by Peter Orner
Milt, after who knows how many scotch and sodas, rises from his chair, glass raised, and Walt says, “What are you, the Statue of Liberty? Siddown, Milton.”
But Pearl shouts, “No, no, you gotta hear this. He’s been working on it, practicing in the mirror and everything.”
And Milt raises his glass even higher, as if he’s standing on his tiptoes, and begins to intone, “To Sarah and Walt Kaplan on the occasion of their thirty-fifth anniversary, I do humbly—”
“Oh, knock it off, Milt, siddown!”
But Sarah, swallowing lobster, says, “Let him say it, Walt, he’s been practicing.”
“As I say,” Milt continues, “humbly wish to go back into the not-so-distant past to say that if my dearly deceased father could see me now in the company I keep—”
“Oh, for Christ with the humbly—”
“My father who fled the czar’s conscription in 1888 wearing nothing but a jockstrap—”
“Siddown, Milt!”
“—was to imagine in his wildest dreams that his only begotten son would be sitting in a four-star establishment eating shellfish of all forbidden fruits barred to the chosen—”
“For the love of God—”
“Wait,” Pearl says, “the Gang Plank only has three stars, if that. It’s not like it’s the Venus de Milo in Swansea. And isn’t this supposed to be about Sarah and Walt?”
“Would you shaddup, Pearl? Would you? I’m getting there, I’m getting there, I’m getting there, I believe that my father would be less shocked by his son’s material wealth”—the only thing Milt loves more than the sound of his own voice, Walt thinks, is the silence of other people while they’re listening to that voice—“than by the quality of his comrades around the table, the flaunting of archaic dietary laws notwithstanding. Indeed, yes! What would have amazed my little pushcart-pushing father the most? you ask. Friendship! I propose that America’s greatest gift to the Jews was not merely the opportunity to make a killing, noble pursuit that it is (I sell cardboard boxes, and I’m a merchant prince?), but time! Time itself! Leisure time, if you will, to pursue, in peace, without fear, friendship, in this case with two of the finest, noblest, kindest, generousest, er, generousistic—”
“All right,” Walt says, “all right already, please, all right.”
And to Walt’s surprise, Milt, red faced and exhausted, sits.
Pearl applauds. “You may now kiss the bride,” she says.
But it’s Sarah who leans over and slops a buttery kiss on Walt’s cheek. Walt pops another fried clam in his mouth. Then Sarah’s all elbows again as she wields her clacker and squeezes a claw like she’s crushing a skull. A crack, a spurt. With her fingers she tears away a bit of shell and pulls out a lump of pink-and-white-speckled meat. Walt finishes off another fried clam and dips the last of a tail into the little paper cup of butter, lobster being only an excuse to imbibe guiltless quantities of melted butter, elixir of the goddesses. He calculates what all this is going to cost Milt. Friendship is friendship, but at twenty-five dollars a pop? And Walt never more by himself than when he’s surrounded by wife and friends. His cocoon of loneliness. Inside the noise, a shroud of silence. The rising din, the mayhem of the Gang Plank on a Saturday night. He’s always able to do some good thinking in a crowd.
And before them on the table: carnage. The bright, unnatural-looking red-orange shards, little hills of the green stuff, the entrails Sarah insists you can eat, that they’re full of nutrients. Demonstrates by gobbling. (Pearl said, “But isn’t that babies?”) Only human beings could make a party out of boiling a few fellow creatures alive and then cracking their backs open.
Now Pearl’s saying they’re saying saccharin causes cancer and the government’s going to ban it. “Did you all read that? Walt must have read it. Walt reads everything.”
“What doesn’t cause cancer?” Milt shouts. “Tomorrow it will be twiddling our thumbs. Day after that, no blow jobs.”
“You’ll be safe!” Pearl claps.
Milt pleads to Sarah and Walt. “It’s true, I haven’t had head since Eisenhower.”
“Ford, dear. Ford,” Pearl says. “Just after Nixon’s resignation. To celebrate. But if you think you’re getting a blow job during Carter, forget about it.”
