by Ross, Fran
Whenever Louise brought Will home for dinner, she said, “Make yo’seff comf-tubble, Frank . . . I mean, John . . . I say, Will.You jus’ like one de fam’ly.”
After he had eaten one of Louise’s specialties, Will, who was in his eighties (this was a Platonic relationship—or maybe Hegelian), would creak into the living room to relax. Once there, he would settle into a chair opposite James and succumb to a myoclonic jerk off to sleep. With his downcurving nose pincering toward his chin like a chela and a cigar held fast between clenched gums, he resembled a pegged lobster. His body became as straight and stiff as a bed slat as he began an inevitable slide to the floor. Just before he clattered into James, Louise would wake him up, thereby preventing him from making a body-temperature cancel mark across her husband’s half swastika. It was Louise’s lot to be surrounded—or, rather, flanked—by rigid but unavailing masculine spare parts—James and Will each in his own quirky fashion an instance of the-part-for-the-whole, a synecdoche of manhood.
Helen in a hotel room, Winnetka, Illinois
She was listening to Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Minor for Guitar and Viola d’Amore. Her head equation
meant that she thought it was time that she went home to visit her family and got Oreo started on her journey to learn the secret of her birth. The phone rang, interrupting the music and breaking off another equation at a crucial operation. It was a wrong number, a woman selling magazine subscriptions. Helen was annoyed, so she let the woman go through the whole megillah. Finally, she said, “You’ve convinced me that I can’t beat your low, low prices. I think I’ll take a three-year subscription to Field and Stream.” The vendor was overjoyed (this was her first actual sale in 5,235 calls). Then Helen said, “That is, of course, if you have a braille edition.” The magazine woman apologized wholeheartedly for her company’s lack of foresight—a choice of words which Helen pointed out was particularly unfortunate for a person with her handicap to hear. With further apologies, muffled sobs, and long-distance groveling over her lack of tact, the woman hung up.
Someone was obviously circulating a defective telephone-sales list, for a few minutes later a dance studio called. Helen debated a moment over whether she should be a paraplegic or an amputee but decided that either would be tasteless and settled for spasticity. Again, apologies, sobs, and groveling. Helen was able to complete her equation:
C = H — MB2
where C = catharsis, psf
H = homesickness, cu ft
M = meanness, mep
B = Bell telephone, min
Jimmie C. and his friend
Jimmie C. and Fonzelle Scarsdale had been best friends ever since Oreo had beat Fonny up during her first practice session of WIT. Fonzelle showed Jimmie C. his report card. He was a straight-F student. He was not exceptionally stupid but had no time for studies, preferring to spend most of his free hours perfecting his walk (“I like to walk heavy, man,” he had confided to Jimmie C.).
Jimmie C., distressed, said, “What is your mother going to say when she sees this? My heart norblats for you, my hands curbel.”
“Hell, man, she’ll just give me a party.”
“A joyber? What kind of joyber?”
“A do-better-next-time party, jim. What else? But I’m hot, though. That yalla-nigger gym teacher give me a F in phiz ed. Now, you know I’m good in gym, jack. I’d like to bust that nigger up ’side his head.”
“Who are you talking about? Mr. Ozaka? He’s Japanese.”
“They got you fooled too, huh? Them so-called Japs, Chinks, all them—they all niggers. Just trying to chicken out of all the heavy shit going down on us black niggers. But they niggers just the same. One of these days, Charlie Chalk gon peep their game, then he’ll start treating them just the way he do us.” He laughed at the prospect.
Fonzelle put his report card back in his wallet and pulled out a celluloid zigzag of identification cards. Each one showed his picture, but the names on the cards ranged from toothsome (Vasquez Delacorte, Miguel Salamanca) to bland (Ronald Gray, Dave Johnson). “In case I ever get picked up, the pigs will be confused, dig?” He compressed the pleats. “My cousin’s a cop. I went with him when he had to testify in night court the other day. This foxy chick walks in. Man, she was really together. Legs so big and rounded off. I scrambled to write that address down. But the judge, he’s keeping it all to hisself. I couldn’t hardly hear, man. You know what they fined that chick? Ten dollars and costs! If it was some ol’ nappy-head broad, some pepperhead, they woulda thrown her ass under the jail. Gee-me-Christmas, there’s some shit going down, jim!”
