Mother for Dinner

by Shalom Auslander

  Away.

  Mm-hmm, said Dr. Isaacson. And where did they come from?

  From the Old Country, said Seventh. My great-grandfather Julius came over when he was eighteen.

  What Old Country?

  I don’t know.

  You don’t know.

  We forgot.

  So you remember that your great-grandfather was a cannibal, but you can’t remember where he came from?

  He was Cannibal, he corrected the good doctor. Not a Cannibal.

  Seventh’s ancestry was a sore point between him and Dr. Isaacson, who never believed Seventh’s story and attributed his outrageous claims to his need for individuation from his narcissistic mother.

  I give you credit, Seventh, he said. I’ve had many patients consumed with their mothers, but I’ve never had a patient who actually wanted to consume her.

  I don’t want to consume her, Seventh bristled. That’s the whole point.

  Eventually Seventh stopped seeing him, his heritage an impasse that doctor and patient could not overcome. Now, though, as the taxi made its way through Brooklyn and Seventh felt anxiety clench like a fist around his heart, he wished that he could phone Dr. Isaacson, right now, wished someone, anyone, would tell him to turn around and go back to Manhattan, back to Carol and to Reese and to the new family he had built on the ruins of his old one.

  Wrote the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne:

  I have broken my chains, you say. But a struggling cur may snap its chain, only to escape with a great length of it fixed to its collar.

  Seventh first encountered Montaigne in college when his English professor assigned the class the famous essay “On Cannibals.” He was terrified at first, assuming the secret of his identity had somehow been revealed. But the professor was unaware of Seventh’s heritage, and had simply chosen the piece as an early example of something he called intertextuality, the very sound of which caused Seventh’s eyes to glaze over. Hearing the names Bakhtin and Barthes soon sealed the non-deal for Seventh, their being the two surest signs to any college student that time was about to slow to an imperceptible crawl and make one long for the sweet release of death. But as he read Montaigne’s words, he was struck by the Frenchman’s passionate humanism, by his defiant open-mindedness, by his contrarian wisdom—by his difference, in every possible way, from the people he had come from. Seventh meant to read more of him, but he was in college, a time of life when gaining knowledge takes a distant second importance to getting laid, and he never pursued Montaigne further. Then, a few months ago, after discontinuing his treatment with Dr. Isaacson, just as Seventh was looking for direction, for insight, for some guidance through the dark forest of his life, a manuscript he was reading by a Jewish-Fourth-Wave-Lesbian-Socialist-Pro-Immigration-Anti-Vax-Latinx-American mentioned Montaigne, attacking him as a Bourgeois-European-Patriarchal-Franco-Roman-Catholic-Cisgendered-Male-Monothesistic-Apologist.

  Perhaps, thought Seventh, it was time to read him again.

  Brooklyn, USA, the taxi driver called out as they passed the WELCOME TO BROOKLYN sign at the end of the bridge. I grew up here.

  Me too, said Seventh.

  Couldn’t afford it now, though.

  Me neither, said Seventh.

  The driver glanced in his rearview mirror, taking note of the color of Seventh’s skin.

  They get rid of us, said the driver. One way or another, they get rid of us.

  They who? Seventh asked, but the driver just waved his hand as if the question wasn’t worth considering.

  Seventh hadn’t been back to the old neighborhood in years. Like most everywhere, it had changed dramatically. Gone were the small corner shops and local markets. In their place he found trendy coffee shops, high-end restaurants, gourmet doughnut bakeries, and artist lofts that no artist could ever afford. Hipsters replaced the homeless, and Seventh gasped as they drove past an Apple Store where once a fruit market stood—selling, he thought wryly, actual apples. Still, though, as he looked up here and there, he could spot occasional remnants of the old Can-Am community: an old Cannibalian frieze above the doorway to a vegan cupcake shop, or perched above the entryway to an old renovated bank (now a coworking space, whatever the hell that was). Here, three figures sitting cross-legged consuming a human leg; there, a prone figure being eviscerated by a standing figure; and everywhere, if you knew where to look, the telltale bas-relief cauldrons non-Cans thought were simple decoration, but which Can-Ams knew to be the traditional markings of the homes of their people.

