The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  “Well, that’s good.” She was standing now, holding her Norton Anthology and notebook against her chest, waiting for permission to leave.

  What was wrong here?

  “Okay,” Bone said. “Have you read the Conrad yet?” An opening for her to feed him a stolen opinion that she could fob off as her own, one of her please-affirm-I’m-worthy observations stated in the form of a question, but she didn’t rise to the bait.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, the final exam’s coming up.”

  “Right. Well, I’ll read it.”

  Telling Miranda Richter she was a great teacher hadn’t helped Bone’s mood one jot or tittle, and the oxytocin boost from his conversation with the Quik-Trip cashier had long since dissipated, leaving in its place the slow-rising dread from calcitonin and noradrenaline swirling up in his blood like mud in a troubled stream. He needed to restore his levels. He tried modulating his hormones by reminding himself that this was how he felt when he was feeling anxious, but contrary to Limongello’s prediction, articulating the emotion seemed to increase rather than diminish it.

  “I have to tell you something,” he said, keeping his voice as cold and scaly as he could manage. “You.” Long pause after that word, building the suspense, savoring her apprehension: What is he about to tell me? Yes, it was definitely working; Bone could feel his oxytocin beginning to seep back into his bloodstream. “Are a very good student. Truly. It is a privilege to have you in class.”

  Belinda stared as if a bucket of cold water had dropped on her head, then astonished Bone by bursting into sobs. “Oh, Professor King!” She hugged him, clawing at his sleeves, wetting his astonished shoulder with her tears.

  After accepting the card with the tough-faced kid, the clutched flowers, and the “I like you,” Mary gave Bone a quizzical look and said, “What’s this about?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s just a card, and it made me think of you.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She kissed him and put the card on the dresser mirror where she would see it every day, and stood there for a time studying it as if it were a clue to a mystery she was working out.

  L, l

  From the North Semitic lamed (l), “ox goad.” A liquid consonant, formed sensuously by pressing the upper side of the tongue to the alveolar ridge.

  love: From the Proto Indo-European lewb. In the Aristotelian concept of essential meanings, love means the same whether we say, “I love bacon,” “I love my wife,” or “God is love,” a problematic point because Aristotle himself had four different words for love: storge, “familial love,” eros, “sexual love,” philia, “love of friends,” and agape, “unselfish love.” Wittgenstein, however, argues that a word’s many meanings are only family resemblances. If so, love’s in-laws and multiremoved cousins could perplex the most patient genealogist. Overview of Neurology (Arthur Limongello, MD, MD, New York: Kakos Publishing, 2009) defines love as “endorphins and oxytocin creating sensations of emotional bonding.” But surely we love even when filled with hormones for anger or fear. Does it overstretch Wittgenstein’s familial similarity to say animals with other hormones than ours feel a version of love? Do chickens, displaying motherly concern for their chicks, know storge? Do turtles, companionably sharing a floating log, have philia? Do they love the sunshine on their backs? Is a chicken closer than a turtle to understanding the essential meaning of love? Are we closer than a chicken? Can God, who, if He exists at all, has no limbic system or hormones whatsoever, love us?

  Bone wondered if after what had happened at the party, Cash would have the nerve to do their lawn on Friday. Cash had the nerve. Of course, while Bone knew Cash had kissed Mary because Mary had told him so, Cash didn’t know Bone knew because Mary hadn’t told Cash she’d told Bone; unless Mary had told Cash she’d told Bone, in which case Cash would know Bone knew Cash kissed Mary, but Bone wouldn’t know Cash knew Bone knew. Jesus, since when had life turned into an Archie Comics book?

  In spite of promising not to “see Cash” again, Mary spent as much time that afternoon with Cash as ever, if not more. “It really hurts me to see you talking to him,” Bone said when she came in to get Cash a glass of tea. What was it about that man and tea?

