Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  It stayed the summer. It stayed through each afternoon after the Goodbye session, when I would go to the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts Library, preferring to listen to the neighboring rumble of the orchestra rehearsals than whatever other rumbles I would hear if I went to Byron Circle. Cyn went home. Most days, Mimi wouldn’t be in the Props Studio, though occasionally I’d stop by and find her for a silent ride home in her Sahara-ready Jeep, the backseat crowded with shopping bags of supper. I stayed for each dinner, the juicy fishes and chicken with grill-lines marching down the breasts. Mimi would unpack the bags and marinate something, not for that evening’s dinner but for the next, or the next, and I stayed for all of them. She made roasted asparagus that stood straight up out of some sort of cornmeal mattress and I stayed to dip each tip in the handpicked blackberry salsa before wrapping my tongue around it. I stayed to flick my fork between the two potatoes roasted to a stinging blush to find the sticky sob of river-fished caviar between them. You can’t start something so difficult and exoskeletal as lobster claws cooked inside a pomegranate and not finish it, or I can’t; once I open my mouth, there’s no stopping me.

  Every year, whether the whole family is sleeping with one another or not, Jewish law requires a meal as loaded and structured as those late-summer dinners: the Passover Seder. In the Seder rulebook there are four descriptions of children and how to tell them why they should stay and finish the meal.

  The wise child says, “What are the testimonies, the statutes and the laws which the Lord, our God, has commanded you?” The wicked one says, “What is this service to you?” “He says ‘to you,’” the Haggadah rages, “but not to him! By thus excluding himself from the community he has denied that which is fundamental.” The simple child says simply, “What is this?” but I knew . I had the surety of wind blowing a door open, of sheets pulled back for a bare playing field, of a spidery hand on a sure and hungry course. These children weren’t me. I was much worse. I was the child who does not know how to inquire, the fourth act in the Passover Child opera. I was at the feast because I didn’t know how to inquire. What you’re supposed to say to that child is, “With a strong hand the Lord took us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage,” that’s really what it says, smirky prose even in a non-incestuous home. But that’s not what anybody said to me, and so there I was, undelivered. Like a box stopped enroute I was trapped in the house of bondage, a lost kid, a kid who doesn’t know how to inquire.

  And you in the audience are the same, you of the why doesn’t he leave? clique. Otherwise why are you finishing your coffee, wide-eyed in your rush? You’ve been to the opera before, or you haven’t but strong hands have taught you how to behave. You stay for the whole thing. You keep quiet, and don’t move, and let the opera play itself out. Even if the plot is full of holes, the action full of unanswered questions, even if you’ve entered the action yourself by entering the mother herself, you gulp the rest of it down when you hear the oboe rehearsing one phrase over and over: T.U.D., T.U.D., T.U.D. Soon the conductor will stand in the narrow spotlight and give the downbeat, and you don’t want to be on a bus, on a plane, or just walking out of the colorcoded city limits. You don’t want to be anywhere but here. You want to sit quietly in your seat as the last act unfolds, as certain and random as the letters of the alphabet: Ah, By Clay Destroy Evil Forces, Golem, Help Israel: Justice. You don’t know how to inquire, but if you sit tight, if you stay perfectly still and leave the continuity unbreached, you might find out.

  Act IV, scene one

  As if skipping ahead nearly a month and changing the scene to a hospital room isn’t disorienting enough, there’s a backstage technical difficulty and the dry ice machine kicks in as the curtain goes up. The fog is not supposed to appear until the following, and final, scene in the cemetery, but there’s nothing those headphoned henchmen can do about it: it billows all over the complicated metallic bed, all the clear plastic vines of IV tubes, the get-well flowers, until the scene looks imaginary, or like something that doesn’t, that couldn’t exist: there is no intensive care ward in heaven.

  The strings are hushed and polite: visiting-hour strings. Strings that won’t wake the patient, or the woman keeping watch. But the singer can’t take her cue—the downbeat is lost in churning fog. In a second, the conductor makes a decision and waves his baton dismissively like he’s killing a bug. The orchestra wavers off; the timpanist, posed for the sudden loom of T.U.D., lowers his sticks, shrugs and taps his drum boredly. The snare player whispers something to him and he smiles, as the fog surges over the rim of the stage and gives him a powdered wig. The conductor, still in the spotlight but with nothing to do, feels he must say something and turns to the audience. “I’m sorry,” he says, and everybody laughs, too loudly. He grins sheepishly at the concertmistress, who hates him, incidentally, and says it again: “I’m sorry. We’ll begin again in a minute.” Act IV, Scene One, the machine fixed. If you please.

