This Body

by Laurel Doud

  PRAISE FOR LAUREL DOUD'S

  This Body

  * * *

  “Laurel Doud has a genuine talent. … She plots ingeniously, draws her two very different central characters, Katharine and Thisby, with great skill, and handles some weighty themes with astonishing sureness.”

  — Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News

  “An entertaining first novel that combines humor with sticky issues of identity. … An amusing novel.”

  — Elizabeth Bukowski, Wall Street Journal

  “A fresh, thoughtful spin on the well-worn fantasy of inhabiting another body, this offbeat debut borrows the cast of A Midsummer Night's Dream and submits them to a very 1990s enchantment. … Crisply written, wry, and intelligent.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “Laurel Doud's humorous and engaging story of a woman who dies and regains consciousness in another's body, This Body captures the reader's imagination from the first. … Doud writes with such grace and conviction that the impossible seems quite plausible.”

  — Lynn Harnett, Herald Sunday (Portsmouth, NH)

  “The richness and intricacy of the plot propel the reader swiftly toward its satisfying conclusion.”

  — Judith Kicinski, Library Journal

  “A fascinating and thought-provoking story. … A compassionate first novel of reincarnation.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

  AUTHOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This work embodies the premise that the writing of a first novel is often by group process, so it is with orgasmic delight that I am able to publicly acknowledge and thank the following people:

  My agent, Leigh Feldman, who saw what it could be; my editor, Sarah Burnes, who helped me make it what it is — organically; and my copyeditor, Stephen Lamont, who was “professional fussbudget” par excellence.

  My readers: Linda Carroll for her rational view and her unwavering support in all my endeavors; Claudia Parker for her no-nonsense approach and her perceptive advice; and Terri and Eric Peterson and Robert McKenna for being there at the very beginning — and at the end.

  My fellow writers (and subsequent readers) at Hedgebrook Cottages: Mylène Dressler for her lyrical beauty and encouragement; Roxanne Ray for her playwright's eye; and Stephanie Grant, who taught an old dog new tricks with her gentle and insightful guidance on two reads.

  But, most of all, to my Muse, Lee Reilly, who loaned me her brain, her heart, and her courage so I could tell this story in the way that I had hoped to.

  See a penni pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1998 by Laurel Doud

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  The author is grateful for permission to include the following previously copyrighted material:

  Burma-Shave advertisement from The Verse by the Side of the Road: The Story of the Burma-Shave Signs and Jingles by Frank Rowsome, Jr. Copyright © 1965 by Frank Rowsome, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Stephen Greene Press.

  Excerpt from “Spilt Milk” by Will Doud-Martin. Copyright © 1998 by Will Doud-Martin. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-08297-6

  You had much ado to make [my] anchor hold.

  — William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, 1.2.213

  “Some don't like the roller coaster; they go on the merry-go-round.

  That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it.”

  So, thanks, Danner and Will. I wouldn't have missed

  the Giant Dipper for anything.

  — with apologies to Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, Parenthood

  Contents

  Praise for Laurel Doud's

  Author's Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Act 1, Scene 1: What's past is prologue, what to come

  Act 1, Scene 2: Where's the rest of me?

  Act 1, Scene 3: What is the body when the head is off?

  Act 1, Scene 4: “A lot of people enjoy being dead.”

  Act 1, Scene 5: I am a feather for each wind that blows.

  Act 1, Scene 6: Was I part of this curious dream?

  Act 2, Scene 1: I do perceive here a divided duty.

  Act 2, Scene 2: Knowledge can be more terrible than ignorance if one can do nothing.

  Act 2, Scene 3: You have a double tongue within your mask.

  Act 2, Scene 4: I will not permit you to have two families,

  Act 2, Scene 5: To live a second life on second head.

  Act 2, Scene 6: Some of us are cursed with memories like flypaper.

  Act 2, Scene 7: Do not give dalliance too much the rein.

  Act 2, Scene 8: I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know what I remember

  Act 2, Scene 9: What's gone and what's past help should be past grief.

  Act 3, Scene 1: I think you people have proven something to the world — that a

  Act 3, Scene 2: All the world's a stage

  Act 3, Scene 3: What we've got here is a failure to communicate.

  Act 3, Scene 4: What, must I hold a candle to my shames?

  Act 3, Scene 5: He told me I would forget. But how could I not remember?

  Act 4, Scene 1: You speak not as you think. It cannot be.

  Act 4, Scene 2: Youth! Stay close to the young and a little rubs off.

  Act 4, Scene 3: I am almost out at heels.

  Act 4, Scene 4: The fates are against me. They tossed a coin — heads, I'm poor;

  Act 4, Scene 5: Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;

  Act 4, Scene 6: Life is a thief.

  Act 5, Scene 1: Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

  Act 5, Scene 2: … we are not ourselves

  Act 5, Scene 3: To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there's the rub.

  Act 5, Scene 4: The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

  Act 5, Scene 5: As you grow older, you'll find that the only things you regret are

  Epilogue

  A Reading Group Guide

  Prologue

  Write me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm … this will put them out of fear.

