The Family Business

By Lee Andrew Weiss

He knocked but there was no answer. "This damned key," Allen said to Helen, standing in the dank narrow hallway, dimly lit by a brace of faux candles, low-wattage bulbs in cobwebbed sconces bracketing the door. He jingled and jerked, and nudged with his shoulder and finally, he got it to turn.

"How's the business?"

"Yeah, hi ma, how are you?" Allen Kopperwitz said as he entered her apartment, shuffling the soles of his scuffed loafers on a threadbare rug.

His wife Helen followed him in, her long legs swooshing in gabardine slacks, her auburn tresses tousled, her rouge smudged. She was a head taller than Allen, whose balding hair was windblown, his glasses fogged. He wiped at his sweaty brow, and cleaned his unfashionable oversized lenses with an untucked corner of his plaid shirt. They were flustered. The traffic on the BQE and the Prospect Expressway had been unbearable, and after ascending the alphabetic streets of Ocean Parkway to Allen's mother's apartment they circled for thirty minutes to find a spot that took yet another ten to pull into; Allen was not the world's best parallel parker.

But here he was, wasting yet another Saturday afternoon he could have spent watching college football, getting a jump on grading papers (Topic: Factors Underlying the Italian Renaissance), reading through the early delivery sections of the Sunday Times , visiting new exhibitions at the Met, making unnecessary bulk purchases (and sampling the often delicious freebies) at Costco, and wandering though the new acquisitions of cramped antique stores in Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and the Heights, with Helen. Instead, here he was, in the company of this woman.

Vivian, the weekend aid, scampered through the apartment, washing dishes and neatening things. "Hello Mr. Allen, Mrs. Helen" she said in lilting Puerto Rican English as she passed them. The last time he'd visited she wore fitted pants and a low cut shirt and Allen couldn't stop gawking; today she wore an oversized t-shirt and baggy jeans that concealed her curves.

"Vivian, we'd been knocking on the door for a while. Didn't you hear us?"

"Oh no, no no no Mr. Allen I did not hear you at all or of course I would have answered. I was washing the dishes in the kitchen," she said.

"I guess the radio was too too loud. They are playing wonderful dancing music."

"Well, please keep attuned next time. By now you should know that we come on alternate Saturday afternoons. For years! And we were last here two Saturdays ago so--"

"Many apologies Mr. Allen. Every two weeks. Next time I will hear, I promise."

"And mother," Allen said, "what about the phone? The phone mother , the phone. We called before we left. I called twice from my cell phone on the way. I called from the hall and could hear the damned phone ringing in here."

Mother didn't answer. She sat gumming, smushing her pallid lips; wheezing through her beaky nose; her wispily whiskered jowl flapping; humming some unrecognizable tune, tapping at the base of her walker with a slippered left foot, her plump stubbled varicose veined calf jiggling. Allen panned his eyes down her legs, almost expecting them to taper into cloven hooves. Her pale grey eyes glassed over, her lids lowered, and she continued to hum. As Allen looked away from her, his eyes locked on the black rotary phone atop a flimsy side table by her left arm.

"Vivian, certainly you heard the phone ring."

"Oh yes Mr. Allen, but Hilda tells me not to answer the phone."

"Mother, why shouldn't Vivian answer the phone? Mother, why didn't you answer the phone? I mean, what kind of meshuggah nonsense is going on here!" Allen looked to Helen for support. He could feel his blood pressure rising. Helen did not back him up. She chose no longer to carry on conversation in the presence of this woman she referred to as Miss Havisham-- not alluding to the off-white muumuu-thing Hilda wore, but rather, to the woman's coldness. She sat quietly behind him in a shabby blue armchair, her legs crossed, drugstore reading glasses low on her nose, engrossed in a new novel. She got a lot of reading done at her mother-in-law's.  

            "So how's the business?"

            This was the question of late, the one she asked over and over and over again. How it got into her head, who knows? But it wasn't going away. Two weeks ago, she must have asked how the business was at least twenty times. "Mother, would you like some tea?" "How's the business?" "Can I get you some of those stewed prunes out of the fridge?" "How's the business?" "Ma, is there anything you would like me to take to the dry cleaners for you?" "How's the business?" The business, the business , Allen thought, what the hell is she yapping about?

            "The business is fine mother," Allen said for the umpteenth time.

            She nodded.

Allen went into the kitchen for a drink. When he opened the old refrigerator no light went on. He wormed his hand past a mushy black-flecked banana, between the wire-handled Chinese food take-out cartons emblazoned with dragons and pagodas, around the Meals-On-Wheels pints of low-fat milk and plastic-wrapped sandwiches, and pulled out a quarter-full bottle of seltzer. It didn't fizz as he opened it which made Allen grimace. He found three glasses in the cupboard, washed them out and poured equal amounts into each, finishing off the bottle. From the freezer he removed ice cubes from a tray and plopped a couple into each of the glasses. He went inside and gave one to his mother.

