Favorite Bodies
It was the lunch break at a large and busy volunteer repair event taking place in a former firehouse. Boxes of pizza had been brought in for the volunteers. My friend Susie was trying to decide which kind of pizza slice to choose, plain or pepperoni. Finally, she chose the plain. I was standing there in the firehouse kitchen, watching her. I wasn’t going to have any pizza that day, but that’s what I would have chosen.
I said that it was a good choice, and that it reminded me of a story I wanted to tell her about a mortician. I said that it was a rather gruesome story.
She asked me please not to tell her the story until she had at least eaten her slice of pizza. I said O.K. She walked back to her workstation with the pizza, and I wandered off in another direction to see if I could be helpful somewhere else in the room. I was a volunteer, too, that day, but I had nothing much to do.
A while later, I went back to Susie’s work table, where she was standing holding a large black shoe. At these events, Susie repairs leather items, such as belts and purses, even leather vests and jackets, but usually not shoes. For instance, a very slender friend of ours had come to get one more hole punched in her belt by Susie and was now walking around chatting with people, her belt cinched nice and tight.
Susie showed me the large black shoe and its pair, women’s shoes, sturdy, a little worn, and not really very attractive. But they looked comfortable, a person’s favorite pair of shoes for everything—walking, shopping, wearing to lunch, slipping on to go get the mail. One of the shoes had been badly chewed by the woman’s dog. The part that was chewed was the part that goes over your instep, a kind of flap or lip. Susie didn’t know what to call it—like a tongue, but on the outside, she said. The only solution, she thought, was to cut away the chewed part and shape the flap nicely on a diagonal, and then cut the other shoe to match it.
When the owner of the shoes came over to see what Susie had decided, Susie said that she had been talking to me about it, and I then identified myself as the shoe-repair consulting diagnostician. I don’t know if either of them thought that was funny, but we were all in a good mood, like almost everyone else at the repair event, so it didn’t matter.
Susie’s idea was a reasonable one. But the owner of the shoes said that she didn’t need symmetry—Susie could just cut away the chewed part of the one shoe and give it a nice edge. After a little more talk, the woman wandered away again. There was plenty to see at the repair event. So many repair volunteers were bent over their tables, working with skill on different interesting items. Even when the items were not interesting, the skill of the repair people at these events was something to watch. They rarely looked up before they were finished; if they did, it was only to ask a question of the owner, or show him or her something. There were a lot of old lamps, some of which had imaginative and peculiar designs, though many were also just plain ugly. Today’s most surprising one was made from a large teapot topped by a stack of three teacups. There were small tables that needed gluing, and there was always clothing to be mended, and, on this day, a lawn chair whose shredded side pieces were being replaced with unmatching but whimsical bits of material.
At the table next to Susie’s, a broad-backed woman with a rather forbidding expression was also bent over her work. But what she was fixing was a page of sheet music, the score of an opera. She was a repair person for musical instruments. Her only work, earlier in the day, had been to adjust the bridge of an old violin. But now, as she explained when I interrupted her to ask, she was altering one of the cello parts of the score because of a confusion involving the “divisi”—I think that was the word. I haven’t yet tried to look it up. The cellos in the orchestra would be playing three different parts, and the three lines of notes were printed one above the other, as a chord, so that it was very hard for the cellists to follow their own part, especially if it was the middle line. So she was whiting out one of the parts. She would be taking the score to a rehearsal the following week. I found this interesting even though I wasn’t sure I understood, and, though her grim expression didn’t change, she didn’t seem to mind explaining it to me.
From the next room came the whirring of a mechanical knife sharpener. Many people had brought tools to be sharpened. Sharpening was almost as popular as lamp repair. People were coming in the door carrying their broken things—vacuum cleaners, small appliances, often awkward to hold—and others were going back out with their things fixed, or at least diagnosed.
I saw that Susie’s piece of pizza was only half eaten, on its plate next to her at the workstation, but, since she wasn’t eating it, I asked if she was ready to hear the story about the mortician. I don’t know why I was so eager to tell it, except that I liked the story, it was new to me, and Susie usually enjoys hearing stories about people’s odd behavior. She likes to tell them, too. She agreed reluctantly. I said that the story wasn’t too bad.
I told her that I’d been reading an article about morticians. One of the morticians interviewed had said something that was a revelation for those of us who don’t often come into contact with dead bodies, and certainly don’t spend time working on them. The mortician had said that the bodies she most liked to work on were the bodies of vegans.
Susie was making a face now, her mouth turned down in a way I’d seen before, when she finds something distasteful. I enjoy that expression—it is so emphatic, as are all her reactions. I went on with the story anyway.
I said that the mortician preferred the bodies of vegans because they were in better condition than the bodies of people who ate meat or fish or eggs or cheese. I loved that—the purity or cleanliness of a vegan body, the ultimate confirmation, once the body had reached the end of its life, of so much health advice. There was one more bit of the story that I wasn’t planning to tell Susie, but then, since there wasn’t much to the story as it was, I did. The mortician had also said that those bodies, the bodies of vegans, smelled better. Susie grunted in disgust. She had certainly not wanted to hear that part. I told her that I was almost at the end of the story, but there was one more thing: the mortician had been so impressed by this that she herself had become vegan. That may have been the part of the story that struck me the most: although the spirits of the people she worked on were no longer present, the bodies they had left behind—the result of their very deliberate choices in life—had taught her by example; she had allowed herself to learn something from those silenced people that had changed the way she lived.
Then Susie, having recovered, glad that the story was over and that she was free of it, said something about her own body that surprised me. She said that she couldn’t bear even to think about her insides. She patted her abdomen—disgusting! And what was worse: Her insides were always there! She was always carrying them around with her!
My story hadn’t been long, but I thought it was good as it was, clear and complete, as well as revealing. I had left Susie with that story, and in return she had given me not only a new fact about herself but also an idea that was new to me—that a person could be horrified by her own insides, though they were invisible, and even more horrified by the thought that she could never get away from them.
The story was done, the mangled shoe had a new, smooth, clean edge to its flap, the cellist at the next table had packed up her things and gone home, and the repair event was winding down. Susie, who liked telling stories, would probably tell another friend about this friend of hers at the repair event who had insisted on telling her a quite distasteful story about a mortician. So she would have not only the story of the mortician but also the story of my persistence.
It occurred to me only later, as I was thinking about the afternoon, that, one day in the future, after the mortician died, she herself would be a vegan body. ♦