Portnoy's Complaint (10 page)

When I am bad and rotten in small ways she can manage me herself: she has, you recall-I know I recall!-only to put me in my coat and galoshes-oh, nice touch, Morn, those galoshes!-lock me out of the house (
lock me out of the house!
) and announce through the door that she is never going to let me in again, so I might as well be off and into my new life; she has only to take that simple and swift course of action to get instantaneously a confession, a self-scorification, and, if she should want it, a signed warranty that I will be one hundred percent pure and good for the rest of my life-all this if only I am allowed back inside that door, where they happen to have my bed and my clothes and
the refrigerator
. But when I am really wicked, so evil that she can only raise her arms to God Almighty to ask Him what she has done to deserve such a child, at such times my father is called in to mete out justice; my mother is herself too sensitive, too fine a creature, it turns out, to administer corporal punishment: It hurts me, I hear her explain to my Aunt Clara, more than it hurts him. That's the kind of person I am. I can't do it, and that's that. Oh, poor Mother.

But look, what is going on here after all? Surely, Doctor, we can figure this thing out, two smart Jewish boys like ourselves . . . A terrible act has been committed, and it has been committed by either my father or me.
 
The wrongdoer, in other words, is one of the two members of the family who owns a penis. Okay. So far so good. Now: did he fuck between those luscious legs the gentile cashier from the office, or have I eaten my sister's chocolate pudding? You see, she
didn't
want it at dinner, but apparently
did
want it saved so she could have it before she went to bed. Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hannah? Who looks into the fine points when he's hungry? I'm eight years old and chocolate pudding happens to get me hot. All I have to do is see that deep chocolatey surface gleaming out at me from the refrigerator, and my life isn't my own. Furthermore,
I thought
it was
left
over! And that's the truth! Jesus Christ, is that what this screaming and
shrying
is all about, that I ate that sad sack's chocolate pudding? Even if I did, I didn't mean it! I thought it was something else! I swear, I swear, I didn't mean to do it! . . . But
is
that me-or my father hollering out his defense before the jury? Sure, that's him -he did it, okay, okay, Sophie, leave me alone already, I did it,
but I didn't mean it!
Shit, the next thing he'll tell her is why he should be forgiven is because he didn't
like
it either. What do you mean, you didn't
mean
it, schmuck -you stuck it in there, didn't you? Then stick up for yourself now, like a man! Tell her, tell her: That's right, Sophie, I slipped it to the
shikse
, and what you think and don't think on the subject don't mean shit to me. Because the way it works, in case you ain't heard, is that I am the man around here,
and I call the shots!
And slug her if you have to! Deck her, Jake! Surely that's what a
goy
would do, would he not? Do you think one of those big-shot deer hunters with a gun collapses in a chair when he gets caught committing the seventh and starts weeping and begging his wife to be
forgiven?
-forgiven for
what?
What after all does it consist of? You put your dick some place and moved it back and forth and stuff came out the front. So, Jake, what's the big deal? How long did thewhole thing last that you should suffer such damnation from her mouth-such guilt, such recrimination and self-loathing! Poppa, why do we have to have such guilty deference to women, you and me- when we don't! We mustn't! Who should run the show, Poppa, is
us!
Daddy has done a terrible terrible thing, cries my mother- or is that my imagination? Isn't what she is saying more like, Oh, little Alex has done a terrible thing again, Daddy- Whatever, she lifts Hannah (of all people, Hannah!), who until that moment I had never really taken seriously as a genuine object of anybody's love, takes her up into her arms and starts kissing her all over her sad and unloved face, saying that her little girl is the only one in the whole wide world she can really trust . . . But if I am eight, Hannah is twelve, and nobody is picking her up, I assure you, because the poor kid's problem is that she is overweight, and how, my mother says. She's not even supposed to
eat
chocolate pudding. Yeah,
that's
why I took it! Tough shit, Hannah, it's what the
doctor
ordered, not me. I can't help it if you're fat and sluggish and I'm skinny and brilliant. I can't help it that I'm so beautiful they stop Mother when she is wheeling me in my carriage so as to get a good look at my gorgeous
punim
-you hear her tell that story, it's something I myself had nothing to do with, it's a simple fact of nature, that I was born beautiful and you were born, if not ugly, certainly not something people wanted to take special looks at. And is that my fault, too? How you were born, four whole years before I even entered the world? Apparently this is the way God wants it to be, Hannah! In the big book!

But the fact of the matter is, she doesn't seem to hold me responsible for anything: she just goes on being good to her darling little baby brother, and never once strikes me or calls me a dirty name. I take her chocolate pudding, and she takes my shit, and never says a word in protest. Just kisses me before I go to bed, and carefully crosses me going to school, and then stands back and obligingly allows herself to be swallowed up by the wall (I guess that's where she is) when I am imitating for my beaming parents all the voices on Allen's Alley, or being heralded to relatives from one end of North Jersey to the other for my perfect report card. Because when I am not being punished, Doctor, I am being carried around that house like the Pope through the streets of Rome . . .

