The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome

by Man Martin

  yoga: Vulgarly a system of exercise but more accurately “discipline.” From the Sanskrit yogu, “yoke” or “harness.” The three types of yoga are Karma Yoga, the discipline of action without attachment to results; Jnana Yoga, the discipline of understanding what is real and unreal, permanent and temporary, and Bhakti Yoga, the discipline of loving devotion to the cosmos.

  In the name of keeping him active, Mary incrementally handed over the household chores to Bone, at first under her hawkeyed supervision and then on his own. She sent him on daily strolls in his walking cast and each week exiled him across the street to play cards and watch TV with Charlotte, the landlady. Although Mary always sent him on these excursions alone, she didn’t go back to Cash’s until he returned. Once, coming in after an especially nail-biting cribbage finale—his blue peg had squeaked across the finish line a whisker ahead of Charlotte’s red one—he found Mary’s face wet with tears, having, she explained, just watched a sad movie.

  Another routine was Tuesday at the Food Bank. He volunteered partly to see Mary’s pleased and startled reaction and partly to get at least one unselfish deed under his belt per week. Bone didn’t find the chore a pleasant one, but he kept going, and gradually it got easier. Father Pepys never failed to bend his ear, but the worst part was one of the regulars, who’d lost her left leg and her husband, both to diabetes—the husband indirectly; he’d abandoned her after the amputation. She smelled bad, looked dirty even when she wasn’t, and couldn’t make a subject and verb agree to save her life.

  Every time she came in, the woman enveloped Bone’s fingers in her moist dishrag of a hand and talked without pause five minutes at a stretch about Jesus, how he’d come to save us, how he loved us, how he’d suffered—and then she would start to cry. Bone had to stay put until she was good and done, wishing he were anywhere but there. He felt ashamed of his feelings, but that didn’t alter them or make him look forward to seeing her with anything but dismay.

  Bone speculated to Father Pepys that the one-legged lady cried not because of Jesus but because her husband had left her, she was poor and alone, and her body was bent on piecemeal butchery.

  When Father Pepys heard all this, he just gave Bone a look, like, “So what’s your point?”

  The day before his interview at Oglethorpe, in a room as white as medical science and latex paint could make it, the orthopedist, Dr. Patel, laid the blade of the electric saw against the cast and turned it on. The blade didn’t exactly cut the cast but vibrated it apart with a buzzing that reached right down to Bone’s foot, crunching through the cottony crème brûlée of plaster while the bony nurse who smelled of crushed aspirin and bandage adhesive looked on. After confinement in its plaster cocoon, Bone’s foot was not nearly as pink or moist as he’d imagined.

  “Wiggle your toes for me,” the orthopedist instructed. Bone wiggled them. “Now, stand.” In spite of the momentary terror of putting his weight on his broken ankle after so long, Bone stood. “How’s that feel?” It felt fine.

  Mary presented him with his other shoe, which sat in a chair beside her in vacant expectation, a sock curled in its gullet. On the way home, she had him drive. His shoe felt as unfamiliar as an oven mitt.

  In spite of having assigned the cooking and cleaning to Bone, on the morning of his job interview at Oglethorpe, Mary didn’t let him so much as pour his own orange juice but made him the “field hand” breakfast: eggs, bacon, grits, and oven toast with crispy brown edges and buttery centers. He had a big day ahead, and she wanted him fueled up for it.

  She wore a preoccupied expression, and Bone asked her why.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just thinking.”

  Bone had sent in his vita and application without expectation, but then—surprise, surprise—Dr. Weinmeker, the humanities chair, asked to meet him for an interview. “You don’t need me to drive you,” Mary told Bone, and for a moment, he thought she would lean in and kiss him, but instead, she just patted his shoulder. She made him change his shirt twice and pants once before letting him go. She didn’t bother letting him select a tie but chose one for him, subjecting him, before he left, to one last inspection. “You missed a belt loop. Jesus, Bone,” she said, but not without affection.

  Bone fixed it. “Is that better?”

  She stared at him judiciously, then nodded, and for the umpteenth time, he felt an illogical transport of joy. How wonderful she was! She embraced him and this time did give him a kiss, only on the cheek, but very tenderly. She pulled away with a strange, wistful look in her eye he could not interpret.