  To see them only fanned the flames of Seventh’s already smoldering guilt. He had always considered himself a ‘cultural Cannibal,’ a designation that meant nothing to Mudd but cowardice, but which allowed Seventh to perform the delicate high-wire act of ambivalence: I am neither a backward leaver of modern people, he could claim, nor a modern leaver of backward people. But to see from the back seat of the taxicab just how the neighborhood had changed caused him to stumble, to lose his footing, and to fall headlong into doubt and regret.

  He had left. He had disappeared. And the community had disappeared with him.

  Melting, Mudd used to say, is for candles.

  But melt most of his family had. Seventh well remembered the day his brother First left home. He watched from the stairs, his small heart breaking, as his beloved eldest brother slung a backpack over his shoulder and walked out the front door, never to return. It was the middle of the night, the neighbors long asleep, but Mudd stood on the front porch, shouting after him into the darkness.

  Would that Julius had sunk at sea! she called. Better for him to have drowned in the Atlantic than to watch you drown in the sea of America. Let me tell you a little something about melting pots, young man; our people know a thing or two about melting pots! They don’t start with your head or your feet or your hands, I can tell you that. They start with your soul; that’s the first thing they cut off! Your spirit! When your spirit is dead, they take your body and boil you down until you’re indistinguishable, until you’re nothing but muck and bones, no different from the million other dead fools in that miserable bastard pot. And while you thank them for letting you boil, they stoke the fire and cheer that you’re gone, you and your whole history with you. Go, you bastard! Go and never darken my doorway again!

  She said the same thing when Second left two years later, and again when Fourth left a few years after that.

  Seventh could still hear her voice, echoing down the darkened street, as his taxi slowed to a stop in front of Mudd’s house.

  Fifteen dollars, said the cab driver.

  Don’t get out, Seventh heard Dr. Isaacson say. Do not get out.

  Seventh got out.

  Fuck.

  * * *

  • • •

  Skin color, sadly, is one of humankind’s primary identity markers. This is primitive and disheartening, to be sure, but perhaps also to be expected, as we are, despite our baseless high estimation of ourselves, just one more species of animal trying to survive. For a zebra, Lion = Death, and none would lecture her for profiling the king of the jungle in such a reductive manner. Still, one can only imagine the heights we humans might rise to if more essential characteristics like kindness and intelligence were as immediately discernible and valued as the stripes and spots of our coats. It is painful and demeaning to be judged by the color of one’s skin, as anyone who has been knows. But if there’s anything worse than being judged by one’s own skin, it is being judged by the color of everyone’s skin. This, though, is the terrible situation Cannibals today suffer, as they are neither black skinned nor white, neither light nor dark, neither Eastern nor Western. Having fled and assimilated and fled again so many times throughout their beleaguered history, they have reached something of a racial absolute zero in terms of their features; their unique characteristic is that they possess no unique characteristic, and their coloring is of such a particul
arly ambiguous shade that they can be taken for—and hated by—every race and every people in every nation of the world. Second, whose early interest in art led to a career in advertising, once remarked that thousands of years of history had left them with no homeland and no treasures; all it had left them with was skin the specific Pantone color of which assured they would be hated by everyone, everywhere, for the rest of time. Seventh had been taken for Mexican in Texas, white in South Central Los Angeles, Palestinian in Jerusalem, and Israeli in the West Bank. In New York City alone he’d been assaulted in Staten Island by a group who thought he was black, in Crown Heights by some Hasidim who thought he was Hispanic, and in Queens by some white supremacists who thought he was a Jew. If there was any upside for Seventh for what Unclish called their ‘accursed ambiguous identity,’ it was the chance it provided Seventh to pursue women from ethnicities who might not have dated him otherwise—an upside Seventh, in his youth, took full advantage of.

  Black? he’d said to Jada, a Pro-Choice-Liberal-Democratic-Baptist-African-American-Dominatrix. Of course I’m black.

