Mother for Dinner

by Shalom Auslander

  When First came home with a black girlfriend, she told him the story of Julius marrying his sister, Julia, just to have Cannibal children and save their people.

  When Second came home with a Jewish girlfriend, she told them stories of how the Muslims raped and killed their people.

  She’s Jewish, Second said, not Muslim.

  Six of one, Mudd said, shrugging, half a dozen of the other.

  But the story she told the most often, the story all Cannibal-Americans told and retold, was the story of their great-grandfather Julius, who came to America with little more than the shirt on his back.

  And it was this story, nearly thirty years after he’d first heard it, that haunted Seventh Seltzer to this day.

  * * *

  • • •

  The year was 1914, said Mudd, when Julius Seltzer, son of Samuel Seltzer, son of some other Seltzer, left the Old Country for the New World, mere days after his eighteenth birthday.

  What was the Old Country like? young Seventh had asked.

  The Old Country, said Mudd, was a paradise, filled with tall trees and babbling brooks and lush meadows, with grapes the size of apples, apples the size of grapefruits, and grapefruits the size of a Chevy. But behold, one day, it was time to leave. A new king had come to power, and it was no longer safe for their ancestors to be there. And so one night, Samuel took his son, Julius, and daughter, Julia, to the dock, where he handed Julius a brown leather valise with a wooden handle and heavy golden clasps, inside which lay the ancient Knife of Redemption, with which the sacred rite of Consumption is performed, and which had been passed down through the family for generations.

  Take this with you, Samuel said to Julius.

  But Papa, said Julius, wary of such responsibility, are you sure?

  Yes, said Samuel. Take it with you, and never forget who you are, or where you came from.

  Four harrowing weeks at sea later, Julius and his sister, Julia, sat huddled on the deck of the SS Endeavor, waiting for the New World to appear on the horizon. With them sat hundreds of other hungry, desperate immigrants, from dozens of Old Countries of their own. The golden sun was beginning to rise in the east, the sky ablaze with violets and pinks; they had departed the Old Country in the dead of winter, but now, as they drew close to the New World, it was early spring. They had braved storms, illness, and deprivation, but at last they were drawing close, in this season of rebirth, to a nation that had itself been born little more than a century and a half before.

  The ship lumbered through the heavy waves of yet another endless sea, the dark waters crashing against its weary hull, when suddenly, an elderly man standing to Julius’s left stood up tall at the rail, pointed over the side of the ship, and cried:

  America!

  Julius and Julia craned their necks and stood on their toes, and there she was, the robed goddess they had been waiting to see with their own eyes, the Statue of Liberty, emerging from the fog, her magnificent torch a beacon of freedom for all.

  At once the passengers began to weep with joy. Those who believed in God raised their voices and sang unto Him songs of praise and thanks, and even those who did not believe joined the faithful in their ecstatic hymns of gratitude. Husbands hugged wives, brothers hugged sisters, stranger danced with stranger. There on the deck of that exhausted, weather-beaten ship, people came together without regard for race or creed or religion or color, for here on the soil of the New World they could live without fear of hatred or oppression.

  You some kinda Negro? the immigration official asked Julius, eyeing his ambiguous pigmentation.

  No.

  Jew?

  No.

  Arab?

  No.

  Asian?

  No.

  Italian?

  No.

  French?

  No.

  Communist?

  No.

  Socialist?

  No.

  Gay?

  Gay? asked Julius.

  Homosexual.

  I know what gay means.

  Well, are you?

  No.

  Jew?

  You asked me that already.

  The official eyed him.

  Then just what the hell are you, boy? he asked. You gotta be something.

  But Julius knew that it was forbidden to reveal who his people were or where they were from, for when they did, pitchforks and torches always followed.

  I’m from the Old Country, Julius said.

  Which old country?

  The oldest one.

  How old?

  Very old.

  Does this country have a name?

  Yes.

  Do you know the name?

  No.

  The official sighed with exasperation.

  Well, you’re sure as shit not from here, he said.

  No, Julius agreed. This is the New World.

  You’re goddamned right it is, said the official, pleased to have asserted his authority in some fashion. I’ll put down Other.

  Perfect, said Julius.

  Married? asked the official.

  Julius paused, for it was well-known that immigration officials preferred the married to the unmarried. Julius could have lied and claimed his wife was arriving on a later ship, but it wouldn’t have helped; if the immigrant’s spouse wasn’t present, the officials considered the immigrant single. And so Julius had no choice.

  No . . . , he began to say, when Julia suddenly stepped forward, took his hand in hers, and said, Yes.

  You’re his wife? the official asked.

  Yes.

  You look like his sister.

  Julia’s heart sank, for Cannibals share strong family resemblances. Hopeless and thinking to just run for the door, she turned around, and there in that immigration center, she saw a shocking sight: brothers kissing sisters, mothers kissing sons, and fathers kissing daughters, all of them desperate to prove they were married, to become, one and all, Americans. And so Julia turned to her brother, took his face in her hands, and kissed him, as passionately and deeply as she had ever kissed anyone before.

