Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  The Camp Director would declare winners and losers and the kids would all scamper to the Morning Activity, the second scene in the Hello Act. Based on some checked-off preferences mailed in by Mom, the kids could learn new Hebrew songs from Cyn, rehearse vaguely Jewish skits under the direction of the pimply boy, glue things in the shack I managed, play a variety of sports rechristened with Hebrew names, get wet under the sunglassed silence of the lifeguard, or, until it was discovered that what they were doing was pairing off to tongue each other in the semi-seclusion of the Theodore Herzl Grove, go on Nature Walks. Bing bing bing and it was time for Peace: a kosher lunch.

  The Goodbye gong marked the afternoon activities, and by the end of Goodbye everybody was cranky, so the two-thirty closing ritual at the flagpole never had the soft-focus magic of the brochure. The cranky audience had to listen to a brief presentation from one cranky group of activiteers. Cyn’s kids would sing. While the pimply director stood in front and mouthed the script, we’d see a vaguely Jewish skit. The lifeguard would break his silence and present the day’s Most-Improved Swimming Medal to some blue-lipped boy who would take the certificate in his proud little puckered hands. And, before Nature was shut down until further notice, a blushing couple would hold out a leaf they’d probably pressed between their heaving Camp Shalom T-shirts.

  My own presentations were a mixed success. Pieces of cloth, decorated with dried macaroni, beads and glitter, the better to cover bread for Shabbat, were an ideal project, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that papier-mâché candleholders were a bad idea until every last one of them caught fire and burned down to their wire-hanger frame in the Goodbye presentation. Assigning each Hello child a pair of animals and getting the whole Goodbye group to collaborate on an ark was an inspiration, but construction-paper mock Torahs drew angry phone calls from Orthodox parents pointing out that The Word is properly written on lambskin. After finding inspiration in events best left undescribed until Act III Scene Two, I trooped the shackers down to Red Sea Creek to scoop mud into big plastic vats which originally held ice cream donated from Scoberg’s Scoops for make-your-own sundaes. They bitched as we lugged them back up the hill, but everybody revelled in the filthy enchantment of dumping the mud onto a big plank and forming it into a giant seated figure. The little Katz kid donated two marbles for his gaping eyes; his leering face was scraped out of the muck with popsicle sticks. We covered our golem with a sheet and the lifeguard helped us slither him over to the flagpole where he dried, a mystery, all day long. For once nobody was cranky for the final ceremony, but in all the excitement I forgot a key rule of golem-making: it’s the Word of God, not the clay, that makes a golem a golem. Mud, when it dries in an atheist context, is just dirt. What looked mighty when wet was as flimsy as construction paper. The friction of the unveiling broke his left leg. It crashed and dusted on impact. The sheet raked him over; his face fell like a bad cake. In a final insult, his right eye rolled right out, hit a small rock and broke into jagged halves, the Katz kid’s best shooter. By the time his whole body was unsheeted he didn’t look like a golem. He didn’t look like a statue. He looked like a pile of shit. Four of the eight-year-olds cried.

  I almost redeemed myself with the God’s Eyes, almost. Put the sticks together to make an X (Not a cross; this is Camp Shalom). Weave the yarn around them in concentric, sloppy squares. Switch colors. Tie the ends. Around and around and around. The results are somewhere between spiderwebs and quilt squares; when the tidier girls made them in dozens of colors with splindly tassels on the corners they looked like the confettied photographs in biology textbooks of tiny creatures supposedly found in every pond. As inexplicable as finding oneself in Pittsburgh for the summer, God’s Eyes became a fad. First adorning the roof drains of the Arts & Crafts Shack, then the Camp Director’s Office, then the dining hall, then the other shacks and the infirmary and the changing rooms at the pool and then every available over-hanging, with miniature versions appearing on kids’ keychains and belt loops and ears and then given as friendship tokens, romantic tokens and Nature Walk tokens, the God’s Eyes surveyed the whole camp within a few days of their debut. Kids would sneak away from swimming to raid the diminishing yarn reserves of the Shack. Missing kids would return as the gong rang, breathless from their excursions, grass stains on their untucked shirts, clutching exchanged talismans of their lust, damp from their sweaty palms. The very act of unravelling yarn became foreplay for the pre-teens. Cyn gave me one as a joke after she mounted me in the changing room during lunchtime, the damp room swirling around us with the ghosts of who knows how many bashful boys hiding their circumcised erections behind the blue and white Camp Shalom towels, how many chlorinated orgasms achieved in the trembling privacy of the stalls, wiped off hairless chests with toilet paper, rinsed in the pool as soon as the protrusions subsided? God knows. They saw everything, things I couldn’t have seen myself, and they told me I must have been wrong. All summer long, blinking in the breezes, we were watched over by the handmade surveillance of God’s Eyes.

