This Body

by Laurel Doud

  She hadn't then called after him to be careful, to drive defensively, as if it were a conferred blessing, as if it would keep him from harm. Would the one time she forgot to warn him be the time he would do something stupid?

  And she really hadn't forgotten — the caveat had been in her mind and on her lips, but that last burst of energy needed to purse her lips forward failed her. She had worried about it as she went to sleep, and that was the last thing she remembered.

  No, that's not right. There was something else.

  She woke up. Yes, she woke up, and something was wrong. She felt bad. Worse than she did now. She felt her rib cage expand from the inside, as if something alien had incubated inside of her and wanted to be born. She was going to explode. She heard, more than sensed, her husband beside her — his snores like the sound of clothespinned playing cards being shuffled against bicycle-wheel spokes. She had this schizoid need to gently nudge him under the shoulder blade as she had done countless times in their two decades of marriage, and to flail at him like a windmill. How can you sleep while I'm dying? He dropped away from her then, and she knew.

  In the last second of life, she had cried, “Wait …”

  What was she supposed to do now? Phone home? Yes, that's exactly what she would do. That would ground her. She would talk to her son or daughter or husband, and then everything would be all right.

  There was a phone by the bed. She leaned over slowly, ignoring the insistent blink of the message-machine light, and picked up the receiver. She dialed her area code first; she would assume she was in LA. What else do I have to go on?

  The phone rang. Pick up! Five heartbeats and someone answered, the greeting too truncated for Katharine to catch who it was.

  “Is this the Ashley residence?” Katharine heard herself say in this other body's voice.

  “Yes, it is. Who's calling, please?” It was a woman, and Katharine did not recognize her.

  “Kath — ” Katharine Ashley? Was she? Really?

  She hung up and stared at the phone. What was she going to do? If only her head and stomach would stop lurching. There was an ache in this body that sometimes felt like hunger, but the thought of food made her tilt. The ache was like desire, and it seemed to be pulling at her, pulling her apart, stretching her over and under like saltwater taffy on metal arms at the Boardwalk.

  She sat there on the bed and kicked at a sweater that was on the floor. Underneath it was a plastic Baggie weighted down in one corner by white powder.

  Is this withdrawal? From drugs? Was this Thisby Flute Bennet an addict then? Katharine stiffened. Had she … OD'd? Fried her brain and left this poor body directorless?

  Her skin itched, and she raked the torn nails down her arms, leaving traces of red. I can't be an addict. Not me. I got through the Woodstock era unscathed. I never even liked marijuana.

  Katharine pulled up sharply on her panic. Did that mean they had made some sort of switch, some sort of transfer? Traded places?

  She had to know. Before she could even begin to think or do anything else, she had to know if some drugged-out doppelgänger was inhabiting Katharine's body, wearing Katharine's clothes, looking at Katharine's face in the mirror, wondering where her own had gone? Saying, “I'm all, you know, like, really freaked out.”

  I'll call work, she thought and dialed her number. Maybe she's there.

  “Ryerson-Connors Insurance. Ned Ryerson's office.”

  Disappointed, Katharine recognized the voice as belonging to Rita, one of the new girls they had hired recently.

  “Katharine Ashley, please,” she said, trying to stay under control, afraid she would be recognized, afraid she wouldn't be.

  There was a longer silence than normal until Rita responded. “May I ask who's calling?”

  Katharine fought down the urge to scream, What are you doing at my desk? You're not trained for my job! “I'm a personal friend,” she said.

  There was another long interval. “I think you should call their home.”

  “I can't get through,” she lied. “Please tell me.”

  “I'm sorry, but Katharine died a year ago. Of a heart attack.”

  Act 1, Scene 3

  What is the body when the head is off?

  —KING EDWARD, Henry VI, Part III, 5.1.41

  Katharine hung up the phone, not knowing whether she had said anything or not. She sat with her hands in her lap. My hands? My God, they aren't mine. They'll never be mine. They're some dead girl's hands.

