This Body

by Laurel Doud

  She entered, and the smell of perm solution and hairspray dimly penetrated her dilithium-hard shell. Katharine had been a teenager in the late sixties, when no self-respecting girl with long straight hair would be caught dead in a beauty salon. Natural was the only way. But after Marion was born and twenty pounds stayed on and on, Katharine treated herself to an afternoon away from the kids and, hopefully, to a new look. It was bliss. It was heaven. Somebody shampooed her hair. Somebody offered her a drink. Somebody massaged the oak-hard knots in her neck and shoulders. She didn't have to do anything. She didn't read the women's magazines or the gossip weeklies, she just sat there until she was nothing but cartilage. Philip didn't much like the new do. She didn't either, really, but it didn't matter. She had found a place where she could let go. Other people hated the smell of perms, but to Katharine it meant pampering and —

  I don't have time for this. She breathed tightly through her mouth.

  The only man in the salon, wearing the seemingly requisite slicked-back hair in a short ponytail, seated her and looked at her somewhat quizzically, like, What in the hell am I supposed to do with this?

  When she told him to cut off just the damaged parts, he took an electric shaver and held it flat to her scalp. “About here. Are you into the juvenile authority look, luv?”

  Katharine contemplated the buzz cut. She had always liked the tactile feel of hair on her shoulders, but not now. She didn't want any hair touching her. She didn't want to feel it at all. When the hairdresser realized that she was actually considering it, he amended his diagnosis. He fussed about and, after lifting a great deal of the flat black color until a pale brown sheen could be seen, left two or three inches all over her head. It stuck straight out, but Katharine liked it. It reminded her of the crimson bottlebrush they had had in the front yard of their first house. Thisby looked like some sort of futuristic punk assassin, tall and thin with all hard edges, but for the first time since she had died, Katharine felt the outside and the inside matching up. Here was no priss. This was something she could have never gotten away with as Katharine but now … I like it. She also felt protected, as if she were in a masquerade. It was a brilliant disguise.

  But not totally.

  On the way home from the store, a car going in the opposite direction honked at her, and a voice called, “Hey, Thiz!” She turned quickly down the next street and hid in the doorway of The Devil's Own, a head shop displaying leather, silver, and incense, until she felt it was safe to continue.

  She prowled the rooms of the apartment after she put away the food and ate half the candy she had bought. She had spent almost all the money and now was furious at herself for succumbing to the grocery store's candy display with the sign overhead that said LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES.

  The white rage blazed.

  She had never before felt this intense, this irrational, this volatile. But it pleased her. She didn't have to think while she was burning this hot, a constant film of strange-smelling sweat trying to cool her skin. She muscled control over this body. She fed it what it didn't want and made the food stay down by sheer willpower. She was a drill sergeant, whipping the new recruits into shape. No mercy.

  It felt good because it didn't feel at all.

  When the flame inside her periodically trimmed to a leaner, steadier glow, she was able to continue her inventory of the apartment. It was during one of these respites that she found the pictures in the utility closet. The closet was long and narrow with shelves butting up to a black wall. Boxes with a progressive range of years marked on the sides in felt pen lined the shelves. She reached up for one of them and her arm was so weak, she could hardly pull it off the shelf. It fell against her chest and she steadied it with her left arm until she had to drop it heavily to the ground. There were photographs inside — a lot of them.

  She dragged the box into the kitchen and went back into the closet to get another one. As she pulled down a box near the back wall, she banged her hip against something. She looked down and, when her eyes adjusted, realized that the wall was really a door, and it was a doorknob that she had hit.

  The beat of her heart staggered. What was beyond the door? Why would TB paint it black? Her hand reached for the knob. Was the audience behind her yelling, “Don't go in there, you stupid fool!”? And indeed it was like watching a movie, her hand slowly reaching for the knob, expecting it to be jerked away by some knife-wielding psycho standing framed in the lurid backlight.

