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

“Mom, masturbation is not perversion.”

“How about those filthy magazines you read with the girls in leather.”

“You’ve been going through my drawers.”

“Without opening them,” she murmured.

“This’s got to stop!” he shouted. “It’s got to end. E-n-d. End! I’m going crazy with you hanging around!”

There was silence. A long silence. Lance wanted to go to the toilet, but he was afraid she’d check it out to make sure his stools were firm and hard. The silence went on and on.

Finally, he stood up and said, “Okay, I’m sorry.”

Still silence.

“I said I was sorry, fer chrissakes! What more do you want from me?”

“A little respect.”

“That’s what I give you. A little respect.”

More silence.

“Mom, you’ve got to face it, I’m not your little boy anymore. I’m an adult, with a job and a life and adult needs and… and…”

He wandered around the house but there was only more silence and more free-floating guilt, and finally he decided he would go for a walk, maybe go to a movie. In hopes Mom was housebound by the rules for ghost mothers.

The only movie he hadn’t seen was a sequel to a Hong Kong kung fu film, Return of the Street Fighter. But he paid his money and went in. No sooner had Sonny Chiba ripped out a man’s genitals, all moist and bloody, and displayed them to the audience in tight closeup, than Lance heard the voice of his mother behind him. “This is revolting. How can a son of mine watch such awful?”

“Mom!” he screamed, and the manager came down and made him leave. His box of popcorn was still half full.

On the street, passersby continued to turn and look at him as he walked past conversing with empty air.

“You’ve got to leave me alone. I need to be left alone. This is cruel and inhuman torture. I was never that Jewish!”

He heard sobbing, from just beside his right ear. He threw up his hands. Now came the tears. “Mommmm, please! ”

“I only wanted to do right for you. If I knew why I was sent back, what it was for, maybe I could make you happy, my son.”

“Mom, you’ll make me happy as a pig in slop if you’ll just go away for a while and stop snooping on me.”

“I’ll do that.”

And she was gone.

When it became obvious that she was gone, Lance went right out and picked up a girl in a bar.

And it was not until they were in bed that she came back.

“I turn my back a second and he’s shtupping a bum from the streets. That I should live to see this!”

Lance had been way under the covers. The girl, whose name was Chrissy, had advised him she was using a new brand of macrobiotic personal hygiene spray, and he had been trying to decide if the taste was, in fact, as asserted, papaya and coconut, or bean sprout and avocado, as his taste buds insisted. Chrissy gasped and squealed. “We’re not alone here!” she said. Lance struggled up from the depths; as his head emerged from beneath the sheet, he heard his mother ask, “She isn’t even Jewish, is she?”

“Mom!”

Chrissy squealed again. “Mom?”

“It’s just a ghost, don’t worry about it,” Lance said reassuringly. Then, to the air, “Mom, will you, fer chrissakes, get out of here? This is in very poor taste.”

“Talk to me taste, Lance my darling. That I should live to see such a thing.”

“ Will you stop saying that?!?” He was getting hysterical.

“A shiksa , a Gentile yet. The shame of it.”

“Mom, the goyim are for practice!”

“I’m getting the hell out of here,” Chrissy said, leaping out of the bed, long brown hair flying.

“Put on your clothes, you bummerkeh ,” Lance’s mother shrilled. “Oh, God, if I only had a wet towel, a coat hanger, a can of Mace, some thing, anything!! ”

And there was such a howling and shrieking and jumping and yowling and shoving and slapping and screaming and cursing and pleading and bruising as had never been heard in that block in the San Fernando Valley. And when it was over and Chrissy had disappeared into the night, to no one knew where, Lance sat in the middle of the bedroom floor weeping—not over his being haunted, not over his mother’s death, not over his predicament: over his lost erection.

And it was all downhill from there. Lance was sure of it. Mom trying to soothe him did not help in the least.

“Sweetheart, don’t cry. I’m sorry. I lost my head, you’ll excuse the expression. But it’s all for the best.”

“It’s not for the best. I’m horny.”

“She wasn’t for you.”

“She was for me, she was for me,” he screamed.

“Not a shiksa. For you a nice, cute girl of a Semitic persuasion.”

“I hate Jewish girls. Audrey was a Jewish girl; Bernice was a Jewish girl; that awful Darlene you fixed me up with from the laundromat, she was a Jewish girl; I hated them all. We have nothing in common.”

“You just haven’t found the right girl yet.”

“I HATE JEWISH GIRLS! THEY’RE ALL LIKE YOU!”

“May God wash your mouth out with a bar of Fels-Naptha,” his mother said in reverential tones. Then there was a meaningful pause and, as though she had had an epiphany, she said, “ That’s why I was sent back. To find you a nice girl, a partner to go with you on the road of life, a loving mate who also not incidentally could be a very terrific cook. That’s what I can do to make you happy, Lance, my sweetness. I can find someone to carry on for me now that I’m no longer able to provide for you, and by the way, that nafkeh left a pair of underpants in the bathroom, I’d appreciate your burning them at your earliest opportunity.”

Lance sat on the floor and hung his head, rocked back and forth and kept devising, then discarding, imaginative ways to take his own life.

The weeks that followed made World War II seem like an inept performance of Gilbert & Sullivan. Mom was everywhere. At his job. (Lance was an instructor for a driving school, a job Mom had never considered worthy of Lance’s talents. “Mom, I can’t paint or sculpt or sing; my hands are too stubby for surgery; I have no power drive and I don’t like movies very much so that eliminates my taking over 20th Century-Fox. I like being a driving teacher. I can leave the job at the office when I come home. Let be already.”) And, of course, at the job she could not “let be.” She made nothing but rude remarks to the inept men and women who were thrust into Lance’s care. And so terrified were they already, just from the idea of driving in traffic, that when Lance’s mother opened up on them, the results were horrendous:

“A driver you call this idiot? Such a driver should be driving a dirigible, the only thing she could hit would be a big ape on a building maybe.”

Into the rear of an RTD bus.

“Will you look at this person! Blind like a litvak! A refugee from the outpatient clinic of the Menninger Foundation.”

Up the sidewalk and into a front yard.

“Now I’ve seen it all! This one not only thinks she’s Jayne Mansfield with the blonde wig and the skirt up around the pupik , hopefully she’ll arouse my innocent son, but she drives backwards like a pig with the staggers.”

Through a bus stop waiting bench, through a bus stop sign, through a car wash office, through a gas station and into a Fotomat.

But she was not only on the job, she was also at the club where Lance went to dance and possibly meet some women; she was at the dinner party a friend threw to celebrate the housewarming (the friend sold the house the following week, swearing it was haunted); she was at the dry cleaner’s, the bank, the picture framers, the ballet, and inevitably in the toilet, examining Lance’s stools to make sure they were firm and hard.