by Barry Rachin
Hummus
by
Barry Rachin
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Published by:
Hummus
Copyright © 2011 by Barry Rachin
This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Hummus
“Naomi Shamir is on the phone.” Sonny Gossage’s mother was standing on the second floor landing just outside her son’s closed bedroom door. “She wants to speak to you.”
Sonny was thumbing through a back issue of National Geographic, ogling pictures of an annual West African fertility ritual. In an open field, teenage virgins were parading in front of the tribal leader. Decked out in leopard skin robes, the grizzled ruler sat on a rickety, straight-backed chair. The debilitated king, who appeared to be in his eighties, smiled regally as over a hundred bare-chested woman passed in review. The girls wore necklaces of gold, silver, ivory and shells at their throat and sported similar finery on their wrists and ankles. Everyone, especially the geriatric ruler, seemed to be having a splendid time.
“Don’t know anybody by that name,” the boy replied as he scanned the column of dark-skinned beauties waiting to present their physical assets.
“The Israeli woman whose husband ran off last summer,” Mrs. Gossage clarified. “She lives with her daughter in that fancy schmancy, split-level house with the green shutters.
Sonny felt his heart begin to race out of control. Throwing the magazine aside, he rose from the bed and made his way to the telephone. “Hello?” There was a brief pause. “Yes, that was my flyer.” After a moment, Sonny hung up the phone and grinned self-consciously. “She wants me to mow her lawn twice a month.”
A week ago Tuesday, Sonny hoofed it up and down the neighborhood stuffing mailboxes with flyers.
Lawn care and landscape services.
Reasonable rates!
Call 508-226-5987 Free estimates.
Sonny had no idea what he meant by ‘landscape services’. He was using his father’s beat-up mower and a Black and Decker electric weed whacker with a hundred-foot extension cord. “Now I got thirteen accounts, including the Jewish lady.”
*****
Mrs. Shamir was a dark-skinned Sabra, native born Israeli, who moved into a spacious ranch house at the far end of Baxter Street when Sonny was still in elementary school. A year later the husband disappeared, flew the coop. It was rumored he deserted his wife and returned to Israel. Naomi was an ophthalmologist who did eye exams at the Vision World up the road in Wrentham. Sometimes she wore a short, white jacket like a medical doctor. The woman had a daughter in first grade, drove a beige BMW and grew her own vegetables in the back yard. Just the other day, Sonny saw her returning from work in the late afternoon her lush, dark hair pulled back in a tight bun.
Saturday morning a pickup truck dumped a load of smelly manure by the side of the house. Later that afternoon, Sonny watched from his upstairs window with binoculars as Mrs. Shamir, dressed in cut-off dungarees and a flimsy halter, made multiple trips with a fire-engine red wheelbarrow, lugging the smelly cow-poop to the back yard where she raked the brown gold out over her newly seeded vegetable garden. Observing the voluptuous, brown-skinned woman wield a short-handle spade was even more arousing than viewing glossy pictures of West African natives parading in front of their king naked from the waist up.
Timing was everything.
Sonny trimmed three other lawns and pruned a fifty-foot hedge over the first half of the following week. Then it rained, a spitting drizzle, straight through until Saturday morning when the sun emerged and temperatures soared into the high eighties. The boy dragged the Toro twenty-one inch, mulching mower over to the Shamir home at ten o’clock in the morning. Naomi was already out in the rear puttering in her garden. Her dark-haired daughter was pushing herself on the swing.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Naomi stood up and brushed the dirt from her hands. A six-pointed star dangled from a silver chain, her jet black hair knotted in a pony tail. Sonny could smell the pungent dung, but it was pleasant. A noisy band of crows flitted back and forth among the Scotch pines that bordered the property. “Why don’t you start in the front?”
The girl said something to her mother in a gruff, guttural language and the mother responded in kind. “This is Ruth.” She pronounced the word as though there was no ‘h’. The girl, who shared the mother’s olive skin tones and hooked nose, wasn’t nearly as pretty.