  — NICK BOTTOM, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 3.1.15

  “Wait … ,” she cried.

  But Death took her anyway.

  After she regained consciousness and was able to think a bit more clearly, she wondered if “wait” was the reason it happened the way it did. Her “hocus pocus.” Her “abracadabra.” Her “presto chango.”

  “Say the magic word, Sparky.”

  Wait …

  It couldn't have been a fluke, though; somebody else — somewhere, somehow — must have stumbled upon it too. But in all the years of waiting in grocery store checkout lines, she never saw any such headline in the National Enquirer or the Star or the Globe. She read only the headlines, of course; she never actually opened any of those tabloids. Well, maybe once, when actor Harrison Ford secretly wedded Melissa Mathison, the screenwriter for the movie E.T., in a private ceremony at the Santa Monica courthouse.

  But in all the years she had stood there, pretending not to read
even those headlines, she never saw THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE! MIND OF DECEASED WOMAN TELEPORTS 400 MILES INTO BRAIN-DEAD GIRL. POSITIVE ID ON BRAIN-WAVE PATTERNS. FAMILIES CLASH OVER CUSTODY AND FILM RIGHTS.

  Act 1, Scene 1

  What's past is prologue, what to come

  In yours and my discharge.

  — ANTONIO, The Tempest, 2.1.253

  Fade in.

  Pain in her eyes is the first sensation.

  Too bright. Too bright.

  Waves of disorientation swell and roll underneath her. She squeezes her eyes shut and waits for the buckling to subside. When the surface firms, she forces her stiff eyelids to roll up over blistered pupils and wills her vision to track. As the shapes in front of her stabilize and come into focus, she realizes she is lying on a bathroom floor.

  That much she can tell.

  She is up close and personal with one of the squat porcelain knobs that cover the bolts at the bottom of a toilet — the ones that never stay on, though this one looks as though it's never come off. A halo of rust barnacles grows solid around its rim. The side of her face is sticking to the floor, and when she tries to shift her jaw back and forth, the skin stretches and pulls. There are oatmeal-like clumps in her mouth, and it's hard to breathe; her nostrils are packed tight. She spits out what she can and pulls her head — ever so gently — from the floor. There is a soft rubber-soled sucking sound. The movement sends her head spinning, and she grabs the toilet seat. Body and mind seem to connect, and even through her clogged nose, she smells a foul odor rising up like a fog from the bathroom floor. She gags, the muscles in her stomach and buttocks cramping spasmodically. The misery of it jolts her to her feet. Before she can faint, she blindly pushes herself out of the bathroom and away from the smell.

  She moves from one room into another. The stink lessens, but she has brought much of it with her. Finding a kitchen sink with a plastic tub full of dirty dishes, she fumbles with the knobs and gets a stream of water going, rubbing her face while digging into her nostrils with her fingernails. She washes out her mouth and, when most of the slime is gone, leans under the faucet and drinks. She straightens up, and the maneuver sends her head whirling away from her again. She sinks down to the floor, and the ceiling above her fades out.

  When she wakes up, cold and clammy and in the dim light of fading day, it takes her a while to realize that the sink is overflowing and that she is soaked through. It's easier to stand up this time, though she has to hold on to the rim of the sink. The knobs ripple slightly when she reaches out to turn them off. She pulls some dingy-looking towels from the handle of the refrigerator and throws them on the floor to sop up the water.

  It's hard to think. She has never felt so sick in her life — not even after that wedding banquet, when she drank an entire bottle of champagne after coming off three months of strenuous dieting. Her husband and their three-year-old son had left to take the babysitter home, and her daughter, who was almost a year old and very mobile, stayed with her. She thought she was just fine, but suddenly the champagne hit her stomach and her head with a double-impact punch. She vaguely remembered her daughter coming into the bathroom as she was draped over the toilet bowl, but when she woke up later almost delirious on the cold floor, she had no idea how long she had been passed out or where her daughter was.

  That was a picnic compared with this.

  Her heart races and it hurts to breathe deeply. Her body shakes, and she feels an anxiousness that threatens to overwhelm her. Her clothes are stuck hard to her like an oldfashioned corn plaster bandage, and her hair is stiff with caked vomit. The only thing she can think of is to shower, and to shower means going back into that cesspool of a bathroom. But she can't think of anything else. She knows she doesn't know where she is or how she got there, but these questions will have to be deferred for the moment.

  She walks deliberately, one foot placed slowly in front of the other as if on a tightrope, back through the only open door, into a bedroom. She grabs the scrunched-up bedspread at the foot of the mattress and throws it on the floor of the bathroom. It will have to do for now.

  She yanks aside the mildew-spotted shower curtain to reveal the small, sliding window above the tiled wall. Stepping into the bathtub and breathing through her mouth, she opens the window as wide as it will go, letting in a slight breeze. She turns on the water and, hardly waiting for it to get lukewarm, twists the handle to redirect the stream to the showerhead. The bong that is slamming from side to side in her head crescendos, and the pain that is flashing across her forehead forces her eyes shut. She strips off her clothes and leaves them at the other end of the tub, the sodden mess sending rivulets of murky water running toward the drain.