“I voted for Nixon twice,” Milt says. “I’d do it again tomorrow.”
“Walt, on the other hand,” Sarah elbows. “Walt enjoys his fair share—Walt? You here, Walt?”
“I voted for Hubert,” Walt says.
“Think about it,” Pearl says. “All the skinny women in the entire country are going to be hoarding the stuff like gold.”
“A black market,” Milt says. “Good business opportunity right there, Walt. Then you wouldn’t have to ‘aye aye, sir’ Irv Pincus anymore—”
“Shush,” Pearl says.
Sarah elbows Walt again. “There’s a lot of meat in the feelers.”
“In the what?”
Sarah holds up a thin, hairy lobster leg. “The feelers!”
“That’s a leg, Sarah.”
“Fish need legs like I need fins. You suck the meat out like this.”
“Enough with all the sucking,” Milt says. “You want to torture a guy?”
“Crustaceans,” Walt says. “Lobsters are crustaceans.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re not fish,” Sarah says.
“I don’t get it,” Pearl says.
“Walt’s educating us,” Milt says. “Walt’s a scholar of life. He thinks us philistines don’t know lobsters are crustaceans.”
“I just don’t like the taste,” Pearl says. “I want to eat chemicals, I’ll drink Drano.”
“What chemicals?”
“Saccharin!”
“She’s back to saccharin!” Milt says. “So don’t eat it, hoard it.”
If I’m anything, Walt thinks, I’m a scholar of death. “The old rabbis,” he says, “thought shellfish were bottom-feeders, the pigs of the ocean, which shows what they understand about the cyclical nature—”
“See what I mean? The man’s a professor. You missed your calling, Walt. Could have spent your life stuffing wisdom into unwitting ears like your brother, Arthur. Think of the pension—”
“Didn’t Itchy Burman drink Drano?” Sarah says.
“Honey Burman’s brother?” Walt says. “Sold insurance? Moved to New Bedford? Used to come into the store and scoff at the prices? That Itchy? He drank Drano? The guy seemed so sure of how much everything should cost. He must have taken a Ward’s catalog and calculated—”
“Honey and Itchy, are those real names?” Pearl says.
“How many Itchys do you know?” Sarah says. “Calculated what?”
“Wasn’t there an Itchy Rosenberg at Brown Elementary?” Milt says.
“There was,” Walt says. “What happened to Itchy Rosenberg?”
“No idea,” Milt says. “Didn’t go to Durfee High. We’d know it if he went to Durfee, wouldn’t we?”
“At least there’s a point to Drano,” Pearl says. “Trying to scald your insides or whatever. I just don’t see the point of saccharin. It’s fake for the sake of fake.”
“Except that it causes cancer.”
“Good point.”
Itchy Rosenberg. Walt remembers the kid used to walk on his hands. He’d wave at everyone with his feet and walk from school all the way to Robeson Street on his hands. The people we knew once as kids, where do they disappear? Two Itchys. Isn’t it amazing, in a single lifetime, one man can know two Itchys? One was a skinflint who drank Drano, the other waltzed on his hands and then vanished? If God were ever called upon to explain himself, what the hell would he say? Behold, I am the creator of uncountable forgettable souls. Nonetheless! Some of them will carry immortal nicknames into oblivion.
Walt looks out the big plate-glass windows of the Gang Plank, or tries to. Because of all the light, he can’t get past his own reflection and the reflections of the other diners. But they don’t call it the Gang Plank for noth
ing. The restaurant stretches narrow out into Mount Hope Bay. Sooner or later a hurricane will carry the place away. For the moment, there’s money to be made. He thinks of the cold, dark water of the bay. How he’d craved it, or convinced himself that he craved it. To be or not to be isn’t the question. Did he want it, or did he only want to want it? How can you tell the difference? Ay, there’s the rub. His mother used to say, Walt, you don’t know yourself coming or going. Always chasing your tail. One question asks another and another and another. But some questions have answers. You hear me, Walter? Some questions don’t need another question.
