Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  For the camp-wide barbecues, the fat and friendly lesbians who worked as cooks used the mausoleum-sized brick barbecues by the side of the lake, but for counselors-only get-togethers there was a bright blue kettle on wheels. Abby Stock wheeled it over to the Shack while Pinchas found a stepladder and a broom with whiskers so dusty that the act of sweeping with it was a textbook example of dramatic irony. Having gleaned from somewhere that smoke was the thing that one did to wasps, the twins got a fire going in the bright blue kettle and threw some construction paper on the grill. A thin pillar of smoke—Pinchas, something of a Torah nerd, made a Moses joke—wafted its way toward the nest whose wrinkles suddenly seemed to be wincing in distaste. The Stock twins thought about two handfuls of paper should do it. The Stock twins thought that the few wasps humming-birding around the nest were probably the last couple of survivors. Pinchas went up the ladder.

  Angry wasps clouded the air in strict arrow-shaped formations more like angry wasps in cartoons on television than you’d think. The arrow pointed first at Pinchas, who fell from the ladder and led the wasps to his partner in crime. Both of them were so covered in stings that their faces looked like seed cakes. Plus the falling ladder broke Abby’s leg. The wasps made a quick lap around the Shack before returning to the nest, so that by the time the lounging counselors arrived on the scene it looked like pain had just descended on the Stock twins, out of nowhere.

  Pittsburgh Bug-B-Gone, who rid Temple Ner Tamid (“Eternal Light”) of the cockroach problem spoiling their kosher catering facilities, took care of the nest, but the problem of finding two more counselors at such short notice fell to the Head of Staff, a theater student who hadn’t been accepted into any summer stock programs and so was spending the summer exiled in his hometown. Chastened, he was living in the sweaty bedroom of his youth and after dark would stroke himself remembering a girl from high school who would pull over halfway home from cast parties to bring him to a shuddering ovation in the backseat of her family’s throbbing car. So when the Stock twins were peppered he didn’t have to look further than his own sticky body. He was buzzing with panting reunion fantasies when he called Cyn, but he had to put his acting skills to use when he said of course she could bring her boyfriend Joseph, and that’s how Cyn and I ended up living in her parents’ house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the summer before my senior year at Mather College. The curtain rises.

  Golem—revenge through attacks by—legends concerning—Fiction

  Our story begins with a golem, a figure in Jewish myth—sort of a Jewish lie, sort of a Jewish truth. Just as God, breathing into clay, created something that was in the shape of, but not as good as, Himself, man can breathe into clay and make something man-shaped but not man. Or in this case, not woman.

  The trick, of course, is the ritual. The mythology of the golem sprung up in the sixteenth century in Worms, Germany, when a beleaguered rabbi, exhausted by the usual government evil, created a new ritual and with it a seven-foot-tall man made of clay. In many ways Pittsburgh is a perfect place for what was surely the first American golem, because although stories of the ritual differ, they usually say that river mud is the best flesh.

  The sixteenth-century Worms fad in Jew-hating was a fairly common one in those days: the blood libel. Jews were accused of killing Christian babies and using their blood to make unleavened bread for Passover, a charge that’s particularly laughable if you’ve ever had even a bite of dry, tasteless matzah. This is a reason why the Glass home is also a perfect locale for a golem revival, because Mrs. Glass cooked her delicious meals using mysterious ingredients obtained at dawn at the downtown market. Who knows what was in that sauce, or what creature previously owned those bulbous objects, rendered unreadable by carmelization?

  According to the records, some Christians would kill their own babies, break into rabbis’ homes and place the baby-bodies in the basement, returning the next morning with a mob. Now that’s anti-semitism. Rabbis set up patrols to block this baby-planting, but all the Christians would have to do was toss the infant corpses directly into the rabbis’ arms and return the next morning with a mob. The ghetto-hood watch wasn’t working; the congregation wanted a better guardian.

