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mermaid,” I say.
    “Who cares about that ?” she screams. “Call my doctor! I’m having a coronary!”
    “Ma, try to understand—there aren’t any Jewish mermaids,” I say.
    “It’s my fault?” she demands. “It’s bad enough that you want to give me grandsons with fins—and how in the world will the rabbi perform the bris ?—but now you tell me that their mother’s a goy ?”
    “I knew I was gonna have trouble with you,” I say unhappily.
    “Trouble?” she shrieks. “Why should there be trouble? Your Uncle Nate will come by with a knife and a cracker and say, ‘Is this a jar of Baluga caviar?’ and I’ll say ‘No, it’s 40,000 of my grandchildren.’”
    “Will you at least meet her?” I ask.
    “Some conversation we’ll have,” she replies. “She’ll say ‘Blub!’ I’ll say ‘Gurgle!’ and she’ll say ‘Glub!’ and I’ll say ‘I’m getting the folds’, and she’ll say—”
    “That’s the bends, not the folds,” I explain.
    “Bends, folds, what’s the difference?” she says. “I plan to be dead of a heart attack in two more minutes.”
    “She speaks English,” I say, getting back to the subject.
    “She does?”
    “With a beautiful lilting accent.”
    “I knew it!” she says. “You’re too young to remember, but they drove our people out of Lilting before the last war …”
    “Lilting isn’t a place, Ma,” I say.
    “It isn’t?” she says suspiciously. “Are you sure of that?”
    “I’m sure,” I say. “She really wants to meet you.”
    “I’ll just bet she does,” she says. “She probably wants to feed me to her pet lobster.”
    “I don’t think lobsters eat people,” I say.
    “Aha!” she says. “But you don’t know !”
    “We’re getting off the subject,” I say.
    “Right,” she agrees. “The subject was my imminent death.”
    “The subject was Melora.”
    “What does this fish person who doesn’t wear a bra want with you anyway?” she demands. “Why doesn’t she go elope with some nice halibut?”
    “I met her while I was hunting for treasure,” I say. “It was love at first sight.”
    “So what you’re saying is that you went down there looking for gold and what you came up with was a topless person of the Purple Mist?”
    “You’re making this very difficult, Ma.”
    “You bring home a cod for dinner, and instead of cooking it I have to give it my son, and I’m making this difficult?” she says, just a bit hysterically.
    I figure it’s time to play my ace in the hole, so I say, “She’s willing to convert, Ma.”
    “Into what—a woman with two or more legs?”
    “To Judaism,” I say. “I told her how important it was to you.”
    “How can she convert?” she says. “Do we know any rabbis who can hold services 50 feet under the water?”
    “She can come to the surface,” I say. “How else would we talk?”
    “When did you ever talk to a girl?” she says. “You’re just like your departed father.”
    “We talk all the time,” I say.
    She considers this and finally nods her head. “I suppose there’s not a lot else you can do.”
    “Don’t get personal, Ma,” I say.
    She raises her eyes to the heavens—which are just beyond the light bulb in the middle of the ceiling—and has another of her hourly chats with God. “He wants me to welcome a lady fish into my family and he tells me not to get personal.”
    “A lady Jewish fish,” I point out.
    “So okay, she won’t be just a fish girl, she’ll be a gefilte fish girl, big deal. What do I feed her? If I give her lox, will she accuse me of cooking her relatives?”
    “She eats fish all the time, Ma.”
    “And when we leave the table to go watch Oprah, do I carry her or does she slither on her belly?”
    “Actually, she doesn’t watch Oprah,” I say.
    “She doesn’t watch Oprah?” she says, and I can tell this shocks her more than the fact that Melora is a mermaid. “What’s wrong with her?”
    “She’s never seen a television,”