Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

And it was. A copy of Dragon Seed by Pearl S. Buck is open on the table beside the bed, where there is also a half-empty glass of flat ginger ale. It’s hot and I’m thirsty and my mother, my mind reader, says I should go ahead and drink what’s left in her glass, I need it more than she does. But dry as I am, I don’t want to drink from any glass to which she has put her lips—for the first time in my life the idea fills me with revulsion! “Take.” “I’m not thirsty.” Look how you’re perspiring.” “I’m not thirsty.” “Don’t be polite all of a sudden.” “But I don’t like ginger ale.” “You? Don’t like ginger ale?” “ No ” “Since when?” Oh, God! She’s alive, and so we are at it again—she’s alive, and right off the bat we’re starting in!

She tells me how Rabbi Warshaw came and sat and talked with her for a whole half hour before—as she now so graphically puts it—she went under the knife. Wasn’t that nice? Wasn’t that thoughtful? (Only twenty-four hours out of the anesthetic, and she knows, you see, that I refused to change out of my Levis for the holiday! ) The woman who is sharing the room with her, whose loving, devouring gaze I am trying to edge out of, and whose opinion, as I remember it, nobody had asked for, takes it upon herself to announce that Rabbi Warshaw is one of the most revered men in all of Newark. Re-ver-ed. Three syllables, as the rabbi himself would enunciate it, in his mighty Anglo-oracular style. I begin to lightly pound at the pocket of my baseball mitt, a signal that I am about ready to go, if only someone will let me. “He loves baseball, he could play baseball twelve months a year,” my mother tells Mrs. Re-ver-ed. I mumble that I have “a league game.” “It’s the finals. For the championship.” “Okay,” says my mother, and lovingly, “you came, you did your duty, now run—run to your league game.” I can hear in her voice how happy and relieved she is to find herself alive on this beautiful September afternoon . . . And isn’t it a relief for me, too? Isn’t this what I prayed for, to a God I do not even believe is there? Wasn’t the unthinkable thing life without her to cook for us, to clean for us, to . . . to everything for us! This is what I prayed and wept for: that she should come out at the other end of her operation, and be alive. And then come home, to be once again our one and only mother. “Run, my baby-boy,” my mother croons to me, and sweetly—oh, she can be so sweet and good to me, so motherly! she will spend hour after hour playing canasta with me, when I am sick and in bed as she is now: imagine, the ginger ale the nurse has brought for her because she has had a serious operation, she offers to me , because I’m overheated! Yes, she will give me the food out of her mouth, that’s a proven fact! And still I will not stay five full minutes at her bedside. “Run,” says my mother, while Mrs. Re-ver-ed, who in no time at all has managed to make herself my enemy, and for the rest of my life, Mrs. Re-ver-ed says, “Soon Mother will be home, soon everything will be just like ordinary . . . Sure, run, run, they all run these days,” says the kind and understanding lady—oh, they are all so kind and understanding, I want to strangle them!—“walking they never heard of, God bless them.”

So I run. Do I run! Having spent maybe two fretful minutes with her—two minutes of my precious time, even though just the day before, the doctors stuck right up her dress ( so I imagined it, before my mother reminded me of “the knife,” our knife ) some kind of horrible shovel with which to scoop out what had gone rotten inside her body. They reached up and pulled down out of her just what she used to reach up and pull down out of the dead chicken. And threw it in the garbage can. Where I was conceived and carried, there now is nothing . A void! Poor Mother! How can I rush to leave her like this, after what she has just gone through? After all she has given me—my very life!—how can I be so cruel? “Will you leave me, my baby-boy, will you ever leave Mommy?” Never, I would answer, never, never, never . . . And yet now that she is hollowed out, I cannot even look her in the eye! And have avoided doing so ever since! Oh, there is her pale red hair, spread across the pillow in long strands of springy ringlets that I might never have seen again . There are the faint moons of freckles that she says used to cover her entire face when she was a small child, and that I would never have seen again . And there are those eyes of reddish brown, eyes the color of the crust of honey cake, and still open, still loving me ! There was her ginger ale—and thirsty as I was, I could not have forced myself to drink it!

