American English, Italian Chocolate

by Rick Bailey

  And I’m shopping for this year’s fava beans.

  26

  Monkey, Nail Biting, Jesus

  I just wish he didn’t sit down there in front.

  I tell my wife this early one Monday morning. We’re at the breakfast table. I’m making her cappuccino while she reads about Naples. The one in Italy. She moves around the boot, reading histories of the regions. She has just come inland from Sicily.

  “Don’t look at him,” she says.

  We’re discussing a kid who grooms himself during church service. I don’t mean the primping kind of grooming, because he wants to look nice. Looking nice is not on his agenda. This is more of a creatural thing. As soon as he sits down, he goes to work on his fingernails, scraping crud out from under them. He then raises his fingers to his face, examines the stuff, and judging it good, eats it. After nails he moves to his hair, which is curly, sandy in color, and the source of additional morsels. He digs and scratches at his scalp, scrutinizes and ingests the harvest. Whatever grows on him and is sloughed off his person is on the menu. “Lift up your hearts,” the priest says. The kid is eating himself. Next to him sit a mother, a sister or two. They seem oblivious.

  I hand my wife a coffee cup. “He eats himself,” I say.

  She takes a sip. “He’s a kid.”

  “Still,” I say, “there’s a time and place.”

  She reads for a minute and then looks up from her book. “The King of Naples was married to the sister of Marie Antoinette.”

  I go to the fridge. Every morning I cut fruits and vegetables into the blender for a smoothie. My wife sometimes calls it a “frappé,” which I love. She’s never tried to make a Catholic of me, which I also love. Most days I’m more spectator than believer.

  I tell her there’s a name for what the kid does.

  “She was Maria Carolina of Austria.”

  “Autosarcophagy,” I say. “The act of eating yourself. And he’s not little. He must be ten or twelve.”

  “He’s probably bored. Doesn’t your mind wander?”

  Does it ever. Generally, I admit, it wanders to pleasures of the flesh. We’re supposed to do that. Let us call to mind our sins. I require no invitation.

  When I was a kid my father made deliveries at a farm north of town. It was a traditional farm—tractors, a barn, cows and pigs—except for the monkey.

  The monkey was a thin, dusty thing, the size of a poodle. It lived in a repurposed dog pen. When we pulled in the driveway and stopped next to the gas tank we were there to fill, my brother and I hopped out of the truck right next to the monkey. It amused my father, I think, how excited we got about seeing a monkey. He would tell us a day or so ahead: “I’ll be at Paul Hafer’s on Thursday.” And we would prepare to see this exotic creature. It had a chain around its neck. It usually sat on the roof of the doghouse with a preoccupied look on its face. It picked at its fur with nimble fingers, finding fleas and lice, which naturally it ate.

  We begged our father for a monkey. It would make a great pet, we argued.

  We were told in no uncertain terms that it would never happen and that we should not under any circumstances try to touch it. Deep down, I know my father hated that monkey, its nervous eyes, its high-pitched chatter, its terrible pink behind that it repeatedly flashed at us.

  Years later, my wife invoked the theory of evolution. My father saw the monkey as a distant relative. He identified with it.

  This, I told her, was pure bunk.

  “Saw himself,” she insisted, “in the monkey.”

  “More likely he just hated the smell.”

  Who knows? Maybe she was right. And maybe I see myself in the kid in church who eats himself.

  And identify with him.

  I am now, and have always been, a nail biter. Nail biting is an infantile oral fixation, I readily admit, like thumb-sucking. It is also reckless and daft, importing filth and bacteria into my system. I might as well lick doorknobs and suck nickels.

  It is also a source of pleasure and pain.

  I practice fingernail husbandry. Nails are a renewable resource, but, you know, there is a season. Left ring finger should be ready for biting in a day or two. Excellent yield from right pointer and thumb last week. What constitutes a mature, ripe, and ready nail? It’s personal. For me, it’s neither too brittle nor too soft. Timing is everything.

  Also, I like a nice, clean arc, even in density and thickness across the width of the nail, tapered at the edges. I try, not always successfully, not to overbite.

