American English, Italian Chocolate Read online

  “And here’s a new one,” my mother said. I felt her tap the top of my head.

  Fred said, “Mhmm hmmm.”

  I squirmed a little. Time was wasting. I had to make the most of my summer before going to camp.

  Fred nodded sagely and said, “I’d take him to the doctor, Alice.”

  When we got home from the drugstore, my brother pointed out that the dog had spots on its belly just like mine. At the dinner table that night there ensued a debate between my mother and father about whether I had infected the dog or it had infected me. When I scratched one of the spots on my belly, my father told me not to pick at it and to go wash my hands.

  A week passed before I went to the doctor. In the meantime, the multiplication of spots seemed to stop. The ones on my arms, legs, and torso were just there. But the one on my head grew to the size of a quarter, then a silver dollar, then the circumference of a coffee cup. Where it grew, my hair fell out. I began to look like a friar preparing to take orders.

  Our family doctor referred me to a dermatologist named Dr. Hand. My mother drove us into downtown Saginaw, parked, and we walked the hot sidewalk to the door of an old building that opened to a narrow stairway. Our footfalls echoed in the stuffy air on the long walk up. I didn’t know anything about doctors, but I was used to brightly lit spaces that smelled clean and alcoholly. What waited for me up there filled me with dread.

  There was no one in the waiting room. I sat on a creaky chair and looked at a pile of Reader’s Digests, which reminded me that I should be reading my Boy Scout Handbook.

  Dr. Hand was a cranky old guy. He had white hair on his head and tufts of wiry bristles growing out of his nose and ears. When he came into the examining room, he said a gruff hello to my mother and looked at me like I should have been taken to the vet. He examined my arm and belly and scratched some scales off my bald spot with what felt like a glass laboratory slide.

  How long would it last? my mother wondered.

  “A while,” he said.

  Would my hair grow back?

  “Eventually,” he said.

  The question that interested me was who had it first, the dog or I, but I decided not to ask. Dr. Hand was not a conversationalist.

  When we left, he handed my mother a white jar of salve and told her I should keep it rubbed into my scalp.

  “Get him a hat,” he said. “He’ll need it.”

  She rubbed some in when we got home. The ointment was black and smelled like tar. When I went outside, the summer sun warmed it up, and droplets of the stuff trickled slowly down my neck. The next morning, I pulled a hat on, which contained the melt. By noon the hat was stained black from the salve. Friar no more. I felt marked for Satan.

  The good thing was, I had a parasite in me. I might be infectious. Scout camp was out of the question.

  Once we boarded, I lost track of the redhead and her busy fingers.

  The flight was nine hours. I had an aisle seat in a row of three center seats. There was an empty seat between me and the lady on the other aisle. My hope was the middle seat would stay empty. I wouldn’t have to get up to let someone go to the can. I wouldn’t have to negotiate the issue of who claimed the narrow armrest between us.

  “Is the flight full?” I asked the woman. She was French-lady thin, with a French-lady hair bob. She was dressed in jeans and an untucked button shirt that revealed—when she hoisted her bag to the overhead—an ivy tattoo on her stomach, left of her belly button, which disappeared below her beltline. It reminded me of that Botticelli woman with the garland coming out of her mouth.

  “What?” She had long, slender fingers. Her arms and hands were tan. On the middle finger of her right hand, she wore four silver rings, on her thumb, a silver thumb ring.

  “Do you know if the flight is full?” I said.

  The look she gave me meant either I don’t understand your language or “What?” is the last thing you will hear me say.

  The next nine hours, she looked straight ahead, French-lady aloof, totally self-contained. She read a French newspaper, watched movies on her computer, and blew her nose.

  And it was—there’s no other word for it—a prodigious blow. French lady’s nose blow made a deafening noise, like a spring had sprung open and mucous was squirting/spraying/geysering into her French hankie. On roughly thirty-minute intervals, she blew and blew. Once, I saw her thumb and forefinger pinch a nostril, an exploratory pick.

