form, saying good-bye. Seeing the other mothers
He never
tearfully embracing their sons, his mother was
shamed into touching hers: she pecked his cheek.
My father only once told me a story about
himself and his mother. I was in college at the
time. The two of us were driving on the highway
on a beautiful, clear, cold winter day. My father
was behind the wheel. Fourteen years earlier, in
1956, his father had died in the hospital while my
father and his mother, Esther, were visiting him.
My father took Esther home to Brooklyn, where
she asked him for a favor. There were some terms
in her will she wanted to review. Would he read
it out loud to her? (Even in Yiddish my grand-
mother was illiterate.) My father was tired and
upset and somewhat puzzled that his mother
wished to go over her will on the night of her hus-
band's death, but he agreed. The will turned out
to be simple: Esther's house and savings were to
go to Sarah, her daughter. Then he heard him-
self, the fly in the web, reading: And to my son,
Sidney, I leave nothing, because he is no good.
My father stared at the road ahead.
Why, I cried, would she have you read that to
her? What did you do?
My father's voice was tired and bitter. She
wanted to see what I would do, he said; she want-
ed to watch my reaction. Ma, I said, I gotta go
home now. I'm tired and it's late. I didn't want
to show her how bad I felt, I didn't want to give
her the satisfaction. I didn't care about the mon-
ey. Let my fucking sister have the money. But why
did she have to write that sentence? Why did she
have me read it?
My father started to cry. He had never cried in
front of me. His hands loosened their grip on
the wheel. The car began to drift into the op-
posite lane, across the white unbroken line.
Look out, I yelled. He grabbed the wheel and
turned us toward safety. Look out, I yelled, and
he did. Look out, I yelled, for what
else could I have said?
I n August 1988, my father was diagnosed with
liver cancer, the result of chronic hepatitis, a
disease associated with heroin addiction. The
doctors predicted he would live for five months.
He tried chemotherapy, ate a macrobiotic diet,
enrolled in an experimental holistic treatment
program. When I visited him in November, it was
clear that things would not tum around.
My mother, who had stuck by him through ev-
erything, was still by his side. He was eager to
share his latest revelation. A social worker in the
treatment program had asked him what he would
miss most when he died. He said: I told her that,
yeah, sure, I'll miss my wife and my kids, but what
I'll miss most is the music. The music is the only
thing that's never let me down.
That the revelation would hurt us-my moth-
er especially-never occurred to him.
kept his thoughts to himself, even if it was cruel
to express them. Neither my mother nor I said a
word. The statement was the truth of him-not
only what he said but also the fact that he would
say it to us, and say it without guilt, without apol-
ogy, without regret.
[Story]
IN LOVE WITH ME
By Padgett Powdl. From the Spring issue of Bomb,
a quarterly published in New York City. Powell's
story "Trick or Treat" appeared in the November
1993 issue of Harper's Magazine.
"Youhave a central pluck and resilience which is
good but is made more interesting by a slight wound-
ed edge-like a shirred oyster. 1like you for this trem-
bling edge, my shirred oyster."
-A writer in love with me.
"You are the most intelligent woman I've ever
met---except Hannah Arendt."
-A librarian in love with me.
"I can't be kilt."
-A wrecker driver in love with me.
"Teach me how to laugh."
-A drunk in love with me.
"Teach me how to laugh."
-A serious young man in love with me.
"Don't tell anyone I'm a county planner."
-A county planner in love with me.
"If! were younger, you'd frighten me."
-Another writer in love with me.
"If you'll get out of that chair I can sweep."
-A cleaning lady in love with me.
"If you'll leave I can spray."
-A bug man in love with me.
"I'd like to protect you."
-The serious young man in love with me.
"He likes it better when you laugh at his jokes than
when he laughs at yours."
-My other writer in love with me,
speaking of the first.
"I can go clockwise, but if! go clockwise I fall ever'
time."
-A Cage of Death motorcycle
rider in love with me.
A ny of these lovers is capable of speaking
at greater length if I choose to let him. The
wrecker driver, the daredevil cyclist, and the bug
man are more articulate, by far, than the librar-
READINGS 31
 ian and the two writers. The serious young man
who wants to protect me is lugubriously priapic
with the need to talk. But he, like the two writ-
ers and the librarian, is so practiced at talk that
the blather lacks precision. You don't get this
all-over-the-roadness with the putatively inar-
ticulate. They are clear bells in the modern or-
chestra of the daily noise of civilized life.