  The sight of ravaged nails, gnawed down to their moons, their cuticles red and ragged, is heartrending. Through husbandry and restraint, I usually manage to avoid this massacre. Eyes are the window of the soul; fingernails also tell us plenty. Salinger comes to mind, his description of the headmaster’s insecure daughter in Catcher in the Rye—“Her nails were all bitten down and bleedy-looking”—and poor, traumatized Esmé: “She placed her fingers flat on the table edge, like someone at a seance, then, almost instantly, closed her hands—her nails were bitten down to the quick.”

  When I’m sitting in a meeting or stopped at an intersection and I see someone gnawing on their fingertips with that urgency, that uncontrollable driven look, I feel revolted and chastened. Don’t do that, I tell myself. Down, boy, I think, especially when the urge arises in public. Sometimes I cross over, however, to the other side. On one finger on my right hand, I have a situation. It’s the middle one, the “finger” finger. I trim it by nibble with the utmost care. But I’ve bitten it wrong too many times. I’ve bitten it for too long, too hungrily. The nail now grows to a certain length, and then it splits, and the cuticle gets tattered and erupts. It hurts. I mean it hurts. At times a crusty tissue forms on the cuticle, which my daughter and wife refer to as a fungus.

  “Ugh,” my daughter says, “you got that fungus.”

  It is not a fungus.

  “It’s green,” my wife says. “A green fungus.”

  It is not a fungus.

  They take turns hectoring me about it.

  “Don’t touch me with that.”

  “You don’t put that in your mouth, do you?”

  I won’t. I don’t.

  I do.

  “Jesus Christ, don’t bite your nails.” She must have said that. When God became a man, it was Mary who made him a nice boy.

  If the mother of God got after him about His nails, it was good advice. Who would throw away everything and follow someone whose nails were bitten down and bleedy-looking? It would have pushed Thomas over the edge and maybe a few of the others. But would you blame Jesus for being just a little bit nervous? He had a lot on His mind.

  Happy are those who are called to His supper.

  When she was a kid in Italy, my wife says she often walked down the street to the convent and visited the old nuns. They ran the asilo, the preschool program. She was an alum. They also made host, mixing the dough and letting it dry in thin sheets. These sheets were then slid into a mechanism, a die they used to stamp out the perfectly round wafers that would be consecrated and served at Communion. If she was good, the nuns let her eat the leftovers. She remembers stuffing scraps of it into her mouth, handfuls of it, gorging herself on host until one of the sisters swept her back out onto the street.

  I think of this gobbling one morning in church.

  Row by row, front to back, in the call to Communion people process down the aisle. Heads bowed, hands folded in front of them or clasped behind their backs or idle at their sides, they wait for a little nibble of Christ, for a sip of wine, “fruit of the vine and work of human hands.”

  I fall in line behind my wife.

  When it’s my turn, I take the host in my hands and say “Amen.” I place the wafer in my mouth and turn to the right.

  There he is, the little manimal, an alternative reminder of our source.

  This morning he is slumped over the pew in front of him, resting his head on his arm. He looks full, satisfied, possibly even asleep. Back in ou
r pew, my wife kneels, closes her eyes. It’ll be a few minutes before we can go. I sit forward in a kneelish posture, let my mind wander, and have a look around. Eventually I come back to the kid. He’s awake and seems to be about his business. When he inserts a finger into his mouth, I can guess what he’s doing. He’s had Communion. Savior is stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he’s trying to loosen it.

  The same thing happens to me. It’s an odd sensation, sort of like having a pebble in your shoe. I work at it and work at it with my tongue. Sometimes it takes forever.

  27

  Cardio, Lightbulbs, and a Funeral

  The day of the funeral I’m on the treadmill at the senior center.

  A guy named Gordon I haven’t seen in a while stops next to me and points. I shake my head, What? He points again. So: I guess my limp is noticeable. I took a minor tumble on some stairs, more sprawl than fall.

