Fortunoff's Child: A Novel

By Leslie Tonner

In her quest to be normal, Josie discovers something much better: how to be exceptional

Josie Goodman just wants to be normal—but how can she be when her family is comprised of a Hare Krishna, an antitobacco crusader, and a famous pop psychologist/syndicated columnist? Determined to be different from her outlandish relatives, Josie dedicates her life to fitting in with the mainstream. But her fatuous marriage to a misguided student radical quickly fails, and the next man in her life, an underwear manufacturer, is contemptuous of her lack of skills in a kosher kitchen. Eventually, motherhood introduces Josie to unexpected challenges, and as she attends to an exceptional child with special needs, she begins to reconcile her relationship with the rest of her family.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Dec 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504025973

Leslie Tonner

Leslie Tonner is the author of eight books, both fiction and nonfiction. She and her family live in Manhattan. 

Book preview

I am told that I was an extremely interesting baby. My mother says I was fascinating.

She ought to know.

She is a Real Expert. She is Dr. Maxine B. Fortunoff, advisor-philosopher to the masses, who write regularly seeking aid, comfort, and motherly love. She punches them in the mouth, metaphorically speaking. They write, Dear Dr. Fortunoff—the bolder ones setting down Dear Maxine, the wiseguys, Dear Doc—and they proceed to pour their hearts out: My husband persists in dressing up in my undergarments. He wears my Maidenform Cross-Your-Heart Bra, my Eighteen-Hour Girdle, my Round-the-Clock Pantyhose, then he steps into my Enna Jetticks and parades around the bedroom for hours. He says it’s great, except his arches are killing him. It’s killing me, too. Signed, Mrs. Transvestite.

Dear Mrs. Transvestite, Mother writes back in a hundred newspapers coast to coast. Tell him to try Supphose.

You see what I mean.

My mother has been doing this for years, her audience is in the millions. She has the syndicated column, she writes books, she has a talk show on television, and she is very famous. I can’t fathom why everyone finds her advice so pithy and why they come to her for comfort. She is the least comforting person I know. But unlike her many readers, I cannot fold my mother up and place her at the bottom of the Kitty Litter box when I’m through reading her. I am a lifetime subscriber.

Dr. Maxine, not yet famous but possessed of all the necessary qualities, was teaching a class in Sociology of Troubled Youth (also known as Juvenile Delinquency 101) when nature called and I made ready for my appearance. She, nine months gone, had defied all university rules and kept on teaching. Her class was full of smirking, unruly parole officers and youth advisors who made snide jokes about her widening girth. She didn’t give a shit, as is her wont. She answered all of their questions in the disarming manner that was to become her trademark once she burst into print. In fact, labor began in the midst of one of her lectures. She was discussing youthful smokers.

Children who puff cigarettes are looking for a way to mimic adult satisfaction, to rebel openly against standards of oral conformism. They are, shall we say, putting their penises in their mouths.

That must have gone over swell with the parole officers. But then the pains began, putting an end to her Sigmund Freud Likes Luckies routine and causing her to slam the blackboard with the pointer and dismiss the class.

I’ll be back in three days, she threatened. Be here. With that she stalked from the classroom, marched down the stairs, into the next building, and threw open the door to the biochemistry lab where my father, Dr. Nahum Goodman, was conducting his nicotine research.

Nat, she bellowed, as the beakers clattered and shook at the high decibel level.

His head popped up from behind a counter. Darling?

Now, said she, with a smile as peaceful as that other great Jewish mother, the Virgin Mary, in all her darling Annunciation altarpieces. My mother is a toughie. No tears, no fears. If anyone ever challenges me by saying Yer mother wears combat boots, I’ll have to agree. There’s no getting around Maxine. She is omnipotent, eternal, everlasting. Your basic Sears Die-Hard, with a lifetime guarantee.

