Table Manners

That night at dinner, Jason is fairly closed-mouthed. It’s not like him. Usually he’s part jester, part preacher, for the kids’ entertainment and edification. Wouldn’t want them to think their father was a dead-head.

Tonight he keeps looking at Brenda. Sizing her up, so to speak. Seeing her with new eyes. Turquoise eyes. He is a man seeking his standing. How would his wife stack up, as a woman, from the point of view of the specimen he’d met today? If Brenda falls short, so will he.

She would not like her, he decides. In spite of all the feminist causes, the sticking-up for women, she refused to enhance what she called her human form. No make-up, no sexy clothes. He remembered the time he’d bought her that pretty little make-up kit. Stupid thing to do, probably, with any woman.

She threw it at him. Right in his face. The corner of it nicked his lip. “You know what that stuff says?” she yelled. “You know what I’m saying if I put that gunk on my face and go into town? “Fuck me!” it says. Fuck me! Is that the message you want your wife to send?”

He wouldn’t at all have minded that message. But he didn’t say so. He backed off and waited till night. Then he proved to her she didn’t need the make-up to send the message.

In the looks department, she was definitely okay. Just not in the same league as the bombshell. He could drown in those pools of aqua. Sink to the bottom and never come up.

Not that he had a chance, and he knew it, otherwise he wouldn’t be indulging himself like this. He ought to tell the whole family about the conversation, then about her. It will fit right in, and her mystique will disappear.

But then, he didn’t. He did something very peculiar instead. He wiped the woman off the map and gave only her intellectual co-ordinates.

The topic was on the Dinner Table News again. “Ms. Marshall told us all about her abortion,” Sheba said, picking the bones out of her salmon. “Except she wouldn’t show us any pictures. She said there weren’t any, that there was nothing to see.”

“Just because she couldn’t see it, doesn’t mean there wasn’t a baby in there.”

“Jason!” Uh-oh. Wrong thing, wrong thing, wrong thing, what made you say such a thing to the children? Don’t you realize how sensitive they are to everything they hear? Do you want them to grow up to favor a fetus over their own happiness? Slaves to a moment of natural passion? Poor? Uneducated? Held back, held down, by people who simply shouldn’t have been born?

Backtrack. Backtrack. What I meant to say was… what? Was exactly what I said. “Maybe you can’t see the baby, but he was there. Which doesn’t mean abortion is wrong, but you ought to know what you’re doing.”

“And what are you doing?” Brenda’s voice drips like an icicle.

“Taking a life,” he says. Why not say it? It’s true. Someone was going to have a life, and now that someone isn’t.

“It’s not a life,” comes the defender of the faith. “It can’t live on its own.”

“Neither can Grandma,” he says, referring to her mother. “But we don’t pull her plug, because that would be called murder.”

Sheba drags herself into the fray with, “Ms. Marshall says it’s a woman’s right.”

“It certainly is,” the parents both say at once. No one denies that.

“Still, let’s call a spade a spade.”

“Ms. Marshall says ‘spade’ is a bad word. It means African-American.”

He can’t believe this. “A spade is a shovel,” he says.

“Then,” says Brenda, “why don’t you call a shovel a shovel?”

The discussion has taken a turn. Zeke offers, “Monty Flagler called me a Jew-bastard today.”

Jason laughs – loudly and harshly – relieved to be off the hook. “Monty himself is a Jew bastard. And unlike you, not only is he a full Jew, he is also a real bastard. No one knows who his father is.”

“Jason!”

“Just calling a shovel a shovel,” he says.

“How can a shovel be an African-American?” Zeke asks thoughtfully, running his fingers through his whiz cut. That’s how Jason thinks of it. One whiz with some kind of electric scissors, twelve-fifty to the barber, and his son looks like a cartoon drawing, his head a sharp, flat plane. Just the opposite of his daughter’s dark mass of curls.

He looked at Sheba. She was sultry. So unlike her mother. So much like his aunts. His father’s sisters. Even her body was different from Brenda’s. It was filling out, he noted. She had curves. Boobs. His daughter had boobs. Not small ones either. Bigger than Brenda’s. He wondered how his wife was taking that. Was she jealous?

“It’s not the word,” Brenda is saying. “It’s what you mean by it. You can hurt people’s feelings with words, and that’s a bad thing to do.”

He can’t stop himself. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never harm me. Didn’t you learn that when you were a kid?”

“That’s different.”

“Why is that different?”

“Because they weren’t talking about a whole group of people being called nasty names.”

