Body Language
by Anne Panning
My Grandma Lucille wrapped a dishtowel around me, stood me on a chair, and set me to work rolling out pie dough. I was bad at it— five, six years old—but the soft velvety flour on my hands, the solid wood rolling pin, planted me safe and sure, and from behind, she’d hug me and call me her “little peanut.” She smelled like butter.
***
There’s a little hammer that lives above my left eye. It doesn’t tap but whispers its force that will hit me hard later. To say “migraine” is to risk its wrath. Let’s call it a sinus headache. Let’s call it an implosion of grief over the loss of my parents so young, so quickly, one after the other like dominoes. Sometimes lavender blooms in my peripheral vision like wet soggy lilacs and I must emergency lie down.
***
For so many years, I tried not to get pregnant, and then, later, I tried so hard to get pregnant. We listened to Van Morrison with the windows open in winter, me upside down, my feet tipped up against the wall, trying to make someone.
***
No one told me that nursing two babies could shrink my right breast down to a droopy 34C. Or swell the left breast to a rotund 34DD. My bras are now a lace-netted mismatch: one low-hanging pear next to a globular cantaloupe, pressing for all they’re worth against underwire.
***
My sister, Amy, and I like to watch bot fly removals on youtube—the squirming bloody ooze to freedom, the wet gaping hole after tweezer extraction. My favorite show is Monsters Inside Me; once a boy fell on the beach, skinned his knee on coral and a seashell grew inside him. Amy and I text when one of us coughs up the rare tonsil stone; we try to describe the smell to each other when we pinch the tiny white nodule between our fingers—like an armpit, a cave, a sharp yeasty bit of cauliflower.
***
I like shoulders. They sit like a solid metal clothesline above my stomach and protect me.
***
To cure her incontinence, my mother had a same-day bladder sling surgery. The doctor said, “We’ll put your bladder up nice and high in a hammock.” I always imagined the hammock rainbow striped, festive and beachy. The hammock failed; its netting disintegrated in shreds that floated throughout her body like rotting flotsam. When the doctor went back in to repair the damage, he couldn’t. “It’s like trying to find a needle in a pound of hamburger.”
***
There is my missing fingertip, now reattached. In cold winter’s soak, it throbs, but taps soft cotton numb on the table.
***
When I was twenty-six, my doctor found a precancerous growth on my cervix. When I told him I was on my way to teach English in China, he said, “Oh! We’ll just do a little cervical conization and you’ll be on your way! You see, it’s just the middle of your cervix, which looks just like the middle of a bagel. We’ll just cut the center out. It’s like removing a Hershey’s kiss.”
***
When my father died, I inherited his barber chair. One day while attempting to clean and buff the leather seat, I found that it pulled right up and out. And below, matted and mixed: years’ worth of old men’s hair, salt, peppered and packed so hard I could peel it off in strips. The smell was soybeans & sweat, old age & Brylcreem, patience & pig manure. I found I couldn’t throw it away; I’d be tossing out history, DNA, my father’s life on earth. Instead, I stuffed it all in a clear plastic bag and tied it off with a knot. Someday, maybe, I’ll make a pillow.
***
Inside the migraine lives grief, dark and purple like a bruise. My Grandma Lucille got “sick headaches” all her life; my mother did, too. I wasn’t struck until age forty when my mother went into hemorrhagic shock during a simple same-day surgery and died—after which my father went grief-crazy and died. Who next? What now? The headaches punctured my brain; the pain went viral and corkscrew deep. “The body is not a machine,” the neurologist said to me one cold November day. “Your orphanhood has injured you deeply. Your headaches are the body’s reaction to your broken heart. Your heart needs healing.”
He placed his hands on the top of my head for the briefest moment.
Anne Panning has published a novel, Butter, as well as the short story collections The Price of Eggs and Super America, which won The Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She has published short work in places such as Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The Florida Review, Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kalliope, Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, The Laurel Review, Five Points, River Teeth, Cimarron Review, West Branch, and Brevity. Her memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Family and Loss, is forthcoming from Stilllhouse Press in 2018. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.