Potatoes Are Cheaper

by Max Shulman

  But then to my big surprise all of a sudden God took a hand, or at least one of His partners did. What happened was I was standing at the Fine Arts Theatre taking tickets one night when who should walk into the lobby but none other than Sister Mary Frances of all people! Well, this startled me, you can be sure, because we were showing Ecstasy tonight which is pretty hot stuff, especially for nuns. There’s one scene—a little bit out of focus, it’s true—but Hedy Laman’s ass is buck naked, no question.

  “Hello, Sister,” I said to Sister Mary Frances. “I think you got the wrong night. Sign of the Cross starts Friday.”

  “I’ve not come for the pictures, you ninny,” she said. “’Tis you I’ve been trackin’ down all day.”

  “What for?” I said.

  “Can we go some place and talk?” she said.

  “I can’t leave my post,” I said.

  “Ask that young man there to take over for a minute,” she said.

  “He can’t leave the popcorn machine,” I said.

  “Not even for a minute?” she said.

  “Listen,” I said, “Mr. Zimmerman once fired a guy for bending down to tie his shoe.”

  “Very well, we’ll talk right here,” she said. “It’s about Bridget.”

  “Oh, my God!” I hollered. “Something happened to her?”

  “You still love her then?” said Sister Mary Frances.

  “Does Heinz still make pickles?” I said.

  “Then you must get her back,” she said.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, I’m quite aware you don’t know how to write poems,” she said. “But write one anyhow. I don’t mean a jape like that last abomination you tried. Don’t steal this time, Morris. Write your own abomination. I assure you, it won’t matter how wretched.”

  “For your information,” I said, getting my dander up a little bit, “it so happens that I have recently finished a new poem which in my opinion is one of the real, true greats.”

  “Oh, bushwa!” she said. “But as I say, it won’t matter. Bridget knows nothin’ about poetry, the sweet little addlepate.”

  “She don’t?” I said.

  “Never has,” said Sister Mary Frances. “Oh, sure, her head’s full of it, but she likes it all, the dear dolt—Henley, Joaquin Miller, Edgar Guest, even that Jezebel, Edna Millay. You’ve nothin’ to worry about, Morris. Give her your dreary poem.”

  “Listen,” I said, “how come you’re so hot to get me and Bridget back together?”

  “Because she’s publishing the banns next Sunday,” she said.

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” I said. “What does it mean?”

  “She’s announcing her engagement to Bruce Albright,” she said.

  “Oh, no!” I hollered.

  “You can’t let her do it,” said Sister Mary Frances, grabbing my sleeve. “She doesn’t love Bruce and never will.”

  “So what’s she banning him for?” I said.

  “Because she hasn’t the strength left to resist,” she said. “She’s faint with love of you and sick with the futility of it. Give her your poem, my son.”

  “I wish I could,” I said.

  “Why can’t you, for pity’s sake?” she said.

  “It’s too hard to exp—” I started to say but then I stopped dead. Because at this very moment, who should be walking into the outer lobby but A. M. Zimmerman himself! That’s all I needed—Zimmerman should find out about me and Bridget!

  “Good evening, Mr. Zimmerman,” I said.

  “Never mind good evening,” he said. “How long has this nun been hanging around?”

  “Just a couple minutes,” I said.

  “Enough already,” he said. “Sister, here’s a quarter and good-by.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. “I’ll put it in our Angelus bell repair fund.”

  “I don’t care if you put it in your wimple,” he said. “But scram, will you? It’s terrible for business, nuns mooching in the lobby.”

  “Directly, sir, directly,” she said.

  “Morris,” he said, “did you get the urinal unplugged?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was a teddy bear.”

  “Fucking kiddie matinees,” he said. “Excuse my French, Sister, but what are you hanging around for? Do I hang around the convent?”

  “I’ll be goin’, sir, and ever so gladly, but first I’ll conclude my business,” she said.

  “What kind of business you got with Morris?” he said.

  “The Angelus bell repair fund,” I said.