  I would have given anything to make eye contact. Good one, I would have said. You’re one of us. Some people have grotesque black bald spots. Some root out blackheads and flick them on the rug. This woman blew.

  We’re all full of bugs and parasites. There’s no escape. We have to be brave.

  3

  Sound Off

  On days my mother had meetings after school, someone came to stay with my brother and me until she got home. The idea was to keep us out of trouble. Tom had started a fire in a neighbor’s garage one summer—a small fire, a friendly fire, pure science on his part. Nevertheless, he stood accused and was no longer above suspicion. In my case, I was caught smoking down by the river. When my father pressed me on the subject, I confessed I had stolen the cigarettes from Joe Hrcka’s Mobil station down the street. But only once, I insisted. I was still in elementary school. I didn’t want my parents to think they had a smoker and a petty thief on their hands, which in fact they did. An amateur liar too. Danny Leman and I, on more than a couple of occasions, had walked out of Pat’s Food Center with packs of Swisher Sweets stuffed in our pants.

  Thursdays the woman who cleaned our house sat with us for an hour or two. Her name was Velma Studaker. She was not quite five feet tall, a vigorous, unmarried woman of few words who dressed in brown and had a helmet of brown hair. She went to our church. She loved us and exuded a force field of rectitude. On her days I think my brother and I stayed straight just to save her the agony of having to rat on us.

  Other afternoons our unlikely companion was Mrs. Mack. She lived across the street with her daughter, Marge, who had two children—one a rangy teenager who got in a lot of fights (his nickname was Mugs), the other a daughter who had been crippled by polio and sat in a wheelchair. Mrs. Mack was an unlikely choice because it was clear to anyone who spoke to Marge that there was alcohol in the house, a lot of it, and most definitely the hard stuff. My parents did not drink. They didn’t socialize with people who drank. We avoided restaurants that served alcohol. But on those afternoons my parents needed someone, Mrs. Mack crossed the street, climbed the steps on our back porch, and came in the house.

  Unlike Velma, there was an air of fatigue and anger about Mrs. Mack. She sat in a wing chair in the living room, stiff and immovable, and watched As the World Turns and The Merv Griffin Show. She ignored us, except on cold afternoons when she ordered us to turn up the heat in the house. We tried to ignore her too, and we would have escaped to the swing set in the backyard if it weren’t for a special talent she possessed.

  During commercial breaks, she would trudge into the kitchen, take down a drinking glass, and fill it half full with water, into which she stirred a teaspoon of baking soda. Steadying herself with one hand on the kitchen counter, she raised the glass and downed her drink. Having returned to the living room, she sat and waited, ruminating, scowling at the TV. Five minutes would pass, maybe ten. Without warning she would raise the deepest, most resonant belches we had ever heard. The first time it happened I’m sure both my brother and I blushed and looked at each other, horrified, unable to believe our ears. Just about every day, unembarrassed, she eructed in our living room, delivering sonorous, roaring belches, while we hovered nearby, out of sight, within easy earshot. One time, after a particularly powerful one, she said, as if putting the matter to rest for us, “I have a heartburn.”

  At that age, we were still finding our voices. We would come to appreciate the difference between an accidental eructation and a purposeful one.

  One day in seventh-grade math, Ellen Schmidt tur
ned to say something to me, opened her mouth, and emitted a tiny, audible—and unmistakable—burp. She turned red; we both laughed. On the other hand, there were belches that were created, that were willed. While Mrs. Mack’s were strictly utilitarian, and Schmidt’s was accidental, these were performance burps, and they could be impressive for duration, tonality, and, of course, volume. Two classmates I remember were particularly eloquent.

  Many mornings after our family moved out of town, Mark Trogan and Dan Leman picked me up in the red pickup truck the Trogans used for utility purposes in their hotel and restaurant business. Sometimes driving back to town on our way to school, listening to Paul Revere and the Raiders on the radio, we took turns belching. Mark was the boss. There was no dispute. He produced numbers that were long, rounded, and ear-splitting. He had a wide mouth, which he opened and stretched to ensure maximum fullness of sound.