Near a clump of lilacs, the woman had planted a profusion of tulips and assorted wild flowers. Taking care not to damage any of the blossoms, Sonny mowed the front lawn then both sides. Where the stringy weeds had grown right up to the foundation he ran the weed whacker, paring the unruly mess away to nothing. The temperature climbed steadily throughout the morning into the low nineties, and Sonny would have preferred to peel his T-shirt off but felt self-conscious. By the time he reached the back, Mrs. Shamir had finished her gardening and gone inside with her daughter. He shut the mower down momentarily to move a picnic table and when he looked up the Israeli woman was standing to one side with a glass of soda.
“You poor boy!” The tone was more humorous than genuinely sympathetic. “We get oppressive heat in my country, too, throughout the summer months. It’s called ‘hamseen’. When the weather gets crazy, so does the population, and there’s an epidemic of traffic accidents, mental breakdowns, robberies and reports of husbands beating their wives. The searing heat makes people mentally unstable.”
She handed him the soda. Sonny didn’t know what to say. She was so insanely pretty with her high cheekbones, plump lips and exotic accent. “Last Sunday,” she continued with the same devilishly engaging smile, “I was taking little Ruthie out for breakfast and saw your family leaving church after Mass.” Mrs. Shamir pursed her lips. “Everybody imagines that Jews don’t believe in Jesus but that’s not completely true. We tend to think of him as just another Biblical prophet in the tradition of Jeremiah, Jonah, Micah or Ezekiel.” She tapped her lips with a slender finger. “He spent some time wandering about Nazareth, you know?”
“Who’s that?” Sonny’s brains were a bit muddled with the heat and physical exertion.
“Jesus Christ.”
The boy felt like a total dunce. The woman spoke with such unassuming, matter-of-factness that the boy thought she might have been referring to a mutual acquaintance rather than the Son of God. “Yes, of course,” he blustered, gawking at her chest. Naomi Shamir’s magnificent breasts were unearthly huge. Not to be denied, they jutted out from her cotton blouse like a pair of perky sentinels.
“I lived in Upper Nazareth with my family all through high school. Your savior was a neighbor a few centuries removed.”
“Never thought of it that way.” Sonny chuckled. “You must attend the synagogue over by the mall.”
“No, I’m not religious. Not in the least.”
“You’re an atheist?”
“Agnostic,” she clarified. “Do you know the difference?” Sonny, who wasn’t totally clear on the subject, shook his head from side to side.
“You must be familiar with the Holocaust and what happened during the Second World War.”
“Yes, we studied that in history last year.”
“Following the war, many Jews asked how a compassionate God could turn his back and let six million innocent people perish in concentration camps.” Her tone was sober, almost clinical in its detachment. “Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher, wrote a short book, The Eclipse of God. He said that during the Nazi evil, God was eclipsed – hidden behind an impenetrable shroud of human wickedness.” <
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Ruth came skipping down the front stairs and wrapped both her stubby arms around her mother’s lovely thigh. “Buber reasoned that God wasn’t insensitive to the suffering of his people. Humanity was its own undoing.” She reached out rather suddenly and tapped him playfully on the shoulder with a taut index finger. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, I get it, but why are you telling me this?”
“I didn’t want you to think that a Jew, arrived straight from the Holy Land and who doesn’t go to temple, is necessarily ignorant of such things.”
“I would never do that,” Sonny promised.
Naomi Shamir retrieved the empty soda glass. “Good!’ The serious mood dissipated and a radiant smile suffused her dark face. Digging deep in her pocket, she pulled out a twenty dollar bill. “See you in two weeks.” Handing him the money, she swept her daughter up in her fleshy arms and disappeared back into the house.
Pushing the mower down the street, Sonny’s brain was in such a state of upheaval he couldn’t manage to string two coherent thoughts back to back. A perverse thought occurred to Sonny: Mr. Shamir had been driven away by his wife’s beauty. No one could live in that blinding light of human perfection for any length of time without going bonkers, drooling like a mindless idiot. Of course the prickly heat didn’t help. What was the Hebrew word she had used? Hamseen. Normally mild-mannered, respectable husbands’ beat their wives; drivers negotiated the highway like they were competing in a demolition derby. But that didn’t explain everything – not even the half of it.