She had me in two hours and was sitting up on the delivery table munching a prune Danish while the obstetrician tried to get her to lie still for the episiotomy. No Lamaze classes, no breathing, no lollipops, just straight childbirth, too late for any anesthesia. The labor and delivery nurses, a callous lot, were amazed. I was known in the nursery as Prune Danish for a good many hours. That was until my mother came up with my name, Josephine. After her grandfather, Joe-the-Nogoodnik Fortunoff. Hence all my good luck.

Nat and Maxine took me home and, right on schedule, Dr. Maxine returned to J.D. 101 to continue her valedictory on smoking. If it sounds as if my parents had a thing about tobacco, they did. She was inspired by his painstaking research, which would yield, much later, important information on the crap found in your average cigarette. The painstaking research would eventually kill him, when he died smoking in bed, testing a new low-tar cigarette made of ersatz tobacco. He was burned to a crisp. But that was later. Early on, cigarettes made Maxine famous before they made her a widow. She published her article, which led to everything else, Why Women Smoke, examining the post–World War II quest for independence of women accustomed to a world without men. She couldn’t actually come out and say penis in the article, times were a bit different, but she got the point across and gave McCall’s readers the thrill of a lifetime. Letters poured in, and before I learned to talk, she had said plenty. The column had begun. Mainstreams, it was called. I don’t know why, but the title gave my mother carte blanche to write about everything in the entire world. Sort of like the Talmud. Heartbreak, hemorrhoids, halitosis, you name it. My mother’s column, a new dissemination of The Word.

Of course, I don’t remember any of this directly. I was just the little inconvenience that had disrupted the parolees’ patrons class. I didn’t know that I was destined to be the daughter of a Famous Person. And, worse still, that no one would know it unless she showed up, or I told them. I was Josephine Goodman. Mother kept her maiden name professionally, like an actress. Later on, the different names were a blessing, for I could sometimes hide when I was far enough away.

Yes, I can get away from her notoriety, but I can never get away from my mother. Like air, she is everywhere. And if she weren’t my mother, I’d probably be writing to her to ask, Dear Maxine, What can I do about my mother? I can’t stand her, but I can’t get rid of her. And my mother would write back, Listen, you ungrateful kid (she always blames it on the letter-writer, without fail), she is Your Mother. Be grateful. Give her a pedicure, a henna rinse, a $25 gift certificate, and thank her for having brought you into this incredible arena we call life. No, make that a $50 gift certificate. What can you get for $25 any more?

My mother. I think I’ll kill her.

February 23, 1970

My baby is crying again.

Josie’s little mouse, barely two months into life. He tenses and flexes with each cry. The sound goes straight through me. It’s like keening—plaintive, mournful, resigned. He must be sick. But his forehead is cool.

The crying isn’t normal, I’m sure, because my mother says I never cried that way as a baby. And since she’s a psychologist, she ought to know these things.

I did everything Dr. Spock said. Now what? I suppose I could call him up. He knows my mother; they’re friends from a show with Barbara Walters. Mother bought me my Spock as a gift and had him autograph it. It says, End the war. Best, and then his signature is scribbled, very messy, very doctorly. If I call him and say, This is Josie, Maxine Fortunoff’s kid, my baby won’t stop crying, he’ll reply, Don’t worry so much, relax, some sugar water in a bottle is an old trick and remember, we’ve got to bring the troops home now! Then he’d remember himself to my mother and tell me what a terrific person she is, as everyone always does.

The old baby doctor wanted a new life and he got it. Why not me? I wanted to be the perfect mother. The only problem is, my child contradicts me every night with his eternal bleating. Why can’t I be perfect? Pregnancy promised so much: there I was, a swollen birthday package, ready to be unwrapped and exclaimed over. I was never so happy, so connected to the world as when I was pregnant. Connected. Like an umbilicus. It was an easy way into the club, a hook onto the main line.