  Act IV, scene one

  The music begins first, just the strings, hushed and polite: visiting-hour strings. The curtain rises to reveal a blindingly white, and perhaps still hazy, hospital room. Mimi is sleeping in the complicated metallic bed, surrounded by the clear plastic vines of IV tubes and get-well flowers flowering away in vases emblazoned with the snowflakes of faux-cut crystal. Beside her, Gramma sits dozing in a chair. Remember Gramma? The gypsy always returns at the end to reap the benefits of cursing. For more than two acts she’s had to wait backstage in full makeup, poor dear, just to flop herself in this chair and feign sleep. As the strings continue, their visit guided along by some polite timpani footfalls, you can see the contralto’s shoulders heaving with breath, either with post-allergic wheeze or from some sleepy overacting.

  The footfalls are literal; an Orderly (tenor) enters, the only black man in the production. It’s wonderful how modern composers are incorporating the entire spectrum of The American Experience into their work, instead of just the elitist white culture: there he is, the Orderly. He enters the room with a tray of inscrutable slabs of breakfast and places it on a small table. With a beatific smile so charming on Orderlies he gazes at the heaving Gramma and, like clearing steam from a window to see out, rustles at her arm to wake her. The timpani rustles along with him, but not Gramma. He rustles again but she doesn’t wake. Still standing far from her body so the audience can see what he’s doing, the Orderly reaches out to her neck like he’s spotted something to wipe off. But, as the rustle becomes a roll, it doesn’t take a repeat of T.U.D. for us to realize that Gramma has already been wiped off. She’s been wiped out; Gramma—the T.U.D. arrives anyway—is dead. “She’s dead!” he sings anyway, and as some supernumeraries come and fetch her stillheaving body away the Orderly launches into an aria which will be immortalized forever as the aria black tenors use for auditions. Mimi sleeps on.

  It, the aria, details the irony of Gramma dying while on death watch, and that, as an Orderly, he knows all about watching. As an Orderly, he spends his time ostensibly watching out for others, but really, like Gramma, he’s dying inside. As some canned jazz-riffs begin to shuffle behind him, the Orderly expands his death watch metaphor to incorporate black people, who sit and watch on the fringes of society but who are dying inside. The audience, white as a hospital, is equally moved by the tenor sax solo—played by the only black man in the orchestra—and their own guilt. “But who will watch me?” he sings at the climactic close, and it’s a good question—many people will not be watching him. Their eyes will be on Gramma as she is carried off, looking to see if the contralto has indeed stopped breathing.

  And it really happened that way, that day. Cyn and I drove to the hospital directly from Camp Shalom, having received special dispensation from the pimply actor to skip the Goodbye ceremony for the rest of the summer—or, as he said, “for the rest of the summer, or, until, until Mrs. Glass, I hope everything will be O.K.” We parked in the lot. We trudged beneath the hot, wet sky to the Osteopathy Ward, the very site of Dr. Glass’s
—Ben’s—broken-bone shame. It was a revenge better than anything Mimi could have cooked up in the basement: she had something wrong with her bones.

  When the doctor spotted Mimi’s Jeep, parked off the road just next to the shore of the Ohio River, directly across from the Old Jewish Cemetery where she’ll be buried in the next scene, he must have thought she was the victim of some violent crime, but the unconscious woman lying face-down in the muck wasn’t dead. She’d been driving home, Mimi explained later, when the aching in her bones that she’d been feeling for months, and never told anybody about because she didn’t want to bother them and she’d thought it was probably just all the long hours at the Props Studio, suddenly overwhelmed her and she had to pull over. Good thing the doctor had come along when he had, otherwise who knows who would have preyed upon the helpless Mimi, there at five in the morning on the shores on the Ohio River.

