by Mat Johnson
“What are you doing? We don’t have time for you to take her in,” I tell my daughter.
“We’re not going to just leave her here.”
“She’s a grown woman,” I explain, as Roslyn, almost as if in response to this, groans. At least, that’s how she responds when I start pulling on her leg.
“No…Western…medicine,” Roslyn manages. It takes a minute. She says all this without opening her eyes, channeling it from whatever dark pit to which her consciousness has been repelled.
“You’ve taken quite shock,” I tell her. I try to make my voice as soothing as possible, while still yelling it at her. “It’s probably for the best you get it looked at.”
“No,” Roslyn says again. At least that’s what I think she says. It’s hard to hear when the ambulance pulls in behind us with its lights on, and starts honking. When the driver gets out of the cab, there’s some yelling too. By then Roslyn, eyes closed, has apparently drifted off again. I put my hand back on her leg and start to pull on it. She kicks me.
“Miss Director, we have a previous invitation to a Shabbat dinner at my grandfather’s, would you like to come with us?” Tal asks, shoving herself next to me.
“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” Roslyn keeps going, and we take that as a yes, throw the wheelchair in the trunk and peel out of there.
—
I am at Irv’s doorstep with his granddaughter after being absent from her life for seventeen years. I have this other woman with me who’s Irv’s age and in a sweat suit and a wheelchair. I’m holding her back by one shoulder to keep her from falling over.
“Irv, this is Roslyn Kornbluth,” Tal begins. She motions to Irv, then motions to Roslyn, who flutters her eyes in recognition. “Roslyn runs my school and Warren just almost killed her with one of those electrocution guns, so we thought it might be nice if she joined us for dinner. She’s black and Jewish, so consider her a peace offering.”
“Must look…a mess,” Roslyn whispers, but not really to anyone, almost like she’s talking to the strands of her curls.
“Nonsense, such a beautiful woman needs no embellishment.” Irv smiles and bends over to her, and I get a whiff of his cologne, which is whiskey. Jovially, he picks up Roslyn’s hand, and first I think he’s going to check her pulse, but he kisses it.
“She’s had a long day,” I tell him.
And Irv just smiles and says, “I’m sure she has, I’m sure she has,” and that’s when I get that he thinks she’s always in this wheelchair, this beat-up fraying thing, not just in it because I almost electrocuted her.
Inside, it’s the same apartment. It’s the same apartment I made Tal in. I remember it as soon as we get inside. The rest, the doorman, the lobby, all these prewar Walnut Street high-rises look identical to me but this apartment, this is it. The place I’ve been avoiding for eighteen years. My memories, my guilt, they were in here, waiting for me. The last time I was in this place, the less successful sperm from Tal’s batch were seeping into my underwear. I’m pretty sure the apartment knows that, remembers my teenage trespass. There will be a sign, I know. Words forming on refrigerator magnets or something, something more than my heavy breathing. Ghosts are real; I can totally see that in this moment. And I really start wheezing, being in this place, being caught back here. We go in the kitchen and apparently there is a toilet handle at the back of my neck, and I can feel it now, I can feel it being pushed, and all the blood rushing from my brain, down, congealing in my jawbone, pulling my mouth slack and open. I know what’s happening. I am fainting. I look at Tal. I look at her so beautiful and think, How bad can my sins be? I scream this in my head, How bad can my sins be? But my body isn’t listening. I lean on the wheelchair to keep from falling over. I lean on Roslyn’s shoulder. Roslyn says, “Ow!” with surprising clarity.
“Here, I’ll take her,” and Irv yanks Roslyn away, and is moving down the hall offering “We’ll get you a nice seat at the table” before I can stop him. Somehow, I didn’t imagine Roslyn coming to the table. I imagined we would just wheel her into a dark and calming room and drape a sheet over her head till it was time to leave. I start to feel dizzy again and Tal takes my hand.
“You can’t lose your shit, okay? Warren? Pops?”
