This Body (15 page)

Katharine knew the name from Thisby's trip to New York.

…
We took a flight to Rochester and saw the Lewis Hine Collection of Social Documentary photographs at the George Eastman House.
Hine photographed a lot of immigrants at Ellis Island and the poor, the coal miners and stuff. He did a lot of action shots
and liked weird angles, climbing up on things and shooting down
.

They had other photographers, too. I'll never forget this one photo. It was of this narrow street lined with tall apartment
buildings and dead trees. It was taken from above, at least three stories up. There was an ambulance in the street. The guys
were bringing someone out on a stretcher. The lights on the ambulance were flashing and lighting up the area around the car.
That was it. But it wasn't. If you looked closer, you could see people like storefront dummies at the windows in the apartment
building across the way, barely visible but backlighted by the TV screens behind them. It was really eerie. I liked it
…

Quince opened up a box and looked through the top layer. “You've marked up a lot of these contact sheets.” She pointed to
hand-drawn lines that cut across the tops and sides of the exposures. “Did you print these up with the new crops?”

“I … I don't know. I don't remember.”

She snorted and shook her head. “Okay, so what do you want me to look for?”

“Let's just separate the ‘like’ from the ‘dislike’ for now.”

“So you're adding to your portfolio?”

Portfolio? What portfolio? I haven't found that. Shit
. “Yeah.”

Quince grunted, then folded and rocked herself into a comfortable lotus position.

“Do you want a Coke or something before we start?”

Quince had stacked photographs and contact sheets in her lap. “No, I'm okay.” She began to spread them out around her like
lily pads until she was awash in a pond of pictures. Katharine watched Quince study each photo critically. This was another
incarnation of Quince Katharine would have to get to know.
And she seems knowledgeable about photography
. Katharine picked up her own stack and started going through it, but very slowly; she kept checking the photos Quince was
interested in.

Surprisingly, it was Katharine who asked if she could put on some music; Quince was completely absorbed. But about five o'clock,
Quince straightened up and announced, “Cigarette break. Smoke 'em if you've got 'em.”

Katharine sensed something sit up excitedly in this body, but she quickly tamped it back down. “I don't smoke anymore, and
you need to go outside if you do.”

“Outside?”

“Yes. You can go out on the balcony. I'll bring you an ashtray.”

“Shit, soon you'll be going to church.”

Katharine snorted and pulled open the sliding glass door to let Quince through. Quince jammed her hand in her shorts and fished
out a crumpled pack and a book of matches. She lit up with practiced ease and blew out a puff of smoke. Katharine's nose began
to quiver and her hands trembled; she shut the door tight.

Katharine had always hated cigarettes, and when a neighbor told her she had seen Ben smoking downtown, Katharine was sick
with embarrassment. She could hear Philip's voice even now, that reasonable, logical, experienced voice, “How can I tell him
to stop smoking when I smoked for ten years? You fell in love with me, married me, when I smoked. How can I tell him his life
will be completely ruined if he smokes? When it isn't true. Yes, it will be hard for him to quit later on in life, but it
can be done. Don't sweat it. There are worse things.” Why was that kind of objectivity so easy for Philip? Why couldn't she
have it too? So now as she searched her mind carefully, she realized that she held no emotional condemnation that Quince smoked.
There was none of the tightness in the stomach, the ache in the jaw. It felt good. It felt light.
No roots of responsibility starting to take to this soil. Is this what it's like being an older sister, as opposed to being
a mother
?

They worked and sorted for another hour until Katharine declared, “Enough. I can't look at another depressing building. Or
used people. Let's go out and eat. What do you want?”

Quince leaped up like a frog from its pad. “That pizza place you took me to last year. Pizza Man, right? And then let's go
to that candy store. You know, the one with the rum balls.”

Katharine had seen the Pizza Man restaurant on one of her earlier walks through the neighborhood and, though she had seen
numerous ice cream, candy, yogurt, and cookie stores, thought she knew which candy store Quince had in mind — the one whose
front-window display was a confection in itself — Sugarbaby. Katharine hoped her instincts were correct.

Quince was as animated on the street as she had been silent in the apartment. She jump-shifted between personalities so fast,
sometimes it was hard for Katharine to keep up. Quince rattled on about wanting a dog, and then about some all-day concert
she and a friend had gotten tickets for. In the pizza parlor, after they had been seated, she cried, “O look, sir, look, sir!
Here is more of you,” pointing to deep grooves in one of the corners of their wooden table. It read “Thisby” in stiff lines
like Greek letters.

It must have taken her a long time to cut that deep
.

Katharine suddenly saw Thisby at the table, her pale face and light eyes hooded by makeup and hair. She has a Swiss Army knife.
A pitcher of beer and glasses sit in wet rings on the table. A pizza tray is shoved to the side, napkins balled up in mounds
like cannon shot. The restaurant is crowded, and although there are many waiting for a table, Thisby and her friends aren't
aware of it or, if they are, ignore it. When she and her friends leave, they won't bus any of their mess, though there is
a sign hanging above the ordering desk requesting such help. The friends wait, talking about nothing in particular, while
Thisby methodically chisels out her name, deeper and deeper. She has nowhere to go, nothing to do, and she's determined that
it will take more than a mere pass with a sander to obliterate her. Some of her friends begin to feel uncomfortable. The management
glares at them; after all, they hadn't bought that much food. But Thisby ignores them all and keeps on carving. The friends
are forced to wait; they will not leave until she's finished. When she's done, she deliberately closes the knife, hands it
back to the person she took it from — a stranger from the next table over — slowly drains her beer glass and stands up. The
rest follow, and the busboys pounce on the table, sweep up the remains, and seat others by the time Thisby and her friends
reach the door. It's as if they were never there — but for the name, gouged out like an injury.

