|Norma had spent her entire life being good, or trying to be good. She was a volunteer at a basket-full of charities, some more seriously than others. She tended to be more attracted to charities that didn't mean much to people, like helping to clean coastal rock formations of the collected bird poo and beer cans that built during the year; no one really warmed to that when she mentioned it. Another one was scanning pictures of unidentified seeds for a local county college. The seed pictures would go into an archive of seed pictures, never to be seen again but for the teacher who had received the grant that paid for the time spent scanning the seeds. He would smile at her in a more real way, but it was a distracted smile and he was the only one doing it.
Her reason for volunteering so much was unclear. She had money so she didn't need to work. She'd inherited her parents sizable retirement funds when they both died in a car crash the same year she graduated from college. Just when she was to be shooed out into the world, expensive piece of paper in hand and higher-than-was-realistic expectations in her head, she was given all the time in the world to grieve. She was told to take all the time in the world, in fact, by just about everyone she met, even those she had barely any knowledge of, like the recycling guy who came every two weeks to pick up her empty wine bottles and stacked newspapers.
"You're so young, it's a pity. It's always a pity when it happens, it always is. Just take as long as you need, sweetheart." He was standing there in her driveway, holding her emptied bin in his gloved hand, looking at her face with a generic tenderness. After a time she thanked him.
A year later she hadn't looked for work but had instead found a boyfriend, who became a husband. He was nice. He died after their two year anniversary from a brain aneurism, a small explosion in his head that was about as big a shock as Norma could imagine. He had taken out a life insurance policy for no reason other than it was very cheap, given his age and health. And because he was nice. So, again, Norma was told to grieve, was given permission to take all the time she could possibly want and then some (the woman who ran the support group for young widows and widowers told her that: "You should take all the time you want, then take more time. Take as much time as you can get." She said it like it was a refund of sorts, and it might be taken away or run out at some point.) The amount of money she had, what with her parent's retirement money, made it reasonable for Norma to never work.
Her reasons for volunteering were mucky, or too sharp, or messy or messed-up, or wavy like heat waves coming off of hot asphalt on the horizon...that was how she described it to herself when she thought about it in the shower or buying some groceries, when she was doing her daily chores and didn't want to derail and end up staring at her middle, actually gazing at her navel. She'd done that far too many times. So she brushed off her need to examine the unexamined altruism. When she was almost asleep, though, her denied consciousness would tell her why she was doing it in pictures: there were dreams, light dreams that came on in the beginning or at the end of sleep, that were about becoming an amorphous cloud or a sheep that is stuck in briars, or being chewing gum. The chewing gum one was just funny, but the cloud and the sheep meant something about something. Norma tried not to think of losing herself, losing bits of herself to thorns or breezes, and it mostly worked. She just volunteered at more places, and that made her tired which made her forget about the whole stupid kittenish game her mind would play with her.
This went on for years. She dated, she took up ice skating and never gave it up. She had a breast cancer scare that turned out to be nothing. She donated her time and not inconsiderate soup- or cookie-making skills to homes or parties or sales. She made friends. She had many friends, most of them older than she and all but one of them was a shut-in. This was just how it worked out, there was no one to blame for her circle of pathologically shy friends unless you wanted to count the friends themselves, which she did not. Three of her housebound friends were on some charity's roster of people to visit, but the other four were not. Norma visited the four non-roster friends as if they were part of a job anyway- that way she was being fair, she felt. She always brought something of hers along to each one of them, usually part of a batch of something she'd baked- she was never empty-handed. Never.
After a while- a good long while- she became less. She was less of herself, somehow, though in the physical realm she was more (she had her own buttery fingers to blame for that if she'd thought of it. She didn't.) Despite her larger size, and despite her muscles that were strong beneath the extra padding because of her regular ice-skating, she was diminishing somehow. She was harder to get going- she had to jolly and wheedle and boss herself out of the house sometimes, as if she were her own sleep-deprived teenager. While at her job/visits, she would occasionally stare into space while her friend talked about the view outside that day or their nephew who was going to call but then didn't . She fell asleep at her oldest friend's house, sitting on the sofa and snoring delicately while her mouth hung open and her friend sat and watched her. It was a weird thing to do- both the sleeping and the staring- and when Norma woke up after about twenty minutes, she nearly broke her neck apologizing; Beth Anne did the same.
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"I'm so so so sorry-" began Norma but Beth Anne cut her off at the pass.
