Why he brought her home, he said, was “for a real Jewish meal.” For weeks he had been jabbering about the new goyische cashier (“a very plain drab person,” he said, “who dresses in shmattas “) who had been pestering him—so went the story he couldn’t stop telling us—for a real Jewish meal from the day she had come to work in the Boston & Northeastern office. Finally my mother couldn’t take any more. “All right, bring her already—she needs it so bad, so I’ll give her one.” Was he caught a little by surprise? Who will ever know.
At any rate, a Jewish meal is what she got all right. I don’t think I have ever heard the word “Jewish” spoken so many times in one evening in my life, and let me tell you, I am a person who has heard the word “Jewish” spoken.
“This is your real Jewish chopped liver, Anne. Have you ever had real Jewish chopped liver before? Well, my wife makes the real thing, you can bet your life on that. Here, you eat it with a piece of bread. This is real Jewish rye bread, with seeds. That’s it, Anne, you’re doing very good, ain’t she doing good, Sophie, for her first time? That’s it, take a nice piece of real Jewish rye, now take a big fork full of the real Jewish chopped liver”—and on and on, right down to the jello—“that’s right, Anne, the jello is kosher too, sure, of course, has to be—oh no, oh no, no cream in your coffee, not after meat, ha ha, hear what Anne wanted, Alex—?”
But babble-babble all you want, Dad dear, a question has just occurred to me, twenty-five years later (not that I have a single shred of evidence, not that until this moment I have ever imagined my father capable of even the slightest infraction of domestic law . . . but since infraction seems to hold for me a certain fascination) a question has arisen in the audience: why did you bring a shikse, of all things, into our home? Because you couldn’t bear that a gentile woman should go through life without the experience of eating a dish of Jewish jello? Or because you could no longer live your own life without making Jewish confession? Without confronting your wife with your crime, so she might accuse, castigate, humiliate, punish, and thus bleed you forever of your forbidden lusts! Yes, a regular Jewish desperado, my father. I recognize the syndrome perfectly. Come, someone, anyone, find me out and condemn me—I did the most terrible thing you can think of: I took what I am not supposed to have! Chose pleasure for myself over duty to my loved ones! Please, catch me, incarcerate me, before God forbid I get away with it completely—and go out and do again something I actually like!
And did my mother oblige? Did Sophie put together the two tits and the two legs and come up with four? Me it seems to have taken two and a half decades to do such steep calculation. Oh, I must be making this up, really. My father . . . and a shikse? Can’t be. Was beyond his ken. My own father—fucked shikses? I’ll admit under duress that he fucked my mother . . . but shikses? I can no more imagine him knocking over a gas station.
But then why is she shouting at him so, what is this scene of accusation and denial, of castigation and threat and unending tears . . . what is this all about except that he has done something that is very bad and maybe even unforgivable? The scene itself is like some piece of heavy furniture that sits in my mind and will not budge—which leads me to believe that, yes, it actually did happen. My sister, I see, is hiding behind my mother: Hannah is clutching her around the middle and whimpering, while my mother’s own tears are tremendous and fall from her face all the way to the linoleum floor. Simultaneously with the tears she is screaming so loud at him that her veins stand out—and screaming at me, too, because, looking further into this thing, I find that while Hannah hides behind my mother, I take refuge behind the culprit himself.
Oh, this is pure fantasy, this is right out of the casebook, is it not? No, no, that is nobody else’s father but my own who now brings his fist down on the kitchen table and shouts back at her, “I did no such thing! That is a lie and wrong!” Only wait a minute—it’s me who is screaming “I didn’t do it!” The culprit is me! And why my mother weeps so is because my father refuses to potch my behind, which she promised would be potched, “and good,” when he found out the terrible thingI had done.