Nicholas is crying because I’m his mother, and he knows that I’m not the sort who’ll raise the Most Popular or the Most Likely to Succeed. My husband wants a football player. He’s already purchased the helmet, shoulder pads, and jersey that reads Pee-Wee Pro. I’m afraid to tell him that in my hands, Nicholas will turn out to be Mortimer Snerd instead of Joe Namath.

When I was pregnant, Jacob would rip the Rona Barrett’s Hollywood out of my hands and give me Sports Illustrated instead. Concentrate, he’d order. Jacob LaVine wanted an heir to the LaVine support-underwear business who’d play semi-pro ball in his spare time. With his jock’s heart, Jake lusted for a tyke he could put through a childhood of spring training. He forgot that in my family, pigeon toes are passed down as automatically as hemophilia among the Romanoffs. Nicky shows all signs of having feet like mine, crossed like two swords in an Errol Flynn movie.

I’m amazed I can still find some humor in my life.

Jacob was so happy I’d had a son. It even made him forget, for five minutes, that he’s my second husband. He doesn’t like the fact that Someone’s been here before, as he puts it, even if that someone was Howard Tuttman, tv addict-cum-Marxist radical and general washout. As Jacob bent over my exhausted body, limp on the delivery table, his surgical greens opened slightly to reveal his chai sign and his Cartier gold chains gleaming amid the lush LaVine/Levine chest hair brought over from Latvia by his forebears many decades ago. He smiled at me weakly—it had been harder on him than me. I didn’t have the heart to ask about the pigeon toes.

He had wanted another Jake, a miniature version of himself. And I? I wanted anything but another Josephine. I wouldn’t have wished that fate on any child.

If you think it’s easy being the daughter of a famous mother, guess again. For my mother is not merely a mother, she is The Mother. She mothers Johnny Carson late at night, and she mothers Merv. She is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval Mother and the B’Nai B’Rith Anti-Defamation League Mother of the Year. Think of it. All of that recognition merely for driving me out of my head. And six books, a syndicated column four days a week (day five is usually given over to Dr. Fred, the diet doctor, who discusses fleshy pads and removing skin from chicken). Her morning advice show, to say nothing of the committees, lecture tours, pamphlets that have flooded the country with Dr. Fortunoff’s wisdom.

Having Nicky was the first thing I tried to do myself, though Lord knows she did her best to participate. She even went to childbirth classes with me one night when Jacob was working late on the stretch briefs account. The teacher, a dried-up crone who looked like a raisin in a basket of Thompson Seedless, tried to explain away the agony of labor. But Maxine stood up and told the class, first-timers all, that the whole thing hurt like hell and if we allowed ourselves to be suckered into thinking pain was not the issue, we were a bunch of idiots. So much for childbirth class. I couldn’t show my belly in there again. I settled for a saddle block, much to her satisfaction.

I told you it would be fine, she whispered at me as I lay, numbed, on the gurney, waiting to be rolled into the delivery room. Now hold out your hand.

What? I asked.

Your hand, she hissed. Put it out.

I tried to move my arm but it was nailed down to the table with a needle and tubing.

No, the left arm.

Gamely, I stuck it out from beneath the sheet.

My mother put something on my wrist. There, she said triumphantly. How does that look?

It was a gold bangle bracelet. Very nice, I said weakly.

Now, just try this other one on. I’ve got them out on approval, you have to pick the one you want right away so I can get back to the store before it closes.

Right now? I gasped. My great moment was about to occur, and my mother was setting up a Tiffany counter on a rolling hospital cart. She held up my wrist, which was now adorned with three bracelets, two of gold, one a plastic hospital band. That looks disgusting, she said, pulling the hospital tag off.

Wait a minute, I panicked. Suppose they put me to sleep and then they don’t know who I am? They won’t know whose baby it is.

They always know, she said. "They know whose pupick is whose. They never see your face anyway. Decide. The one on top or the one on the bottom."

I don’t care, I said, miserable and feeling as if the coming baby was getting itself into something it might not be prepared for.

