So I have this professor who thinks that assigning 4 to 6 page essays due the next day is funny. Right. And he thinks it’s even funnier to assign another one that’s due the day after that. You’d think, legally or socially or spiritually or whatever the fuck, that he wouldn’t be allowed to do that because it’s a Tuesday-Friday class.
You would be wrong.
That newfangled thing called “email” has finally succeeded in eliminating any hint of free time that was apparent this semester. Screw it. I’m gonna make the goddamn time.
I don’t mind writing essays. In fact, I really enjoy it. But I like when teachers give you about three weeks to do it. It only takes me a few hours for a good 4 to 6 page ordeal, and I appreciate it when the professor doesn’t know. This professor evidently has it figured out.
In addition, he’s a fan of “non-traditional” essays and believes that the whole intro-body-conclusion model is so 1970’s. I agree that it’s outdated, but that doesn’t mean I want to experiment with new things for fuck’s sake. I want to be lazy and write that typical automatic ‘A’ essay.
Read on if you care about the essay masterpiece I cranked out in like two hours. Marlie liked it. She’ll now understand about half of what my Mom Mom says when she visits.
“And I says to him, I says, ‘Daniel!’ and he says ‘What?’ and I says, ‘I’ve been speaking to you for the last ten minutes, you shmuck.’”
My mother shakes her head wordlessly in response. Poor Daniel isn’t even here to defend himself. Marlyn tsks, then continues, “And you know what he says? He says—” here, she lowers her voice and makes it sound like that of a dumb henchman’s from a Disney film, “—‘Marlyn, I don’t hear you when you I have these in.’ And I didn’t even see the damn things, but he has these little white speakers stuck in his ears. I don’t know how they don’t fall in!”
“Mom,” my mother attempts, but she’s waved impatiently aside.
“I wasn’t finished,” Marlyn says peevishly. She juts out her chin and, being a rather heavyset woman, that moves quite a bit of flesh. “Let me tell you what happened to us last night at dinner. Our friends were over, Sandy and Ben— you remember them, don’t you? It doesn’t matter, you don’t need to. Last night, we went out to this new place that my eye doctor recommended—” Her hands dart through the air as she talks, graceful despite their plumpness. She’s not yet eighty, but we’re fairly sure she’ll make it there through sheer tenacity. The house we’re in? She bought it with the money she earned fifty years before when she sued a trucking company for slamming its rig into her car. When my mother failed art in grade school? She marched into the administrator’s office, forced a meeting with the principal, and argued that it wasn’t Debbie’s fault that she couldn’t draw a cat, and that as long as there was effort, her daughter should get an ‘A’, thank you and good afternoon.
We’re sitting in her pristine kitchen, sipping lemonade and munching on the diabetic-okay sugar-free cookies of which she has an endless supply. The floor makes me feel like I’ve stepped into some sort of government institution, while the white-and-black pattern occupying the walls reminds me of Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper. Everything gleams, giving me the sadistic urge to tramp in with muddy boots and a puppy that needs a bath. I’m incredibly thankful that my mother inherited a diluted form of her cleaning madness. Beneath my chair is a vent that shoots dead-cold air up my skirt; I squirm uncomfortably before standing and stepping across the small distance to the fridge.
“Babe—” Marlyn interrupts her own story. “Get me a Sierra Mist, would you?” I nod, and she returns to her telling of last night’s dinner events, which have somehow now included a taxi cab driver, lentils, and the Pope. The conversation involves a lot of mangled English and various Yiddish expressions to describe acquaintances. I have learned that Yiddish is a language entirely dedicated to communicating the personality of a person in a single word. When I’m out with Marlyn and we come across a few cursing teenagers, they’re grubber yungs (profane young men). When a stranger holds open the door for her, they’re automatically labeled a gutte neshumah (a good soul). Whenever I give her a kiss or hug, I’m her bubbellah, her darling girl. I won’t claim to be fluent in Yiddish, but I will attest to knowing quite a few words and expressions, most of them useless. When will I ever need to say the specific phrase “by yenim’s toochis, isgita smizen”, which means it’s okay for someone else’s ass, but not for yours?
I open the refrigerator and help myself to two Sierra Mists. Marlyn is still prattling about the dinner, more Yiddish breaking through as she mentions events that infuriate her. “And then the waitress, she says to me— with the drek still in hand, that piece of shit dinner your father ordered— and she was such a chaleria, you have no idea—”
“A what?” I interrupt, handing her a soda. Any Yiddish word I don’t know by now catches my interest.
“A chaleria, a nasty bitch, sugar,” she clarifies. “Thank you. Anyway, so she brings back our farcockt dinner— she screwed up the order so badly— and she says, all farmisht, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ All prim and prissy! Thought she was such a knocker!” Here, Marlyn turns and tsks. “Daniel couldn’t bring himself to do the damnedest thing about it— krotzed in his chair the whole time and wouldn’t stir to say a word!”
