Darrell Schweitzer - Full MoonCity

Beth said, “I’ve got some great news for you.”

“Such as?”

“Mom has thrown Bryson out and fired him as her literary agent.”

“Oh, so? What prompted that?”

My pretty red-haired daughter sat down on the stone bench beside the fishpond. “Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the police caught the Wolf-Man of Westwood last night.”

“I thought that might happen.”

“Bright and early this morning they looked into the cell they popped him in last night,” she continued. “There was Bryson Kranbuhl. He told the cops who he was, but he didn’t have any ID on him. They let him call Mom and she came down to Westwood to identify that jerk and bail him out.”

“Sounds like an act of deep affection to me.”

She shook her head. “Once she knew he was the Wolf-Man, she realized why Westwood was where he was always spotted,” she said. “Mom had suspected that Bryson had a tootsie in Westwood and had been spending some afternoons and evenings with her. She also thought his impulse to swipe women’s underwear was tacky. So he’s out.”

“What about I Married an Asshole ?”

“She’s shelved that for now while she rethinks the project,” my daughter informed me. “So, Dad, this is a perfect time for you to get back together. Don’t you think so?”

Crossing, I sat beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Probably not.”

She looked sad. “Couldn’t you at least drop by and have dinner with us some night?”

After a moment I answered, “That might be possible.”

Beth smiled and clapped her hands together. “Neat. Then my efforts haven’t been in vain.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I said.

The day my mother became a vampire, she ruined my life. I didn’t know it at the time, and I’m sure she didn’t have time to think about it-I have to admit that being dead and coming back to life more-or-less can be distracting-but that’s God’s honest truth and if I were of a slightly different persuasion I’d add “cross my heart and hope to die.”

Give me a break !

It wasn’t as if I were not beside myself with worry, what with Momma and Poppa off on their trip to Romania, he being, though he is my father and I love him, such a nebbish he never stood up to her about anything, so when he booked the two of them on that Dracula Fan Club tour or whatever it was with non-refundable tickets, you could have heard Momma’s jaw drop in Brooklyn, as she observed at the time, and we don’t live anywhere near Brooklyn.

My poppa, he was bats about bats, and about Dracula and Children of the Night and all that stuff. He had a vampire-movie collection like you wouldn’t believe. I think it was the one thing Momma couldn’t take away from him. After I went off to college and they were alone, he got even battier , and so they went on this tour that was supposed to last two weeks, and after they didn’t come back and I didn’t hear a thing from them for six months, you think I shouldn’t worry?

It was one thing, that two weeks, during my spring break, me back in the old house, watching Poppa’s movies when there was nothing else to do-he really does have a dubbed copy of Mein Yiddishe Drakula -and taking care of the cats. The cats, Elvira and Vlad. Poppa named them before Momma could. Just as well because she probably would have called them Pusscha and Poopsie.

Me, I am nothing like my mother, which is just as well, but I have to worry.

My putzy , sometime boyfriend Max, he says maybe they were carried off by the fairies, and I said no, in the Balkans you get carried off by the Gypsies. Ireland, fairies; Romania, Gypsies. Got it?

So Max, not worrying-I should have shot him-says, “Maybe Dracula turned her into a vampire…” and I have to laugh, despite my worries, because Momma is so short. What would she do, stand on a stepladder so she can reach people’s necks to bite them?

Max has no idea what he is talking about.

Then the packages arrive, delivered by Gypsies. The truck says TRANSYLVANIAN PARCEL SERVICE, but I know these guys are Gypsies because what kind of delivery men wear scarves and earrings and make jokes about pulling one over on the gajos while hauling these enormous packages into the living room? I have to make sure the silverware doesn’t disappear.

Max and I are left staring at these two boxes the size of phonebooths, which are marked DO NOT OPEN UNTIL SUNDOWN but today is Tuesday so the Shabbat rules do not apply, so what the hell does this mean? I want to know.

Nevertheless, it is getting late and starting to get dark, and God knows what’s inside these packages, so we close the curtains. Then Max and I whack away at the first crate with hammers and big screwdrivers. Dirt pours out onto Momma’s immaculate living-room rug, and the lid comes off, and inside is a coffin packed in more dirt. To get that open, we have to remove a whole bunch of silver nails, which are probably worth something, so I put them carefully aside.

The coffin lid creaks open just like in the movies. As soon as Momma , lying inside it, sees the hammer in my hand, and I see her , we both scream so loudly we could split the eardrums of everybody from Jersey City to Canton, China. She clutches her chest and says, “Go ahead, drive a stake through your poor mother’s heart. You’ve already broken it!”

I let the hammer drop to the floor. It lands on my foot. While I’m hopping around in pain, I say, “I have?”

And Momma, she looks so weird , I should say terrible- her hair all frizzed up and tangled, her nails like claws, her face so pale and sunken like a balloon that’s lost most of its air, and her eyes so dark and somehow burning that I can’t look away from them. Momma, she turns to Max (who also drops his hammer but misses his foot) and says, “No mother, living or dead, wants to come home after so many trials and tribulations to find out her daughter’s still messing with a sheygets. ”

“But, Mom-” I say.

“But nothing. When are you going to get a serious boyfriend, somebody with a future, somebody you can marry, one of your own kind ?”

Max blurts out, “Who said anything about marriage?”

I stare at her, dumbfounded. Max is a bit of a doofus. He works in a flower shop and makes tie-dyed T-shirts on weekends and would have been a hippie if he’d been born a generation earlier. Maybe he’s not such a good prospect, but this is a stupid time to bring this up.

Apropos of not knowing what else to say, I get defensive. “But, Momma, I like Max.”

Max beams at me like a dope, “You do ?”

I don’t bother to explain that much of the time I’m not entirely sure of that because Max does have his shortcomings. But before I can utter another word Momma gets out of that coffin, opens her mouth to reveal huge, dripping fangs, and slinks over to Max in a way that no respectable short, zaftig, middle-aged woman should, and says, “Well, if you’re going to marry him, he has to convert.” She pronounces it convoit, her accent having somehow grown a lot thicker.

I stamp my foot (not the one the hammer landed on) and shake my finger at her. “Momma, we’ve been over this before! Get used to it! Max doesn’t want to become a Jew !”

Momma’s fangs somehow arc out of her mouth the way a rattlesnake’s do and still (I have no idea how) she’s able to say, “That’s not what I have in mind.”