  “From him you want money?” he said. “That’s rich.”

  “So when you gonna give me a raise?” I said.

  “The twenty-third of Never,” he said. “How’s the house tonight?”

  “Packed,” I said.

  “It better be,” he said. “You know how much I took in here last night? Eleven dollars!”

  “So who told you to book Bobby Breen in Hawaii Calls?” I said.

  “You’re right,” he said. “How drunk is the projectionist?”

  “Staggering a little bit,” I said, “but he got the reels in the right order this time.”

  “Fucking unions,” he said. “Excuse me, Sister. You still hanging around? Well, I’m not. Good-by. Turn down the thermostat, Morris. I’m not running no Turkish bath here.”

  “Okay,” I said and pushed the thermostat down from sixty-two to fifty-eight while Zimmerman went off to cheer up some more employees.

  Sister Mary Frances stood there looking after Zimmerman and crossing herself, fifty or sixty times maybe, and then she turned back to me. “If I happen to hear of another job, Morris, I’ll keep you in mind,” she said.

  “I’d appreciate,” I said.

  “Now then, about Bridget,” she said. “You must give her your poem, my son.”

  “I can’t, I tell you,” I said.

  “You must!” she hollered. “It’s God’s will! A romance this inscrutable could be nothin’ else.”

  “God, schmod,” I said. “I need money.”

  “Oh, my poor Bridget fallen among Hebrews!” she hollered.

  “What are you hollering?” I said. “You’re so anxious to get me back with Bridget? Okay, lend me some money.”

  “Me?” she said. “I’ve taken a vow of poverty.”

  “That was a crazy thing to do,” I said. “How about the rest of your outfit?”

  “Everybody,” she said.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, giving her a nudge. “Somebody over there must have a few bucks squirreled away.”

  “Morris,” she said, “speaking as treasuress, I can assure you that our entire liquidity consists of one hundred and fifty-eight dollars painfully mooched coin by coin to repair the Angelus bell.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, getting excited. Because all of a sudden I saw a way out. Two hundred dollars I needed. Twenty I already saved up. If I could get another 158 from the nun, I’d only be shy 22, and that much I could save in eleven more weeks. Ma could live that long probably.

  Of course, she might topple over dead when I told her about Bridget, but that didn’t seem too likely. Jewish mothers do very little actual dying from shicksas. A lots of hemorrhaging, of course. But actual dying is seldom.

  And besides, I wouldn’t tell Ma about Bridget till after I got rid of Nettie and Gittel. That ought to make it go down a little easier. So wasn’t it worth a gamble? Celeste was up the spout anyways, that was clear, so why shouldn’t I have a little happiness at least from the girl I loved and adored, Bridget?

  “Sister,” I said to Sister Mary Frances, “tell you what I’m gonna do. Lend me the 158 and I’ll take Bridget back.”

  “I certainly will not!” she said. “The very idea!”

  “Okay, okay, don’t lend it to me,” I said. “Some day I hope you’ll tell Bridget you loved a bell better than her.”

  “Oh, you devil,” said Sister Mary Frances. Then she thought for a while, yanking her beads and pacing b
ack and forth in her Ground Grippers. “All right,” she said at last, “God forgive me but I’m goin’ to do it.”

  “Now you’re talking,” I said. “How soon can I have the money?”

  “As soon as you publish your banns with Bridget,” she said.

  “Couldn’t I have it a little sooner?” I said.

  “Not one second sooner, you deicide,” she said.

  “Well, okay,” I said, and a few hours later after giving Celeste her nightly diddle, I went home to dig out my great translation of Itzik Fishel’s Esther Resnick, American from the drawer where I hid it. Naturally it wasn’t there. Since Nettie and Gittel, nothing was ever where you hid it. In the last week alone Pa’s tallis and Libbie’s diaphragm had both disappeared.

  But I got a good memory as it happens, so I was able to recall the entire poem. I wrote it down and the first thing next morning I brought it to Bridget.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I’m not going to stall around and keep you in suspense. I’ll tell you right away that Bridget loved the new poem.