  Act II, scene one

  A pre-curtain woodwind interlude establishes the three weeks between the first we know of Dr. Glass fucking his daughter beneath the attic floor of Joseph’s borrowed room and the eye-piercing blaze when the footlights hit the dagger Mrs. Glass is holding. If the director blocks it carefully, the soprano should be able to catch the light at every angle of her arc, sweeping the audience in pure glare like something arriving from another planet.

  But it’s just a prop. After the first week of camp, instead of riding home with Cyn I had been walking over to the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts to finish off my incomplete in their library. Of course it was still early in the summer, and my box of books from Mather College still hadn’t arrived, so there really wasn’t much work for me to do, but when Mrs. Glass suggested it Cyn agreed so readily that I said O.K. Intellectually I knew that between working together and living together Cyn and I needed some time apart, but I didn’t want to. Still, the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts had a library which could at least give me an idea for the paper until my books arrived, and when I got bored I could stroll down to the Props Studio where Mrs. Glass made the necessary objects for the summer season. It was a fine way to spend my late afternoons, there in the crowded company of plastic ivy, plaster vases, sofas with trompe l’oeil velvet brushed onto them. Meanwhile, the good doctor would return to Byron Circle about the same time, his practice faltering after the ceramic bone disaster, and Cyn said she wanted to spend some quality time. Alone. With him.

  “Nice dagger,” I said, and Mrs. Glass turned and smiled at me. She put her finger on the tip of it and it bent droopily. The audience sighs in relief; it’s rubber.

  “How are you, Joseph?” she asked, taking her finger off the dagger so it bobbed like a freed penis. “How are the Shalomers? How is your paper going?”

  “The campers—Hello, Goodbye, Peace,” I said, sitting down behind a row of white wig heads. “The paper—Going, Going, Gone.”

  She turned down the radio to hear me better. Out of the speaker the summer’s biggest hit was revving up—“Bing Bing Bing.” The sound my heart makes when I see you babe. “You’re done with the paper?”

  “I haven’t started,” I said. “I call the postal people every morning and they can’t help me.”

  “I know what that’s like,” Mrs. Glass said. She thrust the dagger to her own scarcely-sagging breast, took it away, thrust it again, gave a satisfied nod and put it in a box filled with daggers. “I called the clay people today for the umpteenth time and they just keep saying, ‘it’s on its way, it’s on its way.’ ” The clay people, apparently, talk in high screechy voices; that section of the dialog is at the top of most sopranos’ ranges.

  I nodded miserably. Mrs. Glass was cutting shiny foil for another dagger. “By the time the books come there won’t be any time to write my paper.”

  “Then you have to write your paper without those books,” Mrs. Glass sai
d firmly. She disapproved of my incomplete.

  “Yes, Mrs. Glass,” I said mock-meekly.

  Mrs. Glass smiled. “I thought you were going to call me Mimi,” Mimi said. “I’m sorry to snap at you. I’m just stressed that the season’s approaching so quickly. There’s only something like twelve days before we open, and all the clay hasn’t even arrived for—”

  “I know,” I said. “The summer’s going really fast. It seems like last night when I had my first dinner here and Dr. Glass told me he lusted after your daughter.” Or, I got to meet Cyn’s grandmother. Or, we had that delicious salmon-and-sake thing. Or something.

