Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

  In 1950, just seventeen, and Newark two and a half months behind me (well, not exactly “behind”: in the mornings I awake in the dormitory baffled by the unfamiliar blanket in my hand, and the disappearance of one of “my” windows; oppressed and distraught for minutes on end by this unanticipated transformation given my bedroom by my mother)—I perform the most openly defiant act of my life: instead of going home for my first college vacation, I travel by train to Iowa, to spend Thanksgiving with The Pumpkin and her parents. Till September I had never been farther west than Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey—now I am off to Ioway! And with a blondie! Of the Christian religion! Who is more stunned by this desertion, my family or me? What daring! Or was I no more daring than a sleepwalker?

  The white clapboard house in which The Pumpkin had grown up might have been the Taj Mahal for the emotions it released in me. Balboa, maybe, knows what I felt upon first glimpsing the swing tied up to the ceiling of the front porch. She was raised in this house. The girl who has let me undo her brassiere and dry-hump her at the dormitory door, grew up in this white house. Behind those goyische curtains! Look, shutters!

  “Daddy, Mother,” says The Pumpkin, when we disembark at the Davenport train station, “this is the weekend guest, this is the friend from school whom I wrote you about—”

  I am something called “a weekend guest”? I am something called “a friend from school”? What tongue is she speaking? I am “the bonditt,” “the vantz,” I am the insurance man’s son. I am Warshaw’s ambassador! “How do you do, Alex?” To which of course I reply, “Thank you.” Whatever anybody says to me during my first twenty-four hours in Iowa, I answer, “Thank you.” Even to inanimate objects. I walk into a chair, promptly I say to it, “Excuse me, thank you.” I drop my napkin on the floor, lean down, flushing, to pick it up, “Thank you,” I hear myself saying to the napkin—or is it the floor I’m addressing? Would my mother be proud of her little gentleman! Polite even to the furniture!

  Then there’s an expression in English, “Good morning,” or so I have been told; the phrase has never been of any particular use to me. Why should it have been? At breakfast at home I am in fact known to the other boarders as “Mr. Sourball,” and “The Crab.” But suddenly, here in Iowa, in imitation of the local inhabitants, I am transformed into a veritable geyser of good mornings. That’s all anybody around that place knows how to say—they feel the sunshine on their faces, and it just sets off some sort of chemical reaction: Good morning! Good morning! Good morning! sung to half a dozen different tunes! Next they all start asking each other if they had “a good night’s sleep.” And asking me! Did I have a good night’s sleep? I don’t really know, I have to think—the question comes as something of a surprise. Did I Have A Good Night’s Sleep? Why, yes! I think I did! Hey—did you? “Like a log,” replies Mr. Campbell. And for the first time in my life I experience the full force of a simile. This man, who is a real estate broker and an alderman of the Davenport town council, says that he slept like a log, and I actually see a log. I get it! Motionless, heavy, like a log! “Good morning” he says, and now it occurs to me that the word “morning,” as he uses it, refers specifically to the hours between eight A.M. and twelve noon. I’d never thought of it that way before. He wants the hours between eight and twelve to be good, which is to say, enjoyable, pleasurable, beneficial! We are all of us wishing each other four hours of pleasure and accomplishment. Why, that’s terrific! Hey, that’s very nice! Good morning! And the same applies to “Good afternoon”! And “Good evening”! And “Good night”! My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!

  Wait, I’m not finished—as if the experience of being on the inside rather than the outside of these goyische curtains isn’t overwhelming enough, as if the incredible experience of my wishing hour upon hour of pleasure to a houseful of goyim isn’t sufficient source for bewilderment, there is, to compound the ecstasy of disorientation, the name of the street upon which the Campbell house stands, the street where my girl friend grew up! skipped! skated! hop-scotched! sledded! all the while I dreamed of her existence some fifteen hundred miles away, in what they tell me is the same country. The street name? Not Xanadu, no, better even than that, oh, more preposterous by far: Elm. Elm! It is, you see, as though I have walked right through the orange celluloid station band of our old Zenith, directly into “One Man’s Family.” Elm. Where trees grow—which must be elms!

