Fum

by Adam Rapp

  Although at birth Corinthia was a normal eight pounds seven ounces, the span of the past five years — since the arrival of that storied tumor — has seemingly wiped away the “standard” childhood anecdotes from her mother’s memory. Marlene has somehow forgotten all those beautiful firsts. Corinthia’s first words, which happened to be “big girl,” echoed her mother’s, who was praising her for using a spoon for the first time. Who would’ve thought that these two syllables would gain an ironic, almost poetic meaning?

  Other firsts that have been deleted from Marlene’s memory are her daughter’s first steps, her virgin bike ride without training wheels, and the first time she hid underneath the dining-room table with all seventeen of her stuffed FirmaMall dogs, proclaiming to the world that she was running away to Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, which happened to be the name of the town stitched into all the manufacturing tags found under the tails of her dogs. Corinthia obviously thought this was a place of magical deliverance (not to mention more stuffed dogs).

  So the memories are gone, and now there’s this GIANT IN MARLENE’S HOUSE, this medical-physiological MIRACLE. It’s as if Corinthia has always been this way. She might as well have arrived on the Bledsoe premises five years ago, after disembarking from some fateful southern Illinois bus containing Midwestern Freaks.

  And then again, when a mother is confronted with such a dramatic deformity of progeny every day of her life, perhaps she must live in the hyper-present tense. It undoubtedly involves a certain amount of terror. Who knows how much larger her Corinthia’s hands will grow? Those fish-belly white slabs with the creepy funeral-home-director fingers and Alpine-peaked knuckles. And how quickly? Will the plates of her skull ever stop expanding? And what about that chin? At some point will horsehair begin sprouting from it?

  There were a few months when it seemed to Marlene like every time Corinthia lumbered through the front door, there was something more grotesque to behold. If it wasn’t the blotchy cheeks (a reaction to the thyroxine), it was the flaking, inflamed eczema ringing her mouth, or the hellish dandruff, or the outbreak of unexplained bloody noses that made it look as if her enormous daughter’s face were violently menstruating.

  Marlene has turned to God more and more lately, fearing that she is losing connection to her youngest child. The Bledsoes have never been an outwardly religious family — they attend the local Lutheran church only on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday, but God can find his way into the hopes and dreams of even the most marginally faithful. In addition to sneaking into First Lutheran during afternoons after she’s finished the food shopping, Marlene has started praying.

  Dear God, she’ll implore quietly while kneeling beside her and Brill’s brushed-steel four-poster bed (one of her early, most resolute FirmaMall purchases), please give me the strength to be a Good Mother, to love my Baby Girl. Please grant me the serenity to see her on the Inside, to cherish her Honesty and Goodness, to love her unconditionally, to do my best not to watch her eat those enormous helpings of my creamy burrito casseroles or listen to her mouth-breathe at night, which sometimes sounds like a felled, lung-torn wildebeest snuffling for its life in the sun-blighted, dung-clogged earth of some violent, puma-saturated, Sudanese grassland.

  Please let me not take strange pleasure in enumerating her visits to the basement where her private bathroom is and where she will sometimes stay for upward of forty minutes. Is she voiding her bowels, God? Is she urinating? Is her bladder that big? I’ve seen camels urinate on wildlife cable shows, and it just comes and comes and comes like some kind of industrial faucet that won’t turn off! Is it like that for Corinthia, too, God? Or is she doing something strange down there, like looking at herself naked in the mirror or comparing her breasts or picking at a constellation of moles that I don’t know about, like seven raised moles forming the face of that awful villain in the first Die Hard movie, or is she starting to get skin tags, because her father certainly has a few of those and I hear you can just pull them off, but if one were to do that, would it cause another one to grow, or would some leaky intestinal noise commence and never cease, or is she down there studying the water stains that have inexplicably been forming on the gypsum ceiling we installed last year? Maybe she’s just sitting on that enormous commode, just sitting there in the dark because this is the only place where she genuinely feels like she isn’t being ogled by everyone. Yes, I ogle her too, Precious God of Thunder and Light. I ogle and ogle and ogle, but how can I not? Help me, God. Help me to help Corinthia Lee. Please bless her and keep her . . .

  But despite Marlene Bledsoe’s desperate overtures to God, the nightmares come.

