The boyfriend is a Timothy McVeigh sympathizer, he said he knew McVeigh before he got the microchip in his buttocks. I think he’s possibly a member of the Michigan militia, but I don’t really know him. I know he dated my sister for a time. They were serious. However, things ended badly. He has a long thin face. His mouth is no wider than his nose. A face like a Byzantine Jesus. Now he’s dating Joyce’s daughter. Joyce hates him. She wants her daughter to stop seeing him. But she knows how girls can be when their mother tells them to do things. The daughter is always dating fixer-uppers. Joyce worships her daughter, though she’s a daddy’s girl. Joyce knows not to talk about McVeigh and Oklahoma City. Or Ruby Ridge. Or Waco. Or Janet Reno.
I’m over at Joyce’s house for dinner. I’m only using her for her connection to the Jews. She got us both invited to a seder next week. She knows the local Rabbi quite well. I’m excited. I have a thing for the Jewish race. It’s odd now that I think of it. But I’ve studied just enough to know that Jews are God’s chosen people. That’s verified in my mind. God is a soccer mom to these people. He takes care of them. You take celebrities, for instance. The number of Jewish celebrities is disproportionate to their portion of the world’s population. I studied religions, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, et cetera, and I found them all lacking. I read their sacred texts, they were about as meaningful as a drugstore receipt—except for Judaism. I could be Jewish, I could believe in it, it made a certain amount of sense. It was the one receipt that made sense, your dollar really stretched.
Joyce is all dolled up and this is weird because I know how she’s supposed to look—I work with her at the grocery store. I think she is all dolled up on my behalf. She’s trying to look her best for me. Joyce is an older lady. I put her age somewhere near fifty-five. I’m twenty-three. She’s also morbidly obese. Joyce was formerly skinny and formerly a chain smoker. She quit smoking through incessant prayer and put on a few hundred pounds.
“I used to fit inside that chimney,” she said pointing toward the fireplace. I started thinking of the chimney sweep that Blake wrote about. Then I remembered there are two chimney sweeps he wrote about.
“People told me to eat a sandwich. They used to tell me to eat a sandwich wherever I went. They would buy me sandwiches.”
Then she showed me a picture of herself inside a suitcase.
“See how skinny I used to be?” In the picture, her ex-husband is standing over her. . I’ve seen this picture before. She must have forgotten. She carries it around in her purse to show people.
I notice the skin on her arm looks like worn currency that holds no value, confederate currency.
Joyce tells me how she used to drink men under the table. She said she would coat her stomach with a quart of buttermilk beforehand and that would allow her to out-drink them.
Then Erin, the daughter dating the fixer-upper, comes into the room from upstairs. She said Michael Jackson just died.
My sister would be upset about that. She saw him in concert with my dad.
“That’s how skinny I used to be,” Joyce said pointing to Erin with a fat finger.
It’s true. Erin is thin as a rail. She dresses like a boy. She has a boy’s haircut. She’s a few years older than me. She’s pretty. The shirt she’s wearing shows her collarbone.
“I do not want you paying his child support,” Joyce tells Erin as she hands her money.
“Why not, you pay God’s child support.”
Joyce shakes her fist at this comment. It’s a small ham—her fist I mean.
“I get so angry when she says that,” she said to me. But Joyce can’t get angry.
When Erin leaves, I notice the noise the refrigerator is making. Joyce sees me listening to the refrigerator.
“That’s me,” she said. “That humming noise is me. That’s my incessant prayer.”
“What did she mean, you pay God’s child support?”
“I have a bit of a vice. I send money to Russian Jews to help them emigrate to Israel. That must happen for Jesus to return. We need to get the Jews to Israel. I send money when I can. Anyway, that’s what she means. It’s not the same thing. Those Russians, they won’t even capitalize God. When we get the Jews to Israel— it’s finished. And I get a new heavenly body.”
