Free You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman Page A

mean that you won’t be that person at some other time, someday. It doesn’t mean that B is that person, or could be that person if she tried. It doesn’t mean you’re not you. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love you.
I had enumerated the doesn’ts.
    By then I was tired or maybe sad, so I turned the TV on.
    On-screen there was another Kandy Kakes commercial. In this one, Kandy Kat has become a scientist so that he can crack the problem of Kandy Kakes, find out what makes their matter so disastrously incompatible with his own. Kandy Kat guides us through a series of diagrams on the chalkboard that elucidate the basic structure of a Kandy Kake: outer coating of crispy candy shell sprinkled with crushed nuts and a patented candy substance known only as “Choco Shrapnel,” then a layer of gooey caramel followed by two layers of rich chocolate of slightly different consistencies. Then a layer of fluffy cake, kept moist by the four layers of airtight, watertight substances surrounding it, then a layer of crisp chocolate cookie. At the center is the top-secret “Kandy Kore,” a dense, sugary substance whose chemical composition is known to only a few privileged individuals within the Kandy Kakes empire. Rumor has it the Kandy Kore is not strictly edible per se, in the sense that the special materials that give it its unique flavor are not thought to be made of food, specifically. No food that I’ve ever eaten shimmers with such beautiful, rich shades of green and pink. It’s like eating a gasoline rainbow, if gasoline tasted good. Dressed in a white coat, Kandy Kat rubs his hands together eagerly near a gigantic machine that promises to do something scientific to the lone Kake sitting on a pedestal directly beneath its beam. Even in the coat his ribs show through; it’s painful to see them. He pulls a lever and a beam of sizzling green light envelops the Kandy Kake, which Kandy Kat approaches reverently, his eyes growing wider and wider behind his professorial glasses.
    Suddenly I had a thought, and I muted the TV.
    What I heard was unmistakably the sounds of the same commercial playing in the living room, where B was still presumably sitting. It was muffled, yes, as if it were wrapped in a blanket, but I could make out the terrible grinding and cracking sounds that happen when Kandy Kat tries unsuccessfully to bite down on a Kandy Kake. It sounded as if someone were trying to repair a car, but with tools all made of bone and meat. I tried to picture her sitting there on the couch and watching, but all I could picture was myself, sitting on my bed, trying hard to picture something. I stared at the screen, at Kandy Kat trying to eat. He was biting so hard that his teeth cracked.

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    WHAT WAS AT THE ROOT of Disappearing Dad Disorder? Sociologists said it was social, psychologists said it was psychological, and some religious nut said they had heard a call from God to leave behind their wicked lives. Biologists compared it with migration and with songbirds that become confused in the presence of skyscrapers. They compared them with honeybees who abandon their hives: maybe the fathers had been misled by cell phone signals, by highways, by toxins in the water supply. An American studies professor from Cornell argued that it had to do with the breakdown of the single-earner family model upon which our common baseline for masculine worth was founded; a comedian said that all husbands were on the verge of disappearing, only there was still such a thing as a football season, and then a basketball season, and then a baseball season. And a minority voice pointed out that this had been happening forever in minority communities, but it wasn’t called a disorder until it started happening to well-off white people.
    Possible explanations for the self-napping impulse were offered up in interviews with abandoned wives. Their husband was a sneaky rat and had been since the earliest days, the days when they were courting and he