Watch Your Mouth (4 page)

weird way when she fell off a ladder she was standing on to knock a wasps’ nest off of her house. She was swinging the broom to knock it off and she fell. There were some compli- cations, because the woman was stung so many times that they couldn’t reset the bone properly—it turned out she was allergic so her whole body was swollen. Dad said it looked like she was wrapped in a sleeping bag.”

“So he used the ceramics to cure
bee stings?
”

“
Wasps. No.
The wasps made her swell up so they couldn’t set the bone properly, so by the time she swelled down the bone was all messed up. So Dad got the go-ahead—it wasn’t just my Dad, by the way, but when it got screwed up everybody blamed him and the paper blamed him and so it might as well have been just my Dad—Dad got the go-ahead and they put this ceramic leg bone thing inside her leg and when she stood up the leg shattered. Instantly.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It was awful. There was a big newspaper scandal and Dad was denounced everywhere.”

“Wow.”

“Stop that,” she said. “
Really. Wow.
He’s upset, is the point. And that stupid secret fault thing you were talking about was exactly the reason. I don’t really get it, but the ceramic was developed in a way to compensate for any minute air pockets or something in the clay.”

“Not
air pockets,
” Steven said in the tired air of somebody who has always done well in math. “They’re—”

“Whatever they were, it was statisically improbable for these secret defects to line up in the right way to have the leg shatter, but—”

“Impossible,”
Steven said. “Statisically
impossible,
not improb- able.”

“But it happened,” Cyn said. “It can’t be impossible.” “
Statistically
impossible,” he said wearily.

“In any case, that’s why he got upset,” Cyn finished. She was still leaning toward me, her story breathing on my face, my neck, down my shirt. “So don’t sweat it. The cracked plate just upset him.”

“And it wasn’t even the one that was cracked,” Mrs. Glass said, stalking back into the room a little wildly. She picked up the butter plate and threw down dessert spoons like a witch doctor casting bones. “That’s why it wasn’t his fault, don’t you know that? It’s
exactly
like the plates!” She grabbed Cyn’s empty plate and traced the crack through the traces of sake-sauce. “You see? Your plate wasn’t cracked like this, Joseph, and
it’s
the one that broke.”

“That’s exactly what Joseph was talking about,” Steven said, giving me a half-smile of male camaraderie even though I was fucking his sister. “The crack didn’t break the plate because the defects in the ceramic were not lined up correctly. That’s why Joseph’s plate broke even though he just dropped a fork on it. You could probably wham this one down on the table and noth- ing would happen to it.”

“Really?” I said.

Steven took the plate from his mother and gave it to me. Gramma nodded sagely. My fingers were sticky. I looked at everybody and then whammed the plate down on the table, breaking the second plate of the evening.

“What was that?”
Dr. Glass sounded positively cardiac from the kitchen.

“Oh,” said Steven. Together we looked at the large pieces lying ruined on the table like uprooted sidewalk chunks. The plate had cracked right where the crack was, right where you’d think it would crack. Secret defects indeed. The son whisked the pieces away and the father emerged with a tray of strawberry-and-nougat parfaits.

During that summer, Mrs. Glass was mildly renowned at the Glasses’ synagogue for making the best nougat in all the Sister- hood. Even the first night of my stay there she’d already per- fected the recipe (the trick is omitting honey), so all the ceramic tensions were dissolved in spoons of moist stickiness and ripe wet berries. Everybody’s mouths were wet and grinning, even Gramma’s, and Dr. Glass relaxed and continued to talk at me. I nodded and scooped in berries; it was going to be a delicious summer. Jovial French horns or something.

“I’m really looking forward to working at Camp Shalom,” I said. “And I really appreciate your letting me stay here.”

“We wouldn’t have it any other way,” Mrs. Glass said, smil- ing. “It’s good to see our daughter getting laid.”

“What?”

“Usually she volunteers,” Steven said. “She answered phones at a women’s clinic last summer, and before that she candy striped at Dad’s office.”

Paid.

“Well, this summer
you’re
not making any money,” Cyn said.

“Steven is working at a very prestigious lab,” Dr. Glass said. “Carnegie Mellon. Physics. We’re very proud of him.”

“I’m proud of him,” Cyn said defensively. “I just wanted to point out that he’s not making any money.”

