Watch Your Mouth (3 page)

Cyn’s neighborhood was a nicer one, and Cyn’s street was a nicer street. Some English-majors-turned-urban-planners had named the streets after the headings in their syllabi; the Glass home was located in the middle of Byron Circle, a cul-de-sac inappropriately close to Hemingway Way. The neighbors all had each other’s keys. The Glasses’ house had stickers in the win- dows threatening an advanced burglar alarm system, but the stickers were all that were installed. Just about anybody could have walked into that house.

On summer days like this one, everyone washed their cars

while the radio played songs the fathers liked back in college. The rinsed foam swirled into the one drain that always clogged come October when the maples dropped Canadian propaganda over everything. Cyn’s car is still dripping from her father’s nos- taglic scrub as the lights go up on a table tableau, framed per- fectly by the garden window, up center. I am reasonably certain that even this far upstage all the singers can be heard. As the opera begins proper, Cyn Glass (
soprano
) is setting the table and singing of simpler times.

“We’ve had these dishes as long as I can remember,” she said to me (
tenor
), swerving as I snuck up behind her to kiss her on the neck. I was holding silverware like a dozen roses, pointy ends up. She’d caught my reflection in the blue-rimmed plates. “Look how the overhead light reflects, behind your face. It’s like you have a halo.”

“Your angel,” I cooed.

“My
fallen
angel,” she said. “Look.” A big crack ran down the entire plate like a smirk, and it threatened to laugh. “I’d better get another one.”

“I’m sure it’ll hold,”
Mimi Glass (
soprano
) said pointedly, com- ing in with a pitcher of ice water. Mrs. Glass’s first-act costume should be casual clothes that don’t make her look fat, as she kept explaining to me whenever I saw her at home. She also had on an apron, heavily spaghetti-stained.

“It doesn’t look like it,” Cyn insisted, leaning against me af- fectionately and to shock her mother. Beneath her blue jeans lay her ass, warm and ready like something that’d been basking. Just three days ago we’d made love standing up for the first time to celebrate the end of finals. “Look, I can practically bend it, Mom.”

“I’m sure it’ll hold,”
Mrs. Glass said again. Then, peeking back into the kitchen, she hissed, “I can’t believe you’re talking this way, what with your father and everything. Of
course
it’ll hold. Show a little consideration.” She brought down the pitcher like a gavel and left the room, grumpy, with trombones.

“What was that?” I asked, while Cyn’s eyes widened. She shook her head and traced the crack like she was teasing some- thing. In my mouth there was something like an aftertaste, like maybe I should have stayed in Locust, wrote my paper, worked part-time for the Admissions office showing high-school stu- dents around the campus, but to be without Cyn’s taste all sum- mer long—“Did your father
make
these plates?”

“If he had,” she said, “they’d
definitely
break.” Another Act One trick; just before a revelation, the crowd comes in and the party starts with a full-out choral number. If the crowd would come in only a moment later all that tragedy could be avoided. Though in this case not really. Steven (
tenor
), Cyn’s little sci- entific genius brother, brought in a platter of string beans, damp taut strands tossed with almonds. Mrs. Glass, now apronless but still grimacing slightly at Cyn, brought in a fleshy pink fish in a dark shroud of sauce, and Dr. Ben Glass (
baritone
) brought in his mother, Gramma (
contralto
).

We dug in. Mrs. Glass had driven across town in an inexpli- cable Sahara-ready Jeep the family owned, early in the morning while the filth of the rivers is still submerged in grey light and Cyn and I, back in Locust, indulged in soapy caresses, sharing a shower in the deserted dorm. “It’ll be so good to be home,” she moaned, while her mother took her tan sunglasses off her eyes and perched them on top of her head, the better to see the whole fish gaping on ice, laid out morgue-like on thick tables

for all the wives to choose. She put hers in a clear bag while we toweled off, and by the time we hit the road, driving over the train tracks and spilling coffee on my jeans that Cyn could still taste on my legs come noon, Mrs. Glass had entered the Japa- nese Specialty Market where the imported rice wine was stacked neatly on shelves next to hand-calligraphed signs. She Jeeped back to Byron Circle and clopped primly past the hedges in her much-needed high-heeled shoes, the fish dangling from her wrist like a raw purse. The salmon soaked in sake all day long while Mrs. Glass mixed papier-maˆche´ at the Pittsburgh Opera and Cyn and I sped past Amish farms and fast-food restaurants. By the time Mrs. Glass had put the finishing touches on the coffin and began work on
Die Juden
and Cyn and I reached the city limits, the fish had a thick, somewhat gelatinous skin to it, which was to harden to a flaky shell when Mrs. Glass popped it into the oven along with a special ginger-honey paste she’d put aside the night before. That evening, with firework French horns from the orchestra, the Glass family eats the meal rav- enously and juicily, like we’re gutting something.