Later that night, lying on top of the covers in his bedroom, Sonny’s mind was fixed on his Hebrew neighbor like a compulsive fetish. Naomi Shamir, Naomi Shamir, Naomi Shamir, Naomi Shamir, Naomi Shamir, Naomi Shamir, …
*****
Mrs. Gossage claimed Jews were the ‘People of the Book’. They were real smart and rich and good in math and science and banking and just about everything else. The freckle-faced woman had gained fifty pounds since Sonny left middle school. At about the same time her waist began to spread like an over inflated truck tire, Mrs. Gossage switched over to the Charismatic wing of the Catholic Church. She liked their emotional spontaneity and exuberance. Unfortunately, neither Mr. Gossage nor her son shared her enthusiasm and stayed put at Saint Phillips on the west side of Brandenburg.
Agnostics took no stand on the existence of God. They simply didn’t care one way or the other. If God was dead or simply a figment of some fanatic’s delusional mindset, so be it. Sonny wasn’t about to tell his mother about Mrs. Shamir’s religious predilections for fear the woman with the bowling pin legs and pear-shaped physique would blow an ecumenical gasket!
The previous May, Sonny, his father and eight year-old sister, Laverne accompanied Mrs. Gossage to a Charismatic service in Holdenville. Just once. Toward the end of the raucous service, several wild-eyed parishioners began to dance ecstatically in the aisles waving their arms over their heads. One elderly couple was making weird, glottal noises that sounded like gibberish. “What the hell are they doing?” Mr. Gossage muttered.
“Talking in tongue,” his wife replied pleasantly as though the shenanigans were totally normal, commonplace.”
“Those lunatics belong in straightjackets,” he directed his remarks at the linoleum tile.
“I’ll just wait outside until the service is finished,” Mr. Gossage muttered, rising from the pew. Sonny followed his father out the door. Laverne, who appeared to be thoroughly enjoying the three-ring circus, opted to stay.
A half hour later parishioners began filing out of the building. “I fear,” Sonny’s father noted with a poker face, “your mother has gone over to the dark side.”
Bedlam. Goddamn, hedonistic bedlam. That was Sonny’s terse assessment. True enough, the service had a surrealistic, otherworldly quality. At any minute, the boy would not have been overly surprised to see white-coated orderlies burst through the sanctuary doors to haul the true believers off to the loony bin! After the fiasco in Holdenville, Mrs. Gossage continued to attend Charismatic prayer meetings several nights a week. She went alone and said nothing to her family about any extravagant behavior or emotional excesses.
*****
Two weeks later, Sonny was back at the Shamir residence. The BMW was in the driveway but the front door was locked tight. He primed the Biggs and Stratton engine and pulled fiercely on the starter cord. Running the mower the length of the backyard, he turned around and walked back, keeping the inside of the wheels firmly planted in the previous cut mark. This conservative approach added another half hour to the time normally required to do the job, but guaranteed a perfect cut with no holidays.
Throughout the summer, Sonny serviced his other accounts. Mrs. Reardon, a widow who lived in a shabby, run-down place at the far end of the street, requested a senior citizen discount. The old lady had a heart condition and was getting by on social security so Sonny didn’t mind cutting her a break but didn’t feel quite so magnanimous toward the real estate broker diagonally across from the invalid.
“Your prices are a bit steep,” the man groused.
Sonny eyed him mistrustfully. He had already mowed the lawn, trimmed thirty feet of hedges and swept the clippings into a recyclable rubbish bag. “You didn’t mention any problem when I originally gave you my rates.”
“I didn’t mention anything,” he replied glibly, “because, as a businessman, I always prefer talking to a people face-to-face.” He gesticulated vaguely with his chubby hands. “It’s so much more personal that way,” he noted with brittle authority. The broker pulled some bills from his pocket and kept waving them enticingly in the air but without any clear indication that he would fork over the money. “Any chance you can you cut me a break?”
