Brains
Dorothy Parker had a formidable brain. And she knew it. “Of course I talk to myself,” she once wrote, “I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.” In this month’s issue, our writers examine the organ that makes it all happen.
My Little Genius
Word Count 698
In sixth grade, I was struggling in math. My teacher, an oleaginous fellow with bulbous eyes and a balding head, asked me to stay after class one day. I watched my fellow classmates leave with a sinking heart. This was not a man with whom you wanted to be alone. Think Paul Giamatti in “The Holdovers.”
“I read your folder,” he peered at me, while perched on the edge of his desk.
I didn’t know what a “folder” was, but it seemed to hold secrets about one’s inner self that were only available to adults.
“Did you know you’re a genius?” he leaned in, a gleeful leer on his face.
This was not technically true. According to him, my IQ score was 159, which put me one point away from genius. Nevertheless, if 159 was my actual score (to this day, I don’t quite believe it), I ranked near the top .01 of the population.
The Mother of all Tumors
Word Count 2193
Seven years ago, a neurosurgeon removed a giant tumor from my head. Near the top of my head on the right and a little to the back, it was in the posterior right parietal lobe and crossed over the midline into the left hemisphere. It was benign—excellent—but it was bigger than a tennis ball (7x8x9 cm) and was making my brain swell, a lot, inside its bony confines. The tumor was so large that after the operation random neurosurgeons would drop by my hospital room to see me, as if I were a sideshow freak. “We didn’t know how you were still alive when we saw the images,” the head of the neurosurgical ICU told me.
Meningiomas grow slowly in the meninges, the three protective layers of the brain, which are about a millimeter thick and poetically named the dura mater, the arachnoid mater, and the pia mater—or the tough mother, the spider mother, and the gentle mother.
Somebody Who, Somebody Who
Word Count 1135
This story begins with my ear but ends in my brain. One night, while watching TV with my husband, I leaned far back to kiss the dogs that were asleep on the pillow behind me. When I sat up, the world was a Cubist nightmare. I screamed and clung to my husband to prevent myself from slipping further down into these crazy shards of reality. My husband, ever helpful, immediately cried, "OH MY GOD, YOU HAVE A BRAIN TUMOUR. I didn’t. I was having my first vertigo attack. Not being that well off at the time, I didn’t have health insurance, so I learned to live with my vertigo. I never turned my head to the right and always slept on my left-hand side, so now I have deep furrows on my forehead and on one side of my lips. I look like a half-faced smoker.
Highway to Hell
Word Count 618
A police radio rattled next to my bed. I rolled over, tucked the blanket under my chin, and went back to sleep. It buzzed again, this time louder. “Shooting on I-475.” Possible suicide. “Finally,” I shouted, and jumped out of bed. This is what I had been waiting for. My ticket out of Flint.
Months before, I had moved to Michigan to build my portfolio. I was a decent photographer, but to get a newspaper job, which was my goal, I had to cover more hard news--things like crime, protests, and homicide. Flint Journal interns got plenty of practice.
Dressed in full winter gear, I hobbled across the icy driveway to my Cutlas Supreme. I turned the key and prayed it would start. The motor pounded once, twice, then thawed into a whirr. Thank goodness. I needed to hurry.
BirdBrain
Word Count 782
In eleventh grade, I was a spelling bee champion. I won’t bore you with the trials I went through before the finals leading to the state competition. This was both exhilarating and terrifying. I wasn’t good at a lot, but competing in spelling bees came easily, and I was a serious reader with an extensive vocabulary. While words and letters were as natural to me as breathing, all math, including simple arithmetic, was a nightmare. The year before, I’d barely staggered through Algebra 2, which was all the high school mathematics my school required. On the other hand, I was comfortable on a stage and didn’t hesitate to stand in front of a microphone at a podium thanks to an elective I’d taken with an English and drama teacher, Carl T., who taught a speech writing class and cast me twice in prominent if minor roles in two high school plays.
Mabel, Briefly
Word Count 1191
Bumping through the countryside in a van on the way to dinner, I glance at my phone and see a text from my son, Will.
Can you talk?
The words feel urgent.
My heart jumps.
Of course. Give me a few minutes.
I step away from my friends at the family-owned winery we are visiting on a writer’s retreat on the Costa Brava in Spain. I walk down a dirt road bordered by rows of ripe tomatoes, the musky scent of tomatoes all around me. Grape vines are in the distance. A stone farmhouse is in the distance. My dress is yellow, ruched at the waist. It swirls around my calves as I walk.
