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telling your mother. Why did you keep this a secret? Alex, polio doesn't know from baseball games. It only knows from iron lungs and crippled forever! I don't want you running around, and that's final. Or eating hamburgers out. Or mayonnaise. Or chopped liver. Or tuna. Not everybody is careful the way your mother is about spoilage. You're used to a spotless house, you don't begin to know what goes on in restaurants. Do you know why your mother when we go to the Chink's will never sit facing the kitchen? Because I don't want to see what goes on back there. Alex, you must wash everything, is that clear? Everything! God only knows who touched it before you did.
                Look, am I exaggerating to think it's practically miraculous that I'm ambulatory? The hysteria and the superstition! The watch- its and the be- carefuls! You mustn't do this, you can't do that-hold it! don't! you're breaking an important law! What law? Whose law? They might as well have had plates in their lips and rings through their noses and painted themselves blue for all the human sense they made! Oh, and the milchiks and flaishiks besides, all those meshuggeneh rules and regulations on top of their own private craziness! It's a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, Momma, do we believe in winter? Do you get what I'm saying? I was raised by Hottentots and Zulus! I couldn't even contemplate drinking a glass of milk with my salami sandwich without giving serious offense to God Almighty. Imagine then what my conscience gave me for all that jerking off!
                The guilt, the fears-the terror bred into my bones! What in their world was not charged with danger, dripping with germs, fraught with peril? Oh, where was the gusto, where was the boldness and courage? Who filled these parents of mine with such a fearful sense of life? My father, in his retirement now, has really only one subject into which he can sink his teeth, the New Jersey Turnpike. I wouldn't go on that thing if you paid me. You have to be out of your mind to travel on that thing- it's Murder Incorporated, it's a legalized way for people to go out and get themselves killed- Listen, you know what he says to me three times a week on the telephone-and I'm only counting when I pick it up, not the total number of rings I get between six and ten every night. Sell that car, will you? Will you do me a favor and sell that car so I can get a good night's sleep? Why you have to have a car
    in that city is beyond my comprehension. Why you want to pay for insurance and garage and upkeep, I don't even begin to understand. But then I don't understand yet why you even want to live by yourself over in that jungle.
                What do you pay those robbers again for that two-by-four apartment? A penny over fifty dollars a month and you're out of your mind. Why you don't move back to North Jersey is a mystery to me-why you prefer the noise and the crime and the fumes-
                And my mother, she just keeps whispering. Sophie whispers on! I go for dinner once a month, it is a struggle requiring all my guile and cunning and strength, but I have been able over all these years, and against imponderable odds, to hold it down to once a month: I ring the bell, she opens the door, the whispering promptly begins!
                Don't ask what kind of day I had with him yesterday. So I don't. Alex, sotto voce still, when he has a day like that you don't know what a difference a call from you would make. I nod. And, Alex - and I'm nodding away, you know-it doesn't cost anything, and it may even get me through- next week is his birthday. That Mother's Day came and went without a card, plus my birthday, those things don't bother me. But he'll be sixty-six, Alex. That's not a baby, Alex-that's a landmark in a life. So you'll send a card. It wouldn't kill