Jimmie C. nodded in sympathy.
“Hey man,” Fonzelle said, “I’m looking for a job.”
“Doing what?”
“As a lover, man. That’s what I’m best at. What’s the opposite of red?”
“Bormel?” Jimmie C. offered.
“Yeah, blue. I get me a blue light and put it outside my door. Did I tell you about the last one I had. I told her, ‘Three dollars! Are you kidding? Where I come from, you pay me!’ She wasn’t bad, either. Really squared me away. After I came out, I saw this faggot. I thought it was a chick at first. I said, ‘What you mean you ain’t no girl, girl?’ I told Doris about that, and she cracked up. Doris is cool, jim. She may be a dyke, but she one stone fox. Wouldn’t mind some of that cat myself.” He giggled. “Know what she told me the other day? She had to go to the doctor, see? Had a infection in her cat. So the doctor examines her, does his little number with the slides and things, and says, ‘Miss Jefferson, I don’t understand this. You a virgin, you still cherry and all, yet and still you got this infection in your cat. And this ain’t no ordinary infection. This kinda germ, we usually find it in people’s mouth. It’s a—whatchacall—a oral germ. Now, Miss Jefferson, how do you explain that?’ Doris says that without even thinking, she comes out and says, ‘Well, doctor, I sat on a dirty teaspoon.’” Fonzelle doubled over, whooping and hollering.
Jimmie C. smiled gently, not wanting to offend his friend by telling him he didn’t know what the varnok he was talking about.
“You got a telephone book?” Fonzelle asked.
Jimmie C. handed it to him, and Fonzelle dialed a number. “Hello, Alcoholic Anonymous? Please listen careful, now. Scotch on the rocks, gin and tonic, screwdriver, bloody Mary, muscatel, martini, sneaky Pete—” He doubled up again. “They hung up. I can usually get in about ten of them before they see where I’m coming from.”
Jimmie C. was just about to tell him never to use his phone again for such aglug purposes, when his mother, whom he had not seen for almost a year, walked in.
“Nu, how’s my baby?” Helen said, embracing him.
Jimmie C. could not even sing, his small body was curbeling so with joy. Such was his curbelation that he did not notice that Fonzelle had said good-bye and was executing a heavy walk, its choreography a combination of Motown and early Clara Ward, out the door.
When Oreo saw her mother, she said, “Later, Mamanyu,” and went out into the back yard to cry.
When Louise saw her daughter, she said, “Well, I be John Brown! Look who’s yere!” She kissed Helen, pulled her over to James, who grinned and seemed about to get up, and went straight to the kitchen to begin preparing a nice little homecoming meal.
La Carte du Dîner
d'Hélène
Allow 40 min for AMERICAN AND/OR JEWISH dishes.
(Choice of six in each course. No subsitutions.)