“No,” I tell her. I can’t. I straighten up. Tal grips my hand harder.
“No nervous breakdowns until after the kiddush.”
The rest of the Karp family turns out to be just three people, which is a bit of a relief. I can handle three. That’s just: this, that, and the other. This and that are an elderly couple who look like they’re in their sixties or seventies, or white-people fifties. They are introduced as Dot and Art.
“Twins!” Dot says, and there is graveled triumph in this declaration. Victory that she’s still alive to say it, again, and Art winces, dramatically It is clearly a practiced overture, the signature opener of their repertoire. Still a crowd pleaser, even after years of being downgraded from the Broadway of youth to old age’s community theater.
“And this is my daughter, Elissa,” Dot tells me and I look to the side and there is Cindy Karp, twenty years older and back from the grave to haunt me. Same kind of eyes, same kind of hair, exactly the same kind of general disapproval I imagined on her face that last phone call. I know it’s not her, just a cousin, a co-sharer of genetic memory, but I start to sway anyway. I remember to introduce myself. I am Warren Duffy. I’m a grown man now, but I was once the callow youth who owned the penis that once poked your angelic little Cindy, no doubt dooming her. This is my lovely daughter, you know her much better than I, but without her I would be unconscious at this moment. But all I say is my name, and my great joy at meeting them. They look down to the side of me. Smiles freezing. At Roslyn, who has been pushed up to a place setting at the table. They look at Roslyn’s skull; her neck has quit its job. The head has lobbed forward, stopped only by her chin on her breastbone. All you can see of her is the curls of her hair: thick, mostly salt-and-some-pepper spirals rolling from her scalp and stopping just short of the table in front of her.
“This is my friend. Roslyn. She directs the learning center Tal is enrolled in,” I tell them when they look back at me, wondering. “Roslyn?” I ask, leaning in closer to her, smiling enough for both of us. “Roslyn?” again, yet nothing but a light moan comes back to me.
“Is she…?” Art drifts, waiting for me to complete his sentence. What he is asking I have no idea. Is she disabled? Is she my mom? Is she sick? Is she dead?
“Yes,” I tell him, then give a sad look as further answer, and both he and his sister smile knowingly and suddenly all this is normal.
“I thought you’d be blacker,” Dot tells me.
“Mom! No! You can’t say things like that. Please forgive her,” the daughter says to me. Elissa even reaches out her hand in front of me like she can shield me from her mother’s lack of tact.
“No, it’s okay. I totally expected to be blacker also. Every time I look in the mirror, it’s a shock, trust me.”
“You know I don’t mean anything racist by it,” Dot tells me, and I look deep within myself, but I don’t know that at all. Still, I’m very willing to pretend, so nod accordingly. “It’s just, I remember when Cindy said she got pregnant by a black guy, we were expecting a much darker baby, but Tal came out white. I just thought maybe she got confused: Cindy was a wild one.”
“Oh my God, please kill me,” Tal says, and with a thump her forehead hits the table as she hides her face like an ostrich. She looks like she’s doing a Roslyn impression.
“Mother, cut it out, or I’m leaving. Just stop. Just stop now.”
“My daughter thinks I’m a racist. Ever since I voted for McCain.”
“You are not a racist. So stop acting like one.”
“This is why I never had kids.” Art laughs.
“You’re gay. That’s why you didn’t have kids,” Tal mumbles into the table, but we all hear it. Oh dear. Oh my. My daughter is a h
omophobe.
“Tal!” both mother and daughter yell together. This family, they yell. Now mother and daughter are united. They look at each other silently, and the look says, The demon is back. Art gets up, asks if anyone wants anything from the kitchen, and leaves. Then, no one talks.
Dot reaches for her drink, then finally mutters, “Not true. And mean.” Elissa excuses herself to escape to the kitchen as well. On my side of the table, I’m the only one sitting upright to witness this disaster.