She seeks the end of the world. It can’t happen fast enough for her. She is force-feeding the end of the world. This is nothing less than doomsday I’m talking about. The end of all time. The rapture. The judgement.
Joyce’s eyebrows are cave paintings. What I mean is that her eyebrows are drawn on. Joyce’s eyebrows are prehistoric brushstrokes, they are identical to the horns of the bulls in the Lascaux cave paintings.
Joyce knows my dad and my bastard brother. She knows because she went to the same high school as my dad. The same school as the televangelist Jimmy Baker—this is some school. She’s a little younger than my dad, but she went to the same school. She knows I don’t want to talk about it.
We’re eating T-bone steaks which Joyce broiled. These are thick steaks. These are War and Peace steaks. I requested mine well done but Joyce said no way a butcher would request a well-done steak. This steak is rare. There is blood on my plate. I notice my steak is fighting me—it's seen what had happened to Joyce’s steak.
One thing I know about Joyce that she doesn’t know I know is that she eats raw hamburger. I was at work in the cooler when she came down the aisle that leads to the meat department. She came into the meat room where there was a pile of eighty/twenty hamburgers on the butcher block. She scooped up a handful and ate it raw. She didn’t know I was in the cooler looking through the window in the door. She thought she was alone. It reminded me of that Emily Dickinson poem about the bird coming down the sidewalk to eat the raw worm.
I’m telling Joyce about college. I go to college. I want to be a journalist.
“Hemingway was a journalist.” The legs of her chair are groaning an incessant prayer of their own. A chandelier hangs over the table like a gaudy stalactite.
“Steinbeck too,” I said. “You know the story about those two when they met for the first time? Hemingway tells Steinbeck, he bets Steinbeck that he can break a stick over his head.”
“Over Steinbeck’s head?”
“No. Over his own head. You know Hemingway. He had to be tough in every situation.”
“That’s interesting.”
I don’t think I can eat my steak. Joyce is done with hers. She’s chasing peas with her fork like that game with the hungry hippos.
“You like school?”
“I do.”
“I try to get Erin to go back to school.”
“That reminds me. One of my classes is in the old wing of the college and it doesn’t have any female bathrooms. And the college is not planning to build any. My journalism professor calls the old wing a patriarchy museum. He says it’s like Hitler’s plans to turn that synagogue in Prague into a museum for an extinct race. The old wing of the college, is a museum like that.”
“I didn’t know that was allowed.” “It’s probably not,” I said. “One girl the other night didn’t come back from our break soon enough and the teacher refused to let her in the class. After class she was in the hallway in tears. She said it was because the girl’s restroom is miles away.”
An airplane roars over the top of the house, and the shadow it makes is like the house blinking.
“I try to get Erin up there, but she has no ambition,” Joyce said. She points up. She means she’s trying to get Erin to become a stewardess like her other daughter.
There’s a knock on the door. It’s the next-door neighbor kid.
“Hi Johnny,” Joyce said. The kid is selling candy bars and wants to know if Joyce wants some.
“You know I do,” Joyce said.
Joyce buys the box and tells Johnny to pick one for himself. He takes it like it’s a baton in a relay race and he’s out the door.
“I am a candy bar whore,” Joyce said.
A week later we are on our way to the seder. It’s Joyce and myself in her car. I see a cement truck which is always a treat for me. I always think of earth like that, moving through space in two directions at once. Cement trucks remind me, everything else makes me forget.
Some assholes in the car next to us on my side are inflating their cheeks making fun of Joyce’s weight. I pretend not to notice. I do notice her hands on the steering wheel. The top of her hands are yeasty, risen dough awaiting a baker’s punch.
When Joyce turns off the highway ramp my Judaism for Dummies book goes sliding across the dashboard and onto the floor.
The synagogue is in a building that is slowly passing away. I meet the Rabbi. This is the first Rabbi I’ve ever met. Rabbi kisses Joyce on the neck like it’s the wailing wall. Joyce is in thick with these Jews. We get to sit at Rabbi’s table.