  To be truthful, I must admit that I am not able to draw such a conclusion first thing upon alighting from the Campbell car on Wednesday night: after all, it has taken me seventeen years to recognize an oak, and even there I am lost without the acorns. What I see first in a landscape isn’t the flora, believe me—it’s the fauna, the human opposition, who is screwing and who is getting screwed. Greenery I leave to the birds and the bees, they have their worries, I have mine. At home who knows the name of what grows from the pavement at the front of our house? It’s a tree—and that’s it. The kind is of no consequence, who cares what kind, just as long as it doesn’t fall down on your head. In the autumn (or is it the spring? Do you know this stuff? I’m pretty sure it’s not the winter) there drop from its branches long crescent-shaped pods containing hard little pellets. Okay. Here’s a scientific fact about our tree, comes by way of my mother, Sophie Linnaeus: If you shoot those pellets through a straw, you can take somebody’s eye out and make him blind for life. (SO NEVER DO IT! NOT EVEN IN JEST! AND IF ANYBODY DOES IT TO YOU, YOU TELL ME INSTANTLY!) And this, more or less, is the sort of botanical knowledge I am equipped with, until that Sunday afternoon when we are leaving the Campbell house for the train station, and I have my Archimedean experience: Elm Street …. then …. elm trees! How simple! I mean, you don’t need 158 points of I.Q., you don’t have to be a genius to make sense of this world. It’s really all so very simple!

  A memorable weekend in my lifetime, equivalent in human history, I would say, to mankind’s passage through the entire Stone Age. Every time Mr. Campbell called his wife “Mary,” my body temperature shot into the hundreds. There I was, eating off dishes that had been touched by the hands of a woman named Mary. (Is there a clue here as to why I so resisted calling The Monkey by her name, except to chastise her? No?) Please, I pray on the train heading west, let there be no pictures of Jesus Christ in the Campbell house. Let me get through this weekend without having to see his pathetic punim—or deal with anyone wearing a cross! When the aunts and uncles come for the Thanksgiving dinner, please, let there be no anti-Semite among them! Because if someone starts in with “the pushy Jews,” or says “kike” or “jewed him down”—Well, I’ll jew them down all right, I’ll jew their fucking teeth down their throat! No, no violence (as if I even had it in me), let them be violent, that’s their way. No, I’ll rise from my seat—and (vuh den?) make a speech! I will shame and humiliate them in their bigoted hearts! Quote the Declaration of Independence over their candied yams! Who the fuck are they, I’ll ask, to think they own Thanksgiving!

  Then at the railroad station her father says, “How do you do, young man?” and I of course answer, “Thank you.” Why is he acting so nice? Because he has been forewarned (which I don’t know whether to take as an insult or a blessing), or because he doesn’t know yet? Shall I say it then, before we even get into the car? Yes, I must! I can’t go on living a lie! “Well, it sure is nice being here in Davenport, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, what with my being Jewish and all.” Not quite ringing enough perhaps. “Well, as a friend of Kay’s, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, and a Jew, I do want to thank you for inviting me—” Stop pussyfooting! What then? Talk Yiddish? How? I’ve got twenty-five words to my name—half of them dirty, and the rest mispronounced! Shit, just shut up and get in the car. “Thank you, thank you,” I say, picking up my own bag, and we all head for the station wagon.
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  Kay and I climb into the back seat, with the dog. Kay’s dog! To whom she talks as though he’s human! Wow, she really is a goy. What a stupid thing, to talk to a dog—except Kay isn’t stupid! In fact, I think she’s smarter really than I am. And yet talks to a dog? “As far as dogs are concerned, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, we Jews by and large—” Oh, forget it. Not necessary. You are ignoring anyway (or trying awfully hard to) that eloquent appendage called your nose. Not to mention the Afro-Jewish hairpiece. Of course they know. Sorry, but there’s no escaping destiny, bubi, a man’s cartilage is his fate. But I don’t want to escape! Well, that’s nice too—because you can’t. Oh, but yes I can—if I should want to! But you said you don’t want to. But if I did!

