PHLEGM
Ever known an ugly girl who gets all the love she needs? I’m that girl. My coworkers at Adventurous Electrolysis call me the little tramp. It is true that I would look a bit like Charlie Chaplin if I wore a false mustache, and my walk is not unlike his. But they mean something different when they call me that.
I am one of those women who must know exactly in what ways she is presentable, in order to make the most of them, for they are few enough. I have a hooked nose and when I said I would need a false mustache to do Chaplin I did not mean to imply that I have no mustache of my own. At least, I would have, were it not for the perks of my place of gainful employ. All the same I have been called a handsome woman, with snapping black eyes. I have never liked the phrase. Handsome says to me that I have a magnificent bosom and a fine head of hair, but a big chin. I have none of the above, and if eyes snap it is an unseemly affair and I want no part of it. Furthermore, my eyes are hazel. But there you go. It is nice to be complimented at all.
Still, I know how to use the little I have, my flat stomach and rather flatter chest, my slightly bowed, but strong and flexible legs. I produce plenty of phlegm. I have clever hands and a stare that could take the silvering off a mirror. Men flatter themselves they are original in admiring me. How confused they are when they find out they have competition. (There is no desperation like that of a lover who has decided to do you a favor, and finds himself waiting in line.)
I like the way they think of me at work. They ask my advice on molding and flow. I lie. They suck it up.
My coworkers think I am really in touch with my phlegm. Not true. In bed, yes, I know what to do. [See Appendix 1.] I produce my handful, the electrician makes his contribution, we tweak and probe and despite ourselves he and I (two homely, difficult specimens) make something I am not ashamed to keep on the mantelpiece. This, phlegming’s fabled peak, is easy for me. It’s the rest that baffles me, the how do you do, and can I offer you some kirsch?
I have always felt that everyone else knows something I don’t about phlegm. (Maybe if Mother had been around to explain, things would have been different.) Everyone else feels no qualms about sharing their phlegm with all and sundry, comparing textures and quantities, describing the changes it goes through as it ages and the best ways to groom it and skim off dust and insects; they vie to confess their doubts about their ability to produce the best phlegm, or keep producing phlegm, or produce it in sufficient quantities, or at the right time; they talk about molding and shaping it, whether it is acceptable to use cookie cutters, whether free-form modeling is more creative than strict formal arrangements. Every mail brings sticky little sentimental cards and gooey care packages from back home; turn on the TV and you’ll see politicians holding up their gummy fingers, triumphant sports stars stretching a translucent cord between their raised fists, picture-perfect parents leaning over a crib with improbably large bubbles of phlegm hanging from their faces; in the tabloids pale starlets battle through green maelstroms to make Opening Night, phlegm dripping between their D-cups. You would think our economy ran on phlegm, which while private seems to belong to everyone, such that phlegm-withholding between husband and wife is considered a crime in some states, and at least a social blunder between friends and business associates, while the phlegm-challenged are everywhere pitied and also mocked. And yet it nauseates me.
After the thumb incident, the nursing home wanted nothing to do with Father. What could I do? I took him home. Every morning I hoist him out of bed. (He’s not helpless, but he forgets what he is doing, and he is stubborn.) When he is dressed and has his bib on, we make the slow voyage to the kitchen. He greets his chair. He sits in his chair. All day, he sits and looks out the kitchen window. At night, back we go.
My father bangs his glass on the table and demands kirsch. “Kirsch!” It is all he will drink. My father was a swinging exercise instructor in the seventies. In the hall there is a photograph of him in leotards and a lab coat, the leotards for ease of movement, the lab coat to underline the medical soundness of his procedures. He has hair. He has his thumb inside a woman’s mouth. She has a large behind.
What is he doing? He is applying pressure to the roof of the mouth to ease sinus pressure, nosebleeds, headaches, and hiccups. Every morning he shuffles past this picture, stops, turns back, and peers at it, as if he does not know what it represents. Who is that darkly handsome mustached man, and what is he after in there? Every morning he tells me, “I used to receive kiss-o-grams from grateful whatchamacallits, clients, ladies with large keisters. They liked the cut of my jib.” Then he weeps. Every morning the grief is brand-new. He does not remember the grief of the day before. He remembers the kiss-o-grams, however.
One morning he dressed himself in his leotards. It was a sorry sight. His jib is shrunken and wobbly. Now all he wears is that damned kirtle. And the bib.
My father has dribbled kirsch on his bib, but there is no point in changing it now, so close to dinnertime. I pluck the stew meat from the pot. I put it in the grinder. Father can bite, but his hinder teeth are too rotten to chew, and I will not buy him baby food, not yet. So I make him his dinner: a sort of paste of meat and vegetables. Grout, I call it. I smear it on his teeth and he sucks it off. He does not thank me.
Father is dry, though I have always suspected he keeps back his phlegm on purpose, in habitual, petty ill will. My own flow has always been steady. However, my phlegm does not come for Father. Even when he is at his best, with his nose wiped and a glass in his hand, looking quietly out the window, my heart is hard against him. When he is most to be pitied, I stiffen, as if against a hand raised to strike. I have no more than the usual reasons to hate him; I should not begrudge him his little trumped-up self-congratulations now that he can be congratulated for so little. The traits for which my mother left him I know now were nothing special. His demands, his cries—well, I too once cried, once demanded. But still I have no phlegm for him. Not that he wants any. He wants for nothing.
Almost nothing. There is that touchy issue about the thumbs.
My boss is low-phlegm, but he works with it. He’s slick at palming a prepared blob of phlegm (or FLEM!™) and pressing it into a new client’s hand, to jump-start the camaraderie. Studies have shown this works even when you’re conscious of the deception, so sophisticated types (he likes to think he is one) use colored and scented phlegm to make an impact while drawing attention ironically to the artifice. [See Appendix 2.]
“God knows phlegm production is not the be-all and end-all here at Adventurous Electrolysis. We’re a reputable business. God knows we hired you in that you are highly skilled and not for your pretty face.”
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:
Diplomat Spurns President’s Phlegm
Envoy “Wipes” After Formal Greeting
Ally Takes a “Wipe” at US
88% of Americans Hate Phlegm Withholders
Diplomatic Relations Collapse: US Won’t Stand for Snub War?
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?
The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories Page 8