Katharine traced the letters with her left hand, and all of a sudden felt odd. Thisby's past overlapped Katharine's present
and superimposed its existence onto hers. The waitress eyed her suspiciously, and Katharine had a sudden fear, mixed somehow
with perverse anticipation, that the waitress would turn and yell to the cook, “Nick, it's that girl again,” while desperately
seeking to invoke the right-to-refuse-service disclaimer on the menu. But she just took their order sullenly and left.

Katharine mentally punched through the thin membrane that was Thisby and picked up her water with her right hand.

When their order arrived, it came with the attention of two young men at the next table. Katharine supposed they were nineteen,
twenty — too old for Quince.

They began to discuss Raves, the bar Katharine knew from the message on Thisby's answering machine. But there seemed to be
more than one rave; they were all over the LA Basin. She slowly realized that raves were roving portable nightclubs whose
whereabouts were spread by word of mouth. Katharine began to despair that she would ever learn this foreign language fast
enough to protect her double identity.

“Thisby's been to a lot of raves,” Quince volunteered, and the boys turned toward her expectantly. Katharine shrugged noncommittally.
The conversation sagged until Quince picked it up again.

Katharine watched the interplay with fascination. It was a verbal dance, sashaying in and then bowing out. One boy, with his
sad eyes and scraggly facial hair —
oh, Ben, have you shaved off that awful stuff yet
? — tried to redirect the conversation toward her, but Katharine was content to hang back and watch.

When they were finished eating and back outside, Quince rolled her eyes. “What a couple of punk rampants.”

“They were?”
I didn't think they were total … punk rampants. Their awkwardness was kind of endearing
.

Quince pulled the corner of her lip up in a sneer. “Not Hercules could have knocked out their brains, for they had none.”

Katharine laughed. “You mean, you've known sheep that could outwit them? You've worn dresses with higher IQs?”

Quince laughed with her. “Okay, so they weren't that bad.”

They walked on, and Katharine forgot about the boys. She worried about how she was going to entertain Quince after dinner
— she was afraid Quince had some sort of trouble in mind. But on the way back to the apartment, after Quince filled up on
Sugarbaby rum balls — Katharine had nothing, though the sweets called to her like sirens — they rented a movie. It was a slasher
film that neither of them had seen before. It was so bad, they hooted at it with great pleasure, throwing popcorn at the screen.
“Don't go in there, you triple-turn'd fool,” Quince yelled at the heroine.

It seems like old times
.

The next morning they weeded through the photographs they had chosen the previous day. Quince indeed knew a lot about photography
and had Thisby's eye without the despair. In the beginning, Quince was hesitant to give her opinion, as if Thisby had disparaged
her too many times before. But, bit by bit, Katharine was able to coax Quince into offering it.

“Shooting any pictures lately?” Katharine asked, taking a leap of faith.

Quince looked at her with so much suspicion, Katharine was worried she had risked too much. “Not much. My camera's acting
up.”

“It is? Why don't you use … mine?” She jumped up and fetched the Nikon FM2 from the box in the utility room. She placed it
and all the paraphernalia in front of Quince. Quince stared at it, looked back up at Katharine, and then back down at the
camera hungrily. Katharine rushed on, “I mean, I'll be so busy getting this exhibit ready, I won't be taking any pictures.
It's just sitting around not being used. And it should be used.”

Quince reverently unsnapped the cover and lovingly took out the camera. Katharine grimaced, remembering how roughly she had
handled it before. “Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind,” Quince murmured.

“It's okay. Really. I'm not going to use it.”
Ever
.

“Dad'll get mad.”

“Oh, the hell with Dad. I can get mad too.” Katharine saw a flash of fear in Quince's eye. “Hey, it's my camera,” she said
to quiet Quince. “I can loan it to whoever I want. To be really honest, I'm not sure I can ever take another picture. I want
to do this exhibit, but then I think I'm finished. I've got to move on to something else. Really. I want you to have the camera.
Think of it as a loan. You just gotta take good pictures as payment.”

Quince didn't say anything but tucked the camera back into place and set it and the accessories case by her stuff. Katharine
watched her with growing, but unasked for, affection.

Act 2, Scene 5

To live a second life on second head.

— S
ONNET
68,7

Katharine continued to spend time walking around Westwood. It wasn't as odd as she thought it might be, or as uncomfortable.
Knowing her geographical base anchored her, and it also made the days go by faster as she waited to hear from Mr. Mulwray.

Coming home from the grocery story on Monday, Katharine passed by and then backtracked to an innocuous-looking building. The
sign painted on the window read:

THE ANIMAL HOUSE
:

LOW-COST VETERINARY CARE

BOARDING KENNELS

ABANDONED, SPAY, AND NEUTERING SERVICES

Katharine felt that if Quince could volunteer there, it would be a perfect match.
I doubt the animals would care what color hair she has and how many earrings she wears
.

She went inside. The young man at the front desk looked exactly the way he should have looked: tall, thin, with a calm, gentle
face — even the stripes of his cotton shirt were muted and soothing.

“Do you need any volunteers here?” she asked.

He took her back to meet the office manager, Pepa Marcos, who looked like …
a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown
. She was mucking out a dog kennel whose resident had given birth to nine puppies three weeks before. Pepa was ecstatic about
a volunteer. “Your timing is perfect. One of our boarders” — she gestured to the kennel — “gave birth sooner than expected.
And for some reason this summer, we haven't gotten the student help we usually get from the University. We could use another
person to handle the odd jobs. Maybe then I could finally catch up on my paperwork.” But as Katharine watched her affectionately
scratching the head of the German shepherd mother, she wondered.