“Do you drive a car?” she asked on the way to Hyannis.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it because you have a handicap?\u201d<\/p>\n
I had never passed my written test.<\/p>\n
I also felt as estranged from driving a car as I did Stanley Kaplan\u2019s GRE prep course.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Lavina, while driving, explained where Hyannis was. She was perplexed by my inability to grasp the logic of her map.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you also fail geography?\u201d she asked. \u201cMaybe you have a directional disability? Anyway, what do you do for a living?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI work at a prophylactics factory in the Bronx,\u201d I replied.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t you want to do something more important?\u201d<\/p>\n
Lavina lived in a duplex apartment in Brooklyn and owned a house in Hyannis.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I\u2019m happy,\u201d I lied.<\/p>\n
There was no point in currying favor or disfavor. Let her win the argument. There are no room\/board charges if she wins the argument. If she loses and you win, then you lose because invariably you will pay.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, you\u2019re right, perhaps the rubber business is not very prestigious.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe you should try hosiery?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSure.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey give you pensions in the hosiery business. You don\u2019t get that with condoms. Besides, what\u2019s a nice Jewish girl working with rubbers?\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true. My friends were lobbyists for gun companies or copy editors for clients who made butter. It was a small world, and they all knew each other, and gave each other jobs, though not me.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have some friends in the hosiery business. Did you go to college?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cStaten Island State.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIs that why you\u2019re working with rubbers?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, my father said it would help diminish my anger toward men.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat does that mean?”<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said that if I could appreciate that their lives depend on a small piece of synthetic material, I could understand their vulnerability.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not a lesbian, are you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGood, I don\u2019t like lesbians. I think my ex daughter-in-law is one.\u201d Lavina turned red like her Subaru.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Lavina was rather insistent, in general. She was particularly insistent that her neighbor, a \u201cNew age dyke who is a smart business woman,\u201d was responsible for the backward spiral of Lavina\u2019s once sanctimonious rule over a people-free neighborhood on their Hyannis street.<\/p>\n
The woman had a Jack Russell who barked nonstop.<\/p>\n
\u201cShut the fuck up!\u201d Lavina yelled at the wooden house where the canine lived. The house had been built by a gluten-free construction company and you could hear everything outside.<\/p>\n
She was annoyed at this \u201cdumb shiksah<\/em>\u201d for a multitude of reasons, and most recently, because the woman was \u201copening another store in Hyannis.\u201d<\/p>\n It was unclear where Lavina\u2019s antipathy toward lesbians and their money originated.<\/p>\n Lavina\u2019s former daughter-in-law, whom she accused of being a \u201cradical gay,\u201d said Lavina \u201cmolested\u201d her kid.<\/p>\n \u201cAll I did was spank the girl. These politically correct types,\u201d she said, \u201care worse than Stalinists.\u201d Lavina had family members murdered by Stalin, which gave her a bitter view of anything that \u201cveered near communist ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n As for \u201cmolesting her\u00a0granddaughter,\u201d Lavina was more a disciple of brain molestation. She could take your brain and make you feel as if she were your resident lobotomist.<\/p>\n Her \u201cbrain molestation\u201d techniques were also in her art\u2014abstract blue and green smegma patterns\u2014she captured the essence of smegma in batik.<\/p>\n A critic in Art News<\/em> had written, \u201cLavina Schwartz is more on top of this subject matter than Philip Roth.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s what we have in common,\u201d I mentioned to Lavina, \u201cI work with rubbers, and you concern yourself with what goes outside of them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou know nothing<\/em> about my work!\u201d she hissed. \u201cYou know zero about the theoretical precedence of smegma and its expression through batik.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut I work with rubbers,\u201d I added, quietly.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re just a blue-collar factory worker.\u201d<\/p>\n There were a few moments of silence.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d she glanced at me, \u201cdid I offend you?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s very characteristic of me not to defend myself. I lapse into passive\/aggressive inarticulateness, which causes the said person who has caused me neurological pain to suffer.<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d I replied, \u201cI\u2019m just in the middle of a Philip Roth book and I\u2019d like to finish it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh\u2014which one is that?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Breast.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cIs that where the main character gets breast cancer?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo, it\u2019s about a man who turns into a breast.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh\u2026\u201d Her \u201coohs\u201d were self-effacing. You knew, and she knew, the argument, like a tedious chess game, had not gone in her favor.<\/p>\n \u201cHave you gotten your bus schedule for tomorrow?\u201d she asked me, \u201cI won\u2019t be able to drive you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGood.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRemember,\u201d I said to myself, as I took The Breast<\/em> to bed, \u201cnothing in this world is free, and when it is, it is insufferable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cMaybe you should try hosiery?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSure.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey give you pensions in the hosiery business. You don\u2019t get that with condoms. Besides, what\u2019s a nice Jewish girl working with rubbers?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s true. My friends were lobbyists for gun companies or copy editors for clients who made butter. It was a small world, and they all knew each other, and gave each other jobs, though not me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-eleanor-levine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13834"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14057,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13834\/revisions\/14057"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}