The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  backformation: Removing what appears to be a suffix or prefix from an existing word to form a new one. Thus, buttler is derived from butler, burgle from burglar, and more recently conversate from conversation.

  barbarian: A native of a land where they aren’t as civilized as we are. From barbarikos, a derisive onomatopoeia for foreign languages, which to the Greeks sounded like baby talk or bleating sheep: hence, baa-baa-rian.

  Cliché inventory compiled by Bone King during visit to the Northside Hospital Emergency Room

  Cliché item

  yes

  no

  Interminable and meaningless forms to complete1

  x

  Time passing with gelatinous slowness while waiting to be seen by physician

  x

  Young man with head wrapped in bloody gauze

  x

  Suspiciously juvenile-looking physician

  x

  Mysterious and alarming tests performed

  x

  Phrase “overnight for observation” used

  x

  Humiliating hospital gown that fails to cover backside

  x

  Room with motorized hospital bed capable of achieving any angle, slope, incline, or combination thereof conceivable to Euclidean geometry, but which on no account can be made comfortable

  x

  Flavorless hospital food served on plastic tray

  x

  Visit from priest

  x

  Referral to specialist with exotic-sounding name2

  x

  Notes

  1. To wit: “In case of emergency contact.” What do they mean, “in case of emergency”? This is the emergency room. And the person to contact is who came with me. (Pointed this out to Mary, who was not amused.)

  2. Dr. Limongello, whom everyone calls “Wonderful Dr. Lemon Jell-O.”

  Although Bone was capable of navigating on his own steam once he was free of the tub, helpful hands herded him to the living room. Cash and the Mexicans stood stupefied, stiffly shifting from foot to foot, while Mary stroked Bone’s cheek with her fingertips and smoothed his hair, as if this terrible episode were somehow attributable to grooming. “Sweetheart,” she said, “what happened?”

  Bone couldn’t say what had happened because he knew only that he couldn’t move, and that’s what he told her. Her kiss left a tingling spot on his forehead, like a priest’s blessing. Her dark eyes looked into each of his eyes in turn, as if trying two doors to find the unlocked one, while down her blouse he could see the silken hemispheres of her breasts. “We’re taking you to the emergency room,” she said, the first order of business as far as she was concerned. But Bone demurred; it was only a onetime occurrence, surely.

  “I bet you’re right, buddy,” Cash said with a man-to-man sort of compassion. “Probably just a onetime thing. But don’t you think you need to go to the emergency room anyway? Just in case.” A Hispanic murmur of consent rose from the Mexicans, and Bone thought what a good friend Cash would make. Bonhomie’s sudden sunshine filled the room. So Mary drove Bone to the hospital, her face filled with the solemn joy of taking sensible measures in a crisis, Bone suppressing the unspeakable urge to smile.

  At a traffic light Mary asked, “What were you doing in the bathtub?”

  “Oh, just looking at those lines of Chaucer,” Bone said as nonchalantly as he could, gazing with unusual attention at a sign offering to buy ugly houses.

  “But I thought you were done studying Chaucer,” Mary pointed out.

  “There was just something I wanted to check on,” Bone explained. In the subsequent silence, Bone felt uncomfortably certain she knew he was lying.

  In the emergency room, Bone invited Mary to join him in a game of Cliché Hunt while filling out forms, but she only said, “You can’t make everything into one of your little games, Bone.” So he retreated into his ruminations, leaving Mary to hers.

  He was calm throughout his examination by his Clearasil-scented physician: the futile formalities of reflex testing, blood sampling, X-raying, and peering into his skull holes. He was unruffled at being made to walk from one end of the room to the other, stand on one foot, then the other, squeeze with his left hand and then the right. Bone was a patient patient with all of it. It was incredible that the bizarre episode of immobility—already so remote it seemed to belong to another lifetime—would recur; nevertheless, it was charming to be the object of Mary’s concern.

  The inconclusive tests having reached their inconclusions, Boy Doctor confessed himself stumped and referred Bone to an expert in neurological circles, Dr. Limongello, “a double-doc.”

  “What?”

