Helen McHargue: Fleshy

Helen McHargue Fiction

foodsmarts@gmail.com 1000 words

FLESHY

Claustrophobia, my old nemesis, brushed by my back as I waited in the cardiologist’s small examination room crowded with furniture and equipment used for repairing worn out and exhausted hearts. A tall medical cabinet on one side of the room loomed over my chair. Through the top glass doors, I could see stainless steel shelves holding shiny mysterious tools. The bottom of the cabinet was fitted with small drawers, each bearing a plastic label strip naming the contents and hinting at awful things ahead. “Gloves, mirrors, clamps” were waiting in the drawer at the top, the one at my eye level. I sat in the chair. A wheeled swivel stool with a black vinyl seat, the seat of authority, awaited the doctor.

The labels reminded me of Nick, the man who sold us our house, described by his wife as a picky Virgo. He owned a vintage Dymo label maker a nephew had given him for Christmas in 1967. The Dymo company would have to search far and wide for such an enthusiastic user. He identified every drawer, cupboard, and electrical outlet in the garage. Once the garage was finished, he moved into the house where he named the light switches. He’d stuck the labels directly onto the painted drywall. If we pulled them off, an ugly paint-stripped scar would remain. We left them alone and with time became nostalgic about them. Fran, Nick’s wife, must have banned him and his device from the kitchen otherwise I’d be looking at cabinets dotted with red stripes reminding me that “large spoons, small spoons, steak knives” belonged in a particular drawer. I wonder what Nick would think now about his organized garage, heaped with stuff all willy-nilly. Over the years, just as the organization system he’d left us had gone to hell, so had hundreds of his labels lost their grip. As each drawer became more jumbled, its label would curl up and unstick as if embarrassed to be proclaiming order where only confusion reigned. The dried-up red plastic strips piled up in the corners when we swept and looked like discarded cocoons.

The doctor’s assistant, a perky blond dressed in powder blue scrubs, entered the room, her ponytail a-swinging. She took my temperature and blood pressure. Chatting about the hot weather, she recorded my vitals on a clipboard. I noticed her eyes were the same color as her dreamy blue uniform, the eye color that ran through the Irish side of my family but skipped me. They were the blue eyes I wished I’d inherited.

I was visiting the cardiologist because of my eyes. When my optometrists checked my vision a month before, he commented that the rings around my eyes—he called them cholesterol rings—were increasing in size. A corona of watery, yellowish-blue stuff, circled my brown irises and gave me a vacant look. “No one’s home,” they seemed to announce when I checked my face in the magnifying mirror. Everybody in my family had the cholesterol rings. Every one of them died of a heart attack.

The assistant pushed the revolving wheeled stool aside as she left the room, taking my claustrophobia away with her. The seat did a solo pirouette, like a figure skater, and wound down just as the doctor entered. He lowered himself astride it and pushed himself from the cabinet to me. Arms crossed, he asked me a few questions, then used his foot to push himself back to the cabinet where he made notes on the clipboard. I guessed he was jotting reminders next to my name . . . “likes to travel, has a cat.” My friend who worked for a Korean veterinarian told me the vet stuck a star on the corner of the pet’s chart if the owner was troublesome or an “ashhole” as the Korean pronounced it. I hoped I wasn’t getting a poor grade. The doctor wheeled back with a muted flourish. You could tell he enjoyed the short rides. I wondered if they taught them how to use the stools in medical school. Stool Skills 101?

As he scribbled, I looked over at the examination table pushed up against the opposite wall. Menacing clamps adorned the sides; wires coiled out from beneath into black boxes covered with knobs and dials. What were those headphone things? It looked like the scene of a lobotomy. I began sweating.

“Fleshy.” I heard the cardiologist mumble as he made another note.

“What?” I asked. “Was I supposed to hear that?”

“Well,” said the doctor, doing a half-twirl toward me and looking at his clipboard. “You have . . . fat, around your middle, that I don’t like.”

“Well, I don’t like it either,” I added. “But fleshy? Is that a medical term?”

The cardiologist explained that I was turning into an apple—the worst shape and highest risk for heart attack. “Less fleshy would be better,” he said with a straight face. Whatever name you want to use, I was entering the dark side. Ahead lay a whole new set of euphemisms for my fleshy stomach roll: belly, gut, paunch, spare tire and the most naively optimistic of all, love handles.

I called my slim husband and told him I was walking home. “It’s only ten miles,” I said. He reminded me that walking one mile burned sixty-five calories and I’d use only six hundred and fifty calories for all the risks on the road. “Do you want to chance getting hit by a car for the caloric equivalent of a loaded baked potato?”  

“Hmmm . . . not something I’d want to be written on my tombstone,” I replied.

I got into the car and thought about all the lettuce I’d be eating for the next few months. I shut my eyes tightly and saw a vision of my cardiologist spinning on his stool with the blue eyed PA on his shoulders pointing Nick’s Dymo label maker at me, like a gun, clicking out red label strips….Fleshy-click, Fleshy-click, Fleshy-click.

I had my negative eating visual for the future.