It’s Like Mr. Potato Head

by Len Messineo

With hormonal therapy, robotic surgery, and gene editing techniques, we can alter a person like a tailor a suit of clothes. — Shoukhrat Milhop of the Oregon Health and Science University

“How many credits can I transfer over from my Ph.D. program?” I asked Ms. Peabody. I was at the Office of Certification at Education Central, at the behest of my principal, Mr. Scalise.

“None, Mr. Miller,” she said. “Thirty-six hours in education is the minimum requirement.” An otherwise handsome woman, Ms. Peabody had a habit of licking her pouty lips and was walleyed. “Additionally, you’ll have to student-teach for a year.”

“Does nothing I’ve done to date hasten my studies?” I’d had several years of teaching experience as a substitute teacher, and a few full-time at Rosa Parks Elementary.

“You shouldn’t be teaching at all, Mr. Miller,” she said, her voice drenched with disapprobation.

I loved teaching third grade and each year grew attached to my new students. I doted on them as if they were my fledglings. “You’re looking wan this morning, Jimmie,” I’d say. “Have you eaten breakfast?” or “Goodness, Latoya, button your coat. You’ll catch your death of cold.”

Teaching was a pleasant diversion from the hard-knuckled competition of my grad program where we doctoral candidates waddled behind our professors, like imprinted ducklings quacking the latest meme: Truth is an illusion... All literature is plagiarist... Meaning an arbitrary construct.

Doctorates were as common as votive candles at the Vatican and as difficult to obtain as sainthood. As my dissertation advisor Dr. Frees put it, “If you stalk me, you will not get your doctorate. If you do not stalk me, you will not get your doctorate.”

After the few years at Parks Elementary, the degree didn’t seem that important. I had a regular income, a job I loved. I even had a girlfriend, Amy Contretemps, a sotto-voiced wisp of a gal who, far from retiring, was a gymnast in bed. She was the kindergarten teacher and taught in the room directly across from mine.

It was Mr. Scalise, our avuncular principal, who urged me to get my teaching certificate. “I love your work, Miller. Long as I’m here, I’m going to see to the renewal of your contract,” he said. “But what happens when I retire?”

So I pleaded with Ms. Peabody at Education Central. I served up transcripts, glowing references, affidavits as to my good character. I even brought her a spray of spring flowers.

She looked at me, her one good eye adamantine and unforgiving, the other roaming the room like a radar dish.

“What if I became a presidential historian?” I pleaded. “What if I won a Nobel Prize? What if I became an exponent of a new theory of education as far-reaching as John Dewey’s?”

“You must meet the minimum certification requirements, Mr. Miller.”

“Do you know how loved I am by my students, Ms. Peabody?” I boasted. “At Parks, they call me ‘Granny Miller’.”

By now her left eye had rolled back into its socket like a lizard’s. I feared her tongue would dart out and make meal of me.

As to why I came to be called Granny Miller, I can only speculate. Perhaps my prematurely white hair, my ruddy-cheeked Irish complexion, or my habit of looking over my half-rimmed reading glasses, an impish twinkle in my eyes. Or my tendency to say “oopsy daisy” if a student so much as got a papercut. Or perhaps I was emasculated by the doctoral program. One of my favorite teachers was fond of saying, “Who we are to become is the result of our environment, which dictates to us the terms of our being.”

The fact is, my students, since I started teaching the third grade, had somehow elicited from me a grandmotherly response. So strong did this persona assert itself on those around me that by my second Christmas at Parks, my fellow teachers chipped in, bought me a rocking chair, a shawl to cover my knees. Principal Scalise presented me with a pillow embroidered with “Granny Miller on Board.”

I blushed with appreciation for their thoughtfulness and took to conducting my reading lessons — I had three different levels then — with the granny chair drawn up to the sun-dappled red oilcloth-covered table in the back of the room, the shawl on my lap, and when a chill came into the room, around my shoulders.

That I hadn’t fully realized the changes which had overtaken me was made clear when Amy, after we had dined one Saturday on my baked salmon in a garlicky wine sauce, roasted ochre in brown rice, asparagus tips, suddenly announced, “Aren’t you taking this too far?”

Her derisive tone took me aback.

“What did you do today?”

I frowned, studied her. “Why, I went to the market. Then I cleaned the house, baked.” I had just set my kiwi pie on the table. The pie was from a recipe I’d downloaded from The Pioneer Woman website. We were sipping tea and about to play a game of Hearts. “What do you mean, my sweet cumquat?” I said.