“He’s made money previously.” Dr. Glass licked the rest of his nougat off the spoon.

“Well, I’m glad this summer she’s finally pulling her weight,” I said. “I bet you guys were tired of covering her mortgage pay- ments.”

“Ha!”
the doctor said.

“Well,” Cyn said, “speaking of
tired,
I am. And Joseph and I have to make up the bed before we can even hit it. Can we be excused please?”

I promptly set down my spoon.
“Bed?”
Gramma said. “Yes,” Cyn said. “I know it’s only eight-thirty, but Joseph and

I had a long hard drive. Very hard. Very long. And we kept driving faster and faster and faster until we were through, and it was so hot.”

“Bed?”
Gramma said again. “You’re sleeping in
one bed
?” “Oh,” Mrs. Glass said, “yes, we decided that, mother.”
“Together?”
Gramma shrieked.

“That’s what they’re doing at school,” Mrs. Glass said. “It would be hypocritical—”

“It’s the
summertime,
” Gramma said. I filled my mouth with nougat. “There isn’t any school.”

“It would be hypocritical to—”

“You don’t even
know him—
” The violins swell; Gramma lifted her dessert spoon toward me like a gavel. “Well,
I
for one—”

“Mother,” Mrs. Glass said patiently. “I talked it over with my daughter. And Ben. It simply doesn’t make any sense to forbid them to share a bed, when they’re just going to go back to school and—”

“No!”
Gramma shouted.
“I won’t have it!”

“
Please,
let’s not get to shouting about it. It’s only the first night—”

“It’s
against the law!”

Steven giggled. “No it’s not,” he said. “Well, it’s against the
laws of nature!”

“Please,” Mrs. Glass said, smiling nervously at me. “Let’s just enjoy our parfaits.”

“No,”
Gramma said, and here it comes: the old woman’s curse. From such grumpy seniors do lovers die, castles crumble. It always happens at the wedding feast.
“If they sleep together under this roof they will not be forgiven. If they sleep together I call upon catastrophe to visit this house. If they sleep together,
this
will be my revenge.”
On
this
she held up her parfait glass like a goblet. The
parfait
will be her revenge? In some ways it made sense: a parfait is sweet. A parfait is a dish best served cold. The part with strawberries and ice cream didn’t make any sense at all, but if anything’s important in opera they always repeat it.
“If they sleep together,
this
will be my—”

“O.K., Mrs. Glass,” I said. “Everybody. I am very grateful to this family for taking me in this summer, and I don’t want to intrude on anybody’s hospitality. If it makes you feel better, I’ll sleep in another room. I don’t mean to upset anybody, and— well, besides, it will be good. I have an ‘incomplete’ from last semester, and I need to write a paper, so I’ll probably be up late nights.” I couldn’t meet Cyn’s eyes as I said this last one. “So it does make sense for me to sleep in another room. I mean, if you
have
another room. If it isn’t intruding on anybody’s hos- pitality to sleep
separately.
” I couldn’t believe what I was saying. As if the idea of the summer was actually to work Arts & Crafts at Camp Shalom in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of all places,

rather than blanketing myself in Cyn’s body. After sex we were usually so breathless we couldn’t even summon up the energy to grab an inside-out T-shirt and wipe ourselves down; we’d usually just let ourselves drip-dry underneath the glare of cheap dormitory fluorescence. Now, during the hottest months of the year, I was agreeing to summon up the energy to leave the room. But I was raised right. And after the ceramic mishap during the main course I felt obliged to better my batting record.

Gramma’s eyes—long, thin rectangles like cars from the 1950s—met mine, but she didn’t say anything. She was still holding up the parfait; inside the glass, the remaining ice cream liquified and a strawberry toppled into the bottom layer of nougat.

“That’s not necessary,” Cyn’s mother said to both of us. “I have made my decision, Mother, and I’ll thank you to—”

“No no no,”
Gramma said, shaking her head. She stooped up and took a little sweater off the back of the chair. It was red with little black decorations, the Pittsburgh equivalent of a sweeping gypsy shawl. “I’m going home. I hope you two”—her arm sweeps were so vague I didn’t know which set of lovers she meant—“do the sensible thing. The
right
thing. The
legal
thing.”

