This Body Read Free

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