Mother for Dinner

by Shalom Auslander

  Seventh stopped as he passed a garbage-strewn dorm room with a pile of old mattresses stacked against the wall; they were filthy and mildewed, but they would get them through the night.

  What young student, Seventh wondered as he righted the overturned desk, might have lived here, studied here? What posters might he or she have taped to the wall? Of singers, of actors, of Unclish?

  You know those photos they take of Earth from outer space? Second continued. Show me a single nation on that photo. Show me a border. There isn’t one. There’s land and there’s water. That’s it. Nations are fictions, and I don’t die for fictions.

  You have enemies, said Seventh, nudging the garbage into a small pile with his shoe, whether you have a country or not.

  Enemies? said Second. Please. Who? Where? They change every fucking day. Sixty years ago they said Russians were the enemy. Now Republicans say Russians are our friends, and Democrats and Muslims are the enemy. Democrats say Russians and Republicans are our enemy and Muslims are our friends. Miriam used to be afraid of black people. When we met, she would lock the car doors when we drove through the Bronx, just like Mudd used to, remember? Thirteen years later, you know who performed at Josh’s bar mitzvah? Jay-Z, I shit you not. She says Jews and blacks share a common goal, says we both understand being hated. Pre-Trump she feared black people. Post-Trump she’s afraid of white people. Now she locks the door when we drive through Scarsdale.

  But Second had disappeared.

  Seventh couldn’t hear him.

  He is sitting at his desk, headphones over his ears, working on a paper. Biology. Math. History.

  Cannibal history.

  A fellow student pops his head in the door—a Can-Am from Florida, or Michigan or Los Angeles—and taps him on the shoulder.

  Party down the hall, Sev, he says. You coming? Julia’s gonna be there.

  Julia’s the young Can-Am beauty who made eyes at him in the main hall, the one who will one day tell him to skip the talent show because Mudd’s Consumption is more important. But Seventh looks up at the poster of the Old Country taped above the desk.

  No, he says.

  He has work to do.

  For his people.

  * * *

  • • •

  Father told a very different John the Strong story than Mudd did.

  John, Father said, was a no-good thug.

  John, Father said, grew up in a filthy tenement in Brooklyn, hungry, cold, and sick. From his mother, he heard tales of abuse at the hands of Henry Ford. From his father, he heard tales of backbreaking labor, only to be chased from the factory with little more than the shirt on his back.

  That much Mudd and Father agreed on. But where Mudd’s John was a noble freedom fighter for his people, Father’s John was a violent sociopath who used his identity to excuse his actions and fool his parents. When he got caught bullying a classmate, he told his parents it was because the other boy—half his size—had been bullying him for being Can-Am.

  I’m sorry, Mother and Father, he said. But I won’t let our people be pushed around.

  They beamed.

  When he got caught stealing the answers for his eighth-grade math test from the teacher’s drawer, he said it was because his people suffered an unfair disadvantage.

  The tests are rigged against our people, he said.

  They beamed.

  When he and the local Mob boss were caught selling stolen cigarettes out of the back of a stolen tractor trailer, he said it was because his people needed cigarettes.

  Which people? asked his father, who was beginning to suspect something was amiss. Cannibals or Italians?

  All my people, said John.

  He ran drug rings, prostitution rings, gambling rings. He was a mobster, said Father, plain and simple.

  Oh please, Mudd later said when Seventh questioned her about it. When white people do it, it’s investing. When our people do it, it’s a crime.

  The only other part of the John story Mudd and Father agreed on was that he died in a hail of gunfire. But they differed strongly on the reason why.

  They shot him, said Mudd, because they couldn’t stand to see a strong Cannibal male.

  They shot him, said Father, because he murdered two police officers while committing armed robbery.

  As tempting as it was to believe Mudd’s version, Father was John’s son.

  When he hit me, said Father, he said it was because our people needed discipline. When he slapped my mother, he said it was because he held Cannibal women to a higher standard. When he left us, he said it was to fight on our people’s behalf. He wasn’t a hero, Seventh. He was an asshole.

  Mudd saw no contradiction.

  He was an asshole, she said. But he was our asshole.

  * * *

  • • •

  After helping drag the mattresses to the lobby, Seventh decided to explore the west wing. It was dark now, and he aimed the narrow beam of his flashlight down the long central hallway, past rows of what he assumed were administrative offices of some kind: file cabinets, lamps, and swastikas.

  Swastikas, everywhere swastikas: spray-painted on walls, doors, windows.

  Forget about the crackheads, thought Seventh. Either there were a ton of Nazis in New Jersey, or swastikas were just really easy to spray-paint.

  Maybe people weren’t as hateful as graffiti tended to suggest.

