SNEEZES

MY MOTHER WHEN SHE SNEEZES SAYS “The bishop!” and has for as long as I’ve known her. She stifles a sneeze as much as she can, but it has a pleasant, musical tone, like the call of a bird. My father’s sneeze is impossible to represent phonetically. He delivers his with an open embouchure, head thrown back, and the tone, while not musical, is bold and triumphant. I once heard a similar sound on a National Geographic special but was out of the room, and when I got a look at the television screen that particular animal was gone and the show had moved on to another part of the jungle. When my father clears his throat, he produces a loud, sharp growl that, if you have your back to him, may make you jump and drop your knitting. When my mother clears her throat, a little balloon appears over her head containing the word “ahem.”

A person might think that these differences are based on sex—one masculine, one ladylike—but all of my mother’s family sneezes like her, including her brothers, and my father’s family sneezes like him. One of his sisters sneezes in a way that is thrilling to hear. She is a soft-spoken woman, but when she feels one coming she grabs on to a chair or a wall and makes a series of rhythmic cries, louder and louder, rising in pitch, culminating in the ecstatic crescendo, a ringing “Massachusetts!” delivered from the chest, full voice, bel sniso. Dogs jump to their feet, cats dash to safety. “Oh my, that felt good,” she says. On my mother’s side of the family, I think, they would prefer to do this in the bathroom behind a closed door, though their sneezes are pretty well repressed to begin with. They sneeze “Permission!” or “Sister!” but it’s hard to make out the word, because they are covering up and trying to be unintelligible.

I refer here not to the sneezing that comes with a bad cold or hay fever but to the occasional sneeze, the recreational sneeze that the body works up simply to loosen the flesh, adjust the spinal column, jolt the brain, send a message to the extremities. My father sneezes every morning when he wakes up, and again when he walks into bright sunlight. When he has a cold, he is as miserable as anyone else.

Over the years, my own sneezes have loosened up somewhat. In company, I try to rein them in, because I know that people’s attitudes vary—some enjoy a sneeze, and others immediately see the old hygiene-textbook picture of a man releasing a cloud of pestilence into the air—but when I’m alone I cut loose. I crouch, I spring up and make a move like an umpire calling a strike. I give voice to the sneeze. I make it as big as possible.

Not long ago, I walked out the door of my house on a clear, cold morning and was thinking pure business when, halfway across the porch, I felt that familiar pleasant wave in the chest—the magnetic field of the sneeze—and the long intake of breath and the pulsation in the head. I wound up, reared back, and delivered a sneeze worthy of Pavarotti—a six-syllable sneeze that sounded like “onomatopoeia!” On the accented syllable, I stamped my foot (wham!) on the wooden floor, and then the majestic cry (and wham!) came bouncing back to me off the house across the street. I thought, God bless you ! I said good morning to the bunch of children who wait for their schoolbus on my corner. They appeared to be awestruck. I climbed into my car and drove off, and at the corner the stoplight turned a luminous green.