"No more sorry than I am, love; I shouldn't have thrown that grape in your mouth. That was so terrible, I don't know what possessed me." Beth Anne looked down while she said this: they both knew what had possessed her. She was in self-imposed isolation because she had profound impulse control issues, and couldn't trust herself to not run out into traffic or worse, such as what had just happened (in Beth Anne's mind, the grape was worse than the traffic-dashing.)
"I don't know where-" Norma began, then stopped. She was about to finish with "- I'm going" but that's not what she meant. She meant she didn't know where the bits of her were going- she hadn't explained about the bits, the wisps of self that she couldn't account for. "I don't know what's wrong with me." She thought that was close enough.
Beth Anne thought she knew- she said she'd seen it before, that it happened to people who came around. After a while they simply evaporated, she explained. It was a slow process. Beth Anne counselled Norma to lighten her schedule, to drop a few roster friends or to bake less (there was more than one reason to deny themselves some of Norma's cookies, she said, smiling ruefully at her own commendable lap.)
Norma thought that was a terrible idea. She couldn't give up the rounds: those were her friends, they were friends now, despite their original entry into her life as names on a list. She looked up different recipes to make: meringues, and muffins made with low-fat yogurt and applesauce for sugar. They were good, and Beth Anne relaxed some and her other friends didn't notice or if they did they didn't say anything, just thanked her. She was with a friend (a roster name, though no one was counting any more) when Norma felt the first scrap of her physical self fall or slough off (she could never be sure: it was a judgement call, and the difference between a falling or a sloughing was so fine she would vacillate between those descriptives when she did try to really describe it. It probably goes without saying that she only tried describing the event to herself. )
It was a fingernail. A whole one- a whole pinky nail, from her left hand. It dropped rather than drifted to the ground just outside her friend's door as she was leaving. There was no blood as there had been no banging or catching: it was just her fingernail, falling. The bed was pink and very sensitive all of a sudden, feeling the mild breeze as no regular skin could feel, but otherwise it was fine. There had been a little tug, and Norma looked down, and...fingernail. It should have been gross. Instead it was alarming, and she felt another bit of herself loosen and drift:
"Fuck a duck." Norma slipped some fingers atop her lips as if that would take it back. No one had heard her, thank goodness. Cursing- profanity, she thought of it as profanity though she didn't go to church and didn't know what generally constituted the profane- wasn't something Norma ever did. She had the vocabulary, but she didn't use it. She judged those who did as being a little weak or careless; those users of profanity in the everyday were basically children and therefore prone to impetuousness, she felt. So the vocabulary lurked, placid in her brain, never too close to the front of it. She couldn't remember the last time she had cursed, or if she ever had.
Norma picked up her fingernail and dropped it in the next bin she saw. She decided, with a patted-down firmness, that she wouldn't curse again. She got home and eventually went to bed, then got up and made something else to eat and brought it to the home of the woman who was organizing a charity sale for something, some sport-thing. A charity bake sale to raise funds for some new pool equipment, so that disabled people could get into the pool more easily...a motorized lift-seat for the pool, that was it. Norma repeated that fact to herself five times before she got to the house of the woman, but it never came up. She handed the cake over, smiling, already thinking about an alternate route home due to road closures she'd encountered on the ride over, and as the woman took her cake there was another tug. Same finger- the nail-free finger, the left pinky. A big tug, it turned out, because the woman had clasped it along with Norma's cake and when the exchange was made the finger came off of Norma's hand.
Norma looked where the tug had been, the pull or tearing or whatever it had been, and saw the stump. There was some blood- enough to cover the area, enough to convey that there had been flesh and it had been damaged- but really, it was no worse than a skinned knee. She looked at the organizer woman and felt tugging from her brain, or in her brain, right behind the forehead.
"Fucking ass hellish butt-luck, lady. Just the finger-stealing bitch time, eh?"
The organizer woman looked at Norma and looked down at the finger. "Are you all right?" she asked, with an expression that mostly said she didn't want to know the answer. She held the finger out to Norma, as if it were a tissue Norma needed just then. Norma took it gently, mortified: she'd lost her finger. She'd lost words that she didn't necessarily count among the words she knew. They had tugged off of her. Norma left without answering, which given the situation wasn't even that rude.
