long time.

THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKEand all the objects were lit up with early daylight, soaked in a brightness that turned their surfaces stark and self-evident — except maybe for the shadows they cast to their sides, the hollow and unhollow centers, the undersides cold where they failed to find the light. The bottoms of things hid themselves against the ground. Otherwise, the world splayed open to my eyes and felt mostly safe. I checked my phone and there was nothing. I decided to walk over to C’s house to look in on him. To give him another chance to be a better boyfriend or get him to give me another chance to be some kind of girlfriend. I wasn’t going to work today. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.

Each time that I had gone out with C, he had picked me up in his beat-up white coupe and driven me over to his condo, a trip that took about twenty minutes with traffic lights and stop signs. It was a complicated path he took, full of turns, and I wasn’t sure I could follow it exactly on foot. But I felt confident that I would recognize the way there from landmarks that I had stored in my memory over the months we’d been dating. Here was the piece of curb where he used to park and idle his engine while I said my good-byes to B and told her when I’d be back. There at the end of the block was the bent stop sign where someone had totaled their car last Fourth of July.

As I began walking, I kept track of the things I knew, the geographic features that let me know I was going the right way. I saw the azaleas in the yard of the pueblo-style ranch house and the golden retriever in the red collar. On foot each block seemed to take forever, and when I reached the larger roads it felt like I would never again reach an intersection or a landmark, it felt like I was walking the same steps over and over, until suddenly a traffic light would appear in the distance and I would be comforted once more by this proof that I was on the right track and making good progress. As I walked, I rehearsed what I would say to C when I saw him, what attitude I would take toward the fight we had the night before he disappeared. I thought about B waiting alone for me back at home, and about the family whose house I was living in now, a family I truly considered my own even though I wasn’t sure they knew this yet. I imagined them standing in their freshly sheeted home, just about to leave, looking around them, and asking one another, Where is she? Is she coming with us? Does she know it’s the big day? I knew in my heart that this “she” was me. I thought about their phantom love for me, light and airy as the love of ghosts. I thought about the pamphlets I had found on their counter, pamphlets for the Conjoined Eaters Church I had found out about at Wally’s, pamphlets with titles such as “BOUNCING BACK FROM SELF-EXILE” and “THE PROBLEM WITH YOUR LIFE IS YOU.”

When I finally reached C’s condominium complex, my feet were burning and tingling at once and my throat felt like a single lump of pain. I must have been thirsty, and hungry. I would ask C to feed me when I found him. I pushed open the front metal gate and walked in, stepping over pointy metal spikes that sank into the ground when you drove on them the one way and pierced your tires when you crossed the other. I turned right at the geometrically trimmed juniper bush and left at the second left, where a lonely sprinkler jerked back and forth, watering a patch of concrete. When I saw the right group of condos, I headed up the stairs toward the top-right unit just left of the corner unit. I gripped the metal railing with a pink, sweat-filmed hand.

At C’s entrance at the top of the stairs, I knocked and knocked. I made a high-pitched, terrible sound by dragging my fingernails down the door. I pleaded. I texted a series of question marks, nothing but question marks, until the screen of my cell phone looked as though it were glitching. I slumped down and sat on the concrete, thinking it’d only be a while before someone saw me and expressed concern, before someone did something about me. But that time didn’t come.

I waited there until it began to get dark, and then I left to walk back home, emptied out and light-headed, not sure whether the salt on my body was from sweat or from tears.

WHEN I FINALLY RETURNED TOthe house across the street, I felt relief and certainty. This was the place. There was no other place like it in the world. I had everything I needed here: peace, quiet, pamphlets. Everything except food. And my makeup, which was back across the street in what used to be my bedroom. I stepped softly over to the window and looked up into the warm yellow lights of my old apartment. It looked so much safer from over here, with a twenty-yard buffer. I thought I might even be capable of going back inside if only I could wait until the lights went off and B went to sleep, reducing my chances of seeing her to zero. I settled down on the couch in front of the sheeted-over TV to wait. I pulled the TV sheet back, uncovering its large, dark lens, and found myself distorted in its surface, sitting there watching myself watch myself. Time passed and the rooms of my old apartment went entirely dark, one by one.

Then I crept out across the street, past the old oak by my bedroom window, around the driveway to the staircase leading up to our two-bedroom apartment. I turned the key so very slowly in the lock, I opened the door with both hands on the knob. At the top of the stairs I knew I needed to check both bedrooms to see which one B was sleeping in — I had to do it without turning on the lights. I crawled over to her bedroom door, body low to the ground, and listened at the crack for the sound of sleeping. After a few minutes I was sure that I heard it: the sound of no sound, the sound of a stilled throat, the whisper of breath through the nostrils, almost imperceptible. Now I could sneak into the kitchen and grab some oranges, sneak into my bedroom and grab my makeup before leaving forever, victorious.

Then I heard a voice from behind me saying my name, again and again, insistent like the call of a bird. I turned.

She stood staring, gaping as though struggling to believe what she was seeing. It seemed to be her: the tiny mouth, sharp fingers, a voice like water falling on tin. These were parts of the old B, the one I knew. But the self-assurance, the way she leaned forward, extending a hand out toward me as though she thought she was helping, out and into my own space: this wasn’t my frail friend. When the pamphlets instructed me to discern duplicity, was this what they meant? I looked at her, at the traces of varicolored eye shadow that clung to her eyelid. Errors were piling up in her. She needed sorting.