  “A double-doc,” the physician repeated, clearly enjoying Bone’s puzzlement. “He’s an MD in neurology and psychiatry. He’s unorthodox, eccentric even. He’s sort of famous for unusual methods, his bedside manner. But he’s wonderful.”

  The hospital staff set up an appointment for Monday. Meanwhile Bone was to stay overnight for observation. The room they assigned came equipped with:

  · A bed evidently designed for use in outer space

  · A wall-mounted TV

  · A screen where Bone’s heartbeat rose and fell in a fragile white line, steep mesas dropping into craggy valleys, like someone turning the knob on an Etch-a-Sketch.

  A nurse came to check on him—“Oh, he’s wonderful,” she exclaimed when she heard Lemon Jell-O was going to look at Bone. He lay pretending to write notes on his pad, staring at Mary from the corner of one eye as she sat in an armchair by the bed watching the local news.

  Car wreck. Crime. Politician. Weather, with a forty percent chance of other weather later on. Then something upbeat to close—a girl gets her dying wish: a photo op with a pop star.

  Mary’s shoes lay on the floor, one upright, one on its side. The curve of her smooth calves tucked beneath her made a tilde (~), and two brunette strands fell across her forehead, escaping her bun after a day’s confinement at work, her studious frown and black-framed glasses accenting her beauty: a “plain girl” sitcom character destined to transform into a knockout by removing her glasses and shaking her hair free of its restraint. He did not deserve her, and he knew it.

  Father Pepys arrived at suppertime and chatted as Bone lay ill at ease, ruins of chipped beef and two pale peas wading in liquefied red Jell-O in his plastic tray. Since starting work as the church secretary, Mary had become a churchgoer, and Bone attended as often as he could stand it. What got to him was not the homogenized nonsense of Christianity but the unchewable chunks of Father Pepys’s own contribution. Once Mary came home from service and wrote “atonement” on a piece of paper. “Look what Father Pepys showed us,” she said, adding dashes to make the word “at-one-ment.” “It means at-one-ment. Jesus died so we could be at one with God. At-one-ment.” This particular piece of Pepysian poppycock had practically put Bone into apoplexy. Bone’s fury at this was in no way assuaged when to his astonishment he later discovered that the priest’s goofy etymology was actually correct.

  After the priest left, Mary looked around the room. “Not many places for me to sleep,” she remarked.

  “Oh, you don’t have to stay here,” Bone said. “Go home.” But what he was really thinking was, stay here.

  “Don’t be a dope,” she said. “Of course, I’m staying.”

  “I appreciate it,” he said. “But I don’t think they’ll allow it anyway. Why don’t you go home and get a good night’s sleep? You can pick me up in the morning.” He heard the words, but they seemed to be coming from someone else’s mouth. What was he saying? Stay here, stay here.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. She seemed disappointed.

  “Absolutely, I’ll be fine. Go home.” Why was he saying this? What was wrong with him that he didn’t just say thank you, I love you, I’m grateful for you? But he didn’t. She asked if he wanted the light off, and pressed the switch. Her silhouette leaned forward to kiss him, a moment of gardenia. And she was gone.


  Even with lights out, a hospital room gets only as dark as an arctic midnight in June. Bone lay disconsolate in what darkness there was. She would have stayed if he’d asked; why hadn’t he? Somewhere along the way, he’d stopped telling her how he loved and needed her and entered the realpolitik of marriage, where above all else, you must never risk shifting the all-important balance of power. Bone rolled onto his side. On the screen, the beat of his heart drew and erased, drew and erased, over and over.

  When Bone first met his future wife, he was coming off a near miss of a relationship with Miranda Richter, the medievalist in the office next to his. After a promising start, they’d solidified immovably in the friend zone, the familiar story of Bone’s romantic life. Mary Snyder had been a student in his Composition 1101 class, second row, one seat from the middle. Bone immediately made up his mind to dislike her. Dislike or madness: ignoring her would not do.