  “We have to act normal. He lives in our neighborhood. I can’t avoid him,” Mary pointed out with the infuriating calm of common sense. Still, it cut Bone to pieces seeing them together in the speckled shadows of the Rose of Sharon. What the hell were they talking about? If she were capable of talking to Cash so brazenly when Bone was there, what prevented her from doing something more than talk when Bone wasn’t? Or did it work the other way around? Did she only allow herself to be around Cash when she had Bone as a chaperone?

  Mary came inside, rinsed Cash’s glass, and put it in the dishwasher, then finished off a glass of water herself, draining it in a single swallow—a way she had—setting the glass down and gasping. With a look of having something to say, but waiting for when saying it would seem natural, she stared out the window at Cash lowering the truck gate and a Mexican rolling the lawn mower up it. Bone could see Mary weighing and planning, mentally constructing and demolishing conversational bridges to carry her from the blank wall of utter silence to whatever it was she had to tell him. Finally, she came out with it: she was driving up to the mountains to spend the weekend with Laurel.

  When did this come up?, was what Bone wanted to know.

  It transpired that she and Laurel had been discussing it for a while now and had finalized the plans at Betty’s party.

  The same party at which she had kissed Cash?

  Jesus, how long was Bone going to keep throwing that up in her face?

  Why did she have to go to the mountains? Why couldn’t she stay here with him?

  To paint. She’d always wanted to paint, and this was her chance. She’d already been to Binders’ Art Supply: a bag of wooden stretcher strips, canvas, tubes of Bengal Rose and Cerulean Blue were waiting in her Honda.

  Jesus. She was leaving now? Right now?

  Yes.

  Couldn’t he come, too?

  She couldn’t concentrate with Bone around. She needed to be alone.

  But wasn’t Laurel going to be there?

  That wasn’t the same thing.

  Was anyone else going to be there?

  What was he talking about?

  Cash?

  Jesus, how many times was he going to throw that up in her face?

  Couldn’t she understand? He was sick. He had a condition.

  “If you don’t want me to go,” her chin was out, “then I won’t go.”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I already told Laurel I would.”

  So she went.

  Of the many ways to console oneself, diagramming sentences is the rarest; nevertheless, other comforts—walking room to empty room mumbling, for example—don’t provide the serene, objectifying distance between ourselves and our self-pity that diagramming does. Ordinary sentences, outwardly so similar, anatomized in a diagram, show the operations of transitive, intransitive, and passive verbs that define our relationships to each other, the outside world, and ourselves.

  Bone took a simple-seeming example: There Mary goes.

  Until you see it diagrammed, you might almost mistake “there” for the subject, but “there” is not doing the going; it is a mere preposition, a dummy subject taking the place of the absent Mary. Ironically, “goes” is an intransitive verb. No object receives the action of Mary’s going. She simply goes and is gone.

  Unlike “to go,” which a subject does by itself, a transitive verb is a vector requiring an object to receive the action. Next Bone considered the sentence, “Bone diagrams himself a sentence.”

  If not for the diagram, we might whimsically imagine that Bone is diagramming himself, but the diagram clarifies that what Bone diagrams is “a sentence” and that “himself” is only an object, the person for whom he diagrams
it. Identity is fractured here; “Bone,” as subject, occupies the primary position, but as “himself” hangs as an afterthought, broken from the main sentence stem like a pencil refracted in a glass of water.

  Some verbs, however, do not show action, transitive or intransitive, but a state of being. These are passive verbs. Take, for example, “Bone is all alone.” “All” is redundant (“alone” being a compound of all and one) but permissible for emphasis.

  Instead of being perpendicular, the line after the verb totters back toward the subject, signifying that “Bone” is not performing an action, such as “going” or “diagramming”; he merely is alone. Unless we supply the adverb “now,” there’s no reason to infer a time he was ever not alone. Unlike a transitive verb, a passive verb stays put, an unmoving link between subject and complement. Since the verb is directionless, the same idea can be expressed in almost any order. While it would be untrue to say, “Bone left Mary,” and nonsense to say, “A sentence diagrammed himself Bone,” it would be perfectly correct—although unorthodox—to say, instead of “Bone is all alone,” “All alone is Bone.”