  Did she love it because it was true what Sister Mary Frances said: that Bridget wouldn’t know a good poem if it bit her in the ass? Or did she love it because it happened to be one of the real true greats? Well, you know what I think but don’t let that influence you. Here’s the poem and you make up your own mind. I’m confident you’ll come to a fair decision, no matter what snotty remarks you might have heard from nuns.

  ESTHER RESNICK, AMERICAN

  Last night a girl aged sixteen years,

  Named Esther Resnick, not J. P. Morgan,

  Took out her pair of pinking shears,

  And plunged them through a vital organ.

  Why did this lassie die so young?

  Why lays she now in death’s cold rigor,

  With her eyes-a-glazed and her fair pink tongue,

  A-turning black and a-getting bigger?

  She was just an innocent immigrant maid,

  Who came from Poland, shy and green,

  And found a job in the garment trade,

  By the menswear factory of Meyer Levine.

  Levine was a typical capitalist swine,

  If you joined the union, he gave you the boot,

  If you went to the toilet, he docked you a dime,

  If you died, he repossessed your suit.

  Poor Esther slaved in his cutting room,

  Toiling long hours and sweating quarts,

  Yet who can tell where love will bloom?

  ’Twas here she met young Irving Schwartz.

  Irving worked across the table,

  To a cutter he was apprenticed,

  An ambitious lad and very able,

  He studied nights to be a dentist.

  But it wasn’t to be, this tender romance,

  For Meyer Levine like a typical boss,

  One day called in Esther, unbuttoned his pants,

  And told her, “You’re fired if you don’t come across.”

  “Oh, no!” she shrieked. “I am marrying soon!

  Don’t make me unfit to wear a white dress!

  The wedding is set for the twelfth of June,

  When Irving is getting his D.D.S.”

  She fell on her knees and begged for her virtue,

  But Levine, he only gave a shrug.

  “Come on,” he said, “it wouldn’t hurt you.”

  And he wreaked his will on the office rug.

  Well, that’s how it is in the U.S.A.

  A working girl don’t find gold in the street.

  Disgrace she finds and a twelve-hour day,

  And the boss on her belly if she wants to eat.

  So Esther that night her quietus made,

  Who never knew joy or anything near it.

  Tomorrow her last remains get laid.

  Rest, Esther. Rest, perturbèd spirit.

  So comrades from the garment trade,

  Learn something from this grim charade:

  Don’t ever trust a boss’s promise,

  And next time vote for Norman Thomas.

  “Oh, Morris, it’s a marvelous poem!” hollered Bridget. “But it is more than just a poem. It is the wild keening of an outraged heart. How wise you were not to polish.”

  “Thanks,” I said, giving a modest smile.

  “How apt, this clumsiness!” she said. “How deeply, deeply human!”

  “I try my best, is all,” I said.

  “I do hope you’ll write some more in this gauche new vein,” she said.

  “Sure thing,” I said. “Every Sunday if you want.”

  “Oh, Morris, Morris!” she said. “To think I ever doubted you!”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We all make mistakes.”

  “How Jewish of you to forgive,” she said.

  “When you gonna dump Bruce Albright?” I said.

  “As soon as you say you’ll have me back,” she said.

  “I’ll have you back,” I said.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “And I love you,” I said and gave her a kiss right in the L’Etoile du Nord.

  “Not here, sweet eaglet,” she said. “Someone might see.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Us!” hollered Lance Berman and Claude Applebaum who were up in the transom giggling.

  “Let’s wait till tonight, dear Morris,” said Bridget.

  “Well, here’s the thing,” I said. “I’m working nights at the theater, so for a while I’m afraid I can only see you in the daytime.”

  “Not for long, I hope,” she said.

  “Not too,” I said. “Just eleven weeks.”

  “Oh, Morris,” she hollered, “it is just as I feared! You have stopped loving me, haven’t you?”