  Why she’d been driving at five in the morning, away from Squirrel Hill rather than towards it, was explained as vaguely as the specific nature of Mimi’s disease. In fact the whole scenario seemed vague, as if shrouded in thick dry ice. The doctor (tenor) who had come upon Mimi, for example, was rife with curiosities. For one thing, his name was Dr. Zhivago. For another, he was a bone expert—he’d been one of the panel which had upbraided Ben during the Ceramic Bone Fiasco. So not only was he the one who rushed Mimi here to the hospital but was now exclusively supervising her care, even shipping in special nurses (and Orderlies! Notice the Orderlies! The entire American Experience is here!) to work under him.

  Dr. Zhivago was as gaunt and thin as a ghost story, with beady little flickering eyes that made him seem like he was always taking notes. He was. He jotted them down on a clipboard as he hovered over Mimi and we hovered over him. He would not, just would not tell us exactly what was wrong with Mimi, who looked fine except for a constant wince of pain taped onto her face like a piece of paper you’d use to remind yourself of something: LOCK THE BACK DOOR. DENTIST TOMORROW. MY BONES HURT. “It’s cancerous,” Dr. Zhivago said, “but not quite cancer.” We’d have these conversations in the hallways, with nurses and orderlies padding by, their footfalls like tympani. “It’s in the core of the bone. She cannot even bend her knees. Unfortunately, her leg bones have broken in several places, but we can’t go in and set them otherwise it might set off a chain reaction.”

  Stephen, who did nothing all day but study chain reactions, would ask for details, but Dr. Zhivago didn’t give him any. “Could we have some more details?” Stephen would ask, and Dr. Zhivago would say, “No.” Gramma was usually sitting watch at her daughter-in-law’s bed, and Ben was always sitting on a bench a ways down the hallway, out of earshot and glaring at Zhivago. Aside from the tension which already existed between the two osteopaths, there was another wrench in the works: Mimi wasn’t speaking to her husband. She hadn’t spoken to him since That Night, and had scarcely spoken to Cyn. Zhivago passed on the message to Ben that not only did his wife not want him to treat her, but not to visit her. Cyn was clearly torn, but soon ended up spending these late afternoons and evenings on the bench next to him, so it was just Stephen and me standing across from a renowned bone expert who had just happened to be happening by the banks of the Ohio River at five in the morning.

  “I just don’t understand it,” Stephen said, running a spidery hand through his summer-bleached hair, all shaggy from months at the lab. “What was my mother doing there? Where was she going? Where were you going? What is this? What’s happening?” Zhivago would write something down in his clipboard and frown. “You shouldn’t be talking so much to me,” he would say. “You should be talking to your mother. She’s in a lot of pain. She cannot even bend her knees.” Then Stephen would look at me, like I knew something more than I was telling. And I did, too: I answered Zhivago’s phone call saying that Mimi had been found by the banks of the Ohio River—a phone call that, bing bing bing, jostled people out of all sorts of bedrooms, all the wrong ones, their faces smeared with the puckered and smug look of the recently laid. Stephen and Cyn and Ben—in the dim hallway I couldn’t even tell who had come out of what room—hovered by the phone as I stood in Ben’s robe and relayed the news. There was a lot of slapstick room-switching again, as everybody rushed to get dressed for the hospital drive: nobody knew where to go. I did, though. I knew where to go. I went right down to the basement and flicked on the light while Cassius sniffed at the brushes, dripping and rinsed. The room was clean. The golem was gone. I couldn’t remember what Rabbi Tsouris had said about golem-raising—did you have to do it by a river, or did you just need river mud?—so I didn’t say anything to Stephen. He’d ask more questions, and look at Dr. Zhivago, and then at Cyn and Ben on the bench, her hand on his knee in tender comfort, and then at me, and his shoulders would sag with resignation, like a body found dead in a chair.

  It was, that afternoon, just another twitchy orchestration, like the oboe which accompanies Zhivago’s announcement note-by-note. Cyn and I were stalking silently down the curiously dark hallway when the doctor suddenly stepped out of Mimi’s room and stood there in silent silhouette like a movie monster. Cyn broke her silence and shrieked, a little bit. “I’m sorry,” Dr. Zhivago said. Behind him we could see Stephen standing by the bed and stroking Mimi’s hand.

