Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  That was the table shaking, rattling the serving spoons and making the unlit candles shake in their holders. I thought for a minute that the story I was telling was being fleshed out there in the dining room. But it was Dr. Glass. He looked like a volcano. His face was dark red and his hands were clenched into trembling fists and although it was probably just steam from the string beans it looked like smoke was coming out of his nostrils. It was making the table shake, that and the timpanis.

  “I’ll—go—get—dessert—” he stuttered in a terrible voice, and reached across the table toward me. I shrank back—it looked like he was going to throttle me—but he merely grabbed both halves of my split plate and carried them into the kitchen like Moses down from Sinai. A small river of sake-sauce began to widen on the tablecloth in front of me. Except for the color it looked like the stains on my sheets that had me eating dinner here in the first place. What in the world was going on?

  “Did I say—” I swallowed as the Glass eyes swiveled like periscopes to my stained place at the table. “Did I—something wrong?”

  Cyn smiled and half-shrugged. “You said everything wrong,” she said. “It’s O.K. You don’t know and Dad knows you don’t know.”

  “What—”

  “Dad had a catastrophe recently at work,” Steven said, bundling up Gramma’s wad in his napkin like a party favor.

  “It wasn’t a catastrophe,” Mrs. Glass said, thumping her water glass down and picking up some intact plates. “That’s the whole problem. He keeps thinking it was a catastrophe. It was just—”

  “A mistake?” Cyn said, raising her eyebrows.

  “Well, it wasn’t a success, let’s just put it that way.”

  “My son is a genius!” Gramma croaked suddenly. Which is what she’d later do: croak suddenly. “Geniuses are never wrong.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Glass said blankly. She held four dirty plates in a careful stack, towards her floppy breasts like she was nursing them. “Look, Cyn, you tell Joseph. Your father is still upset about it and if you’re going to be here for the summer”—here she parted her lips to me in an impeccably puppeted smile—“he might as well know. The point is for our family to be together. You know, family-making.”

  Cyn grimaced and brushed a strand of hair out of her mouth. “I wish you’d stop using that—”

  “Genius!” Gramma said again. Her eyes hooded over and from somewhere in my childhood I remembered that there was always a chance that Gramma was really a wolf in disguise.

  Mrs. Glass exited. Steven poured Gramma some more water out of a pitcher made in Mexico and bought at the Mexican Specialty Market. Cyn leaned toward me and kissed me wetly on the mouth. Gramma snorted at us. Then, still kissing distance, she told me in a lush, low voice about the Fall of Genius. Usually a tale of shame is introduced with lush low strings, violas or cellos in short loose bursts like something strumming.

  “Three months ago my father finally got the funding to go ahead with the last phase of—well, this project. I told you he’s a bone specialist, right? He’s put together a lot of people’s knees. Famous sports guys and everything. So he had this idea that he’d been testing for years—replacement bones made out of this new ceramic that they’re building plane parts with. Dad read about it in one of those high-tech magazines. So he tested it with computer models and stuff, and then on some animals, although it was really impossible to tell how it would do with animals because of animal tissue. I don’t know quite how.” Offstage in the kitchen came the percussion of dropped silverware.

  “How did he test it on animals?”

  “What do you mean how? First they took rabbits and took out their real leg bones and put in these ceramic leg bones instead. They were supposed to be better than the metal and plastic deals that they use now. Then they tried it on chimps. It worked pretty well but Dad kept saying it was all irrelevant because animal tissue is different from human tissue. So they finally got the go-ahead—the money and the red tape or whatever. They tried it on this woman. She’d broken her leg in some weird way when she fell off a ladder she was standing on to knock a wasps’ nest off of her house. She was swinging the broom to knock it off and she fell. There were some complications, because the woman was stung so many times that they couldn’t reset the bone properly—it turned out she was allergic so her whole body was swollen. Dad said it looked like she was wrapped in a sleeping bag.”

  “So he used the ceramics to cure bee stings?”

