Odyssey In A Teacup (17 page)

By all accounts, at a funeral you can express your feelings with reckless abandon, and without fear of criticism in an emotionally constipated society. God knows, Ralph did. As my gut spasmed and growled again and I sat there thinking and shrinking, I noticed him looking at me.

‘What’s up?’
he mouthed.

‘I need to fart,’
I mouthed back.

‘Me too,’
he mouthed in response.

Seriously?

Then, with a tortured look on his face, Ralph leaned forward. Wrapping his arms around his waist, he rocked back and forth, silent sobs wracking his body ... or so it might have seemed to the average onlooker. I knew better, though. Ralph was laughing. He was finessing the fine line between the facial expressions of crying and laughter. Another fucking drama queen; another Sylvia protégé! I felt even more inadequate. But I’d have to deal with those feelings later.

A fart is not a feeling, even if I tried acting like it was. And it’s not socially acceptable. Martyrdom, on the other hand,
is
socially acceptable. It also scored you pity points in the community. Sylvia excelled at the role of the crucified one. Sylvia embraced martyrdom. She often said,
‘Pour
être belle, il faut souffrir’
, which means ‘To be beautiful, it is necessary to suffer’, although I think her idea of suffering related to the pain of waxing, tweezing, wearing girdles, etcetera. But my understanding of being
belle
meant not doing anything where I might end up being perceived as ugly. So, not long after I unleashed the beast on the bus that day twelve years earlier, I put a muzzle on it. And on this particular day, it meant not only keeping my mouth shut, but every other orifice as well. So, this fart was going to remain confined, and godammit, I was going to suffer for it!

Or ... maybe not.

Did I really want to live like Sylvia? No way!

Option 7: Become the warrior!

This fart was going to remain confined. Same decision the martyr would make; different driving force. I wasn’t going to be at the mercy of base impulses like Joe. Typhon and I were at war!

I was winning.

Infused with strength, I felt the wind abate, and the pain ceased. The service had come to an end, but as the congregation stood, Zola suddenly turned towards me.
Oh no
.

‘Are you going to the cemetery?’ she asked.

Why? Why was this person talking to me? Was she the designated stonemason for the Jewish sector of the cemetery? Was she going to use me as the raw materials for granny Ida’s headstone?

‘Um ... aren’t they serving lunch first?’

Zola gasped and looked at me with disdain.

‘Lunch is not served at a funeral!’ she spat. As my cheeks reddened under her filthy look, she turned on her heel and said under her breath,
‘How impertinent! What temerity!’

My body tensed up. Was I turning to stone? In a manner of speaking, yes—I was petrified. It would serve me right. But why? It wasn’t like I’d done anything—yet. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, but nobody told me that a funeral wasn’t catered. I naïvely assumed it was scheduled for eleven-thirty because that was around lunchtime. And why didn’t they serve food?

Jewish rites of passage are traditionally associated with fine feasts: ‘How was the wedding?’ ‘Oh, it was a wonderful spread.’ A funeral is a rite of passage. Okay, so it’s the last one, but still. Wouldn’t the dead want a kind of celebration of their lives before they’re interred? It doesn’t have to be a sit down affair. Finger foods would do. If I catered this funeral, I’d probably serve up devilled eggs and angels on horseback (a bit of an icebreaker to get the congregation speculating about where granny Ida would take up residence in the afterlife), cocktail weenies served on toothpicks with a dipping sauce, Monte Cristo sandwiches, mini pizzas, chicken drummies, baklava, kugelhopf ...

Ooh ... Oi! Nisht gut!
My gut churned violently. Worse, I felt a sneeze coming on.
Shit
. Must be from the fucking pepper on my imaginary bagel! Typhon and I were still at war, but have you ever tried to outmanoeuvre a being that has thousands of years of practice under his belt?

Typhon was winning.

I needed to launch; I needed to get out of there. Pronto! So, tight-sphinctered (like that day at Henley Pool), I shuffled (not so pronto) towards the door, down the steps and into the chatty crowd assembled on the pavement. Time was of the essence now, and fortunately my car was parked only a few metres away. Still, hanging on was a Herculean task. And because Hercules was half-man, half-god, pitted against an all-god like Typhon, it wasn’t hard to figure out who would blow who away.

Hercules lost.

KA-BOOM!

