WHACKING OFF
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this one has decided that the food I cook isn't good enough for
him.
He'd rather be sick and scare the living daylights out of me."
"What did he do?"
"I don't want to upset you," she says. "Let's just forget the
whole thing." But she can't, so she begins to cry. Look, she
is
prob–
ably not the happiest person in the world, either, you know. She was
once a tall stringbean of a girl whom the boys called "Red,"
in
high
school. When I was nine and ten years old I was an addict of her
high school yearbook.
Sophie Ginsky the boys call (fRed,"
She'll go far with her big brown eyes and her clever head.
And that was my mother!
Also, she had been secretary to the track team, an office pretty
much without laurels in our time, but apparently quite a post to hold
in Bayonne during the First World War. So I thought, at any rate,
while I turned the pages of her yearbook, and she pointed out to me
her dark-haired beautiful beau, who had been the outstanding broad
jumper of Hudson County, captain of the team and today, to quote
Sophie, "the biggest manufacturer of mustard in New York." "And
I could have married him instead of your father," she told me, and
more than once. I used to wonder sometimes what that would have
been like for my Mamma and me, invariably when my father some–
times took us to dine out at the comer delicatessen. I look around
the place and think, "We would have manufactured
all
this mustard."
She must have had thoughts like that herself.
"He eats french fries," she says, as she sinks into a kitchen chair
to weep her heart out once and for all. "He goes after school with
Sheldon Weiner and stuffs himself with french fried potatoes. Jack,
you tell him, I'm only his mother. Tell him what the end is going to
be. Alex," she says passionately, looking to where I am edging out
of the room,
(ftateleh,
it begins with diarrhea, but do you know how
it ends? With a sensitive stomach like yours, do you know how it
finally ends?
WeaTing a plastic bag to do your business in!"
Who in the history of the world has been least able to deal with
a woman's tears? My father. I am second. He says to me, "You