  “Just wait until you get older,” she said, creasing the tip of the blade. Next she opened a small jar of clear sticky glue, to keep everything in place and make it shine. “Your whole life will just race by. I can’t believe my daughter’s already the age I was when Ben and I were—well, when I was in my first year at college, Ben and I met and immediately—well, I can’t believe she’s bringing somebody home already, you know? Nothing against you, of course. I just can’t believe—Ben and I weren’t married yet, but both of us were free thinkers, and—you know? It just races by.”

  “Um,”

  “I just can’t—I can’t believe. I mean, little Cynthia! I was her age when Ben and I”—she gestured circularly with the half-finished dagger—“and now that little baby is bringing boys home—I just can’t believe you guys are having sex already! I mean, if Cynthia were my age—Cynthia is my age—she’d be having sex with Ben! Her father! I mean—”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. On the wall, mapped out in masking tape, were the outlines of tools that had been taken down.

  “I’m sorry,” Mimi said, wiping the wet dagger with her fingers like she was smoothing a feather. “It’s just on my mind. Cynthia is already in college, and even Steven is getting bigger and bigger. When he was born he was completely hairless, Joseph. You should have seen it. Ben always said that it was a wonder, because I’m so hairy.” She shook her hair and held up the dagger to the light. Though the orchestration to this point should be as bewildering as the aria itself, here when the new dagger glints everything should stop. Absolutely.

  “You don’t seem that hairy to me,” I said, believing this to be the polite response.

  “You haven’t seen all of me,” she said, sweeping her arm down her front as if describing an apron. “All over, I’m telling you. But Steven came out of my body like a Ping-Pong ball. You know? I remember holding him in my hands and his head was like those white peaches that show up at the Farmer’s Market for maybe three weeks tops. I forget what they’re called.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said, eager to skip past the tabletennis part of the conversation. “They’re like albino peaches but they’re not. Or something.”

  “Right,” she said, stabbing the dagger into herself again, checking the tip again, starting another dagger. “His head was fuzzy like that. It was so fuzzy and warm, fuzzy and warm like the belly of a bird. I wanted him so safe, when he was hairless like that. I felt the same thing when Cyn came out of me—fierce and tender love, this book called it.” She took one long-nailed hand off the raw dagger and reached over to a book that lay next to her purse. She scratched her sticky hands on the jacket, briefly, like she was typing a single word. I couldn’t see the title. “Fierce and tender love. He just felt so vulnerable. I wanted him safe in the world.”

  I thought of the big brick house on Byron Circle, squatting on its foundation, its windows stickered with warnings of an elaborate alarm system. And every morning Mimi drove him from the house—I mean, gave him a ride to work to the prestigious lab before heading to the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts. I wondered if he and Mimi talked, if the car gave the same erotic bedspring rattle as it lumbered over Pittsburgh’s bridges and streets, carrying Steven from his solid house to a hermetically sealed room. “He seems pretty safe to me,” I said.

  “Well, now,” she said, shrugging the dagger like now was a movie she didn’t care for. “Now he’s all grown up. He was such a serious boy. I remember one day he got worried because he stepped on a crack in the asphalt at his school—that was one of the reasons we ended up putting the kids in private school, because the public school grounds weren’t kept up that well—anyway, he stepped on a crack and he was terrified all day long because he thought he’d broken my back. You know: ‘Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.’ But all those days are gone.”

  “He doesn’t step on cracks any more?”

  Mimi smiled, stabbed, started another. How many daggers did they need, anyway? “It’s just that—do you mind if I tell you something? It might be a little embarrassing.”

  I wondered if Mimi could see in my head the mortifying sex circus she’d already shown to me—an image of my girlfriend’s mother, hairy legs spread, expelling Ping-Pong-ball children like some machine designed for batting practice. Or if she, one floor below me, felt chilly shame pressing upon her like a steamroller as she heard the noises I kept hearing, the whispers, the creaks of the carved wooden bedframe Mimi had undoubtedly found in an out-of-town antique store and brought into the city slowly in the far right lane with hazard lights clicking in relentless rhythm, the moans covered by sweaty palms. I’d been in perpetual embarrassment for weeks now and I haven’t decided yet how an orchestra can best convey this. “Go ahead.”

  “Well,” Mimi said eagerly, “a few days ago I was airing out the house. You know it’s not good just to have the air conditioning going all the time. So I opened the window at the end of the hall, you know, the one above that little wrought-iron table I showed you?”

