Gross Anatomy

by Mara Altman

  “You know,” I said, “when I’m PMS’ing, I actually mean everything I say.”

  “I know you do,” he said.

  “You do?”

  We were at a stoplight, waiting to turn down Clinton Street.

  “Yeah,” he said, “you make that abundantly clear, but you’re at a ten instead of a four.” After we crossed the street, he said, “I like it better when you’re at a four.”

  “If you listened to me,” I said, “then maybe I wouldn’t have to become a ten.” I told him about the spool and how it unwinds—all my frustrations get the green light and are released.

  “Not every relationship has to be perfect,” he said.

  We reached the restaurant at this point, but stopped just outside.

  I grabbed his arm and turned to face him. “But look, I want you to put the toilet seat down,” I said. “It’s really important to me.” I was so calm that he couldn’t possibly deflect what I’d said, nor could he tell me that I was shitting into his soul.

  “I’m not being malicious,” he said. “Honestly, I just forget.”

  That was the first time we got beyond accusation and evasion.

  I took in what he said and understood how forgetfulness could be the culprit: he didn’t meticulously plan out and desire his wife to fall—tush first—into the toilet bowl. How could that be a benefit? We share the same sheets after all.

  We took two seats at the counter, and while we shared a plate of longonissa sausage and fried eggs, we talked about how we might be able to fix his memory. When we got home, I enacted our plan. I took out a piece of eight-by-eleven-inch paper and a Sharpie. I wrote on the paper in big block letters and then taped it to the wall behind the toilet. The sign said, “PUT THE FUCKING SEAT DOWN.”

  We continue to live in imperfect harmony, but more often than not, my butt stays dry.

  15

  Wart, Me Worry?

  I am five feet tall, yet my shoe size is an excessive 8½. I was built with the foundation to support a skyscraper, but only a small mobile home was docked atop. By the time I was twenty, I had bunions—bone nuggets that jutted out at my big-toe joint like toadstools from a crack in concrete. At twenty-two, a doc lopped the suckers off and cranked my big toes straight. Now, on the top of each foot, I have jagged Frankenstein scars. The nail on my pinky toe, which is the unseemly size of a cricket’s eye socket, regularly falls off. All it takes is the friction of putting on a sock. Basically, if I were Cinderella, my glass slippers—if they had any chance of fitting—would need to be made of Teflon and look like two wide gravy boats.

  My feet have issues: Because of their relative girth and gnarls, I call them peasant feet, which I pretend is prized in this farm-to-table atmosphere. I’ve handled all of the above with grace, but there is one issue I haven’t mentioned so far, one that was harder to deal with than the rest, which was my stint with foot warts. This is the twenty-first century—isn’t it time we see a Disney princess who has extra-wide feet spotted with viral growths?

  “No,” you say?

  Okay, you’re probably right.

  Foot warts (known more widely as plantar warts) are a strain of the human papillomavirus (HPV), just like genital warts, but instead of colonizing your junk, these little virions have a thing for feet. At least if you have genital warts, there is some likelihood that you had good sex to get them. With foot warts, on the other hand (or foot), there is absolutely no chance of orgasm. On the upside, foot warts rarely cause breakups or the need for therapy.

  I spoke with Adam Friedman, an associate professor of dermatology at the George Washington School of Medicine & Health Sciences in the hopes that he could convince me that warts aren’t as grotesque as we’ve all been lead to believe and that I could, with extra information, chalk them up to being just one more rustic characteristic of my artisanal feet.

  The professor began on a considerably anticlimactic note. “A wart, plain and simple from a visible perspective,” he said, “is extra skin.”

  He explained that for the virus to slip inside our bodies, we must have a micro-abrasion. The abrasion can be so tiny that we wouldn’t even notice it, like a patch of dry skin. Once inside, the wart virus weasels its way to the bottom part of the epidermis. It then inserts itself inside our skin cells. “Which is why warts can persist for so long,” Friedman said. “They are living within us, so to speak, and our immune system just doesn’t pick up on it.”