Of course you should care. Eighteen carat. A terrific buy. Cousin Abe’s brother-in-law. He does wonderful work, just as good as Cartier. I wanted you to have a little something before you went through everything.

You got me the saddle block.

No, no. She waved her busy hands. I mean something good. Something for real.

Remember I want to name the baby after Daddy, I said, trying to get back to the real subject.

I remember, she said automatically.

The nurses came then. Right, Miz LaVine, they said, pulling my arm out to check the tag.

Where’s your name bracelet at? one nurse said, staring at the gold bangles adorning my arm. Got to leave the jewelry off.

Don’t touch, they’re only on approval, my mother yelped, and she took off the bracelets and packed them into their little velvet sacks.

They wheeled me away, and my mother called out, Which one?

The bottom, I said, knowing that I couldn’t win. And then, as they pushed me through the swinging doors, I heard her say, The one on the top is nicer. And just use the initial when you pick the name. I never could stand the name Nahum.

Nicholas will not stop crying. I’d better go in to him. Maybe he’s wet or hungry, and he’ll stop when I change him. I’m sure there’s nothing really wrong, just bad baby dreams or whatever bothers them when they’re tiny. Maybe he doesn’t like his pigeon toes either.

But if everything isn’t all right, I won’t be surprised. Just upset, and afraid to tell my mother.

I’d better call her right away.

I was the only little girl living in our cushy suburban Long Island enclave of Sagend who had a lung in the garage. It was a bottled lung, nicely pickled, and it was part of my father’s traveling road show for his anti-smoking lecture. He had decided to spread the word on why smoking wasn’t good for you. I don’t know if people in the 1950s believed that smoking was healthy, I don’t recall the ads saying, Live Longer—Inhale! but they didn’t exactly discourage it. So my father had this crusade and the lung went along with him. It wasn’t very pretty; in fact it was nauseating, with its fishlike tissue spoiled by nicotine and tar—all those chemicals hiding in the little alveoli waiting to wreak destruction on the breather. The lung was one thing that set us apart from our neighbors. That and my mother.

We lived in splendor in a fairly unmodest house on an acre of land in an area the goyim had only recently ceded to the urban refugees yearning to pay high school taxes. Sagend was known as a Bedroom Community, a description which always reminds me of satin sheets and maribou-trimmed mules, but which refers to the movements of its populace. Each morning it emptied of its men and each night filled up again. Just like a lung breathing in good air, breathing out the bad.

My mother was Eve, thrust into the Garden, wondering what all these new things were, like the Dugan Bakery truck and the drive-in dry cleaners. She developed a taste for antiques and bought carloads of decaying objects, most of which she made into lamps. We had coffee-grinder lamps, crockery jug lamps, a stuffed owl lamp that once caught fire because the bulb singed its wings, and a lamp made of bronzed baby shoes which my father called Lamp Unto My Feet. When not engaged in purchasing potential lamps, my mother shopped for anything cunning and unusual that would justify her presence out in the sticks. She thought she was taking advantage of local color, but, frankly, she was simply being rooked. We lived in a museum of gewgaws and unworkable gadgets, amid trophies that led a kind of schizophrenic life of their own. We had sets of leather-bound books that were actually portable liquor cabinets or jewelry safes; we had giant soup tureens with drainage holes in the bottom, for planters, and Dresden figurines with salt and pepper holes cleverly hidden in their porcelain hair. In the bathroom, the toilet paper holder played I Love You Truly whenever you grabbed a wad of paper. Imagine being toilet-trained to music. It’s like growing up a Pavlovian dog. Every time I attend a wedding, I want to pee.

