BODIES
When I was a child, flat and smooth as a cedar shingle, my mother and the neighborhood doc stood me on the examination table and took a survey. “She has lordosis.” (Swayback.) “Her shoulders droop.” “She has too much red hair.” “Her arches are high.” “Her neck is too short.” I never forgot.
Lifelong my mother continued the list. “Why do you hold your thumb out like that?” “You have a double chin.” “Stand up straighter.” “Your bosom is droopy.” “Your red hair is out of control.”
Twice I reduced my knees to hamburger, once by trying to rollerskate down the steep driveway in primary school years. I howled even though my mother cleaned and bandaged me and threatened that if I didn’t stop and go to sleep, we would not go see “Fantasia” which was newly released. I didn’t see it until I was near-adult.
The second time was on my bike when I hit gravel, crashed, and came home with legs striped with blood. Cleaned up, told to suck it up. We never used pain killers. None were available anyway, except aspirin. Never did know where our bikes and trikes came from. Mine was an old girl’s bike but my brother had a proper boy’s bike because he had a paper route. There were two trikes. The bigger one would easily capsize. A scooter came from somewhere.
I went round and round and round the block, gritting my teeth when I went under the plum tree because of all the pits on the sidewalk. There were two dogs who bit: a chow on the corner and an airedale on the back of the block. I never did get bitten. I tried to charm them.
Once, still flat, I had a rash on my front all the way up and down. The doc said it was fungus, because of Oregon climate, and put me under a sun lamp with no clothes on. It was in a sort of closet just off the hallway and a boy went past. I closed my eyes so he couldn’t see me.
Then the cat got ringworm and gave it to all we three kids. The treatment was iodine which stung like fury. My mother stood us on the bench to her dressing table to find all the spots and we screamed and danced. The girl who moved in across the street said they thought we were being tortured. After that I kept a close inspection on my black and white cat and got used to seeing it black, white and iodine color, sort of purple-brown. Once it broke its toe fighting and my mother cut off the toe with the bolt cutters. It healed with no trouble.
We all had measles and chicken pox, but not whooping cough. There were no vaccines except for small pox, which meant they scraped and poked a little circle and swabbed the vaccine onto the lesion. A thick scab formed and we were threatened never to scratch it, though it itched furiously. My brother had scarlet fever and they said it damaged his heart.
When I had pneumonia, the doctor came to the house, flipped me onto my face and shot my butt with penicillin. Before penicillin children died of flu routinely. It was a miracle.
Once I had an abscess between my toes and the doctor cleaned it out. He shot me locally with novocaine (he had pain killers), but I insisted I could still feel his knife. Today sometimes I can still feel that place twinge. He took out my tonsils and adenoids and it interfered with my swallowing and ears forever after. I told him so, and he was angry.
That doc was completely bald, which I thought was usefully sanitary. He practiced out of his own house and if you were sick enough to be kept overnight, his mother-in-law slept on the sofa so you could sleep in her bed and he could check on you often. This family was part of the neighborhood and didn’t move away even after the doctor’s wife was attacked at her back door by someone who wanted drugs or money. In fact, when I worked for the nuisance department, Mrs. Doctor Duncan called in a complaint about something. The doc was dead by then.
Earlier, when I worked for animal control, a cat bit my thumb to the bone and it infected. Just as with my toes in childhood, the doc cleaned out the pus and inflamed tissue, saying, “Oh, ick!” all the time. It stunk but it healed. Now I just soak such things in hot salt water. I don’t complain or cry. I’ve learned to be stoic. Once in Browning I was bitten to the bone by a baby porcupine but it didn’t infect and didn’t hurt that much.
It was no wonder I had no business with embodiment. I didn’t want to think about my body, which was a nuisance. The best I could manage was endurance and resistance, as much psychological as physical, though I sometimes thought about appearance. I had some nice adventures with makeup in high school. To counter my ruddy face, I mixed green eyeshadow in my liquid foundation and achieved an interesting pale green which I thought might be taken for white until a classmate demanded to know why my face was green. No one noticed I was using mascara because I wore glasses.
Eighty years later my hair is white and there’s a lot less of it. I keep my baseball cap on. “I love it when old women dress like young men,” said a young woman. For a while I wore bib overalls.
The worst was much later. My husband at the end of another ten hour day in the foundry said, “Look at you! A pot belly and your feet stink.” Close to the end by then. He was famous enough to expect glamour and got it, but not from me. I said something equally stinging and humiliating to him. I didn’t comment on his webbed toes. I didn’t say he was furry as a bear. The truth is that he was my path to embodiment and because I loved him, everything about him was dear. Like a little duck I was imprinted and would always have special affection for furry men with solid chest/bellies and webbed toes. That never happened with anyone else.
In his defense, he once decided to buy me new clothes and took me to Elba Higgins’ dress shop where he bought me a nice dress with a little jacket and a hat like a sugar bowl upside-down. He squinted and adjusted and we added sparkly earrings. Days later I realized he had dressed me just like his mother. Embodiment thought is tricky stuff, verging on Freudian.