  Maybe they were just shitty artists.

  Farther down the hall he passed what must have been the University’s library. It was a large, grand room, its arched windows bricked over, its walls lined with empty bookshelves.

  An ending, he wondered, the books stolen or removed? Or a stalled beginning, the books still on their way?

  The library is filled with students, but they hardly make a sound, focused as they are on their studies. They sit in rapt silence at long oak tables, their laptops and coffee at the ready. And there is Julia, her dark, Cannibal blue-black hair glistening in the soft sunlight, her Cannibal skin that impossibly alluring ambiguous tone; it is not, as Seventh once thought, a nonspecific color, but rather a blending of every color, which makes it the most beautiful color of all, the color of many, the color all humankind had been blending on its palette since time began.

  She glances over her delicate shoulder at him, tucks her hair behind her ear, and smiles.

  He holds a finger up to his mouth—Shh!—and she smiles.

  Seventh continued down the hall, at the far end of which he noticed a pair of ornate wooden doors, not unlike the front door of the main hall itself. But something seemed odd about them to him, something off, and as he drew closer, he realized that by all appearances, the doors hadn’t been touched—not vandalized, not graffitied, not even opened—in years, perhaps not even since the building had been built.

  Seventh reached out, took hold of the gleaming bronze handles, and pulled. The rest of the doors in the building had either fallen off their hinges or squealed loudly when opened, but these doors were silent, new. Slowly, warily, Seventh stepped inside what was the most magnificent theater he had ever seen. By virtue of his profession, he had led something of a cultured life—readings, stage plays, symphonies, film premieres—but he had never, in all those years, seen a theater as achingly gorgeous as this. Proscenium style, it contained the same high arched ceilings and tall windows as the main hall, but the theater was as undisturbed as its ancient doors had been: no graffiti, no trash, no needles. Even the dust that had settled everywhere else in the University, it seemed, dared not settle here. Rows of red theater seats led down to the wide wooden stage, where it seemed as if the show was ready to go on. Stage lights hung from the rafters, tall speakers lined the stage walls, a podium stood at center stage, the microphone still in its stand. And though he knew that the seats waited in vain for an audience that would never come, Seventh could hear the laughter and
applause that would have filled the room, see the couples in their finest evening wear, air-kissing one another after the show and walking out, arm in arm, having experienced in the great Cannibal story they saw there that which other peoples long had:

  I belong.

  Seventh made his way down the aisle, climbed the small stairs to the wooden stage, the floorboards creaking beneath him, and took his place at the podium.

  He looked out at the crowd.

  A full house.

  Men, women, children.

  Ladies and gentlemen, he called out. Cannibals. Good evening. And welcome, at long last, more than one hundred years after Julius Seltzer first came to this country with little more than the shirt on his back . . . to the Ishmael Seltzer Cannibal-American Theater.

  And the crowd goes wild.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was Montaigne’s disdain for certainty that drew Seventh to him. His adamant uncertainty—about his opinions, about the world, about his own self. His willingness to be wrong, to enthusiastically not know. You can keep your rock stars and political revolutionaries. Self-doubt was real rebellion. Even when Montaigne made changes to his essays, he only added to them, never deleted; he wanted his readers to see his malleability; the changes were the point, not the conclusions. He contradicted himself, changed his mind, ever open, ever searching.

  I like the words we use to soften and moderate the presumptuous character of our arguments, he wrote. Perchance, To some extent, Some, It is said, I think, and others like them.

  But now, as he lay on a filthy mattress in the crumbling lobby of his people’s university, Seventh wanted certainty.

  Am I this or that?

  Am I last or first?

  Am I hero or villain?

  Something felt right about this place, Seventh thought. Despite the trash and the disrepair, the cold and the dark, something felt right and warm. Lying there, surrounded by his family, all of them coming together to perform this ancient ritual, Seventh closed his eyes and smiled, enjoying that which he never thought he would:

  The warm safety, the comfort, like a hug, of the box he had so long been desperate to escape.

  * * *

  • • •

  Side dishes are a problem. Appetizers are tricky, too, but few subjects in all Cannibal law are as debated as those governing sides. Early Cannibals held that the body must be Consumed alone, with no other food whatsoever. To include a side dish, they said, would be to suggest that this was merely a meal like any other, for sustenance and survival, rather than a sacred transubstantiation ritual and the gifting of eternal life to our beloveds. Extreme as this position was, there are still those today who hold that side dishes are strictly prohibited, that to serve one is an insult to the deceased, to their people, and to their history as well.

  Not even a salad? the Elders asked.

  Not even a salad, said the Elder Elders.

  What about a garnish? asked the Elders.