  As soon as I enter the house I begin (on the sly, and somewhat to my own surprise) to sniff: what will the odor be like? Mashed potatoes? An old lady’s dress? Fresh cement? I sniff and I sniff, trying to catch the scent. There! is that it, is that Christianity I smell, or just the dog? Everything I see, taste, touch, I think, “Goyish!” My first morning I squeeze half an inch of Pepsodent down the drain rather than put my brush where Kay’s mother or father may have touched the bristles with which they cleanse their own goyische molars. True! The soap on the sink is bubbly with foam from somebody’s hands. Whose? Mary’s? Should I just take hold of it and begin to wash, or should I maybe run a little water over it first, just to be safe. But safe from what? Schmuck, maybe you want to get a piece of soap to wash the soap with! I tiptoe to the toilet, I peer over into the bowl: “Well, there it is, boy, a real goyische toilet bowl. The genuine article. Where your girl friend’s father drops his gentile turds. What do you think, huh? Pretty impressive.” Obsessed? Spellbound!

  Next I have to decide whether or not to line the seat. It isn’t a matter of hygiene, I’m sure the place is clean, spotless in its own particular antiseptic goy way: the question is, what if it’s warm yet from a Campbell behind—from her mother! Mary! Mother also of Jesus Christ! If only for the sake of my family, maybe I should put a little paper around the rim; it doesn’t cost anything, and who will ever know?

  I will! I will! So down I go—and it is warm! Yi, seventeen years old and I am rubbing asses with the enemy! How far I have traveled since September! By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion! And yea is right! On the can I am besieged by doubt and regret, I am suddenly languishing with all my heart for home … When my father drives out to buy “real apple cider” at the roadside farmer’s market off in Union, I won’t be with him! And how can Hannah and Morty go to the Weequahic-Hillside game Thanksgiving morning without me along to make them laugh? Jesus, I hope we win (which is to say, lose by less than 21 points). Beat Hillside, you bastards! Double U, Double E, Q U A, H I C! Bernie, Sidney, Leon, “Ushie,” come on, backfield, FIGHT!

  Aye-aye ki-ike-us,

  Nobody likes us,

  We are the boys of Weequahic High—

  Aye-aye ki-ucch-us,

  Kish mir in tuchis,

  We are the boys of Weequahic High!

  Come on—hold that line, make that point, kick ‘em in the kishkas, go team go!

  See, I’m missing my chance to be clever and quick-witted in the stands! To show off my sarcastic and mocking tongue! And after the game, missing the historical Thanksgiving meal prepared by my mother, that freckled and red-headed descendant of Polish Jews! Oh, how the blood will flow out of their faces, what a deathly silence will prevail, when she holds up the huge drumstick, and cries, “Here! For guess who!” and Guess-who is found to be AWOL! Why have I deserted my family? Maybe around the table we don’t look like a painting by Norman Rockwell, but we have a good time, too, don’t you worry! We don’t go back to the Plymouth Rock, no Indian ever brought maize to any member of our family as far as we know—but just smell that stuffing! And look, cylinders of cranberry sauce at either end of the table! And the turkey’s name, “Tom”! Why then can’t I believe I am eating my dinner in America, that America is where I am, instead of some other place to which I will one day travel, as my father and I must travel every November out to that hayseed and his wife in Union, New Jersey (the two of them in overalls), for real Thanksgiving apple cider.

  “I’m going to Iowa,” I tell them from the phone booth on my floor. “To where?” “To Davenport, Iowa.” “On your first college vacation?!” “—I know, but it’s a great opportunity, and I can’t turn it down—” “Opportunity? To do what?” “Yes, to spend Thanksgiving with this boy named Bill Campbell’s family—” “Who?” “Campbell. Like the soup. He lives in my dorm—” But they are expecting me.

