A pleasant disciplinarian, PopPop, disposed to random fits of overbearing affection verging on emotional abuse.
In your Majesty’s room, though, He’s safe: MomMom’s old preserve (her and PopPop’d slept separately ever since Arschstrong took the eastern corner of the floor just below), filled to its trim of oceana green with novelties exclusively MomMom, kitsch like thimbles hewn from pewter, porcelain owls with fake emeralds glittery for eyes, fortunes from Oriental restaurants tacked to emery in any order of desirability — a schedule for the fulfillment of dreams. This is home if only for a week, one rotation of the wheel PopPop’s nailed to the door to the room, which flimsy paper would rotate according to the day of the week to one of seven vectors of its circle, each adumbrating responsibilities expected fulfilled at His leisure, chores to complete: clear table, clean sink’s toilet, broom and mop the floors, your Majesty; declutter gutters and weed the mail; anytime prior to bed, which is now.
Here only long enough for this barely to’ve become rituaclass="underline" Benjamin tucked in with PopPop sitting at bed’s edge for their dedicated hour of skullshaping (His uppermost still as soft as PopPop’s own low head is hard) — an ordeal erotic, leaving Him distraught, dizzied audience for the story PopPop would tell, followed by the silence of the nightly Shema, noticeably unwhispered. Then, PopPop to retire a limp off to his room, offlimits, to pack his dead wife’s personals; only now, a year later, moved out from her room to make room for Him: girlishly untouched saddleshoes, bobbysocks, poodling skirts, even her weddingdress that she’d sewn herself from a magazined pattern, then mothballed and tied in necklaces faux pearl and gold, lying all the other jewelry fake out atop pillows, a flaky substance passing for diamond, costumed cubic zirconia, moissanite, not so sterling silver, pseudoSwarowski and Tiffany imitations, being charitable donations, and verily, PopPop understands, elated further, it’s all taxdeductible.
A longing twilight, with relations sundered, together only in that they’re alone — after the tempered happiness, the disapproval of day, an unblinking moon, arched eyebrows of cloud…this, a memory of that ceremonial strangeness, the ritual off, which would almost ruin such promise, their vows, put a damper on incipient bliss, its bounty eternaclass="underline" the bride carried in, the door shut after its holding uniform’s tipped in splurging style, lavishly absurd in its shame; this tasteless as tastefully underlit room as expensive as happiness always is, this milk and honeymooning who could afford, and who couldn’t? Benjamin had had enough of this side of the family, Israel’s people and their Affiliated menschs, their slumming marriages, their goyishe lusts, His PopPop having married out of the tribe, His MomMom’s mother and her mothers, their mothers before them and blah, all having married an alien kind: how they loved stuff like this, they lived for it, demanded to be spent on, and their menschs were spent, paying topdollar for luxury, bankrupting themselves to be pampered, degraded by class.
His mother’s people, Hanna’s, they were that whole different story, the dialectical spiel; He never knew them, they died too long ago before they would’ve died for all time; it was cancer, too, of the wallet, of the pocket, it had to’ve been, whichever was cheaper to die of…
It’d been a mania for intermarriage that’d afflicted untold generations of Benjamin’s family: Benjamin on His mother’s side simply the product of untold generations of Affiliated women who without fail had married the Unaffiliated, and had verily reproduced with them, and so, in terms of the Law, their offspring would be Affiliated, would’ve been, though not many households were as monogamously observant — religionwise, and especially leaning to the wife’s Affiliation — as was Benjamin’s and would be still, only if. All these goyim, these goyishe monsters of prick and pride attracted to Affiliated women, gonifs with their loves and lust for darkhaired darkheiresses, breastcrowned lusciously, princesses if not queens. Benjamin’s father, Unaffiliated — born, later converted, the first — Benjamin’s mother’s father, Hanna’s, Unaffiliated, check, check, probably sundering unto the first Unaffiliated, Adam, whose second wife seems to’ve been the first Affiliated Mother herself, and how to explain, calling her Cain inside for a piece fruit, very funny. Darkeyed, darker skin, or maybe just maybe degree of endogamy dependant so pale, demure, modest modestum in their natural habitat — in winter the mall, in summer the stripmall — often to be found in their long sleeves and skirts, a secret fetish this ritualwear, dressed down to their white sneaks shomering home on the Shabbos from shuclass="underline" these women, these girls, daughters ghettowilling, shtupshy. And the goyim they end up with, even worse, dripping smegma from their every pore sebaceous, obsessed with fantasies of the right shoppingbags for breasts, a thickening neck hung with heavy amber jewelry, of women thicklipped, too, frizzyheaded, between their thighs egregriously burning Flatbushes to consume, consume, consume without ever consuming…O these dyed-in-the-lamb’s-wool-maydels — preferring the savor of unkosher salami, treyf schlong, endless unskinned lengths forced through golden doors, a Chosen Peephole through which to taste, sniff, or ogle: the throb of shaigetzes, each to their own specialized lusts, unholy desires but out also to ascend angelic ladders, social and business both; and so union after separation, love sacrificed to lust, new Unaffiliateds kept on being introduced into the line, water to wine, water to wine, and still any offspring, abracadabra, would be Affiliated, thanks Mom, as long as you’re holding the — lessening — line, how’s dad?
Tell him I say what’s up!
It wasn’t what’d transpired the last three months of engagement, or during the six months prior, which her parents weren’t aware of, anyway; it wasn’t even the audacity of the two of them, or the invitations into my home, how her mother had put it, he was a guest in my house, ate my food off my plates, drank from my glasses then my daughter, it wasn’t even the pigheadedness of his parents, how they’d never understand that, that, her mother had said, even she understood, it wasn’t even that he’d asked her, or that she’d ever accepted, or that she — mother, hers — had attempted then out of ritual obligation to stick her greased head into an oven preheated to the temperature of the last war, or that they actually went through with it, wasn’t even the wedding itself, or that she looked, again her mother, sooooooo gorgeous, it wasn’t even the possibility of an entire life together, lives, entire futzed generations exploding forth from one lone smashing of want against need; wasn’t even that night or what was to happen that night, she’s an adult now and yadda, she has to make her own decisions, her own decisions to make her — no, it was most perfectly that that was made that night, the result, the issue that irked; it was, very simply, the Kid. That’s how He, every he in His family — the sprout of an estranged seed, watered with a mixed drink — that’s how they were talked about, if only initially, until they, too, could talk, consciousness with a creditcard, platinumplus and the silence around you it buys: the Kid, the Kind, and just for the sake of argument, devil’s advocate and with what he’s charging I want you should forget about the fathers before, they who’d been born pure, you introduce a foreign element and, nu — what about the Kid, think about the Kid; they even thought themselves mature enough to kid around about it, the whole process, secretly thinking it an instantaneous evolution is what she did, him, also, doubtless, with regard to himself, a next rung on the ladder, ascended just like that, snap! and she’d snap her fingers, just like that! and he’d the goyim say guffaw, nudge her with an elbow recently moisturized and joke, I last longer than that, don’t I, then who knows, she might even in her laughing at him, beside him, feel enough of a new person herself to attempt a guffaw of her own, whatever that is and right along with him, that’s how they’d survived; and this is every woman, every marriage down the Senior line until now, after those twelve, this surviving, fullsized thirteenth — the litany Hanna and Israel could recite in their sleeps, which had always been without trouble, ergonomically sound.