Strange Wine (11 page)

“I’m getting the hell out of here,” Chrissy said, leaping out of the bed, long brown hair flying.

“Put on your clothes, you
bummerkeh
,” Lance’s mother shrilled. “Oh, God, if I only had a wet towel, a coat hanger, a can of Mace,
some
thing,
anything!!
”

And there was such a howling and shrieking and jumping and yowling and shoving and slapping and screaming and cursing and pleading and bruising as had never been heard in that block in the San Fernando Valley. And when it was over and Chrissy had disappeared into the night, to no one knew where, Lance sat in the middle of the bedroom floor weeping–not over his being haunted, not over his mother’s death, not over his predicament: over his lost erection.

And it was all downhill from there. Lance was sure of it. Mom trying to soothe him did not help in the least.

“Sweetheart, don’t cry. I’m sorry. I lost my head, you’ll excuse the expression. But it’s all for the best.”

“It’s not for the best. I’m horny.”

“She wasn’t for you.”

“She was for me, she was for me,” he screamed.

“Not a
shiksa
. For you a nice, cute girl of a Semitic persuasion.”

“I
hate
Jewish girls. Audrey was a Jewish girl; Bernice was a Jewish girl; that awful Darlene you fixed me up with from the laundromat, she was a Jewish girl; I hated them all. We have nothing in common.”

“You just haven’t found the right girl yet.”

“I HATE JEWISH GIRLS! THEY’RE ALL LIKE YOU!”

“May God wash your mouth out with a bar of Fels-Naptha,” his mother said in reverential tones. Then there was a meaningful pause and, as though she had had an epiphany, she said, “
That’s
why I was sent back. To find you a nice girl, a partner to go with you on the road of life, a loving mate who also not incidentally could be a very terrific cook. That’s what I can do to make you happy, Lance, my sweetness. I can find someone to carry on for me now that I’m no longer able to provide for you, and by the way, that
nafkeh
left a pair of underpants in the bathroom, I’d appreciate your burning them at your earliest opportunity.”

Lance sat on the floor and hung his head, rocked back and forth and kept devising, then discarding, imaginative ways to take his own life.

The weeks that followed made World War II seem like an inept performance of Gilbert & Sullivan. Mom was everywhere. At his job. (Lance was an instructor for a driving school, a job Mom had never considered worthy of Lance’s talents. “Mom, I can’t paint or sculpt or sing; my hands are too stubby for surgery; I have no power drive and I don’t like movies very much so that eliminates my taking over 20th Century-Fox. I
like
being a driving teacher. I can leave the job at the office when I come home. Let be already.”) And, of course, at the job she could not “let be.” She made nothing but rude remarks to the inept men and women who were thrust into Lance’s care. And so terrified were they already, just from the
idea
of driving in traffic, that when Lance’s mother opened up on them, the results were horrendous:

“A driver you call this idiot? Such a driver should be driving a dirigible, the only thing she could hit would be a big ape on a building maybe.”

Into the rear of an RTD bus.

“Will you look at this person! Blind like a
litvak!
A refugee from the outpatient clinic of the Menninger Foundation.”

Up the sidewalk and into a front yard.

“Now I’ve seen it all! This one not only thinks she’s Jayne Mansfield with the blonde wig and the skirt up around the
pupik
, hopefully she’ll arouse my innocent son, but she drives backwards like a pig with the staggers.”

Through a bus stop waiting bench, through a bus stop sign, through a car wash office, through a gas station and into a Fotomat.

But she was not only on the job, she was also at the club where Lance went to dance and possibly meet some women; she was at the dinner party a friend threw to celebrate the housewarming (the friend sold the house the following week, swearing it was haunted); she was at the dry cleaner’s, the bank, the picture framers, the ballet, and inevitably in the toilet, examining Lance’s stools to make sure they were firm and hard.

