This Body (5 page)

“Of course I do.”
Did she
? She hadn't checked to see if the license was valid.

“Is the Porsche all right? You didn't wreck it, did you?”

Katharine was beginning to ripple.
I take it all back. This isn't going to be easy
. “Listen, Rob, I'll be ready at one —”

“Rob?” he barked.

Oh, hell, what have I said now
?

“What do you really want?” he demanded.

Katharine felt exhausted. She could hardly answer. “I'll be ready at one. Bye.”

She hung up the phone and dissolved into tears. Her head hurt. Her eyes hurt. The muscles across her chest and shoulders hurt.
These aren't even my pains. I didn't do anything to deserve this. I want to go home. I can't handle this. They'll probably
put me away. Maybe I am insane. But I want to go home. I want to see my family.

She stopped crying, too depleted to continue. She would go home. She would find this Porsche of TB's and drive home. She'd
somehow make them realize who she was. She knew things about them only she could know. They would have to believe her.
So their mother returns after being dead a year, in the body of a twenty-two-year-old drug addict from LA
. It was weird, of course. But they couldn't deny who she was. Her kids would have a young-looking mother. Her husband would
have an old wife in a new body.
Maybe cleaned up, this body wouldn't be so bad. He might even like it
. Going home. It sounded so soothing. But something kept tweaking her.
That woman. That woman on the phone. Who is she
?

She picked up the phone again and dialed home. That woman answered. She was laughing.

“Is Mrs. Ashley home?” Katharine asked almost belligerently.

The woman laughed again, her mouth not quite on the receiver. “Stop that.” There was a muffled chuckle. “I'm sorry,” she said
into the mouthpiece. “This is Mrs. Ashley.”

“Mrs. Katharine Ashley?” Katharine was getting mad. It kept the panic at bay.

“No. This is Diana Ashley,” and her voice took on a more formal tone. “I'm sorry, Katharine died a year ago.”

Oh, God. It's true. I'm dead and gone, and he's remarried. Why did they let me live if they planned on taking my life away
?

“Would you like to speak with my husband? He's right here.” Katharine heard Philip chuckle again. The woman's voice spun away
from the receiver. “Hon, it's someone asking for Katharine.”

“No,” Katharine gasped. “No,” she repeated and hung up.
My husband. My husband
. She felt her heart shrivel —
two sizes too small
— then picked up the phone again and dialed 411.

“What city, please,” said the voice.

“I need to know the date and the day of the week.”

“June twenty-seventh. Tuesday,” the voice said without hesitation.

What a city, LA. No one bats an eye
.

Katharine put the receiver down with measured control. She had three and a half days to prepare to meet her new family.

Act 1, Scene 4

“A lot of people enjoy being dead.”

“But they're not dead really. They're just backing away from life.”

—B
UD
C
ORT AND
R
UTH
G
ORDON
,
Harold and Maude
(1971)

Katharine ran on white rage. She was a dilithium crystal, glowing hardcold with righteous anger and jealousy. A halo of betrayal
surrounded her, and she felt as though she could blind people with her incandescence.
He couldn't even wait a year to get married
.

She found and stalked the laundry room —
just let anyone confront me as Thisby. I'll blow right through them
— but apparently TB had not been the friendliest person in the complex. People said hello, but they did not start up any
conversations.

Well, that's just fine with me
.

By Thursday morning, she decided it was time to go out into the big city. She walked along the outskirts of UCLA and at Westwood
Boulevard turned away from the school and headed into the business section decorated in the blue, white, and red of the upcoming
Independence Day. The shops were small, mostly record and clothing stores catering to students, fastfood restaurants, bars,
bakeries. She propelled herself away from the smell of the doughnuts, bought a bagel in a delicatessen, and picked at it while
she continued down the street.

She went through the sidewalk bins of pulp fiction and used textbooks at Prospero's Books and bought a street map of LA and
a dog-eared
Sunset Western Garden Book
, which armed her with a small measure of self.

She stopped in front of a small beauty salon called, simply, Hair. She was worried about spending all the money in Thisby's
wallet, but the reflection in the glass was more than she could stand. She looked drawn and unhealthy, and she didn't know
what to do about Thisby's hair. She had tried to comb it flat, but it just ended up looking like some sort of nonregulation
pith helmet.

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.