“What’s nasty about the word ‘spade’? It’s a perfectly good word. Has a nice sound. It could just as easily have been chosen as Black. Don’t you remember how wicked it was to say Black before it was adopted by the previously named Negroes?”

Zeke giggles. “Daddy said the N-word!”

“I did not.” “He did not!” the parents say in tandem.

“There is nothing wrong with the word Negro,” Jason states.

But Zeke is having none of it. “He said it again!” He screams with glee.

Jason can not think of a way to win the argument without actually using the N-word, and he is not about to do that.

“Your father would never say the N-word,” Brenda says sternly. “Would you!” she snaps at Jason.

“No, no, never. Never, never, never,” he says, trying to get some satisfaction out of the N’s, because though he thinks he has probably never said the N-word in his life, suddenly he feels a tremendous urge to see what it would feel like.

Brenda’s phone goes off – a no-no at the dinner table. Her rule. Everybody looks up and freezes while she answers, cutting off her ringtone’s wish for “the world to sing in perfect harmony.” Her eyes are defensive and pleading. Mommy has done a baddy, and now there’s no time to squirm out of it, or even apologize. She does mouth the word “sorry”.

Phone has the same urgency it ever had. The voice from the outside calls, everybody jumps. The peasants at the night-time meal. A knock on the door. It’s the King’s men. Now whoever it is, it’s the King’s man. He gets to talk, you don’t.

Brenda sits up straighter in her chair. She turns slightly to look out between husband and daughter, into emptiness, her eyes glazed. She isn’t with them anymore. She’s with whoever is on the other end of the phone.

She listens for only a moment. “Yes, Mr. Wagman. No, Mr. Wagman. Of course, Mr. Wagman.” Or so it sounds. Then she’s back.

“Calling at dinner-time? I thought that was forboten by the school.”

“It’s forboten by me, and I forgot to turn off my phone. I’m sorry.”

“What does the big creep want?” He’d been calling her principal the big creep ever since Monica Lewinsky called Clinton one. He was a dead ringer for the past president. Probably many men were. People with his genes have a lot of relatives.

Not that he didn’t like Clinton. Especially that aspect of him. Clinton let the truth reign, while every other man, including Jason, was lying through his teeth every time he saw a woman and didn‘t jump her. Clinton had a higher jumping ratio and was therefore a more honest man.

“Don’t call him that,” Brenda says. “He is not a creep. He’s a very nice man.” Her eyes are on the children as she says this. She’s speaking to them. He knows her real feelings are complex. The man does look like Clinton, after all.

But children, it seems, are exempt from the necessity of having to hear the truth, and Brenda is quite adept at telling them anything that will sooth their souls, rather than enlighten them.

“So what did he want?” Jason says, not enjoying this other man horning in on his territory, during his hours. Wagman had his wife in thrall from nine to three, then remotely, reading homework and quizzes, from seven to ten. Couldn’t he leave them one fucking hour?

That was pretty good. It could be known as the fucking hour – no, that’s later. The fucking hour was actually from 10 to 11. After that there was the latest in a long line of Johnnys. Leno, Letterman, and now the incorrigible Jon Stewart, né Leibowitz. His lansman. His half lansman.

“He wouldn’t say. He sounded very excited. Asked would I please come to his office as soon as I get to school, he’ll have an aide cover my class, there’s something very important he wants to talk to me about, and I shouldn’t worry, it’s good.”

“Don’t let him lock the door,” Jason says.

“Jason!”

Giggles from both Shapiro children, who had been very quiet during this conversation so as not to call attention to themselves. Children do get it, you know. The kid-kit includes a sensor of adult emotions, even though they may not know what it’s all about. Content aside, this information goes right to the core, their psyches absorb it, their physiques change, and you have contributed, unintentionally, to their socio-sexual mindset.

There’s nothing to do about it; that’s what it means to be a parent. You may not teach, but they will learn.

These two felt, though they did not exactly know, where that caress on the back of their mother’s neck was going. They heard the difference in the quality of silence coming from the master bedroom. Deep in the libido, it all registered.

And deep in his libido, as he held his smooth, efficient wife in his arms, pressed himself against her and ran his hands up and down her back from top to bottom, a woman kicked off her stiletto heels and slinked across the floor to his desk, removing the top of that little black suit, revealing two perfectly symmetrical mounds, each with an enormous, erect nipple in the center.

Okay, folks, I tried to tell you this was an adult novel. Get those kids off the computer, and I’ll see you next time.