Everyone turned to look. Every. Single. Person.

Not at me, though. They were looking at the passing car that had backfired at exactly the same time that I did.

Phew!
Or ... maybe not. I was a tad disappointed. Nobody heard me.
I
didn’t even hear me. But I sensed it would have made Joe’s after hour performances sound like amateur night. Yet, whether it was a beneficial or a destructive wind was open to debate. I needed Ralph’s input on my output. And there he was, several metres away, flanked by two attractive women who seemed to be comforting him.
Really?
Geez, hadn’t he milked it enough? I started zigzagging through the crowd towards him when Uncle Ernie stepped in front of me.

‘Hey toots, was that a moving service or what?’ he asked my breasts.

‘Yes it was.’
You have no idea. But ... hang on a sec, your mother just died ... and you’re perving on my tits? Ecch!
I was about to lose the lunch I hadn’t actually eaten.

‘Wanna lift to the cemetery?’

I squinted apologetically. ‘I’m not going.’ The tank was out of gas; I had a void inside me that needed filling. Picking Ralph’s brain would have to wait. ‘I have to go home.’
For lunch.

CHAPTER ELEVEN:
ESCAPE FROM THE MAD HOUSE

Ralph, Maxi, Vette and I shared many anecdotes and many laughs that weekend. The four of us agreed there was a need to organise an annual mini-break to recharge our batteries, and we all went home enlivened. But I was now more aware that home, for me, hadn’t changed. The crazy exterior of the house I grew up in should have tipped me off long ago that the way we lived was not normal, especially seeing as everyone else had ordinary looking houses. As a child, I had believed that was what normality looked like.

With the help of Albie, Joe had vulgarised what was originally an unobtrusive, red brick home by painstakingly painting the mortar black, then varnishing both bricks and mortar in a high gloss Estapol. And it wasn’t as if we were hidden in a cul-de-sac like an embarrassing secret; we lived on a main road, so everybody I knew (and didn’t know) could see the frontage. Fortunately, the masses couldn’t see the inside of the house.

Joe’s customised tacky taste in clothes spilled over into how he decked out everything. His office positively vomited kitsch. Lining his desk was a collection of Bobblehead dolls (each one sitting on a lacy doily), snow globes, an owl cookie jar (with nothing in it), a vase of plastic flowers, a vintage long neck poodle figurine, and half a dozen troll dolls. His domain. Fine. But he was also the self-appointed interior decorator at home. According to Joe, because he was the breadwinner, he had the last—and only—word.

The interior walls and doors were painted with a faux finish. Some of the walls had a rag-rolled effect; others had a stippled, textured finish. The radiata pine doors were painted with a pseudo woodgrain effect. An exposed, brick feature-wall in the lounge was covered with wood imitation wallpaper. The carpet Joe had chosen was a mess of swirls and flowers in various shades of brown, mustard and yellow. We had a dog (Mitzi the Maltese terrier) that used to pee and poop on it. Her droppings blended well with the colour scheme.

All of this was telling. Sylvia was preoccupied with image and overly concerned with what the neighbours would think; Joe, who was impervious to others’ opinions, came across as a genuine, down to earth bloke. But the only realness I’d witnessed behind veneered closed doors and within those four walls with their bogus finishes was the dog and the carpet: Mitzi wasn’t an approval junkie. She didn’t care what anyone thought when she soiled the carpet. And the carpet might have been horrid looking, but it was 100% pure wool.

With all the fauxness, there had been little hope of being parented by mature adults. I hadn’t. I’d been raised by adulterated children in grown up bodies. And when Sylvia struggled in vain to adulterate me with her ridiculous rules, she turned on Joe.

‘
Oeuf!
I’m the disciplinarian and you’re Father Christmas!’

This had been puzzling. To my young mind, Joe had become God. But this now meant he was both God
and
Santa. I loved Santa, but after hearing this, on the odd occasion when I copped a spanking after the just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home crap, well, Father Christmas could shove his jolly ho-ho-ho fat arse back up the chimney, and choke on the soot!

And the idea that Joe was also Santa further distorted my image of God. Where other kids my age had a vision of God as an old hombre with a long white beard, bushy white hair, dressed all in white, my vision of God was now that of an old hombre who had a long white beard, bushy white hair, and was dressed in red with a white fur trim.
And fat,
which for a cacomorphobe is a problem in itself.

