I Shudder Read online

  My next apartment, a few years later, was an improvement—it was a one-bedroom on Christopher Street. It was only on the second floor, so the sisters had no trouble climbing their way up.

  “This is so much nicer,” said Lil, inspecting my living room; she was absolutely right, since this was the first time I’d ever had a separate living room.

  “I love this!” said Hilda. “And there’s a kitchenette!”

  “Are we allowed to look in the bedroom,” asked my mother, “or did you clean up for us by taking everything and throwing it in there?”

  “Excuse me,” I said, deeply offended, opening the door to my sliver of a bedroom. “See? It’s a showplace.” Then I quickly shut the door, before my mother or my aunts could actually take too close a look and find either my porn or the moldy laundry which was in fact lumped under both the bed and the bedspread.

  “So what’s that place next door?” asked Lil. “Is it a bar?”

  “It’s a leather bar,” I said; it was called Ty’s, and it was one of the oldest, and busiest, such places in the city.

  “A leather bar?” asked Hilda.

  “He means it’s an S and M bar,” said my mother, trying to sound both sophisticated and nonchalant.

  “S and M,” said Lil, nodding her head. “That’s when people like to have other people beat them up, right? Like on a date?”

  They were all looking at me, as if I were suddenly a bondage authority, and I’d never even been in the bar. Like any decent citizen, I’d only watched S&M porn, with titles like Dungeon Daddy and Stableboy II: The Revenge.

  “I don’t think that they necessarily beat each other up,” I replied, haltingly. “I think that they do all sorts of things, like…I don’t know, bondage and discipline.”

  “You know,” said Hilda, “when some of those rowdy kids come into my library and they’re yelling and they won’t sit still or choose a book, I could use a little S and M.”

  “S and M,” Lil repeated. “Does that stand for, what—sadomasochism?”

  “Or slave and master,” I said.

  “How do you know so much?” my mother asked me, warily.

  “They’re my neighbors,” I said, as if that explained everything.

  “So who decides who’s the slave and who’s the master?” Lil wondered. My mother, Hilda, and I exchanged a glance, and I’m pretty sure that we were all thinking the same thing: Lil was definitely a top.

  “I think people just naturally pick,” I told Lil.

  “That makes sense,” said Hilda.

  “And look at all of your nice things,” said Lil, now zeroing in on the main function of the visit. For the sisters, any fresh location could become a gallery or, even better, a store.

  “You’ve been buying things,” my mother said, approvingly, “where do you find all of this stuff?”

  The sisters were, it must be said, world-class shoppers. They weren’t spendthrifts, they didn’t shop recklessly, and they didn’t hoard; they weren’t like those women who can be found sobbing on daytime talk shows as they watch videotape of their crammed closets, bloated with twenty-eight unworn ponchos and fifty-three sets of baby clothes for their childless homes.

  The sisters shopped with a scientific delight. Every item held the potential to surprise and amaze, from a chipped yard-sale saucer to an enameled pillbox in a Parisian department store. They rarely spent large amounts of money, because they’d feel too guilty, and unable to shop again later that afternoon. They especially loved shopping for others; that way they got the high without the crash. They were retail Mother Teresas.

  Lil was the Ali, the Michael Jordan, the legendary presence. Lil could leave Bloomingdale’s with an armload of possible outfits for her grandchildren, all unpaid for; the salespeople knew her and trusted her to pay for what she kept and return the rest. Lil knew that at a discount store, if a dress had a missing button or belt, she could point out the defect to a clerk and receive additional money off. I don’t believe for a second that she ever surreptitiously removed a button and slipped it into her purse, but there were rumors.

  I considered myself to be merely the sisters’ humble trainee, their bungling intern. But I do have the gift. By the time I’d moved to Christopher Street, I was making just enough money for some oddball purchases, and plenty of foraging. I’d haunt the city’s junk shops, weekend flea markets, and lowest-end antiques stores, unearthing stuff like plaster forearms, circular oil paintings of Roman ruins, and abandoned souvenirs, like a tiny alabaster model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. My apartment was half dull-gray industrial shelving bought used at a restaurant supply store on the Bowery, and half what can only be called tchotchkes. “Tchotchke” is a Yiddish word meaning “something peculiar which you don’t need, and which has no discernible purpose or value, but which you can’t live without.”

