Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  When she had forsaken painting the previous year, it was because she was disillusioned with the New York art world and devastated by Boomer’s conquest of it. It had been a negative reaction. Now she thought she would like to attempt a positive withdrawal. She decided to see what it would feel like not to merely give up art but to give up being an artist. To honestly, completely give it up. To be something else for a change. And since, for the time being, there was only one other thing she was qualified to be, she wrote “I am a waitress” five hundred times on the blackboard of her consciousness. Not “I am an artist/waitress” or “I am an artist temporarily working as a waitress,” but “I am a waitress.”

  Perhaps after Thanksgiving, after he had returned from Jerusalem, she would try out her new identity on Boomer. Tomorrow, she’d disclose it to Spike and Mr. Hadee. That night, however, she set Popeye’s spinach down in front of Wimpy, and, tossing and moaning, dreamed away any chance of a tip.

  To tone her waitress muscles—the extensor hallucis, the tendo calcaneus, the tibialis anterior—Ellen Cherry walked to work the next morning. Along the frosty trek downtown, her nose parting lace curtain after lace curtain of her own exhalations, she passed countless kiosks and newsstands, each, it seemed, festooned with the same inky banners announcing further violence in Israel. In cries or whispers, depending upon their style, the public journals told of curfews and roadblocks, flaming tires and bulldozed kitchens, bridal veils of tear gas and sweaters of blood; told of leaders with tongues of stale lightning, cradles filled with stones, and young girls who danced with live ammunition when they should have been dancing with their fathers (too young were they to dance with boys); told of the old primate grab-and-hold—the berserk baboon dance that anthropologists call “territorial imperative” and politicians call “national interest"; told of the gash that four thousand years had not sewn shut, the lunatic legacy of Isaac and Ishmael.

  Ellen Cherry’s shift, the one she hoped would be her last as maître d’, ended at three o’clock, but she waited around for Spike and Abu, who generally returned from tennis at quarter past four. She intended to ask them for a demotion. It was silly, in the first place, to have a day captain on duty in a restaurant whose lunch crowd would fit comfortably into a hermit’s rec room. As well-to-do as Spike and Abu might be, they couldn’t continue to lose money indefinitely. If they agreed to let her wait tables, they would save her salary plus the wages of the waitpersons whom she’d replace. The I & I’s staff consisted mostly of earnest but errant young liberals killing time until they could be readmitted to law schools, and she was confident that she could do the work of two of them. Possibly three. For a lunch crowd of a dozen, what was there to do?

  When her employers did arrive, Spike’s feline eyes searching the room at shoe-level, Abu’s nose flaming more red than usual (whether from the cold or the tennis, she could not tell), it was obvious by their manner that they, too, had tasted the latest toxic headlines from Israel.

  Normally, the owners refrained from overt political discussion inside the I & I. Their running commentary on the Holy City was more in the order of a paean to its loveliness, its passion, its mysterious hold on the hearts of men. Or bemused puzzling over such questions as, why, always, in the hills of Jerusalem did the rocks look like sheep and the sheep like rocks? Today, however, the harsh pepper that sifted from the media’s grinders was stinging their throats and inciting them to speak out in strained voices.

  “The suffering of the Jews, everyone knows already,” said Spike. He, Abu, and Ellen Cherry were sitting in the empty bar, staring at empty glasses, as if expecting them to fill spontaneously. For the moment, not one of them was sufficiently motivated to stand up and play bartender. “Much more on the subject of our persecution we don’t need. You don’t have the Jews on your conscience today already, you’re not going to have them next Tuesday. What needs to be said is that we’re dishing it out as well as taking it.”