  “Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck,” she said. Then added, “You’ll do great.”

  That Bone managed to be late was not his fault; at the Johnson Ferry traffic light, a sedan hit the curb in a manner Bone concluded was guaranteed to pop the tire; a few rotations later, the tire itself came to the same conclusion. The starboard bumper sagged, and a plopping and grinding trailed the car as it rolled on the wheel rim. The sedan turned in to Patterson’s Funeral Home, and Bone followed and, sliding down his window, asked, “Need any help?”

  “God, yes, could you?” said the driver, a man with black hair oddly piled on his head like Lyle Lovett’s. “I’ve never changed a tire. And I’ve got to be somewhere, like”—a moment to calculate the time—“like now.”

  Bone found himself stuck by the unanticipated glueyness of an offer he hadn’t expected the other driver to accept. But he couldn’t decently say, “I didn’t really intend to help; I was being nice,” so he got out of his car, reminding himself, “This is a good day,” and mentally clapping his hands. He shook his head. Lord, how the fake Limongello’s advice persisted.

  Bone made a call but got only Weinmeker’s answering machine. He opened the sedan’s trunk and pulled away the ersatz carpet and particle-board covering to find the replacement tire and jack stowed as snug as Russian stacking dolls. The stranded motorist murmured approving murmurs, occasionally scratching his ankle—a skin infection, Bone surmised.

  Inserting the hook end of the lug wrench into the jack’s ring nose, Bone turned and turned while the device grudgingly expanded into a flattened trapezoid, thence to a square, thence to a diamond, and the rear bumper slowly hove into the air until at last the tire finally levitated, still flattened on the bottom, unable to forget its puncture. The thin sound of a speeding car grew fatter as it approached, and thin again as it went by.

  This is how I feel when I’m being impatient, Bone reminded himself, and the anxiety-producing calcitonin in his bloodstream ebbed a bit, and he began to calm. After all, it wasn’t as bad as all that. There were worse things than being late for Oglethorpe.

  “Can I pay you anything?” the man asked.

  “No, no problem,” Bone demurred, giving him a smile. “Just do something nice for the next guy, I guess.” As the sedan drove off, Bone examined his grimy hands. The knee of his dress pants was dirty, too, but he couldn’t do anything about that. He’d have to stop in the Burger King to wash, and by now he was already a good twenty minutes overdue. His cell phone hadn’t buzzed. No one had called to see what had detained him.

  With the serenity that comes from the certainty that one has well and truly blown it, Bone arrived at Oglethorpe and entered the big front doors, where he consulted the building directory to find Weinmeker’s office. Already framing his excuse for being so late, he ascended the wooden stairs and knocked. Oh, well, there would be other jobs.

  As Bone entered, the man behind the desk rose from his chair, even his Lyle Lovett hair registering surprise to see Bone again so soon. The stranded motorist.

  From time to time as they talked, Russell Weinmeker reached down to pull up his pant cuff and scratch the skin above his argyle sock. “Can’t help it,” Weinmeker said without sounding in the least chagrined. “It’s a skin condition. The dermatologist says there’s nothing to do for it. It’s not contagious.” Weinmeker reminded Bone of Loundsberry, or rather what Loundsberry would have been had Loundsberr
y had any choice in the matter. Loundsberry apotheosized. “Anyway, now that I’ve given you the rundown of how we do things around here, let me show you around.” From the hall outside Weinmeker’s office, they descended through a dark stairwell and into the brightness of a crisp fall day. “The original campus was burned during the Civil War. Everything you see was built in 1915 by Dr. Thornwall Jacobs,” Weinmeker said, explaining the medieval-looking stone edifices around them. “He was an MD who wanted it to look as he imagined Oxford College in England looks. Whenever we have to add something new, we try to keep consistent with the original design.”

  Leaves had changed color but only just begun to fall; crowns of trees rose like variegated red-and-orange hillsides against the horizon. At one end of the quad, yellow leaves spread like a tablecloth at the base of a maple. A carillon above the turreted clock tower chimed, filling the fall air with music. It resembled an Ivy League university in a movie where the cocky student ultimately gets the girl but first learns an enduring life lesson from Professor Witherwood, the curmudgeonly lecturer who conceals a heart of gold beneath his crusty exterior. The effect was undeniably corny but beautiful. Fulsome didn’t even have a quad, unless you counted the parking lot between the English building and the main offices.