Hors d'Oeuvre
halibut imojo
funghi marinati
CHEESE AND CRACKERS
PICKLED HERRING
Leberknödel
sashimi
dim sum
empanadas
pâté maison
vatrushki
Zubrowka
Aquavit
Pepsi
Soupe
mtori
stracciatella
NEW ENGLAND CLAM CHOWDER
MATZO-BALL SOUP
&n
bsp; Hühner Suppe
awase miso
yen-wo-t'ang
canja
petite marmite
rassolnik
Amontillado
Madeira
Poisson
samaki kavu
scampi alla griglia
FRIED SMELTS
SMOKED SABLE
Forelle blau mit Kapern
takara bune
hung-shao-yü
pescado yucateco
saumon poché à la Louise
osetrina zalivnaya
1961 Montrachet, Chassagne-Montrachet
Entrée
zilzil alecha
osso bucco
BRAISED SHORT RIBS OF BEEF
STEAMED CALF'S FOOT
Kalbshaxen
tori mushiyaki
fu-chu-jou-pien
matambre
côtes de veau en papillote
shashlyk
1953 Château Pétrus, Pomerol
Rôt
frangainho piripiri
pollo al diavolo
ROAST TURKEY WITH CORNBREAD STUFFING
ROAST CHICKEN GOLDA MEIR
Wiener Gans
yakitori
Pei-ching-k'ao-ya
conejo en coco
faison Souvaroff
kotmis satsivi
1947 Château Margaux, Médoc
Entremets
ovos moles de papaia
gelato torinese
LEMON SHERBET
TSIMMES
Gefülte Melonen
kusamochi
shin-chin-kuo-pin
leche de coco
soufflé glacé Hélène
kisel
1959 Champagne, Veuve Clicquot
Relevé
mokoto
fritto misto
GLAZED HAM
SALAMI SURPRISE MOSHE DAYAN
Sardellenschnitzel
tatsuta age
hao-shih-niu-jou
feijoada
noisettes d’agneau Christine
basturma
1964 Chambertin, Gevrey-Chambertin
Salade
yegomen kitfo
insalata di pomodori
POTATO SALAD
COLESLAW MURRAY
Roter Rübenkren
horenso hitashi
liang-pan-huang-kua
ensalada de nopalitos
salade russe
rossolye
Dessert
cocada amarela
spumoni
APPLE PIE WITH OREO CRUST
HALVAH
Sachertorte
kyogashi
hsing-jen-ping
manjar blanco
Mont Blanc au chocolat du deux Jameses
paskha
1953 Sauternes, Châ Coutet, Barsac
Le thé, Constant Comment
Le café, Chock full o’Nuts
Cognac
Calvados
.
What happened while Louise was cooking
Five people in the neighborhood went insane from the bouquets that wafted to them from Louise’s kitchen. The tongues of two men macerated in the overload from their salivary glands. Three men and a woman had to be chained up by their families when they began gnawing at a quincaillerie of substances that wiser heads have found to be inedible. These substances—which blind chance had put within the compass of snatchability of the unfortunate four—ranged from butterfly nuts to galoshes, with a catalog of intervening items that good taste precludes mention of here. In a section of West Philadelphia referred to as “down the Bottom,” at some remove from the Clarks’ neighborhood, a woman who had never laid eyes on Oreo’s family was heard to remark, “That Louise cooking again. Helen must be home. I wish that woman would send out a warning when she gon do this.” And she adjusted her husband’s chains so that they would not rattle against the hot-water pipes and keep her awake all night.
Helen entertains
Helen told the family stories of her life on the road. She acted out all the parts, animate and inanimate (one of her best bits was a bowl of mashed potatoes being covered with gravy). The family favorite that night was the story she told about playing at a house party in the all-black suburb of Whitehall, so much in the news when low-income whites were making their first pitiful attempts to get in. The upper-middle-class blacks of Whitehall objected to the palefaces, not because they were poor (“The poor we have with us always,” said town spokesman, the Reverend Cotton Smith-Jones, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church), but because they were white (“We just do not want whitey, with his honky ways, around us,” said Reverend Smith-Jones to a chorus of genteel Episcopalian “Amens”). As Smith-Jones pointed out, whitey was beyond help. Chuck did not groove on crime in the streets, the way black people did; he did not dig getting his head whipped, his house robbed, his wife raped, the way black people did; he was not really into getting his jollies over his youngsters’ popping pills, tripping out, or shooting up, the way black people did. Such uptight, constipated people should not be allowed to mingle with decent, pleasure-loving black folk. That was the true story, but officially Whitehall had to be against the would-be intruders on the basis of poverty.