  I’d rather not go into it right now. I’m listening to Ray Charles sing “Oh, what a beautiful morning” on my headset and watching Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan on one of the four TVs hung on the wall. But Gordon stands there, smiling. I pause the Ray, pop out an earbud.

  “You hurt?” he says.

  “Not much.” I dial down the speed and nod hello. “Where you been?”

  “On a yacht,” he says. “What happened?”

  Gordon is a junior senior. His hair is all white. He’s retired, not yet sixty, and reminds me of the Pillsbury Doughboy. The two years I’ve worked out at the senior center, I’ll see Gordon three days a week every week for a stretch. Then he’ll be gone for weeks at a time. He is swift on the elliptical and then swiftly done and gone upstairs for coffee and networking. I glance back at the TV. It’s confetti time on Kelly and Michael. Three days a week I watch the silent confetti-drop. It’s goofy, but everyone in the studio loves it. I guess I do too.

  I tell him I took a little fall down some stairs. There’s a pause. I’m still walking, he’s standing by. “So,” I say. “A yacht.”

  “There’s no such thing as a little fall,” he says.

  “Whereabouts, Caribbean?”

  “Not this time,” he says. “Up in the North Channel. With Don.” Don is one of the senior seniors. He says he’s too old for exercise equipment. He wears big shoes and sleds a few laps around the tiny indoor track before stopping for a long coffee. He does a couple of cruises a year. Gordon must be first mate.

  “Every afternoon,” he says, “cocktail hour on the flying bridge, some cool jazz. It was sweet.”

  “Must be some yacht.”

  He considers his answer, smiles, and says, “Not that big.”

  I start to say there’s no such thing as a small yacht but think otherwise. I kind of want to get back to Ray Charles. I point to the TV and ask what he thinks of Kelly Ripa’s hair. It’s new, a Frenchy-looking bob. I don’t think she likes it. She touches it a lot.

  Gordon glances at the TV, then back at me, like, Are you joking?

  Later that morning I squeeze in a trip to Home Depot, looking for lightbulbs and superglue.

  A few days ago my wife called to me from the basement. She said the stairway lights were out, one at the top, one at the bottom. That stairway goes down three steps to a landing and then makes a right turn to go down the rest of the way, thirteen steps in all, all carpeted. I stood on a toppish step; she was downstairs. We flipped switches and talked. It was definitely dark. It turned out I didn’t know what step I was on. When I went to set my foot on the landing, it wasn’t quite there, and suddenly I went down in a pile of twisted and stretched muscle, bone, and fat.

  “I’m okay,” I said to my wife. It was a tentative assessment, kind of a lie. I hurt like hell.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Probably,” I told her. I just didn’t feel like moving yet.

  Falls run in the family. In his old age my father stepped off a ladder and crashed onto the cement floor in the garage. He limped for a month. When she was seventy my mother-in-law misjudged a stair step in our house, fell, and broke her ankle. One night my father-in-law woke up and walked the length of his house in the dark to the bathroom, the one he used over by the garage, the one next to the door to the basement. He opened the wrong door and stepped into the dark stairway. There was no landing to abbreviate his fall. He tumbled straight down all thirteen stairs. Somehow, he was not hurt.

  Thirteen. That should tell us something.

  For some time now whenever I carry a case of wine to the basement, I imagine myself slipping and falling. Put carpet on stairs, you’re tempting fate. In this imagined fall my arms fly up, I launch the case of wine into the air, and bottles fly and fall, breaking and spilling. When I roll into the glassy, winey mess at the bottom of the stairs, I cut my throat. Cheers.

  In the aisles of Home Depot I decide to look for the long-lasting bulbs. Bulb technology, it turns out, is taking giant, if confusing, steps forward. Really, it’s a stampede. There’s incandescent, halogen, fluorescent, compact fluorescent, and LED. Check for lumens, watts, kelvin value, for soft light, hard light, dimables, and warm-up time. Then there’s savings per year, calculated to the penny, and year life. It’s kind of like shopping for French wine. The light steward I eventually talk to holds out a package of bulbs, recommends LED.

  “How long will they last?” I ask.

