The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (11 page)

We laugh good-naturedly.

“But we need to talk about your people skills. Our customers want to see a little phlegm. Give to get!”

I stop listening. My boss molds phlegm with too much zest and alarms our clients, some of whom are skittish to begin with. You cannot tell him anything about phlegm, however.

My father wants me to put my thumb in his mouth. He says that if I will only do this, putting pressure on the palate, it will ease the chronic blockage he suffers due to his deviated septum. He begs me to do it. I have a problem with this: I am afraid he will forget himself and bite my thumb off. He would put his own thumbs in his mouth but he has no thumbs anymore, only the pads and those poor, futile flippers. He weeps.

…

When it is a matter of putting your fingers inside someone’s mouth, accidents will happen. Father claims that two patients bit off his thumbs (on separate occasions): a blonde with hiccups and a nervous mother of four with a large keister. He says he remained calm and urged them to disgorge his thumbs. What a stroke of bad luck that they both had strong swallow reflexes! They tried to puke, he tried to make them puke, the EMTs with their ipecac tried to make them puke. Eventually they puked. But the thumbs were not fit for reattachment anymore. That was the end of his practice and the tragedy of his life. He weeps.

In fact he bit them off himself, possibly to protest the home I put him in.

Some of our busybody neighbors (led by Mrs. Nachtsheim, who also instituted the Block Watch and the Phone Tree), not content to let things take their course, have taken to spreading their extra phlegm outside their houses and encouraging others to do the same as a way of binding us closer together. The idea is that the autonomic processes of phlegm production will respond to this climate and take over, upping yield. Sometimes I see skeins of phlegm draped among the hedges in our neighborhood, but usually by midday it has dried into an almost invisible and barely tacky film that tears, shrivels into threads, and blows away. However, lately I have seen bigger blobs (under bushes, in the crawl space under porch steps) that last almost all day.

Father is kittenish today. “Check out the keister on her!” He is talking about the fat-bottomed woman across the street, who is
carrying a limp swag of hose across the lawn. Her cat watches from the window with an air of affront. Halfway across the lawn the woman stops. Then she drops the rope as if she has forgotten it and walks back into the house. Has she thought of something better to do? Has she lost faith in the value of homely tasks such as watering the lawn? For a moment, when I saw her carrying the hose, I felt a slight uplift of the spirits, though I am only aware of it in the peace that comes afterwards, when familiar despair sweeps back in and puts things to rights, like a good nurse. I believed that she knew what she wanted of that hose, and she knew it was a right thing to want it, and she knew how to get it. It gave me a brisk, optimistic feeling about doing things when ordinarily doing things is not my strong suit. I was ready to try doing something myself, buying a little shovel maybe, with which to keep the driveway clear of phlegm if it should come to that. Of course she drops the hose, as I might have known she would.

Father sees things in a completely different light. He is unusually animated. I suppose I should be grateful for her keister. “Chyesss!” he says. He bangs his palm on his kneepan with a jaunty, yo-heave-ho sort of gesture. He attempts that pumping gesture baseball players make as they start around the bases, a gesture I find particularly repellent. I confess I feel some satisfaction when he bangs his elbow on the standing ashtray (now used as a spittoon). He weeps.

It seems that we may be about to go to war over a point of etiquette. The headlines, in quick succession, have read:

As a result it has suddenly become not just unfriendly but also unpatriotic to keep your phlegm to yourself.

Father is lonesome, though he would not admit it. Every time the phone rings, he perks up. For Father there are no wrong numbers.

We get a lot of calls. That is because of the Nimnick situation. I assume these callers, always foreign, are clients or customers, since they always ask for “Mr. Nimnick” or just “Nimnick”—Barney Nimnick is unheard of, as is Lance, Joachim, or Ulrich—and since they ask for him with such bright expectancy, but are not very disappointed not to reach him.

