By Any Other Name

She has one of those faces, which she’s learned to bear with patience if not love, in which people see who and what they want to see, and so she gets it all the time, strangers saying: Don’t I know you?... Aren’t you So-and-So from…? Has anyone ever told you that you look like...? It has been happening so long, with such regularity, she not only doesn’t mind anymore, but invites it into the game of her life. A feature not a bug. Perhaps she’s even learned to attract it, manifest it, to cipher herself as strategy for fitness: hair, basic yet off-the-cover classic; makeup, clarifying without accentuating; a wardrobe best described as on-trend timeless; a resting face at once open and inward. Arts of specific nondescription. On account of these errors many friends had dealt their way into her mix, and more than several kinds of lovers, from the life-altering to regrettable: invigorating fucks, transformative intimacies and traumatic heartbreaks, monumental wastes of time. Ended up on a private jet to Kuwait en route to a class reunion in Bismarck. Let a guy call her Tina for a week, cribbed a whole bio off of this friend of a friend’s Facebook—quoted movies she hadn’t seen, told boat-stories from her time fishing in Alaska, learned permaculture and Utah state history while he slept, really committed to the role—and let the scenario play out. Reader, that one she married.

Once strangers feel free enough to address you, to accost you, to publicly impose a narrative upon you, to incarnate you into their wooly imaginaries with a word, with a touch on the shoulder, and once you give a standing-order yes to playing this role—nothing can be the same as it would otherwise be. The first time it happened she was twelve. Disney World, within earshot of Jungle Cruise: a distraught woman convinced that she is her daughter, abducted ten years earlier, runs up, accosts her parents, can they prove she’s theirs, etc., suggesting before accusing them of adopting her off the black market. Attempts at restraint were made, park police called. The raised birthmark by her ear, she said, vaguely clover-shaped, how could there be more than one? She has my nose. What are the odds? Fast forward, years later, top story: the governor of Michigan, the most prominent orphan in America, raised by hardscrabble