  Ignore the gormless, slack-jawed freshman, with hair that looked as if he’d combed it in a wind tunnel; the chubby, bubbly, gum-chewing co-ed, always squealing first, loudest, and longest at Bone’s jokes; the stone-faced business majors resenting this detour from their lifework of relentless acquisition and conspicuous consumption; the savant wannabe smoking clove cigarettes on breaks, appending an interrogative “no” to every statement like some sort of damn European: “The typical syntax in Old English was still subject, verb, object—no?”

  Ignore everyone else, but not her. The almond eyes beckoning, Gaze into me, fall into my depths, the chestnut hair, lustrous and despicable, that you ached to curl around your fingers, and the adorable, detestable, heart-shaped face—who goes around with a face like that?—and the sweater undulating over the swell and dip from clavicle to hip.

  If she’d been beautiful, and beautiful only, he’d have gotten over her, but once, as he slipped in just before the unwritten deadline allowing students to skip when the teacher is a no-show, Mary narrowed her eyes and pointed her finger with a stern “This better be worth it.” It wasn’t the joke that got him but the way she said it, and by the way she said it, Bone knew she was flirting with him. She was flirting with him. The rest of class, his heart hammered at his sternum as if it were putting up siding.

  Each semester he held individual student conferences, a chore he enlivened by transforming it into an improvisatory performance, with himself cast in the role of Professor Witherwood, a composite character based on Hollywood depictions of Ivy League professors. The essence of the Witherwood character was his absurdly elevated diction, which fell just short of an Oxford accent. Student reaction ranged from indifference to stupefaction; they never suspected that Bone had drafted them into an unscripted one-act comedy. But then came Mary. During her conference, Bone called her to task for overusing adverbs: “Select sincere verbs and adjectives that know their business, and no further modifiers are necessary.” Her smile at this emboldened him to further flights of eloquence. “Your verbs, my dear, and there’s no point trying to conceal the fact, are not all a good verb should be. They lack the requisite vim. As for your adjectives, they’re evasive and lack conviction. You can tell their hearts are elsewhere.” She laughed outright, and that evening Bone went home, feet scarcely touching the ground.

  Mary, he learned, worked as Dean Gordon’s secretary. Close to himself in age—early thirties, Bone guessed—she became Bone’s ally, nodding at cultural allusions no one else shared, laughing at sly aspersions that sailed safely over everyone else’s head, getting, in short, him. By the time he realized he’d broken his resolution to dislike her, he was already half in love. Finally, after enduring an entire heavenly, hellish semester under the heat lamps of her almond eyes, developing a sore neck from avoiding looking toward her heart-shaped face, and getting migraines holding his breath lest he whiff the heady sweetness from that lustrous dark hair, Bone determined to act.

  For some, asking Mary out would have been a natural next step, but not for Bone. Life had taught him many things; unfortunately, almost all of them were about grammar and etymology. He could have told you that “kiss” is both common noun and transitive verb, as are “date” and “love”; the mechanics of an actual kiss, however, or arranging a date, let alone finding love, were matters as opaque to him as the steel door of a bank- vault. So, knowing no better, during the final exam, he beckoned her into the hall, “Ms. Snyder,” and then when they were alone, the very molecules of the air holding their breath as if before a thunderbolt, he said, “So when are you going out with me?”

  The six-year-old at the state fair wins the plush panda a head taller than himself; the housewife ignorant of sports catches the home run cracked to the stands; the Baptist pastor, morally opposed to gambling, who bought a ticket only to soften the embarrassment of facing the cashier with his wife’s tampons, wins the million-dollar jackpot. In this way, by the mysterious cosmic force known by envious runners-up as beginner’s luck, Bone’s untutored tactic brought home the metaphorical bacon.

  “How about this Saturday?” Mary asked.

  On Saturday at sundown, therefore, Bone stood ready to press the doorbell of Mary’s townhouse apartment. Twilight gave each skinny tree—precisely one per lot—a poetic, wistful beauty. Someone was grilling a steak. Birds tittered in the eaves. But Bone was aware only of the starched shirt leaning on his shoulders like a cardboard sheet. Even he knew that arriving this early was a faux pas; wouldn’t it save embarrassment to wait in the car a few minutes before announcing himself? He turned, stepped toward his car, hesitated—on second thought. Turned. Raised his hand to the doorbell. Stopped. Lowered his hand. Considered. Raised it. Lowered it.