Among our neighbors was a family named Hundt. Mrs. Hundt bred Persian cats. The cats were a nuisance; they yowled and scratched and went through the fires of hell during heat, and they shed their Persian hair all over my clothes. Mrs. Hundt had snaggleteeth and smoked incessantly. My father’s crusade offended her mightily. If God didn’t want us to smoke, why’d he make ashtrays? she’d say, dropping in unannounced to search for one of her expensive kitties gone astray. Mrs. Hundt was the first to warn us of the peculiarities of our next-door neighbors, the Grubharts. They were Orthodox Jews. Real Orthodox, Mrs. Hundt would say, pointedly. She peered under our dining room table and made clucking noises. Puss-puss, she coaxed professionally, lighting up another cigarette. My mother followed her around with a can of air freshener and whatever she chose to offer as an ashtray. On this occasion it was a coffin-shaped glass box with Death by Toxic Fumes printed on it, a souvenir of one of my father’s annual lab Christmas parties.

I listened to this exchange, wondering what Orthodox meant. I thought it had something to do with teeth, as my father was always telling my mother I needed orthodonture. The Orthodox Grubharts were exceedingly pale and spent much of their time industriously preparing for various holidays and festivals, cooking, building, scrubbing, and praying. Due to my parents’ lack of interest, I was a moderately ignorant Jewish child and thought the Grubharts practiced some other religion, perhaps one having to do with fillings and cavities, although confusingly, their teeth didn’t look all that terrific to me.

My mother used to ask the visiting Mrs. Hundt a lot of questions about Mr. Hundt. He was the neighborhood dynamo, a tall, nervous fellow with Tyrone Power good looks and a flashy manner that indicated he was going places, despite the cat hair on his clothes. That he was in the pet food business was lucky for the Persians, and he was about to make a gigantic fortune on the burgeoning of budgies, canaries, Siamese, poodles, and tropical fish that took place during my childhood years. I couldn’t understand why my mother was interested in a pet food person but she always inquired after his affairs when Mrs. H. came in to chase the Persians.

Neither the Grubharts nor the Hundts nor any of our other neighbors pleased my mother. When she told my father, he shrugged amiably and kept on reading his science magazine. He enjoyed the disgustingly illustrated articles about diseased tissue and studied the pictures carefully. Once he showed me a color shot of a cirrhotic liver and I threw up.

The neighbor issue grew to great proportions and influenced my mother’s column. She began blaming things on nosy neighbors, and wrote answers that reflected her own suburban dissatisfaction.

Dear Dr. Fortunoff, My friend’s husband keeps making passes at me. It’s very embarrassing, especially when we have our Saturday night canasta games. He gropes for my leg under the table and when I go into the kitchen to get more Planters nuts, he follows on the pretense that he wants a glass of milk. I know he doesn’t drink milk and I’m sure his wife Bea knows, too. What should I do? Signed, Unhappy Card Partier.

Dear Unhappy, my mother replied nationally. Why in heck are you entertaining neighbors? Isn’t it enough that you live right on top of each other? There’s no need to extend this relationship any further. Play canasta with your cousin from Pittsburgh. Remember, as in Berlin, good fences make the grass greener.

My mother sometimes mixed her metaphors fiercely.

As fate would have it, we soon got rid of our neighbors on account of the lung in the garage. My mother was delighted, but I ended up being the only child in Sagend who had to play running bases alone. It made for an exhausting childhood.

Our isolation came about when my mother was pregnant with my brother, Sib, and went off to have the baby. I had been told some nonsense about indigestion, which I believed. All that swelling was just gas. That’s part of my problem. I always believe what my mother tells me. At any rate, my mother’s sister, Aunt Pisha, took over. Her name was Letitia, which I had perpetually mispronounced, so Pisha it was, to her spinsterish dismay. Pisha was your original pushover, and it was a cinch to get forbidden foods (Hostess cupcakes with the squiggle and Coca-Cola) when she was around. My mother believed firmly and unscientifically that Coke was one of the major causes of infantile paralysis—why else was polio so rampant in the South where they drank all that Coke? But Pisha knew from nothing. She even let me play in the garage with the lung. I invited Rachel Grubhart and Danny Hundt to play Ring Around the Lung and Hide the Lung with me, and we had a jolly time, trying to lift the bottle and tip it here and there. But Danny gave it one push too many and the bottle fell over, crashing to the garage floor and breaking open. The briny water seeped everywhere while the lung lay, slimy and inert, surrounded by broken glass.

