She guessed that since she'd been to every other museum in Philadelphia and likes to walk for at least an hour each day, it wouldn't kill her. However, she did, for the first time since I met her, agree to let us pay for her ticket.
Three adult admissions cost us $60. I would have paid $600, but still I stared at my mother-in-law willing her to lie about her age by just one year, so we could get the senior discount. She pretended to not see me.
The Soap Lady was just inside the first gallery. Postmortem bacteria had turned the fatty tissues of her body into a wax like substance that covered and preserved her corpse. I wondered if it bothered her that she was on display for something she did not choose or probably even understand, but then I remembered that there is no consciousness after death, and that must be very comforting to the person who locks up at night.
Next was a floor to ceiling display of skulls with tags that said things like:
"Woman. 18 years old. Executed for murdering her child."
"Male child. 12 years old. Tuberculosis. Gypsy."
"Soldier. 23 years old. Killed in fight at brothel. Catholic."
"Man. 44 years old. Idiot."
It was really something.
Downstairs, we saw part of a colon that has expanded to the size of a car tire. The poor man in the photo looked miserable, but the placard told us he wasn't constipated.
The American Giant's skeleton towered over Jaime, so for a quick second, I was attracted to it. Beside him, Mary Ashberry, a dwarf, stood with the crushed skull of her infant at her feet. Doctors had tried to save them by removing the baby with forceps but both died from the traumatic birth.
There was also an average-sized skeleton in the case that no one cared about.
Jars upon jars of diseased parts and deformed fetuses lined the walls interrupted every so often by wax representations of boils, tumors and rashes.
It was all incredible, but for me, the holiest of grails was the cast made of Chang and Eng Bunker, the conjoined twins from Siam. Their liver and band of tissue that connected them at their sternums was preserved in formaldehyde underneath.
I was admiring these childhood idols of mine next to a kid and his mother.
She looked over at him and said, "This is what will happen to you if you smoke," then she made direct eye contact with me daring me to contradict her.
I thought, "You could have said that about LiTerAlLy anything else in this entire museum, and it would have been more believable."
But the kid just said, "Another person will get stuck to me? Cool." Kid's already acquainted with the ganja.
Having fully maintained our appetites somehow, we left to pick up lunch for the family.
When we got home, my sister-in-law asked me how it was. I told her it was life-affirming, but probably not everyone would agree. She still thought she should go sometime, but I told her to for sure wait until they're done having children...
...because I want to take them there.
She'll thank me later.