  The clay is laid out in the shape of a man and the creator is dressed in white. Candles are lit and the body is circled a number of times argued over extensively in horrifically dull texts on Jewish mysticism. The prayers are of course also in dispute, but my favorite is an alphabetical one sung by a hopelessly Gentile tenor in Golem, one of the productions that summer at the Pittsburgh Opera: “Ah, By Clay Destroy Evil Forces, Golem, Help Israel: Justice!” This brought the clay to an obedient, powerful and creepy life.

  The fact it’s the alphabet is worth noting. The golem, like so many aspects of Judaism, is inundated with the power of the Word. God’s name is a secret—abbreviated “Ha Shem,” or “The Name,” most of the time. In the beginning, of course, was the Word. It’s generally agreed that a short prayer, inscribed on a scroll of paper, should be placed in the golem’s mouth; if he ever speaks, the Word of God tumbles out and the golem turns back into clay. Pretend you’re an evil Christian, sneaking through the ghettos of Worms with a dead baby, when a sevenfoot silent figure of clay steps out of the shadows. No way are you returning the next morning with a mob. That’s the power of the Word. The name of the beleaguered rabbi was Rabbi Liva.

  The name of the river from which the flesh was taken was the Moldau River. The name of the first golem was Joseph. The name of the story where all this is told is The Wondrous Tale That Was Widely Known As The Sorrows Of A Daughter.

  Cyn had not the slightest interest in her religious heritage, but one time we were caught in a freak thunderstorm while walking around the campus cemetery, one of those picturesque old ones where people are always doing rubbings. We huddled underneath a tree, getting damp, then soaked, then horny: we did a rubbing. Cyn always preferred being on top and I always submitted, even when that meant my bare body pressed into mud and her hair and face dripping on me like a wet tree. Even when she shifted her position and moved her hands from the mud to my chest, leaving a thick handprintc of clay on each shoulder, I didn’t mind. As she constricted around me I felt like I was coming to life, obedient to her will. She stuck a claystained finger into my mouth and though the taste was bitter I was afraid to say anything and ruin it. The rain stopped but we didn’t; I was afraid that somebody might see us, stepping out of the shadows on their way somewhere. But I didn’t speak. I’d do anything for her.

  And that’s how Cyn and I ended up living in her parents’ house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the summer before my senior year at Mather. The curtain rises.

  Act I, scene one

  The set for the first scene would probably win something in Operagoer magazine’s Annual Audience Awards. In the foreground is an expensive garden, not quite in bloom but full of promise. There are a handful of enormous ceramic pots, large enough for a child’s first bath, with small lime trees waving in the summer breeze like the hands of a spindly pianist, warming up. In fact the whole place is warming up: the flaccid hose, ready to spring into action if somebody pumps in water; bags of potting soil, swollen pregnant with earthy minerals and expensive dung; the prongs of polished tools, catching the glare of the sharply-angled lights installed for security reasons; a beckoning watering can and packets and packets and packets of seeds. In Pittsburgh, it’s the heat and the humidity, so although the soil looks parched, the leaves are moist from the evening’s condensation. If you touch them they feel like showered skin. The propsmistress accomplishes this look with a thin, clear paste—the same stuff they use to make those new-album posters stick to construction sites in seedier parts of town.

  Cyn’s neighborhood was a nicer one, and Cyn’s street was a nicer street. Some English-majors-turned-urban-planners had named the streets after the headings in their syllabi; the Glass home was located in the middle of Byron Circle, a cul-de-sac inappropriately close to Hemingway Way. The
neighbors all had each other’s keys. The Glasses’ house had stickers in the windows threatening an advanced burglar alarm system, but the stickers were all that were installed. Just about anybody could have walked into that house.

  On summer days like this one, everyone washed their cars while the radio played songs the fathers liked back in college. The rinsed foam swirled into the one drain that always clogged come October when the maples dropped Canadian propaganda over everything. Cyn’s car is still dripping from her father’s nostaglic scrub as the lights go up on a table tableau, framed perfectly by the garden window, up center. I am reasonably certain that even this far upstage all the singers can be heard. As the opera begins proper, Cyn Glass (soprano) is setting the table and singing of simpler times.