  A year? She died a year ago? But it was June. She couldn't remember the exact date, but it was definitely the month of June. She rubbed her forehead. It was so hard to concentrate. Was this body rejecting her as a brain donor?

  She picked up a stiff and riffled-through newspaper from the floor. The masthead read Los Angeles Times, the front page story, POLICE DOUBT FIRE IS ACCIDENTAL, the dateline, Wednesday, June 21. She relaxed, but then she saw the year.

  It was one year in her mind, but the next in this body.

  Dead a whole year.

  How could they live without her?

  No one even knows how to load the dishwasher properly. They probably do the dishes twice as of ten, and you know no one has put a new roll of toilet paper on the holder in a year. No one has probably even thrown away the old ones. They're probably still there — cardboard tubes lined up on the windowsill, old soldiers with wisps of toilet paper stuck to their cylinders as if to staunch shaving nicks.

  One whole year? Who would be giving Rathbone his pills and walking him every other day? And the bills? Her husband was terrible at paying bills. Oh dear. He saw the Nordstrom's charge …

  As if it really matters now.

  Did I die with clean underwear on? She snorted out loud. I missed Ben's junior year, his junior prom, if he deigned to go, and Marion's graduation from junior high. She started to like that Jones boy. I missed all of that. I missed the spring, the bulbs I would have planted. I was planning to have the best spring garden: the crocuses, the tulips, then the Dutch hyacinths and irises.

  So much missing …

  Does Philip miss me?

  In the spring — last spring? — she had gone away for a weekend by herself. When she came back, the house was a complete disaster. Her husband's only comment was that nobody died; they'd survived, as if that were the best to be expected of them. He said he missed her, though. She knew he was a little hurt when she didn't reciprocate. It wasn't as if she didn't miss him and the kids, but the respite from their lives and their emotions and their schedules and needs and wants was … such a relief.

  The minute she walked in the house, it was as if she had never left, and after she got readjusted, got the house back in order, she realized she had missed Philip.

  Was he missing her now?

  Has he fallen in love again? Was that woman who answered the phone his new love? Katharine saw them at the kitchen table, all together, an unusual event in her day, laughing at some dumb pun Ben made, Marion eyeing her milk glass as if it were filled with hemlock, Philip having concocted some new vegetable pasta and exclaiming, “I can't wait until you guys go away to college. Then you'll be begging to come home to eat my fettuccine,” Rathbone munching happily on some dinner scraps slipped to him not very surreptitiously by that new woman. You'll kill him with that kind of food!

  Breathless, Katharine rubbed her chest with stiff fingers, feeling the sharp ridges of the breastbone beneath the thin layer of skin. Panic yawned and threatened to swallow her insides like the sucking mouth of a black hole. Katharine felt herself being drawn down into it.

  I'll think about it tomorrow! I'll think about it when I'm stronger. I've got to stay sane. …

  She was going to have to be practical, or lose her mind for the second time. She had always been a practical sort of person. This would be her greatest trial. But she needed to act. She needed to postpone the unanswered and unthinkable.

  What she needed to do was to clean this apartment. She would never be able to focus in a
mess like this. It would never do.

  She felt like a stagehand working quickly to get ready for the next scene. By the front door, she stacked the newspapers that were scattered over the couches in the living room. She piled the beer cans and the whiskey bottles in the kitchen to be taken out later.

  Tucked underneath sofa cushions and the general rubbage, she found more plastic bags of marijuana and the white powder she assumed was cocaine. She dumped them into the garbage can with such a strong combination of regret and viciousness, she was unwilling to analyze either emotion.

  The predominant brand of cigarettes in the overflowing ashtrays was Marlboro, but there were other brands as well. TB's friends, no doubt. “TB” was Katharine's mental signature for this body, this Thisby Bennet. She wondered if the apartment reeked of cigarette smoke; she couldn't smell anything. Perhaps this body's nasal passages are so irritated they can't detect it — and that means the stink in the bathroom is really bad.

