Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

So: dusk on the frozen lake of a city park, skating behind the puffy red earmuffs and the fluttering yellow ringlets of a strange shikse teaches me the meaning of the word longing . It is almost more than an angry thirteen-year-old little Jewish Momma’s Boy can bear. Forgive the luxuriating, but these are probably the most poignant hours of my life I’m talking about—I learn the meaning of the word longing, I learn the meaning of the word pang. There go the darling things dashing up the embankment, clattering along the shoveled walk between the evergreens—and so here I go too (if I dare!). The sun is almost all the way down, and everything is purple (including my prose) as I follow at a safe distance until they cross the street on their skates, and go giggling into the little park-side candy store. By the time I get up the nerve to come through the door—every eye will surely be upon me!—they have already loosened their mufflers and unzipped their jackets, and are raising cups of hot chocolate between their smooth and burning cheeks—and those noses, mystery of mysteries! each disappears entirely into a cup full of chocolate and marshmallows and comes out at the other end unblemished by liquid! Jesus, look how guiltlessly they eat between meals! What girls! Crazily, impetuously, I order a cup of chocolate myself—and proceed to ruin my appetite for dinner, served promptly by my Jumping-jack mother at five-thirty, when my father walks into the house “starved.” Then I follow them back to the lake. Then I follow them around the lake. Then at last my ecstasy is over—they go home to the grammatical fathers and the composed mothers and the self-assured brothers who all live with them in harmony and bliss behind their goyische curtains, and I start back to Newark, to my palpitating life with my family, lived now behind the aluminum “Venetians” for which my mother has been saving out of her table-money for years.

What a rise in social class we have made with those blinds! Headlong, my mother seems to feel, we have been catapulted into high society. A good part of her life is now given over to the dusting and polishing of the slats of the blinds; she is behind them wiping away during the day, and at dusk, looks out from between her clean slats at the snow, where it has begun to fall through the light of the street lamp—and begins pumping up the worry-machine. It is usually only a matter of minutes before she is appropriately frantic. “Where is he already?” she moans, each time a pair of headlights comes sweeping up the street and are not his. Where, oh where, our Odysseus! Upstairs Uncle Hymie is home, across the street Landau is home, next door Silverstein is home—everybody is home by five forty-five except my father, and the radio says that a blizzard is already bearing down on Newark from the North Pole. Well, there is just no doubt about it, we might as well call Tuckerman & Farber about the funeral arrangements, and start inviting the guests. Yes, it needs only for the roads to begin to glisten with ice for the assumption to be made that my father, fifteen minutes late for dinner, is crunched up against a telegraph pole somewhere, lying dead in a pool of his own blood. My mother comes into the kitchen, her face by now a face out of El Greco. “My two starving Armenians,” she says in a breaking voice, “eat, go ahead, darlings—start, there’s no sense waiting—” And who wouldn’t be grief-struck? Just think of the years to come—her two babies without a father, herself without a husband and provider, all because out of nowhere, just as that poor man was starting home, it had to begin to snow.

Meanwhile I wonder if with my father dead I will have to get a job after school and Saturdays, and consequently give up skating at Irvington Park—give up skating with my shikses before I have even spoken a single word to a one of them. I am afraid to open my mouth for fear that if I do no words will come out—or the wrong words. “Portnoy, yes, it’s an old French name, a corruption of porte noir, meaning black door or gate. Apparently in the Middle Ages in France the door to our family manor house was painted . . .” et cetera and so forth. No, no, they will hear the oy at the end, and the jig will be up. Al Port then, Al Parsons! “How do you do. Miss McCoy, mind if I skate alongside, my name is Al Parsons—” but isn’t Alan as Jewish and foreign as Alexander? I know there’s Alan Ladd, but there’s also my friend Alan Rubin, the shortstop for our softball team. And wait’ll she hears I’m from Weequahic. Oh, what’s the difference anyway, I can lie about my name, I can lie about my school, but how am I going to lie about this fucking nose? “You seem like a very nice person, Mr. Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of your face like that?” Because suddenly it has taken off, the middle of my face! Because gone is the button of my childhood years, that pretty little thing that people used to look at in my carriage, and lo and behold, the middle of my face has begun to reach out toward God! Porte-Noir and Parsons my ass, kid, you have got J-E-W written right across the middle of that face—look at the shnoz on him, for God’s sakes! That ain’t a nose, it’s a hose! Screw off, Jewboy! Get off the ice and leave these girls alone!

And it’s true. I lower my head to the kitchen table and on a piece of my father’s office stationery outline my profile with a pencil. And it’s terrible . How has this happened to me who was so gorgeous in that carriage. Mother! At the top it has begun to aim toward the heavens, while simultaneously, where the cartilage ends halfway down the slope, it is beginning to bend back toward my mouth. A couple of years and I won’t even be able to eat, this thing will be directly in the path of the food! No! No! It can’t be! I go into the bathroom and stand before the mirror, I press the nostrils upward with two fingers. From the side it’s not too bad either, but in front, where my upper lip used to be, there is now just teeth and gum. Some goy . I look like Bugs Bunny! I cut pieces from the cardboard that comes back in the shirts from the laundry and Scotch-tape them to either side of my nose, thus restoring in profile the nice upward curve that I sported all through my childhood . . . but which is now gone! It actually seems that this sprouting of my beak dates exactly from the time that I discovered the shikses skating in Irvington Park—as though my own nose bone has taken it upon itself to act as my parents’ agent! Skating with shikses? Just you try it, wise guy. Remember Pinocchio? Well, that is nothing compared with what is going to happen to you. They’ll laugh and laugh, howl and hoot—and worse, calling you Goldberg in the bargain, send vou on your wav roasting with fury and resentment. Who do you think they’re always giggling about as it is? You! The skinny Yid and his shnoz following them around the ice every single afternoon—and can’t talk! “Please, will you stop playing with your nose,” my mother says. “I’m not interested, Alex, in what’s growing up inside there, not at dinner.” “But it’s too big ” “What? What’s too big?” says my father. “My nose!” I scream. “Please, it gives you character,” my mother says, “so leave it alone!”

But who wants character? I want The real McCoy! In her blue parka and her red earmuffs and her big white mittens—Miss America, on blades! With her mistletoe and her plum pudding (whatever that may be), and her one-family house with a banister and a staircase, and parents who are tranquil and patient and dignified , and also a brother Billy who knows how to take motors apart and says “Much obliged,” and isn’t afraid of anything physical, and oh the way she’ll cuddle next to me on the sofa in her Angora sweater with her legs pulled back up beneath her tartan skirt, and the way shell turn at the doorway and say to me, “And thank you ever so much for a wonderful wonderful evening,” and then this amazing creature—to whom no one has ever said “ Shah! ” or “I only hope your children will do the same to you someday!”—this perfect, perfect-stranger, who is as smooth and shiny and cool as custard, will kiss me—raising up one shapely calf behind her—and my nose and my name will have become as nothing.