  Weinmeker led Bone through the tall oaken door into the clock-tower building, where there was a library, not ostentatious but commodious, with rows of hardbound volumes ranged in muted reds, greens, and browns on the shelves of tall bookcases equipped with a rolling wooden ladder running along a rail to reach the top. Soft leather armchairs faced a pair of tall windows overlooking the campus and the early-autumn afternoon.

  “Dr. Wilson,” Weinmeker said, addressing the occupants of one of these chairs, “I’d like to introduce Dr. King.”

  Wilson, putting aside a book, extracted himself with the aid of a cane from the valley of a deep chair. He was a slight, elfin man with an absurdly precise pencil mustache. He didn’t wear a tweed jacket but, like Weinmeker, had a vest and bow tie. Bone began to wonder if working here would require buying a new wardrobe.

  “His dissertation is on etymology,” Weinmeker said, “and his thesis won first place for Books on Grammar and Usage in the Southeast.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m already familiar with it,” Wilson said, smiling and holding up the book he’d been reading. To Bone’s astonishment, it was Misplaced Modifiers.

  “I was telling Dr. King about our curriculum here at Oglethorpe,” Weinmeker said, reaching down to lift a pant leg and scratch his ankle.

  “Yes, we’re very traditional,” Wilson said. “For the first two years, it’s nothing but—good Lord!”

  Bone’s arm had shot up involuntarily.

  “It’s a condition,” Bone explained, “or actually the side effect of my medication. Sometimes my arm goes up like that. Sorry, I know it’s kind of disturbing. They can’t seem to get my meds balanced.”

  Wilson and Weinmeker exchanged a look, but not, as Bone might have expected, one of alarm or discomfort. Rather, they seemed to communicate some silent signal of approval—even envy?—Dr. King would need no skin condition or cane to make him eccentric enough for Oglethorpe. Get him a vest and a bow tie, and he’d fit like a pen in a pen holder.

  “Anyway,” Wilson continued, recovering himself, “for the students’ first year, it’s all classics: Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. Then on to Locke, Hume, and Kant. We don’t let them even touch their core classes until they have a solid foundation in the basics.”

  “We need someone to teach a class in good, traditional grammar starting spring semester. The other applicants—” Weinmeker trailed off and shook his head.

  “Comp-Rhet,” Wilson said. “They go around using words like ‘Comp-Rhet.’ I suppose it’s okay if you like that sort of thing. But it’s not for us. We’re trying to impart a sense of tradition.”

  “Anyway,” Weinmeker said, “let me show you one of our classrooms.”

  They crossed the quad to another building, and Weinmeker led Bone down a hallway past a bulletin board posted with notices—someone looking for a roommate, selling a ten-speed, offering free kittens, a brightly colored photo of the Mediterranean advertising a study-abroad program. A door with a frosted-glass window opened into a classroom. The gravity of the dark hardwood floor was alleviated by dust-moted light pouring though tall windows. The nose-tickling odor of chalk dust lingered in the air like the echo of a prayer. “We should probably get those smart-board things,” Weinmeker said, “and in the fullness of time, we probably will. We have the budget, Lord knows. There’s no fighting progress. Still, we do what we can.”

  Bone brushed his fingertips over the blackboard’s pleasing grittiness. It had another blackboard on top that could be rolled back and forth in case someone needed to save the notes from a previous lecture. Sir Isaac Newton had been erased, but his pale ghost remained.

  Back in Weinmeker’s office, Bone came right out and asked his chances.

  “You’re definitely a strong candidate,” Weinmeker affirmed. “We have a few more applicants to look at, then we’ll get back to you.” They smiled at one another and shook hands, and Bone left.

  He was halfway down the stairs before he turned and went back up. “I’m sorry,” he said, reentering Weinmeker’s office. He saw himself with sudden empathy; he was worthy of having what he needed. “But that just won’t do. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to tell me now. I won’t leave until I know I got the job. This matters. It’s important.”

