Adam Levin - The Instructions

Although she favored a far less modest look — t-shirts and jeans or fatigue pants, if not tank-tops and shorts or cotton dresses that quit above the knee — my mother, who never paid attention to weather forecasts, had, on the day before she was to meet my father’s parents, bought for the occasion an ankle-length skirt of unbreathing fabric and a blouse that buttoned up to her chin and down to her wrists. This was springtime, and Chicago, and despite it having been wintery on the day she’d purchased the clothing, the temperature climbed forty-five degrees over the ensuing twenty-four hours. My mom did own other slightly less formal, far less constricting items that she wore to the hospital, but those clothes were at her apartment in Hyde Park, whereas she was at my father’s apartment on the other side of the city, in Uptown. She had Fridays off and had spent Thursday night there, as had become her habit, and by the time it occurred to her that she would suffocate in the clothing she’d bought, she and my father had only half an hour to get to my grandparents’ house; even if she’d had enough money to buy a new outfit at a local thrift store — the only kind of store there was back then in Uptown that didn’t sell liquor, candybars, or used saxophones — there was just no time to do it.

So she frummed up as originally planned, and over the course of the two-mile walk to his parents’ house, my dad, nervous himself, attempted to lighten the situation with one-liners that failed to hit til he came upon, “At least the material’s too thick to shvitz through,” at which point my mother, bent at the knees with gallows laughter, turned her head and saw that she had, in fact, shvitzed through the fabric that covered her left underarm, and began to cry.

They got to my grandparents’ a few minutes early, only to find my grandmother behind schedule. In order to finish the cooking before sundown, she needed help in the kitchen.

“We’re going to have to use the pressure cooker because we are under pressure. Do you know how to use a pressure cooker, honey?”

“Yes,” my mother said, dabbing a damp handkerchief behind her ears.

“And how are you with a chicken?” my grandma said.

“I fix a nice chick-chicken,” said my mother, the stutter the only evidence of the gasp she’d otherwise stifled upon realizing, mid-sentence, that the chicken she was committing to would be a kosher one.

My grandma said, “You don’t sound so sure,” and my father, who did not yet know about the Six-Day War chicken trauma, and who was still in the kitchen at the time, believed his mother had said so lightheartedly.

My mother, on the other hand, was confident that “You don’t sound so sure” = “Are you telling me that you expect my son to spend his life with a woman who balks at the thought of cooking a nice kosher chicken in a pressure cooker on Shabbos?” = “Do you expect me to believe that you are presenting yourself honestly in that high-collared get-up when already a rash is forming on that delicate neck of yours?” = “With your skin so dark, and my son’s so light, how can you even consider bringing my grandchildren into the world?”

“I’m sure,” my mom said.

She was shown the vegetables and the knives, the spicerack and the pressure cooker, and then she was shown the chicken. “Will you poke it just to double-check it’s thawed?” said my grandmother.

My mom, a soldier, a killer, poked the hairy chicken with the knuckles of her clenched fists and got to work. She prepped the chicken with the spices, pressure-cooked the chicken with the vegetables, and set the chicken on the chicken-dish when the chicken was finished cooking. By the time they all sat down to eat, she had performed so many compulsive eyelid-checks that the small bit of mascara she’d applied that afternoon was smudged like warpaint.

“I looked like a harlot,” she always tells me. “Tell him, Judah. I looked like a cheap harlot.”

And “Of harlots I know only what I’ve read in books and seen through the windshield on North Avenue,” responds my father. “So a harlot if she says so, boychic; but if a harlot, the most expensive harlot in the history of man, and of that I can be sure, for the one thing about which all the books agree is that the less a harlot looks a harlot, the more that harlot costs.”

“You are such a sweet man,” my mother says to him, “but so superstitious. He is so sweet and superstitious, Gurion, that in the cause of protecting me from the evil eye his mother was casting upon the shvitzing black harlot her son had brought to her sabbath dinner table, he actually convinced himself I looked as nice as I wished I did. I did not.”

“You looked gorgeous!”

“He is crazy.”

However my mother looked, and whatever my paternal grand-mother thought of her, this is where the story of that Shabbos bends its knees for the leap into slapstick that it must make to remain true. It is at this point in their telling of the story that my father lights a cigarette to share with my mother, to pass back and forth with her like soldiers in a forest, the filter pinched between thumb and pointerfinger, the cherry pointed down, their cupped hands turned to shield the orange light from the eyes of snipers who hide behind anterior trees; it is at this point that my parents lean toward me and fictionalize unabashedly and I lean toward them and listen without questioning and we get so involved that I sometimes take the cigarette from one of them and put it to my own lips before any of us becomes aware of what I’m doing; this is the point at which we three conspire. We agree to act as if what’s about to get said actually took place. Hardly any of it did, but the meaning of what my parents describe is truer than the meaning that would come across if they attempted to describe what actually happened — what actually happened was, I am led to believe, mostly unlistenable, if not untellable: a series of uncomfortable glances cast in near-silence, a few cutting remarks that echoed off the soup tureen, the damage of these remarks magnifying even as the decibels diminished. What actually happened, I am led to believe, was not funny at all, was painful and dull. Yet so would have been the life of the tramp in Chaplin’s City Lights , if the tramp were not fictional; so would have been the life of the blind girl the tramp loved, if the girl were not fictional; so would have been the operation the tramp struggled to pay for and the struggle to pay for it, were the operation and the struggle not fictional. And that operation never would have worked if it weren’t fictional, and even if by some miracle it had worked, the tramp would never have been able to get the money for it. But in City Lights , the tramp does get the money, the operation does succeed, and everything eventually works out for the lovers. And all of it should be true. And so in a way it is true. And they are worth crying for, a non-fictional tramp and the non-fictional blind girl he loves — in real-life such a doomed couple would deserve our tears. Yet had Chaplin presented them as they would have been had they not been fictional, we would turn away after five minutes instead of staying til the end and weeping as we should. I once asked my father: Why do we go to the symphony hall once a year to see City Lights with orchestral accompaniment at seventy-five dollars a head? “Because it is the greatest movie ever made,” he said. And what makes it the greatest? “It is the truest,” he told me. And why do we only weep at the end of the movie? Why do we weep once we know that everything will be alright? “We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we’ve seen can’t be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.” And so to go challenging the facts in this portion of the story — like some lawyer, some headshrinker — would be to act against faith, to act against truth, to dishonor my mother and father. To monkey with the slapstick would be to lie, and I will not lie.