Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison Page B

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