  At first the door seemed locked, until Katharine turned the knob harder. Boy, you're really fearless. She shoved the door aside. She couldn't see a thing. The feeble light from behind her shadowed a pull chain hanging just below the door header in front of her face. She jerked it hard and flinched as a red, leering light flooded the room. It's a little whorehouse. … No, it was her son's bedroom when he went through a phase of colored lights and folded Indian-print bedspreads nailed over the windows like blackout curtains.

  A drug-processing operation?

  No, a photographer's darkroom, narrow and deep, with counters running the length of the space. Cardboard boxes and plastic jugs lined the shelves below both counters. A sink was surrounded by trays and round containers, and a clothesline was strung at an angle from one wall to another.

  The room was clean and neat and, therefore, seemed unused. There were no pictures on the corkboard, no negatives pinned like streamers from the clothesline. There was a very light film of dust on the countertops, undisturbed by fingerprints. TB had obviously abandoned this place, so Katharine turned off the light, closed the door, and went back into the kitchen, taking another box with her.

  There was more in the boxes than she could have expected, yet less than she could have wished for. One box held a black case with padded shoulder straps. Inside was a camera, beautiful even to Katharine's untrained eye. The name on it was Nikon FM2, and there were lenses and other paraphernalia in a matching case. The other boxes were filled with photographs, negatives, 8 × 10 sheets with rows of small pictures, and a small spiral notebook filled with dates, numbers, and symbols like mathematical formulas written in Thisby's juvenile hand.

  The real find was a stack of photo albums. The first one began when Thisby was a newborn. It looked like something her mother had started for her, half baby book, half photo album. A birth announcement was taped to the first page:

  Thisby Flute Bennet

  Wednesday, December 24

  “There was a star danc'd, and under that she was born.”

  Katharine watched Thisby grow from a pretty baby to a chunky toddler to a waifish young child, performing in ballet recitals and acting in plays, though Thisby was always in the back with the chorus, not in front with the leads. There were photographs of the family, mostly of Rob and Thisby clowning around together. One was always next to the other, linked arm in arm, grinning identical smiles, the right side of their lips slanted up and out. Thisby's parents always appeared together too. They were a beautiful couple, smiling and confident and proud. Anne Bennet had the look of fine china, fragile yet stronger than might be expected. If Thisby could grow into an Anne Bennet, there might be hope.

  When Thisby was seven or eight, a vague baby appeared — sister “Kewpie,” as Thisby captioned her. The baby was always out of focus, but she did look like a Kewpie doll, with a topknot of hair tied with a thin ribbon above a round face.

  From then on, the album was strictly Thisby's, and it looked as if she had taken to photography with a vengeance. She took pictures of everything and everyone, though the baby disappeared quickly from the photoplay. If Rob hadn't talked about Quincey in the present tense, Katharine might have thought she had died in infancy.

  Sometimes the photos had captions, sometimes not. Katharine found out that Thisby had a dog named Snout and a best friend named Maxie Glenn. Her neighborhood cronies were named Curt and Steve and Laurie and Falfa — the most interesting of their photos, a lineup against a mural of the American flag almost obscured by gangland graffiti.
There were pictures of cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and various boyfriends she captioned “Jack,” “Ryan,” and “Jake.”

  Rob was often a subject by himself, hamming it up with odd postures or silly faces. Sometimes the captions underneath read “The Merry Wanderer” or “Goodfellow” or what looked like a P with a great flourish underneath. But the pictures of Rob slowly decreased. By the time he looked to be in high school, there were hardly any at all, and it appeared as if Thisby had gone out of her way to distort the ones she did take of him. Sometimes he looked to have a tree sprouting from his head, or a shadow like a cancerous growth crawled up his face. Sometimes he looked like a mannequin. One photograph she had entitled “The Freshman,” and he had shadows like thick horn-rimmed glasses around his eyes. He looked like some sort of diddlebockian nerd, and Katharine couldn't tell if the effect had been intentional.