He has a thinker’s forehead. Five lines of latitude never leave Rabbi’s forehead.
Rabbi doesn’t want to shake my hand; it feels like I’m pulling open a dented filing cabinet.
“Did you hear about Michael Jackson?” Rabbi asked us.
I see a gorgeous Jewish girl who is approaching. She is something special.
“Hi Rabbi,” she said. “You look forlorn.”
“Even Homer sometimes nods,” Rabbi said.
I’m possessed by a strange feeling that I’m supposed to be this Jewish girl. I’m supposed to be her, not the person I am, but her. This feeling is strong. I’m supposed to be in her brain, her body. She catches me staring at her. I’m supposed to own the world’s suffering, not her.
The girl goes back to the table she came from. She holds her chin up the rest of the night.
The seder plate is a test I had prepared for but I’m still apprehensive.
Joyce sits in her chair like she’s on the back of a motorcycle.
When Rabbi finds out I’m going to school to be a journalist, he asks me about Daniel Pearl, the beheaded journalist. I don’t know much about it. But Rabbi tells me about it in detail.
“Journalism is the deadliest profession in the world,” he said, like it’s large news.
Joyce has drool coming out of one side of her mouth, but she must not know. Like the cinnamon roll does not know about icing.
“You really know your way around a seder plate,” I said.
“We are getting our vegetables today,” Joyce said.
There’s a woman walking around with a picture that she’s showing everybody. She shows me and Joyce. It’s a picture of her mother when she was in Auschwitz. She is nothing but bones. The experience of the holocaust is in her eyes.
“I keep this picture in my purse. I show everyone.”
I ask Rabbi about Kabbalah, and he quickly shovels answers on my questions like dirt on a dead body. I can’t catch any of it.
“The Torah is held together in the same manner as the French revolution—by beheadings,” Rabbi said. “Kabbalah attaches the wrong head to the wrong body.”
Rabbi has a great eye, what I mean is, one is larger than the other. He’s giving me the great eye.
“You must talk to Fred,” Rabbi said. “He’s a writer. He is man of considerable accomplishment.”
It turns out Fred is a great writer. He’s well-known for his history of the Bath Massacre.
“I wrote that book in a week,” he said.
He’s giving me all sorts of writing advice. Great advice. But he’s filled with two words he uses too much: therefore and however.
“What are you doing here?” he asks after a while. He almost knocks over the entire table we’re at. He’s unaware of his height. He’s six foot five at least. Everything about the man goes on for miles.
I thought it was obvious why I’m here.
“You know where you are don’t you? This is the armistice car. You’re in the armistice car. Therefore, you’re surrendering by being here at this seder. You’re surrendering to us Jews.”
He asks me what my last name is, he must have forgotten.
“I know your people. I know your dad. I know what he did. However, I don’t judge.”
He’s talking about my dad embezzling from the grocery store. He could probably write a bestseller about it in a week.
I start drinking then. I drink like Noah. I swallow wine the way Hitler swallowed Europe. I deserved to get drunk. My book smart faith and I got stinking drunk. After four cups of Manischewitz, my bladder is about to burst. I go to the bathroom—its hell finding the bathroom—and I piss like Patton into the Rhine. I’m pissing into a great river. I feel like I’m marking some great victory. I try to open the window in the bathroom—I want to stick my head out the window, but it’s been painted shut. It’s a stubborn window for stubborn people.
It’s an old bathroom with lots of ceramic tile. The handles on the sink read C for cold and H for hot, only some wise guy carved the C into an A. Then I see that on top of the urinal, there’s an X that I had in mind I can turn into a swastika. I’m armed with swastikas, armed to the teeth with swastikas.
When I get back out to where the Seder is, Erin’s there. I feel like I have half-lidded eyes, but no one says a word about it. Erin’s telling Joyce we have to leave. Luke has been arrested for threatening to blow up the Friend of the Court over his child support payments.