Mommy! He sounds like a small boy.
The Last Day of Cadaver Lab
Word Count 1852
My job was to hold Claudia’s head firmly between my hands and not flinch while Tom worked the hand saw. He steadied the blade below her nose, clear of the thin upper lip, and got to work. It was the last day of cadaver lab, and while the rest of my team backed away, gloved hands held up in surrender, I volunteered. As the saw kept up its steady rhythm back and forth, grinding its way through the roots of her upper teeth, I began to understand why everyone else had hesitated. It wasn’t so much the sight of it, or even my complicity, it was the sound gnawing the air, making my hands vibrate, my molars ache. Bone reduced to pulp and wet dust, Tom’s right bicep bulging with effort as his left hand clutched the top of Claudia’s head to help steady her.
Masha’s Brain: A Mother’s Intuition
Word Count 984
I took my daughter, Masha, to her pediatrician when the vomiting started. “It’s the flu,” said the doctor. Five days later, the nausea and vomiting continuing every morning with no change in sight, I called the doctor again. “A flu can last 10 days,” she said.
On Day 11, I brought Masha back to the pediatrician’s office. “This is not the flu,” I told her. The doctor examined my daughter and said she wanted her to see a psychiatrist as teenage girls can often turn to certain behaviors to lose weight. My New-York-City-sophisticated daughter heard that and said “I am not making myself throw up.” My daughter is not a secretive teenager. I knew she was not bulimic. I knew in my soul that she was telling the truth.
The pediatrician stood firm in her conclusion. I told her that Masha was seeing a therapist for testing anxiety. I was sure her therapist would disagree with this assessment, so I gave the pediatrician the therapist’s phone number. We had an appointment that same day.
Such a Good Brain
Word Count 1217
The hospice nurse arrived to clock the time of death, the funeral home came and wrapped his body in a white sheath and took him out, gently, respectfully, to the van. We walked out onto the porch, my children and I, while our neighbors and friends moved towards us in slow motion like a movie set, walking up our front steps and joining us to watch him being slipped into the back of the van and then watched the van drive away to the funeral home where he would be laid on the cold steel table in a basement room where he would rest, with the shomrim – Jewish tenders who watch the body -- sitting with him, never leaving his body for a moment so that his restless soul would know when to fly, when it was time to leave this corporeal earth and be returned to the dust, the dirt we would shovel and pile on his casket, first me, then each of our children, leaving our hands and landing with a thud.
The Seizure
Word Count 1029
I’m never prepared when it happens. Your eyes roll up inside your head, then skate back and forth. Your legs tighten and release, tighten and release as your arms jerk stiff spasms. As you seize, I cradle you, your head in the bend of my left elbow; you’re small enough now that your hips and legs curl my midsection. Sometimes, you wet your pants. I say, “It’s okay, Stellebelle, Mama’s here.” Or “Come back to Mama. Come back.” Because you seem light years away, resident on some distant planet. Even as I’m talking to you, holding you, I’m watching the clock. I stretch to take the Diastat from the kitchen cabinet behind where we crouch. Any seizure that lasts more than five minutes requires Diastat. “It’s okay, Stellebelle. Mommy’s here.” I open the plastic holder, take out the rectal syringe, and the lubricant. I hold you. We wait.
The Hole in My Head
Word Count 600
Five years after surgery for a brain tumor, during my semiannual Zoom checkup, I was joined first by a young resident. This student enthusiastically put the images of my latest brain scan on the shared screen. Then we sat face to face with the full-frontal view of Pinena, my tumor named for her place of origin, the pineal gland; the pinecone-shaped endocrine gland nestled between the left and right hemispheres. It’s a place of myth, magic, and legend. Some say this third eye is an all-knowing, all-intuitive source of wisdom.
Pinena sits dead center in the deepest part of the brain. Watching her is creepy and thrilling, kind of like a mirror in a fun house.
Rapid Cycler
Word Count 1196
Over the years, he said to me more times than I can count, “You’ll never understand.” This phrase irritated the shit out of me. I was dedicated to proving him wrong, but he was right. I never understood.
I read extensively and talked to others who either experienced the same or knew/loved those who did. I peppered my therapist with questions at each session and talked with his psychiatrist the one time he let me in the room. I learned to identify symptoms and explored treatments with him. I tolerated side effects — not happening to me exactly, but near me — with the patience of any dedicated wife. He suffered; I suffered. But I could never actually be in my husband’s head, and therefore, could never truly, properly understand.