"Oy vay iz mir," Rachel said, her eyes large and brown against her pale, pale skin.

Yeah, well, Danny blabbed. I stood sternly nearby, hands on my hips, completely panicked.

Now whaddryou gonna do? I demanded.

Danny looked around guiltily. He spotted my old baby carriage, an enormous English-style pram with thick rubber wheels and fancy curlicued metal supports. My father had nicknamed it The Rolls.

We’ll put it in there, Danny said.

In there? I said. Then I saw the wisdom of his suggestion: hide the evidence.

Who’s gonna touch it? Rachel asked in terror.

Not me, I said. I didn’t break it.

It’s your mother’s, Danny pointed out.

Nope.

Your father’s then.

You do it, I charged Danny. And then two of his mother’s Persians entered the garage, stepping daintily through the mess. They began to sniff the lung.

They’re gonna eat it, Rachel said, horrified. She worried inordinately about food since she couldn’t touch a thing that wasn’t kosher. I guess she knew the status of the lung.

Boo! Danny yelled at the cats, who regarded him as they might a small insect; pesky, but of no real significance.

You’d better do something, I threatened. What if my mother recovered from her stomachache and came home? And what about my father? Pisha didn’t give me a turn. I could tell her whatever I wanted. She, being childless, believed that children were capable of anything.

Danny picked up a snow shovel and raised it toward the cats. They hissed at him but backed off reluctantly. Amazed at his own inventiveness, he reached down and clumsily scooped up the lung with the shovel. Half of it hung over the edge, limp and waterlogged, black with tar and nicotine.

Hurry, hurry, moaned Rachel. Her legs were twisted together, as if she had to go to the bathroom, which she probably did.

Danny turned the shovel slightly as it slipped from his grip and the lung fell to the garage floor with a plop. Rachel and I groaned. Danny scooped it up again, along with some broken glass, and moved toward The Rolls. With a grunt, he raised the shovel and balanced it on the side of the carriage. Then, rather neatly, he put the shovel at an angle and the lung slid into the carriage.

Bombs away, he cried happily. I moved over hesitantly to inspect my former napping grounds. The lung, comfortably nestled on the white-sheeted mattress, looked less menacing. I felt maternal.

There, there, I said, and I rocked the carriage gently. A plaid blanket was hung over the handle. I picked it up and covered the lung so that only a bit peeped out.

Now we’ll take it to the Lake, and dump it, said Danny.

The Lake was an empty foundation on a lot two blocks away which regularly filled up with rain water and around which we were forbidden to play. The suggestion was thrilling and dangerous. After a few minutes we figured out how to work the brake and The Rolls, under its own steam, coasted down the driveway and into the street. Danny, Rachel, and I walked demurely along, pushing our guilty burden and watching out for stray adults.

We had a high old time. We played Family. I was the Momma, Danny the Daddy, and Rachel was Big Sister. The lung we called Baby, There, Baby, we cooed, and I was debating whether to run home and get my doll’s baby bottle and bonnet when I spotted trouble coming down the street. It was Mrs. Grubhart, walking back from the kosher butcher with a huge shopping bag. She was heading straight for us. She had a big smile on her face.

We froze. She came marching up, peering at us happily from under her thatch of strawlike hair. Years later, I realized it was a wig. But as a child, I’d thought it was real.

Oh, you got your new brother-or-sister? So soon?

No, I fidgeted, I-ah-uh. Rachel hid her face in her hands, and Danny looked up at the sky as if watching for a shooting star or a sunspot.

May I see? Mrs. Grubhart smiled, and she leaned over and lifted the blanket.

