And it was all downhill from there. Lance was sure of it. Mom trying to soothe him did not help in the least.
“Sweetheart, don’t cry. I’m sorry. I lost my head, you’ll excuse the expression. But it’s all for the best.”
“It’s not for the best. I’m horny.”
“She wasn’t for you.”
“She was for me, she was for me,” he screamed.
“Not a shiksa. For you a nice, cute girl of a Semitic persuasion.”
“I hate Jewish girls. Audrey was a Jewish girl; Bernice was a Jewish girl; that awful Darlene you fixed me up with from the laundromat, she was a Jewish girl; I hated them all. We have nothing in common.”
“You just haven’t found the right girl yet.”
“I HATE JEWISH GIRLS! THEY’RE ALL LIKE YOU!”
“May God wash your mouth out with a bar of Fels-Naptha,” his mother said in reverential tones. Then there was a meaningful pause and, as though she had had an epiphany, she said, “That’s why I was sent back. To find you a nice girl, a partner to go with you on the road of life, a loving mate who also not incidentally could be a very terrific cook. That’s what I can do to make you happy, Lance, my sweetness. I can find someone to carry on for me now that I’m no longer able to provide for you, and by the way, that nafkeh left a pair of underpants in the bathroom, I’d appreciate your burning them at your earliest opportunity.”
Lance sat on the floor and hung his head, rocked back and forth and kept devising, then discarding, imaginative ways to take his own life.
The weeks that followed made World War II seem like an inept performance of Gilbert & Sullivan. Mom was everywhere. At his job. (Lance was an instructor for a driving school, a job Mom had never considered worthy of Lance’s talents. “Mom, I can’t paint or sculpt or sing; my hands are too stubby for surgery; I have no power drive and I don’t like movies very much so that eliminates my taking over 20th Century-Fox. I like being a driving teacher. I can leave the job at the office when I come home. Let be already.”) And, of course, at the job she could not “let be.” She made nothing but rude remarks to the inept men and women who were thrust into Lance’s care. And so terrified were they already, just from the idea of driving in traffic, that when Lance’s mother opened up on them, the results were horrendous:
“A driver you call this idiot? Such a driver should be driving a dirigible, the only thing she could hit would be a big ape on a building maybe.”
Into the rear of an RTD bus.
“Will you look at this person! Blind like a litvak! A refugee from the outpatient clinic of the Menninger Foundation.”
Up the sidewalk and into a front yard.
“Now I’ve seen it all! This one not only thinks she’s Jayne Mansfield with the blonde wig and the skirt up around the pupik, hopefully she’ll arouse my innocent son, but she drives backwards like a pig with the staggers.”
Through a bus stop waiting bench, through a bus stop sign, through a car wash office, through a gas station and into a Fotomat.
But she was not only on the job, she was also at the club where Lance went to dance and possibly meet some women; she was at the dinner party a friend threw to celebrate the housewarming (the friend sold the house the following week, swearing it was haunted); she was at the dry cleaner’s, the bank, the picture framers, the ballet, and inevitably in the toilet, examining Lance’s stools to make sure they were firm and hard.
And every night there were phone calls from girls. Girls who had received impossible urges to call this number. “Are you Lance Goldfein? You’re not going to believe this, but I, er, uh, now don’t think I’m crazy, but I heard this voice when I was at my kid brother’s bar mitzvah last Saturday. This voice kept telling me what a swell fellah you are, and how we’d get along so well. My name is Shirley and I’m single and…”
They appeared at his door, they came up to him at work, they stopped by on their lunch hour, they accosted him in the street, they called and called and called.
And they were all like Mom. Thick ankles, glasses, sweet beyond belief, Escoffier chefs every one of them, with tales of potato latkes as light as a dryad’s breath. And he fled them, screaming.
But no matter where he hid, they found him.
He pleaded with his mother, but she was determined to find him a nice girl.
Not a woman, a girl. A nice girl. A nice Jewish girl. If there were easier ways of going crazy, Lance Goldfein could not conceive of them. At times he was really talking to himself.
He met Joanie in the Hughes Market. They bumped carts, he stepped backward into a display of Pringles, and she helped him clean up the mess. Her sense of humor was so black it lapsed over into the ultraviolet, and he loved her pixie haircut. He asked her for coffee. She accepted, and he silently prayed Mom would not interfere.
Two weeks later, in bed, with Mom nowhere in sight, he told her he loved her, they talked for a long time about her continuing her career in advocacy journalism with a small Los Angeles weekly, and decided they should get married.
Then he felt he should tell her about Mom.
“Yes, I know,” she said, when he was finished.
“You know?”
“Yes. Your mother asked me to look you up.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“Amen,” she said.
“What?”
“Well, I met your mother and we had a nice chat. She seems like a lovely woman. A bit too possessive, perhaps, but basically she means well.”
“You met my mother…?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But… but… Joanie…”
“Don’t worry about it, honey,” she said, drawing him down to her small, but tidy, bosom. “I think we’ve seen the last of Mom. She won’t be coming back. Some do come back, some even get recorporeated, but your mother has gone to a lovely place where she won’t worry about you anymore.”
“But you’re so unlike the girls she tried to fix me up with.” And then he stopped, stunned. “Wait a minute… you met her? Then that means…”
“Yes, dear, that’s what it means. But don’t let it bother you. I’m perfectly human in every other way. And what’s best of all is I think we’ve outfoxed her.”
“We have?”
“I think so. Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I love you, too.”
“I never thought I’d fall in love with a Jewish girl my mother found for me, Joanie.”
“Uh, that’s what I mean about outfoxing her. I’m not Jewish.”
“You’re not?”
“No, I just had the right amount of soul for your mother and she assumed.”
“But, Joanie…”
“You can call me Joan.”
But he never called her the Maid of Orléans. And they lived happily ever after, in a castle not all that neat.
bummerkeh (bumå-er-keh) A female bum; generally, a “loose” lady.
“Eli Eli” (aå-lee aå-lee) Well-known Hebrew-Yiddish folk song composed in 1896 by Jacob Koppel Sandler. Title means “My God, my God.” Opens with a poignant cry of perplexity: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” from Psalm 22:2 of the Old Testament. Owes its popularity to Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt, who recorded and sang it many times as an encore during concerts in early 1900s. Al Jolson also did rather well with it. Not the kind of song Perry Como or Bruce Springsteen would record.