“Quality food means quality time,” Dr. Glass announced in a simple recitativo, a harpsichord strumming behind him. I could tell he’d said this all the time.

“Right, Dad,” Steven said, spearing a bean.

“No, no,” his father said. “I want to explain to Joseph why we’re eating so well.”

“Because it tastes good?” I asked. Cyn smiled and looked down at the cracked plate.

He smiled and touched his beard, a beneficent rabbi. “No,” he said. “It’s because a good meal makes everybody happy. Ju- daism is a religion which places great spiritual importance on

food—we fast to focus ourselves for atonement on Yom Kippur, we refrain from eating leavened bread as we celebrate attaining freedom during Passover and if we kept the strictest laws, we’d have a kosher kitchen, all the food becoming a ritual.”

“We have a new rabbi,” Mrs. Glass said, “who Ben really likes.”

“Just so you don’t think he always talks like this,” said Steven. “In the modern day, the evening meal is often the only time when the family can be together. The time should be
quality
.

You know what Rabbi Tsouris calls it?
Family-making
.”

Mrs. Glass, Steven and Cyn laughed at the same pitch as each other, as do the trumpets which along with the snare drum will be used throughout to indicate jollity. I pursed my lips into what I hoped was a non-mocking, attentive expression. Gramma spat out a bone.

“Family-making?”
Cyn asked incredulously. “It sounds like— well—” Foreboding from quivering violas.

“Family-making,” the good doctor said, smiling blandly, nod- ding sagely. “Anyway, if we have quality food, the meal can achieve spirituality. So I feel a personal commitment to having really delicious food, every night.”

“Actually,” Mrs. Glass said, “it’s
me
who has the commitment to having delicious food. I’m the one who gets up in the early morning to go to that fish morgue.”

“But it’s
my
commitment,” Dr. Glass said. It was the first time I saw this in Cyn’s father: the implacable and irritating sure- footedness of those who are grandiose and wrong. “
You
may make the food, but it’s
me
who really
commits
to having it be good.”

Gramma coughed, wet and loud and startled me and I

dropped my fork. She kept coughing; she hadn’t said a word for all of dinner and now she was dominating the conversation. Dr. Glass moved like he’d been trained for such scenarios, which of course he had been, but all he did was stand behind her and unroll his sleeves. I thought for one moment he was going to reach into Gramma’s mouth and pull out the troublesome bite, like veterinarians on public television who reach
into
the birth- ing cow, but he just stood there in medical readiness until she coughed it out by herself and it flew at the wall like a bug to a windshield. Cyn and I had killed so many bugs on the way to Pittsburgh that we’d run out of the blue soapy fluid that sprays from under the hood, and we had to stop and wipe the insects off the glass with the same sticky T-shirt we’d used to wipe sperm off our legs after our lunch in the back seat. Unsure whether laughter was appropriate, I looked down at my plate and for a moment I thought there was something wrong with my eyes: the salmon had split into two separate continents, with only my startled fork as a stainless steel Bering Strait. No. The plate was broken, smacked in half like a pair of breasts.

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,” I stuttered. A high hornet buzz from a few violins. “I dropped my fork. I’m really sorry, I’ll pay for it.”

“Don’t worry,” Mrs. Glass said quietly. Under her bangs, long and straight as venetian blinds, her face had gone powder-pale. She licked her lips. She wasn’t looking at me. Gramma was wiping her mouth with a napkin that matched everybody’s. Steven was taking his napkin and dabbing at the glob on the wall which was stuck there in a neat spoonful. I couldn’t un- derstand why everything felt like a funeral until I tried to meet Cyn’s eyes. She was looking at her father.

