Харлан Эллисон: More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

“No, Aunt Hannah, I’m sorry. Elka didn’t remember and I had other things to think about. Is everything else okay out there?”

“Sure, okay. Why shouldn’t it be okay on the day your mother is buried?” It ran in the family.

“Listen, Aunt Hannah, I’d like to be alone for a while, if you don’t mind.”

She nodded and began to withdraw from the doorway. For a moment Lance thought he had gotten away clean, that she had not heard him speaking to whatever or whomever he had been speaking to. But she paused, looked around the kitchen, and said, “Who were you talking to?”

“I was talking to myself?” he suggested, hoping she’d go for it.

“Lance, you’re a very ordinary person. You don’t talk to yourself.”

“I’m distraught. Maybe unhinged.”

“Who were you speaking to?”

“The Sparkletts man. He delivered a bottle of mountain spring mineral water. He was passing his condolences.”

“He certainly got out the door fast as I came in; I heard you talking before I came in.”

“He’s big, but he’s fast. Covers the whole Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks area all by himself. Terrific person, you’d like him a lot. His name’s Melville. Always makes me think of big fish when I talk to him.”

He was babbling, hoping it would all go away. Hannah looked at him strangely. “I take it all back, Lance. You’re not that ordinary. Talking to yourself I can believe.”

She went back to the groaning board. Sans gefilte fish.

“What a pity,” said the voice of Lance Goldfein’s mother. “I love Hannah, but she ain’t playing with a full deck, if you catch my drift.”

“Mom, you’ve got to tell me what the hell is going on here. Could Hannah hear your voice?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean: you don’t think so? You’re the ghost, don’t you know the rules?”

“I just got here. There are things I haven’t picked up yet”

“Did you find a mah jongg group yet?”

“Don’t be such a cutesy smartmouth. I can still give you a crack across the mouth.”

“How? You’re ectoplasm.”

“Don’t be disgusting.”

“You know, I finally believe it’s you. At first I thought I was going over the edge. But it’s you. What I still want to know is why?!? And why you, and why me? Of all the people in the world, how did this happen to us?”

“We’re not the first. It happens all the time.”

“You mean Conan Doyle really did speak to spirits?”

“I don’t know him.”

“Nice man. Probably still eligible. Look around up there, you’re bound to run into him. Hey, by the way: you are up there , aren’t you?”

“What a dummy I raised. No, I’m not up there , I’m down here. Talking to you.”

“Tell me about it,” he murmured softly to himself.

“I heard that.”

“I’m sorry.”

The door from the dining room swung open again and half a dozen relatives were standing there. They were all staring at Lance as though he had just fallen off the moon. “Lance, darling,” said Aunt Rachel, “would you like to come home tonight with Aaron and me? It’s so gloomy here in the house all alone.”

“What gloomy? It’s the same sunny house it’s always been.”

“But you seem so… so… distressed….”

From one of the kitchen cabinets Lance heard the distinct sound of a blatting raspberry. Mom was not happy with Rachel’s remark. Mom had never been that happy with Rachel, to begin with. Aaron was Mom’s brother, and she had always felt Rachel had married him because he had a thriving poultry business. Lance did not share the view; it had to’ve been true love. Uncle Aaron was a singularly unappetizing human being. He picked his nose in public. And always smelled of defunct chickens.

“I’m not distressed, Rachel. I’m just unhappy, and I’m trying to decide what I’m going to do next. Going home with you would only put it off for another day, and I want to get started as soon as I can. That’s why I’m talking to myself.”

They stared. And smiled a great deal.

“Why don’t you all leave me alone for a while. I don’t mean it to sound impertinent, but I think I’d like to be by myself. You know what I mean?”

Lew, who had more sense than all the rest of them put together, understood perfectly. “That’s not a bad idea, Lance. Come on, everyone; let’s get out of here and let Lance do some thinking. Anybody need a lift?”

They began moving out, and Lance went with them to the front room where Hannah asked if he minded if she put together a doggie bag of food, after all why should it go to waste such terrific deli goodies. Lance said he didn’t mind, and Hannah and Rachel and Gert and Lilian and Benny (who was unmarried) all got their doggie bags, savaging the remains on the card tables until there was nothing left but one piece of pastrami (it wouldn’t look nice to take the last piece), several pickles, and a dollop of potato salad. The marabunta army ants could not have carried out a better program of scorching the earth.

And when they were gone, Lance fell into the big easy chair by the television, sighed a sigh of release, and closed his eyes. “Good,” said his mother from the ashtray on the side table. “Now we can have a long mother-son heart-to-heart.”

Lance closed his eyes tighter. Why me? he thought.

He hoped Mom would never be sent to Hell, because he learned in the next few days that Hell was being a son whose mother has come back to haunt him, and if Mom were ever sent there, it would be a terrible existence in which she would no doubt be harassed by her own long-dead mother, her grandmothers on both sides, and God only knew how many random nuhdzing relatives from ages past.

Primary among the horrors of being haunted by a Jewish mother’s ghost was the neatness. Lance’s mother had been an extremely neat person. One could eat off the floor. Lance had never understood the efficacy of such an act, but his mother had always used it as a yardstick of worthiness for housekeeping.

Lance, on the other hand, was a slob. He liked it that way, and for most of his thirty years umbilically linked to his mother, he had suffered the pains of a running battle about clothes dropped on the floor, rings from coffee cups permanently staining the teak table, cigarette ashes dumped into the wastebaskets from overflowing ashtrays without benefit of a trash can liner. He could recite by heart the diatribe attendant on his mother’s having to scour out the wastebasket with Dow Spray.

And now, when by all rights he should have been free to live as he chose, at long last, after thirty years, he had been forced to become a housemaid for himself.

No matter where he went in the house, Mom was there. Hanging from the ceiling, hiding in the nap of the rug, speaking up at him from the sink drain, calling him from the cabinet where the vacuum cleaner reposed in blissful disuse. “A pigsty,” would come the voice, from empty air. “A certifiable pigsty. My son lives in filth.”

“Mom,” Lance would reply, pulling a pop-tab off a fresh can of beer or flipping a page in Oui , “this is not a pigsty. It’s an average semiclean domicile in which a normal, growing American boy lives.”

“There’s shmootz all over the sink from the peanut butter and jelly. You’ll draw ants.”

“Ants have more sense than to venture in here and take their chances with you.” He was finding it difficult to live. “Mom, why don’t you get off my case?”

“I saw you playing with yourself last night.”

Lance sat up straight. “You’ve been spying on me!”

“Spying? A mother is spying when she’s concerned her son will go blind from doing personal abuse things to himself? That’s the thanks I get after thirty years of raising. A son who’s become a pervert.”