- Naming the Monster
As part of her conversion to Judaism, Amanda is koshering her kitchen, and has taken the day off to get it done. She works for a public relations firm in Greenwich Village whose clients include a set of adult Siamese twins who are stand-up comics, a rock group with 666 tattooed on their foreheads, and an MD who claims aliens abducted him and telepathically imparted to him an AIDS cure that Johns Hopkins obstinately refuses to test. Amanda didn't volunteer why she needed the time off. Her boss wouldn't have believed her, though he believes the client who says he's found proof an ancient race of people with magical powers lives inside Mount Shasta. It seems easier to Amanda to let him fill in today's blank with PMS, personal issues, a herpes outbreak, whatever.
On her stove, vats of boiling water bubble and sputter, in which she systematically immerses all her pots and pans and silverware, according to her rabbi's detailed instructions for the ritual purification of kitchen utensils. "One piece at a time," he had told her, "and no quick dipping and thinking the job is correctly done. Allow them to remain a few moments in the boiling water. This is a serious step you are taking. It's important to do it right. Keeping a kosher home is the heart of an observant Jew's life."
"De-paganizing the Pyrex, dear?" her longtime live-in asks as he leaves for his job on Wall Street, his body piercings and mildly counterculture notions carefully camouflaged by Abercrombie & Fitch pinstripes. He frowns at the kitchen, which resembles Old Faithful on a good day. "If scalding cookware really makes it holy, why don't you just put everything in the fucking dishwasher on high-temp wash and say some prayers during the cycle?" is his parting shot as he slams out of the apartment.
Amanda ignores him, not wanting to break the sweet spell as she presides like an ancient priestess over the comforting clouds of steam that cloak a mystery she longs to penetrate. [End Page 147]
Uptown, in his condo overlooking Central Park, Amanda's father begins mixing martinis mid-morning and scowls at the crawl of stock market quotes on the cable news. He lives in perpetual dread of a dinner invitation from his daughter. She's going to serve exsanguinated beef from the weird butchers with the long black coats and earlocks, he thinks, gazing gloomily into the unblinking red eye of a pimento-stuffed olive in the bottom of his glass. How can you have a bloody rare steak if your religion has a rule that you have to salt and soak it to drain out all the juices before you cook it?
He anticipates this second marriage, midlife accident of a child will loudly espouse unpopular causes, wear a babushka, sprout chin hairs she'll righteously refuse to remove, balk at attending Christmas dinner at Aunt Alicia's in Chevy Chase, announce at the next family gathering that she's moving to Israel to go one-on-one with the P.L.O., find new and embarrassing ways to be even stranger than she currently is, with a ring in her nose and a stud in her tongue and hair dyed a startling shade of magenta and the stated intention of whelping her future babies like puppies in the back yard of her Greenwich Village garden apartment instead of in the hospital.
Amanda's mother has cultivated a more philosophical attitude. "Look!" she cries, waving her arms like Glinda the Good Witch, as if magic has made all things possible. "Look at all the beautiful china our daughter has as a result of her new faith!" Upon learning that Orthodox Jews use separate sets of dishes for certain foods, her mother had immediately perked up and gone out to shop for them - any occasion requiring a major purchase must be a holy one, she thinks. This is nowhere near as awful as when Amanda dressed like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and insisted on telling everyone that her parents were fallen-away...