  “We’ve had these dishes as long as I can remember,” she said to me (tenor), swerving as I snuck up behind her to kiss her on the neck. I was holding silverware like a dozen roses, pointy ends up. She’d caught my reflection in the blue-rimmed plates. “Look how the overhead light reflects, behind your face. It’s like you have a halo.”

  “Your angel,” I cooed.

  “My fallen angel,” she said. “Look.” A big crack ran down the entire plate like a smirk, and it threatened to laugh. “I’d better get another one.”

  “I’m sure it’ll hold,” Mimi Glass (soprano) said pointedly, coming in with a pitcher of ice water. Mrs. Glass’s first-act costume should be casual clothes that don’t make her look fat, as she kept explaining to me whenever I saw her at home. She also had on an apron, heavily spaghetti-stained.

  “It doesn’t look like it,” Cyn insisted, leaning against me affectionately and to shock her mother. Beneath her blue jeans lay her ass, warm and ready like something that’d been basking. Just three days ago we’d made love standing up for the first time to celebrate the end of finals. “Look, I can practically bend it, Mom.”

  “I’m sure it’ll hold,” Mrs. Glass said again. Then, peeking back into the kitchen, she hissed, “I can’t believe you’re talking this way, what with your father and everything. Of course it’ll hold. Show a little consideration.” She brought down the pitcher like a gavel and left the room, grumpy, with trombones.

  “What was that?” I asked, while Cyn’s eyes widened. She shook her head and traced the crack like she was teasing something. In my mouth there was something like an after-taste, like maybe I should have stayed in Locust, wrote my paper, worked part-time for the Admissions office showing high-school students around the campus, but to be without Cyn’s taste all summer long—“Did your father make these plates?”

  “If he had,” she said, “they’d definitely break.” Another Act One trick; just before a revelation, the crowd comes in and the party starts with a full-out choral number. If the crowd would come in only a moment later all that tragedy could be avoided. Though in this case not really. Steven (tenor), Cyn’s little scientific genius brother, brought in a platter of string beans, damp taut strands tossed with almonds. Mrs. Glass, now apronless but still grimacing slightly at Cyn, brought in a fleshy pink fish in a dark shroud of sauce, and Dr. Ben Glass (baritone) brought in his mother, Gramma (contralto).

  We dug in. Mrs. Glass had driven across town in an inexplicable Sahara-ready Jeep the family owned, early in the morning while the filth of the rivers is still submerged in grey light and Cyn and I, back in Locust, indulged in soapy caresses, sharing a shower in the deserted dorm. “It’ll be so good to be home,” she moaned, while her mother took her tan sunglasses off her eyes and perched them on top of her head, the better to see the whole fish gaping on ice, laid out morgue-like on thick tables for all the wives to choose. She put hers in a clear bag while we toweled off, and by the time we hit the road, driving over the train tracks and spilling coffee on my jeans that Cyn could still taste on my legs come noon, Mrs. Glass had entered the Japanese Specialty Market where the imported rice wine was stacked neatly on shelves next to hand-calligraphed signs. She Jeeped back to Byron Circle and clopped primly past the hedges in her much-needed high-heeled shoes, the fish dangling from her wrist like a raw purse. The salmon soaked in sake all day long while Mrs. Glass mixed papier-mâché at the Pittsburgh Opera and Cyn and I sped past Amish farms and fast-food restaurants. By the time Mrs. Glass had put the finishing touches on the coffin and began work on Die Juden and Cyn and I reached the city limits, the fish had a thick, somewhat gelatinous skin to it, which was to harden to a flaky shell when Mrs. Glass popped it into the oven along with a special ginger-honey paste she’d put aside the night before. That evening, with firework French horns from the orchestra, the Glass family eats the meal ravenously and juicily, like we’re gutting something.

  “Quality food means quality time,” Dr. Glass announced in a simple recitativo, a harpsichord strumming behind him. I could tell he’d said this all the time.

  “Right, Dad,” Steven said, spearing a bean.

  “No, no,” his father said. “I want to explain to Joseph why we’re eating so well.”