So I ran all right, out of the hospital and up to the playground and right out to center field, the position I play for a softball team that wears silky blue-and-gold jackets with the name of the club scrawled in big white felt letters from one shoulder to the other: S E A B E E S, A.C. Thank God for the Seabees A.C.! Thank God for center field! Doctor, you can’t imagine how truly glorious it is out there, so alone in all that space . . . Do you know baseball at all? Because center field is like some observation post, a kind of control tower, where you are able to see everything and everyone, to understand what’s happening the instant it happens, not only by the sound of the struck bat, but by the spark of movement that goes through the infielders in the first second that the ball comes flying at them; and once it gets beyond them, “It’s mine,” you call, “it’s mine,” and then after it you go. For in center field, if you can get to it, it is yours. Oh, how unlike my home it is to be in center field, where no one will appropriate unto himself anything that I say is mine!

Unfortunately, I was too anxious a hitter to make the high school team—I swung and missed at bad pitches so often during the tryouts for the freshman squad that eventually the ironical coach took me aside and said, “Sonny, are you sure you don’t wear glasses?” and then sent me on my way. But did I have form! did I have style! And in my playground softball league, where the ball came in just a little slower and a little bigger, I am the star I dreamed I might become for the whole school. Of course, still in my ardent desire to excel I too frequently swing and miss, but when I connect, it goes great distances. Doctor, it flies over fences and is called a home run. Oh, and there is really nothing in life, nothing at all, that quite compares with that pleasure of rounding second base at a nice slow clip, because there’s just no hurry any more, because that ball you’ve hit has just gone sailing out of sight . . . And I could field, too, and the farther I had to run, the better. “I got it! I got it! I got it!” and tear in toward second, to trap in the webbing of my glove—and barely an inch off the ground—a ball driven hard and low and right down the middle, a base hit, someone thought . . . Or back I go, “ I got it, I got it—” back easily and gracefully toward that wire fence, moving practically in slow motion, and then that delicious Di Maggio sensation of grabbing it like something heaven-sent over one shoulder . . . Or running! turning! leaping! like little Al Gionfriddo—a baseball player. Doctor, who once did a very great thing . . . Or just standing nice and calm—nothing trembling, everything serene—standing there in the sunshine (as though in the middle of an empty field, or passing the time on the street corner), standing without a care in the world in the sunshine, like my king of kings, the Lord my God, The Duke Himself (Snider, Doctor, the name may come up again), standing there as loose and as easy, as happy as I will ever be, just waiting by myself under a high fly ball ( a towering fly ball , I hear Red Barber say, as he watches from behind his microphone—hit out toward Portnoy; Alex under it, under it ), just waiting there for the ball to fall into the glove I raise to it, and yup, there it is, plock , the third out of the inning ( and Alex gathers it in for out number three, and, folks, here’s old C.D. for P. Lorillard and Company ), and then in one motion, while old Connie brings us a message from Old Golds, I start in toward the bench, holding the ball now with the five fingers of my bare left hand, and when I get to the infield—having come down hard with one foot on the bag at second base—I shoot it gently, with just a flick of the wrist, at the opposing team’s shortstop as he comes trotting out onto the field, and still without breaking stride, go loping in all the way, shoulders shifting, head hanging, a touch pigeon-toed, my knees coming slowly up and down in an altogether brilliant imitation of The Duke. Oh, the unruffled nonchalance of that game! There’s not a movement that I don’t know still down in the tissue of my muscles and the joints between my bones. How to bend over to pick up my glove and how to toss it away, how to test the weight of the bat, how to hold it and carry it and swing it around in the on-deck circle, how to raise that bat above my head and flex and loosen my shoulders and my neck before stepping in and planting my two feet exactly where my two feet belong in the batter’s box—and how, when I take a called strike (which I have a tendency to do, it balances off nicely swinging at bad pitches), to step out and express, if only through a slight poking with the bat at the ground, just the right amount of exasperation with the powers that be . . . yes, every little detail so thoroughly studied and mastered, that it is simply beyond the realm of possibility for any situation to arise in which I do not know how to move, or where to move, or what to say or leave unsaid . . . And it’s true, is it not?—incredible, but apparently true—there are people who feel in life the ease, the self-assurance, the simple and essential affiliation with what is going on, that I used to feel as the center fielder for the Seabees? Because it wasn’t, you see, that one was the best center fielder imaginable, only that one knew exactly, and down to the smallest particular, how a center fielder should conduct himself. And there are people like that walking the streets of the U.S. of A.? I ask you, why can’t I be one! Why can’t I exist now as I existed for the Seabees out there in center field! Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder—and nothing more!