by Rhoda Lerman
“Richard, don’t you have a fucking conscience? Your mother’s on the floor,” Blossom yelled.
“Stephanie, go help them, will you?”
I didn’t. I couldn’t. It was the first time the girl knew who I was. I was ashamed.
“Sweetheart, what are you going to do with . . . with that, that box, sweetheart?”
“I’ll bury him someplace nice. With sunshine and mice. In Bermuda.”
“I don’t ask much from you, Stephanie, but I am asking you to go in and help my mother. NOW!”
He turned back to Innocent Marie. “Look, let me just throw it in the incinerator.”
“Good-bye, Richard.”
“Just a goddamn minute, Innocent Marie, don’t go.”
She turned to leave. If only I had the strength to leave with her. Richard closed the door after her but there was one moment when she turned around and looked at him, that last horrible moment, and her face looked the way mine felt that day in the taxi when he closed the door on me and said we’d do it right. Hurt, shock, confusion. But she was getting away with more than her dying asparagus plant and her dead cat. She still had her integrity. And she was getting away. Richard and I stood very still. Then he walked by me and looked upon me with glaring hatred. I shrank away from him. Then another Richard ran past me in tennis whites, ran back and forth, weaving between all the women, trying to clean his mother and lift her from the bathroom floor. I at last found a box of Q-tips and began to clean the grout in the bathroom tile of the blood and fish scales and cat hair. Richard simply stepped over me again and again. Wine, ice cubes, tea, smelling salts. His mother finally groaned, stood, and leaning on that Richard, stumbled to the living room.
“So, now, Richard? That’s over. We’ll have to buy the gefilte fish.” She was heaving. “Do me a favor. Settle down now. Another time like this would kill me.”
“I didn’t ask you to do it. Don’t blame it on me that you don’t bounce.”
“Richard, don’t get her upset, for Christ’s sake. Leave her alone.”
“She used my tennis racket. My stainless steel tennis racket. Nice?” His temples pulsed incredibly. I returned to the bathroom. I wiped the walls down. I scrubbed the golden cat hair and the scales and blood, but I did not look in the tub. I was numb. The Richard in the bathroom with me was too quiet, almost automatic. I hoped both of us didn’t come alive at the same time. We’d destroy each other. I cleaned every line of grout slowly and painstakingly and used all the Q-tips. I was trapped in the bathroom. And I couldn’t stand the smell and then I looked into the tub and began to scream. I filled the small bathroom with my scream. I slung my scream into the grout like Newton’s blood. I screamed long and well for Harry Truman to get me out of the bathroom.
Richard looked in and exclaimed simply, “Jesus, another one.” And shut the door on my scream.
RHODA LERMAN (1936–2015) is the author of numerous critically acclaimed novels, including Call Me Ishtar which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, God’s Ear, Eleanor, and The Book of the Night, forthcoming in new editions from The Overlook Press. As a speaker and writer, her work has been recognized and honored in India, Tibet, South America, and Europe. She taught and lectured at major universities, including Ghent, Harvard, Wisconsin, Colorado, Syracuse, Buffalo, and California Institute of the Arts as consultant. She served the State Department as an AMPART speaker.
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GOD’S EAR
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“Lerman has a sharp, lyrical, and almost uncanny ear for the Jewish absurd.” —Susan Shapiro, Newsday
“Lerman effortlessly works an immense amount of Jewish learning and Hasidic lore into a novel that’s moving, wise, and very, very funny. Irresistible storytelling.” —Kirkus
“Like a Chagall painting translated to print . . . The very opposite of a minimalist, Lerman proves herself mistress not only of side-splitting one-liners but also of pregnant perception about faith and virtue.” —Publishers Weekly
Excerpt from God’s Ear
by Rhoda Lerman
1
THE RABBI’S ONLY SON, YUSSEL, SOLD INSURANCE, MOSTLY LIFE. He made a fortune because everyone in the Hasidishe world knew that his father, the Rabbi, and his grandfather of blessed memory, and his grandfather’s grandfather of blessed memory, all of them stretching back unbroken in a golden chain from Far Rockaway to Horodenka, to Braslow, Chernobyl, Lublin, Tiberias, Jerusalem, to David, to Adam, all of them in the Fetner family, made prophecy.
“So, why are you here, Yussel?”
“To sell you some life insurance.”
“Oy. What do you know?”
“Nothing.”
“Today, this particular day, why are you here?”
“You’re on my list. I come every six months. Your premium’s due.”
“The truth, Yussel.”
“You’re on my list.”
“How will I go?”
“Bernie, Bernie, I’m just selling life insurance.”
“Believe me, Yussel, if a Fetner comes to my door selling life insurance, I’m buying.”
Behind his back his clients called him the Angel of Death. The Rabbi’s son made a lot of money selling insurance. From Williamsburg, from Borough Park, from the Five Towns, they came to him to buy. As soon as he picked up the phone and said, “Guess who?” they bought. Life, accident, doubled their umbrellas, upped their homeowner’s and liability. Everything.
Yussel married a beautiful sweet girl from Toronto, a rabbi’s daughter. Although she spoke perfect Poylishe Yiddish she also had a slight British accent and looked a little like Patty Duke. He had a Mercedes, a house near the beach with moss-brick on three walls in the leisure room, two ovens, the Patty Duke wife, four Donna Reed daughters, one son who looked like him, which wasn’t so bad but very Jewish.
“You know something I should know, Yussel?”
“Nothing, it’s just time to look over your policy, Berel.”
“Your father tell you something? Your uncles? Did you hear something? Maybe about the Almighty’s intentions?”
“Berel, I don’t know from HaShem’s intentions. I know only from accidents, from the tables.”