“That’s what I mean! The syrupy way you have of talking to me.”

“But I love you bunches, Amy,” I said.

“I don’t want to be loved bunches. I don’t want you to swing me between your legs or bounce me on your knees or twirl me overhead.”

“What is it, Sweetness and Light? You can tell Granny.”

She stomped a leather shod heel on the floor. “I want you to fuck me!”

Before I could speak, she charged out of my front door, slamming it so hard it dislodged my shadowbox of Willie Black Bear figurines. It was true, I had been remiss in my conjugal duties of late. But don’t we purchase stability with the decline of excitement?

I tried to knit to calm myself but my hands were aflutter, and I kept patting my hair. I had in the last few months started wearing it in a Funfetti-size bun.

I waited frantically night after night for Amy to call. I felt terribly marginalized and a sense of oppressiveness washed over me. Didn’t Amy realize that I took on this role for my students’ sake? We live in a violent age; oughtn’t teachers to dampen down the roguish male?

I began to take a good hard look at myself. In the space of two years I’d become paunchy. My hips flared and my bottom ballooned out. My breasts sagged; they waggled when I walked. I would soon need wear a bra.

I became increasingly aware that people were patronizing me. My dissertation advisor, Dr. Frees, who always scorned me, who corrected my dissertation proposal with a thick red laundry marker, became deferential, over-solicitous: “But, of course, you can have an extension on your thesis, Miller.” And, “Would you rather take this test in a place more commodious to you, Miller?” And, “Are we going too fast for you, Miller?”

Waitresses with crabbed faces and dark dispositions fussed and fawned over me and called me “dearie.” Beautiful women who a year earlier accused me of making unwanted sexual advances held the door open for me.

* * *

With Amy’s absence, I became increasingly peevish and mean-spirited. I swatted a Scout with a sash of merit badges with my umbrella for trying to help me across the street. I threatened a woman in my quilting circle with a bayonet-sized hat pin for telling me I looked like Bette Midler. I even started snapping at my kids. “Don’t be expecting me to always be wiping your sniffling noses and buckling your boots.”

“What’s wrong with me, doctor? I’m not sleeping. And when I do, I wake in the middle of the night in a pool of sweat.”

“Are you feeling fatigued lately? Diminished libido, irritability, hot flashes?”

“Yes, yes, and yes.”

After a thorough physical, he sat me down. “If I didn’t know you, Mr. Miller, given your shrunken scrotum and muscle atrophy, I’d say you were a sixty-year old woman in the grips of menopause.”

He referred me to a specialist.

“Yep,” Dr. Stine assured me, “you’re transitioning. We’re seeing a lot of this sort of thing, Men in women’s bodies. Women in men’s bodies. Nature all hinky and haywire. In just the last year, I had a decorated fireman, overstressed, wanted to have a baby in a race against his biological clock. I even had a patient who claimed she was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — the whole choir, baritones, tenors, altos. Couldn’t even carry a tune. Thankfully, we live in an enlightened age. With our new technologies, we can work miracles, activate genes, lather up hormones, knead the human body” — Dr. Stine made a rolling motion with his hands — “like modeling clay.”

Dr. Stine directed me to what I first thought a pediatric waiting room. Toys littered a maplewood table, the kind I thought intended to assuage the anxiety of waiting children: shiny plastic red and blue and green anatomical parts — arms, legs, hands, feet, noses, chins, internal organs — that could be cobbled together as if they were Legos. I looked at Dr. Stine, questioningly.

“It’s like Mr. Potato Head, Mr. Miller,” he said. “Play. Let your imagination run wild.”

My transformation under Dr. Stine’s care was nothing short of miraculous. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindrome Repeats), a new technology allowing for gene-line editing, can change an organism from the ground up. The procedure is relatively simple and noninvasive. An injection of a chromosomal tags using a bacterial carrier edits the genetic code at precise locations. The chromosomal tag modifies the set of instructions at the cellular-DNA level which controls future growth.

Additionally, I had Lasik surgery, a mastectomy to remove the fatty tissue around my breasts, a tummy-tuck for the stretch marks, and a buttock reduction. I started lifting weights, took up the martial arts, ran five miles a day before going to school. Energized by the testosterone-B12 injections, steroidal cocktails, I was like a thoroughbred released from the gate. My white wispy hair thickened, turned an unruly grey black. I had to shave twice a day. I looked like a Marvel comic superhero.