When I am bad and rotten in small ways she can manage me herself: she has, you recall—I know I recall!—only to put me in my coat and galoshes—oh, nice touch, Morn, those galoshes!—lock me out of the house ( lock me out of the house! ) and announce through the door that she is never going to let me in again, so I might as well be off and into my new life; she has only to take that simple and swift course of action to get instantaneously a confession, a self-scarification, and, if she should want it, a signed warranty that I will be one hundred percent pure and good for the rest of my life—all this if only I am allowed back inside that door, where they happen to have my bed and my clothes and the refrigerator. But when I am really wicked, so evil that she can only raise her arms to God Almighty to ask Him what she has done to deserve such a child, at such times my father is called in to mete out justice; my mother is herself too sensitive, too fine a creature, it turns out, to administer corporal punishment: “It hurts me,” I hear her explain to my Aunt Clara, “more than it hurts him. That’s the kind of person I am. I can’t do it, and that’s that.” Oh, poor Mother.
But look, what is going on here after all? Surely, Doctor, we can figure this thing out, two smart Jewish boys like ourselves . . . A terrible act has been committed, and it has been committed by either my father or me. The wrongdoer, in other words, is one of the two members of the family who owns a penis. Okay. So far so good. Now: did he fuck between those luscious legs the gentile cashier from the office, or have I eaten my sister’s chocolate pudding? You see, she didn’t want it at dinner, but apparently did want it saved so she could have it before she went to bed. Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hannah? Who looks into the fine points when he’s hungry? I’m eight years old and chocolate pudding happens to get me hot. All I have to do is see that deep chocolatey surface gleaming out at me from the refrigerator, and my life isn’t my own. Furthermore, I thought it was left over! And that’s the truth! Jesus Christ, is that what this screaming and shrying is all about, that I ate that sad sack’s chocolate pudding? Even if I did, I didn’t mean it! I thought it was something else! I swear, I swear, I didn’t mean to do it! . . . But is that me—or my father hollering out his defense before the jury? Sure, that’s him—he did it, okay, okay, Sophie, leave me alone already, I did it, but I didn’t mean it! Shit, the next thing he’ll tell her is why he should be forgiven is because he didn’t like it either. What do you mean, you didn’t mean it, schmuck—you stuck it in there, didn’t you? Then stick up for yourself now, like a man! Tell her, tell her: “That’s right, Sophie, I slipped it to the shikse, and what you think and don’t think on the subject don’t mean shit to me. Because the way it works, in case you ain’t heard, is that I am the man around here, and I call the shots!” And slug her if you have to! Deck her, Jake! Surely that’s what a goy would do, would he not? Do you think one of those big-shot deer hunters with a gun collapses in a chair when he gets caught committing the seventh and starts weeping and begging his wife to be forgiven?—forgiven for what? What after all does it consist of? You put your dick some place and moved it back and forth and stuff came out the front. So, Jake, what’s the big deal? How long did the whole thing last that you should suffer such damnation from her mouth—such guilt, such recrimination and self-loathing! Poppa, why do we have to have such guilty deference to women, you and me—when we don’t! We mustn’t! Who should run the show, Poppa, is us! “Daddy has done a terrible terrible thing,” cries my mother—or is that my imagination? Isn’t what she is saying more like, “Oh, little Alex has done a terrible thing again, Daddy—” Whatever, she lifts Hannah (of all people, Hannah!), who until that moment I had never really taken seriously as a genuine object of anybody’s love, takes her up into her arms and starts kissing her all over her sad and unloved face, saying that her little girl is the only one in the whole wide world she can really trust . . . But if I am eight, Hannah is twelve, and nobody is picking her up, I assure you, because the poor kid’s problem is that she is overweight, “and how,” my mother says. She’s not even supposed to eat chocolate pudding. Yeah, that’s why I took it! Tough shit, Hannah, it’s what the doctor ordered, not me. I can’t help it if you’re fat and “sluggish” and I’m skinny and brilliant. I can’t help it that I’m so beautiful they stop Mother when she is wheeling me in my carriage so as to get a good look at my gorgeous punim—you hear her tell that story, it’s something I myself had nothing to do with, it’s a simple fact of nature, that I was born beautiful and you were born, if not ugly, certainly not something people wanted to take special looks at. And is that my fault, too? How you were born, four whole years before I even entered the world? Apparently this is the way God wants it to be, Hannah! In the big book!