  Lil eyed my tchotchkes with a hungry, practiced eye, as if beneath a velvet throw pillow or a carved wooden deer head she’d find a gold doubloon, or the secret of perpetual motion. She moved from one object to the next, sometimes letting her hand linger flirtatiously, as if she was murmuring, “Do I love you? Or you? My, aren’t you pretty.” Finally, she picked up a heavy brass paperweight, in the shape of a prominent Roman nose. She examined it, as if through some invisible jeweler’s loupe, and then turned it over, assuming there’d be a price tag underneath. There wasn’t. Lil wasn’t cheap, or obsessed with money, but still, she liked to know what things went for. It told her where she stood.

  “This is very nice,” she commented, holding the paperweight, as if we were in some Cairo bazaar and I was crouched nearby, wearing a fez. Then, with an even more surpassingly bogus not-that-I-care attitude, she asked, “So, what did you pay for this?”

  “That’s none of your business,” I said, raising the ante.

  “No, come on, seriously. I’m just curious—what did you pay for this?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  My mother and Hilda were getting nervous; they loved Lil but almost never stood up to her. It was too risky.

  “Why aren’t you going to tell me?” Lil asked.

  “Because it’s private, and you don’t need to know.”

  The atmosphere became dangerously electric.

  “You should tell her,” Hilda advised me. “Just tell her.”

  “You don’t have to tell her,” my mother said, her voice quavering. “But you could.”

  “No, no,” said Lil, putting the paperweight back down onto my desk. “He’s absolutely right, it’s his personal business, and I don’t need to know.”

  My mother and Hilda looked at each other, staggered. Had we entered some parallel universe? Had the earth just spun off its axis? Had Lil surrendered?

  “Thank you,” I said, with just a little too much premature smugness.

  “But tell me,” said Lil, picking the paperweight back up, “just out of curiosity, you know, what would you pay for something…like this?”

  Sometimes you just want to applaud.

  4.

  Some years later Lil’s husband, my Uncle Rudy, who was in his seventies, died what I can only call the Platonic ideal of a Jewish death: he had a fatal heart attack on the ninth hole of a golf course in Miami Beach. Rudy and Lil had both been very athletic, so his death was unexpected: like his wife, Rudy had seemed unstoppably vigorous and up for any tennis match or Vermont bicycle ride or hike through a kibbutz.

  At Rudy’s funeral, Lil stood with one hand on her husband’s coffin and the other around my shoulders. “Your Uncle Rudy always loved you, you know that, don’t you?” she said. “He never understood why, in your writing, you had to use that kind of language, but he loved you.”

  Less than two years later, Lil shocked her sisters by remarrying. She had been living in Florida, where she’d met Bernie, a widower who’d been married for many years to an extremely gutsy, opinionated woman, not unlike Lil. Bernie’s late wife had also enjoyed crafts, and had left behind many unfinished projects, all o
f which Lil thoughtfully wrapped up and mailed off as gifts, so various friends and relatives soon received a dead woman’s half-completed tissue-paper-and-glue collages, and translucent, oversized, plastic-resin daisies.

  Lil surprised the family in other ways as well: she broke the sisterly edict against wearing fur by buying a large white mink stole. Lil wasn’t a tall woman, and she refused to drape the stole across her back and bunch it in the crook of her arms, as many women do, with a slouchy, champagne-at-the-country-club élan. Lil preferred to wear the mink slung around her neck, with the two square-cut ends hanging straight down, almost to the floor, like a white mink prayer shawl, or a polar bear carcass.

  I, meanwhile, had been pursuing marriage material of my own. I was on the dance floor of a downtown club when I was introduced to John, and I had the most romantic response possible: I knew instantly that he was far too self-possessed and good-looking for me, and that I’d be completely ignored. When we danced and talked and then actually began to go out, the scenario felt like a rip in the time-space continuum. But here’s why it all began to make sense: John was a doctor, with a specialty in rehabilitative medicine and head injuries. I was obviously a test case.

