Abzug

The term “onomatopoeic” has been used by linguists to designate words and names which presumably derive from some sound heard in nature. Thus the word “drip” is “drip” because it sounds remarkably like dripping. I have no linguistic credentials; still, I can assure you that the word abzug, as applied to its best known object, is onomatopoeic of a human soul.

Say it softly under your breath, abzug, abzug. Bella wallows out of the sound, her mammoth, sluggish hips ridiculing a body’s natural ball and socket litheness. Abzug, abzug: the strange, hooded, leering, Mongoloid eyes. Abzug: the too many teeth, which are certainly all there, yet seem gapped, now above, now below. Abzug: the demagogue’s rhetoric, husked out in a voice which cannot be categorized by sex, gross and shameless as the thing itself. This grossness is a tool, used as Belle Barth used grossness. To shock. After all, what you can’t cosmetize must be made a virtue. For the reasons, I refer you to John Murray Cuddihy’s The Ordeal of Civility—an ordeal that Bella Abzug was never even invited to.