“‘Crustacean’ is, of course, the proper term,” Milt says. “‘Shellfish’ is a colloquialism, but Walt always feels the need to light the way. You see, Walt’s a ponderer, he thinks deeply about deep things, he’s like that statue we saw in Paris, the naked guy who pondered himself into a pretzel—”
“Milt,” Pearl says quietly. “Wait.” And there’s something different about her voice, something out of the flow of talk, less hyena, less stupid. Her real voice, the voice she must use in the bedroom, in the morning, before they shove the curtains open.
“What is it?” Milt says.
“Your face,” she says even more quietly. “Blood. Blood’s pouring—”
And it is, and Milt puts his hand up to his nose. “Nosebleed,” he says. “You know I sometimes get—”
“Not in public,” Pearl says. “Here.” She tries to hand Milt her soiled napkin. And it’s hard to say exactly, but there’s something off-kilter. Maybe they’ve all had too much to drink, especially Milt. He refuses to take the napkin and looks at his wife with his bloody face. The blood looks almost blackish in the light, and it’s draining out of his nostrils, down his lips, off his chin.
“Milt, please.”
Sarah’s pressing her heel down into Walt’s shoe.
Do something about it.
What do you want me to do about it? He doesn’t want a napkin, he doesn’t want to cover it up, he wants—
Something between Milt and Pearl. Who knows what? Something buried rising? If we’re mysteries to ourselves, how can we possibly know other people? As if he wants her to look at him now, here, in public. Sometimes the blood just has to flow? This won’t, Walt knows, be one of those stories they tell. Remember that time Milt’s nose bled at the Gang Plank? Pearl tried to give him a napkin, but he wouldn’t take it. No. They’ll remember it, but they won’t tell it. Why not? The color of an old friend’s blood is that shocking?
Yeah.
“Milt, your face.”
“Itchy Rosenberg walked on his hands,” Walt says. “Do you remember?”
“He did!” Milt shouts, his nose still pouring forth, a little geyser, the tablecloth like a crime scene. “I do remember. Amazing, that kid could walk for blocks!”
5
Garbage Day
Oh sweet smell of Monday in a Fall River August, after the garbage crews have torn through like marauders, dumped their hauls, and heaved the corrugated-steel trash cans back into the street so that they roll to the edge of the curb, where they lie like scattered souls. That smell, putrid, syrupy rot, fermenting in the bottom of the cans, how greedy Walt is to inhale it. He stops the Lincoln in the middle of the street and gets out and huffs it up, the odor of his city, like smelling your own armpits, there’s pride there, a private pride, but pride…
6
The Jaffe Girl
Earlier that night, as they were leaving the service, Walt had watched Sarah say a few words to the mother, Lorraine Jaffe. This was in September. It seemed to Walt that as each month went by, every year, worse and worse things happened. Stupid. Where to start? How far back? How long ago was the Inquisition? Bad few years right there. Impossible to say that, even in its most terrible moments, this abominable century has been a worse time to be a human being than any other. And yet maybe there was something to be said for the notion that the horror was creeping ever closer to his own street, his own doorstep, his own wilted geraniums in their sun-bleached orange pots. A sixteen-year-old girl he and Sarah both knew found strangled in the woods behind Kennedy Park? Nero, Attila the Hun, Isabella and Ferdinand (were those the bad ones or the couple that was chummy with Columbus?), Hitler, this loony tune Pol Pot who’d pluck your eyes out for wearing sunglasses—with these characters you knew where things stood. But rape and murder and pillage under the reign of Jimmy Carter? It just didn’t add up.