“You’re all man-haters. Find one person in this office who doesn’t hate men. Now I know why people blow these places up.” Erin said this is what Luke said that got him into trouble. It was perceived as a direct threat, and he was arrested. He was going to be arrested anyway for child support arrears.
It’s then that I see the Chagall painting by the entrance. The one with the miniature Rabbi standing on a Rabbi’s head. That made me feel bad about the swastika in the bathroom.
The bail bondsman is not far. The sign outside said: “If I can’t get you out, you ain’t getting out.” He has his back to the door. He’s eating a burger and fries and wiping his hands on a napkin the way a mechanic does, finger by finger. As it turns out, he knows Joyce, he used to work at the grocery store, a long time ago. Joyce waves at him with two hands at once—I hate that.
“Why do you guys want to get him out? He’s scum. He hasn’t paid child support in two years. He’s going to jail one way or another.”
Joyce is a little embarrassed. She looks toward Erin. Erin looks like a frightened bird caught in a grocery store.
“Never mind,” he said. “It’s none of my business if you want to throw good money after bad.”
Once we get Luke out, he wants to know what took us so long. He also wants to go directly to see his son. He said he needs to see his son before they put him back in jail. Joyce said that he can spend the night at her house, and she can take him in the morning.
“We’ll get you where you need to be,” she said. “If you’re a good boy.”
I have swastikas in my head. I can’t get that swastika off my head. I’m thinking what I need to do is find another swastika that I can erase to atone for the one in the bathroom. I’m not drunk anymore. Joyce is driving, I’m in the front passenger side and the lovebirds are in the back seat.
I’m thinking, if we could find a payphone there would be a swastika there, but a genocide of payphones had occurred. There are only a few left. Just think of all the swastikas that left this world when we got rid of the payphones.
We see a broken-down motorist by the side of the highway.
“You have to turn around,” Luke said. Luke orders her to turn around, to go back, to help. “It’s the decent thing to do.”
Joyce did it without complaint as if she had a miniature Luke atop her head. We helped the motorist, an elderly guy, change his tire. It took us some time to do that. My hands are little black things from changing the dirty tire. I wash them with some leftover snow. The motorist is appreciative. We all pat ourselves on the back after that. We look smart.
“Whose book is this I’m sitting on? Judaism for Dummies?” Luke asked.
“It belongs to me,” I said.
“Tell your sister I said hi.” Luke seems to notice me for the first time.
He turns on the overhead light and starts reading my book.
Just a few miles further down the road, we see another car on the side of the road. It’s a family. The father is waving us down. He’s holding a gas can. He gives us money to get him some gas.
At the gas station, I go into the bathroom and find a swastika (right beside a pentagram). It makes me cheerful to erase it.
There’s a man set up outside the gas station selling Michael Jackson memorabilia. He has everything. He has posters, photos, records, cassettes, compact discs. I bought a sequined glove for my sister.
“Why didn’t you buy a newspaper? You’re a journalist.”
“I should have,” I said. “I didn’t think of it. I will tomorrow.”
“How can you bring that glove in this car?” Luke said. “The guy was raping little kids.”
“At least he didn’t blow up a daycare,” Joyce said.
“In a way, he did. In a way he did blow up a daycare,” Erin said.
“He wasn’t trying to hasten the end of the world,” I said.
And so, we have an argument, we have a debate about the lesser of two evils.
When we get back to the stranded family, the man raises his arms upon seeing us like it’s some great victory. We handed off the gas can to him. He snatches it like it’s a trophy.
“You see?” he said to his family. He’s in rapture. “They came back! My wife and my family said I was wrong to believe. They said, ‘what is taking them so long? When are they coming back? I don’t think they are coming back.’ I said, ‘have faith. They will return.’”
He’s scaring his family—you can tell he’s a family tyrant.
He wipes the corners of his mouth with his thumb.
“I should leave them here,” he said. “They should be left behind as a special judgement.”
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