The Jewish Handshake

Doping. Coping. Hoping to stop the downward sloping.

Editor’s Note: Schanzer’s description of this dizzying tale of disorientation begins this way: "The whole house of Israel, both living and dead, swigs Mylanta from their shoulder bags." As they say, no truer words…. — David Michael Slater

Prologue

Mendele Mocher Sforim kept an old bottle of Xanax in the side pocket of his good black purse, crunched to dust by the up and down of his commute and the banging of his bag on his portly thighs. He kept refilling the prescription and taking the new ones, but the bottle of dust kept its place where it sat. You would’ve needed a little silver salt spoon, or a coke-man’s yellow pinkie nail to dispense it, so he stuck to the new pills.

            Mendele Mocher Sforim, Golda Meyer, Rube Goldberg, Eliezer Ben Yehuda—that poisonous consumptive—and both of his wives, Hemda and Devorah, sisters who were once paid a half -kopek a word for their Yiddish phrases, Yentl, Leopold and Loeb, Karl Marx and Trotsky, Henny Youngman, Susan Levy—the poet laureate of Yonkers--and Mary Rabinowitz-Lefkowitz of Park Slope, midwife, anti-vaxxer, advanced guard for BDS at the Park Slope Food Coop, and crystal apologist. The whole host of the international Jewish conspiracy, the dirty wicked Zionists, the dirty wicked anti-Zionists, horned gruesome perverts, including the statue of Moses as depicted by Michelangelo, all hung up with drugs and prescriptions from their shrinks, G.P.s, Gynecologists, ear doctors, and whomever else they could get on board to write a script.

            Pockets stuffed with pills, hand over fist, a fist of pills down their gullet—hypertension, migraines, OCD, space odor, foot shimmering, unreality express, tremors, brain spasm, constipation psychosis, Bronchial Tourettes, sleep apnea, foot heel screaming—knock, knock, knock-- and anxiety all the way down. Black-out brain clog, psychosomatic consumption, eye chevron apocalypse, with a side order of “the poops.”

            Their shaking hands with that fistful of pills down the hatch, put in the middle of balls of day-old challah as for a toothless rescue terrier, because the ones that dissolve under the tongue are not paid for by insurance. It’s a shame with that-- Globus will kill you.

            And none more effective than a knockout that lets the shakes subside. Back to being you when the drugs leave your system—Don’t let the psychiatrists fool you! The drugs have improved: Atavan lasts longer than Xanax, starts working quicker, and Lexapro is better than Milltown. The colossus of psychopharmacology had strode heavily through the hallways of the JCC.

The real scientists suspect that the problem does not live in the chemical pathways, it is on the quantum level, where the soul resides. The infinite wave is rushing and retreating. And if it is all connected, then that jibbering universe is connected by tendrils to our own brains. Surely someone needs to get on it. “But of course, come into my office. I see you are looking at my diploma. Yale Med ’75 with a postdoc in Quantum Psychopharmacology.”

            But where are the Jewish researchers with the new better meds? Who in the Hadassah Medical Center will crack the code of what to do about this gibbering, stomach-cramped brain? Step it up to the plate, Dr. Avital Gabai! Your grandmother has bitten her nails down to the quick.

            The drugs can’t keep up with the years of exile, tzores, molestation, barfing, emetophobia, wolf-whistling dog whistles, stateless from 1930-1950 like Hannah Arendt, who washed ashore in NYC without a valid passport. The drugs are a hanky to a brow. They can’t stanch the sweating.

            “Do you have…ahem…a pill or two?” asks Eliahu Hanavi at school pickup for his kids. “I’m…freaking out.”

            “Of course, of course,” says Yentl, for this is the Jewish handshake. “Right in the pocket of my talis bag next to the secret pack of cigarettes I keep hidden from my family.”

            So too, then, was Hinde Beile Lamed at the corner of Monroe Place under the scaffolding of the Humanitarian church where she pulled her mother-friend aside and enquired. Her mother-friend had a son in the same B’nei Mitzvah cohort, although the children were four years away from that.

            Of course, the woman had one to spare, as she carried the full bottle around in case she needed to peace out quickly before the 3:25 pick up. You wouldn’t think it, but death sometimes seemed preferable to this Jewess than making small talk with a bunch of people in the process of renovating their homes.

The exchange was made, and Hinde went on to count down the time till when the pill would work. 1,000 was the point when they were sure to have started working, but sometimes you needed to get to 2,000 or 3,000 before they did. Her daughter Marnie would be due out much before she hit 1,000, so that was another question altogether, as she did not like Marnie to see her holding onto the railing where she waited, like a blind man who has had his stick kicked away from him in a strange country having lost, too, his wallet and Braille guidebook.