  Which include:

  Corinthia eating the local Lugo children, feasting on their limbs like drumsticks, her mouth a horror-movie rictus of saliva and innocent, half-chewed flesh, her eyes pinned and cougarlike, her nostrils flaring ludicrously.

  Or the one where the knobs of Corinthia’s spine are pressing through her skin, and she’s cackling madly while protoplasm-slathered pterodactyl wings are bursting through the flesh between her shoulder blades.

  Or the other one, where Corinthia opens her mouth and the sound of the universe screams forth, which is sort of like an infinite chorus of lost hysterical children mixed with the sounds of earthmovers, and then thousands of bats fly out of her throat and blacken the sky.

  On Tuesday nights, Marlene has started to frequent a support group across the Ohio River, in Louisville, Kentucky, to be exact, where, not far from the city’s beloved Yum! Center, in a fluorescently lit, wood-paneled church basement that smells a little like damp, moldy curtains, she gathers with a dozen or so other Parents of Grotesquely Disfigured Children, the PGDC.

  One African-American man, Sturm Fullilove, has a daughter, Opal, who was born with no mouth. Opal is four now, and in addition to being mouthless, she has a nose that runs incessantly, and according to the pictures Sturm brings to Group, there seems to be a permanent rime of dry mucus caking the area where her upper lip would be. The word for having no oral cavity is astomatous — Sturm likes to use this word a lot. The first time he passed around a framed portrait of Opal to the other Parents of Grotesquely Disfigured Children, Marlene Bledsoe almost vomited into her own perfectly normal mouth.

  In an effort to provide her with another orifice through which to draw oxygen (her nose is often severely congested), a small spout has been surgically created just below Opal Fullilove’s chin. Of course, this spout is simply and exactly that — a spout. There are no teeth. There is no tongue or salivary system and thus no way to break down and ingest food orally, so her nourishment is all fluid-based. The poor girl has been attached to some intravenous system or other since birth.

  Then there were many weeks when, through the most delicate forms of physical therapy, Opal Fullilove had to learn to use this spout, much like a porpoise does. In fact, that’s exactly what Sturm said while showing the photo to the rest of the group.

  “She breathes through that little hole there, just like porpoises do.”

  Sturm Fullilove often brings Krispy Kreme doughnuts to the Tuesday-night meetings. Doughnuts topped with icing and jelly beans and multicolored sprinkles.

  Clinette and Spinner Sloper, also African Americans, who parent six-hundred-pound DeMarcus, bring fat-free muffins. But every once in a while they’ll bring hot browns in a box instead. The hot brown, Marlene has learned, is a traditional Louisville sandwich made with turkey and bacon on toasted white bread and smothered with a mysterious condiment called Mornay sauce.

  Then there’s Chauncey Shore, a white man whose daughter, Pru, was born with two left arms (in addition to a right arm). Chauncey brings a big bag of sea-salt-and-vinegar potato chips to meetings. Daughter Pru’s pair of left arms is totally normal, but the right one is really small and sort of looks like a turtle leg. The hand at the end of the arm doesn’t quite have fingers, but instead the blunt, melted hint of them. Chauncey is the only one who eats the sea-salt-and-vinegar potato chips, probably because h
e doesn’t actually distribute them but holds them in his lap and pretty much lords over them as if his life depends on it. Marlene has a mind to snatch them out of his lap and give them to a homeless man who always solicits her where she parks her car in the garage across from the Yum! Center.

  And what does Marlene bring to the meetings?

  Marlene Bledsoe, whose fellow suffering parents have come to accidentally call her Maylene, brings miniature bottles of Poland Spring water that she buys from the Sheetz on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. If she were to buy them at the Sheetz on the Illinois side, she fears she might be spotted by someone, like her husband’s barber, Willis Brunch, for instance, or her daughter’s physical therapist, the kindhearted, always-smiling Carole Pie, or Hakeem Maybe, the ageless West Indian man with the ancient, minty-smelling dreadlocks, who manages the Better Burger on Tango Drive. Then there’s Dora Momadora, her former employer and owner of the nail salon, who seems to be everywhere at all times. Or Zumba enthusiast Shoshone Candeleria and her yippy little schnauzer that has a face like a bitter third-world dictator.