And every night there were phone calls from girls. Girls who had received impossible urges to call this number. “Are you Lance Goldfein? You’re not going to believe this, but I, er, uh, now don’t think I’m crazy, but I heard this
voice
when I was at my kid brother’s bar mitzvah last Saturday. This voice kept telling me what a swell fellah you are, and how we’d get along so well. My name is Shirley and I’m single and…”

They appeared at his door, they came up to him at work, they stopped by on their lunch hour, they accosted him in the street, they called and called and called.

And they were
all
like Mom. Thick ankles, glasses, sweet beyond belief, Escoffier chefs every one of them, with tales of potato
latkes
as light as a dryad’s breath. And he fled them, screaming.

But no matter where he hid, they found him.

He pleaded with his mother, but she was determined to find him a nice girl.

Not a woman, a girl. A nice girl. A nice
Jewish
girl. If there were easier ways of going crazy, Lance Goldfein could not conceive of them. At times he was
really
talking to himself.

He met Joanie in the Hughes Market. They bumped carts, he stepped backward into a display of Pringles, and she helped him clean up the mess. Her sense of humor was so black it lapsed over into the ultraviolet, and he loved her pixie haircut. He asked her for coffee. She accepted, and he silently prayed Mom would not interfere.

Two weeks later, in bed, with Mom nowhere in sight, he told her he loved her, they talked for a long time about her continuing her career in advocacy journalism with a small Los Angeles weekly, and decided they should get married.

Then he felt he should tell her about Mom.

“Yes, I know,” she said, when he was finished.

“You know?”

“Yes. Your mother asked me to look you up.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Amen,” she said.

“What?”

“Well, I met your mother and we had a nice chat. She seems like a lovely woman. A bit too possessive, perhaps, but basically she means well.”

“You
met
my mother…?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But…but…Joanie…”

“Don’t worry about it, honey,” she said, drawing him down to her small, but tidy, bosom. “I think we’ve seen the last of Mom. She won’t be coming back. Some
do
come back, some even get recorporeated, but your mother has gone to a lovely place where she won’t worry about you anymore.”

“But you’re so unlike the girls she tried to fix me up with.” And then he stopped, stunned. “Wait a minute…you
met
her? Then that means…”

“Yes, dear, that’s what it means. But don’t let it bother you. I’m perfectly human in every other way. And what’s best of all is I think we’ve outfoxed her.”

“We have?”

“I think so. Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I love you, too.”

“I never thought I’d fall in love with a Jewish girl my mother found for me, Joanie.”

“Uh, that’s what I mean about outfoxing her. I’m not Jewish.”

“You’re not?”

“No, I just had the right amount of soul for your mother and she assumed.”

“But, Joanie…”

“You can call me Joan.”

But he never called her the Maid of Orléans. And they lived happily ever after, in a castle not all that neat.

A MINI-GLOSSARY OF YIDDISH WORDS USED IN “MOM”

bummerkeh
(bu-er-keh): A female bum; generically, a “loose” lady.

“
Eli Eli
” (á-lee á-lee): Well-known Hebrew-Yiddish folk song composed in 1896 by Jacob Koppel Sandler. Title means “My God, my God.” Opens with a poignant cry of perplexity: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” from Psalm 22:2 of the Old Testament. Owes its popularity to Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt, who recorded and sang it many times as an encore during concerts in early 1900s. Al Jolson also did rather well with it. Not the kind of song Perry Como or Bruce Springsteen would record.

fressing
(fresś-ing): To eat quickly, noisily; really stuffing one’s face; synonymous with eating mashed potatoes with both hands.

latkes
: Pancakes, usually potato pancakes but can also be made from matzoh meal. When made by my mother, not unlike millstones.

Litvak
: A Jew from Lithuania; variously erudite but pedantic, thin, dry, humorless, learned but skeptical, shrewd and clever; but used in this context as a derogatory by Lance’s mom, who was a
Galitzianer
, or Austro-Polish Jew; the antipathy between them is said to go back to Cain and Abel, one of whom was a Litvak, the other a Galitzianer…but that’s just foolish. I guess.