  Saturday, Bone drove out in the rain to buy himself some cut fruit, bread, and sandwich meat and had the good fortune to come across someone stranded with a dead battery in the parking lot of the Skyland Kroger. Having helped the stranger jump-start his battery, sprinkled with raindrops and personal virtue, Bone went to the library to return one set of books and check out another.

  That night, Mary called.

  “So how’re the mountains?”

  “Beautiful. I wish you could have come.”

  “I thought you said I couldn’t,” Bone said. Mary responded with silence, and for a moment Bone thought he’d lost the connection. “So are you getting much painting done?” This time an “um” was her reply. “Come home soon, Mary.”

  She said, “That sounds like an order.”

  “I just meant that I love you, and I miss you, and I want you home.”

  “I don’t like it when you give orders.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bone said. Something had shifted. He felt as if she had stepped behind clouded glass. “Listen, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Bone leaned on the kitchen wall, forehead to wrist, the side of his face casting twin dove-gray shadows, dark as a rain-sky where they overlapped. The phone mashed into the side of his face. “There was something you were telling me about a year or so ago. It was a day we were out shopping, and I showed you the sign for the attorneys.”

  “What are you talking about, Bone?”

  “The sign for the attorneys, do you remember? It was misspelled. We were just coming back from the library, and I pointed it out to you and said how irritating it was that some people can’t master simple spelling. Do you remember that?”

  “No.”

  “You were saying something at the time, you were trying to say something, but I wasn’t listening because I was looking at the sign. Do you remember that?”

  “No. I can’t say I do.”

  “The point is, if you remembered what you were talking about, you were unhappy about something, I’d listen now. I’m sorry I wasn’t listening then, but I’d listen now. You were unhappy about something. Can’t you remember? I think it was about me.”

  “Not everything is about you, Bone.”

  “I know that. It’s just that I miss you.”

  The call, which Bone had been looking forward to all day, ended with a dismal exchange of “I love you”s, a distance in her voice much greater than from there to the mountains.

  Late that night, on a terrible, irresistible impulse, he got in his car and drove to a house one street over. No truck was in the driveway. His stomach clenched so hard, he thought he’d be sick. But that didn’t prove anything, right? He was going crazy. Get a grip. He drove home but couldn’t sleep. Mentally, he returned over and over to Cash’s house, gliding in his mind like a silent manta ray over the wet blacktop to double-, triple-, quadruple-check: no truck in the driveway, no truck in the driveway.

  Sunday, Mary came home, and Bone was grateful to have her. She kissed him, but they didn’t make love because she had a yeast infection. Cash’s truck being gone had been a coincidence. There was nothing to worry about between her and Cash. Nevertheless, Bone couldn’t help noticing that after a weekend of painting, not one stretcher strip had been assembled with another, her canvas was unsized, and her tubes of gesso, Bengal Rose, and Cerulean Blue were unopened.

  M, m

  From the Semitic mem (M), “water.” Our modern M has the same sharp, steep waves but, rather than cascading, stands on two feet, dipping a beak in the middle to touch the ground, so it now resembles twin mountains more than a waterfall.

  metathesis: The transposition of sounds in a word, as in the childish pronunciation of “pasketti” for “spaghetti” or the doltish proclivity for saying “noocular” for “nuclear.” Metathesis is responsible for some genuine words in English: sideburns take their name from the metathesis of Burnsides, the Civil War general who popularized the style. Alas, the charming notion that a butterfly was once known as a flutterby has no empirical backing.

  mind: An efflorescence of the nervous system, an unverifiable but undeniable consciousness of one’s own consciousness. From the Greek menos, “mind,” hence mental and mentor. Menos is unmistakably related to mania, “madness.”

  move: From the Latin movere, whence also motion, motor, demote, and promote as well as emotion and motivation. Movement is expressed as the ratio of distance and time: miles per hour, feet per second. We use time to measure movement and movement to measure time—the gliding of a second hand around a dial; the march of numbers across the Cartesian grid of a calendar; a sweetheart’s good-bye. Without movement, time would not exist.