            "What's this?"

            "It's seltzer Mom."

            "What?"

            "Seltzer," he said louder. "Club soda."

            "Oh," she said, "well I didn't ask for this."

            "Well I didn't ask for this ," Allen mumbled. He took a deep breath. "I know mother. It's a drink. From your kitchen. If you don't want it, then don't drink it."

            Hilda followed Allen with her eyes as he walked across to Helen with outstretched glass. "Well, look Allen, you've brought your little sweetheart with you. Isn't that nice. Hello there little sweetheart." Helen looked up from her book and smirked. She looked up at Allen who looked back at her with a similarly perturbed expression: we've been married twenty-two years now, and this woman can't remember that it's Helen, that my wife's name is Helen. She remembers exactly how many pairs of pants are hanging in her closet, how many tea bags and Sweet 'N Low packets are left in the pantry, but never my wife's name.

"You and your little sweetheart make a nice couple Allen," Hilda said.

"Yeah thanks Ma," Allen said, examining her teeth, sunk at a diagonal to the bottom of a highball glass on the table next to her. A prop, Allen thought, the exemplar for Polident advertisements.

"So Allen, how's the business?"

"Oh, the business Ma, you want to know how the business is?" Allen paused. "Well Ma, let me tell you," he said, wagging a finger. "It's fine Ma. No, no it's better than fine. It's wonderful. They've been selling like hotcakes. We do a brisk business. I make little suits for them. I teach them tricks, because the best time to teach them tricks is when they're real young. It's a hot item these days. Hot. Everyone wants a baby monkey."

For a woman whose face constantly contorted in expressions of perplexity, this had really done it. To look at Hilda at that moment you would think the gears were really turning, that she were a great Jewish mind struggling over abstruse matters: Maimonides codifying the Talmud, Mendelssohn postulating immortality, Einstein revolutionizing relativity... "Oh," she said finally, and nodded.

Helen said nothing; she knew better than to get involved.

            Allen was a teacher. He taught two sections of Advanced Placement European History in a good Brooklyn public high school. He did per session work, acted as an advisor for school concerts, the chess club, in the spring tutored for the global history regent to make extra money off the books.

"Yeah Ma, we're opening a second baby monkey store soon. We've got a rapid growth plan we're hoping to put into effect. Monkey maximization. This is a positive time for the baby monkey business. Maybe down the line we'll even go public. The venture capital people seem excited. There are IPO talks in the works."

Then a lull, silence broken only by Hilda loudly breaking wind. Helen, disgusted, held her book very close to her face. Allen turned away and looked through an AARP pamphlet he picked off the coffee table. My mother never smiles like these nice old people in the pictures, Allen thought. They fly kites. They play duplicate bridge. They build birdfeeders. They hold in their gas. They keep their teeth in their mouths.

"Allen, look how tall you are."

"Yeah Ma, tall." Allen was five eight in shoes.

"I mean look at you Allen, stand up and let me see. I remember when you were young and a little bondit , and how you would never flush the toilet. How you were afraid to flush the toilet after you did your business. You remember, no? And how you would listen always to the radio and beg us to get a television after the one we gave you broke and..."

She went on one of her rambles, switching subjects without segue. Allen tuned her out. He couldn't listen anymore. He stared at a dusty photograph, a profile shot, monotonic and warped by sunlight, in a gilt frame hanging crooked on the wall behind her. It was of Allen on his supposed day of manhood. There he was, a gawky little kid on the bema , in one of the few items of clothing she ever bought for him, a suit for his bar mitzvah, heavy black wool, skinny lapel, single-breasted, three-button. A large Star of David in the periphery, seemingly hovering overhead, between Allen and the Ark. Squinty-eyed from the flash; his yarmulke crooked; draped in a tallis that would have been big on a six-foot man, further dwarfed by the broad pulpit he was leaning on. She bought me that suit, a not-bad but too-big suit that I wore for maybe three days out of the year, yet all through school the kids mocked me, mocked me because I wore the same ratty clothes. I asked her all the time. She couldn't buy me another pair of pants? Couldn't buy me a neutral colored shirt, one that I could wear a lot and not get teased for? How do you get a date wearing the same grubby plaid every day?

His mother kept talking, but Allen wasn't hearing her. He kept staring at himself on bar mitzvah day. Listening to thirteen year-old Allen speak. Actually, it wasn't even bar mitzvah day, but the day before bar mitzvah day, when photographs could be taken in the temple.

"I can't find my glasses again," Hilda said.

Why am I here, why am I doing this? Is the fact that she birthed me enough to make me endure this miserable ridiculousness? The fact that I was a Mistake to begin with, eighteen years younger than Sarah, who wasn't around when I needed her. She was out drinking and getting knocked up, and I was all alone. Mom never gave two shits about me growing up; I can count on my fingers the motherly things she has ever done for me.