#

            What did the Jews do before the meds? This horrifying question haunts the mind, at the vision of the whole house of Israel white-knuckling it in egregious sobriety. Alcohol does not knock it back quite so much, and sometimes it adds whirling to whirling, therefore we were never world-class shickers. If we had been, we would have been laid out in the gutters with the Doestoevsky drunks, frozen solid under a pile of snow that first night, no second chance. The whole house of Israel dead by alcohol in one tremendous Shabbat celebration: men, women, and children. A switch in the head flipped to another position by Slivovitz. But we are generally terrible drunks, try as we might.

            Judeo-futurism imagines first of all a glowing cabinet of perfect sedatives, or better, a drip in rainbows, a hinge on the skull, and a robot with an eyedropper tending the mind like a diligent gardener thoughtfully plucking weeds. Or watering a hothouse full of orchids. Or sensors on your pocket watch toning when the levels are low, in the manner of a diabetic’s squared-off stomach interface. “You are getting very down at this moment. Drink a glass of water. Eat a banana, and take dropper #9 directly into your ear” What bliss! All day long with color-coded pill boxes straight from the bespoke pharmaceutical giant, L’chaim Ltd., we will apply sweet-smelling drugs to our brains. Peace is the color and range of apple blossoms. Baruch Hashem.

            See us now in Haifa Space Station #43, gliding by pleasantly on our way to the gym or in the reading room, chewing on a pencil deep in thought. “Let’s have a coffee in the commissary and after take a stroll. I want to tell you about the new curriculum at the school.”

            The levels are off, though, and the serotonin paths are bone dry, like a wadi when a drought has lasted overlong. 1, 2, 3,4 generations without a rainfall. The best of our lot engage mightily—they offer a nightly round-up of the Trump trial on MSNBC, legal scholars who look like men who sit and learn and let their wives support the family with receptionist jobs in the diamond district. (By the courts, the men walk by with heads that cry out for yamulkes. They look wrong without them.) The best of our lot are well managed. Their ulcers stay where they were put initially, in the pits of their stomachs, and don’t migrate outwards. They run compulsively in their off-hours until their toenails blacken and fall off and the x-rays they are made to take find stress fractures in every bone.

Part II: Hinde

            Along the shimmering band of the East River, the heat and light bore down on the happy pedestrians, happy all it seemed except for Hinde Beile Lamed who was waiting for Marnie at the roller rink. Marnie was half an hour into a roller-skating play date, and wouldn’t be extricable for another hour, which was when her friend’s parents were due back to pick her up.

            All of Brooklyn was having a good time at the public barbeques down by the water. There were balloons, and chip bags ripped open, and chicken marinating in plastic bags about to be dumped on the grill. There was music and even small prayer circles before the start of the outdoor meal. It was a good time, by anyone’s accounting.

            Boats in the harbor motored by. Dogs ran into the water at the dog beach, whether or not it was a dog beach, or they were allowed in at all. There were no park officials to police them. Just as Woody Guthrie said, there are no policemen in heaven, ergo, this was the place.

            To gild the lily: there were even all manner of people roller skating, an engagement party on the grass with a wicker basket of champagne, several girls taking selfies, a dog in a blue bandana, a couple cheerfully making out on a bench, and a poor kid with a ten-dollar ice cream cone.

            The poor kid with the ten-dollar ice cream cone was the other exception to the rule, besides Hinde. Every lick of the ice cream cone, his mother’s sweet smiling face so pleased to have gotten it for him, watching delightedly as he ate it, was bitter guilt going down. He offered it to her to share, but she did not even take a bite. Take note, devils in Medieval hell, that’s a new one.

            Hinde had a book she’d read already, and still could not make it out of the first chapter, an empty water bottle, the ghost sensation of needing to go to the bathroom and nowhere private to do it, and a very bad attitude that caused her to roll along on a peevish and enraged wave of thoughts throughout her day.

            It turned out that was something susceptible to medication: depression even? Normal people, it seemed, did not spend their days awash in the fact of the poor boy, his mother, and the ten-dollar ice cream, whom she had noticed on the way over and now couldn’t get out of her head. Ten, twenty years from now, if she lived that long, she would still remember that boy, just like a whole host of other small sorrows, petty grievances, etc., etc., etc.

            If you did not notice them in the first place, you could not retain them obviously, so Hinde did what she could: not wearing her glasses when walking around was the big one, but you couldn’t safely do that on the subway, otherwise the gentle twitching of a businessman with Tourettes would look like a lunatic who was about ready to pop.

            Therefore, she could name many sights she’d seen and couldn’t unsee, couldn’t find another way to interpret, and she lived with a painful complicity that a nice woman absorbed in her phone wouldn’t have to bear.