  She wets her clumpy hair and washes it with some shampoo, its perfumed smell almost turning her stomach again. She manages to get through two rinses before the thin venner of her strength sloughs down the drain. Turning the water off, she steps onto the bedspread and wraps slightly crusty but thickly woven towels around her torso and her hair.

  She heads straight for the bed in the next room and lies down, the towels still around her. It is almost dark. The vertigo settles slowly, and this time she falls asleep.

  When she awakens, there is morning light, but she has a sense that she has slept a long time, perhaps through another entire day. Her body is dead weight, that sensation that comes with sleeping so deeply and in one position for too long. It takes all her strength to break the inertia and sit up, her body aching as if it has been clipped and spun up over the hood of a car. She touches her head, and feels that her hair is dry, but her scalp is thick with layers of sweat. Her mouth is dried out almost to cracking, and her stomach feels as though it has dropped down into the base of her spine. Her head still throbs, but her mind is beginning to clear — it's time to find out exactly what's going on.

  She gets up, and the towels unravel around her, remaining on the bed. She looks down the length of her body and is hit with another attack of vertigo, so strong that she has to sit down on the edge of the bed. She doesn't want to move — ever again — but she makes herself slowly stretch out her arms and hands in front of her.

  They are not hers.

  The arms are pale, thin but shapely, the long fingers tipped with ragged nails. Dancer's hands — even she can make them pirouette like butterflies. She looks down, and the almost nonexistent breasts with the very dark nipples are not hers. The flat — nay, concave — stomach, the thin thighs, the knees, are not hers. She stumbles into the bathroom, closes the medicine cabinet door, and stares at the reflection in the mirror.

  The face, the hair, the eyes, are not hers.

  This is not Katharine.

  Act 1, Scene 2

  Where's the rest of me?

  — RONALD REAGAN, Kings Row (1942)

  Katharine watched as the hands that were not her hands touched the face that was not her face. She walked the fingers across the cheeks, up the nose, and across the forehead as if she were a blind person reading some new acquaintance's visage. This face was sharp and drawn, the skin the color and texture of bleached linen. The impossibly flat black hair sprang matted and tangled from the head like yarn from an old and grubby puppet. Whose body is this? She ran the hands down over the breasts and stomach and between the thighs. She could put both hands together as if in prayer and still not touch the inside of the thighs. She couldn't remember if she had ever in her adult life been able to do that with her own body. Whose body is this?

  She jerked herself back into the bedroom and started looking for some sort of purse, flinging things off the dresser and the night tables that flanked the queen-size bed. On the desk, she found a brightly colored pocketbook and snatched at it as if it might scuttle away.

  There was a driver's license — its photograph a version of the reflection that had stared back at her from the bathroom mirror, albeit a healthier one. Thisby Flute Bennet, the license read. Is that a name? 1125 Hillcrest Heights, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. Geezus, only in LA. She loo
ked at the birth date listed; this body was seventeen years younger than her own. She turned over the license, and handwritten on the back was “155 Bruin Circle, #33, LA 90049.”

  This must be some sort of hallucination.

  She stood up awkwardly, as if there were loose connections, a short circuit, in this body, and she had to consciously dictate orders to the extremities.

  This must be a dream.

  She had always dreamed vividly and with such clarity that she would wake up and not be sure whether the dream had actually happened. But there was no disputing the bites of this reality. This was not a dream. Every filament of this body screamed. Every neuron in her brain was on fire.

  “What am I going to do?” she said out loud, hoarsely at first, but then with enough strength to hear the accent and cadence of the voice. It was not hers.

  Is nothing mine but my mind? Returning to silence to hear her own voice in her own brain.

  She quickly rummaged through the dresser drawers to find some clothes to cover this strange naked flesh. The jeans looked terribly thin — there would be no way she could fit into them, but this body did, obscenely easily. She felt more composed now, though — and less like a voyeur.

  What do I remember last about me, in my own body? she thought as she slumped down on the bed. Work? Yes, she remembered it had been a workday, and a long one. She had been tired and not feeling very well, though that was not unusual. She hadn't been feeling well for a long time. Years, it seemed. Doctors pronounced her healthy, yet she still didn't feel good. So tired, so out of sync. She would have settled for feeling okay. Feeling good was for the young. She didn't remember anything unusual happening that night. It was a bit of a blur, though she was sure alcohol hadn't been involved — at least, not any more than the usual two glasses of wine before dinner. She had gone to bed early. She did remember that, suddenly. There had been a fight with her son, and she had ached to steal awhile into the oblivion of sleep. The fight was over something — something, no doubt, like school or grades. He was going to be a junior in the fall, and he was avoiding his required summer reading. His first-semester grades would be incredibly important for college. Didn't he realize that? She had lost her temper and said some things, and as he slammed out of the house, her daughter's bedroom door sounding in sympathetic echo, she had immediately wanted to take back her words.