  “It’s O.K.,” Cyn said. “You just startled me.”

  “No,” Zhivago said, and put his clipboard behind his back. “I mean, I have some bad news. Your grandmother is dead.”

  Cyn blinked, and frowning, chewed on a nail. Her face reddened like she’d been slapped, or kissed a long, long time. “You can’t even—” she sputtered to him. “You can’t get them straight. It’s my mother, you—”

  “No,” Zhivago said again. I watched Stephen lean in to kiss Mimi, watched her hand close around his like an anenome. “Your mother is doing better today, actually. It is your grandmother. I mean, it was. She was—your grandmother is dead. We found her this morning. She died in her sleep.” Stephen and Mimi’s entwined hands moved up the bedsheets slowly as he murmured something to her I couldn’t hear. Zhivago stepped back and blocked my view; had the hands moved down to the metal railing, or up, to Mimi’s breasts? “She was watching over your mother and died in her sleep. I’m very sorry.”

  “My—grandmother?” Cyn, too, was trying to look over Zhivago’s shoulder. It’s difficult to twist your body that way, and sing the rather complicated scale to which “grandmother?” is set. “My—somebody just found her, just like that? My grandmother?”

  “Your mother is fine,” he said. Now I could only see a bit of Stephen, just his skinny legs, bare beneath his shorts, and his dangling feet. In decades back, couples were allowed to be alone as long as the chaperone, peering from a discreet distance, could see everyone’s feet on the floor. Now I saw one of Stephen’s legs raise like he was mounting a horse, and Zhivago, following my eyes, shut the door softly. “Mrs. Glass is fine,” he said. “It’s your grandmother who is dead.” There were all sorts of bedside manners going on here, and none of them were good. All behavior exists within a social and cultural context, but what explained this, this ghost story doctor, this mounting son?

  “My grandmother?” Cyn said again. She looked at me like she couldn’t quite place me. “My grandmother?”

  “What happened to your grandmother?” Ben said behind us, and we all jumped. He was looking at Cyn and me with the elaborate care of not looking at somebody else. Dr. Zhivago coughed and put his hand on Ben’s shoulder.

  “Mimi is dead,” he said.

  Ben looked from the hand on his shoulder, to Zhivago’s eyes, and back, several times, hand-eyes, hand-eyes, handeyes. “What?” he whispered.

  “I thought you said she was fine,” I said, pointing to the closed door.

  “Gramma—Gramma’s name—she’s also Mimi,” Cyn said, and then, with a trill of cellos, shuddered.

  “What?” Ben said again. “My mother—”

  “She was watching over Mimi,” Zhivago said. “We found
her this morning. Just—in her sleep.”

  Ben shook his hand away. “What?”

  Cyn reached out to her father’s shoulder. Her face was so calm, so sober and professional it looked like she was offering him a position. I mean a job. “Your mother is dead,” she said.

  “My mother?” he said. “Not your—”

  “Mom’s all right,” she said.

  “Well, not really all right,” Zhivago said.

  “It’s Gramma. She died in her sleep,” Cyn said.

  Ben blinked, didn’t get it, blinked, got it. “Oh,” he said, and his shoulder sagged like someone had let go of the strings. “Oh,” he said, louder. Cyn put a hand on his shoulder and he shook it off. His eyes were fixed on Zhivago.

  “No,” Dr. Zhivago said. “You can’t see her.”

  “She’s my mother!” he shouted.

  “Oh,” he said. “You can see her . She’s downstairs. We took her downstairs. You can’t see your wife.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Your wife,” Zhivago said, “is leaving you. Whether she recovers or not.”

  “What?”

  “Your wife,” Zhivago said, and this time he shrugged, almost. The cellos shrug, too, a low, noncommital growl. “Your wife is leaving you. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”

  There was a pause—the conductor, arms raised, looks like he’s about to sneeze—and then blast!, the trumpets scream in as Ben leapt at the doctor with a roar. Cyn grabbed him by the waist, but his arms kept going, clenched and roaring. Zhivago stepped aside in one clean lurch, and then grabbed Ben’s wrists. The clipboard clattered to the Orderly-shined floor.

  “What?” Ben screamed. “What? What? What?”