  While crossing the Ohio, Marlene Bledsoe often experiences the feeling that she can get away with just about anything. The thrill of possibility tingles in her kidneys and makes her feel sort of like she has to pee, but in a good way.

  Oh, crossing the Ohio River and its dirty little thrill!

  And speaking of tingling, the person Marlene likes the most at PGDC is Lemon Tidwell, a tranquil white man with an FM radio deejay voice, who brings bags of individually wrapped pastel-colored blobs of salt-water taffy.

  Lemon Tidwell’s son, Cecil, has a football-size benign but inoperable tumor growing out of the left side of his skull. Benign because it’s about as malignant as a wooden shoe but inoperable because it’s managed to house itself too dangerously close to Cecil’s anterior cerebral artery. During the colder seasons, Cecil is forced to don two knit caps: one that he wears over the expanse of his slightly lunch box – shaped head, into which a hole is cut to accommodate the Sputnik-like tumor; and another for the tumor itself, which doesn’t grow hair but pulses with enough nerve life to register extreme temperatures.

  Lemon will often break out his compact slide-show device, which attaches to his smartphone through some mini-USB-cord-port arrangement and projects images onto a white sheet that he duct-tapes to one of the church basement’s slightly warped wood-paneled walls. The lighthearted photos, curated with the hope of injecting humor into each meeting, are captured by Lemon Tidwell himself through the user-friendly but sophisticated technology afforded by his Nikon digital point-and-shoot. The subject is his son Cecil, of course, who, seven now, is featured outfitting the tumor with lamp shades, an empty KFC bucket, an orange traffic cone, various serving and mixing bowls, a broken cuckoo clock, an unfinished birdhouse, a giant cardinal-red LOUISVILLE IS #1 sponge hand, and the riffled, gutted remains of a piñata.

  Marlene Bledsoe appreciates Lemon Tidwell’s upbeat approach to Cecil’s deformity, and his thick salt-and-pepper hair has grown on her in recent weeks (not literally). Marlene’s husband, Brill, who is forty-three now, has very few grays — you can barely see them, in fact — and her former high-school prom date will likely continue to age this way, and it’s his natural external youth and trim belly that make it easier for her to accept the blinding morning breath (like an old banana left in a mailbox), his strange intestinal warblings heard at the dinner table, and the recent sty and accompanying twitch that’s emerged under his right eye. The sty is pearl-colored with just a hint of yellow crust, and she and Brill have never actually talked about it. And the not talking about it — this inviolable collusion — hangs in the air between them like some half-dead monkey dipped in corn oil and in intermittent spasms makes Marlene feel like she might just thrust her hand into the opening of the garbage disposal and turn the thing on! She practically makes a fist every time she walks past the sink just so she won’t do it!

  At the most recent PGDC meeting — last Tuesday, to be exact — Marlene learned that Lemon Tidwell is a widower. His wife, Nancy, died of a strange condition related to sleep apnea. Lemon is relatively new to the group — he started coming only a week or two before Marlene did — and when Clinette Sloper pointed to his wedding band and asked if his wife might attend, he simply stated, “My wife died in her sleep about a year ago.” Then he smiled sweetly, his teeth just the least bit dim in that sexy cowboy sort of way, and offered a piece of salt-water taffy to Sturm Fullilove, whose face was racked with such grief that one might’ve thought Lemon Tidwell was talking about Sturm’s dead wife.

  The sleep apnea details were revealed a few weeks later when, during the twenty-minute break, while most everyone else was either outside bumming cigarettes or finding a more service-friendly area to check their smartphones, Marlene approached Lemon at the snacks table.

  “Was your wife ill?” she half whispered.

  Lemon Tidwell used his gentle cowboy voice to tell her about his wife’s condition and how she stopped wearing the special mask prescribed by her doctor, one that helped battle the sleep apnea.

  He said, “Nance didn’t like the mask. Complained that it made her look like she was goin’ deep-sea diving. So that was that.”

  Marlene loves that he calls his wife “Nance.”

  And she loves that he wears faded Lee jeans and smells like pipe tobacco.

  And more than anything, she loves his reddish-brown mustache and sandpapery face.