The week continued like that. There were pieces of Norma falling everywhere: there were more fingers, and there were the fingernails before them like white flags; there were toenails that she alone saw with horror; there were a few weird chunks of hair. Her temples were pocked with white scalp, shiny as if she'd been shaved for surgery. And the words, which were so much worse to Norma: terrible droppings of crass syllables, laden with meaning and intended to shock, she realized. The words were meant to call attention to her calamity. She couldn't abide it but she couldn't make it stop. Some of the things she'd said that other people heard (or overheard):
"Some cuntly piece of shitside work right here" when her other pinky came off, in front of a man who was taking her money for the milk she was buying.
"Balls and dicks and a pretty gash, that's some fucking horsegut" to one of her roster-friends, who was taking the cake plate from her when her first chunk of hair fell out.
"Fuckity fuckity fuckity fuck-bait with a fuck on the side" to her doctor, who managed to get her right pinky to fall into his hand just by gently holding it in a pincer grip.
This doctor sighed. There was very little to do, since there was no blood and no pain and no damage to any major body area. There was a lot of wait-and-seeing advice circling the room, and some more sighing and a rake of a hand in the rumple of hair.
"Is this shit bonafide? Are you licking my clit, that's all you fucking have to say you shitwad?" said Norma. She'd felt the tug before this came from her mouth, but along with the mortification there was a feeling of lightness. There was a springy focus in her mind after she said that. It was the best feeling she'd had in a week and a half.
"Uh." said the doctor. "Well...uh." He raked the hand through the hair again. "Sorry, I just don't know. Normally there's some sign of trauma, some regular sign like damage to the skin and there's bone and there's the tendon, just..." His volume slipped down, then off. He shrugged, then said he was ordering lots of tests- "Just lots of them" he'd said- and sent her with instructions to wait and see. He asked the receptionist to make an appointment for Norma for the following week ("So that's what you have to do to get an appointment in less than two months! Hoopty-fuckin-do!" Norma said, which, relative to the other things she'd been saying, was only mildly perturbing. "Ha ha" said the receptionist, who was looking for an obscure phone number that Norma was to call if there were anything else that she shed before the appointment.) Norma went home, with one less digit and one more piece of business card in her purse.
Norma thought at home. There were so many words, so many, and so few of them were nasty little pieces; yet those were the words that flew around her skull like CGI ghosts in a horror movie, threatening (no, promising) to gout onto her tongue so that she might spit them out at some horrible moment soon, soon. And the prospect was not bad but dire, because the thing was she wanted them out! She wanted them free, she wanted to say those words and others as if she were saying "what a delightful cheesecake, not too heavy, I must get the recipe"! She could only hope to contain the potential social mayhem by containing the agent of volatility. Norma altered her schedule- it was the only way.
She went to work first thing the next morning, calling everyone on her visitation schedule, roster or no, and telling them that she'd only be coming in every third week (it seemed like a reasonable assumption that she'd be able to hold the words in if she only needed to every third week.) She made sure she was home at 2:00 every day, and drew the curtains gently but firmly so that she could nap. She took the nap. None of it was as big a help as she needed it to be. She looked forward to seeing the doctor, since it was something to look forward to.
The day came: an appointment with a doctor, some other doctor who knew what they were doing. She wasn't told that the new doctor was more competent. Norma assumed this because it was a reasonable thing to assume: she pictured someone with a tool belt over their white jacket, holding her pinky- which was labeled and telling in it's scientist's jar- and squinting. It was the knowledgeable squint that made the fantasy seem more than what was happening. Norma felt her head was liquid inside, all of the words she had known were moving about like eels and making her giddy. She knew enough to dread what was coming, but she also couldn't help the pull of the unthinkable words that she was thinking. She smiled on her way to the office.
The doctor- or rather the Doctor- did a great deal of verbalizing herself. "We don't understand the pathology yet, Norma, but that's not because we can't understand it; it's really because we haven't identified which system we should be concentrating on yet. There's the obvious ones, like the mechanical systems of muscle, tendon, bone. There's also the CNS, and your endocrine systems, which would normally have no significance in your shedding-" and blah blah blah.
"Blah blah blah" Norma said. She beamed right after she said it, despite being very embarassed.
"It is a lot of talking I'm doing, I know. You'd be amazed how much doctoring comes down to just talking. Or not talking." The doctor was testing the reflexes in her hand. Norma looked at her bent head, knocking her knees with one of those little dopey hammers. She was a dark-haired woman and she was using one of those hammers on Norma's knee, so she said something.
"You're a fucking Kike, right? Am I right? A Kike? I'm not sure what a Kike is. I was thinking while you were talking that you could teach me about jewishness. I could pay you for your fuckin' trouble, I know the Heebs like their gold" Norma said.