  Jewish? he’d said to Leah, a Pro-War-Orthodox-Neoconservative-Zionist-Jewish-American-Nymphomaniac. I’m as Jewish as they come.

  Persian? he’d said to Yazmin, a Bisexual-Communist-Dyslexic-Persian-American. Don’t I look Persian?

  The ruse wasn’t easy to sustain, though, and as the murky waters of his numerous fictional identities rose up around him, he wished he could meet someone who identified simply as Human. But such a person was not to be found, and Seventh was soon drowning in such a deluge of nationalities and designators that he often couldn’t recall whom he was dating, where she was from, or what he had claimed to be. Keira was the final straw, the Nigerian-Irish-Ukrainian-Egyptian poet/accountant/producer he met at the book party for a recently released memoir by a Gender-Fluid-Hearing-Impaired-Liberal-Democratic-Palestinian-Canadian-American (It’s about time! the Times had raved). Seventh was relieved when their relationship finally fell apart; his shoulders ached from carrying protest placards with her every weekend, and he often couldn’t remember what cause he was supposed to be claiming to support and which cause he was supposed to be claiming he was protesting. He was fairly certain Keira didn’t know either, and pointing that out to her brought their relationship to a swift end. He swore off women, cursed relationships, rejected human beings, and proclaimed the impossibility of love, which is precisely when he met Carol.

  What are you? he asked, awaiting the usual deluge of identifiers.

  What am I? she asked. Or who am I?

  Let’s start with what, he said.

  I’m a human, asshole. How about you?

  Seventh was smitten. Carol was even more beautiful inside than out, and he found her endlessly fascinating: her fiery opinions, her dark humor, her jade green eyes that seemed to burn brighter when she spoke of the things she loved and which blackened when she railed against that which she disdained. And her laugh—a laugh so uninhibited, so lustful, that he knew the first time he heard it that he wanted to hear it every day for the rest of his life. But alas, so cluttered was his mind with tags and adjectives by then that though he loved her dearly, the only thing about her heritage he could recall two months into their relationship was that she was Dominican-Something-American, and to ask her now would be impossible. As for what he had told her about himself, all he could be certain of was that it was a lie.

  Dad, this is Seventh, Carol had said when first introducing him to her father. Seventh, this is Dad.

  Hello, her father said, eyeing Seventh’s skin tone for clues. Are you . . . Colombian?

  Yes, sir, said Seventh.

  You said you were Dominican, said Carol.

  I’m Dominican-Colombian, said Seventh.

  But you said your father was Guatemalan, she said.

  My father was Guatemalan, Seventh said. Guatemalan-Colombian. My mother was Dominican. I’m Dominican-Guatemalan-Colombian-American.

  Carol shrugged, not particularly concerned either way, and when she went to the kitchen to get drinks, her father gave Seventh a hearty slap on the back.

  As long as you’re good to my daughter, he said, I don’t care what you are.

  Then he winked, nudged Seventh with his elbow, and whispered, Just as long as you’re not a goddamned Haitian.

  Heh, said Seventh.

  Seventh didn’t know what Carol’s father’s issue with Haitians was, but if he hated Haitians, he wasn’t going to like Cannibals very much, and he worried Carol shared her father’s prejudices. And so Seventh never said a word to her about his people, or about his traditions, or about who he really was, and to this day neither Carol nor Reese knew about his actual heritage. Now looking for the first time in over ten years at his childhood home—at the lawn where he once tossed a ball with his father, at the second-floor window from which he and First dropped plastic parachuted army men, at the front door Sixth had once bounded out to greet him when he walked up the path, at perhaps the last home of the last Cannibal-American family in existence—he wondered if he should tell them. If they should know. If he should just sit Carol and Reese down and say, Guys, I have something important to tell you. You know the fat guy on Gilligan’s Island with the bone through his nose? The one holding a spear and shouting Ooga Booga? Well, that’s me.

  Maybe it was time.

  To accept who he was.