  Garnishes, said the Elder Elders, are a tool of our oppressors who wish to trick us into eating that which is not our tradition.

  Trick us? the Elders asked.

  Do they not cut their radishes to look like flowers? the Elder Elders said. And their carrots like springs, and their cucumbers like roses?

  Indeed, said the Elders. But what about some bread? For dinner rolls look only like dinner rolls.

  You want a dinner roll, said the Elder Elders, have a dinner roll.

  But traditions are mutable, no matter how much comfort we take in their supposed permanence. And so, after Julius had Drained, Purged, and Partitioned his beloved Julia, he sat at the dining table he had shared with her for so many years, looked down at the plate before him, nothing upon it but a meager slice of meat, and wept. Julia, after all, had lived through terrible suffering. She had been so defiled and beaten in her youth that by her middle years, she had been robbed of her beauty itself; her ugliness reduced the number of assaults, but the anguish of beatings was replaced by the deprivations of the Great Depression. Pain had been her constant companion in youth, hunger ever after. Nobody suffered more than Cannibals, and no Cannibal suffered more than Julia. And so, Julius decided there could be no greater insult to Julia than the empty plate that had haunted her throughout her life. He stood from the table, went to the kitchen, and brought back with him some slices of apple, which had been her favorite fruit, and some peanut butter, which she liked to spread on the apples, and a handful of shortbread cookies, which were her favorite dessert, and he consumed them with her as one.

  For many years after, that was the accepted tradition. No Consumption was considered complete without a few slices of apple, some peanut butter, and a handful of shortbread cookies. To do any less, it was said, was an insult to the deceased, their people, and their history.

  By the time Julius himself died some years later, his son, John, was already a notorious criminal/hero, with a large house, two cars, and a mattress full of cash. Having watched his father Consume his mother with nothing but some apples and cookies, John decided to make Julius’s Consumption a lavish feast, the most opulent, sumptuous feast ever held, for any and all Cannibal-Americans who wished to come (those who didn’t would answer to him).

  The feast lasted three days and three nights. In addition to the two plates piled high with the meat of his father, there were two platters from every animal on earth: cows and chickens and deer and bears and bison and rabbits; there were tables full of sausage, potatoes, pasta, salads, cheese, wine, liquor, and desserts. People would speak of Julius’s Consumption for years to come. As a result, what was once an austere tradition now became for many a lavish, catered affair, held at the finest clubs and ballrooms in the world. Even to this day there are those who insist that no Consumption is complete without a band and a caterer. To do any less, they say, is an insult to the deceased, their people, and their history.

  Not everyone approved of this change, of course, most notably John’s own son Ishmael, later Unclish, who lamented what had become of their sacred tradition.

  We have not just Consumed my grandfather, Unclish said regarding John’s Consumption of Julius, we have been consumed by Consumption itself.

  And so, when some years later the police eventually killed John in the act of robbing a bank/reclaiming his people’s money, Unclish Consumed him, as his grandfather had his grandmother, with some simple fruit and a nice piece of cake. Some years later Unclish became the spiritual leader of their people, and decreed that the only food permitted at Consumptions beyond the deceased themselves and some apples would be a single side dish (the favorite side dish of the deceased), a one-cup serving (not rounded), with no beverages (water is permitted—still, not sparkling) except maybe a cup of coffee (hot, not iced), with a nice piece of cake afterward (single layer, no filling, no pies). To do any more than that, Unclish proclaimed, would be an insult to the deceased, their people, and their history.

  * * *

  • • •

  Early the next morning, Unclish roused Seventh, frost on his old man breath, saying, It is time for you to go to town, and to acquire for us a handsaw.

  Seventh wiped the sleep from his eyes and nodded.

  Okay, he said.

  And a grill.

  Got it.

  And some fries.

  Fries?

  With ketchup, said Unclish, as according to Third, fries with ketchup was Mudd’s favorite side dish.

  Seventh pulled on his coat and hat, woke First, and they headed into town.

  The first thing I’m gonna buy when my inheritance check clears? First said. A Ford. I don’t even want one, I don’t even care what model it is. Just to fuck her. What do you think?

  Zero sat in the back, happy for any excuse to get out of the University.

  I think you’re petty, she said.

  Perfect, said First
as he pulled into the hardware store lot. I was going for petty.

  It being winter, the choice of grills was slim. Seventh chose the least expensive charcoal model he could find; he didn’t want to go cheap on Mudd’s Consumption, but he figured they were only going to use it once, and he doubted anyone was going to want to take it home.

  We’ll take this one, he said to the salesman. And a bag of charcoal.

  What’re you grilling? the salesman asked. If you don’t mind my asking.