"I've never really liked that, never really understood what the big fuss was about going there and watching that. Am I right or am I right?" Hilda said.

"What? Oh, right Ma."

That she and Dad went for lavish weeklong vacations to borscht belt resorts, to Florida, and left me alone while I was still in grade school. "Sadie will check in on you," she'd say. Sadie will check in on you. Big shit. That when my bed broke when I was twelve, she made me sleep on the sagged mattress on the floor through college. My back hurt so bad. Messed up my posture. Seventeen years old and I was a goddamned human question mark.

"That Vivian, she meddles with my things. I hide them and then they're not there anymore. I think she's stealing from me. I know these things. The Puerto Ricans are no better than the coloreds. Dreck. She is taking my jewels. I know it," Hilda said.

For four years she wouldn't buy me glasses, for four years, four years though I was so nearsighted distance had become a big grey blur for me. And then, then, I had to take a year off between high school and college because even though I had a scholarship to NYU, I couldn't afford to pay for books, and she and Dad wouldn't even loan me the money. All on my own I had to figure it out, had to get enrolled at Brooklyn College full time so I wouldn't get sent off to fucking 'Nam!

            "The chicken was feh . Bland. It needed something else, but I don't know what. Some spices or some of the herbs. At least some salt, some flavor, you know?" Hilda said.

Now I'm supposed to dawdle over her? To assuage her discomfort and stomach her kvetching ? To worry over her worsening ailments and mental lapses? Now that she can't realize how lousy a mother she's been. How she has fucked up my life. Now that she can't even begin to comprehend that she is the reason I see shrinks, take meds. That she's the root of my anxiety attacks and my fear of having children. That her neglect abetted my moodiness and apprehensions and anger and bouts with depression...

            "And the pie, the pie they give you with that, it's included, a nice size slice but it isn't so tasty, the fruit is bland and could use more sugar or sweetener or something. Bland," Hilda said.

            Helen thumbed at a stubborn page; she licked her fingertip and flipped. Allen gazed at the photograph.

            "But I've never been much of a pie eater to begin with, I prefer a nice moist cake."

            "Mother."

            "A babka. A babka is a good cake and--"

"I have to go mother. I have to go now. You know how it is. Working hard, busy with the business." She shifted her head, further scrunched her wizened face, squinted her eyes, her double chin especially protuberant from the angling: a bulldog saddened by her owner's impending departure. "Business mother, I have business to attend to. Come on Helen, it's time for us to go."

"Are you leaving already Mr. Allen?" Vivian said while passing through, her arms the foundation for a tottering tower of folded towels, the lace undone on her left sneaker.

"Yes Vivian, we have to leave."

"Next time Mr. Allen, I will get the phone."

            In haste Allen picked himself out of the chair. He cleared his throat, which Helen took as a sign to hurry along. He put his hand into his pocket and jingled his keys. Helen dog-eared a page, closed the book and tucked it under her right arm; she slung her pocketbook over her left shoulder as she rose to her feet. Then they left, Allen slamming the door behind him.

            As they walked down the dim hallway, as they waited for the elevator, as they descended, not a word was spoken. In the lobby Helen said, "This book is getting really interesting. I mean the characters, the characters are just so, so interesting, " to which Allen bunched his lips but did not respond, and Helen knew not to say anything more.

He didn't love her. He was perfectly sure of this. Convinced as he left her building, as he walked to the car without a word to say to his wife of twenty-two years whom he was reasonably sure he did love. But no, he didn't love her . As he looked back at the crusted brick and limestone façade in need of a powerwashing, as he brushed his hand along the amorphous tops of the evergreen shrubs lining the side of the building, as he waded and crunched through the oaks and maples, ochres, autumn-reds and umbers blanketing the curb. He had a terrible pain in the pit of his stomach. He took several antacid tablets from his pocket and chewed them as he took The Club off the steering wheel, as he buckled his seat belt, as he started the engine, as tears welled in his eyes. He sat there motionless, eyes sealed, hunched forward, his arms folded across the wheel. He hadn't noticed Helen patting him on the shoulder, her soft sweet voice repetitively asking him if he was OK.

Allen, are you OK Allen, are you OK honey, Allen, Allen honey?

And then: A maniacal outburst, violent laughter. They just popped into his head. Baby monkeys, everywhere: in jester suits, in red bandanas and coveralls, tapping their tails, clanking cymbals, peddling diminutive unicycles, dancing jigs, hopping, puffing rings from fat cigars, juggling brightly colored balls, shuffling decks of fifty-two. And he laughed and laughed and laughed as tears dripped across his cheeks, off the tip of his aquiline nose. "That's it," he said. "I'm done, I'm through with her."

He was. He didn't go back for two weeks.