Occasionally, though, someone does seem disappointed, even distraught, and keeps repeating “Nimnick, Nimnick,” unable or unwilling to grasp that he has moved on. Then I am full of a mellow astonishment and I remind myself that even a Nimnick stirs the deepest feelings in somebody’s heart, if only in the heart of another Nimnick. A little phlegm comes up. But at this my heart changes again, and I am affronted, and turn away the caller with particular violence:

“There is no Nimnick! There has never been a Nimnick at this number!” And I hang up.

At Adventurous Electrolysis we have a little accident and have to call the electrician. The boss takes the singed client for a
really nice meal and to get him soused plus whatever it takes not to get sued. I take the electrician home with me, as I have done before. Not since Father came home, however. Father bleats from his room but I ignore him. The electrician gives me a questioning look but I press my chest up against him and he relaxes.

Unfortunately, Father’s cries put me in a weird frame of mind. The electrician is shy and he waits to see what I will do, breathing noisily. I wait too, lying up against him with my meager chest against his and my chin in the soft spot at the pit of his neck, and I feel his ribs moving uncomfortably as he breathes, and with my lips I feel his Adam’s apple, and with my feet the weird shapes of his feet against mine. In the hot space under my chin a mucous ball suddenly forms.

I bring it forth and we play with it. [See
Appendix 3
.] We smack it with improvised paddles, we smite it with ideations and then we bring out our special tricks. I do the one that is like winding a tetherball around a pole, the electrician does the one that is like making a little paper hat for his finger and performing Punch and Judy. We play peek-a-boo through a “cooch” in the phlegm. He “parks” his phlegm in my “domain,” I fashion a small symbolic torus for him to wear. We do poodling, purling, beading. When all is done, I am left with a souvenir in the warm hollow of the bed, a little totem or statuette. It’s not much to look at, but I like it.

There are photographs of me, too, a square and dogged figure in the “ethnic” shirts and wraps my mother saw fit to send me to school in. I look something like a kachina doll, only not so fetching. Mother looks regal in her kaftan, of course.

That was when Father was emulating Malcolm X and reading the dictionary straight through from start to finish. He had only gotten as far as K by the time Mother left us. “If only I’d had the whole dictionary under my belt, I might have been able to talk her out of it!” he said in a lucid moment. “I was taking my time, really trying to get to know
beargarden,
a rowdy or noisy scene, and
bertha,
a deep, falling collar often of lace, and even spending some time with words I thought I already knew, such as
Bermuda shorts
and
bestiality.
I hadn’t gotten to
marriage
yet, I hadn’t plumbed its glinting depths, its complex and shifting layers.” He weeps. “All I have left is a few bobby pins with blond hairs caught in them, her kirtle, and you, our little kelpie.”

“Whose fault is that?” I say.

Father says, “Why are you so uncompassionate? My gut tells me that our experimenting with lifestyles was to blame.”

The neighbors congratulate one another when another phlegm bubble takes shape in our airspace, they compare notes on its extent and agree that it’s bigger than the last one. They wonder how long it will last this time: twenty minutes, an hour, an afternoon? Eventually, it bursts, but someday it may not burst. Then it will slowly fill with phlegm.

I climb up on the roof with a long metal spike. It was once part of an umbrella. I have sharpened it. I lash it to the chimney. I hope it looks like an antenna. Of course its purpose is to pop the bubble, if it comes too close to my house. Mrs. Nachtsheim brings a delegation to speak to me about it. They suggest that there is something un-American about the spike, with respect to the international crisis. They hold out their hands. If I
presented phlegm it would ease their minds, I know. But with a great effort I withhold; my vents stay dry. All day I feel excited and proud.

“Is Mr. Nimnick there?”

“He has not lived at this address for a long time.”

“Mr. Nimnick, please?”

“Not here. No Nimnick.”

“Nimnick?”

“No.”

My boss stops by my desk and winks and makes a veiled reference to the electrician. “You’re doing swell. Just remember to sow where you reap and what side your bread is buttered on! Don’t hide your phlegm under a purely personal bushel, for goodness’ sake!”

