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Authors: Rena Rossner,Ofir Touche Gafla,Shimon Adaf,Daniel Polansky,Sarah Lotz,Benjamin Rosenbaum,Anna Tambour,Adam Roberts

Jews vs Zombies (10 page)

BOOK: Jews vs Zombies
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Leo stabbed that cover – Marvel Tales, May 1940 – with his pipe. Ashes fell on the assistant’s manic frown. ‘What have you to tell me?’

Irving opened his mouth, looking ready to recite, or yawn.

‘No, that’s too easy,’ said Leo. ‘What does that remind you of? And this is no bordello. What you lying down for?’

Irving sat up and ran his hand through his thick curls. ‘The other pink job.’

‘And when are they not pink?’

‘When they’re red or chartreuse or – ’

‘If you can’t piece these together, just how you think – ’

The boy took off his glasses and pinched his nose, an odd gesture considering that without his horn-rims, he looked like Michelangelo’s son of stone. ‘Long blade of paper-guillotine in action of cutting a brunette in half. All right already. False underwire of round cotton-waste piping, non-adjustable rayon-satin ribbon straps, one-inch separator of same connecting bandeaux-style shallow unshaped cups. Suitable for women with no body who think they don’t need fill. A Twenties look.’

‘Better.’ Leo produced yet another magazine from inside his fitted suit. ‘This? I just picked it up.’

Irving pulled the magazine close to his face. Its ink was still loud, crude. Only out for a few months, this February 1941 Spicy-Adventure Stories, ‘Space Burial’, featured a screaming redhead slipping off the back of some flying bird – the important thing being that apricot sateen number with the shaped straps and wholly improbable way that the breasts could be supported. He snorted. ‘Artistic license. No can do. Not with that fabric and no seams.’

‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’ Leo pointed to the bed. ‘What do you think of that one in the line-up?’

‘ “The Soul Scorcher’s Lair”?’

The middle-aged man with no paunch waited. After all, he had once had dreams, too. But 15 seconds was enough.

‘If you think I’ll let a fantazyor eat your mother’s kreplach. And she a widow working her fingers off… ’

‘Hot-formed lace, steel underwire, flare-banded from armpit to breast differentiators, elasticised arm straps, presumably three-hook back, D cup, black, suitable for full but firm breasts because there is still no adequate support for the average woman.’

‘Excellent, my boy.’ Leo smiled broadly, the picture of the proud uncle, even possibly, though he’d never seen it, the university professor gratified that his student had actually listened to all his lectures. Leo was proud of himself, too, for he had successfully hidden the hurt that the boy, through the callousness of youth, had dealt him. For Irving was right. That bra had been a great seller in ’37 – but its success had rested on the racy lace and daring black. Women don’t know how to fit a bra, and this one, for all its advertised appeal, was two flimsy colanders, so the average woman’s breasts were sadly earthbound or showing their inadequacy of build with an embarrassment of collapsed cups when what they needed was adequate shaping, filling, engineering, uplift.

As Irving civilised his hair and washed his face and hands, he heard his mother setting the freshly scrubbed table in the kitchen – laying it with three places for the three people who lived in that little flat in the Bronx.

He was pleased in one way that he’d made Uncle Leo happy. Of course he didn’t want to hurt the man – and besides, he felt sorry for him. But he also felt a simmering anger that he could hardly admit to himself. To sign his life away. Yes, so Mama had started in the sweatshops at the age of nine. But still. Irving put that out of his mind while he dried his face, and dreamed for another snatched moment of designing rockets.

What he knew of the breasts of the average woman, of any woman for that matter, was the sum of what he’d seen of Egyptian, Greek and Roman statuary in the Metropolitan Museum, all those magazines his uncle brought home for him to study, and Leo’s own blueprints and lectures about the real things.

Irving wondered if the man, that lifelong bachelor, had ever touched the real things. He’d gone from being a tailor of men’s suits, an unenviable specialty in New York in the 1930s, to a brassier designer, only because of a friendship made by Irving’s mother, who when her husband dropped dead of a heart attack when Irving was only 13, went into business on her own, sewing foundation garments to fit particular women, especially those with a breast or two cut off, and opera singers.

Her constructions, all made of pink canvas, could have held cement. Their fillings felt rather like it, and never shifted. Sometimes she made shapes that looked quite beautiful to Irving, but that she inevitably had to modify for her conservative clients, who seemed to prefer what Irving thought of as the ‘squashed look’. Maybe they were ashamed. He didn’t know but felt frustrated for his mother, who couldn’t afford that luxury.