There was a hush that descended, and it was so deep it seemed that the patients in the other rooms with their doctors had heard the insults and were quiet so they didn't get blamed for anything. Norma COULD NOT BELIEVE she'd just said that, yet there it was: the wide-eyed stare from the Doctor, her eyes like giant coins on her face, and the silence. The words themselves were practically visible, swishing around in lazy circles above their heads. Norma thought to giggle- it was what she wanted to do- and immediately clenched every muscle she could isolate so that she didn't. Except, holy crap, there was more-
"Anyway, you don't look like a Kike unless you're a Kraut Kike, which is funny if you think about it. It's hilarious, am I right? I'm saying that you don't look like a regular Jew, you look like one of the Jews that Hitler might have missed because your eyes are blue and you didn't go to temple much. So your name didn't appear on any lists, and you lied and gave away families that you knew from years back so that you would appear a Kraut to the captains that mattered. Like that. You look like a Nazi Jew is what I'm saying." Norma literally could not stop the words coming out of her mouth: she tried to lift her hand up to clap it against her awful traitor of a mouth. The hand, a part of her body that obeyed her every command except the implicit one that normally kept the fingers attached, wouldn't budge past her sternum. She sat there spouting hateful Nazi-centric bits with her hands fluttering around her chest, neither getting to her mouth to stop the abuse. She was giddy enough to worry that she might faint.
There was that silence again. The Doctor stared at her again, and the whole building was hushed while it waited for her response to the vitriol. She opened her mouth and said "Give me your foot." She held out her hand for it and waited. Norma didn't know what to do other than give her her heel. She put her left foot in the Doctor's hand, expecting the scalpel, expecting the scapula, exultant in her fear of what was to happen, which she was sure would involve vivisection. She expected it so hard that it became wanting it, but again, the surprises: this alleged Nazi Jew just held her foot and gently pulled on each toe in turn. Of the four that were left she got two. The doctor put her foot back down on the floor, so gently, and held Norma's toes in her own palm, playing with them, switching them back and forth like they were Ben-Wa balls. Norma felt nakeder than before even though technically she was less naked.
"Are the outbursts part of what's going on? Do you feel upset or overwhelmed when you talk?"
Norma stared at the toes in the doctor's hands going around in little circles. "What the fuckity fuck do you think, assdick? Am I the only one here who can extrapolate that shit?" Norma felt herself shift away from the whole conversation. She listened to herself insult and berate the doctor at every question and at every blank spot in the talking, and it was not pleasant but at the same time it was. It was ever so pleasant. Norma spent the remaining time listening to herself with gleeful horror and then was sent home with her toes in a small plastic bag that was just the right size, as if purpose-built for two human toes. When she got home she sat down with a cup of tea. She took a deep breath and spoke, deliberately:
"Holy fuck-damn shitty ass cunt, cuntly gash dick-ass hole runny gummed up pissing cum-mouth. Fucking fuckity shit damn fornicating curly headed cunt-hats, with some puny soft pus-filled dick-shits. Merry fucking cunt hell, with a ho ho ho and a nasty tit-job that's all fucked to hell with yours truly the most fucked of all the fucking hellish bitchy shit-stains every to fart her way through some bullshit life with not the least fucking clue about how to fuck this shit when it shitstorms around in a helatious fuck-fire and can't suck the tits off anything, not even her own stupid cunt-ass self."
Norma looked at herself in a mirror after this- she looked carefully. Nothing appeared any different. She pulled a small handful of hair, quick and hard, and it fell off into her hand. The diatribe of nasty words had done nothing- if anything she could feel them swirling around in there, more of the same, ready for someone to pull a bit of her away or just for someone else to be present. After a solid hour of this, she put the mirror down and headed to bed.
The next day she got up and brushed her teeth, then put a scarf around her head to hide the now-remarkable loss of hairline. She drove to Beth Anne's and rang the bell.
"Hiya." Beth Anne was still in her pyjamas. Norma had brought hers along, hoping for an invite. "You're not supposed to come today- you were just here the other day. Day before yesterday."
Norma smiled, and felt the words shiver in her skull. "Hey Beth-Anne, do you have a problem with cursing?" she said.
Beth Anne smiled. "Fuck no" she said. Norma smiled back. It felt like the first time she'd smiled- or rather it felt like the first time she had felt like smiling since her pinky nail had fallen floorward.