  People were replaced by buildings in the last album. The photographs were even more distorted by strange lighting and odd angles. Katharine realized the photos in the living room had been taken by Thisby, and these were their precursors. They were black-and-white, but Katharine had a sense that color wouldn't have mattered; everything was made up of grays: dirty, smoggy skies, grimy concrete and stone buildings, rubbled streets. It took Katharine a while to realize, however, that there were people in the photographs, but they could be mistaken for a part of the landscape, the architecture. They were slouched against the walls of buildings like rumpled gargoyles or stood stock-still like extra support for the columns. One photograph, taken at a slant, was of a low billboard with one side sagging to the ground. The advertisement was for a housing community called Pacific Heights, and in the corner a palm tree waved in the breeze over the swimming complex. Only it wasn't a palm tree but a wafer-thin black man who stood leaning against the billboard, his dreadlocks sticking out in a frond of spikes.

  She was reminded of a children's perception game she used to like to play — Hidden Pictures. The goal was to find the incongruous items hidden in a larger landscape. Find the barnyard animals drawn into a city street. Find the kitchen appliances in a forest.

  Find the vagrant.

  It was as if humanity were hidden, masquerading as the inanimate, and unless viewers wanted to take the time and effort to find it, they didn't have to.

  And I don't.

  Act 1, Scene 5

  I am a feather for each wind that blows.

  — LEONTES, The Winter's Tale, 2.3.154

  By the time Katharine woke up Saturday morning, the flame that had burned since Tuesday had consumed the insides of this body. The fury had turned her entrails to ash, and they swirled away in the hot summer breeze. Now there was nothing — no emotion, no feeling — and she felt as calm and logical as a mentat. She could fill this body, this husk, with any emotions or feelings she so chose. I can be forgiving. I can be vindictive. I can be … Oh, the hell with this … I need to know what I'm going to do. I need a Plan. I need a goal. A mission.

  I need money and I need to know where I stand. With my family. With my husband. Was she going to fight for her husband? Could she even win him back, if she wanted to? She did have some rights, some claim to his affections. But whether she could wrest him from this Diana would have to be decided by trial. Did she want to do that? Yes. Yes. What else was there for her to do? He is the only man I have ever known. He is the only man I have ever loved, who ever loved me … I don't know anyone else but him. I don't know anything else but him.

  She remembered how Philip looked the first time he held Ben in his arms, how amazingly comfortable and confident he looked, already rocking from side to side, a motion, even seventeen years later, he duplicated if he held anything in his arms for long. Philip had looked down at Ben, then over to her, and there was such incredible awe in his face. “We created this,” they said to each other virtually simultaneously, which made them laugh, though Katharine's lower half protested such use. Katharine had loved Philip so then. It was a moment in her life she had framed and reverently centered on the mantelpiece of her mind.

  That's what she wanted back.

  Katharine could feel the fury seeping back into her, but it had a direction. To go back home. She would be the lioness fighting for her family. She would be out for blood. She would tear the interloper limb from limb. What else was there for her to do? She needed to arm herself, though, with information and money. She would infiltrate Thisby's family, find out how to finance herself back into the world, and find out what that world had become. And go back home.

  What else was there for her to do?

  She worried about what to wear for her introduction into Thisby's family. Out of habit she had looked for a dress and stockings, namely Hanes Alive to help alleviate the varicose veins that had plagued her as a result of her two pregnancies. But this body had no varicose veins, as Katharine had discovered while shaving in the shower, one heel propped up on the soapdish. These legs were not webbed with the purple lumps she had hated so much that she wore midcalf styles and pants — never shorts or miniskirts. She had run her hands up the inside of Thisby's smooth calves, feeling an almost absurd sense of joy. To be rid of those … It's almost worth it.