But I find that you cannot live on Ritz crack-
ers and a wrecker driver in your wordless bed late
at night alone. He stops chewing long enough to
ponder what Mr. Letterman is laughing about
but not why Mr. Lena has the world's smallest
horses on his stage. Against this, for reasons
aligned with forces of cosmic balance, you must
eat Camembert and water crackers with the li-
brarian and watch Meet the Press on Sunday morn-
ings. The librarian stops chewing at nothing. I
have four lovers coming over today. There is no
[Etiquette]
DOING THE WAVE,
WITH FINESSE
From the MLLE Copes advice column in the June
1993 issue of Mademoiselle. The column was writ-
ten by Mary Killen.
Q. What is the correct etiquette on waving?
During the summer, I usually spend weekends
with friends who live by the beach. I always have
a good time, but I do not enjoy the leave-taking
process because I hate the business of waving
good-bye as I drive away from the house. Having
already gone through the slightly tense-making
ritual of kissing, congratulating, thanking, etc.,
I get into the car and start driving, but I am nev-
er sure at which point I should stop waving, or in-
deed at which point my hosts should stop waving.
It is particularly difficult if the car can be seen for
a long way from the house.
A. It is best to begin with a show of enthusias-
tic waving, then give the impression that there's
some difficulty in the car-a coat stuck in a door
or the contents of a bag spilling.The way to do this
is to assume a perplexed expression and then drop
your waving hand out of view as if fiddling with
something. Keep this perplexed expression until
you are almost out of sight of your hosts. Then pre-
tend to recover from the difficultyand wave hearti-
ly,giving one final gesture of enthusiasm.
32 HARPER'S MAGAZlKE jAUGUST 1994
problem should they see each other, or even
should they briefly overlap. I have set up what in
sports would be called zone coverage. The writ-
er in the morning thinks the writer at noon is
coming for lunch and for me to laugh more at his
jokes than he does at mine. The wrecker driver
will see the second writer as, somehow, part of my
job. The librarian who arrives slump-shouldered
and CRT-eyed after a day of processing will see in
the wrecker driver a man who wears his pants so
low you can see the crack of his ass, a man in
whom no one he, the librarian, is interested in
could possibly be interested. I would not let the
wrecker driver see the daredevil cyclist, howev-
er; of that you may be sure. I will have had four
good, wounded, helpless men in one
day. Together, they make a whole.
N a set of lovers is complete until you have
one whose irrepressible impulse is to tell you, in
intimate detail, of all his past affairs. All men,
of course, suffer from this curious proclivity to
an extent, but my loquacious lover is so con-
sumed by, is so beside himself with, imprudent
revelation that a kind of charm finally obtains:
bird, I suppose, to snake. "She told me that her
lesbian experimenting," he tells me, "had to
do, she thought, with bad weather with her
men. That's the way she said it, tempo male-she
lived in Italy. She said she was surprised by how
heavy breasts are, and that's true, a certain size-
and not, as you might think, the large ones but
the, oh, about navel-orange ones-are surpris-
ingly heavy, so I knew she was telling the truth.
Then she told me about going catatonic after
this hunk dumped her and painting all her ap-
pliances orange, and then drowning all the
apartment-complex cats in the apartment-com-
plex pool, and then painting the sidewalk out-
side her apartment orange, and then being put
in a place, but she was not crazy, she insisted,
then or now, and I don't know, it spooked me,
I kept having visions of her coming after me
with a butcher knife some night, so I, ah, end-
ed it."
A loquacious lover will be, at a point like
this, ready to kiss you. But not quite yet. "I was
afraid of her. And you know that a scared lover
is less useful to a woman"-he nods to me, re-
minding us I am a woman-"than one unfaith-
ful or altogether impotent." Upon "impotent" he
is fired up and ready to make his move. From the
charged sphere of a distant apartment full of or-
ange appliances and a madwoman, he's ready
to show you what's up his sleeve. It is not up his
sleeve, and it is generally of considerable ardor,
if you let the talking lover talk. You are free to
let him have his way with you, to feel in you the
deep, early roots of the story he will tell some-
day of you. •