  “Wasps. No. The wasps made her swell up so they couldn’t set the bone properly, so by the time she swelled down the bone was all messed up. So Dad got the go-ahead—it wasn’t just my Dad, by the way, but when it got screwed up everybody blamed him and the paper blamed him and so it might as well have been just my Dad—Dad got the go-ahead and they put this ceramic leg bone thing inside her leg and when she stood up the leg shattered. Instantly.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It was awful. There was a big newspaper scandal and Dad was denounced everywhere.”

  “Wow.”

  “Stop that,” she said. “Really. Wow. He’s upset, is the point. And that stupid secret fault thing you were talking about was exactly the reason. I don’t really get it, but the ceramic was developed in a way to compensate for any minute air pockets or something in the clay.”

  “Not air pockets,” Steven said in the tired air of somebody who has always done well in math. “They’re—”

  “Whatever they were, it was statisically improbable for these secret defects to line up in the right way to have the leg shatter, but—”

  “Impossible,” Steven said. “Statisically impossible, not improbable.”

  “But it happened,” Cyn said. “It can’t be impossible.”

  “Statistically impossible,” he said wearily.

  “In any case, that’s why he got upset,” Cyn finished. She was still leaning toward me, her story breathing on my face, my neck, down my shirt. “So don’t sweat it. The cracked plate just upset him.”

  “And it wasn’t even the one that was cracked,” Mrs. Glass said, stalking back into the room a little wildly. She picked up the butter plate and threw down dessert spoons like a witch doctor casting bones. “That’s why it wasn’t his fault, don’t you know that? It’s exactly like the plates!” She grabbed Cyn’s empty plate and traced the crack through the traces of sake-sauce. “You see? Your plate wasn’t cracked like this, Joseph, and it’s the one that broke.”

  “That’s exactly what Joseph was talking about,” Steven said, giving me a half-smile of male camaraderie even though I was fucking his sister. “The crack didn’t break the plate because the defects in the ceramic were not lined up correctly. That’s why Joseph’s plate broke even though he just dropped a fork on it. You could probably wham this one down on the table and nothing would happen to it.”

  “Really?” I said.

  Steven took the plate from his mother and gave it to me. Gramma nodded sagely. My fingers were sticky. I looked at everybody and then whammed the plate down on the table, breaking the second plate of the evening.

  “What was that?” Dr. Glass sounded positively cardiac from the kitchen.

  “Oh,” said Steven. Together we looked at the large pieces lying ruined on the table like uprooted sidewalk chunks. The plate had cracked right where the crack was, right where you’d think it would crack. Secret defects indeed. The son whisked the pieces away and the father emerged with a tray of strawberry-and-nougat parfaits.

  During that summer, Mrs. Glass was mildly renowned at the Glasses’ synagogue for making the best nougat in all the Sisterhood. Even the first night of my stay there she’d already perfected the recipe (the trick is omitting honey), so all the ceramic tensions were dissolved in spoons of moist stickiness and ripe wet berries. Everybody’s mouths were wet and grinning, even Gramma’s, and Dr. Glass relaxed and continued to talk at me. I nodded and scooped in berries; it was going to be a delicious summer. Jovial French horns or something.

  �
�I’m really looking forward to working at Camp Shalom,” I said. “And I really appreciate your letting me stay here.”

  “We wouldn’t have it any other way,” Mrs. Glass said, smiling. “It’s good to see our daughter getting laid.”

  “What?”

  “Usually she volunteers,” Steven said. “She answered phones at a women’s clinic last summer, and before that she candy striped at Dad’s office.”

  Paid.

  “Well, this summer you’re not making any money,” Cyn said.

  “Steven is working at a very prestigious lab,” Dr. Glass said. “Carnegie Mellon. Physics. We’re very proud of him.”

  “I’m proud of him,” Cyn said defensively. “I just wanted to point out that he’s not making any money.”

  “He’s made money previously.” Dr. Glass licked the rest of his nougat off the spoon.

  “Well, I’m glad this summer she’s finally pulling her weight,” I said. “I bet you guys were tired of covering her mortgage payments.”

  “Ha!” the doctor said.