  Everybody is expecting me. Morty has the tickets to the game. What am I talking opportunity? “And who is this boy all of a sudden, Campbell?” “My friend! Bill!” “But,” says my father, “the cider.” Oh my God, it’s happened, what I swore I wouldn’t permit!—I am in tears, and “cider” is the little word that does it. The man is a natural—he could go on Groucho Marx and win a fortune guessing the secret-woid. He guesses mine, every single time! And wins my jackpot of contrition! “I can’t back out, I’m sorry, I’ve accepted—we’re going!” “Going? And how, Alex—I don’t understand this plan at all,” interrupts my mother—“how are you going, if I may be so bold, and where? and in a convertible too, that too—” “NO!” “And if the highways are icy, Alex—” “We’re going, Mother, in a Sherman tank! Okay? Okay?” “Alex,” she says sternly, “I hear it in your voice, I know you’re not telling me the whole truth, you’re going to hitchhike in a convertible or some other crazy thing—two months away from home, seventeen years old, and he’s going wild!”

  Sixteen years ago I made that phone call. A little more than half the age I am now. November 1950—here, it’s tattooed on my wrist, the date of my Emancipation Proclamation. Children unborn when I first telephoned my parents to say I wasn’t coming home from college are just entering college, I suppose—only I’m still telephoning my parents to say I’m not coming home! Fighting off my family, still! What use to skip those two grades in grammar school and get such a jump on everybody else, when the result is to wind up so far behind? My early promise is legend: starring in all those grade-school plays! taking on at the age of twelve the entire DAR! Why then do I live by myself and have no children of my own? It’s no non sequitur, that question! Professionally I’m going somewhere, granted, but privately—what have I got to show for myself? Children should be playing on this earth who look like me! Why not? Why should every shtunk with a picture window and a carport have offspring, and not me? It don’t make sense! Think of it, half the race is over, and I still stand here at the starting line—me, the first one out of his swaddling clothes and into his track suit! a hundred and fifty-eight points of I.Q., and still arguing with the authorities about the rules and regulations! disputing the course to be run! calling into question the legitimacy of the track commission! Yes, “crab” is correct, Mother! “Sourball” is perfect, right on The Nose’s nose! “Mr. Conniption-Fit”—c’est moi!

  Another of these words I went through childhood thinking of as “Jewish.” Conniption. “Go ahead, have a conniption-fit,” my mother would advise. “See if it changes anything, my brilliant son.” And how I tried! How I used to hurl myself against the walls of her kitchen! Mr. Hot-Under-The Collar! Mr. Hit-The-Ceiling! Mr. Fly-Off-The-Handle! The names I earn for myself! God forbid somebody should look at you cockeyed, Alex, their life isn’t worth two cents! Mr. Always-Right-And-Never-Wrong! Grumpy From The Seven Dwarfs Is Visiting Us, Daddy. Ah, Hannah, Your Brother Surly Has Honored Us With His Presence This Evening, It’s A Pleasure To Have You, Surly. “Hi Ho Silver,” she sighs, as I rush into my bedroom to sink my fangs into the bedspread, “The Temper Tantrum Kid Rides Again.”

  Near the end of our junior year Kay missed a period, and so we began, and with a certain eager delight—and wholly without panic, interestingly—to make plans to be married. We would offer ourselves as resident baby-sitters to a young faculty coupl
e who were fond of us; in return they would give us their roomy attic to live in, and a shelf to use in their refrigerator. We would wear old clothes and eat spaghetti. Kay would write poetry about having a baby, and, she said, type term papers for extra money. We had our scholarships, what more did we need? (besides a mattress, some bricks and boards for bookshelves, Kay’s Dylan Thomas record, and in time, a crib). We thought of ourselves as adventurers.