Momser:
An untrustworthy person; a stubborn, difficult person; a detestable, impudent person; not a nice person.

nafkeh
: A nonprofessional prostitute; a
bummer-keh
(see above); not quite a hooker, but clearly not the sort of woman a mother would call “mine darling daughter-in-law.”

nuhdzing:
To pester, to nag, to bore, to drive someone up a wall. The core of the story. Practiced by mothers of all ethnic origins, be they Jewish, Italian, or WASP. To bore; to hassle; to be bugged into eating your asparagus, putting on your galoshes, getting up and taking her home, etc. Very painful.

pupik
: Navel. Belly button.

shiksa
: A non-Jewish woman, especially a young one.

shmootz
(shmootz): Dirt.

shtumie
: Lesser insult-value than calling someone a
schlemiel
(shleh-meal’). A foolish person, a simpleton; a consistently unlucky or unfortunate person; a social misfit; a clumsy, gauche, butterfingered person; more offhand than
schlemiel
, less significant; the word you’d use when batting away someone like a gnat.

shtupping:
Sexual intercourse.

tante
: Aunt.

yenta
: A woman of low origins or vulgar manners; a shrew; a shallow, coarse termagant; tactless; a gossipy woman or scandal spreader; one unable to keep a secret or respect a confidence; much of the
nuhdz
in her. If it’s a man, it’s the same word, a blabbermouth.

The demons that live within our skins are the worst. From time to time, when I write of the madness of men and women who savage one another, I am pilloried by readers who do not perceive my misery at how little we think of ourselves. They write me and accuse me of holier-than-thou attitudes, denying the demons I say are in them. “Not I!” they cry, and detail their good deeds. “And you’re no better than we,” they add. How right they are. The same furies reside in me. What they do not seem to understand is that I have a love-hate relationship with the human race. That I revere the nobility and the courage and the friendship in us, and despise the violence, cowardice, and rapaciousness that motivates us most of the time.

I chuckle at the paper tiger of violence on television, that which provides rallying cries for self-serving petty politicians. We decry violence, and yet the most watched films and television series are those that come closest to satisfying our need for blood. What a duplicitous, mendacious species we are.

The demons within us are only fear.

And living with fear is a miserable way to exist.

There is more violence in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
than in an entire season of television cruelty.

And there is more psychic violence in one night of the marriage of two of my dearest friends than in the streets of San Francisco on that same night. This story is an open letter to them. It says: Do not live in fear of K.

“It is precisely at their worst that human beings are most interesting.”

H. L. Mencken, 12 Jan 43

“He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.”

William Dean Howells,
Pordenone
, Act IV

They had been in the pit as long as either could remember; they had discussed it many times; neither could think of a time when they had
not
been in the pit. They had, perhaps, been there forever. It didn’t matter.

There was no way out.

Where they lived, in the single chamber, the greenglass walls were smooth and gave off a dull, constant, pale-emerald light; too dim and corrupt to ever see anything clearly or free of disquieting distortion, too bright to ever permit untroubled sleep. The chamber was perfectly circular, and the walls rose up slick and unbroken until they vanished in darkness. If there was an opening far above, it could neither be seen nor reached. They were two prisoners, condemned to live at the bottom of a well.

There was one opening. It was a semicircular hole two heads taller than Noah. The opening looked out on the maze. If Claudia stepped two paces beyond the opening, just outside their living chamber, and looked to her left, she saw a dark rough-stone passage that followed the outside wall of the chamber. To her right was another, vanishing into darkness. Directly in front of her were seven more tunnels whose mouths were black and ominous. The ceiling above her was also rough dark stone, with tiny flecks of brightness that might have been tin.

She had once ventured a few steps down the fourth of the seven tunnels, and two steps further it had branched in three directions. Clearly, what lay beyond the chamber was a maze. A black void of tunnels within tunnels within tunnels.

But it was not the certainty of being lost forever in the tunnel maze that had kept her, or Noah, from venturing into that labyrinth. Even being lost, even to die attempting to find a way out would have been preferable to living alone with such a hated companion. Neither Claudia nor Noah went more than a step or two into the tunnels for another, more important reason. The creature lived in those tunnels. K lived in the tunnels.