  She had to root through the dresser to find a decent bra — not that Thisby really needed one. Her breasts barely stuck out from beyond her rib cage. Perhaps with a bit more flesh, they would be more prominent. In Katharine's teenage days, her peers didn't wear bras regardless of their breast mass, but Katharine had taken to heart the articles she read in the more conservative fashion magazines. If she could not pass the pencil test — if her breast sagged low enough to hold a pencil between it and her rib cage — she must wear a bra. Almost right after puberty she could put practically a whole box of pencils under her breasts, and they would be held fast. Okay, an exaggeration. She had tried to go without a bra a couple of times, but it had always felt so uncomfortable that it wasn't worth it. Her husband never seemed to mind her less-than-upright boobs, but she often eyed with envy the actresses on the screen. Even as large as they were, their uplifted breasts would have passed the pencil test. What kind of breasts does that Diana have?

  Well, now she had breasts that could pass the pencil test — they could pass a toothpick test; be careful what you wish for, you just might get it — but it still felt uncomfortable to Katharine to go braless. She found one that looked like a training bra and put it on. The feel of the straps, the closure hooks, felt right.

  She couldn't bring herself to dress as she imagined Thisby would, yet she couldn't make herself dress as Katharine would have. That was for a body that … sleeps with the fishes. She finally settled on an outfit her daughter would have liked: jeans, a white T-shirt, an oversized sport coat with contrasting turned-up sleeves, and white socks and penny loafers she found in the back of the closet. She looked at TB's reflection in the full-length mirror hung on the inside of the closet door and felt she was looking at a catalog ad. Studied casualness, but it suddenly seemed to fit the current symbiosis between this body and her mind.

  The doorbell rang at twenty minutes to one. The airy sensation she had felt all morning suddenly solidified, and she crashed jarringly to the ground. She looked through the aperture in the front door, and the fish-eye lens revealed a young man, tight-jawed and rigid, half turned back toward the elevator. This was another version of the brother in Thisby's photographs.

  This is it. This is not a screen test. This is real life.

  She opened the door, and Rob turned around. He had grown into a handsome young man, though he still retained that stiff, controlled look that was evident in the last of Thisby's pictures. His blondish hair was thick and slightly curly. It was brushed back off his forehead and looked as though it often had ideas of its own, no matter what the cut or the volume of hair mousse. He was taller by half a head than TB and was dressed somewhat similarly to herself: jeans, a maroon T-shirt, and worn deck shoes over bare feet. At least, I'm close.

  “So you didn't skip,
” he said, and walked into the apartment. He looked around, and there was thinly veiled surprise on his face. “I figured I'd better catch you before you did.” He turned toward her and raked her up and down. “Don't you ever eat?”

  Katharine opened her mouth to speak but then realized there was no answer he wanted to hear.

  “Well, at least you don't look like one of the brides of Dracula like usual.”

  His sanctimonious tone bit hard. He had no right to speak to her like that, or to Thisby for that matter.

  “You don't have to be so rude,” Katharine demanded before she could check herself.

  He turned and stared coldly at her. “What do you mean? I'm the very pink of courtesy.” He turned once more as if to check out the apartment. “Come, recreant, come thou child. I'm parked illegally.”

  She grabbed Thisby's purse and followed him out.

  His car was electric blue and looked as though it could ride the slipstream easily. Marion would love it. When she felt the band around her heart start to squeeze, she shook herself. Not now.

  “Do you want the top down?” he asked.

  “No.” They had to talk. She didn't want to postpone it. She didn't want to get cold feet. She needed to know now whether she was going to be able to pull this off. How much do these people really know about Thisby? Will they see me as the impostor that I am? Probably not, considering what I've seen … How much do I know about my own children? Would I know them? … Of course I would. A mother can sense these things. She knows. … Then perhaps Anne Bennet will be my ultimate challenge.

  “So, Rob,” she began but stopped when she saw his face freeze up. Oh, wonderful. This is not a great way to start.