            There was, to start with the worst, the preteen boy on the train when they were coming home from a concert, with a strange look on his face, the uncle he was with standing over him holding onto the bar, his crotch waving in his direction, and the boy had looked at her, the uncle had looked…the uncle had a look of wicked pleasure. She had put years already into trying to find the words for it…vulpine?

            What could she do? What could she do? And then her stop had made the answer for her. They were off the train and the duo rode on. The right person would have had the sense to do the right thing, whatever it was. And yet all around her no one else had noticed, and felt no guilt from that moment forward. She was cursed again and again in that way, and yet that one was the worst, and she still thought about it often: 10, 15, 20 years later. If you saw things, but you didn’t act on them, then the anchor of it was hung around your neck. But what had it been to see? What had it been to act on?

            This is what she thought about at the picnic tables by the skating rink as Marnie and her friend circled smiling to the radio version of Cardi B that was booming out of the speakers. There was a group of teens in shorts dancing on their skates, their hands to the sky, blessing the air with their groove.

            This was what the anti-depressants were supposed to address. Who knew it was a symptom of something, this darkness, the scales always descending, no matter the weight of the light. She told the shrink about her childhood years crying behind her dollhouse, her head at the level of the parlor and its soft out-of-scale rugs, and the shrink had said, “Well yes, of course.”

            The drugs had addressed the extreme weeping over Marnie that she’d had as soon as the nursing hormone had left her system. That too, it turned out, was not just a natural part of motherhood. But that state was not aberrant to her. Just her regular state of affairs, that weeping. The end of the hormones had just let her back off at her regular station.

            When the waiting at the rink became unbearable, she snapped an Atavan in half and took it.

Why not, why not, why not?

#

The narrator is the tummler, he moves the proceedings along and takes the piss out of the bride’s family and the drunk uncle. He takes the piss out of grandpa’s mustache but not out of grandma, whose hand he might kiss if he weren’t shomer negiah. He is a black hat tummler and not funny by the standards of the Jews who write the goyishe television programs.

He has a variety of snappy songs at his fingertips and many of them are of his own composing—he’s had a skill at it since his first one, composed in the long hours of potty training, sitting upon a plastic chamber pot. It was overly scatological for his frum mother, who giggled despite herself but didn’t appreciate her son making reference to his tiny “peepee.”

Tummler, tummler: a zissen, freileichen tummler.

#

The children have returned their rental skates, and the parents of the friend have texted that they’re running late, so Hinde takes the kids to the fancy ice cream place where the poor kid had wasted his mother’s money. They would waste Hinde’s money as well, as Hinde was “work shy” and couldn’t put together a full-time salary if her life depended on it.

Other things she couldn’t do: pay her bills on time, keep track of her period, self-care, as in: her feet looked terrible and her legs were unshaved. Other things she couldn’t do: Keep the house clean, find a new agent. Other things she couldn’t do: write back to friends in a timely fashion, keep her weight down.

The invisible weight on her back was considerable. That too they said was depression. She had as many blessings as anyone else, probably. A more than average amount even, and yet she could not remember the good things with any form of clarity. It was the darkness that settled on her chest. The boy on the subway, the bum with the CVS bags filled with ziti on the street near Bendels, all of that kind of thing. The house they had sold, death sneaking in for children, the whole of it. The children whose kindergarten teacher sang songs with them while they waited for the Zyklon B to fill the chamber.

Marnie and her friend got decent ice creams and sat on a bench near enough so that she could see them. She “kept her eyes on them” as the saying went, though thank God they had passed the age when they could be easily abducted. It made her job unbelievably easy compared to what it once was. Eton Patz’s mother took her eyes off him for one miserable second when he walked to the bus. It was even his very first day walking to the bus on his own, as everybody knew.

#

Where did you find this guy, the tummler asks. What a shaine punim you have! What a putz he is! And on like that. The new husband accepts his lot in life, and the ribbing serves as a complement. She is quite pretty. He’s fine too, but she is very pretty.

The tummler better talk fast, he better joke fast, or else the crowd will forget themselves and burst into tears. They have consumed all the l’chaims they can find and have gotten maudlin. The wedding party especially has smiles pasted onto their faces. The mother of the bride especially, for her little baby has never lived on her own before, away from her mother. The father of the bride is sad too, so are her sisters. Her wedding is a rupture first and foremost.

Where else can the tummler officiate? Bring the tummler to my house when the sun starts to set and the blue hour arrives. All the inhabitants bite their nails and hang their heads at that hour. Talk faster!

#

Fifty years from now when Hinde Lamed sits on the porch of her retirement home, Marnie’s grandchildren will come to visit with her and play dolls. They bring them in a shoe box and lay them out on the porch, and Hinde will pick which ones she wants to be today. Some are old, old, old. They were Marnie’s when she was little, and Hinde remembers them well. Marnie played well with them and the dolls made it in relatively good shape, though there are places on their ankles where the plastic has broken and you can see the metal frame.