  When I told my mother that I was dating a doctor, her ancient tribal DNA kicked in, and she almost imploded with happiness. “He sounds wonderful,” she said, and then, inevitably, she asked, “Is he Jewish?” I said no, and there was a distinct pause. Finally she asked, “Is he smart?”

  I think my mother was just getting back at me because, a few years earlier, she’d called me with the welcome news that Hilda had hit the true Jewish-American jackpot: her son Carl, who was a doctor, had become engaged to another doctor, a terrific woman named Marcie Levine. That’s when I’d taken a distinct pause and then asked, “Jewish?” And that was when my mother hung up on me.

  Soon John invited me to visit him at his rehab center, out in New Jersey. I was nervous about going because, while I found head injuries fascinating, I was squeamish about almost all medical procedures. John, however, being a professional, was thoroughly at home with even the most graphic physical symptoms, and he loved watching cable shows like The Man with the 25-Pound Face-Eating Tumor and a drastic weight-loss documentary called A Trash Can Full of Skin. This latter program was the genuinely moving story of an Englishwoman who, after losing hundreds of pounds, traveled to America for radical surgery to remove her many yards of hanging flesh, and she’d titled the show herself. I had trouble watching the scalpel slice into her abdomen and thighs, but John was riveted.

  “But what do they do with the excess skin once they cut it off?” I asked, while watching the show with my hands covering my eyes. “Is it like fabric or more like fruit roll-up? Could they fold it up and store it in a freezer for skin grafts? Is there enough to make a really unusual carry-on bag?”

  John looked at me. “I won’t answer you,” he decided, “unless you take your hands away and watch the surgery.” My Aunt Lil was right: as she’d once told me, the goyim are crafty.

  John’s rehab center was a pleasant, campus-like brick complex, and as he walked me through the halls, all of his patients approached him adoringly.

  “Well, hello, Doctor,” said one middle-aged woman, with a meaningful wink. John had told me that after this patient had been in a car wreck, she’d recovered physically but had become sexually insatiable. This sounded like an urban legend, concocted online, but there she was. “Last week,” John said, “the nurses found her in one of the other patients’ rooms, with this man who, because he was having severe balance problems, needed to be tied to his bed. She was all over him, and we had to call the orderly to drag her out.”

  “Lookin’ good, baby,” the woman told John, wriggling her shoulders appreciatively, “Mm, mm, mmmm…”

  “Vicky,” said John, “do you remember what we said? About boundaries and inappropriate behavior?”

  “Oh, come on, Doc,” the woman scoffed. “All I need is a man and a beer.”

  We moved on, and John spoke with another patient, a man who, following a motorcycle mishap, looked fine but could no longer determine what was food and what wasn’t. His family had caught him nibbling golf balls.

  “Is this food?” the man asked, cradling a small brushed-steel lamp.

  “Not food, Frank,” John replied, and the man gratefully put the lamp back on an end table.

  “You see,” John told me, “Frank is fine, because he’s learned that he just has to ask.”

  “But that lamp might be food if you were really, really hungry,” I pointed out.

  John stared at me. “Did you even finish high school?” he asked. Then he was called away, because a new patient, an extremely dazed, near-comatose eighteen-year-old, was being admitted. This boy was from rural Pennsylvania, where he’d locked himself in his bedroom for the better part of a week, chugging a homemade brew incorporating grain alcohol. His family, which had somehow permitted this spree, had brought him in and reported that he was “foamulating” at the mouth. John had also told me about another family he’d met while he was in medical school, who had referred to the fibroid tumors in the mother’s uterus as “fireballs of the Eucharist.”

  John left me alone in his office, where I instantly tried on one of his extra white jackets and pretended to write prescriptions on one of his pads. “Here you go,” I told an imaginary sufferer, “just take this entire bottle of pills all at once.” Then I made a major strategic error, when I left the office to get a sip of water from a nearby fountain, not realizing the office door would lock automatically behind me. As I stood outside the door to John’s office, a cluster of his patients began to circle me, with grave and increasingly belligerent suspicions. I remembered a scene from the fifties B-movie Shock Corridor, in which a reporter infiltrates a mental hospital, only to find himself trapped in a ward filled with sexually predatory women. “Nymphos!” he mutters.

