And there are more memories like this one. Doctor. A lot more. This is my mother and father I’m talking about.
But-but-but- let me pull myself together—there is also this vision of him emerging from the bathroom, savagely kneading the back of his neck and sourly swallowing a belch. “All right, what is it that was so urgent you couldn’t wait till I came out to tell me?”
“Nothing,” says my mother. “It’s settled.”
He looks at me, so disappointed. I’m what he lives for, and I know it. “What did he do?”
“What he did is over and done with, God willing. You, did you move your bowels?” she asks him.
“Of course I didn’t move my bowels.”
“Jack, what is it going to be with you, with those bowels”?
They’re turning into concrete, that’s what it’s going to be.”
“Because you eat too fast.”
“I don’t eat too fast.”
“How then, slow?”
“I eat regular.”
“You eat like a pig, and somebody should tell you.”
“Oh, you got a wonderful way of expressing yourself sometimes, do you know that?”
“I’m only speaking the truth,” she says. “I stand on my feet all day in this kitchen, and you eat like there’s a fire somewhere, and this one—this one has decided that the food I cook isn’t good enough for him. He’d rather be sick and scare the living daylights out of me.”
“What did he do?”
“I don’t want to upset you,” she says. “Let’s just forget the whole thing.” But she can’t, so now she begins to cry. Look, she is probably not the happiest person in the world either. She was once a tall stringbean of a girl whom the boys called “Red” in high school. When I was nine and ten years old I had an absolute passion for her high school yearbook. For a while I kept it in the same drawer with that other volume of exotica, my stamp collection.
And that was my mother!
Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during the First World War. So I thought, at any rate, when I turned the pages of her yearbook, and she pointed out to me her dark-haired beau, who had been captain of the team, and today, to quote Sophie, “the biggest manufacturer of mustard in New York.” “And I could have married him instead of your father,” she confided in me, and more than once. I used to wonder sometimes what that would have been like for my momma and me, invariably on the occasions when my father took us to dine out at the corner delicatessen. I look around the place and think, “We would have manufactured all this mustard.” I suppose she must have had thoughts like that herself.
“He eats French fries,” she says, and sinks into a kitchen chair to Weep Her Heart Out once and for all. “He goes after school with Melvin Weiner and stuffs himself with French-fried potatoes. Jack, you tell him, I’m only his mother. Tell him what the end is going to be. Alex,” she says passionately, looking to where I am edging out of the room, “tateleh, it begins with diarrhea, but do you know how it ends? With a sensitive stomach like yours, do you know how it finally ends? Wearing a plastic bag to do your business in!”
Who in the history of the world has been least able to deal with a woman’s tears? My father. I am second. He says to me, “You heard your mother. Don’t eat French fries with Melvin Weiner after school.”
“Or ever,” she pleads.
“Or ever,” my father says.
“Or hamburgers out,” she pleads.
“Hamburgers,” she says bitterly, just as she might say Hitler, “where they can put anything in the world in that they want—and he eats them. Jack, make him promise before he gives himself a terrible tsura, and it’s too late.”
“I promise!” I scream. “I promise!” and race from the kitchen—to where? Where else.
I tear off my pants, furiously I grab that battered battering ram to freedom, my adolescent cock, even as my mother begins to call from the other side of the bathroom door. “Now this time don’t flush. Do you hear me, Alex? I have to see what’s in that bowl!”
Doctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wang was all I really had that I could call my own. You should have watched her at work during polio season! She should have gotten medals from the March of Dimes! Open your mouth. Why is your throat red? Do you have a headache you’re not telling me about? You’re not going to any baseball game, Alex, until I see you move your neck. Is your neck stiff? Then why are you moving it that way? You ate like you were nauseous, are you nauseous? Well, you ate like you were nauseous. I don’t want you drinking from the drinking fountain in that playground. If you’re thirsty wait until you’re home. Your throat is sore, isn’t it? I can tell how you’re swallowing. I think maybe what you are going to do, Mr. Joe Di Maggie, is put that glove away and lie down. I am not going to allow you to go outside in this heat and run around, not with that sore throat, I’m not. I want to take your temperature. I don’t like the sound of this throat business one bit. To be very frank, I am actually beside myself that you have been walking around all day with a sore throat and not telling your mother. Why did you keep this a secret? Alex, polio doesn’t know from baseball games. It only knows from iron lungs and crippled forever! I don’t want you running around, and that’s final. Or eating hamburgers out. Or mayonnaise. Or chopped liver. Or tuna. Not everybody is careful the way your mother is about spoilage. You’re used to a spotless house, you don’t begin to know what goes on in restaurants. Do you know why your mother when we go to the Chink’s will never sit facing the kitchen? Because I don’t want to see what goes on back there. Alex, you must wash everything, is that clear? Everything! God only knows who touched it before you did.
Look, am I exaggerating to think it’s practically miraculous that I’m ambulatory? The hysteria and the superstition! The watch—its and the be—carefuls! You mustn’t do this, you can’t do that—hold it! don’t! you’re breaking an important law! What law? Whose law? They might as well have had plates in their lips and rings through their noses and painted themselves blue for all the human sense they made! Oh, and the milchiks and flaishiks besides, all those meshuggeneh rules and regulations on top of their own private craziness! It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, “Momma, do we believe in winter?” Do you get what I’m saying? I was raised by Hottentots and Zulus! I couldn’t even contemplate drinking a glass of milk with my salami sandwich without giving serious offense to God Almighty. Imagine then what my conscience gave me for all that jerking off!