  So far this was as far removed from mortification as the Glasses got. Anti-embarrassment. Non-mortification. “Yes. Little claw feet.”

  “Right. Well, whenever I open the window in that hallway it always opens one of the doors. Some air pressure, or wind rushing thing. This time it made the bathroom door open. Steven’s bathroom. And he was just stepping out of the shower.”

  I examined the little outlines of masking tape. A hammer? A chisel? What fit? “Oh.”

  “I mean literally stepping out. He didn’t see me. He was stepping over the side of the bathtub, you know? And I could see everything. He was reaching for a towel.” Mimi stepped into the middle of the room and pantomimed it for me and all the blank wig heads. First one leg and then the other stepped out of the invisible tub, arcing like fired missiles. I could see what it looked like to watch him, and when she reached for a towel the crotch of her paste-stained jeans was spread flat in front of my eyes like a stretched canvas and I knew what she was talking about. If I could just reach over and turn the radio way up, I could hear the biggest hit of the summer instead of—

  “I could see everything. My little hairless boy. Well, not any more. He had this small triangle of downy hair on his chest that went down to—like, I don’t know, like a landing strip.” The timpani comes in first, thrumming out the rhythm of the now-familiar theme: T.U.D. The Unknown Dread is here in the Props Studio, the cellos, the violas, the bassoons sneaking into the air over the radio and into my ears and the ears of all the Styrofoam heads. “I could see everything. My boy has grown up. Little Steven has grown up. I just keep thinking about it. His body has come to fruition.” Her voice here should throb with vibrato, each quiver moist with expectation like a mouth watering. “I just keep thinking about it and thinking about it. His body, stepping out of the shower like that. I’m attracted to him.”

  The orchestra, in one big unison blast: BRUM!

  “Mrs. Glass, you’re kidding.”

  Mrs. Glass turned to face me, her eyes and mouth all sharp angles. Tense as a wire trap, she looked like a line drawing of herself. An outline. She wasn’t kidding. Her mouth pulled up at the sides into a geometric smile. “I thought you were going to call me Mimi.”

  “Mimi you’re kidding,” I said flatly.

  “No. I mean, just think about it. Sleeping with one’s son—if on
e is attracted to him, of course—actually makes a lot of sense.”

  “Incest?” I asked, amazed at my non-amazement. It was like the fourth newscast of a military maneuver or a just-discovered ten-year famine. The first time is horrific, of course, but by the fourth night they’re using the same footage over and over again and by now the crisis has a title: Standoff at the Border. Starvation in the Desert. Incest in Pittsburgh. With the “Bing Bing Bing” soundtrack the catastrophe was even cushioned in commercial sponsorship. I could watch this, if there’s nothing else on. I could tune in.

  “Well, not incest. Not if you think of it as incest. I mean, all behavior exists within a social and cultural context. I mean, think about it: children are born of sex. My son came out of my vagina. He nursed at my breasts. Why shouldn’t he suckle again, at puberty? It would be fulfilling a different need, that’s true, but it would be filling a need nonetheless. I mean, the taboo against in—the taboo against a child sleeping with a parent and vice versa—the taboo against—”

  I stepped in like a co-host. “Intergenerational sex?”

  “Yes! That’s great! Intergenerational sex! I love it! The taboo against intergenerational sex is really interrupting the natural flow of sexual energy between a mother and her child. The book I’m reading has something that really stuck with me.”

  Mrs. Glass—Mimi—turned off the radio and picked up her book. She flipped through it as I got a look at the spine: When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother . “Here it is,” she said, and read out loud: “‘The greatest paradox within the relationship between child and parent is that children’s beliefs about parents come from the parents.’” She paused for me to take this in.

  “You think that suggests incest?” I asked.

  “Well, not directly . But I think it implies it. If I teach my son that I shouldn’t sleep with him, I’m teaching him that the sexual urge isn’t a natural one, because I’m teaching him that it is unnatural to have sex with the person who had sex to bring him into the world. You see what I mean? When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother. When I can’t be friends with my son—and he’s been so moody, so adolescent lately—maybe I can be something else.”