  Mark was bested, to my knowledge, only by Bob Strecker. If a belch could have a kick or thrust, Bob’s did. When he squared his shoulders and let one go, his lips forming a tight, perfect O, the sound and the force of it were worthy of a physics experiment, for which, unfortunately—this being the predigital age—we lacked the technology. I’m sure the data would have been impressive.

  Scientists have taken little interest in belching. The American Journal of Gastroenterology makes mention of “a behavioral peculiarity,” offering this clinical distinction: “The gastric belch is the result of a vagally mediated reflex leading to relaxation of the lower esophageal sphincter and venting of gastric air. The supragastric belch is a behavioral peculiarity. During this type of belch, pharyngeal air is sucked or injected into the esophagus, after which it is immediately expulsed before it has reached the stomach” (my emphasis). Indeed. In their study of the supragastric variety, I can just picture a team of gastroenterologists observing adolescent boys with time on their hands and easy access to air. The Journal adds: “Behavioral therapy has been proven to decrease belching complaints in patients with isolated excessive belching.” They don’t describe the therapeutic regimen, but I guess it would include grounding, withholding allowance and privileges, frequent endless lectures, and beatings.

  Oddly, I have scant memory of my children learning to eructate. One child, I recall, could belch but not whistle; the other whistles but does not belch. There may be an obscure genetic determinant at work here, the way some people have, or lack, the ability to roll their tongues, or some family members have, or lack, attached earlobes.

  I cannot imagine not being able to belch. The behavior is antisocial and puerile, but not without an element of joy. Maybe Mrs. Mack cracked a smile once in a while.

  4

  Kissing Age

  Last night, halfway through Jeopardy!, I asked my wife if she wanted to suck face. She shook her head in disgust. “Suck face” is not our usual nomenclature.

  “How about a smooch?”

  No.

  “A peck?”

  “No.”

  “Buss?”

  “Why do you talk that way?” She pointed at the TV. Alex Trebek was introducing Arthur Chu for the tenth time. Was there anything left to say about Arthur?

  While the Double Jeopardy! categories loaded, I watched her. She saw me and refused to make eye contact. The truth is, I didn’t want to kiss. I just wanted to use that expression. And I wanted to see what her reaction would be. Finally, she glanced in my direction, gave her head another dismissive shake, and told me I was a fool.

  Wiktionary teaches us, as if that’s really necessary, that “suck face” means “to kiss, especially deeply and for a prolonged time.” Free Dictionary (by Farlex) suggests: “to engage in French kissing (soul kissing).” And the online Urban Dictionary, which I use when confronted with youthful patois and argot, defines “suck face” as “a game where you make out in the least atractive [sic] way possible.”

  I didn’t know it was a game. Who would want to watch?

  The first movie kiss was filmed by Thomas Edison in 1896. I’ve seen the film and the smacker. The film is a re-creation of a stage kiss from a play called The Widow Jones. Edison must have been prim as a director, instructing the actors not to suck face. The film runs forty-seven seconds. Blink and you will miss the kiss.

  Imagine a movie today called The Widow Jones. The kissing would be wet and wild. Indeed, for some time now, I’ve been inclined to avert my gaze when people kiss in the movies or on TV. The kissing is usually so earnest and hungry, so noisy. Do they have to slurp like that? I can’t watch. I do not find it attractive.

  My first episode of real kissing was deep and prolonged. I was in eighth grade. My girlfriend and I attended a party in a two-car garage that had been converted into a rec room. We were eight or nine couples. We played records and milled about for thirty minutes, whereupon the lights were dimmed and we got down to serious kissing. From couches in corners, large La-Z-Boy recliners, and a few treacherous beanbag chairs came the sighs and sounds of slippery, wet mashing. Again and again that evening, I had the sensation of looking at myself from above, both participant and spectator. So this is what it’s like, I thought.

  At intermission, a female friend I was not kissing asked me how it was going. What I wanted to say was, “It’s actually kind of boring.”