  Julius stammered, Julia blushed, the official stamped their papers, and behold, Julius and Julia passed through the door marked WELCOME, and took the family’s first steps into the New World of their dreams.

  But their joy, Mudd said heavily, was short-lived. The streets weren’t paved with gold. Most of them weren’t paved at all. New York City was a toilet. There was too little work and not enough food. And so when Julius heard that a great man named Henry Ford was promising to pay his workers five dollars a day, a fortune in those times, he decided to pack their few belongings and head west for the land of Michigan, where he took a job, like so many other new immigrants, at the Ford Motor Company in the city of Detroit.

  There too, though, the reality was not as Julius had hoped it would be. The work was brutal and dangerous, the overseers cruel, the machines relentless; should a worker’s cuff get caught in one of the gears or hooks, the machine would consume him in seconds. But for these men, cold and hungry, the risk to their lives was worth the five dollars a day to care for their families. And so they came, day in and day out, by the thousands. So many workers came, in fact, that Ford changed the rules. To be eligible for the five-dollar daily salary, he decreed, each immigrant first had to be Americanized, a demanding process that included mandatory classes, random home inspections by Ford overseers, and the following of strict regulations. It was arduous and intense, and often demeaning, and many did not successfully complete the process. But once a year, on what he called Americanization Day, Henry Ford held a ceremony for those who did.

  The event, fittingly, took place on the Fourth of July. Friends and family of those being Americanized would arrive at the appointed time to a strange sight: the plywood façade of
a black cauldron, thirty feet wide by fifteen feet high, the words Melting Pot scrawled in large white letters across the front. After a few brief introductory comments, the ceremony began. One by one, the employees who had successfully completed their courses at the Americanization Academy would emerge, dressed in the traditional garb of their native countries. As their families watched, they would, by way of a ladder, climb up and ‘into’ the Melting Pot. Once inside and out of the view of the audience, each employee would shed his traditional garb, underneath which he would be wearing the black suit and necktie of the respectable American worker. He would then be handed a small American flag, and directed to the ladder on the opposite side of the Melting Pot, by which he would emerge, to the cheers of the crowd, a proud suit-wearing, flag-waving American.

  Here Mudd’s voice would crack with emotion.

  Julius emerged from that infernal pot in tears, she said. A broken man he had entered that pot, desperate for money, but he emerged not a man at all. For what is a man but his past and his people? Without them, he is only a ghost, a shadow, a featureless shape without depth or substance. And so poor Julius climbed out the other side of that damned pot, stumbled down that damned ladder, whereupon Julia took him in her arms, and wept, saying, America: it was not worth it.

  It was, said Mudd, the most woeful story in the most agonizing chapter of the entire heartbreaking history of Cannibal-Americans. Ever since, it has been the tradition that on the day of their eighteenth birthdays, young Cannibal-American men go about in black suits and ties, carrying brown leather valises with wooden handles and heavy golden clasps, to commemorate the terrible day Julius was forced to become an American.

  And you kids, Mudd would say as she wiped the tears from her face, you’re diving into that pot headfirst.

  * * *

  • • •

  Seventh Seltzer opened the door to his mother’s house and fell backward in time. Here history lived on, like the slasher in a horror film one thought was dead but who always manages to return for one final bludgeoning.

  Hello? he called. Mudd?

  Nothing had changed since he’d left: not the photos of Sixth beside the armoire, not the floral-print couch mummified for eternity in a clear vinyl slipcover, not the fading four-foot-tall poster of the University that had dominated the room since his childhood.

  The sight of the University caused Seventh to shudder.

  The University had been Unclish’s greatest project, a vast, multimillion-dollar Cannibal-American center of learning located in New Jersey, the first of its kind in Cannibal history. The poster was composed of an artist’s watercolor rendering of the exterior of the grand main hall, Cannibal-American students passing in and out through its tall arched doors, while others sat in the shade of a nearby oak, debating their people’s laws and customs, longing for the Old Country, and telling stories of their blessed forefathers.

  One day you’ll go there, Mudd said to Seventh, and you’ll be the pride of the whole university.

  But that dream, like so many of Mudd’s dreams, never came to be, and again the foul taste of guilt filled his mouth.

  Hello? he called again. Anyone here?

  The kitchen door swung open and Zero emerged, a cold compress in her hand. She stopped in her tracks to see him.

  Seventh? she asked.

  Zero? he gasped. Zero, my God, is that you?

  Seventh hadn’t seen his sister in years. She was twenty now, and had grown into a striking young woman, tall and olive-skinned with deep, dark eyes. But within those eyes, Seventh detected a weariness that he hadn’t known in her before. Mudd’s infirmity had no doubt taken a toll, but it was the weariness of a parent he sensed in Zero, and he remembered that just as he had taken care of her when she was a child, Zero, for years now, had been taking care of Third, who, even in his midthirties, was still developmentally just a child. Zero fed him and clothed him, took him for walks in the park, to playgrounds she didn’t play in and to children’s movies she had no interest in seeing. Seventh’s childhood may have been marked by dysfunction and discrimination, but Zero had never had a childhood at all.

  Sev, she said, hugging him tightly.