  “Well,” Cyn said, “speaking of tired, I am. And Joseph and I have to make up the bed before we can even hit it. Can we be excused please?”

  I promptly set down my spoon. “Bed?” Gramma said.

  “Yes,” Cyn said. “I know it’s only eight-thirty, but Joseph and I had a long hard drive. Very hard. Very long. And we kept driving faster and faster and faster until we were through, and it was so hot.”

  “Bed?” Gramma said again. “You’re sleeping in one bed?”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Glass said, “yes, we decided that, mother.”

  “Together?” Gramma shrieked.

  “That’s what they’re doing at school,” Mrs. Glass said. “It would be hypocritical—”

  “It’s the summertime,” Gramma said. I filled my mouth with nougat. “There isn’t any school.”

  “It would be hypocritical to—”

  “You don’t even know him—” The violins swell; Gramma lifted her dessert spoon toward me like a gavel. “Well, I for one—”

  “Mother,” Mrs. Glass said patiently. “I talked it over with my daughter. And Ben. It simply doesn’t make any sense to forbid them to share a bed, when they’re just going to go back to school and—”

  “No!” Gramma shouted. “I won’t have it!”

  “Please, let’s not get to shouting about it. It’s only the first night—”

  “It’s against the law!”

  Steven giggled. “No it’s not,” he said.

  “Well, it’s against the laws of nature!”

  “Please,” Mrs. Glass said, smiling nervously at me. “Let’s just enjoy our parfaits.”

  “No,” Gramma said, and here it comes: the old woman’s curse. From such grumpy seniors do lovers die, castles crumble. It always happens at the wedding feast. “If they sleep together under this roof they will not be forgiven. If they sleep together I call upon catastrophe to visit this house. If they sleep together , this will be my revenge.” On this she held up her parfait glass like a goblet. The parfait will be her revenge? In some ways it made sense: a parfait is sweet. A parfait is a dish best served cold. The part with strawberries and ice cream didn’t make any sense at all, but if anything’s important in opera they always repeat it. “If they sleep together, this will be my—”

  “O.K., Mrs. Glass,” I said. “Everybody. I am very grateful to this family for taking me in this summer, and I don’t want to intrude on anybody’s hospitality. If it makes you feel better, I’ll sleep in another room. I don’t mean to upset anybody, and—well, besides, it will be good. I have an ‘incomplete’ from last semester, and I need to write a paper, so I’ll probably be up late nights.” I couldn’t meet Cyn’s eyes as I said this last one. “So it does make sense for me to sleep in another room. I mean, if you have another room. If it isn’t intruding on anybody’s hospitality to sleep separately .” I couldn’t believe what I was saying. As if the idea of the summer was actually to work Arts & Crafts at Camp Shalom in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of all places, rather than blanketing myself in Cyn’s body. After sex we were usually so breathless we couldn’t even summon up the energy to grab an inside-out T-shirt and wipe ourselves down; we’d usually just let ourselves drip-dry underneath the glare of cheap dormitory fluorescence. Now, during the hottest months of the year, I was agreeing to summon up the energy to leave the room. But I was raised right. And after the ceramic mishap during the main course I felt obliged to better my batting record.

  Gramma’s eyes—long, thin rectangles like cars from the 1950s—met mine, but she didn’t say anything. She was still holding up the parfait; inside the glass, the remaining ice cream liquified and a strawberry toppled into the bottom layer of nougat.

  “That’s not necessary,” Cyn’s mother said to both of us. “I have made my decision, Mother, and I’ll thank you to—”

  “No no no,” Gramma said, shaking her head. She stooped up and took a little sweater off the back of the chair. It was red with little black decorations, the Pittsburgh equivalent of a sweeping gypsy shawl. “I’m going home. I hope you two”—her arm sweeps were so vague I didn’t know which set of lovers she meant—“do the sensible thing. The right thing. The legal thing.”