  On the bookshelves in the living room, she found stacks of black-and-white photographs of strangely focused street scenes, their perspectives so off-balance that they made her stomach whirl. She replaced them facedown on the shelves.

  Behind a cabinet door was a TV, VCR, and stereo system. The cassette left in the VCR was a Quentin Tarantino film that Katharine had never heard of — she had missed that too. Katharine wasn't really a fan of Tarantino's films — too violent, too bloody, too strange — and watched them only because she wanted to know what Ben was watching, and only in video when she could use the remote control to fast-forward.

  The artists on the CDs and tapes sounded familiar, and some she knew she had heard blaring from Ben's room. Ben had gone through numerous musical styles and had been a fan of grunge, industrial, ska, hardcore, heavy metal, speed metal, death metal. Until he stopped talking to her, she had been regaled with facts about various groups — who trashed their instruments, who taught himself to play, who wrote their own songs. Marion was a classic-rock listener: Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Doobie Brothers. Sometimes Marion would come racing into the living room to pump up the volume on the stereo. “Oh, I just love this song,” she would gush, and Katharine would find herself in a kind of time machine, seeing herself at the very same age, gushing over the very same song.

  She felt a pinioning stab of homesickness. She fended it off.

  The kitchen table was stacked with mail and grocery bags with food still in them. One bag had an opened box of Frosted Flakes. The eater had obviously just reached in and pulled out handfuls of the stuff, as flakes skittered across the bottom of the bag when Katharine moved it.

  There wasn't much in the cupboards: some canned goods, condiments, and bottles of scotch, vermouth, and bitters. In another cabinet were plastic vials of prescription medicines, antibiotics generally, but there were also a couple whose curative powers remained a mystery to her. It didn't surprise her that TB would be a sickly person, but it surprised her that she would bother with doctors. Or is he her pusher? Amphetamines and depressants and such things. The doctor's name on all the labels, some with expiration dates long past, was the same: Dr. Elliot Mantle, Beverly Hills. She should probably remember that. Maybe she should start a list of the things she knew about Thisby — just in case someone showed up: family, friends, boyfriends, and she had to be her. Her dead ringer. She could just imagine what type of boyfriend a person of her obvious habits would attract. It made her shudder.

  She pulled open drawers that rattled with useless inventory. The child did not seem to own a pen or a sheet of paper. She found a stubby yellow pencil like the ones available at miniature golf or at the library — no doubt, this was a golfing acquisition — and ripped up a grocery bag into strips. She wrote awkwardly — her hand not responding well to commands — at the top of one sheet, “Elliot Mantle — doctor — Beverly Hills — 555–8411.” She stacked the prescription labels neatly for future reference.

  The contents of the refrigerator were hardly more nourishing. There was beer, Coke, an empty carton of juice, five jars of maraschino cherries (which she had always hated), and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, the thought of which twitched her stomach counterclockwise. She pitched everything out while gulping down a Coke, which made her throat tingle.

  Katharine stood in front of the opened refrigerator. She liked bare refrigerators, one of those small contentions with Philip she had discovered early in their marriage. He loved them bulging with food and drink, a sign of wealth and prosperity. Of course, he wasn't the one to discover two-month-old leftovers, growing black-and-green fungus and smelling of putrid decay in their Tupperware containers.

  She closed the door, leaned over the sink, and threw up, her stomach muscles barely strong enough to send the stinging soda back up her throat.

  Katharine sat at the kitchen table with a small pile of mail in front of her. She had feebly frisbeed the junk mail, including a UCLA summer schedule of classes, into the garbage can and had separated the bills from the personal letters. There was only one of the latter, its envelope handwritten with no return address, Los Angeles on the canceled stamp. It read:

  T —

  Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.

  I want out of this fucking place. Call around 3 on

  Tuesday/Thursday.

