I just wish he didn’t sit down there in front.
I tell my wife this early one Monday morning. We’re at the breakfast table. I’m making her cappuccino while she reads about Naples. The one in Italy. She moves around the boot, reading histories of the regions. She has just come inland from Sicily.
“Don’t look at him,” she says.
We’re discussing a kid who grooms himself during church service. I don’t mean the primping kind of grooming, because he wants to look nice. Looking nice is not on his agenda. This is more of a creatural thing. As soon as he sits down, he goes to work on his fingernails, scraping crud out from under them. He then raises his fingers to his face, examines the stuff, and judging it good, eats it. After nails he moves to his hair, which is curly, sandy in color, and the source of additional morsels. He digs and scratches at his scalp, scrutinizes and ingests the harvest. Whatever grows on him and is sloughed off his person is on the menu. “Lift up your hearts,” the priest says. The kid is eating himself. Next to him sit a mother, a sister or two. They seem oblivious.
I hand my wife a coffee cup. “He eats himself,” I say.
She takes a sip. “He’s a kid.”
“Still,” I say, “there’s a time and place.”
She reads for a minute and then looks up from her book. “The King of Naples was married to the sister of Marie Antoinette.”
I go to the fridge. Every morning I cut fruits and vegetables into the blender for a smoothie. My wife sometimes calls it a “frappé,” which I love. She’s never tried to make a Catholic of me, which I also love. Most days I’m more spectator than believer.
I tell her there’s a name for what the kid does.
“She was Maria Carolina of Austria.”
“Autosarcophagy,” I say. “The act of eating yourself. And he’s not little. He must be ten or twelve.”
“He’s probably bored. Doesn’t your mind wander?”
Does it ever. Generally, I admit, it wanders to pleasures of the flesh. We’re supposed to do that. Let us call to mind our sins. I require no invitation.
When I was a kid my father made deliveries at a farm north of town. It was a traditional farm—tractors, a barn, cows and pigs—except for the monkey.
The monkey was a thin, dusty thing, the size of a poodle. It lived in a repurposed dog pen. When we pulled in the driveway and stopped next to the gas tank we were there to fill, my brother and I hopped out of the truck right next to the monkey. It amused my father, I think, how excited we got about seeing a monkey. He would tell us a day or so ahead: “I’ll be at Paul Hafer’s on Thursday.” And we would prepare to see this exotic creature. It had a chain around its neck. It usually sat on the roof of the doghouse with a preoccupied look on its face. It picked at its fur with nimble fingers, finding fleas and lice, which naturally it ate.
We begged our father for a monkey. It would make a great pet, we argued.
We were told in no uncertain terms that it would never happen and that we should not under any circumstances try to touch it. Deep down, I know my father hated that monkey, its nervous eyes, its high-pitched chatter, its terrible pink behind that it repeatedly flashed at us.
Years later, my wife invoked the theory of evolution. My father saw the monkey as a distant relative. He identified with it.
This, I told her, was pure bunk.
“Saw himself,” she insisted, “in the monkey.”
“More likely he just hated the smell.”
Who knows? Maybe she was right. And maybe I see myself in the kid in church who eats himself.
And identify with him.
I am now, and have always been, a nail biter. Nail biting is an infantile oral fixation, I readily admit, like thumb-sucking. It is also reckless and daft, importing filth and bacteria into my system. I might as well lick doorknobs and suck nickels.
It is also a source of pleasure and pain.
I practice fingernail husbandry. Nails are a renewable resource, but, you know, there is a season. Left ring finger should be ready for biting in a day or two. Excellent yield from right pointer and thumb last week. What constitutes a mature, ripe, and ready nail? It’s personal. For me, it’s neither too brittle nor too soft. Timing is everything.
Also, I like a nice, clean arc, even in density and thickness across the width of the nail, tapered at the edges. I try, not always successfully, not to overbite.
The sight of ravaged nails, gnawed down to their moons, their cuticles red and ragged, is heartrending. Through husbandry and restraint, I usually manage to avoid this massacre. Eyes are the window of the soul; fingernails also tell us plenty. Salinger comes to mind, his description of the headmaster’s insecure daughter in Catcher in the Rye—“Her nails were all bitten down and bleedy-looking”—and poor, traumatized Esmé: “She placed her fingers flat on the table edge, like someone at a seance, then, almost instantly, closed her hands—her nails were bitten down to the quick.”
When I’m sitting in a meeting or stopped at an intersection and I see someone gnawing on their fingertips with that urgency, that uncontrollable driven look, I feel revolted and chastened. Don’t do that, I tell myself. Down, boy, I think, especially when the urge arises in public. Sometimes I cross over, however, to the other side. On one finger on my right hand, I have a situation. It’s the middle one, the “finger” finger. I trim it by nibble with the utmost care. But I’ve bitten it wrong too many times. I’ve bitten it for too long, too hungrily. The nail now grows to a certain length, and then it splits, and the cuticle gets tattered and erupts. It hurts. I mean it hurts. At times a crusty tissue forms on the cuticle, which my daughter and wife refer to as a fungus.
“Ugh,” my daughter says, “you got that fungus.”
It is not a fungus.
“It’s green,” my wife says. “A green fungus.”
It is not a fungus.
They take turns hectoring me about it.
“Don’t touch me with that.”
“You don’t put that in your mouth, do you?”
I won’t. I don’t.
I do.
“Jesus Christ, don’t bite your nails.” She must have said that. When God became a man, it was Mary who made him a nice boy.
If the mother of God got after him about His nails, it was good advice. Who would throw away everything and follow someone whose nails were bitten down and bleedy-looking? It would have pushed Thomas over the edge and maybe a few of the others. But would you blame Jesus for being just a little bit nervous? He had a lot on His mind.
Happy are those who are called to His supper.
When she was a kid in Italy, my wife says she often walked down the street to the convent and visited the old nuns. They ran the asilo, the preschool program. She was an alum. They also made host, mixing the dough and letting it dry in thin sheets. These sheets were then slid into a mechanism, a die they used to stamp out the perfectly round wafers that would be consecrated and served at Communion. If she was good, the nuns let her eat the leftovers. She remembers stuffing scraps of it into her mouth, handfuls of it, gorging herself on host until one of the sisters swept her back out onto the street.
I think of this gobbling one morning in church.
Row by row, front to back, in the call to Communion people process down the aisle. Heads bowed, hands folded in front of them or clasped behind their backs or idle at their sides, they wait for a little nibble of Christ, for a sip of wine, “fruit of the vine and work of human hands.”
I fall in line behind my wife.
When it’s my turn, I take the host in my hands and say “Amen.” I place the wafer in my mouth and turn to the right.
There he is, the little manimal, an alternative reminder of our source.
This morning he is slumped over the pew in front of him, resting his head on his arm. He looks full, satisfied, possibly even asleep. Back in our pew, my wife kneels, closes her eyes. It’ll be a few minutes before we can go. I sit forward in a kneelish posture, let my mind wander, and have a look around. Eventually I come back to the kid. He’s awake and seems to be about his business. When he inserts a finger into his mouth, I can guess what he’s doing. He’s had Communion. Savior is stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he’s trying to loosen it.
The same thing happens to me. It’s an odd sensation, sort of like having a pebble in your shoe. I work at it and work at it with my tongue. Sometimes it takes forever.