The town adopted a strict housing code, which was automatically rescinded for blacks and reinstated whenever whites appeared. (The code was shredded, its particles sprinkled into confiscated timed-release capsules, and is now part of the consciousness of millions of cold sufferers.) “Keep Whitehall black,” the townspeople chanted in their characteristically rich baritones and basses. “If you’re black, you’re all right, jack; if you’re white, get out of my sight,” said others in aberrant Butterfly McQueen falsettos. These and other racist slogans were heard as the social, moral, economic, and political life of the town was threatened.
The white blue-collar workers who labored so faithfully at the Smith-Jones Afro Wig and Dashiki Co., Inc., were welcome to earn their daily bread in the town, but they were not welcome to bring their low-cholesterol foods, their derivative folk-rock music, and their sentimental craxploitation films to Whitehall. The poor, the white, and the disadvantaged could go jump.
The people of Whitehall set up floodlights to play over the outskirts of the neighboring, honky-loving black town, whose lawns (formerly reasonably manicured but now nervously bitten to the quick) bore sad witness to the instant herbaphobia that whites brought with them. Black Whitehall posted sentries and devised elaborate alarm/gotcha systems (the showpiece was a giant microwave oven with the door ajar). The Whitehall PO-lice raised attack dogs on a special ‘‘preview” diet of saltines and the white meat of turkeys. Helen quoted Reverend Smith-Jones as saying, in his down-home way, “If any chalks should be rash enough to come in here, those dogs will jump on them like white on rice.”
“Pass me some tsimmes,” said Helen, when she had finished with Whitehall. She tasted it, blew her mother a kiss. “You know who made a lousy tsimmes—Mrs. Zipstein.”
At the mention of the wife of the man who had pickled him into anti-Semitism, James stirred in his corner. He immediately went back to concentrating on swallowing the Veuve Clicquot Jimmie C. was feeding him, grinning as he reminisced about Gladstone’s village idiot.
“You ever yere from de daughter? Whatchacall?” said Louise.
“Sadie. Sadie-Above-It-All, the Jewish princess. No, I wonder what ever happened to her.”
Oreo watched with anticipation as her mother got up from her seat to do some shtiklech. “Here’s Mrs. Zipstein,” Helen said. She bent over, holding her back. As she walked, she pointed to her feet. “Mrs. Zipstein has those lumpy black shoes that look like they have potatoes inside—no, like she has a lot of little feet stuck to her regular foot. She’s walking, see? ‘Oi, oi, oi, doit and filt, filt and doit. God to gad id op. Oi, oi, oi.’” Helen straightened up. Instantly she was Sadie being carried on a pillow by Nubian slaves. ‘Be careful with my gown, you graubyon! You, on the right—don’
t glitch or you’ll tear it! This is no shmatte, you know. Cost a fortune.’” Helen/Sadie’s arms flapped helplessly. “‘Oh my God, the floor’s dirty—come quick, somebody, and clean it up. Quick or I’ll turn blue.’” Helen sat down. “Nobody enjoys digging in other people’s dirt, but Sadie can’t even come near her own. She could be sitting on the toilet and she’d say, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t do it. Somebody, come in and wipe!’ They could cut her salary to a dollar ninety-eight a week and her ‘girl-who-comes- in-twice-a-week’—who’s probably older than her mother—would be the last thing she’d give up. ‘There’s always a shvartze to do these nasty things, so I should worry?’ Ah, but the guilt. ‘I don’t know what it is, Debbie, but I can’t bring myself to stay at home when Beulah’s there. I do my important shopping on those two days.’ Beulah down there on her knees probably reminds her of her mother, Mrs. Clean. As for Mrs. Clean herself, maybe she’s always making with the rubbing and scrubbing because there’s nothing else for a religious Jewish woman to do.” Helen was suddenly a rabbi. “‘Go to the mikvah and stop nudzhing, you dirty women, you. Don’t defile our scholars with your monthlies and your sinful ways. It’s enough, already, and stretching a point besides that we let you light the shabbes candle. So cook, so clean, so make amends.’” Helen paused. ‘‘So vot am I tokkink?” she said, laughing, and changed the subject. “Mother, do you remember when I was going with Freddie Cole, the football player?”