  “Ah, but there is no comparison,” Abu objected. “The Israeli army uses excessive force in quelling protests on the West Bank, true enough, and sometimes sadistic and cruel force, but even though it is radically motivated, and directed against my cousins, I must regard it an insignificant trifle compared to the Holocaust—”

  “Hold on, my friend,” said Spike. “For one minute, hold on. Holocaust? We Jews perpetrated our own holocaust, I’m telling you. When? Who against? Over three thousand years ago against the Canaanites, that’s when and who. How is the Land of Canaan turning suddenly into the Land of Israel? By what sale, what deal, eh; what magic trick? By a holocaust. The Hebrews escaping from Egypt invaded Canaan and killed everybody, the whole country, old men, women, children, little babies what were in arms. A million, we butchered. Look it up. In history, maybe the first recorded act of genocide. The only Canaanites left alive were a few what were good for slave labor.”

  “Wow!” said Ellen Cherry. “That’s pretty heavy. But that was a very long time ago. And, anyway, weren’t the Jews just taking back their homeland; you know, fighting to recover their promised land from these Canaanites?”

  “Ha! So who is telling you this? The ghost of Moses, maybe? A homeland the Hebrews have never had. We’re nomads, already. Our tribes shlepped through this Canaan, lived there among its inhabitants for a while. Then, most of them moved on into Egypt. So, a long time passed, and then the Hebrews were slaves of the pharaoh, too bad for us, and this guy Moses told them, ’Hey, we’re getting out of this mess, we’re going to escape.’ And the Jews said, ’Okay, but where’s it to that we’re escaping, already?’ ’To Canaan,’ Moses said. ’Canaan is our rightful home in case you’ve forgotten it. God spoke to Abraham personally and said, “I promise you the Land of Canaan. You are my number one people what I’ve chosen, and Canaan is the place I’ve set aside for you, for your own forever.”’ Good. Only nobody read the fine print, which said that to move into our new home, we had to slaughter hundreds of thousands of human beings what were living there at the time.”

  “You’re not exaggerating, Mr. Cohen? Wasn’t Canaan kind of a wilderness area that was open for settlement?”

  “Hoo boy! You young people today, you’re knowing nothing very much. An advanced civilization, we’re talking about here. Already two thousand years old when the Hebrews invaded it. A lot of our culture comes from Canaan. You believe, darlink, that God told Moses go invade an advanced civilization, pilfer its territory, and kill all its people? Suppose in Westchester you had a nice house, and I stayed there the weekend as your guest, and then years pass and one day I come back and say, ’God promised me your house.’ You would believe such a cockamamie story? No, you would not. So, okay, I murder you and your kids and your grandmother what’s in a wheelchair and your cat and your dog and your three goldfishes. And I say to the neighbors, ’It’s my house now, don’t be peeing on my lawn.’ Hoo boy!”

  “I guess we got America the same way,” ventured Ellen Cherry. “From the Indians.”

  Spike ran his index finger, stubby and liver spotted, along the rim of his dry glass. “Okay, yes,” he said, “but at least John Wayne never said that God promised it to him. He honestly stole it.”

  He paused. “I can tell you something?” He paused again, and Ellen Cherry could detect tearwater magnifying the green gooseberries of his eyes. “I can tell you something? Why I changed my birth name? Abu knows this, but no other body. I quote to you from the Old Testament. Joshua ’carried off all the livestock of these cities,’ meaning the cities of Canaan, ’but all the people he put to the sword, not sparing anyone who breathed.’ Joshua ’plundered,’ Joshua ’burned,’ Joshua ’massacred,’ Joshua ’wiped them out,’ Joshua ’put to death,’ Joshua ’turned his forces,’ ’all were taken by storm . . . annihilated without mercy and utterly destroyed,’ Joshua ’subdued,’ Joshua ’slew,’ Joshua ’left no survivors.’ In your Christian Bible you will find this nice story of this nice guy Joshua. You think I could go on living when I wear the name of such a man?”
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  Ellen Cherry was both touched and embarrassed. She reached out and patted the cuff of his canary-and-catsup plaid sport coat.

  Abu came on line. “Aside from the Joshua business, my friend, which I think you are ridiculous to take personally, I can appreciate what you are saying. You are wondering if in the Middle East it wasn’t the Jews who started the bloody ball rolling. Maybe, maybe not. And you are asking, where does the Israeli get the chutzpah to be so self-righteously possessive about territory his ancestors acquired in such barbaric fashion? Fair enough. For that matter, the West Bank, itself, was taken by force in fairly recent times. But, Spike, I wish to point out to you yet again that these so-called Palestinians who contest the Jews for this territory have little or no legitimate title to it.”