I’m a sucker for filling silence. Once I open my mouth there’s no stopping me. “I’m very sorry. Of course I’ll pay for the plate.” Nobody said anything. Against the still-buzzing violins was only the sound of Steven’s napkin against salmon against saliva against the wall. “It’s weird that it broke that way, don’t you think? There must have been some secret fault in the plate or something. You know, like when small earthquakes split big buildings. I read about this somewhere. Buildings that were sup- posed to be earthquake-proof, it turned out that a bunch of microscopic air pockets lined up in just the right way, by sheer coincidence, so even though the buildings were earthquake- proof it turned out that they couldn’t protect themselves from earthquakes. Steven, you probably know more about this. Cyn said you were a science guy—do you know something about this? This wasn’t even the plate that had the crack. What’s that?”
That
was the table shaking, rattling the serving spoons and making the unlit candles shake in their holders. I thought for a minute that the story I was telling was being fleshed out there in the dining room. But it was Dr. Glass. He looked like a vol- cano. His face was dark red and his hands were clenched into trembling fists and although it was probably just steam from the string beans it looked like smoke was coming out of his

nostrils. It was making the table shake, that and the timpanis.

“I’ll—go—get—dessert—”
he stuttered in a terrible voice, and reached across the table toward me. I shrank back—it looked like he was going to throttle me—but he merely grabbed both halves of my split plate and carried them into the kitchen like Moses down from Sinai. A small river of sake-sauce began to widen on the tablecloth in front of me. Except for the color

it looked like the stains on my sheets that had me eating dinner here in the first place. What in the world was going on?

“Did I say—” I swallowed as the Glass eyes swiveled like periscopes to my stained place at the table. “Did I—something wrong?”

Cyn smiled and half-shrugged. “You said
everything
wrong,” she said. “It’s O.K. You don’t know and Dad knows you don’t know.”

“What—”

“Dad had a catastrophe recently at work,” Steven said, bun- dling up Gramma’s wad in his napkin like a party favor.

“It wasn’t a
catastrophe,
” Mrs. Glass said, thumping her wa- ter glass down and picking up some intact plates. “That’s the whole problem. He keeps thinking it was a catastrophe. It was just—”

“A mistake?” Cyn said, raising her eyebrows. “Well, it wasn’t a success, let’s just put it that way.”

“My son is a
genius
!” Gramma croaked suddenly. Which is what she’d later do: croak suddenly. “Geniuses are never
wrong.
”

“Yes,” Mrs. Glass said blankly. She held four dirty plates in a careful stack, towards her floppy breasts like she was nursing them. “Look, Cyn,
you
tell Joseph. Your father is still upset about it and if you’re going to be here for the summer”—here she parted her lips to me in an impeccably puppeted smile— “he might as well know. The point is for our family to be to- gether. You know,
family-making
.”

Cyn grimaced and brushed a strand of hair out of her mouth. “I wish you’d stop using that—”

“Genius!”
Gramma said again. Her eyes hooded over and

from somewhere in my childhood I remembered that there was always a chance that Gramma was really a wolf in disguise.

Mrs. Glass exited. Steven poured Gramma some more water out of a pitcher made in Mexico and bought at the Mexican Specialty Market. Cyn leaned toward me and kissed me wetly on the mouth. Gramma snorted at us. Then, still kissing- distance, she told me in a lush, low voice about the Fall of Genius. Usually a tale of shame is introduced with lush low strings, violas or cellos in short loose bursts like something strumming.

“Three months ago my father finally got the funding to go ahead with the last phase of—well, this project. I told you he’s a bone specialist, right? He’s put together a lot of people’s knees. Famous sports guys and everything. So he had this idea that he’d been testing for years—replacement bones made out of this new ceramic that they’re building plane parts with. Dad read about it in one of those high-tech magazines. So he tested it with computer models and stuff, and then on some animals, although it was really impossible to tell how it would do with animals because of animal tissue. I don’t know quite how.” Offs- tage in the kitchen came the percussion of dropped silverware.

“How did he test it on animals?”

“What do you mean how? First they took rabbits and took out their real leg bones and put in these ceramic leg bones in- stead. They were supposed to be better than the metal and plas- tic deals that they use now. Then they tried it on chimps. It worked pretty well but Dad kept saying it was all irrelevant because animal tissue is different from human tissue. So they finally got the go-ahead—the money and the red tape or what- ever. They tried it on this woman. She’d broken her leg in some