  As far as Marlene can tell, Lemon Tidwell is a man who doesn’t succumb to the undertow of bad luck and sorrow. He keeps the bottom-feeders of bitterness at bay with a long spear of positivity and shows up at meetings with entertaining slide-show photos of his grossly deformed but good-spirited son.

  And there’s also this little tidbit:

  Marlene has been hoarding his taffy.

  She hides it all over the house: behind books, under the fine crystal in the living-room china cabinet, and inside the hollow belly of the ceramic elephant she brought back from the trip she and Brill took to Thailand before Channing was born.

  She’s even buried a few pieces in the depths of the flour bin.

  Marlene Bledsoe has yet to share a picture of Corinthia with the group. Sharing is a big step, after all. It can take months. And there’s no pressure; there really isn’t. But everyone talks about how freeing it is.

  Shepard Montrose, the leader of the PGDC, is always talking about how important it is to share, but also how one must come to this moment in one’s own time.

  Shepard, a gentle, passive man with thick white hair and a mouth like a letter opener, has a son who was born without limbs. Toby Montrose, seventeen now, recently left home to join a traveling freak show known as The Beautiful Apocalypse, which tours small colleges in the American South and Midwest. He is basically a head attached to a lumpy, formless, lightly furred torso, but he boasts a pair of impressive carotid arteries on either side of an extremely well-developed neck, a neck so well developed, in fact, that Marlene has found it almost erotic.

  The concept of Toby’s attraction is that he is “planted” in a Plexiglas terrarium of soil, among carefully arranged dandelions. This startling installation is billed as “Plato the Potato Boy.” Bored into each of the four panels of Plexiglas are fist-size holes, designed for either airflow or feeding, though it’s not entirely clear, because Toby Montrose is prone to hunger strikes.

  Apparently there is a lavaliere microphone taped to his cheek, and Toby, who has officially changed his name to Plato, likes to sing anti-consumer songs, a cappella, over a P.A. “Fling Your Smartphone at a Drone” is his favorite one; that and “App-Happy Babylon,” which is actually more of a spoken-word piece than a classic song in that it trades conventional melody for a kind of demonic, incantatory chant that is downright disturbing.

  Occasionally, overcome with the need to rant about the hypocrisy and evils of professional baseball, particularly those associated with the St. Louis Cardinals post – Alber
t Pujols, Toby/Plato will stop singing and unleash long, heavily embroidered monologues.

  Shepard Montrose shares pix of Toby performing as Plato the Potato Boy in his Plexiglas box. He doesn’t project them like Lemon Tidwell; he simply passes around three-by-five snapshots.

  Regarding his son’s dark turn, Shepard’s demeanor is quietly accepting, if not resigned. Last spring he spent some time following The Beautiful Apocalypse. After visiting Shorter University in Rome, Georgia, and Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina, he ended his trip at Rust College, an African-American liberal arts institution in Holly Springs, Mississippi, after his son started spouting invective over the P.A. while using an infrared laser device that was attached to his forehead to point out his “asshole father” to the students gathered around his box. The laser beam’s red point danced invasively around Shepard’s left eye until he was forced to turn away.

  “STOP FOLLOWING ME!” Toby/Plato screamed, red-faced and seething. He then told everyone how at the age of sixteen, he had legally divorced his parents (which is true) because he was tired of being objectified as a “thing” to be “carried around” and “shown” to people, like an “exhibit.” (The profound irony of course being that this is precisely what he has become.) Then Toby/Plato led the students in an Ebonical chant of “PEACE OUT, POPS. PEACE THE FUCK OUT! PEACE OUT, POPS. PEACE THE FUCK OUT!” until, humiliated, Shepard made his exit to thunderous undergraduate African-American applause and so much hissing, he thought snakes were slithering after him.

  The whole thing just got to be too painful.

  At the last PGDC meeting, Shepard handed out four-color programs from The Beautiful Apocalypse. The cover featured his son, Toby, aka “Plato the Potato Boy,” preaching to hundreds of undergraduate students from his terrarium. Marlene took the program home, along with Lemon Tidwell’s taffy, and hid it at the bottom of her sock drawer. She has since taken it out three times and studied the cover along with several other freak-show attractions. One woman has a face like a crocodile. There is a set of Siamese twins joined at the head called Tito the Two-Headed Boy. The back of the program lists the many colleges that comprise the tour, as well as a website and contact information.