  While inside, the wart doesn’t just chill on the sofa like a houseguest. The wart is much more intense; it wants to take over our lease.

  “They insert themselves into the various machines inside our cells and start making the skin turn over faster,” Friedman said. A wart looks like a really thick callus, he explained, because it’s skin that’s been making itself way too quickly. “The difference here is that this new skin is chock-full of wart virus with the ultimate hope to spread and multiply.”

  Getting a wart, in other words, is our body’s microscopic remake of the film Alien.

  People have been trying to cure warts for much of human history. As far as I can tell, no one has ever been like, “Oh, look at that barnacle on my extremity, let me nurture it.” No, they want to get rid of them so badly that they’ve resorted to all manner of crazy.

  In a paper called “‘Warts and All’—The History and Folklore of Warts” published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, author D. A. Burns catalogued many of the outré methods proposed anywhere from Roman-Hellenistic times to the 1800s. In one case, wart sufferers were told to rub a slug over their warts for nine consecutive days and then impale each slug on a thorn. “For as the snail, exposed to such cruel treatment, will gradually wither away, so it is believed that the wart, being impregnated with its matter, will slowly do the same.” Another “cure” involves a dead cat, and yet another uses fasting spittle. “Spittle must be early morning, pure and unadulterated,” wrote Burns.

  Morning spittle is clearly the only way that spittle makes sense.

  We can laugh all we want at the slug murderers, but to this day, we still have no foolproof cure for warts. Friedman said that plantar warts will often resolve on their own after a year or two, but even when doctors go the extra mile to freeze, burn, or even surgically remove them, they may not be gone for good. “The thing people don’t get,” he said, “is that the virus is likely living inside the normal skin cells around the wart, but it’s kind of asleep.” He explained that the leftover virus, for a number of reasons, could reawaken and cause a resurrection of the wart. He also said we should never scratch our warts, because that, in a lot of cases, is what causes them to spread.

  When he said that, I admitted to him that I suspected I had a scalp wart, which I often scratch at when I’m bored. “I do all of the things you’re not supposed to do,” I told Friedman, “yet my face hasn’t gotten warty yet.”

  “I don’t recommend doing that,” he said. “That’s a terrible idea. You can play wart roulette if you want, but you’re right, it’s also not a hundred percent that you’ll get more warts.”

  His response concerned me. I never do well at the slots.

  Dermatologists still aren’t sure why some people are more prone to warts than others. “It probably has something to do with our immune system and genetic predisposition,” he said.

  With that in mind, foot warts, depending on the person and circumstance, can and do spread widely. All it takes is for one infected skin cell left on the ground to be stomped on by another bare-footed person who has the most imperceptible scratch on his sole. One of my friends—let’s call her Deb—told me that she gave foot warts to her boyfriend. I asked and received permission to call the guy up to see how he dealt with the transmission.

  “How did you feel when Deb told you that she had foot warts?”

  “I didn’t care,” he said.

  “And you knew they were contagious?”

  “She kept saying that, but I was like, ‘Nah, I’m not going to get them.�
�”

  “But then you got them.”

  “I did.” He said he had about four now, which is more than Deb ever had.

  “Only one of them is like, ‘Fuck you, I’m staying forever,’” he said, “but the others aren’t very serious.”

  I asked him if he was upset about his new additions, but he was really chill about the whole thing. “Deb was mortified, but my reaction was, ‘Aw, I have your warts,’ which displeased her, but I treated them like they were ours and they were adorable.”

  I found this wart story endearing, but I wasn’t impressed. Ultimately, I’ll have to stand by my initial sentiment. Warts are gross.

  Epilogue

  I was in the driver’s seat of a black Honda CRV, heading north on the I-15 with my mom in the passenger seat. We were on our way to Glen Eden Sun Club, a resort community located in Corona, California. This wasn’t any old resort, though; this was a nudist resort. Not clothes optional. Naked only.