“My brother has always lived alone. Always has. That’s the problem with being a single man of maturity. People cast aspersions. It’s as if, despite all of the overcrowding on this planet, the environment and all that, somehow living the life of a bachelor is suspect, perverted. Now that’s racist.”
“Yes,” Art says, returning with a glass of Irv’s whiskey in hand, looking me straight in the eye. He winks at me.
“And because he chose to work in the theater. He’s just creative,” Dot adds.
“Sure,” Art, rolling his eyes at someone, agrees with her.
“I mean: even his name is Art!” Dot says, and we all laugh too hard, because we are back on script again.
—
Horseradish is hot sauce for Eastern European Jews. These guys put it on everything, even apples. When the food comes, Tal lifts her head up, acts like nothing has ever happened, and thereby joins the rest of us. I turn to Roslyn.
“It’s dinnertime,” I tell her, just to not be rude, and a miracle takes place. Roslyn’s head lifts. The hair pulls back, and that face pops back into play.
“Starved,” she says, and we’re back to single syllables, but this is still an improvement. The others look over at her, grin and nod, but keep talking, as if she only left to take a little nap, a little necessary self-indulgence, and now she’s right as rain and not reaching all the way across the table to violently yank a chunk off the challah. Roslyn says no more after that, but it’s okay because I don’t talk either, and Tal barely does, even when asked direct questions. Seeing her interacting with them, I realize how honored I am. In my presence, she has been downright gregarious in comparison. Tal catches me staring at her, and her tongue sticks out in my direction. There are bits of bread on it that look like little brown slugs and I flinch in disgust. Tal looks at her reflection in her spoon, giggles. I smile with her. Irv looks over at her, me, grins too. His face is red. He is completely lit. In a second, he’s up to get even more wine, but he leans over and whispers into my ear, “So what, I’m drunk. Tonight’s the night I got to tell my granddaughter I’m dying.”
—
I feel tipsy, decide to slow down. For my daughter. And so I can drive out of here. The door’s closed to the study and I can see it from the table and Tal went in there with Irv and after ten minutes I know she knows he’s battling cancer. I strain to listen for crying. The table is loud, though. Because they’re all drinking, too. Just a few bottles of malbec, but enough to get things lubricated. I stare at the door, and I keep one of the bottles in front of me and when the family is distracted I pour back the rest of my glass.
“This school you have Tal at, the one for all black kids, what’s that all about?” Dot asks. I don’t really hear the sentence at first, it’s background noise, something I have to go back and decipher once I realize it’s aimed at me.
“It’s a special program for biracial children.”
“Black, kinda black, black-ish—you know what I’m talking about.”
“Mother, please. I will leave. You’re being a boor.”
“No, you always say I treat you like a child—you love saying that—well don’t treat me as one. We’re all adults. We’re all adults here. This is an adult conversation. We’re all supposed to be ‘post-racial’ now, right? Everyone’s saying we have to be ‘post-racial.’ It’s segregation. I don’t know why Tal couldn’t just go to Kadima like Cindy and you did.”
“ ‘A school for open Jews who want their children to have it all.’ ” It comes from Roslyn, who’s looking up at Dot. Dot stares back, speechless. I can’t tell what she’s more surprised about: what Roslyn said, that she’s not mentally impaired, or that she’s even talking.
Roslyn looks fine now. Groggy, but fine. I have not killed her. So there’s that.
“That’s offensive,” Dot says, and I agree with her. I would say I agree with her, but my mortification has moved me past verbal expression.
“That’s the motto, Mom.” Elissa smacks her own head. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a real person do that.
“Class of ’74,” Roslyn tells them. “I did all thirteen years at Kadima. Well, twelve really, I did my junior year abroad at Kibbutz Lotan, in the Arava Valley. That’s where the concept for the Mélange Center comes from: a holistic community of outreach, a society of ideals, a home for the wanderers. What I set out to do was give mixed-raced people that same vision my faith gave me.” Roslyn keeps going. She is just starting, and she’s already going. There’s a speech coming; this is the preamble.