Having Santa for a father might have sounded exciting, and Santa did bring gifts—Joe was very generous with Myron and me—but in reality he wasn’t there that often, which I’d also come to realise about God. And Joe. And not only was Joe’s Sunday morning practice of hiding behind the newspaper testament to this, I eventually learned it was a fine example of the way he and Sylvia jockeyed for dominance over each other.

On this Godless day, these two blended with the ugly décor. He, slopped about on his chair in the lounge wearing a green towelling burnoose over his red, Holeproof, waffle-knit pyjamas; she, hair in curlers, dressed in a gaudy muumuu and pink Jiffies, a slender tortoiseshell cigarette holder with a lit cigarette inserted, which dangled from her lips as she thrashed around in the kitchen muttering ‘
oeuf’
under her breath. I used to pray for the doorbell to ring so people could see what Carol and Mike Brady were
really
like. Pointless. It was Sunday. But when she let loose with
‘merde’
(‘shit’), it indicated she was supremely pissed off about something he had or hadn’t done.

Merde
was menacing. It meant there was a hurricane on the horizon (the horizon had become tainted very early in the piece). Sylvia knew that when Joe took cover behind the newspaper, she’d end up shadowboxing because he refused to engage her. She’d stomp off to their room and lie across the bed (always across, with her head at the nine o’clock position and her toes at three o’clock. By covering both his and her side of the bed, it was as if she were rebelling—impinging on his territory as a means of taking back control). But Myron and I knew that this action was the calm before the storm, and there would be approximately a twenty-four hour turnaround before the
merde
hit the fan. When we got home from school the next day, we were only allowed fruit for afternoon tea, nothing good like biscuits or cake.
Merde!
This was the prelude—the storm warning. Then she called us for an early dinner. Although this was fine because fruit doesn’t fill you up, it was the tempest itself that no broadsheet-screen could stave off.
Merde!
Sylvia was a good cook, but under these circumstances, we were about to be force-fed slops.

If she burst into the dining room and put the plates down firmly in front of us, it might be fishy tasting fish or greyish, stewed lamb with unstrung green beans. Or stuffed capsicums. If she slammed the plates down and yelled, ‘EAT!’, then even without looking at the plate, I knew it was bumya.

Bumya is okra, Turkish style, served in a tomato-ey sauce, which doesn’t kill the flavour; it enhances it. This noxious vegetable should never be served anywhere other than prison.
And only on death row.
Feeding okra to a prisoner on death row would help him accept his fate—welcome it, even. Okra is gross because it has a bristly texture, and five o’clock shadows should be reserved for blokes, not vegetables. I firmly believe that a petty criminal made to eat okra has serious grounds to appeal his sentence.

On these hellish bumya nights, I sat staring at the plate, the cutlery remaining on either side, untouched. The dialogue unfolded predictably.

‘
Oeuf!
Eat your bumya!
Pest!
’

‘I don’t like it.’

‘I don’t care. You are not leaving this table till you finish what’s on your plate!’

‘No!’

‘Then no dessert!’

‘It’s a small price to pay.’

‘EAT IT!’

‘But I
haaaaaate
it!’

‘Too bad. There are children starving in Africa.’

‘Well then, can I put it in an envelope and send it to them?’

Slap.

Even though she always won, at least I put up a fight; goody two-shoes Myron did as he was told. But with his sensitive gag reflex, every mouthful of bumya would make him retch, which of course would get me going. These fun evenings with the two of us gagging throughout the meal had become a little too regular. The crap that was dished up to our parents in the homeland became a source of punishment for us.

But our ritualised Saturday lunch had been Sylvia’s redemption. Even though we were Jewish, and the consumption of pig meat was forbidden in Judaism, bad mood or not, she used to cook roast pork. I so loved the crackling. Although, while Myron was studying for his Barmitzvah, Sylvia made a quasi-attempt at observing the High Holy days in that for the eight days of Passover, we ate matza (a mix of wheat flour and water that’s flattened and baked and comes out cracker-like). On Sundays, she served cold, leftover pork sandwiched between two pieces of matza (no matter; God wasn’t watching). We were supposedly Orthodox Jews but clearly, our parents’ observation of Passover was unorthodox. Yet, everything else in their lives remained orthodox.