  At first, the resort wouldn’t let me come for a visit. If you’re married, they want both spouses to come. When only one has come in the past, it has bitten them in the ass. “Husbands have shown up at the gate agitated and jealous,” Jane, the receptionist, explained.

  But Dave, I told them, would undergo waterboarding before he’d go to a nudist resort. He’d take a bullet in the knee before waving his schlong around the 155-acre rural swatch of land, which was a problem because I needed to be around naked people. After spending the past year plus investigating individual body parts, I wanted to experience the body as a whole.

  After obtaining a notarized letter (that the resort asked for but never ended up taking) from Dave explaining his position—“I’ll eat raw road kill before you get to see my hairy balls”—and five more phone calls, Glen Eden finally granted my mom and me permission to come for the day.

  There was another issue, though. My mom wasn’t the most gung-ho participant, either. Earlier that morning, I’d come to pick her up at her home, but she wasn’t ready yet. She was dithering while packing up a bunch of clothes. “But we’re going to a nudist resort,” I kept telling her, as she stuffed sweaters, workout gear, wool socks, and a big fluffy robe into a large blue tote. Her overzealous preparation was either out of habit or hope; I was not sure.

  She was also running late because she’d done her hair. When I asked her why she put forth the effort, she explained that usually she can dress nice to make a good impression, but that’s not an option when you have to be naked. “It’s the only thing on my body I have any control over,” she said, fluffing her ’do.

  She had done the nudist thing as a twenty-one-year-old and remembered it being a sweat-provoking experience. Forty-four years had passed and she lamented how time had treated her body. “Do I really need to do this again?” she seemingly asked a woven shawl, before throwing it into the tote as well.

  Because of my persistent harassment—“Mom, whether you like it or not, this book needs to end with two generations of women embracing their female bodies, so let’s embrace, okay?”—she found herself next to me in the car at ten-thirty on a Saturday morning in early April, bound for a nudist resort while armed with more clothes than one would pack for an Alaskan sojourn.

  After an hour drive, we pulled into the Glen Eden parking lot, a small patch of asphalt beside a brown trailer that serves as office and reception. The resort is just off the freeway, but hidden down a narrow tree-lined road and nestled between a ring of scrub-filled hills. Suburban tract housing and strip malls were only minutes outside the premises, but seemed to exist on an entirely different planetary plane.

  As we walked toward the office, my mom pulled her sweater tight. “It’s so cold,” she said. I rolled my eyes like any compassionate daughter would and said, “Come on, it’s not that bad!” I’ll admit that it was cold, but it was California cold. It wasn’t New York cold. It was in the sixties with some scattered clouds and a slight breeze. I tried not to worry. Nudists, I assured myself, surely wouldn’t be practical people. If they were true to their agenda, they’d go nude no matter the climactic obstacles.

  The two women at reception were clothed, and I got concerned that because of the weather, everyone would be dressed. But then I learned that clothing was the rule for front-office staff. They gave us papers full of regulations. Two that stuck with me: No PDA (this was no swing club!), and carry a towel around with you at all times to place on any surface before sitting. How totally appropriate and respectable, I thought, of how they broached the possible transmission of ass germs. I happily signed my name on the bottom line.

  The final step before being granted admission: The ladies hovered over us as we placed an orange circular sticker over our phone’s camera. “We had a man who recorded people for a year,” one said, “so no more of that.” She told us to wait outside for our tour guide, who’d give us the lay of the land.

  A few minutes later, careening toward us in a golf cart, came Sheryl, a woman with a boyish haircut and an athletic build who’d lived at Glen Eden for more than twenty years. “You gals are lucky,” she said. “I usually make everyone take the tour naked, but it’s chilly today.”

  I looked up at the gray sky, the leaves blowing across the path, and the goose pimples on my arms. “It’s not that bad,” I said, somewhat desperately. “Let’s do it naked anyway.”

  “Too cold for me,” Sheryl said, zipping up her windbreaker a tiny bit more.

  My mom raised one eyebrow and gave me a smug smile. Nudists, it turns out, were infuriatingly sensible.