  “Does she like it?”

  I told her I wasn’t sure.

  “Did you feel her up?”

  “What?” I felt my face go hot and red. Didn’t she know I was a Methodist?

  Sometime after that rec room romp, a girl in our town named Lila Elembaas came down with mono, which my mother informed me was “the kissing disease.” Lila was older and—I could only assume—way more advanced. Still, it was unsettling news. A few years later, when I learned to play blues harmonica, my mentor, Rod Gorski, told me not to French my harp. “You know how you kiss your mother?” he said. “The way you purse your lips?” He demonstrated: a round, tight pucker, at its center a whistle-sized aperture. “Like that,” he said. “Mainly, you draw. That’s where the good sound is.” From that sucking kiss, soulful music.

  Experts tell us that in human history, kissing is a recent development. Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University and authority on the evolution of human kissing, thinks kissing probably happened by accident. Like other creatures, humans must have checked each other out by sniffing. Then one day Moog’s lips brushed against Gorga’s.

  She said, “Hey, what was that?”

  And he said, “I don’t know, but I liked it.”

  They got right to work. The rest is history.

  Texts of Vedic Sanskrit in 1500 BC make references to licking and “drinking moisture of the lips.” In Song of Solomon, we read, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. For thy love is better than wine.” Yea, verily. The Bible says it’s so. Sheril Kirshenbaum, research associate at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, reports that in the early twentieth century, perhaps 90 percent of cultures worldwide kissed. “With the rise of the Internet,” she hypothesizes, “and ease of travel in the 21st century, it’s fair to assume that nearly all of us are doing it.”

  None kiss better than the French, we might think, though plenty of Frenching must have been going on long before there was a France. And if kissing is their thing, why is their language so impoverished in that department? Only now, in 2017, is there a word for French kiss in Le Petit Robert dictionary (galocher), adding to, and perhaps improving upon, baiser avec la langue (kiss with the tongue). The British, a poetic people, call it “snogging.” I’ll take “suck face” over that, but that’s me being patriotic.

  My wife’s culture is kissy. In Italy you may be called upon to greet loved ones and friends with two kisses. Remember, right cheek first. I tend to go left (I also twirl spaghetti counterclockwise), crossing the intersection diagonally, which leads to awkward moments and embarrassing collisions. This kissing dates back to Roman times. Precise in all administrative matters, t
he Romans distinguished between the osculum, a kiss on the cheek; the basium, a kiss on the lips; and the savolium, a deep, prolonged, soulful pre-French kiss.

  My wife is a far better linguist than I am. She learned Latin from the nuns. But I can’t imagine asking her, “Are you up for a savolium?” Maybe because it rhymes with linoleum.

  She’ll give me a signal. Something obvious, like, “Kiss me, you fool.” And I will be there.

  5

  There Will Be Horses

  This girl I was dating in high school decided we should go horseback riding. We’d talked on the phone a lot. We’d gone to see a few movies. We’d made out at a couple of garage parties. Our relationship was moving along.

  “Riding,” I said.

  She had friends who were very horse positive. A bunch of them had gone riding a few times before. Horses were so fun.

  My experience with horses was limited. I knew them from television. I knew that, in temperament, horses were on a continuum, from Flicka to Fury.

  As far as actual contact was concerned, a horse had stepped on my foot when I was a kid. We were at my aunt’s house one summer. My brother and I followed our cousin Dean across the road into a field. Dean was a sophisticated twelve-year-old. He had a pack of Salems stuffed in his back pocket that day. I was keen to watch him smoke. No sooner had we climbed over the fence than the neighbors’ pony came plodding in our direction. Its name was Daisy. When it stopped in our midst, I stepped away at first, due to the smell. Dean lit a crooked Salem, took a puff, and blew smoke out through his nostrils. He invited me to pet the pony. I approached the animal just as it was shifting its weight, and roughly a quarter of that weight went from the ground to my foot. Daisy was only a junior horse, but my foot hurt something awful.