  On the way home, Bone stopped at Kroger for a bottle of chardonnay—Mary’s favorite, and maybe some cheese—what else? Some fruit to go with it, for that extra je ne sais quoi. Selecting the sole pear they would divide and share, a mellow amber orb in a spongy white net, Bone rehearsed his lines as well as his dour look: “I need a drink,” he’d announce as he came in—look dour, Bone, look dour—he’d let just the bottle top show over the top of the bag for corroboration, a paper bag to complete the look of wino desperation. “Well, first, I was late,” Bone would say truthfully—dour, dour. The rest—how he’d rescued Weinmeker and then wowed him at the interview, about his ultimatum and the emergency Star Chamber convened to grant him the job—he’d save for when they were sharing Camembert, pear wedges, and a good laugh at how he’d fooled her; nearly fooled her was as close as she’d come to admitting it.

  As Bone pulled onto his street, he reconsidered his tactics; dour was too obvious; she’d see right through that. Instead, he’d act brave: a smile, but he’d try to make it tremble a little. He’d keep the line about being late and how he wanted a drink. He’d say he didn’t want to talk about it, which of course would make Mary pry it out of him. He chuckled at how well the surprise was going to work. A big bunch of birds all at once lifted from the green grass in a blizzard of black scraps.

  He didn’t surprise her; she surprised him. Her Honda was gone from the carport, and on the kitchen counter he found her note.

  Bone,

  Congratulations. I know you will get the job. I’m sorry I’m not here in person. [She had begun to add a “but” but changed her mind and crossed it out.] I couldn’t leave when I thought you needed me. But you don’t need me anymore because you’ve got everything set. The medication is working, your dissertation is finished, and soon you’ll have a new job. Dr. Limongello will get your meds balanced to take care of the arm thing, but even that’s not anything really serious. Good luck in your life. You’re going to do great things and be very happy. The one thing I’m sorry about is I won’t be there to see you hooded at your dissertation ceremony.

  —M

  [She had also started to add a “P” for PS but had crossed this out, too.]

  For a few moments, Bone just stared at the letter.

  Her strange, solemn expression. Her insistence he drive himself home from the doctor and then to Oglethorpe. Getting him to help her with the cooking and cleaning and finally making him take it over. She’d been preparing him. Seeing to it th
at he could get along without her. She’d planned this all along. He shook his head at his own obtuseness. How could he not have seen this coming? He felt a mixture of gratitude and loss so poignant, it was almost unendurable. He sighed and felt his shoulders rise and fall.

  So, okay, then.

  Z, z

  From zayn (I), “ax,” the seventh letter of the Semitic alphabet. The Greeks bent the handle to create zeta (Z), giving it a serrated tooth in keeping with its saw-like buzz, a sound never made by any ax. The letter has not changed in appearance since. The British name for Z is zed, the only letter Shakespeare ever used as an insult: “Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter!” (King Lear II, ii).

  zeugma: A pun employing the same word with two different meanings in one sentence: “The patient wasn’t.”

  zero: One less than one, from the Arabic zifr, “cipher.” The addition of zero to the set of whole numbers facilitated momentous mathematical achievements not possible to the inflexible numerical system of the Romans and Greeks.

  zzz: A cartoon idiom for snoring, without clear onomatopoetic value but intuitively appropriate. Attributed to H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, 1909.

  Time did the one thing you can count on; it passed. Bone taught at Oglethorpe, sorted out his new life alone, prepared his manuscript to send to publishers, and speculated on what had become of Flash Wye. He knew better than to ask the real Limongello the whereabouts of the fake one, but since there hadn’t been anything in the news about it and no one had served him with a subpoena or asked for a deposition, he reasoned that maybe Wye hadn’t been charged after all. Was it possible that—his wrist firmly and sternly slapped and a judicial finger wagged at him in no uncertain manner—Wye had been released to the outside world, supervised, of course, like a GPS-equipped coyote, “set free” by a naturalist for the purpose of monitoring? Might Wye at this very moment be working at his old job?

  Bone’s dreams began a few days after Mary left. These were not the suffocating dreams of attic entrapment, but they left him with the same tingling sensation of incompletion, that there was something left unattended to. He woke in the morning aware he’d had the dream but unable to recall it, and during the day he’d forget altogether. But then he’d wake the next morning from the same dream and say to himself, “Huh. I had the dream again.” Only he couldn’t remember what it was.