their wives. Not until the sherbet arrived did Doyle—who my mother also describes as “in looks a second Errol Flynn, and not just in looks”—did Doyle reveal to her what it was she had actually ingested.
Subsequently she was over the toilet all night throwing up. “My
kishkas
came out from that thing! Some practical joker! That’s why to this day I tell you, Alex, never to commit a practical joke—because the consequences can be tragic! I was so sick, Alex,” she used to love to remind herself and me, and my father too, five, ten, fifteen years after the cataclysm itself, “that your father, Mr. Brave One here, had to call the hotel doctor out of a sound sleep to come to the room. See how I’m holding my fingers? I was throwing up so hard, they got stiff just like this, like I was
paralyzed
, and
ask
your father—Jack, tell him, tell him what you thought when you saw what happened to my fingers from the lobster Newburg.” “What lobster Newburg?” “That your friend Doyle forced down my throat.” “Doyle? What Doyle?” “Doyle, The
Shicker Goy
Who They Had To Transfer To The Wilds of South Jersey He Was Such A Run-Around. Doyle! Who Looked Like Errol Flynn! Tell Alex what happened to my fingers, that you
thought
happened—” “Look, I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” which is probably the case: not everybody quite senses my mother’s life to be the high drama she herself experiences—also, there is always a possibility that this story has more to do with imagination than reality (more to do, needless to say, with the dangerous Doyle than the forbidden lobster). And then, of course, my father is a man who has a certain amount of worrying to do each day, and sometimes he just has to forgo listening to the conversations going on around him in order to fulfill his anxiety requirement. It can well be that he hasn’t really heard a word she’s been saying.
But on it goes, my mother’s monologue. As other children hear the story of Scrooge every year, or are read to nightly from some favorite book, I am continually
shtupped
full of the suspense-filled chapters of her perilous life. This in fact is the literature of my childhood, these stories of my mother’s—the only bound books in the house, aside from schoolbooks, are those that have been given as presents to my parents when one or the other was recuperating in the hospital. One third of our library consists of
Dragon Seed
(her hysterectomy) (moral: nothing is never ironic, there’s always a laugh lurking somewhere) and the other two thirds are
Argentine Diary
by William L. Shirer and (same moral)
The Memoirs of Casanova
(his appendectomy). Otherwise our books are written by Sophie Portnoy, each an addition to that famous series of hers entitled,
You Know Me, I’ll Try Anything Once
. For the idea that seems to generate and inform her works is that she is some sort of daredevil who goes exuberantly out into life in search of the new and the thrilling, only to be slapped down for her pioneering spirit. She actually seems to think of herself as a woman at the very frontiers of experience, some doomed dazzling combination of Marie Curie, Anna Karenina, and Amelia Earhart. At any rate, that is the sort of romantic image of her which this little boy goes to bed with, after she has buttoned him into his pajamas and tucked him between the sheets with the story of how she learned to drive a car when she was pregnant with my sister, and the very first day that she had her license—“the very first
hour
, Alex”—“some maniac” slammed into her rear bumper, and consequently she has never driven a car from that moment on. Or the story of how she was searching for the goldfish in a pond at Saratoga Springs, New York, where she had been taken at the age of ten to visit an old sick aunt, and accidentally fell in, right to the bottom of the filthy pond, and has not gone into the water since, not even down the shore, when it’s low tide
Subsequently she was over the toilet all night throwing up. “My
kishkas
came out from that thing! Some practical joker! That’s why to this day I tell you, Alex, never to commit a practical joke—because the consequences can be tragic! I was so sick, Alex,” she used to love to remind herself and me, and my father too, five, ten, fifteen years after the cataclysm itself, “that your father, Mr. Brave One here, had to call the hotel doctor out of a sound sleep to come to the room. See how I’m holding my fingers? I was throwing up so hard, they got stiff just like this, like I was
paralyzed
, and
ask
your father—Jack, tell him, tell him what you thought when you saw what happened to my fingers from the lobster Newburg.” “What lobster Newburg?” “That your friend Doyle forced down my throat.” “Doyle? What Doyle?” “Doyle, The
Shicker Goy
Who They Had To Transfer To The Wilds of South Jersey He Was Such A Run-Around. Doyle! Who Looked Like Errol Flynn! Tell Alex what happened to my fingers, that you
thought
happened—” “Look, I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” which is probably the case: not everybody quite senses my mother’s life to be the high drama she herself experiences—also, there is always a possibility that this story has more to do with imagination than reality (more to do, needless to say, with the dangerous Doyle than the forbidden lobster). And then, of course, my father is a man who has a certain amount of worrying to do each day, and sometimes he just has to forgo listening to the conversations going on around him in order to fulfill his anxiety requirement. It can well be that he hasn’t really heard a word she’s been saying.
But on it goes, my mother’s monologue. As other children hear the story of Scrooge every year, or are read to nightly from some favorite book, I am continually
shtupped
full of the suspense-filled chapters of her perilous life. This in fact is the literature of my childhood, these stories of my mother’s—the only bound books in the house, aside from schoolbooks, are those that have been given as presents to my parents when one or the other was recuperating in the hospital. One third of our library consists of
Dragon Seed
(her hysterectomy) (moral: nothing is never ironic, there’s always a laugh lurking somewhere) and the other two thirds are
Argentine Diary
by William L. Shirer and (same moral)
The Memoirs of Casanova
(his appendectomy). Otherwise our books are written by Sophie Portnoy, each an addition to that famous series of hers entitled,
You Know Me, I’ll Try Anything Once
. For the idea that seems to generate and inform her works is that she is some sort of daredevil who goes exuberantly out into life in search of the new and the thrilling, only to be slapped down for her pioneering spirit. She actually seems to think of herself as a woman at the very frontiers of experience, some doomed dazzling combination of Marie Curie, Anna Karenina, and Amelia Earhart. At any rate, that is the sort of romantic image of her which this little boy goes to bed with, after she has buttoned him into his pajamas and tucked him between the sheets with the story of how she learned to drive a car when she was pregnant with my sister, and the very first day that she had her license—“the very first
hour
, Alex”—“some maniac” slammed into her rear bumper, and consequently she has never driven a car from that moment on. Or the story of how she was searching for the goldfish in a pond at Saratoga Springs, New York, where she had been taken at the age of ten to visit an old sick aunt, and accidentally fell in, right to the bottom of the filthy pond, and has not gone into the water since, not even down the shore, when it’s low tide
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