Watch Your Mouth Read Free Page A

suddenly seemed to be wincing in distaste. The Stock twins thought about two handfuls of paper should do it. The Stock twins thought that the few wasps hummingbirding around the nest were prob- ably the last couple of survivors. Pinchas went up the ladder.
    Angry wasps clouded the air in strict arrow-shaped forma- tions more like angry wasps in cartoons on television than you’d think. The arrow pointed first at Pinchas, who fell from the ladder and led the wasps to his partner in crime. Both of them were so covered in stings that their faces looked like seed cakes. Plus the falling ladder broke Abby’s leg. The wasps made a quick lap around the Shack before returning to the nest, so that by the time the lounging counselors arrived on the scene it looked like pain had just descended on the Stock twins, out of nowhere.
    Pittsburgh Bug-B-Gone, who rid Temple Ner Tamid (“Eter- nal Light”) of the cockroach problem spoiling their kosher ca- tering facilities, took care of the nest, but the problem of finding two more counselors at such short notice fell to the Head of Staff, a theater student who hadn’t been accepted into any sum- mer stock programs and so was spending the summer exiled in his hometown. Chastened, he was living in the sweaty bedroom of his youth and after dark would stroke himself remembering a girl from high school who would pull over halfway home from cast parties to bring him to a shuddering ovation in the backseat of her family’s throbbing car. So when the Stock twins were peppered he didn’t have to look further than his own sticky body. He was buzzing with panting reunion fantasies when he called Cyn, but he had to put his acting skills to use when he said of course she could bring her boyfriend Joseph, and that’s
    how Cyn and I ended up living in her parents’ house in Pitts- burgh, Pennsylvania, during the summer before my senior year at Mather College. The curtain rises.

Golem—revenge through attacks by—legends concerning—Fiction
    Our story begins with a golem, a figure in Jewish myth—sort of a Jewish lie, sort of a Jewish truth. Just as God, breathing into clay, created something that was in the shape of, but not as good as, Himself, man can breathe into clay and make some- thing man-shaped but not man. Or in this case, not woman.
    The trick, of course, is the ritual. The mythology of the golem sprung up in the sixteenth century in Worms, Germany, when a beleaguered rabbi, exhausted by the usual government evil, created a new ritual and with it a seven-foot-tall man made of clay. In many ways Pittsburgh is a perfect place for what was surely the first American golem, because although stories of the ritual differ, they usually say that river mud is the best flesh.
    The sixteenth-century Worms fad in Jew-hating was a fairly common one in those days: the blood libel. Jews were accused of killing Christian babies and using their blood to make un- leavened bread for Passover, a charge that’s particularly laugh- able if you’ve ever had even a bite of dry, tasteless matzah. This is a reason why the Glass home is also a perfect locale for a golem revival, because Mrs. Glass cooked her delicious meals using mysterious ingredients obtained at dawn at the downtown market. Who knows what was in that sauce, or what creature previously owned those bulbous objects, rendered unreadable by carmelization?
    According to the records, some Christians would kill their own babies, break into rabbis’ homes and place the baby-bodies in the basement, returning the next morning with a mob. Now that’s anti-semitism. Rabbis set up patrols to block this baby- planting, but all the Christians would have to do was toss the infant corpses directly into the rabbis’ arms and return the next morning with a mob. The ghetto-hood watch wasn’t working; the congregation wanted a better guardian.
    The clay is laid out in the shape of a man and the creator is dressed in white. Candles are lit and the body is