Every once in a while, if they’d seen all the movies that were on at the mall in Seekonk, Sarah and Walt would attend Friday-night services as a social occasion. Sarah wasn’t especially devout, but she appreciated the ritual of gathering among people she’d always known, even if half of them she no longer spoke to. Walt complained coming and going. It’s smoke and mirrors without the smoke and mirrors. But he, too, felt at ease at Beth El. They were Jews like they wore shoes or overate at lunch. They stood whenever everybody else stood and sat down when everybody else sat down. Walt couldn’t deny that there was a certain military mindlessness to it that wasn’t entirely unpleasurable. He’d sit and gaze up at the tall stained-glass windows that depicted the twelve tribes of Israel. Let’s see, we’ve got the Levis, nice folks, aren’t they in the carpet business? And oh yes, the Dan clan. Husband’s all right, it’s the wife you got to watch out for. Woman sold me a camel lame in the foreleg, had to leave him to die in Smyrna. And Walt also couldn’t deny, either, that the sanctuary itself was stately, if now too grand a scale for a vanishing congregation. The only Jews who stayed in Fall River were the ones who’d died and the ones waiting for the opportunity. And this particular Friday night, Rabbi Ruderman had spent forty-five minutes hectoring the few people who’d shown up about those who hadn’t. Those of our members who choose shallow entertainments over the perpetuation of their own culture…Walt had cupped his hand over Sarah’s ear, and said, “See? Told you we should have seen Silver Streak a third time.”
Now home, in their room, Walt wants to know what Sarah had said to Lorraine Jaffe. Sarah’s sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over, pulling off a heel. She stays like that for a moment, frozen in the act of pulling, and looks at him. Walt’s standing beside the bed loosening his belt.
“What did I say?” Sarah says. “What could anybody? I said I’m sorry.”
“You said more than that,” Walt says. “I saw your lips move more than sorry. How long’s it been?”
“About three weeks.”
“Her face looked like it just happened.”
“I would think,” Sarah says. “Wouldn’t you think? That over and over, it would just keep happening. That first moment you heard?”
Sarah returns to the battle with her shoe, wins, and tosses the heel through the open closet door and out of her life forever. Never again will those shoes meet these feet. She stands, yanks her dress over her head, and examines her girdle-clad self in the mirror screwed to the back of the closet door.
“I can hardly be contained,” she says.
“I’ll contain you,” Walt says. “Come here.”
“I said, ‘I can’t imagine.’ I said, ‘Lorraine, I can’t even begin to imagine.’”
Walt lets fall his pants and tosses his belt toward the corner chair, misses. Once again, the two of them in their little bedroom. The AC’s been fixed, but they turn the unit on only just before they go to sleep. Save a few bucks. And anyway at this point in early September the humidity’s so thick their sweat is another layer of skin. They hardly notice it anymore. They could undress in separate rooms now that Miriam’s in Chicago and has been for nearly twenty years, hard to believe, but they’ve never spread out to her room. Here they huddle, night after night. The overhead light’s off. Only the lamp beside Sarah’s bed is on. The familiar yellow-brown burlap light. As if they’re in a cave. There’s not enough room on the walls for their shadows. Hardly recognizable blobular shapes hulk down from the ceiling.
“But you can,” Walt says. “You can imagine.”
&
nbsp; “It was something to say.”
“You think Miriam never went in the woods with a boy she hardly knew?”
“More than once with that Fradkin.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“What?” Sarah says. “What are you saying?”
“That we’re always dodging bullets.”
“How many times can we have this conversation, Walt? Wake up in the morning, you’re dodging bullets. Go to sleep, dodging bullets. Walk down the street—” She stops, unfastens her clasps. “I almost look better without all the armor.”
“Why didn’t he just—?” Walt says. “Why’d he have to—?”
Sarah turns to face him, and Walt, in spite of himself, can’t help but think, Breasts, what strange, exquisite gifts bestowed to a wholly unworthy malekind.
“You mean why spoil a good time by choking her to death?”
Sarah grabs a nightdress off a hook in the closet, pulls it over her head, and once again faces the mirror. Walt unbuttons his shirt. We put on, we take off. We button, we unbutton. On, un, on, un.
“Now I look like a curtain.”
“I guess I do mean that,” Walt says. “Yes. Exactly, why spoil—”
“It must have gone hand in hand,” Sarah says. “He must not have wanted the one without the other. Also—”