It was she who had talked to her brother about setting Irving up. She not only didn’t have the money but there was also that limit of ‘Hebrew’ students already reached in all the top schools. So he had to take that job Uncle Leo wangled for him, opening in January. Until then, after graduation from high school in a week (what a waste of science classes!) he was to learn the trade – designing for three dimensions with two-dimensional materials, under her. Not that this training came, of course, with an opportunity to look at or touch the goods inside these constructions.

The first day in training  he successfully ran a Singer needle through his forefinger. It was a good lesson in driving speed on the newly electrified machine. After that, he surprised himself on the thing, finding that the more difficult the curves, the more fun he had making the turns, and he grew so skilled that his mother started trusting him with ever more mountainous jobs.

The fittings were all done in her bedroom, and the clients looked nothing like, say, that blonde with manacled hands and the rayon full-torso breast-delineating underpiping but otherwise purely unsupportive cups fronting Terror Tales, September 1934. Most of her clients were, frankly, variations on the potato or a cubist painting, even with her expert foundations giving them shape. ‘Today’s woman,’ he said to her one day, ‘should thrust out rockets, not your matzo balls.’

‘So, Irving. This today’s woman? She tells you this?’

Her son blushed reassuringly.

‘You fantazyor,’ she said, patting his cheek. ‘Your today’s woman is in the future, and she’s made of steel.’

But to make him happy, she let him create two designs that were quite astoundingly shaped, giving body where needed he said, but always ‘up and outlift’. She hated wasting the canvas and thread, but kept that thought to herself. After he had constructed both models – impeccably cut and sewn, she was pleased to note – she offered them to her two youngest clients, having quickly to explain that it was just an idea. She almost lost both women.

So instead, she asked Irving to tell her of his dreams while he sewed.

It helped him to hear her sigh.

The months passed more quickly than he imagined they would, and he was doubly sorry to see them go. His mother had always been a heroine to his way of thinking. One day he would find a woman like that, he thought when he forgot that he’d be a brassiere designer, something to laugh at. So embarrassed did he feel that he refused all comers, and with looks like his and his shy, thinker’s manner, he could have explored all he wanted, even the nice girls.

December came, and with it, the Day of Reprieve.

He was told that there was no way he could get into the Air Corps, so he went to the Army office across the street, but after interviewing him, the guy there wrote something on a piece of paper and sent him back across the street. And he walked out of that office signed up for a course, launching him into the Air Corps.

With his new skills in map-making, he flew over Germany and then was stationed to Burma, where he learned to hate the English for their filled storehouses, meant not for the people who needed them, but for export; visited temples that he laughed to think about gracing towns in the US of A – the horror! And in this alien land he felt for the first time, the real things, if only stone; and after much encouragement and teasing, the real things with a real-life woman, who said she ‘love’ him, but she kicked his pet mongoose.

He hadn’t been surprised that the stone women on the temples had matzo-ball breasts. After all, they were ancient, weren’t they? But this woman in the flesh – hers were something he had only imagined. She was soft and warm, but they could have been made of tin, they were so conical. They only confirmed, however, his thoughts that the woman of today would love to look like that if she could. Of course, she must have been a freak, a beautiful one but nevertheless a fantasy come to life in flesh. Breasts like these didn’t grow on women, or he would have seen them on statues. They needed guidance.

Not that he planned to give it to them. No siree. Now that he’d escaped, he saw – through the squalor of death and fear, the confusion of cruelties intended and unthinkingly dealt out, this war that he helped to serve – not only the opportunity but the responsibility to engineer a shining, uplifting future.

He was just having what isn’t supposed to be but what many have experienced: a great war – when in a nightmare, a blonde turned up, ‘Dead Man’s Bride’ from Terror Tales.

One pitiless noon he was sitting outside his tent, a wet kerchief over his head. He had been dreaming – but only daydreaming, and sketching rockets.

‘Wise guy,’ she cracked, as if that nut were fresh. She had a hand on her hip and one of those so-sure-of-herself voices that fit her cover-girl looks, on that cover. But she mustn’t have travelled with a compact. Her peach-gold skin was pitted with oozing sores, one eye filled with dirt, and her skull poked out like the Andaman Islands, from a blue-tinged scalp.