“It
isn’t
illegal, Gramma,” Steven said. But Gramma was gone, scowling through the garden past the damp plants, quivering in fear of the curse. I haven’t decided if this weighs down the open- ing scene too much, but a short ballet would be appropriate here: The Dance of the Terrified Plants. Faces emerge from the greenery, while offstage Gramma’s cackles can still be heard, and the stagehands bang those metal sheets used to produce

thunder. The dancers line up: flowers, trees, tomatoes, swaying and trembling. Through opera glasses you can see the ingenious way the dancers have been hiding in the foreground during this entire scene. The orchestra wails on, and untwining from the set are the thinnest, limberest dancers, who have been repre- senting serpentine vines this whole time. The nuts and bolts would of course be left to the choreographer, but the music clearly indicates a broad outline. Shaking with fear, the plants group together and discuss the curse in hushed flora language. Gradually the swooning heat of the evening makes the discus- sion feverish; piccolos trill and the flowers swirl in small inter- locking circles. The fever becomes desire; the music grows lush. While timpanis roll the pairing of plants grows less conversa- tional and more reproductive. Flickering colored lights indicate flying spores. Despite the inherent asexuality the dancing be- comes sensual, erotic, orgasmic. The plants fall back to their original places, quivering once more.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Glass and Cyn had left Dr. Glass and me with the dishes, because we didn’t cook. Of course, Cyn and Steven hadn’t cooked either, but I recognized the cleanup as a male-bonding stratagem and let it go; I was a guest. Cyn saw I was O.K. with it when she returned to grab her water glass and met my eyes. Picking up still more sauce-stained plates—how could any possibly be left, anyway?—I nodded at her, and hun- grily watched her leave the room.

“Delicious, huh?” Dr. Glass said to me.

Watching her jeans was making me remember a sex texture: Cyn’s denimed crotch rubbing up against my naked one, while her bare breasts brushed against my shirt which she hadn’t yet

unbuttoned, sort of a yin-yang of nudity and clothedness. Re- gretfully I returned to the dining room. “Yes,” I said. “Salmon’s always been one of my favorite—”

“I mean my daughter,” he said.

What?
His eyes were sly. Actually I couldn’t see his eyes, but they could have been sly. In any case he was definitely sweeping crumbs off the table into one of his well-insured hands. I watched the spindles of bone or muscle or whatever-they-are moving underneath the skin of his fingers like the legs of a sleeper twitching beneath blankets. At any moment, an air pocket could materialize out of invisibility, and everything could crack. “Your daughter?” I said blankly. “Oh, yes. I’m sure she liked it, too.”

“No, I mean
delicious
. My daughter. A good-looking woman. That’s what we used to say when we saw a beautiful woman, back when I was at school. You know?”

I nodded. Mather College was in the throes of radical femi- nism but I kept my knee from jerking. I was trying to appreciate this family taking me in, and if I played my cards right the summer could spread its legs before me like a garden of earthly delights. “Delicious. I don’t think I’ve heard that.” And I’d rather not have it explained to me, thanks very much, Dr. Glass, sir.

“I think it came from calling a girl a dish. You know,
check out that dish!”
He turned to ogle an imaginary woman with exaggerated heartiness. Couldn’t he just talk about basketball or something? “Then we began to get more detailed about the dishes, you know: spicy, delicious, whatever.”

“I get it.”

“And Cynthia’s a delicious one.”

Four bars of woodwinds before I answer. “Um,” “Does it embarrass you that I say it like that?” “Yes. I mean,
no,
not really. I don’t know.”

“I don’t mean anything improper. I’m just proud of her.” “Yes.”

“She’s very pretty.”

It struck me that maybe he was paying a compliment. “Well, thanks.”

Dr. Glass laughed with a boom-boom of bass drum and trom- bone. “
You
should be thanking
me.
”

I blinked. “I just did.”

He blinked, and then duplicated the laugh. “No, no, no. I mean,
I
should be saying thanks. After all, it’s
my
genetic ma- terial that made her so delicious, right?”

Suddenly I could the see the Wayfinder sign that would lead me to some better topic of conversation. “Well, it could be heredity or environment, right?” A nice basic subject for doctor and student to rehash as we cleared the table.

“It doesn’t matter. Either way I win.” “That’s true. Well, nice going, sir.”