After they took Mrs. Grubhart home, she didn’t appear outside for weeks. She never spoke to my mother again, which was fine with my mother. But I could no longer play with Danny or Rachel. They were a bad influence, my parents said, though Danny told everyone it was all my fault. I suppose it was partly my fault. I only know that you pay a heavy price for being a follower. I should have learned my lesson from the lung, that listening to other people can only get you into trouble. But the moral of the story didn’t stick and my penchant for conformity has followed me through life. That and the picture of Mrs. Grubhart’s face beneath that thatch-twig wig, trying to make sense out of a nicotined, pickled lung covered with a plaid carriage blanket. She was probably a bit like me, when I saw the shots of the cirrhotic liver. I’ll bet she went home and threw up. I retreated to the sidelines and waited for someone else to come along and add a little excitement to my life.

April 8, 1970

I have finally heard something from Sib, about my baby being born. You’d think being an uncle would have some meaning in every culture, including Sib’s adopted one. But apparently he was so busy rising at 4 A.M., praying to Krishna or Vishnu or whomever, preparing bean sprouts for breakfast and incense for street sales, that he just didn’t have the time to answer the letter I enclosed with the birth announcement (NICHOLAS JONATHAN, 7 lbs. 2 oz., 22 inches). The Jonathan part was Jacob’s idea, in honor of Johnny Unitas, his idol. Jacob is most frequently Jewish, but when he’s not Jewish, he too worships an alien culture: athletics.

Sib didn’t exactly address himself to the issues raised by the birth announcement. That is, he didn’t write an Uncle-ish letter back asking for snaps and details of feedings, smiles, yawns, and so forth. Instead, he sent one of their pamphlets. Hare Krishna, Mother is the title and it is written in esoteric jargon and chock-full of instructions about raising little incense peddlers of your own.

Sometimes I am so angry with my brother for dropping out of the family that I could scream. The situation, his absenting himself, isn’t new. There’s always been something for Sib to hide behind, something he could put between himself and my mother, my father, or me. After he finished his infant years, during which he took the world’s record for throwing up, he proceeded into the terrible threes, fours, fives, sixes, on up to junior high school. Then he developed an advanced case of acne, which I think my mother attributed to masturbation (that was alluded to in one of her columns). Scarred and shell-shocked, he emerged around the time of college to move into a dormitory at Alfred University, in upstate New York, where he contracted agoraphobia. He simply never left the dorm. No classes, no meals, nothing. He lay on his bed surrounded by dirty linen and piles of wrappers from cheese peanut-butter crackers (he got them from the vending machines in the basement), emerging only to go to the bathroom or to buy more crackers. His roommate, offended by the sight of the laundry, to say nothing of the sight of Sib, marshmallowy and pale from his Oblomov-like decline, called my mother. So Sib was whisked back to the family manse. It was merely a matter of months before he discovered the true god, his Krishna-Vishnu father/mother figure, one of those Indian idols with ladyish breasts and fat cheeks that looked as if it would giggle instead of talk. He joined the lineup in front of the Museum of Modern Art selling incense, and, one sunny day two months later, shaved his head. My mother found him, bald, chanting in the dining room. She called me up immediately. I was married to Jacob, my second husband, by then, and midway through my pregnancy.

She was so upset she neglected to notice that Jacob answered my phone.

It’s your mother, he said, wagging his eyebrows like Groucho. He put an extra push on the your. He likes Maxine all right, but I suspect he’s always watching me for signs of her pushiness. Jacob, the natural athlete, is ever anxious to protect his balls, with or without a metal cup.

Hi, I tried to say but she was too fast for even a syllable.

I can’t believe what he’s done to himself, was what she said in a second or two. And she said it dramatically, and passionately. If there were an Academy Award for two-second performance on the telephone, she’d be a cinch.

Immediately I thought Sib had set fire to himself, like a monk. Of course I knew he was Sib. My mother favors pronouns. Sib is he, I am she, my father was him. Jacob was your friend, but he will soon graduate to you, judging from my last marriage.

"Oh, my