The girls have the dolls stride their long legs back and forth on the porch between the legs of the chairs, and Hinde from her seat can’t really participate in that, but she laughs along with them, and whistles at the sexy dolls. Well, not everything can change, even in the future.

“Hoochy Mama,” says Hinde in her old voice. “Who’s that sexy lady?” and the little girls laugh until they roll over on their sides and flail their legs around like bugs.

Marnie’s daughter hands out juice boxes to all of them, even herself, even her old grandmother. It is a hot day and the porch is well-shaded, but still, everyone needs to think of their own hydration. Hinde is wearing a white loose blouse for that reason, to keep cool.

The doctor at the retirement home comes with her plastic box every week and takes out the vials of colored liquid, first doing an intake to find out how Hinde is feeling, how the doctor must tune the levels of her mind, properly calibrate them all. It is an extremely precise and lovely system.

It’s newish too. Only in the last ten years has it been fully approved for the geriatric community. Hinde is at the age, however, when she can’t be bothered to read up on it. The doctor certainly has good intentions, the medicine is working, what harm could there be in any of it? And if there is harm, and it still works? That seems fine to Hinde too.

And the side effects have been divine. Her memory of things has changed, and all the good things that she could not latch onto over the years have come to the forefront, have made themselves important. They poured up, wetting the ground from below, as the inflammation receded.

She no longer thinks of the boy on the train with his uncle, or the boy with the too-expensive ice cream, or the bags of ziti on Fifth Avenue by Bendel’s. Other things have stepped into the breach.

Here is Marnie on the sofa, and they are laughing over children’s books: the drunkard in “The Happy Little Farmer” with his bright red cheeks, the Moomins facing the snow storm. “Bolt the Door!” says Moomintroll, and Marnie laughs uncontrollably. Here they are making tiny pancakes for the Moncichis, pouring milk into the raspberry cups. Here they are finding funny dresses at thrift stores.

Here are cocktails at a hotel with her husband, smoking cigarettes and eating peanuts. Her husband almost had to carry her home, she got so drunk. And the ice at the corners on that New Year’s Eve when they went to three different parties in three different neighborhoods far from each other and took the train with all the fixings for gin and tonics in their bag. Here they are buying comic books in Boston and taking the bus home, making love in his apartment on a rainy afternoon in the room where the bats congregated in the ivy around his corner windows.

Here is her mother and her sister on the lawn, and the breeze quaking the aspens, ruffled by the smallest thing. Here is her mother braiding her hair before school as she sat on the arm of the couch. Here is her sister playing her the Beatles records that she had accumulated.

Here is her grandmother and her soft hands, her grandfather and the parrakeet who drank from his coffee cup. The parakeet would shake his head from side to side when he took a sip. The coffee was too hot for his liking!

Here is her doll house, and she behind it. No tears at all in this memory, just the proper use of it, organizing the living room, the sofa, and the side table on which a little lamp lit up, attached to its own small battery.

Bio: Olivia Schanzer is a writer, illustrator, and teacher born in Brooklyn. Her grandfather was a dapper photographer of accidents from whom she learned that the secret to a beautiful black-and-white image, as well as a story, is that it must contain the full range of shades: pure white to pure black. She has written and illustrated YA science fiction, created a book of interviews about Occupy Wall Street (both available from matchlockpress.com), written a novel about the upper-crust in Manhattan and one about middle-class Jews in the mid to late twentieth century called Nothing’s Possible, though it was, and has recently finished an illuminated and hand-lettered book about scammers and lapsed orthodox booksellers in Sunset Park. Her pen and ink drawings have appeared in the Believer, and the Nation, among other places, and her work has been included in the Best American Comics anthology. She is currently working on a book of short stories about Jewish people in Brooklyn, Europe, and on a space station called Haifa.

What are five tiny delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?

1.     The sound of owls calling to each other in a forest at night.

2.     Also, loons in the bowl of a lake echoing into the evening.

3.     Unlimited, solid! coffee with oat milk.

4.     Tiny things that glitter, like little faceted glass beads.

5.     Very windy days, perfect for air-drying curly hair.

What are five tiny JEWISH delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?

1.     Hearing the voices of children chanting prayers, whether they have strong voices or ones that are slightly off-key.

2.     Singing Avinu Malchenu at Yom Kippur and hearing in my mind my grandmother’s thick Ashkenazi pronunciation, “aw,” all the way down.

3.     The good frozen gefilte fish that you have to buy specially (and its weird warnings about worms).

4.     “The Talis Lady” in New Jersey who picks up her own phone, even though with a name like that you’d think she was a star.

5.     A banging, drunken Shabbat where the singing of Shalom Aleichem gets seriously carried away.