  He looks at me and smiles. “You’ll probably never have to buy bulbs again.” It’s an innocent remark. In my lifetime, he means. He sees something in my facial expression, intimations of my imminent demise, and offers a sheepish apology.

  On the way to the funeral my wife says, “They’re not supposed to die before us.”

  No, they’re not.

  He was fifty. He was big. He had a mountain-man beard and a soft voice. He had light in his eyes and a smile that made you want to love him. At the funeral we stand in the church vestibule for half an hour, a visitation that begins in soft murmuring and mournful glances and rises to a din of conversation and laughter so loud the funeral director can’t hush us up and herd us into the church. There’s a balm in that din, an affirmation. But still, the man is gone.

  We file in, find seats in pews, and wait. Whoever made this church understood light. The floor and walls and ceiling are all white. There’s stained glass, but it’s stained glass lite. The afternoon sunlight pouring in has a kind of echo. Maybe it helps. While we wait, the pianist plays in minor keys, slowly, a lot of sostenuto. Maybe that helps too. I remark to my wife: above the altar, the wheel chandelier hanging from the ceiling. When she looks, I whisper, “A little lower, it could be a pot rack.” She wags a finger: keep quiet. Way off to the left, behind the organ, is a huge set of drums worthy of Ginger Baker and a pile of amplifiers for playing God rock. The horror.

  Then the pianist shifts to a major key. We stand.

  Then come the family, the casket, words.

  Outside afterward, we stand facing the hearse, arguably the worst time. One church bell begins to toll. I hope they’re doing it on purpose. “If a clod be washed away by the sea,” I think. We are the less.

  Lying in bed that night I find my wife’s hand and remember: superglue. It’s for a ceramic lemon that she bought in Sicily and that I broke a few weeks ago. I plan to fix it. Two or three pieces, clean breakage. It will be almost good as new. We lie there, drifting toward sleep. Drifting, I think about lemons and glue, and carpet on a well-lit stairway, about my limp to wellness on the treadmill, about a yacht anchored in the North Channel, floating in the dark, a couple of staterooms lit by a few tiny lights, and people having drinks, feeling lucky.

  28

  The Rule of One

  Apply pressure and elevate.

  I know that’s how you stop bleeding. But this is my nose. I just cut it shaving. A careless flick of the razor and I caught the wing of my right nostril. The gore, the gore. I don’t know how to elevate my nose.

  “You ready?” my wife yells from downstairs.

  Since when is she ready before me? We’re goi
ng for an R and R dinner tonight. That’s Rachel and Ron, our friends we told where to go in Italy. They went, they’re back, we’ve seen some pictures online. They’re going to tell us about it. And now I’ve got this bleeding nostril.

  “Almost.” I press a handful of toilet paper to the wound.

  “If we leave early we can swing by Newton and look at trees.”

  Some weeks ago we planted three cherry trees in the yard. Overnight they were denuded of leaves by deer. In crisis mode we set out deer repellent, a particulate poured into leftover pantyhose and hung from the branches. Not attractive, which I guess is the point if you’re a deer. Not attractive if you’re a human either, which doesn’t matter to my wife. Such is her commitment to trees, while I am Darwinian.

  I yell okay. But this thing is not okay. If it would just clot. Stick a piece of toilet paper on it, usually it clots. Not this time.

  “Let’s get some of that spray,” she yells up to me. Another repellent, one you spray on the tree. It’s Off for deer. I hear on the steps she’s coming up.

  She pushes through the door into the bathroom, sees the sink full of bloody tissues. “Hey, what?”

  “I cut myself.”

  “I can see that. Geez, it’s bloody. Did you try a Band-Aid? Did you stick a piece of toilet paper on it? Did you apply pressure?”

  “All those things.”

  “How about ice?”

  “That’s for swelling.”

  “Still.”

  “Swelling, bleeding, not the same thing.”

  She opens a door of the vanity. “Gauze.”

  I tell her first we have to stop the bleeding.

  “Should we go to emergency? Lemme see that.” I lift the toilet paper from my sliced nostril. In the mirror I see a red ribbon of blood trickle down my lip. It’s just like TV.