  “It isn’t illegal, Gramma,” Steven said. But Gramma was gone, scowling through the garden past the damp plants, quivering in fear of the curse. I haven’t decided if this weighs down the opening scene too much, but a short ballet would be appropriate here: The Dance of the Terrified Plants. Faces emerge from the greenery, while offstage Gramma’s cackles can still be heard, and the stagehands bang those metal sheets used to produce thunder. The dancers line up: flowers, trees, tomatoes, swaying and trembling. Through opera glasses you can see the ingenious way the dancers have been hiding in the foreground during this entire scene. The orchestra wails on, and untwining from the set are the thinnest, limberest dancers, who have been representing serpentine vines this whole time. The nuts and bolts would of course be left to the choreographer, but the music clearly indicates a broad outline. Shaking with fear, the plants group together and discuss the curse in hushed flora language. Gradually the swooning heat of the evening makes the discussion feverish; piccolos trill and the flowers swirl in small interlocking circles. The fever becomes desire; the music grows lush. While timpanis roll the pairing of plants grows less conversational and more reproductive. Flickering colored lights indicate flying spores. Despite the inherent asexuality the dancing becomes sensual, erotic, orgasmic. The plants fall back to their original places, quivering once more.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Glass and Cyn had left Dr. Glass and me with the dishes, because we didn’t cook. Of course, Cyn and Steven hadn’t cooked either, but I recognized the cleanup as a male-bonding stratagem and let it go; I was a guest. Cyn saw I was O.K. with it when she returned to grab her water glass and met my eyes. Picking up still more sauce-stained plates—how could any possibly be left, anyway?—I nodded at her, and hungrily watched her leave the room.

  “Delicious, huh?” Dr. Glass said to me.

  Watching her jeans was making me remember a sex texture: Cyn’s denimed crotch rubbing up against my naked one, while her bare breasts brushed against my shirt which she hadn’t yet unbuttoned, sort of a yin-yang of nudity and clothedness. Regretfully I returned to the dining room. “Yes,” I said. “Salmon’s always been one of my favorite—”

  “I mean my daughter,” he said.

  What? His eyes were sly. Actually I couldn’t see his eyes, but they could have been sly. In any case he was definitely sweeping crumbs off the table into one of his well-insured hands. I watched the spindles of bone or muscle or whatever-they-are moving underneath the skin of his fingers like the legs of a sleeper twitching beneath blankets. At any moment, an air pocket could materialize out of invisibility, and everything could crack. “Your daughter?” I said blankly. “Oh, yes. I’m sure she liked it, too.”

  “No, I mean delicious. My daughter. A good-looking wom
an. That’s what we used to say when we saw a beautiful woman, back when I was at school. You know?”

  I nodded. Mather College was in the throes of radical feminism but I kept my knee from jerking. I was trying to appreciate this family taking me in, and if I played my cards right the summer could spread its legs before me like a garden of earthly delights. “Delicious. I don’t think I’ve heard that.” And I’d rather not have it explained to me, thanks very much, Dr. Glass, sir.

  “I think it came from calling a girl a dish. You know, check out that dish!” He turned to ogle an imaginary woman with exaggerated heartiness. Couldn’t he just talk about basketball or something? “Then we began to get more detailed about the dishes, you know: spicy, delicious, whatever.”

  “I get it.”

  “And Cynthia’s a delicious one.”

  Four bars of woodwinds before I answer. “Um,”

  “Does it embarrass you that I say it like that?”

  “Yes. I mean, no, not really. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t mean anything improper. I’m just proud of her.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  It struck me that maybe he was paying a compliment. “Well, thanks.”

  Dr. Glass laughed with a boom-boom of bass drum and trombone. “You should be thanking me.”

  I blinked. “I just did.”

  He blinked, and then duplicated the laugh. “No, no, no. I mean, I should be saying thanks. After all, it’s my genetic material that made her so delicious, right?”

  Suddenly I could the see the Wayfinder sign that would lead me to some better topic of conversation. “Well, it could be heredity or environment, right?” A nice basic subject for doctor and student to rehash as we cleared the table.

  “It doesn’t matter. Either way I win.”

  “That’s true. Well, nice going, sir.”

  “Sir? You’re making me feel old.” Dr. Glass took his handful of crumbs and dropped them into the bowl I was holding.