  “Because it tastes good?” I asked. Cyn smiled and looked down at the cracked plate.

  He smiled and touched his beard, a beneficent rabbi. “No,” he said. “It’s because a good meal makes everybody happy. Judaism is a religion which places great spiritual importance on food—we fast to focus ourselves for atonement on Yom Kippur, we refrain from eating leavened bread as we celebrate attaining freedom during Passover and if we kept the strictest laws, we’d have a kosher kitchen, all the food becoming a ritual.”

  “We have a new rabbi,” Mrs. Glass said, “who Ben really likes.”

  “Just so you don’t think he always talks like this,” said Steven.

  “In the modern day, the evening meal is often the only time when the family can be together. The time should be quality. You know what Rabbi Tsouris calls it? Family-making.”

  Mrs. Glass, Steven and Cyn laughed at the same pitch as each other, as do the trumpets which along with the snare drum will be used throughout to indicate jollity. I pursed my lips into what I hoped was a non-mocking, attentive expression. Gramma spat out a bone.

  “Family-making?” Cyn asked incredulously. “It sounds like—well—” Foreboding from quivering violas.

  “Family-making,” the good doctor said, smiling blandly, nodding sagely. “Anyway, if we have quality food, the meal can achieve spirituality. So I feel a personal commitment to having really delicious food, every night.”

  “Actually,” Mrs. Glass said, “it’s me who has the commitment to having delicious food. I’m the one who gets up in the early morning to go to that fish morgue.”

  “But it’s my commitment,” Dr. Glass said. It was the first time I saw this in Cyn’s father: the implacable and irritating surefootedness of those who are grandiose and wrong. “You may make the food, but it’s me who really commits to having it be good.”

  Gramma coughed, wet and loud and startled me and I dropped my fork. She kept coughing; she hadn’t said a word for all of dinner and now she was dominating the conversation. Dr. Glass moved like he’d been trained for such scenarios, which of course he had been, but all he did was stand behind her and unroll his sleeves. I thought for one moment he was going to reach into Gramma’s mouth and pull out the troublesome bite, like veterinarians on public television who reach into the birthing cow, but he just stood there in medical readiness until she coughed it out by herself and it flew at the wall like a bug to a windshield. Cyn and I had killed so many bugs on the way to Pittsburgh that we’d run out of the blue soapy fluid that sprays from under the hood, and we had to stop and wipe the insects off the glass with the same sticky T-shirt we’d used to wipe sperm off our legs after our lunch in the back seat. Unsure whether laughter was appropriate, I looked down at my plate and for a moment I thought there was something wrong with my eyes: the salmon had split into two separate continents, with only my startled fork as a stainless steel Bering Strait. No. The plate was broken, smacked in half like a pair of breasts.

  “Oh, gosh, I�
��m sorry,” I stuttered. A high hornet buzz from a few violins. “I dropped my fork. I’m really sorry, I’ll pay for it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Glass said quietly. Under her bangs, long and straight as venetian blinds, her face had gone powder-pale. She licked her lips. She wasn’t looking at me. Gramma was wiping her mouth with a napkin that matched everybody’s. Steven was taking his napkin and dabbing at the glob on the wall which was stuck there in a neat spoonful. I couldn’t understand why everything felt like a funeral until I tried to meet Cyn’s eyes. She was looking at her father.

  I’m a sucker for filling silence. Once I open my mouth there’s no stopping me. “I’m very sorry. Of course I’ll pay for the plate.” Nobody said anything. Against the still-buzzing violins was only the sound of Steven’s napkin against salmon against saliva against the wall. “It’s weird that it broke that way, don’t you think? There must have been some secret fault in the plate or something. You know, like when small earthquakes split big buildings. I read about this somewhere. Buildings that were supposed to be earthquake-proof, it turned out that a bunch of microscopic air pockets lined up in just the right way, by sheer coincidence, so even though the buildings were earthquake-proof it turned out that they couldn’t protect themselves from earthquakes. Steven, you probably know more about this. Cyn said you were a science guy—do you know something about this? This wasn’t even the plate that had the crack. What’s that?”