And me. She had me. I was still giving her instruction, coaching her in her theosophics, rabbinics and doxologicals.
“When Hear-O-Israel wants—”
“Why do you use those names?”
“What names?”
“Hear-O-Israel. Holy One, Blessed-Is-He. Whole-Kit-and-Kaboodle. Master-of-the-Fruit-and-Vegetables. Those names you call God.”
And I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t mockery but I/Thou, only a little tit for tat. “He likes it,” I said. “He likes the way I do business.”
“Really?”
“Sure,” I said, “He don’t mind. He’s got a terrific sense of humor.”
“Really?”
“Hey,” I said, “didn’t He hang some monikers on the Jews? Why, your own name is Goldkorn. Your mother was a Guttman. Or take a look at the names on those stones out there. Schwartz and Fishbloom, Cohen, Lebowitz and Prumm and Stein. Steins fore and aft. Steinberg. Rothstein. All the Steins — Goldstein, Rubenstein, Finklestein, Finestein. Feigenbaum, Wiedenbaum, Teitelbaum. Weinberg, Goldberg, Rosenberg. The Baums and the Bergs. The Baums and the Bergs and the Blooms. Goldbloom, Rosenbloom, Blumbloom. You see? He stuck us with Plotkin and Popkin. He stuck us with Krochmalnik and Eppel.
“Even first names. Names you’d have every right to expect would be denomination-neutral. What did Old Nachas-Giver give us? Irving and Sam, Jake and Izzy. Moe and Meyer. Are these proper Christian names? Names out of jokes, Connie. Tailors’ names, names from the rag trade. Of peddlers, diamond merchants, the owners of discount appliance stores.
“And what about Jew itself? Jewish?”
“Oh, Daddy!”
“Papa.”
“Fa-ther!”
“Pop.”
Because, as I told my Connie, we’re not a chosen people so much as a marked one. Handles on us like signs over pubs. A called attention. This way to the Jews! The sounds of our titulars like cleared sinuses, the intimate throat and nose catarrhs. This way to the Jew! The blums, blooms, baums and bergs, the steins and itzes like a periodic table of the percussive, all the booms, snares and rimshots of baggy pants and low comedy. This way, this way to the Jew! All the landmarks, signposts, milestones. Our banners and gonfalons. The heraldry of our hair. The footprint of our faces. Something in our mien and countenance, at large in the lineaments like handwriting. The spectacle of the schnoz, the shrug like a broken code and an accent like a visible scar. Our outsize pores and busted profiles like difficult coastline. Some faint sweat and kasha scent and feel in the ambiance. And all the rest. Our farpotshkets, zaftigs, zhlubs, and shlumperdiks. The loksh’s unleavened life. Genug! Who said genug? Not genug! Step right up, right this way, ladies and gentlemen. This way to the Jew! The ghetto and mezuzah. The menorah, the yarmulke, the golden chai. The inscribed gates, I mean, the lintels and frontlets — all the blood plagues, all the frog, the vermin and beasts and marred cattle, the boils, the hail, the locusts and darkness and smiting of the firstborn — the Angel-of-Death-blessed, God-fingered children of Israel with their bloodied, odd-and-even, apotropaically marked doors. This way, this way to the Jews!
So don’t talk to me about designation and nomenclature, don’t tell me about the shrill, brassy mouthfuls, the racket of roll call. Because if I feel like mixing it up with Him once in a way now and again or, as I was laying it right out for my daughter, if I take Him at His Word and choose to engage Him in the I/Thou’s and Me/You’s, it ain’t only any testy Old Testament God we’re dealing with here, it’s a testy Old Testament rabbi, too! Don’t go screaming Mocker! Heresiarch! Blasphemer! Apostate! Pagan! at me. I’m in a game two can play, and am only living the quid pro quo, turn-table, give and get, measure-for-measure life. Ain’t that so, Blessed-Art-Thou? Do I have the range, All-Including-I-Am-the-One-and-Not-the-Other? Do I, Messiah-Scheduler? Am I at least in the ballpark, Sabbath-Sanctifier? How about it, Eternal-Our-God, Ruler-of-the-Universe? How about it, King-of-the-King-of-the-Kings?
Now genug! Basta! Genug already!
Anyway, Shelley came in at this point in the discussion and threw me one of those quick little as-you-were headshakes, sloughing her existence with some don’t-mind-me squint and grovel of the eyes, all her voluntary, I’m-not-here subordinatives and Cheshire meltdowns of being. She may even have put a finger to her lips. They were like salutes, selfless Shelley’s sinuous sloughings and shruggings, and I’m here to tell you you wouldn’t believe what one of my wife’s elaborate downcast-eyes gestures could do to this little man of God.
Or I, apparently, in my rabbi mode, to her.
“Go, doll,” I told my daughter, “go play.”
“No,” Shelley said in what I can’t help but think of as her piggy Jew Latin, “go on with the lessons-e-le. Don’t mind-a-le me.”
“It’s all right, Shelley. We were through anyway.”
“Oy, I’m interrupting,” Shelley said, pouting obeisance.
“Really,” I said, “we’re finished. Aren’t we, Connie?”
“I guess.”
“Sure,” I said. “Go on, sweetheart. Go and play.”
“Who with?”
“What about Robert? Go find Robert and keep him company.”
“That’s so grisly. Daddy. Robert’s crazy.”
“Robert is not crazy. Don’t say Robert is crazy. Robert has a touch of Alzheimer’s.”
I don’t know what it is Shelley does to me. Or vice versa either. Some mutual sucker punch to the wayward randoms of our drifting sexuals, I guess. A shove in the frictions, the rubbed chilblains of our underground plates and riled, misunderstood tectonics of all low nature’s abrasive underbite, I suppose. The attractions and curious customaries — tits, testicles, elbows and armdown, great gams, fleshy cocks, muscles and eyebrows, kneecaps, jawlines and hairlines, the heft of an ass or tone of a tooth — in us converted to stuff lifted above conventional flesh and blood and bone, lifted beyond fact or even ordinary aberrant deviation, the quotidian fabrics and metals, I mean — your leathers, your irons, I do declare! In us converted to stuff beyond parsing, mysteries, enchantments, beyond, in fact, my rabbi’s mode to understand, all my offshore learning notwithstanding, all that talmudic quease and quibble I was telling our Connie about. Our aphrodisiacs, our spice and pick-me-ups, sorcerous endearings, something amiss in the character perhaps. In Shelley a thing — though I wear none — for beards. (Didn’t I say lifted above the conventional flesh and blood and bone?) The gray and unkempt beard she cartoons in on me in her imagination to her only some necessary high sign of spirit. God the turn-on and the rabbi, in her mind, merely the conductor or maybe the buffer or just the good grounding that will keep her from harm. Or in love, could be, with the dark Jew gabardines of the head and heart. And in me — the attraction — to quirkiness itself, Shell’s forlorn, fussy, pseudo-baleboste ways. I don’t know what it is Shelley does to me. Well, of course I know what. It’s how that sends me to the encyclopedias.
Meanwhile I’m growing a hard-on as big as the Ritz and Shelley is filling up with wet like you could let in a tub from her. She’s probably raining on herself. I know this. I can tell. It’s urgent. We’ve got to dispose of Connie. And it’s Shelley who’s going to handle it.
“Sha,” she says. “Let-e-le me. I’ll talk-e-le to her.”
“I understand Yiddish, Ma!” Connie, exasperated, said.