Choke

Chapter 22

DR. PAIGE MARSHALL STRETCHES A STRING of something white tight between her two gloved hands. She stands over a deflated old woman in a recliner chair, and Dr. Marshall says, "Mrs. Wintower? I need you to open your mouth as wide as you can."

Latex gloves, the yellow way they make your hands look, this is just how cadaver skin looks. The medical cadavers from first-year anatomy with their shaved heads and pubic hair. The little stubble of the hairs. The skin could be chicken skin, cheap stewing chicken, turning yellow and dimpled with follicles. Feathers or hair, it's all just keratin. The muscles of the human thigh look the same as dark-meat turkey. During first-year anatomy, you can't look at chicken or turkey and not be eating a cadaver.

The old woman tilts her head back to show her teeth wedged in their brown curve. Her tongue coated white. Her eyes are closed. This is how all these old women look at Communion, at Catholic Mass, when you're an altar boy and have to follow along with the priest as he puts the wafer on tongue after old tongue. The church says you can receive the Host into your hand, then feed yourself, but not these old ladies. In church, you'll still look down the Communion rail and see two hundred open mouths, two hundred old ladies stretching their tongues toward salvation.

Paige Marshall leans in and forces the white string between the old woman's teeth. She pulls, and when the string twangs out from the mouth, some soft gray bits flick out. She runs the string between two more teeth, and the string comes out red.

For bleeding gums, see also: Oral cancers.

See also: Necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis.

The only good part about being an altar boy is you get to hold the paten under the chin of each person receiving Communion. This is a gold platter on a stick you use to catch the Host if it falls. Even if a Host hits the floor, you still have to eat it. At this point it's consecrated. It's become the body of Christ. The flesh incarnate.

I watch from behind while Paige Marshall puts the bloody string back into the old woman's mouth again and again. Gray and white bits of smear collect on the front of Paige's lab coat. Little specks of pink.

A nurse leans in the doorway and says, "Everybody okay in here?" To the old woman in the chair, she says, "Paige isn't hurting you, is she?"

The woman gargles an answer.

The nurse says, "What was that?"

The old woman swallows and says, "Dr. Marshall is very gentle. She's more gentle than when you do my teeth."

"Almost done," Dr. Marshall says. "You are being so good, Mrs. Wintower."

And the nurse shrugs and leaves.

The good part of being an altar boy is when you hit somebody in the throat with the paten. People on their knees with their hands clasped in prayer, the little gaggy face they make right at the moment they are being so divine. I loved that.

As the priest puts the host on their tongue, he'll say, "Body of Christ."

And the person kneeling for Communion will say, "Amen."

What's best is to hit their throat so the "Amen" comes out as a ga-ga baby sound. Or they make a duck quack. Or chicken cluck. Still, you had to do this by accident. And you had to not laugh.

"All done," Dr. Marshall says. She straightens up, and when she goes to toss the bloody string in the trash she sees me.

"I didn't want to interrupt," I say.

She's helping the old woman out of the recliner and says, "Mrs. Wintower? Can you send Mrs. Tsunimitsu in to see me?"

Mrs. Wintower nods. Through her cheeks, you can see her tongue stretching around inside her mouth, feeling her teeth, sucking her lips into a tight pucker. Before she steps out into the hallway, she looks at me and says, "Howard, I've forgiven you for cheating on me. You don't have to keep coming around."

"Remember to send in Mrs. Tsunimitsu," says Dr. Marshall.

And I say, "So?"

And Paige Marshall says, "So I have to do dental hygiene all day. What do you need?"

I need to know what it says in my Mom's diary.

"Oh, that," she says. She's snapping off her latex gloves and stuffing them into a hazardous-waste canister. "The only thing that diary proves is your mother was delusional since before you were born."

Delusional how?

Paige Marshall looks at a clock on the wall. She waves at the chair, the vinyl leather- look recliner Mrs. Wintower just left, and says, "Take a seat." She's stretching on a new pair of latex gloves.

She wants to floss my teeth?

"It will help with your breath," she says. She spools out a length of dental floss, and says, "Sit, and I'll tell you what's in the diary."

So I sit, and my weight pushes a cloud of bad stink out of the recliner.

"That wasn't me," I say. "That smell, I mean. I didn't do that."

And Paige Marshall says, "Before you were born, your mother spent some time in Italy, right?"

"So that's the big secret?" I say.

And Paige says, "What?"

That I'm Italian?

"No," Paige says. She leans into my mouth. "But your mother is Catholic, isn't she?"

The string hurts as she snaps it between a couple teeth.

"Please be joking," I say. Around her fingers, I say, "I'm not Italian and Catholic! This is too much to bear."

I tell her I already know all this.

And Paige says, "Shut up." She leans back.

"So who's my father?" I say.

She leans into my mouth, and the string snaps between two back teeth. The taste of blood pools around the base of my tongue. She's squinting her attention deep into me, and says, "Well, if you believe in the Holy Trinity, you're your own father."

I'm my own father?

Paige says, "My point is that your mother's dementia appears to go back to before you were born. According to what's written in her diary, she's been deluded since at least her late thirties."

She twangs the string out and bits of mouth food flick onto her coat.

And I ask, what does she mean the Holy Trinity?

"You know," Paige says. "The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. Three in one. Saint Patrick and the shamrock." She says, "Could you open a little wider?"

So just frigging tell me, flat out, I ask her, what does my mom's diary say about me?

She looks at the bloody string just yanked out of my mouth, and she looks down at my bits of blood and food flicked onto her lab coat and says, "It's a fairly common delusion among mothers." She leans in with the string and loops it around another tooth.

Bits of stuff, half-digested stuff I didn't know was there, it's all breaking loose and coming out. With her pulling my head around by the floss, I could be a horse in harness at Colonial Dunsboro.

"Your poor mother," Paige Marshall says, looking through the blood flecked on her eyeglass lenses, "she's so delusional she truly believes you're the second coming of Christ."