  To own his story, wasn’t that what the kids were doing these days? Owning their stories?

  He’d been afraid when he was younger; afraid he would be rejected, that he would never belong to the larger world beyond his doorstep. But what larger world? he now wondered. There was no larger world, just a collection of warring mini-worlds of nationalities, genders, politics and religions, of ists and isms, neo-this’s and ultra-that’s.

  Maybe Rosenbloom was right.

  Maybe if everyone else was retreating to their cages and calling it freedom, maybe he should too.

  Maybe it was time to embrace his shackles.

  Maybe the only people left to belong to anymore were your own.

  * * *

  • • •

  Seventh Seltzer was drowning in stories. The damned things were everywhere: old stories written by dead masters overflowed the shelves of his home; new stories piled up in his office, screaming, shouting, demanding to be heard; but worse than any other, there in the dark corners of his mind, were the stories about his people—hundreds of them, thousands of years long, stories of suffering and oppression, of persecution and accusations, of shattered dreams and broken bones, maudlin and grim, the miserable tales of yesterday that waylaid his every today.

  The horror story, Mudd called it, of Us.

  Mudd told her children stories. Day and night she told them, horrible stories, stories she forbade them to forget and commanded them to retell; stories of misery and torture, of victimization and slaughter, of endless suffering at the bloody hands of the hateful nations of the world. Once upon a time, fuck.

  No child was too young to hear them.

  You kids, she began every tale, have it easy.

  Everything was worse in the past, she said, unimaginably worse, and the further back in the past one went, the worse things became. Two hundred years ago, said Mudd, they raped and killed our babies in front of their mothers. Three hundred years ago they raped our mothers in front of their babies, and then, when they were done, they raped the babies in front of the mothers. Then they killed them both.

  What did they do four hundred years ago? Third had asked.

  Mudd clopped him on the head with the back of her hand.

  Stop being stupid, she said.

  Mudd was a strict authoritarian even in the most casual of times, but never more so than when she was telling her people’s stories. Then she brooked no disrespect, allowed no questions, suffered no childish levity. Not even First dared challenge her when she w
as telling of their past.

  At least back then they killed you honestly, she said, with a knife to your throat or a sword through your belly. Here in America, they cut you up one piece at a time: they change your name, they ban your traditions, they belittle you on TV, until all that’s left of thousands of years of heritage is a television set and a pair of Levi’s.

  What are Levi’s? asked Second.

  Pants, said Mudd. Made by some New York Jew.

  Levi Strauss was from San Francisco, Fourth pointed out.

  Pardon me, Mudd said. Made by some Jewish fag.

  Mudd loved her people, so much so that, as a matter of pride, she despised all others: she hated blacks, Asians, Latinos, Caucasians, Indians, Germans, Sumerians, Macedonians, Canaanites, Hittites, Babylonians, homosexuals, cross-dressers, leathermen, tops, bottoms, vegans, hippies, Christians, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Baptists, Catholics, Jainists, Manichaeans, Ashurists, pagans, and atheists, and she was unabashed in her declarations, privately and publicly, that they were stupid, lazy, criminal, unethical, cowardly, imperialistic, deceitful, manipulative, dirty, cheap, ugly, foul smelling, uneducated, and sexually perverse.

  There must be something good about them, Fifth had said.

  Yeah, said Mudd. They die.

  Seventh often worried that he would contract her hatred, inherit her bigotry, like a virus, like a birth defect, despite his best efforts to resist, a sort of Fetal Asshole Syndrome; but he was thirty now and thus far he hadn’t seen any symptoms. But you had to be vigilant; you never knew when it might appear, and you’d suddenly find yourself one Sunday afternoon at the local Klan Depot, getting the wife and kids fitted for the Robe-N-Hood Combo.

  Stories were Mudd’s way of inoculating her children from the influence of these despised and dangerous others. She used stories to treat her children the way physicians use medication to treat their patients, examining her offspring for signs of moral infection, of cultural poisoning, and deciding, based on their symptoms, which story to administer, how frequently, and in what form.