  “What were you doing in the doctor’s office?” asked one man, who had a noticeable dent in his forehead.

  “I’m…visiting,” I replied.

  “Does the doctor know you were in there?” asked a sturdy-looking woman, rubbing her knuckles.

  “Oh yes,” I said, “he left me in there.”

  “Then why did you come out here?” asked the man with the food-recognition issues; it occurred to me that, from his point of view, I might be a tasty ham sandwich or a plate of his mom’s ziti.

  “I came out here to get a drink,” I said, knowing I sounded defensive.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here,” said the guy with the dent.

  “I’m going to call the orderly,” said the foodie, and I wondered if he was going to ask the orderly to bring condiments and sharp utensils.

  “Ain’t you somethin’,” said the woman with the boundary problems, eyeballing me, with her hands on her hips. “Me likee.”

  “He’s not supposed to be here,” growled a newcomer, a hulking college athlete with a bandaged head and a menacing cast on his arm.

  “It’s fine, guys,” John told the mob, as he came to my rescue. “This is Paul, and we’re still not sure what’s wrong with him.”

  John proved himself again, because when I went with him to a medical conference in Florida a few months later, he insisted that we stop in West Palm on our way back, so that he could meet Aunt Lil and my new Uncle Bernie.

  John drove our rental car out to Heritage Acres, the retirement community where the couple was living. My mother and Hilda had been down for a few visits, and while Hilda had been polite, the place was my mother’s worst nightmare. “It’s like a warehouse for old people,” she’d told me, “where all they do, all day long, is play golf and compare their diseases. I love my sister, but if I had to live there, I’d cut my throat.”

  John and I drove through the gates, and we saw hundreds of identical, single-story bungalows, lined up in neat rows beside narrow canals. The sun was merciless, and there weren’t many trees. Everything seemed to be covered w
ith stucco and painted the color of a faded Band-Aid. Heritage Acres was like a well-tended terrorist training camp, filled with eighty-five-year-old women in roomy, quilted floral housecoats, and potbellied, cigar-smoking men in Sansabelt slacks. We pulled up to Lil’s bungalow, and she greeted us at the front door. Lil was now in a wheelchair, which was being pushed by the astoundingly compliant Bernie.

  “Look who’s here!” cried Lil, and, as we entered the smallish front hallway, she managed to back her wheelchair directly over Bernie’s toes. He didn’t wince or complain in the slightest, and she continued to crush his toes throughout our visit. His refusal to gripe, or even mention the torment, pretty much defined their relationship—Bernie was a total sweetheart, and utterly devoted to Lil. “So this must be the doctor,” she said, motioning John into the living room, where she could take a better look.

  The house was small, but sunny and cheerful. Lil had filled the pastel walls and wicker shelving with a mix of framed family photos, ornamental, hammered-brass Passover plates, and pottery and wall hangings collected on her travels; there was also a lumpy but impressive, almost life-sized, brown ceramic bust of Golda Meir. A shaded rear sun porch overlooked a canal. While I understood my mother’s fears, for a couple like Lil and Bernie, Heritage Acres was warm, wheelchair-accessible, and even lively; it was the modern shtetl, with cable, medical facilities, and a nearby airport.

  “And you must be Lil,” said John, “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” said Lil, gesturing to me. “So tell me, Doctor, what’s wrong with me?”

  John took a deep breath and entered the arena by offering both his credentials and free medical advice. About a year earlier, Lil, who was now in her eighties, had been driving and her legs had gone numb. John quizzed her on her symptoms, which involved spinal problems and difficulties in adjusting her many medications. John agreed with her current doctor’s diagnosis, and he mentioned all of the most recent research on Lil’s condition. I stood by, proudly and nervously, like the spouse of a hopeful immigrant during his citizenship exam.