Body Parts

I am 28 weeks and 4 days pregnant, and I have gotten used to stray body parts kicking me under the ribs or goosing me below my belly button. The best are Baby's hiccups, which feel like mice making a trampoline of my pelvic floor.

But this morning as I squatted to stretch my (increasing) snug pants, I felt a small bulge in my pocket. I reached in and found an errant esophagus. I left the rubbery lint-covered thing on the dresser for Duncan. Later as I rinsed the breakfast dishes I found a diaphragm in the sink (the kind that gives Baby hiccups, not the kind that will prevent his having more siblings). I rinsed it too, and left it on the counter. Yesterday I pulled a liver out of the dryer. It's hard to keep the parts together.

In fact, the whole body was missing for months. Its four-year old owner unfairly took the blame, when in fact it was another casualty of his mother's clean-up mania. Last week when she suffered another bout, leading to the total disgorgement of all children's books from the living room shelf, what did she find neatly tucked in a ziplock bag? The entire human body, brain and all. Mother and son shared a roar of excitement.

I don't remember when Duncan's obsession with the human body began, but it seems we visited the box at Barnes and Noble on a weekly basis last winter, reaching in through a small hole in the plastic case to feel the delightfully squishy intestines. Duncan must not have been the only child to discover this loophole in the product's marketing scheme: Eventually enough fingers had reached in to dislodge the intestines all together, possibly even rupture the spleen, and the stomach and liver were knocking around under the skeletal feet. Sometime in March Barnes and Noble wisely moved the boxes to a shelf requiring an adult, and in my case and adult + step-ladder, to reach.

Duncan saved his money for months, calculating and re-calculating his progress toward thirty dollars. The ultimate test of character came in May when his best friend Gabriel asked for the same human body for his birthday. Could we endure giving the human body away before we ourselves had one? In his usual way, Duncan got his head around it. Not only was it a good thing to make his friend happy on his special day, but the gift would give Duncan a sneak preview feel of the other parts that couldn't be reached through the little plastic hole.

But still he yearned. When the month of June brought Biblical floods to New York and took Jordy away on a protracted business trip, I decided an outing was in desperate need. Years ago when I was a graduate student in L.A., I had tried to see the "Bodies" exhibit, but it was such a hot ticket that the only admission I could ever reserve was for 2 a.m. Interested as I was to see actual human bodies chemically preserved in active poses (tennis anyone?), I didn't need to spend the night with them. But years later here was the Human Body right at the South Street Seaport, with a 4:30pm reservation available today! Better yet, we could ride the Ikea water taxi from Brooklyn, albeit through the choppy waters of the endless rain storm, satisfying Reeve's love of boats and Duncan's obsession with the body in one ingeniously designed field trip. Good thinking, Momma!

By the time we reached Manhattan's shores (all of ten minutes), I wanted to vomit with sea sickness. We were met by sheets of rain, cold vindictive rain like you'd expect in March not June. Our umbrella flipped instantly inside out. Reeve's violent aversion to wet feet necessitated an emergency stop in the restroom to blow-dry both his Crocs and his feet before we could proceed.

At last we made it to the dramatically darkened exhibit hall, a muscular dead man greeting us with eyeballs and teeth bared in an aggressive smile or else a warning. The living man who took our tickets informed me that strollers were not permitted. "Really?" I pleaded. "Sorry, ma'am. They can bump into the bodies." My heart sank (all the way past my gall bladder). I lifted Reeve (aka "the Rocket"), who could not have been happier to be liberated, and checked the stroller. In we went.

Duncan was immediately comfortable with human remains kicking soccer balls, conducting orchestras, drinking tea, arm wrestling. He wanted to touch -- who wouldn't? There wasn't even a plastic box blocking little fingers from these guys. But he got his head around the rules and held back. He looked but didn't linger, wandering off to the next room to see the circulatory system suspended in red and blue, then the nervous system. Duncan's main interest was, "Who were they?" And, "Why do they all have penises?" In Reeve's two-year old eyes, these dead people must have looked more like playmates. He charged each new body with full speed glee, while I ran interception before a playful punch destroyed a multi-million dollar specimen. (Are strollers really the greater menace?) Reeve screamed and arched his back when I lifted him, drawing disapproving looks from other visitors. It was then that I realized how utterly silent the place was, apart from me and my two rowdy tots. Did this exhibit demand the reverence of a wake? I'd treated it more like a med school lab. I realized I should have been having deep thoughts about ashes to ashes and the wonder of it all, but at that moment I was just trying to get through without a corpse casualty on my hands.

The last room focused on fetal development, which we braved despite the "WARNING: RELIGIOUS OR PERSONAL BELIEFS MAY BE OFFENDED BY THE FOLLOWING EXHIBIT." At last we found a body without a penis. The woman had been pregnant when she died, giving rise to many disturbing questions. Other fetuses on display had died from genetic or developmental anomalies. I was suddenly arrested by thoughts of the baby we lost before Duncan. His renal system hadn't develop properly. At sixteen weeks an ultrasound revealed that he wasn't passing the amniotic fluid he was ingesting; as a consequence, he had developed a cyst that obstructed the rest of his organs from developing. Here I was at sixteen weeks again.

There is a morning prayer in Hebrew that thanks G-d for our organs, with a part about the proper functioning of the sphincters in particular. I wished I had learned it by heart.

The next day, Duncan and I counted his money again. He was still a few bucks short of the thirty dollar price tag, but we agreed that he deserved a one-off bonus for outstanding behavior on the Bodies field trip. At Barnes and Noble, I scaled the step-ladder and pulled down a pristine Human Body box. He clutched it as if holding a dear friend.

For a week or so, we kept a tight inventory on the organs but eventually gave up. The parts drifted around until we thought they'd wandered off to the magical land where so many Thomas trains and Lego pieces end up. Hence our extreme delight at discovering the organs, together again, in a ziplock bag. (Intelligent design? If so, this creator has no recollection her work.) The body parts are enjoying a reprise as Favorite Toy, enshrined in elaborate MagnaTile temples and traveling to school in little boys' pockets. The musculature of the arm engaged in mortal combat with the femur yesterday morning over Mini-Wheats. A fragment of the small intestine is currently enjoying a ride in the backseat of a Matchbox car.

And a heel or knee just got me good in my right flank.