Yes, Irv had been around. He noticed not only that, but that her breasts were like two flops of camp stew. Man, did she need engineering, and uplift.

She sidled around behind him and hung her head over his shoulder. ‘That’s what I want,’ she said. ‘We all want it.’

‘This?’ He drew the nose cone, then another one beside it, and drew straps.

‘Exactly.’ She snatched up the paper as something precious, and held it to her ravaged chest. He was almost charmed. And she didn’t smell half as bad as other unexpecteds he’d come across, unreported ‘casualties’, the still oozing dead.

He wondered if someone had put her up to this. ‘Do you know the woman in that black lace number in Eerie – ’

‘Corinne? She prayed for you! Thank her for your luck changing.’

He repressed a smile. He’d always reckoned this blonde for a tale-spinner, but it was flattering nonetheless.

‘Can she come here?’

The earth moved, and up from it crawled Corinne. That bra had not lasted half as well as it should have. It was even less recognizable than Corinne.

But she retained some of her strawberry-blonde set hair. It had looked to be so shellacked that its preserved curves looked set for her to be displayed in a museum.

‘Dis war will end,’ she said through her lipless mouth. ‘And you will become the greatest brassiere designer there ever was.’

He jumped up. They could have tossed a grenade in his lap, his heart pounded that bad. He wanted to flee into the jungle, but knew they’d follow. What did they have to lose? He couldn’t lose them, so he said simply, like some dumb grunt, ‘I’m sorry but I’m a rocket man.’

‘Not on your life, you’re not,’ said the Dime Mystery Maid, now to his left. He looked her over, and was unsurprised to note that her flimsy slip of a bra, which couldn’t hold two flies, had slipped to her waist. What with her ribs sticking out, and her breastbone and all, he had to remember what her problem was. Ah yes, no breasts to speak of.

Before the rest of his troop came back from manoeuvres, he was surrounded by a bevy of former cover girls, all insisting that he heed their call. Their story was that it was too late for them, but they still had their duty, which they would carry out no matter what.

‘Not,’ chuckled the siren named Mitzi (‘of “Crisis in Utopia” ’, she reminded him) ‘that “no matter what” means anything to us. We have forever. And a purpose in death.’

‘But why should you care?’

‘Haven’t you noticed that we’re all young dead?’ said Mitzi. ‘Models don’t last long. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel solidarity with the girls still walking the streets in flesh and bras. They don’t want old-fashioned bodies. They don’t want straps that fall down. They need up and outlift! And you’re gonna give it to ’em, Captain.’

The girls, as they called themselves, gave her the best they could with a Bronx cheer.

They were more persistent than gunfire in an assault. And they didn’t let up for sleep or regrouping. He’d seen so much already in this war that he didn’t think them any more strange than some of the orders he’d been given by Command. Nor the sights that he came upon and helped to make, because of the orders from people whose war experience was intensely spent on maps only pocked by pins.

He argued with the girls. Then he tried to reason, telling them what a waste a creative brain like his would be – to engineer brassieres – when space (and the needs of war of the future) cried out for a genius with solutions.

‘But you’re such a genius in this,’ said Corinne, giving her lacquered hair a flick, which exposed her shapely bones. ‘Besides, you can’t deny your heritage.’

‘What’s that s’posed to mean,’ Mitzi shot.

‘He’s a Hebe, that’s all. No offense, Mitzi, but you know.’

Mitzi would have flashed her eyes, but she couldn’t even blink them. Instead, she said, ‘Captain Wiseman. Irving. Be a doctor.’

‘Or better yet,’ piped up the woman who still had chunks of her zaftig build, dug into her terrible torture marks. ‘A psychiatrist.’

So suddenly he had two allies, sort of.

And there was war amongst the girls till finally, he was shipped home, a month after the war officially ended.

The ship was crammed full of men, but that didn’t stop the girls boarding too. They weren’t alone. There was a whole contingent of dead with missions, attached to both troops and officers. Irving sensed this, though they were better at hiding than any soldier he’d ever known. He never talked about them to anyone, and no one told him of the dead who stalked them. Does it take war to bring them out, he wondered. And if so, could at least there be the retribution of having them pester just as much the idiots in Command, the civvies who made money from the war, or glorified all the wrong things about it. But he’d been around enough by now to figure that only soldiers were delivered these particular rations – these dead, all on missions.

BOOK: Jews vs Zombies
13.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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