  We climbed onto the golf cart as Sheryl pumped the gas. The narrow looping lanes were packed with mobile homes and RVs, each only feet from the next, but bedecked and made unique with flowering plants, tchotchkes, and endearing signs like “Life Is Short, Party Naked” and “Caution: Menopause at Work.” At least two hundred people live in the community permanently, while more than sixteen hundred members visit for day trips. It felt like an adult summer camp with its many facilities—tennis courts, pickleball courts, an art and sewing studio with the sign “Naked Needle Gang” hanging in front, a café, a rec hall, a gym, an indoor pool for water volleyball, and the outdoor pool area, which was our final stop. “Usually, you have to come at six a.m. to get a lounge chair,” Sheryl said. Then she looked up at the sky. “Not today.”

  There were more than two hundred chairs. Only two were taken.

  She said that because of the weather, she’d allow us to be partially clothed that day. I was disappointed in her willingness to make her guests comfortable. “Have fun,” she said, before disappearing inside the Sunshine Café for lunch.

  My mom, trying to contain her excitement, changed into her massive white robe and lay down on a lounge chair. With no secure closure and the connotation of pre- or post-shower wear, the robe gave the illusion that she was more scantily clad, but in actuality, she was bundled in about four times more material than she would be on a typical day. I could see only her big toes and eyeballs. I, meanwhile, remained resolute. I would experience a nudist resort.

  I shimmied out of my clothes. I didn’t have the same trouble disrobing as I did months before when I’d ridden through New York City topless, even though it would make sense if I did. See, since the bike ride, massive bodily changes had occurred.

  I was now seven and a half months pregnant with twins.

  Many of the bodily issues I had before—the ones that had caused me to talk to scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and strangers from the casual encounters page of Craigslist—had been exacerbated by the two fetuses homesteading in my abdomen. I used to think I had hemorrhoids, but those ones were for amateurs. I now could swear I had pool floaties where I once had a butthole. My belly button went from a mature outie to a gigantic protruding stump. The hare could have a comfy nap on it while waiting for the tortoise to catch up. And not only had my goatee filled in even more, but I also grew a few black chest hairs conspicuous enough for Dave to think it perfectly appropriate to pluck them, using p
ointer finger and thumb, when we recently found ourselves in direct sunlight. His actions made me tear up with an intense mixture of emotion—shock, shame, but also an unexpected dash of delight. Though horrid, it was also intimate and accepting. In a giant upset to my preconceived notions, if I was ever in a coma, it might actually be my husband who maintains my beard.

  I spread a towel out on the lounge chair next to my mom and plopped down. The chill in the air was refreshing, I swear. “It’s a whale,” said my mom.

  “What is?” For a moment, I thought she was making fun of me in my new ample form.

  “That cloud,” she said, pointing.

  She was not on task at all. She lifted her pointer finger again. “And that’s an alligator, for sure.”

  While fighting to access this place for the past two weeks, this was not even close to the most far-fetched scenario I had fathomed—naked and alone by a pool while my mom played Rorschach with cumuli.

  But then those clouds opened up, albeit a very small amount, but enough for people to begin emerging from their trailers and wherever else nudists hide in the cold. I was happier to see other people than I was to stop shivering. There was a dude who looked like a badass Hells Angel; he wore a white T-shirt under a leather vest and big silver cuffs in his ears, and had a salt-and-pepper beard down to his chest, but also, no pants. I hate to say it, but seeing his little tush made him about 100 percent less intimidating. He met up with a group of guys under an awning to play a board game. Meanwhile, a half-clad man hit volleys on the tennis court while a woman, with only a visor on, drove her golf cart toward pickleball.

  Then, to the left, we heard a sudden bout of live music. We walked toward the sound and saw a group of about fifteen people, all in various states of undress, serenading one of the mobile homes. “That’s our ukulele jam group,” explained a woman to my right. She was wearing only a sarong around her waist and banging a tambourine along with the beat.