First Day in the Gross Laboratory by Dorothy Grunes, MSI              25 August, 1993            Today was the day, They’ve called it, along with Organic Chemistry 202, the medical “rite of passage”, but somehow I don’t feel as if I’m in Catcher in the Rye, watching my young sister reaching for the golden ring of the merry- go-round in the park.              My favorite aunt wanted to donate her body to Chicago Medical School, where her husband was a professor.  The story she tells is that they turned her down.  Too pathological they explained.              We were talking, me and Zola, (our busty and sensitive anatomist), about stuff, this and that. Like a cannibal victim, Kurt Vonnagut writes, the listener of a story must be fresh. I guess I was telling her about my terrifying experience this morning with my Hepatitis B shot. I had already told the cats and had begun to run out of audience. My conversation was stunted as it usually is early in the morning, since I’ve given up coffee, and I forgot my lab jacket and I couldn’t remember the combination to my locker and then I couldn’t remember where my locker was and everybody showed up with their little well fitting jackets and their little pens and their little notebooks, you know, the cute ones with the leather covers, and I’m sitting there la la la notebookless, penless, jacketless and tripping over all my words.              She just opens the door, and – There are those white bags, maybe 15 of them – On these steel tables – And the bags are shaped like bags mostly, except they taper in towards the feet. Feet.  You know. Those things you walk around on.  Not tentacles, not fins, not even paws.  The descriptive word reminds one of human anatomy because I’m twenty-two. I’m a little hung over and I’m standing in the medical school anatomy lab.  Then I was sweating and I guess someone pushed a chair under me. I was rolled towards a table and our tour of the liver and the spleen continued. There were these white bags, and they had these zippers and one wasn’t quite zipped up to the top.  She explained, there are two places where we get the bodies from. The first she said, was Chicago.  Chicago? That is enough of an answer to folks in Carbondale. Chicago must be a giant vat of dead bodies. It seemed that way to me all of a sudden. This body, she continued, is from Chicago. That’s why it has an extra bag.  She explained that the reason why the body was bound with rope is because they are in a huge swimming pool and when you want a body you fish it out and this way their arms don’t get tangled up and legs and other peoples arms and other peoples legs.  This way its easier to fish them out.              I dream I am suspicious.              The other place they get the bodies is from the mortuary, or rather the mortuary training school. She points out some stuff about preservation and I look, just for a second, and I see the hand of a very old woman, it has liver spots, it is relaxed as the binding of the arms in front of her body gives the illusion that she is patiently waiting, with her hands gently folded in her lap.  Waiting? Waiting for the bus, waiting for the waitress to refill her ice tea with lemon on the side.  Waiting for her husband to come home form work.  Waiting for the telephone to ring.  Now I think I might faint.  I kick some girl off the stool.  I am the old woman waiting on the bus.  Aren’t you going to let me sit down.              Her head is shaved.              Zola said you can see if older adults were mistreated in life by their feet. Zola explains that the remains, after we finish, are going to be cremated and returned to the families. That’s nice, I think to myself.  Some comfort.  This is not dehumanizing.  If they want them, Zola adds, I ask if I can get some air. Everyone stares at me. As I try to stand the corner of my eye catches the red painted trash can.  Body Parts Only.              Before I leave Zola is explaining that this is the body of a woman, even though her head is shaved, Zola says, she still has pubic hair.  The fat in her thigh is falling out where an incision had been made.              The bodies are a dark colorless, darker than tan, but the same idea. Everything is the same colorless I later find out. The insides are as colorless as the outside.  Except for the lips.  Or the toes.              Zola explains that some of the bodies have nail polish on, and toenail polish. I can no longer see at this point as I am backing towards the door.  She explains about some of the techniques the funeral home uses to make the bodies seem more life like.  They might be painted up in which case their brains are still intact.  At a later time we’ll drill two holes in their heads and insert either two pencils of golf tees. If we have a mortuary student’s body. There is some significance to this ritualistic action. It has, it seems, escaped me.              Zola explains that she has two dissections which she keeps emerged in wintergreen flavored formaldahypesque stuff(but less carcinogenic) and there are locks on these two tanks.  One is the remains of a woman, and one, the remains of a man.  Adam and Eve, I think, stuck in the emergence tanks, padlocked in to keep overzealous med students from cutting them up anymore. Separate and absolutely inorganic, unable able to eat from the tree of knowl- edge, and unable to exit Eden “Hand in hand with providence their guide, with wandering step make their solitary way” or whatever Milton’s daughter tran- scribed.  Adam and Eve can’t bring forth a world.  It is stilted as my conversation. From their flesh does not come a multitude of life. Something isn’t quite right but I cannot put my finger on it.              She takes out Adam.  I can look at him.  He seems artificial. It strikes me that Zola might be a little unbalanced.  You want to see liver?  Here’s a liver.  She holds it up.  I think she is about to throw it at someone in a friendly game of catch. You see, she says, over the years if a student does a particularly nice dissection I like to save it.  So there are a bunch of pieces in here.  Don’t be alarmed.  Getting my sea legs I peer into Adam’s casket. His nose and mouth exist, however his neck looks as if it has been replaced by wires. Worm colored tubes.  I see an extra face, gentle.  Eyeless like the blind stare of a Greek statue, gently sleeping where the knees would have been. Is this the fate of Venus deMilo?