  “They don’t?” asked Ellen Cherry. The question slipped out before she could harness it. She bit her tongue, too late, and thought, rugs.

  “No,” said Abu. “They are not descended from the Canaanites. Nor from the Phoenicians, who were the only Canaanite people to survive Joshua’s rampage. What’s more, the disputed territory has not been their home since time immemorial, as they contend. Very few of them have lived in the area for more than fifty years.”

  “Rugs.”

  “It is true. Jews did not displace Arabs in Palestine. Quite the reverse. Most of the Arabs there have foreign roots. They migrated and immigrated into areas settled by Jews in pre-Israel Palestine. In the nineteen-forties. I said ’migrated and immigrated,’ but what really happened is that they were trucked in from all over the Arab world by the British. The Brits resettled them there in a land that was new to them.”

  “Beautiful rugs.”

  “With American compliance, I am sure, the British actively imported Arabs in great numbers when it became obvious that the UN was going to establish the state of Israel once World War Two was over. So, I am always reminding Spike that no matter how brutally and unfairly they are being treated, the Palestinians have even less claim to the territory than the Jews.

  “But you may be wondering,” Abu went on, “why the British, with American compliance, I am sure, bothered to resettle foreign Arabs in Palestine.”

  “Hand-tied, vegetable-dyed rugs.”

  “It was a deliberate trick to lock the Jews in a pressure cooker and keep them there. To place them in such a permanently volatile situation that it would severely restrict any financial or cultural influence they could exert on the rest of the world. It was a huge, cynical deception. Spike understandably cannot face up to this, but to my mind, if Hitler’s Holocaust was the greatest anti-Semitic act in history, the creation of the state of Israel was the second greatest. A monstrous Anglo-American trap.”

  In Ellen Cherry’s mind, flying carpets of exquisite weaves were buzzing the control towers of various airports. When eventually it dawned on her that both of her employers had fallen silent, she arose and filled their glasses, Spike’s with rum and Coke, Abu’s with tea.

  “You are having nothing, darlink?” asked Spike.

  It was then that she entered her plea for demotion, assuring them that they would not only save money but would also acquire the services of a waitress totally absorbed in and dedicated to her profession.

  “But, my dear, you are an artist,” said Abu.

  “Patience. A nice gallery for you I’m getting,” said Spike.

  When she persisted, they asked if they might discuss the matter privately. She consented to take a walk and return for their decision in an hour.

  As she was leaving the restaurant, carrying a doggie bag of leftover shish tawook, she overheard Abu ask, “Why do you suppose she kept mumbling about rugs?”

  In her last Seattle apartment, the landlord had provided Ellen Cherry with a Coldspot stove and a Hotpoint refrigerator. Can o’ Beans, from his/her perch in the kitchen cupboard, was both amused and dismayed by the titular contradiction, by the imprecise language. As for Ellen Cherry, she said once to Boomer, over the phone, “I’ve got a cold spot and a hot point.”

  “You and every other woman I’ve tangled with,” said Boomer.

  Ellen Cherry recalled that exchange as she walked up Forty-ninth Street. She had intended to stroll along the East River, but the breeze was too fresh, and besides, there was a demonstration in progress in front of the UN Headquarters building. Arab-Americans, joined by a surprising number of Jews, were protesting the viciousness with which Israel was maintaining authority in its occupied territories. So, she had elected to make a quick jaunt up to Fifth Avenue to catch the last few increments of Turn Around Norman’s protracted swivel. As she half-jogged along the familiar route, doggie bag swinging in the chill, she was thinking that never in her twenty-five years had her cold spot been colder or her hot point hotter.

  When, passing the Mel Davis Dog Boutique, she noticed a cardboard roast turkey on its door glass (evidently, Thanksgiving was for poodles, too), she was not amazed to find herself growing simultaneously more icy and more ablaze.

