Bodies

Bodies

         The grudge she holds against me has no logical source. It’s an excuse for her to slam doors and scream insults and slink into her darkened room to watch Food Network all day without ever planning to pick up a spatula. Every day she straightens her almost-black hair with a hot metal plate and combs it, fluffs it, until it falls like feathers on either side of her face. But no one ever sees. She never makes it past the front door.

         I’m eating oatmeal with a crooked spoon when she comes into the kitchen. She grabs a chocolate-laced granola bar and a Coke, and I give her my traditional speech about breakfast setting the pace for the rest of your day. She tells me that she’ll eat as much junk as she wants to and like it, then takes it to her room and closes the door.

         We were going to go to the museum and see the Impressionist paintings, but she changed her mind and said she wanted to see the human body exhibit instead. I said okay, since she never makes it out of the house much anymore.

         I use rollers and prickly round brushes to make soft waves and springs in my hair before we leave. When I ask her to borrow roller clips she tells me to stop stealing her stuff and throws them at me. My fingers scrape the coral-colored carpet when I pick them up.

         The sunlight from my window highlights thin strands in my hair so they stand out like old gold. She comes into my room and leans against the doorway, one hand on her hip and the other somewhere I can’t see. Her blue eyes have always reminded me of ice, pale but dark, chilly to look at. She taps her foot and says, “Why do you need to do that just to go downtown? What’s the point? No one cares about you.”

          “I do,” I tell her, but she doesn’t understand.

         When we get to the museum, we see bodies that have been taken apart, separated, spread out, twisted. Twenty-five feet of intestine boarders a wall. Muscle and bone structure stand next to each other in a faceoff. Laid out in a glass case is a body-shaped glove of skin that lost its owner for science. We comment on how gross it is, the whole of it, and wonder what it would be like to be one of those people they’ve put on display. We finally talk like sisters should, calm, collected, mature. Two grown women, two equals, a pair. The unstated bitterness she has toward me dissolves in the moment.

         When we see a body split in half, some of its organs sticking out on the left and some on the right, she grabs my arm with her thin, pale fingers so roughly that her nails embed themselves in my skin. “I can’t imagine having someone strip me like that and cut me apart,” she says, “can you?”

         And I say no, I can’t, but her nails are still there. All she has left to do is take the skin away.