  Limongello called and said to meet at the Waffle House on the 285 access road. When he arrived, Bone was shocked by the doctor’s downcast expression, almost like the cartoon frowny-face the nurse was to show Bone later in the hospital, the far-right expression that represented 10 on the pain scale of 1 to 10, where the mouth bends into a nearly perfect upside-down U, lacking only the ant-column of teardrops marching down the cheek from one eye.

  “Are you okay?” Bone asked. “I hope you don’t mind my asking. You look like you have the weight of the world on you.”

  “There’s a little something for all of us in this world, I guess,” Limongello said. “That’s why all this.” He nodded toward the plates before him; he’d ordered the All-Star Breakfast, a meal of monstrous glory requiring four plates to serve: waffles, eggs, toast, bacon, and hash browns. “Trying to give my digestive system enough to do so it’ll trick the ol’ amygdala into not releasing so dang many stress hormones. An old trick, but effective sometimes. I guess I’m going through a rough patch right now. Thanks for asking.” He said in a comically dramatic voice, “So the patient becomes the doctor. Ha-ha. Speaking of which, how is your own therapy coming, the tasks I gave you?”

  “I really think it’s helping. Just the other day, I got to help a man whose battery died. Lucky break running into him. I’ve been feeling a lot better.”

  “Lucky break,” Limongello agreed, as if he considered the break as far from being lucky as a break could get. He stared at his scattered and smothered hash browns as if the bloom had gone off them and cut a bite-sized piece of waffle from the main mass, then further divided the piece with his knife and fork. “That’s all well and good, but I want to warn you, at first, the tasks will make you feel terrific, but that wears off. The time comes, and sooner rather than later, when you won’t feel so good dishing out compliments and doing good deeds. And when you clap your hands in the morning, you just feel stupid.” Limongello cut the recut bite of waffle again, pushing it with his fork through a thin smear of syrup to the side of the plate and arranging the other pieces around it in a triangle. He seemed to be attempting to break his waffle into sufficiently small bits that it would atomize and disappear entirely, saving him the trouble of ea
ting. “You’re going to start feeling stupid and resenting the whole process, but that’s when you really need to keep it up. We want to get to the point where you do it without feeling especially one way or the other. When you get to the stage where it stops feeling good, you need to keep going. Promise me.”

  “You almost talk like you’re not going to be here.”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s the other thing we need to discuss. I’m going to Leipzig for a neurological institute. I’d like to put it off, but I can’t.” Spearing his waffle bit on two tines of his fork, Limongello pointed it at the upside-down U of his mouth but did not eat. “I’ve got some friends there, some colleagues I’m corresponding with, and maybe they can shed some light on your condition.” Another sigh, and he reluctantly ate the waffle bit, jaws working slowly as if he were masticating a sponge the size of a supper plate. “I can’t tell you exactly how long I’ll be gone, because—well, it’s a pretty major thing. It’s international, you see. But in the meantime, and I can’t stress this enough, I need you to follow through with your therapy. Will you promise?”

  “Of course.”

  “It may get pretty unpleasant.”

  “Actually, I’ve sort of been enjoying it.”

  “And I’m here to tell you, that won’t last. After a while, you won’t like it. It’s like jogging.” Another bit of waffle was subjected to Limongello’s relentless dissection and resection, preparatory to eventual doleful chewing. “The first few minutes are great, and you think, ‘I could do this all day!’ Then it starts to get hard, and all you can think about is lying on the sofa in front of the TV with a big bag of Fritos and a beer. Believe me, though, just when it starts to get really tough, that’s when you know it’s doing the most good. Like with jogging. You haven’t gone far enough until your feet get sore and your side starts cramping.” Limongello looked at his wrist as if he expected to find a watch there and, when he didn’t, looked at the Waffle House clock. “I wish I could be here with you, but maybe it’s for the best. You need to do the next part on your own. Walk that lonesome valley and all that.”