cosmiComedy
by lavinia plonka

GNOME CHROMOSOMES

Last year, my husband Ron decided that my tomato staking efforts were inadequate. We hadn’t realized that in North Carolina, tomato plants grow 8 feet tall, their branches greedily reaching out like Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors to envelope you as you desperately try to find the cucumbers underneath. The resulting sprawling chaos, and the wild network of desperate strings I used to support the branches, crisscrossing like a lunatic’s labyrinth, offended his artistic sensibility.

So after I set out the plants, Ron pounded in a rectangle of stakes, gorgeously networked with tough nylon string.

Of course, the stakes were only six feet high; the plants grew into creatures from a Harry Potter film and soon Ron’s elegant construction had become another tangled maze of insane threads.

This spring the stakes needed to come out – after all, one must rotate the tomato crop. I didn’t want to disturb the artist husband, locked in his garret, staring at his computer. I pulled.

Nothing. I pushed the stakes – left, right, forward, back.

Nothing. He had used his Y chromosome to drive these stakes into the mantle of the earth. I idly wondered if perhaps this was the cause of last year’s earthquake. I thought of the mysterious beasts that dwell within the earth in a parallel universe: the gnomes, trolls and slithering fantasies our collective consciousness has created.

I envisioned a desperate little gnome below. When our stakes had suddenly appeared in his universe last spring, he had happily used them as pillars for his subterranean porch. (Being a Southern gnome, his porch was indeed expansive). I pictured him below me now, clutching his precious stake as it rocked, swayed and tried to heave itself out of his world.

When the gnome won, I stormed inside. This is the part I hate. I love being a woman – being able to express my emotions, dying my hair an impossible red, wearing purple shoes–yes, I enjoy being a girl.

But when it’s clear to me that I just lack the strength for the job, I rail at the gods. Why couldn’t I have been an Amazon? Or at least a few inches taller? A self-proclaimed guru once told me my problem lay in the fact that I was half man/half woman. I nearly decked him, but instead, I burst into tears. We are told that the only thing that differentiates the male and female is the Y chromosome. The Y is just an X with a piece knocked off of it. Or one could say the X is a Y with an extra limb. This Y chromosome comprises just .38% (that’s POINT 38!) of the DNA molecule that sits in the nucleus of the cell. The entire history of the planet revolves around this difference. Maybe that’s why men are always trying to get “in touch with their female side” and why like Lesley Gore, I “sometimes wish I were a boy.”

Ron sighed as I ranted, and turned the page in the copy of Art News he was reading. It was the February issue, even though this was April. The March and April issues were also on the table.

Periodically, I sneak into his reading places – his night table, his bathroom, the dining room table, the coffee table, and scoop up the piles of Smithsonians, MacWorlds, and Territory Ahead catalogs and transfer them to the recycling bin.
He rarely notices either their absence or the sudden appearance of the dining room table. Ron’s totem animal must be some burrowing creature, the kind that lines his cave with flotsam from the outside world: newspapers, bits of string, old rags providing comfort and décor.

Perhaps the gnome on his cavern porch is right now reading a back issue of Artesian News, his porch a chaos of glittery stones he’s picked up while Mrs. Gnome is bitching in the kitchen about how he never goes up top anymore.
Unable to bear my whining anymore, Ron saunters outside. Less than five minutes later, he’s back. “OK, stakes are out.” I am stunned.

I had struggled for a half hour to no avail. “Ah, “ I say, “That’s what men are for.”

The hurt expression quickly disappears as he retorts, “You just didn’t do it right.” He then proceeds to lecture me on the physics of stake removal.

I of course know better. Just like all the jars he opens easily after I have mightily strained – I prepared the way. The gnome below, who had held on tightly as I pulled, wrapping his legs around the stake, had given up. I see him now, sitting on his ruined porch.

His wife has her arms folded in disgust. “I told you not to trust those poles,” she is saying. She continues nagging and lecturing.

Mr. Gnome sits quietly because he has learned that she will eventually run out of steam. All men know that that little extra piece of chromosome causes excess verbiage.

Recently a nebula was discovered near the center of the Milky Way that happens to look exactly like a DNA molecule: double helix and everything. Scientists are of course trying to explain its shape as the result of the gravitational pull of the black hole nearby. I’m thinking that it’s more evidence that the universe is one giant organism and the Milky Way is just a cell. I can’t wait till those scientists go deeper so that we can learn whether the Milky Way’s DNA contains an X or a Y chromosome. And whether the universe is piling magazines or nagging.

When not trying to get in touch with her male side, or communicating with her better half, Lavinia teaches The Feldenkrais Method®, an elegant movement system that helps you get in touch with your whole self, at the Asheville Movement Center. [ laviniaplonka.com ]