Portnoy's Complaint Read Free

to the cemetery has the common sense, the ordinary common decency, to clear the weeds from the graves of our relatives. The first bright day of spring, and she has mothproofed everything wool in the house, rolled and bound the rugs, and dragged them off to my father's trophy room. She is never ashamed of her house: a stranger could walk in and open any closet, any drawer, and she would have nothing to be ashamed of. You could even eat off her bathroom floor, if that should ever become necessary. When she loses at mah-jongg she takes it like a sport, not-like-the-others-whose-names-she-could-mention-but-she-won't-not-even-Tilly-Hochman-it's-too-petty-to-even- talk-about-let’s-just-forget-she-even-brought -it- up. She sews, she knits, she darns- she irons better even than the schvartze , to whom, of all her friends who each possess   a piece of this grinning childish black old lady's hide, she alone is good. I'm the only one who's good to her. I'm the only one who gives her a whole can of tuna for lunch, and I’m not talking dreck , either, I’m talking Chicken of the Sea, Alex. I'm sorry, I can't be a stingy person. Excuse me, but I can't live like that, even if it is 2 for 49 Esther Wasserberg leaves twenty-five cents in nickels around the house when Dorothy comes, and counts up afterwards to see it's all there. Maybe I'm too good, she whispers to me, meanwhile running scalding water over the dish from which the cleaning lady has   just eaten her lunch, alone like a leper, but I couldn't do a thing like that. Once Dorothy chanced to come back into the kitchen while my mother was still standing over the faucet marked H, sending torrents down upon the knife and fork that had passed   between the schvartze's thick pink lips. Oh, you know how hard it is to get mayonnaise off silverware these days,   Dorothy, says my nimble-tongued mother- and thus, she tells me later, by her quick thinking, has managed to spare the colored woman's feelings.
                When I am bad I am locked out of the apartment. I stand at the door hammering and hammering until I swear I will turn over a new leaf. But what is it I have done? I shine my shoes every evening on a sheet of last night's newspaper laid carefully over the linoleum; afterward I never fail to turn securely the lid on the tin of polish, and to return all the equipment to where it belongs. I roll the toothpaste tube from the bottom, I brush my teeth in circles and never up and down, I say Thank you, I say You're   welcome, I say I beg your pardon,   and May I. When Hannah is ill or out before supper with her blue tin can collecting for the Jewish National Fund, I voluntarily and out of my turn set the table, remembering always knife and spoon on the right, fork on the left, and napkin to the left of the fork and folded into a triangle. I would never eat milchiks off a flaishedigeh dish, never, never, never. Nonetheless, there is a year or so in my life when not a month goes by that I don't do something so inexcusable that I am told to pack a bag and leave. But what could it possibly be? Mother, it's   me,   the   little boy who spends whole   nights before school begins beautifully lettering in Old English script the names of his subjects on his colored course dividers, who patiently fastens   reinforcements to a term's worth of three-ringed paper, lined and unlined both. I carry a comb and a clean hankie; never do my knicker stockings drag at my shoes, I see to that; my homework is completed weeks in advance of the assignment- let's face it, Ma, I am the smartest and neatest little boy in the history of my school! Teachers (as you know, as they have told you) go home happy to their husbands because of me. So what is it I have done? Will someone with the answer to that question please stand up! I am so awful she will not have me in her house a minute longer . When I once called my sister a cocky-doody, my mouth was immediately washed with a cake of brown