“Mom,” my mother says for what has to be the seventh or eighth time, and this time she succeeds. “Dad was trying not to make a scene, don’t you see?” She hates when her parents fight, something I can understand as a concept, but not what I think of when it comes to my grandparents. They’ve been married for sixty-seven years; in my opinion, they’re entitled to kvetch at each other as much as they want. Besides, as frequently as they shout back and forth and call my mother to complain about each other, it’s a game, a sport that’s a mix of chess and tennis. There are certain acceptable moves and pieces of memory that are not allowed to be recalled by mutual agreement. At the same time, to watch a game be played out is to turn your head to the left to watch Marlyn scream unknown Yiddish expletives and then turn your head to the right to personally witness Daniel’s answering bellow. When it’s all over, he kisses her forehead with weathered lips and fetches her a glass of water. She smiles, accepts, and the conversation moves on.
“Scene, schmene,” Marlyn mutters now with her particular scowl. Her cheeks draw in, her mouth puckers, and she starts to resemble a pop-eyed doll that’s been squeezed too tightly. “I can make any scene I want— I’m an alta kocker— I can say I’m senile and no one can say anything!” My mother and I make identical faces of disapproval, catch each other doing it, and laugh. “You laugh, sure,” Marlyn shakes a finger at us, “but when I was your age, I would catch my elders doing such kockamayme things. They would say ‘Gay avek, gay avek,’ but when I didn’t leave, they would get all kinds of crazy— what do you call them— freebies, that’s it. Like gonif.”
“Gonif?” my mother asks.
“Thieves, dishonest people. It’s like you two don’t know anything. Bubbelah,” she says suddenly, drawing my focus. “Will you teach these to your children?”
“What?”
“All of the Yiddish I’ve taught you, will you pass it on?”
“Sure,” I say, surprised. “But you’ll teach them yourself, right?”
“I don’t know,” she says in reply, her sharp eyes brightening. “Will I have time? Are you married yet?”
“I’m only 19,”I protest.
“I got married at 19,” she reminds me.
“It was a different world!”
“It’s the same one you’re standing in today, isn’t it?” She taps her long, professionally red nails on the table for emphasis. “Now, I don’t mean to kibbitz—”
“This isn’t your business at all—”
“—and I don’t want you to find anyone mishuggah en cup who will take you home and rob you and carve you up like a piece of meat—”
“Mom!” my mother shrieks.
“—but you should find a nice boy soon before they’re all taken,” Marlyn urges me, her lined face serious. “I want you to be happy. I want to see a smile on that zeisah punim, yeah?” She clasps my chin in one hand and smiles at me herself, dimples deepening. From first grade to twelfth, there was one consistent compliment my teachers had for me: “She was always smiling.” I know where I get it from. It’s what continues to make elderly gentlemen and doctors swoon over Marlyn even today.
“I’m working on it,” I promise, and the soft wrinkles that she has when she relaxes disappear.
“Working on it?” she scoffs. The word ‘working’ is accented with the special back-in-the-throat noise Yiddish speakers reserve for only the most disgusting or disappointing of concepts. “I want to see some vildechiahs scuffing my floors and jumping on my furniture within the next five years.”
“First of all, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I tell her, my expression completely deadpan. “And second, my children will not be wild indians!”
“Ah, so you know that one, do you? Then you’ll remember to have some kinder before I plotz.” She picks up her soda and drains the rest of it. “I’m going to spoil your children so much that when you pick them up, they’ll cry to go home. They’ll say, ‘Mommy, let me stay with Bubby.’”
I giggle and finish my drink as well.
“Bubbelah, are you hungry?” Marlyn asks. “Of course you are. We’ll get something to eat. I know this great restaurant, a bissel epis, just a tiny place, where we can get burgers. I know, I know, you two says, ‘But Marlyn, you can get burgers anywhere. What’s so special about these?’ It’s the rolls on them? So soft! You can feel them mush in your mouth!” She closes her eyes as if in relish, and I can see the spidery veins running blue across them.
Then she heaves herself out of chair and makes her way slowly over to a pair of smart, black shoes by the door. “Come on, slowpokes. Don’t you want to eat some good food? Hurry up or I’ll drive myself there. And you both should know—” she starts as we scramble to get up and leave with her, “—that the owner, Mr. Simmons, is a very good friend of mine. We knew each other when we were only kinder ourselves. He had a crush on me then, you know, but he was a bulvan, a big ox of a man, and really who would go out with that? Well, beshert es beshert, I suppose.”
“Beshert es beshert?” I question.
Marlyn straightens, having finished with her shoes. “What will be, will be, sugar. My mother used to say it to me all the time.”
“Oh, like qué será, será?”
“Qué será será?” she asks, raising her eyebrows. “Well…” Marlyn makes a big show of adjusting her flawlessly neat sweater as she contemplates it. “Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.”
After reading it, Marlie's like, "And what was I supposed to learn from this?"
"Besides all that Yiddish vocabulary?"
"Obviously."
"That beshert can be a noun as well."
Here she scowled. "So the hell what?"
I wouldn't tell her so she'd have to look it up by herself. I'll do the same to all of you. Any Yiddish dictionary online can tell you.