  You know she's never here then.

  Q

  She gingerly sipped another Coke. She took up a piece of brown-bag stationery and wrote “friends/family” at the top. She listed “Q” but with a large question mark after it.

  The bills were pretty straightforward — a phone bill, a rent-hike notice. Geezus, the place looks nice, cleaned up and all, but the rent is our entire house payment up north. There were no credit card bills. No gas card bills. There's only eighty dollars in her wallet and no checkbook. Katharine stopped. How was she going to pay for things like rent and food? How did TB pay for them? Did she have a job? Did she sell drugs for a living? Maybe she gets paid for casual sex? What do I know? Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes and slipped down her cheeks. She quickly wiped them away with the back of her hand. Come on. Buck up. You can cry tomorrow.

  She figured she could do a reconnaissance of the bedroom before having to lie down again but then realized the search would have to be postponed until she cleaned the bathroom; the overwhelming stench had started to attack her precarious stomach.

  Katharine didn't know quite where to start but decided to mop up as much of the offending purge as possible with the bedspread. She would have given anything for her largecapacity, four-cycle, heavy-duty Maytag washing machine, with its electronic sensors and infinitely adjustable water-level control. … Stop it. Move on.

  There was a balcony off the kitchen nook, and she put the bedspread there until she could wash it. The crud would harden like little cement patties, but there was nothing else to be done.

  Underneath the sink were basic cleaning supplies with labels so faded that if it weren't for their distinctive shapes, she wouldn't have known what they were. With these, she managed to get the worst of the topsoil off and left the heavy stuff for the next cleaning. Her arm and shoulder ached, she was so weak. She couldn't smell anything but Comet and Mr. Clean.

  Seeping fatigue had slowly but steadily wormed its way up her fingers and into her soul. She tried to marshal strength, but couldn't. I'm running on empty. Her head and the back of her neck were thick and stiff with pain, and thunderbolts stabbed periodically behind her eyes. The sun had set some time before, and it was now quite dark outside. She barely had the energy to find a sweater to put on, as she was beginning to shake from a cold that seemed to emanate from within. The nagging hunger that wasn't for food pulled at her too. She crawled into bed and tugged the covers up and the pillow down until she was positively cocooned.

  She wondered what her family was doing. Were they preparing for bed too? It was probably way too early for Ben, who even on restriction would rattle around the house, eating cereal, watching videos, unt
il the wee hours of the morning. Would Philip be in bed? If he was, he'd be asleep already; the man was able to attain unconsciousness in less than a minute, something she was continually awed at as she lay in bed, her brain rumbling with half-finished conversations, lists of things to do, scenarios and worries of what might happen and to whom.

  She suddenly had a vision of Philip when they were first married, how he would come to bed wearing a folded bandanna to keep his hair from frizzing into a hair ball around his head; he wouldn't let that happen on purpose until the next year, when Afros became fashionable. He was wearing that headband the first time she saw him. December 1, 1969. He was playing touch football with his friends on one of the grass fields on campus. He had tied the bandanna across his forehead to keep his long, curly hair out of his face and to sop up the sweat that streamed from his hairline. He looked like a medieval knight. His dog, a small shepherd mix, wore a matching scarf around his neck and waited patiently on the sidelines. A boy and his dog. The dog's name was Siddhartha. Philip was really into existentialism then. She pretended she understood Hesse and Sartre and Camus, but she never saw what all the fuss was about. Later, she wondered whether Philip had pretended too. He never reread those books, and man's essential isolation never seemed to concern him again.

  Katharine had noticed Sid — even his master quickly forgot his more lofty name — before she noticed Philip. Sid had a pleasant grin, and even though Katharine wasn't much good at it, he let her throw the Frisbee for him — probably, she suspected, because nobody else would. When Philip and his friends somehow decided that their game was finished, he came over to retrieve Sid, who was happily stationed on her feet.