  Neither extreme of her psychological climate was visible to the objects in the cellar. In fact, they barely registered her presence on the cathedral steps. On that day, at that moment, their attention elsewhere was fixed.

  “Would that I could go in your place, Miss Spoon,” Can o’ Beans said consolingly.

  “Would that I couldn’t,” said Dirty Sock. “But, hey, sugar, you’ll do okay. You’re too little to scoop shit and too big to scoop cocaine. Nobody in New York’ll wanna fuss with you. Just go on out there and win one for the Gipper. Make the world safe for democracy. Remember the Alamo. Damn the torpedoes. Yours is not to question why, yours is but to do or . . .”

  Painted Stick barked something in Phoenician that the sock couldn’t possibly translate, but it got the drift and shut up.

  Spoon was already mute. She hadn’t uttered a sound in hours. She just stood there by the grate, looking as glazed as if she’d spent all day in a plate of Patsy’s jellied chicken salad.

  The plan was relatively simple. As the sun sank, as St. Patrick’s umbra turned a half-block of Fifth Avenue into a coalfield, immediately before Turn Around Norman, to zero applause, brought his geologic pivot to a screechless halt, Spoon was to slip through the grate (parting, like veils, the candy wrappers and wadded-up Scientology leaflets that the wind pressed against its bars), slither as quietly and quickly as possible along the five yards of sidewalk between grate and Norman, and dive into the performer’s donation box right before he bent to snatch it up.

  As in most things, it was the timing that mattered.

  Like Ellen Cherry, the objects had become so familiar with Norman’s routine that they could predict with exactitude the moment when he would close the show and take off with the receipts. Now, as his doll-baby lashes commenced to flutter like those of a windup Jezebel; as his screw-top brow relaxed, assuming some of the placidity of cork; as his lips unpuckered and his violently blue orbs shifted focus, Painted Stick gave Spoon a nudge, Conch Shell gave her a blessing, and clink tink, she was suddenly through the grid and shooting down the sidewalk like a stubby silver arrow released from a toy bow.

  “Bon voyage,” whispered Can o’ Beans.

  “See ya later, alligator,” called Dirty Sock.

  Spoon didn’t hear them. More terrified than she had been in her life, she heard only the clink tink dink of her body against cement, and the noise was so exaggerated by fear and excitement that she imagined that it could be heard above the rush-hour parrot-thunder of midtown traffic. “Oh, dear! O Blessed Mother, Mary of God!”

  Clink tink. There were only two more yards to go, but she felt footfalls so close behind her that she was certain she was about to be stepped on. She glanced behind her—just for a second—but in so doing she angled inches off course and sideswiped the rise of the first step of the cathedral, which sent her flying out of control.

  “What’s that thing?” she heard (or thought she heard) a human squeal. A shadow fell over her (though she was already in shadow), and she cou
ld sense (or believed she could sense) a rough, inquisitive hand reaching to yank her from the pavement.

  In full panic now, unable to reason or breathe, she took a desperate flying leap into the nearest enclosure, which happened to be the partially open doggie bag that was at Ellen Cherry’s feet.

  And as Turn Around Norman gathered up his meager earnings and melted into the crowd, Spoon lay in darkness, next to a foil-wrapped serving of shish tawook, and shook so hard that a passerby might have surmised the bag to be full of mice.

  It was after six now, and the zillions of tiny particles that comprised Manhattan’s atmosphere had slipped out of their loud sport clothes and donned tuxedos. As she returned to Isaac & Ishmael’s, hopeful for demotion, Ellen Cherry walked inside a bag of night nearly as black as the one in which Spoon trembled. Only the discreet neon of the sushi bars or the flashing headlights of taxicabs clipped random bow ties of brightness and color to the formal collars of evening’s molecules. Spoon had calmed down enough to comprehend her general whereabouts, and although still rather terrified, she was comforted by the realization that it was to Ellen Cherry Charles and not some stranger that her fate was wed.