“I give discounts to cripples and senior citizens,” Sonny’s voice cracked but he didn’t waver. “If I charge you less, I might as well give all my other full-paying customers a rebate. What’s fair is fair.”
“Then don’t come back any more,” the real estate broker barked gruffly, flinging the money at his feet and turning way. “You don’t know shit about business etiquette.”
Sonny counted the crumpled bills. He was short five dollars. The man never intended to pay him the full amount - probably would have offered even less if Sonny lost his nerve. “Asshole!” he muttered under his breath as he rolled the Toro mower down the street in the direction of his house. “Stingy, two-bit asshole!”
*****
On Saturday Sonny returned to the Israeli woman’s home. The car was gone from the driveway. He rang the doorbell but then noticed a note scotch taped to the screen door.
Sonny,
I got called into work.
Go ahead and mow the lawn.
I’ll touch bases with you
sometime during the week.
Thanks,
Naomi Shamir
“Aw, crap!” Sonny primed the engine and pulled on the starter cord. He pushed the mower the length of the backyard, turned around and walked back again. Sonny ran his Black and Decker fourteen-inch GrassHog weed whacker around the perimeter of Mrs. Shamir’s flower beds. Then he used the edger to tidy up the flagstone walkway leading to the front steps. All of the extra work was gratis. He wouldn’t get paid an extra cent, but, for some inexplicable reason, it made him feel good.
He had been looking forward to seeing the lovely woman and perhaps having another conversation. No one ever took him half-serious – certainly not his God-crazed mother. Had she ever heard of Martin Buber and The Eclipse of God? The other day Mrs. Gossage asked Sonny if he might like to accompany her to the Tuesday night prayer meeting. Laverne had long since lost interest with the metaphysical buffoonery, and the woman had better sense than to ask her husband.
“No Thanks,” Sonny mumbled.
“There are young girls your age who attend,” Mrs. Gossage replied coyly.
Sonny recalled a pimply-faced blonde at the prayer service he attended with his father. When the religious c
haos reached a crescendo, the girl collapsed on the floor writhing about like an epileptic experiencing grand mal seizures. If the goofy girl had torn her clothes off and danced an Irish jig, the tawdry sideshow could not have been more revolting. “In the Bible,” Sonny replied, “it says that a person should go in a closet and pray quietly.” He fixed his mother with a challenging expression. “Pray quietly and alone,” he repeated. “Don’t make a big show of your devotion.”
Mrs. Gossage grinned defiantly at her son; her double chin and squat nose lent the face a vulgar coarseness. “The reading you’re referring to is from the Old Testament. Charismatic believers tend to worship more energetically.”
“I’m not going.” Sonny said tersely and his mother hurried out the door.
*****
“Sonny! Sonny!” One evening in late October, Mrs. Gossage came rushing up the stairs like a bull elephant on the rampage. Her voice was shrill, borderline hysterical.
“What’s wrong?” Sonny was at his desk finishing a chemistry assignment.
“Mrs. Shamir is downstairs and needs to speak to you.”
Sonny closed the book. He hadn’t seen the woman in over two months. “What does she want?”
“It’s a long story.” Mrs. Gossage, still gasping for breath, waved her hand fitfully implying that he should speak directly with the neighbor.
Dressed in a strapless black evening gown and high heels, Naomi Shamir was standing in the foyer with Ruthy clutching her mother’s hand. “Asone gadoal... a huge calamity,” Mrs. Shamir announced with a pained expression. “I have a dinner party this evening, and my babysitter called out sick at the last moment. Is there any chance you could mind Ruthy for a few hours?”
Sonny stared at the woman. Something was subtly different. Cosmetics – the woman never wore a stitch of makeup. But tonight she sported a glossy, wine-colored lipstick and eye shadow. Nothing more. That was all she needed. The steep V-cut in front of her dress left nothing to the imagination. “I didn’t finish my homework,” Sonny stammered. “Can I bring my books?”