  “I love you, I love you,” I said. “Keep your shirt on.”

  “Oh, thank God!” she said and gave me another kiss, but naturally not much of a one with Lance and Claude snickering in the transom.

  “Let’s go someplace where we can be alone,” I said.

  “Gladly, dear minstrel,” she said.

  So we went out and started looking. But where can you find privacy in the daytime? I mean real privacy—somewheres I could hold Bridget and kiss her and smell her hair again. And also—I’m going to level with you—to do intercourse on her if she seemed willing, which I felt sure she’d seem. Because I’d made up my mind not to be a schmuck like I was the last time—letting Bridget get away because I was waiting for the perfect time and place to do it. I’d learned my lesson, believe me: when it comes to humping, the perfect time is now and the perfect place is the nearest flat surface.

  But, as I say, where can you do it in the daytime where you won’t get arrested? The River Bank was definitely out and so was the stadium. A hotel room would have been fine of course, if I had the money which I didn’t. Or if I could have borrowed a car I might have found a culvert or somewheres safe to park, but who’d lend me a car? Not Celeste, you can be sure, and not my cousin Albert either because he was driving around looking for work all day. He wasn’t in school any more. When Aunt Lena found out about the fur coat, she dis-enrolled him the very next day so she could get his tuition back—which, incidentally, was far from easy. The bursar told Aunt Lena there were positively no refunds after six weeks, but she stood in front of his window screaming, “Antisemite!” till he finally broke down. Three and a half days it took, and the money finally came out of the bursar’s own pocket, the poor bastard.

  Incidentally, while I’m talking about Albert—or Mr. Tough Titty as I was starting in to call him because that’s the kind of luck he had—let me tell you the latest. Being out of school now and naturally finding no jobs, Albert decided he might as well enter some of those contests you see in the newspaper. You know: Find all the Oxydol boxes concealed in this picture and then complete this sentence in twenty-five words or less: I like Oxydol because …

  Well, you know what kind of thoroughness Albert got. He didn’t just enter some contests; he entered
every one on every page of the paper, even the ones on the kiddies page, so wouldn’t you know it? That’s what he finally won: a kiddie contest. I hate to tell you the prize: a Shetland pony. Alive, I mean.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll sell it,” he told Aunt Lena. So he went out and tried and he learned something: if there’s one item that nobody in the whole St. Paul wants including the humane society, it’s a Shetland pony. And it wasn’t even kosher so you could eat it.

  So Albert put it the only place he could—down the cellar—and Aunt Lena had another topic to scream about besides the fur coat. Also the horse wasn’t too happy in the cellar so he kicked over the furnace, and now the whole family was going around the house in overcoats. You see what I mean about Mr. Tough Titty?

  But back to Bridget, we wandered around campus looking for places to be private but there weren’t any. So finally I let her shlep me into the University museum. It was that or freeze to death.

  I almost wished I’d chose freezing. Not only did the museum have guards in every room to prevent grabass, but also there was an exhibit of somebody called Chagall who paints very Jewish so naturally Bridget went off her noodle from happiness. I thought sure she was going to break into a hora any minute. But she didn’t. All she did was keep hollering stuff like “Such merry pathos!” and “Such pathetic merriment!”

  “You bet,” I kept answering but frankly by me pictures of flying rabbis is no way to kill an afternoon.

  So I had plenty pathos myself when I brought Bridget back to her dorm around five-thirty. “Would you like to sit in the lobby and talk for a while?” she said.

  “No,” I said because this happened to be the one activity I wasn’t too crazy about doing with Bridget: talking. “I don’t suppose I could come up to your room for a minute,” I said.

  “You don’t suppose correct, buster,” said the house mother.

  “Good night, Morris. I love you,” said Bridget, holding Vachel Lindsay’s Song Bag in front of her face so the house mother couldn’t lip-read.

  “I love you too,” I said which I certainly did, even if this reunion so far was a real glass of shit.

  “Good night, my eaglet,” she said.