Yussel rolled his shirtsleeves up over hairy muscular arms—he played baseball with the Kneth Israel Cemetery Association, handball on Sunday mornings against the wall of the Yeshiva behind his house— took his pen from his vest, removed his Hasidishe beaver hat, filled out the insurance papers. His friend Berel watched Yussel shove his skullcap forward and backward, forward and backward. Everyone thought this was a sign he was doing prophecy. Berel began to sweat. His wife brought a silver tray of schnapps and kickel.
“How long does my Berel have, Yussel?”
“Your husband’s terrific. Look at his medical report.”
“How long do I have, Yussel?”
Yussel shrugged and took his hand from his skullcap. “As long as you have, you have.”
Such wisdom from the Fetners. The insured discussed every word Yussel spoke, watched everything he did, read everything he gave them to read. They discussed mortality tables and immortality. They discussed HaShem’s intentions versus random accidents. They discussed handball, baseball, miracles, how much chicken fat a man could eat in a lifetime, cholesterol levels, the possible sainthood of the Fetners, the Rabbi, his wife, this remarkable only son. They discussed prophecy. Everyone was waiting for Yussel to become a rabbi even though Yussel swore never on his life. Yussel showed his clients the Metropolitan Life Expectancy Charts, wouldn’t discuss prophecy. He offered variable rates, good returns on single-life premiums, no predictions. He wore his beaver hat over his skullcap, tried to keep his hand from pushing it backward, forward on his head. The Fetners don’t see everything and they can’t control what they do see, but they can turn it off if it starts coming in on the screen. Which is what Yussel did when he went to sell insurance. Yussel didn’t w
ant to know from prophecy, from God’s intentions, from reward and punishment. Yussel knew from insurance tables: chance, probability, accident. One in 1,500 skiers at Aspen breaks a leg; one in 10,000 drivers breaks an axle; one in 200,000 planes is bombed. He knew the tables by heart. The average nonsmoker female lives to 72; smokers to 73. His father, on the other hand, lived in a universe in which absolutely everything is God’s intention, where there’s no coincidence, where an angel stands behind every blade of grass, singing, “Grow, darling, grow.” Yussel didn’t want to live in such a universe because if there’s an angel behind every blade of grass you have to watch every step you take. Yussel only wanted to be a wealthy Jew, sell insurance, live in his house by the ocean in Far Rockaway, be comfortable.
“For me, Yussel?”
Yussel found the line in the tables, the age, the life expectancy, showed Berel.
“For me? Here?” “
That I can’t guarantee.”
Yussel wasn’t stupid. Yussel, like everyone else in the family—the uncles, the mother, the father, even the sister—was brilliant. He soared through theological seminary like an eagle, his teachers reported, and then cursed him when he left the Talmud for actuary tables. Yussel wanted no part of the soul, the law, the rabbinate, the lineage, the blood. He was thirty-six years old. What he had, he wanted; what he wanted, he had.
Yussel sometimes walked on the boardwalk, sometimes on the beach, sometimes climbed out on the jetties, and sometimes, when the tide was out and the moon was shining on the wet sand and he could walk on the moon, through the moon, those times he wondered for just a moment if maybe he should be a rabbi and continue the dynasty.
On Friday night, if a man goes to his wife with the correct sexual procedures in the creative act, if he pays attention to what it means, not how it feels, his child will come down from Heaven with a higher consciousness. His child will be delivered out of the waters of the evil inclination, out of Egypt, into Sinai. And when this child, with all these
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CALL ME ISHTAR
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“Lerman equals Philip Roth at his own good game—the Jewish absurd. Her eye for the giveaway detail, her ear for the mad half-phrase, her ability to sustain the cadences of a comic scene, all have that peculiar mix of energy, lucidity and hysteria at which Roth excels . . . Call Me Ishtar announces a writer of genuine talent. Rhoda Lerman is a find . . . go out and find her.”
—Harriet Rosenstein, The New York Times Book Review
“A brilliant and original triumph of the imagination.”
—Marge Piercy
Excerpt from Call Me Ishtar
by Rhoda Lerman
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
What am I doing here? It is very simple. Your world is a mess.
A mess.
Your laws are inhuman. Your religion is without love. Your love is without religion and both, undirected, are useless. Your pastrami is stringy, and I am bored by your degeneracy.
But what’s a mother to do? I’m here to bring it all back together again. I’ll come and straighten things out for you. I will choose an image here to do my work. To do your work. I shall spray your dusty corners with Lysol so you will find knowledge, stitch up those parts of your souls which have lost each other so that man knows what is womanly in him and woman knows what is manly in her. You hate, screw, war, starve and die without knowing me. The closets of your souls are empty of power and love. I do not like to come down here and work. There are no men here for me and I become, as a fish beyond the sea, hungry. And when I am overworked and hungry, I am mean. And when I am mean, I am destructive. So watch it. You are going to have to show me some respect this time, or you will all be impotent and once more the world will come grinding to an end and that end, as in your own grinding, which I have witnessed often, uncomfortably, will have no ecstasy.
Excuse me. I begin my threats again. I must remember, this time, that if I want you to become more divine, I must be more humane.
Somehow, I will distribute the wonders of my baking to you, to heal and balance and restore to you the powers that once were yours in the antique. I have always been the connection between heaven and earth, between man and woman, between thought and act, between everything. If your philosophers insist the world is a dichotomy, tell them that two plus two don’t make four unless something brings them together. The connection has been lost. But I’m back. Don’t worry. I am going to give you the secrets this time. You are not ready, but then you may never be and whatever will I do with them then? I must warn you I am jealous and selfish. However, I am really all that you have. I am one and my name is one and there shall be no one before me. I will forgive you anything, though, if you will love me. Cordially yours,
I remain,
Your Mother/Harlot/Maiden/Wife
(The Queen of Heaven)
P.S. Call me Ishtar