A text message that appears on my phone says, Come to the door.
I go to the door Irv closed. I try to open it again, do so as loudly as I can, but nothing follows. So I knock. Tal opens it. She’s been crying. She knows. Past her, I see Irv sitting on the edge of a made bed, head in hands.
“Never mind. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? I’m here. I’m here for you. You know that, right?”
“I’m going to spend the weekend here,” she says, staring off. Then, looking back at my eyes again. “I mean, I want to spend the weekend here. I need to. With Irv. Is that okay?” my daughter asks me, and of course it is.
When I come back to the table, the wheelchair is empty. Roslyn is standing. Roslyn is talking with Elissa; Dot leans in too. Art sits on a chair in front of them, legs folded, taking it in.
“We create our communities, our identities, but we do it by maintaining our heritage,” and Roslyn makes it sound like something she has never said before, like she’s just thinking it up on the fly. I wait, listen to the whole spiel one more time, just like I listened to it at the campfire days before. After a while, Roslyn pauses for air, and I lean in to tell her it’s time to go.
Goodnight, Pops, my phone’s display tells me. I look back at Irv’s door, it’s closed again. I want to text her that I love her. Because I do. But I haven’t told her this truth to her face, and a text is no way to begin.
I take the wheelchair out to the car, then come back for Roslyn, who’s still going. She ends with, “As Rabbi Hillel said, ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?’ ”
The first contribution comes from Elissa. It’s written out leaning the checkbook high against the wall, and with a look to her mother as soon as she puts it in Roslyn’s hand in exchange for thank-yous. The older lady follows.
“I gave McCain and Romney less than this, combined. Am I absolved now?” Dot asks her daughter as she writes out her check as she presses it vertically on the armoire.
Roslyn looks at the donation amount and says, “I believe you are.”
I drive Roslyn back to my house, where she says her car is parked. Down Kelly Drive, through the woods, windows open to wake me up. She plays with the radio, sings along to some oldies I’ve never heard before, turning it up loud enough that we don’t have to talk. Around us, the trees of Fairmount Park, the snake of Lincoln Drive, as we go through the forest that brings us to Germantown. I want the night to be over. The whole night, from the alarm to this moment, all of it needs to be over.
It isn’t until after I drive the Beetle up the hill toward the garage and turn off the engine, that Roslyn says anything to me. And that’s after I go to open my car door but she doesn’t, and I’m forced to ask her why.
“Where’s your ride?” I ask, and she points to an old hatchback on the street. She didn’t say anything when I drove past it. Still, she makes no move to get out.
�
��You want me to drive you back over there.”
“No. I want you to give me the Taser.”
“What?” I ask, but I know what. I start laughing. Roslyn laughs too. But then she stops, and waits for an answer, and I realize she’s serious. And suddenly this isn’t funny anymore.
“Come on, Warren. You were a bad boy; you have to face the punishment. Families have rules. I have my dignity to consider. It’s going to hurt me to do it, but now I have to Tase you, then we’re even. You have it on you, don’t you?”
“Yeah, right. Listen, I’m so sorry about before. I thought you were a burglar.”
“I’m not,” Roslyn says. “And you shouldn’t have done that; it was very naughty. Now hand it over.”
The Taser’s in my pocket. It has been all night. Roslyn knows this; she’s looking right at it. Its bright yellow plastic handle is hanging out. She could just reach in and take it if she wanted. But she doesn’t. She wants me to hand it to her. She wants me to go out back and pick my own switch for my whupping. But she’s not my mother. I don’t know who she is, really, beyond someone who wants something.
“Give it to me, Warren. If you want to continue at Mélange,” Roslyn orders, and I, too exhausted to argue, give it to her.
Roslyn inspects it for a moment. She holds it out to the window, says “Pow,” smiling. Her other hand goes to the rearview mirror, angling to herself. She holds it straight up beside her head, squinting into the reflection of her own action-hero pose. Then she turns it on.