The phlegm I made with the electrician has dried and hardened into something not very nice. Cracked, disfigured. A sort of voodoo doll. All the same, it is a trophy of sorts. A green freak for the mantelpiece. I enjoy looking at it, and I even take it in my backpack to show my coworkers, though when I see it with their eyes I can’t help saying things like, “It’s got a lot of hairs stuck to it,” and “I just did it because what the hell.” Alone, I run my fingers over the ugliest bits. I smile and smell my fingers.

It is proper to mention the freak to the electrician. Not because he owes it anything; it exists now, separate from either of us, like a standing wave. I wouldn’t want to see him brandishing ownership papers or even standing with a proprietary hand
on the freak. But because I like it, I feel a rush of warmth toward the electrician. It is not necessary to confess that I hadn’t expected so much from him, only to convey my pleasure that our accidental and ill-considered project came out so well.

The electrician welcomes me more enthusiastically than I expected. A ball of phlegm forms at my throat. I show the electrician. He palps it knowingly. I feel a faint revulsion, and begin to move away. But I check the impulse. I liked the freak. I might like the freak again.

Sometimes I think that a good daughter would let her father bite her thumbs off, or at least would not hesitate to perform the sinus-draining boon he craves (possibly wearing a protective thumb-guard such as one might devise from a piece of sheet metal and some wire, or maybe shoving a block of wood between the jaws, as wise heroines do in the case of dragons), but then I think, what is this self-defeating shit? How is it selfish if I elect to keep my thumbs, which are opposable and therefore help me to wield moist towelettes and keep the chin of my father in pink, shining good nick?

But I’m not entirely comfortable with this thought process, because as I have discovered through being involuntarily inducted into the caring professions, it is possible to do or say something entirely fair for self-serving and mean reasons. Though whether that implies that you ought to do unfair things so as not to be trying to come across so saintly all the time is not something I can quite weigh out on my moral scale. Is it better to help someone when you don’t really give a hoot, or to refuse help because it’s more honest?

…

It must be hard to bite off a thumb. How fierce and vital Father must have felt as he chowed down. For one moment of decision and purpose. Then to relax back into lethargy and regret, forever.

This ennobles him in my eyes. Despite all the scorn and loathing he inspires, in the end he escapes my judgment. Unknowable, thumbless, he sits just out of reach.

Where Father’s thumbs were there are ugly keloid cushions. It is sad to watch the stumps strain inward toward the palm when Father is trying to pick something up. When I look at the stumps vainly trying to help, I almost feel my phlegm come up. I even resent his stumps for being so cute and pitiful, since Father made them that way, probably on purpose to make people care for him, having taken a good gander at himself in the mirror and judged rightly that there would be no more free gifts.

The electrician and I go to bed again. We toil, and produce a scant dram of goo, a sorry gob. We start to play with it. It gets all over me.

Suddenly I am claustrophobic. I rip the hairs off my arms getting unstuck. (Oh, the involuntary depilations I have undergone.) The electrician collects a little phlegm off his own neck and sits there in his socks, molding it. Papa is wailing. Everything is terrible.

There is an area some blocks away where two or three houses and their inhabitants have become more thickly engrossed in phlegm. This is heralded as an occasion for civic pride; we received a flyer anouncing a celebratory potluck.

I have bought a shovel.

…

I decide that I will phlegm no more. The electrician is history and I will shake hands dry, never mind if I start World War III. I will bathe my slit with alum. If necessary I will tape it shut.

Now I spend a lot of time looking out the window with Father. We watch the woman with the big butt putter in her garden. Her red windbreaker is bright against the loogey building high over Loyal Heights; the verge of the congested area is only two blocks away now. Her shoulders are hunched.

“Sad woman,” says Father. “Not a gardener. But what a keister.”

My boss speaks to me again. “I’m talking outreach. A little sass and spirit of play will carry the day here at Adventurous. I have to stress that while I wouldn’t go so far as to say your job is in jeopardy—” I zone out until he sticks his hand right under my nose.

“Let’s try this. It won’t hurt. Put ‘er there, tenderfoot!” I look at the nonstandard white phlegm laid out on his palm ready for some companionable manipulation, the comment-inspiring white phlegm, with its Crisco good looks. “Cross my palm with phlegm, pal!”