During one of my free periods, I mustered the courage to ask Amy if she’d have coffee with me at Starbucks. While we sipped our espressos, she tugged at the mat of hair on my forearms. “I’ve missed you,” she said, rubbing her stockinged foot against my calf.

Our chat turned into weekend stay-over at her place. Neither of us got much rest. My shrunken scrotum was a thing of the past. Just walking across the room, I sounded like a bell choir. I had to adopt the expedient of a wide-kneed gait, like Russell Crow in Gladiator.

I continued to be fond of my students but would no longer mollycoddle them. “It’s a dangerous world out there,” I told them. “I’m not in the business of raising sissies.” Instead of Hawaiian punch and Oreo cookies, we started each morning with a high-protein shake of whey and liver powder. I gave them a fistful of pills — lecithin, inositol, and choline — a brain tonic. Then followed push-ups, stomach crunches, and paramilitary maneuvers in the school playground. Not only were my kids winning scholastic awards, a few of them succeeded in getting spots on the middle-school lacrosse team.

But if I thought this would solve my identity crisis, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Amy was by turn sexually insatiable and uncommunicative. In my earlier identity, we used to have soulful conversations that went on late into the evening, now she’d invite me over for dinner. When I arrived, she’d be on her third glass of wine, lounging in her midnight blue negligee. I’d just barely seated myself, fork and knife in hand, she’d hurl herself upon me, licking and slurping my face. “Let’s just skip to the dessert tonight, hon,” she’d hiss in my ear.

My fellow teachers gossiped mercilessly. What’s become of Mr. Miller? He used to be so sweet. He’s like a junkyard dog.

To add to my travail, my sponsor Mr. Scalise was retiring. I was called down to Education Central, to meet up with my nemesis, Ms. Peabody. I rolled out of bed, stretched. We’d had a long holiday weekend. My hair was matted, I hadn’t shaved. Ms. Peabody had so far remained unyielding. I doubled my steroid-hormonal dose.

Ms. Peabody looked at me hard. “You’ve not taken any education credits, Mr. Miller. You will no longer be able to teach at Parks. Or anywhere else, if I can help it.”

Her unctuous superiority made my hair bristle. My jowl curled back involuntarily; a deep rumbling growl emanated deep in my throat.

“Oh, really, Mr. Miller!” she said in a taunting way.

I instantly fell on all fours, snapping, twisting back and forth as I dug my incisors into her ankle, shredding her support stockings, puncturing her flesh. It took three of her aides to pull me off.

The delicious taste of blood revenge was sweet in my mouth as I raced to the university. I pushed through the crowding students who were changing classes, charged down the hall of the English Department and into Dr. Frees’ office. I leapt on his desk, chomping into his laptop, snapping it around until chips and boards flew hither and thither. I shredded the stack of galley sheets of his latest book, chewed up and swallowed his thumb drive. During all this, Dr. Frees cowered on his books case. His corduroys were drenched, emanating from them the acrid stink of pee.

“What am I to do, Dr. Stine?”

“Not to worry, son,” he said. He explained that in my case the Cas9 cut into my genomic DNA at an inopportune site. Genetic edits, if they occur at the wrong link of the palindrome lead to untoward mutations. What was needed was a splice at the nucleotide insertion point, glue the two cuts together, and repair would occur naturally. He patted my shoulder and said, “A few injections. A little more surgery and you’ll be fine.”

My recovery was slow. I didn’t feel like myself for the longest time. During the day, I sat up on the arm of the sofa, listless, absently staring out the window. By now I had grown indifferent to Amy. I’d lost interest in teaching; Ms. Peabody was right to furlough me. It was sometime during the hottest part of summer that I developed a new love interest, the lady next door, a sleek shiny-haired redhead with enough attitude to win an Oscar. But why had I never noticed her before?

Though there was a complication; every time I saw her, some bull-legged putz with a face like a boxer was all over her. Like fleas on a dog.

During the night, feverish, I slept on the bathroom tile floor where it was cool, lapped water from the toilet bowl.

Early one night, when I was feeling more like myself, I saw them again, on the front lawn. The boxer was trying to mount her. Unthinkingly, I hurled myself through the window, darted towards him, snapping my mandible in a threatening way. I chomped my incisors deeply into his rump. He shot away, whimpering and howling. The sultry Irish Setter rolled over, exposing her soft part, her lady-like paws pedaling the sky.

I nudged her, friendly-like, on her lovely loins. She rose up, licked me. As to who or what I was, I no longer cared. The moon was waxing full. I released a plaintive howl into the cooling night air. The bitch and I scampered joyfully into the woods.