Alligators May Be Present: A Novel

A Vision of Feathers

255 I ’m calling with some bad news,” Teenie ominously greeted her grandson over the phone line. . . . It had been three months since Teenie’s stroke, and they had been a good three months—for Glassman and for his grandmother . Teenie, as Dr. Sullivan prognosticated, had made a complete recovery. She just had one more pill now to ingest over her breakfasts of Melba toast, cantaloupe, and hot water with lemon, one more set of water exercises to perform in the shallow end of her overheated pool. To celebrate her recovered health and good spirits, Glassman and Rebecca hosted a brunch for the first time and invited as many of Glassman’s Lackawanna relatives and friends as they could fit into their house. They went “overboard,” as Teenie harshly praised afterwards. Edith and Ben, Ellen and Herbie, Mildred and Nat, Ruth Spitz, and various and sundry Fishbeins, Dinners, Bassoffs , Truckers, Wolfs, Gelbs, Popkins, and Bornsteins crammed gamely around the kitchen table, the edge of the family room futon, the wobbly card-table on the patio, and, mostly, in a line of knees across the slate ledge before the faux fireplace. Irving Birnbaum attended the brunch as well. After telling his grandmother to take a deep breath, Glassman told his grandmother A Vision of Feathers all about Birnbaum’s emergence and convinced her that welcoming him back into the Lackawanna fold was the right thing to do. He had anticipated a stronger resistance from Teenie, but his grandmother seemed oddly excited about Birnbaum’s emergence. She easily persuaded the rest of Lackawanna-south to be welcoming to Irving. A forty-year, largely self-imposed exile for his wrongs was plenty punishment enough. At Glassman’s brunch, Birnbaum sat directly in the middle of the line of knees across the slate ledge, between Teenie and Uncle Herbie . Glassman was glad that Birnbaum accepted the invitation, for he knew that the old man needed more by way of companionship than what he could provide alone. Birnbaum, perhaps, realized this as well. In fact, unless Glassman was mistaken, Birnbaum and his grandmother sat closer to one another than was absolutely necessary, the fabric of their clothes just touching shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. Birnbaum, along with twenty of his contemporaries, balanced on his lap a heavy plate of smoked fish, a sesame bagel and kugel, and a generous wedge of cantaloupe. He joined with them as they all toasted Teenie’s health, the family room a motley assortment of inexpensive ceramic mugs filled with “coffee” (read: decaf), upraised and clinking. Glassman, like Teenie, had also begun a course of medication. A very, very low dosage, the balding, bespectacled, and eminently likeable Dr. Gould had assured him. Glassman had to admit to Rebecca that the small pills didn’t turn him into a zombie as he had feared. The medication only sanded away the sharpest, most dangerous of his edges. He was still Glassman. Ever Glassman. And, for the first time, this didn’t seem like such a harsh fate. Rebecca and he had even started trying once again to conceive. Dr. Arias had given Rebecca a clean bill of health just before the brunch. Rather than resign themselves to a long cycle of effortful copulation, they had resolved not to allow their reproductive efforts to affect their lovemaking. No fertility kits, no rigid schedules to take advantage of ovular receptiveness, no conception-friendly positions. 256 257 They would let nature take its course. Life, they assured themselves, would find a way. Not such a harsh fate to be Glassman. This is what he was thinking as he held forth at his brunch . . . More coffee Aunt Edith? . . . Can I get you something while I’m up, Mildred ? . . . what he was thinking as Nat Siegel, engorged after his third bagel, finally relinquished his plate for him to clear, as he scraped the last stray egg noodle from one of the plates into the sink’s disposal with a fork, as he faintly heard through the kitchen window his Uncle Ben (on the patio now where everyone retired to digest) retell his favorite joke . . . Why do Jewish wives have sex with their eyes closed? They can’t stand to see their husbands having a good time. . . . and as he heard Ruth Spitz return the volley . . . Why don’t I ever hear you when you have your orgasm? the husband asks his wife. Because you...