You know, I can really come up with no more than a dozen memories involving my sister from those early years of my childhood. Mostly, until she emerges in my adolescence as the only sane person in that lunatic asylum whom I can talk to, it is as though she is someone we see maybe once or twice a year-for a night or two she visits with us, eating at our table, sleeping in one of our beds, and then, poor fat thing, she just blessedly disappears.

Even in the Chinese restaurant, where the Lord has lifted the ban on pork dishes for the obedient children of Israel, the eating of lobster Cantonese is considered by God (Whose mouthpiece on earth, in matters pertaining to food, is my Morn) to be totally out of the question. Why we can eat pig on Pell Street and not at home is because . . . frankly I still haven't got the whole thing figured out, but at the time I believe it has largely to do with the fact that the elderly man who owns the place, and whom amongst ourselves we call
Shmendrick
, isn't somebody whose opinion of us we have cause to worry about. Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese. Because, one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but
white
-and maybe even Anglo-Saxon. Imagine! No wonder the waiters can't intimidate us. To them we're just some big-nosed variety of WASP! Boy, do we eat! Suddenly even the pig is no threat-though, to be sure, it comes to us so chopped and shredded, and is then set afloat on our plates in such oceans of soy sauce, as to bear no resemblance at all to a pork chop, or a hambone, or, most disgusting of all, a
sausage
(ucchh! ). .. But why then can't we eat a lobster, too, disguised as something else? Allow my mother a logical explanation. The syllogism, Doctor, as used by Sophie Portnoy. Ready? Why we can't eat lobster. Because it can kill you! Because I ate it once, and I nearly died!

Yes, she too has committed her transgressions, and has been duly punished. In her wild youth (which all took place before I got to know her) she had allowed herself to be bamboozled (which is to say, flattered and shamed simultaneously) into eating lobster Newburg by a mischievous, attractive insurance agent who worked with my father for Boston Northeastern, a lush named ( could it be better? ) Doyle.

It was at a convention held by the company in Atlantic City, at a noisy farewell banquet, that Doyle led my mother to believe that even though that wasn't what it smelled like, the plate the waiter had shoved in front of her corsage contained nothing but chicken a la king. To be sure, she sensed that something was up even then, suspected even as the handsome drunken Doyle tried to feed her with her own fork that tragedy, as she calls it, was lurking in the wings. But high herself on the fruit of two whiskey sours, she rashly turned up her long Jewish nose to a very genuine premonition of foul play, and-oh, hotheaded bitch! wanton hussy! improvident adventuress! -surrendered herself wholly to the spirit of reckless abandon that apparently had taken possession of this hall full of insurance agents and 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 and a lifeguard is on duty. And then there is the lobster, which even in her drunkenness
 
she knew wasn't chicken a la king, but only to shut up the mouth on that Doyle had forced down her throat, and subsequently the near-tragedy happened, and she has not of course eaten anything even faintly resembling lobster since. And does not want me to either. Ever. Not, she says, if I know what is good for me. There are plenty of good things to eat in the world, Alex, without eating a thing like a lobster and running the risk of having paralyzed hands for the rest of your life.

Whew! Have I got grievances! Do I harbor hatreds I didn't even know were there! Is it the process. Doctor, or is it what we call the material ? All I do is complain, the repugnance seems bottomless, and I'm beginning to wonder if maybe enough isn't enough. I hear myself indulging in the kind of ritualized bellyaching that is just what gives psychoanalytic patients such a bad name with the general public. Could I really have detested this childhood and resented these poor parents of mine to the same degree then as I seem to now, looking backward upon what I was from the vantage point of what I am-and am not? Is this truth I'm delivering up, or is it just plain
kvetching?
Or is
kvetching
for people like me a
form
of truth?
 
Regardless, my conscience wishes to make it known, before the beefing begins anew, that
at the time
my boyhood was not this thing I feel so estranged from and resentful of now. Vast as my confusion was, deep as my inner turmoil seems to appear in retrospect, I don't remember that I was one of those kids who went around wishing he lived in another house with other people, whatever my unconscious yearnings may have been in that direction. After all, where else would I find an audience like those two for my imitations? I used to leave them in the aisles at mealtime -my mother once actually wet her pants, Doctor, and had to go running in hysterical laughter to the bathroom from my impression of Mister Kitzel on The Jack Benny Show. What else? Walks, walks with my father in Weequahic Park on Sundays that I still haven't forgotten. You know, I can't go off to the country and find an acorn on the ground without thinking of him and those walks. And that's not nothing, nearly thirty years later.