  Zero-Hero, he said, using the name he’d called her when they were young. How is she?

  Not good.

  Was it the burgers? he asked.

  She shrugged.

  How many? he asked.

  In total? Third was keeping count. Around thirteen thousand.

  Thirteen thousand?

  She’s been eating them for three years . . .

  What’s a Whopper cost these days, he asked, four bucks? Five?

  Six, said Zero. Double bacon, extra cheese.

  That’s gonna take a chunk out of the inheritance, Seventh joked. Better not tell First.

  Zero smiled, and once again, for a brief moment, she was the sunny child he remembered.

  Come, she said, taking him by the hand. There’s not much time.

  Zero led Seventh upstairs to Mudd’s bedroom, where the rest of the Seltzer siblings were already waiting, all ten of them, crammed into Mudd’s small bedroom around her extra-large bed.

  Seventh couldn’t remember the last time they had all stood in a room together. He wasn’t sure they ever had; as the youngest Seltzers were just learning to stand up, the oldest were already running away.

  The room reeked, a putrid combination of Whoppers and urine, like a bathroom at a truck-stop Burger King. The air was thick and heavy, suffocating, a situation made worse by the dozen adults pressed so tightly together that from the doorway Seventh couldn’t even see the bed they were gathered around.

  First, standing closest, as always, to the door, turned to him and nodded a dutifully somber hello. First was approaching middle age now, his hair beginning to recede and gray, but his eyes with the same intensity Seventh remembered from their youth. Seventh spotted Tenth across the way, the grief on his face a bizarre contrast to the garish, multicolored tracksuit he was wearing; he seemed to have come straight from the gym, where, judging from his physique, he spent a considerable portion of his time.

  Still the warrior, thought Seventh, still waiting for war.

  (I lifted two hundred pounds today, Tenth once bragged to Fourth after a triumphant afternoon at the gym, flexing his arms and chest.

  Why? Fourth had asked. We have machines to do that for us now.

  It was a genuine inquiry, but Tenth had tackled him and held him in a headlock until Fourth admitted that lifting heavy weights was a reasonable pursuit despite mankind’s significant mechanical progress.)

  Beside Tenth stood Eleventh and Twelfth—the twins, as they were known to all—wearing somber black dresses and black felt hats draped with black netted veils, delicately dabbing tissues to their noses and the corners of their mascara-stained eyes. They stepped aside to let Seventh through, their high heels clicking on the floor as they did. Seventh cringed, wishing they hadn’t moved, knowing Mudd would hear their heels too. It was a vestigial reaction from his childhood, one he thought he’d left behind: wanting the twins to be free to be themselves, but worried at every turn about Mudd being hurt.

  Third, towering a full two feet taller than anyone else in the room, stood at the foot of Mudd’s bed, inconsolable. Zero held his huge hand in hers, trying to comfort him. Third stepped aside to let Seventh through, and there in her bed, at the center of them all, he saw Mudd, the rusty hub of the dilapidated wheel of his family.

  And she was enormous.

  Beyond enormous.

  She had grown utterly, unfeasibly, impossibly obese, as wide now as she had always been tall; her breath was shallow and labored, and she seemed to Seventh to be asphyxiating to death beneath her own impossible mass. He wondered not how she could be dying, but how she could possibly be alive.

  Discarded Burger King bags were piled high on the nightstand. Empty
ketchup packets lay strewn about the linens. French fries littered the floor, as if trying to escape their certain fate.

  Mudd? he asked, coming closer to her, unable to hide his shock. Mudd . . . ?

  It was customary among their people for those in the late stages of their lives—and, more importantly, early stages of death—to gorge themselves with food, to put on as much weight as possible before dying, a tradition known as the Cornucopiacation, so that all who wished to Consume them could do so without limit. It began many years ago, following the Great Deprivation, the terrible time in the Old Country when their people were so hungry and poor that when they finally wasted away and died, there was little left of them to Consume. Determined to continue their traditions, the Cannibals created a dish called Zubets, though to call it a dish was optimistic—it was basically just a pile of the deceased’s salted bones the family would gnaw on until someone lost a tooth, at which point the Consumption would be declared complete.

  That was why Mudd had been eating a dozen Whoppers every day. Certain that death was approaching, she was beginning her Cornucopiacation. But death had been slower to arrive than she expected—or was unable to kill her when he did—and she had put on so much weight over the past few years that Seventh wouldn’t have recognized her had he passed her on the street, assuming she could fit out the front door.

  Seventh? Mudd moaned. Is that you?

  Seventh took her enormous, bloated hand in his.

  I’m here, Mudd, he said. I’m here.

  Mudd looked up at him, her eyes glassy and dim.

  You’re late, she said.

  There was traffic, he said. On the bridge.

  What kind of an idiot takes the bridge on a weekday? she said.

  Mudd, said Seventh, what’s going on?

  Ninth stood opposite Seventh in his white doctor’s lab coat; he too must have come straight from work, but from where he stood, Seventh couldn’t make out the hospital name embroidered on his chest pocket. Ninth took Mudd’s other hand in his, feeling her wrist for her pulse. He looked to Seventh and shook his head. It was bad.