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By Root 3843 0

forth and stuff came out the front. So, Jake, what’s the big deal? How long did the whole thing last that you should suffer such damnation from her mouth—such guilt, such recrimination and self-loathing! Poppa, why do we have to have such guilt) deference to women, you and me—when we don’t! We mustn’t! Who should run the show, Poppa, is us! “Daddy has done a terrible terrible thing,” cries my mother—or is that my imagination? Isn’t what she is saying more like, “Oh, little Alex has done a terrible thing again, Daddy—” Whatever, she lifts Hannah (of all people, Hannah!), who until that moment I had never really taken seriously as a genuine object of anybody’s love, takes her up into her arms and starts kissing her all over her sad and unloved face, saying that her little girl is the only one in the whole wide world she can really trust … But if I am eight, Hannah is twelve, and nobody is picking her up, I assure you, because the poor kid’s problem is that she is overweight, “and how,” my mother says. She’s not even supposed to eat chocolate pudding. Yeah, that’s why I took it! Tough shit, Hannah, it’s what the doctor ordered, not me. I can’t help it if you’re fat and “sluggish” and I’m skinny and brilliant. I can’t help it that I’m so beautiful they stop Mother when she is wheeling me in my carriage so as to get a good look at my gorgeous punim—you hear her tell that story, it’s something I myself had nothing to do with, it’s a simple fact of nature, that I was born beautiful and you were born, if not ugly, certainly not something people wanted to take special looks at. And is that my fault, too? How you were born, four whole years before I even entered the world? Apparently this is the way God wants it to be, Hannah! In the big book!

But the fact of the matter is, she doesn’t seem to hold me responsible for anything: she just goes on being good to her darling little baby brother, and never once strikes me or calls me a dirty name. I take her chocolate pudding, and she takes my shit, and never says a word in protest. Just kisses me before I go to bed, and carefully crosses me going to school, and then stands back and obligingly allows herself to be swallowed up by the wall (I guess that’s where she is) when I am imitating for my beaming parents all the voices on “Allen’s Alley,” or being heralded to relatives from one end of North Jersey to the other for my perfect report card. Because when I am not being punished, Doctor, I am being carried around that house like the Pope through the streets of Rome …

You know, I can really come up with no more than a dozen memories involving my sister from those early years of my childhood. Mostly, until she emerges in my adolescence as the only sane person in that lunatic asylum whom I can talk to, it is as though she is someone we see maybe once or twice a year—for a night or two she visits with us, eating at our table, sleeping in one of our beds, and then, poor fat thing, she just blessedly disappears.

Even in the Chinese restaurant, where the Lord has lifted the ban on pork dishes for the obedient children of Israel, the eating of lobster Cantonese is considered by God (Whose mouthpiece on earth, in matters pertaining to food, is my Mom) to be totally out of the question. Why we can eat pig on Pell Street and not at home is because … frankly I still haven’t got the whole thing figured out, but at the time I believe it has largely to do with the fact that the elderly man who owns the place, and whom amongst ourselves we call “Shmendrick” isn’t somebody whose opinion of us we have cause to worry about. Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese. Because, one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but white—and maybe even Anglo-Saxon. Imagine! No wonder the waiters can’t intimidate us. To them we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP! Boy, do we eat! Suddenly even the pig is no threat—though,