  He never knew how long Mary’s roommate, Laurel, had been watching before he finally noticed her face in the window. Once he stopped, Laurel called, “Mare-ree! Your date’s here!” The door opened, and he slunk across the threshold.

  As he waited, making strained replies to Laurel’s small talk, Bone’s surroundings—the Jacques Brel poster over the unused ten-speed; the dusty potted ficus; the plastic crate-cum-bookshelf housing Salinger, Vonnegut, and The Fountainhead—stamped his memory, the way the priest’s face, guards’ clasping hands, and clanking leg irons imprint the consciousness of a prisoner en route to the electric chair. Bone had an unignorable foresense of failure.

  Indeed, the date was not precisely a success.

  He took her to dinner and a movie, which, he’d gleaned, is standard operating procedure on dates, but sitting across a table from the woman he’d fantasized about, rather than inspiring him to gallantry and charm, merely stunned him.

  She gave him a roll from the bread basket and held it in his fingers as she buttered it for him, an unexpected intimacy that sent electricity crackling up his arm. “It must be exciting being an author,” Mary said. Bone said it was not that exciting. “When do you find time to write?” Mornings, Bone told her. “I always wished I could write.” Bone said she should try it.

  After a few more failed gambits on her part, the silence went unspoiled by human speech until the theater, when Bone’s two-quart paper cup of crushed ice and syrupy grape soda, which a sign at the concession counter ludicrously identified as “medium,” managed to upend into Mary’s lap.

  After this episode they left without seeing the rest of the movie.

  Back at the apartment, Mary gave Bone her cheek when he went in for the kiss, and his attempt to land on her mouth only resulted in an evasive maneuver resembling an experiment in magnetic repulsion. “So,” Bone said. He felt shortchanged and short-tempered. He was no skinflint, but this rendezvous had run him—between tickets, popcorn, and soda, not to mention the lavish dinner he had barely tasted—a great amount of money, money he could ill afford on a college teacher’s salary. In contrast to this, a kiss—the memory of which might have warmed the cold baloney sandwiches on which he would subsist next month to economize—would have cost her nothing, and yet she withheld it. He hated himself for having these thoughts, but in no way did that stop him from ha
ving them.

  “So,” he said, “can I ask you out again?”

  “Sure,” she said, her reply as insincere as his request. “Give me a call.”

  He did call—why, who can say, unless to confirm his bitter hypothesis—four times: the first time she answered; the next two times it was Laurel; each time Bone was informed Mary had a prior engagement. The fourth time no one answered at all.

  Bone heard, through a vine of particularly sour grapes, that Mary, “you know, that pretty secretary who works in the dean’s office,” was “involved with” Dr. Gordon, the dean, a serial womanizer whose wife would no doubt “just die” if she found out.

  In its long existence the word “love” has acquired its share of false etymologies, to wit: in French l’oeuf, “egg,” is metonymy for zero, the egg’s shape suggesting 0, as “goose egg” does in English. The British anglicized l’oeuf to “love,” and in the way that meaningless coincidences sometimes become meaningful, to this day, in tennis, as in life, love means nothing. Bone warmed himself reflecting on this chilly irony.

  The gossip about Mary he added to a preliminary but quickly growing store of data regarding the bad character and otherwise undesirable qualities of Mary and women like her, indeed all women generally, coolly committing himself to the solitary life. As for Gordon, if Bone had not especially liked him before, he loathed him now.

  Therefore, when Bone answered his telephone one day and heard Mary’s voice on the other end, you could have knocked him over with a hummingbird feather.

  “What’s up?” she asked. The question flummoxed; what was up? The white clouds, he supposed, the yellow sun that warmed the earth, his soaring heart; these things were up, and yet he could make no reply. “You haven’t called in a while,” Mary chided, as if above all things else the anticipation of his call were the chief delight of her existence. “I thought you and I were going out again.”