Mother for Dinner Read online

  First is there? In your house?

  He’s downstairs, she said. With the others.

  Which others?

  Everyone, she said. It’s time, Seventh. Will you come?

  Say no, thought Seventh.

  Yes, he said.

  Fuck.

  And so Seventh Seltzer put down the memoir of a Paraplegic-Pescatarian-Presbyterian-Conjoined-Filipinx-Arab-American, and headed for Brooklyn.

  * * *

  • • •

  The immigrant experience of Cannibals in America has been much the same as any other minority community, albeit more clandestine and precarious. They too came here long ago with dreams of acceptance; they too were met with rejection and hostility; they too were systematically and institutionally excluded from the promise of this country; they too were forced to hide their traditions and ceremonies. And soon they, too, melted. Tired of not belonging and lured by the seductive gleam of capitalism and materialism, the younger generations began to assimilate. They intermarried. They moved out, moved up, and moved away, and the Can-Am community began to dwindle. For a time, their culture was sustained by their local butcher shops, which in the Cannibal-American diaspora often served as their community center. But when those, facing competition from national supermarket chains, began to shut down, it was the death blow Can-Am leaders knew was coming.

  What was once a thriving community in Brooklyn was soon reduced to little more than a few dozen families. Their people’s very existence was threatened. Drastic measures were needed, and so were heroes—heroes who would do whatever it took to save their people. Which was why Mudd, soon after she and Humphrey married, vowed to have as many children as she could.

  A dozen, she said.

  A dozen? asked Humphrey.

  Sons, Mudd insisted, for Cannibals are a patrilineal people. Sons who will carry on our name and build our nation.

  Yeah, but a dozen?

  Mudd got to her feet; she was an enormous woman, six foot four in her bare size-twelve feet. Humphrey was a slight man, and she liked to remind him of that whenever she sensed resistance.

  There is a war going on, Humphrey Seltzer, she said, wagging her finger in his face, her hand the size of his head. A covert war, a guerrilla war, undeclared but undeniable. The battleground is not in the Middle East or Europe or Africa. No, Humphrey. It is in the wombs and testicles of the people of the world. We are engaged in an international, winner-take-all fuck-a-thon. A war for existence, a war for domination. The strategy is fucking, Humphrey, and the weapons are babies.

  I know, he sighed, for this was not the first time she had espoused this worldview. But a dozen?

  From Brooklyn to Palestine, she continued, from the Ukraine to China, people are fucking themselves into majorities—Mexicans, Jews, Muslims, Chinese, Japanese, brown, black, white, polka-dot, you name it—fucking themselves into power while fucking their enemies into irrelevance. Do you know how many kids the average Muslim has? Ten. Jews have even more. And don’t get me started with the Chinese. You drive through their communities all the time, Hump, you see them. They’re crawling out the goddamned windows.

  But twelve sons, Mudd, said Humphrey. On a taxi driver’s salary?

  But Mudd was adamant—the Ancient Spirits will provide, she insisted—and Humphrey was in love, and so he dutifully performed as she had commanded.

  Nine months later, Mudd gave birth to a healthy boy, and she named him First.

  First? Humphrey asked.

  First, she said. And the next shall be Second. I’m keeping count, Humphrey. I’m keeping score.

  Humphrey was concerned that such a naming scheme would harm the child’s sense of self-worth; to think of himself as just a number, as mere ballast, the valuation of his individual being reduced to membership in a group—surely that would create emotional problems further down the road.

  Just a number? she asked. What could be more important than to be a number? They’re our people’s new tribes—our future, Humphrey, like the tribes of Abraham.

  Jacob, he corrected her.

  Were they just numbers? she asked. Were the apostles just numbers?

  No, said Humphrey. They had names.

  Name them.

  Luke. John.

  Keep going.

  I don’t know. Steve.

  Mudd scoffed. You’d remember them if they were numbers, she said. Our people are going to remember our children, Humphrey, for our children shall repopulate our people, as God Himself has promised.

  Promises, promises, Humphrey grumbled.

  Mudd gasped to hear her husband speak so. Cannibal-Americans have always been a religious people, but damned to secrecy as they were, for as long as they were, the specifics of their spiritual beliefs were now lost, and nobody was certain any longer just what religion it was they followed. Some claimed Cannibals were Christian, some claimed they were Jewish, some claimed they were Muslim, a difference of opinion that resulted in predictably divisive results. The enmity between Christian Cannibal-Americans, Jewish Cannibal-Americans, and Muslim Cannibal-Americans fractured their already small community, and so the Ancients in their great wisdom declared that while it was forbidden to deny the existence of God, it was even more forbidden to say with any certainty who that God was, or what He might want of us, except to say for certain that He didn’t want anyone to say for certain who He was, or it might cause people to come to blows. Cannibals are thus unique among the religious peoples of the world in that the most devout vehemently deny knowing anything, often referring to God as Whoever or Someone to underscore their pious uncertainty; it is only the despised heathens who destructively preach the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, or claim that the Quran is the literal word of God. Humphrey, personally, preferred the Old Testament to the New; he didn’t think himself a Jewish Cannibal-American, but the Judaic concept of an Asshole God fit his generally negative view of the universe. Mudd, meanwhile, while not declaring herself a Christian Can-Am, preferred the New Testament, which told the story of Jesus, who she said was a Cannibal.

  Eat my flesh and drink my blood? she said to Seventh. Jew, my ass. Christ was a Cannibal, just like you and me.

  Mudd’s naming system worked as planned for the first five children, until the terrible night when Sixth died. He was just five years old, his death sudden and without warning. Mudd wept, not because of the loss of her child, but because Seventh, who was four at the time, and Eighth, who was two, were now no longer her seventh and eighth children. Sixth was dead, so Seventh was now sixth, and Eighth was now seventh, and Mudd was pregnant with Ninth, who would be eighth. The whole naming system was fucked.

  Her plan ruined, or at the very least made infinitely more complex, Mudd took to bed in debilitating sorrow, a sorrow from which she refused to emerge. Humphrey begged her to think of the health of the child in her womb, and, hoping to relieve her spirits, promised that they would now have thirteen children (including Sixth), thereby netting twelve in the end. Ninth was born a few months later, without incident, but when a child dies, so often does the marriage that created it, and that is what happened to Mudd and Humphrey Seltzer. Gloom, blame, and recrimination filled the Seltzer home, and Humphrey swore loudly and often that as soon as his promise of husbandry was fulfilled, he would leave Mudd and never see her again. A year later Mudd gave birth to Tenth, two years after that she bore the twins Eleventh and Twelfth, and when she announced, two years after that, that she was pregnant with Thirteenth, Humphrey raised his hands overhead, said, I’m out, packed his bags, and left that very night. That was not the end of the story, though, for a few months later, a routine sonogram revealed that Mudd’s thirteenth child was, tragically, a girl.

  What have I done to Someone, Mudd wept as she looked at the sonogram, to deserve such punishment?

  Mudd was furious with Humphrey for not delivering his promised dozen males, but Hu
mphrey wouldn’t accept her calls, and eventually changed his number. She declared him a traitor, an enemy of his people, and worse than Jack Nicholson.

  When the baby was born a few months later, the thirteenth child who should have been her twelfth boy but was instead her first girl, Mudd named her Zero.

  Because, Mudd said, she didn’t count.

  * * *

  • • •

  Picture a candelabra, Mudd used to tell Seventh when he was a child. A beautiful, silver candelabra, crafted by the world’s finest silversmiths, with a tall ornate stem atop of which sit three beautiful candles. One is red, one is white, and one is blue. The candles, too, are the finest of their kind, tall and without blemish and tapered gently from their strong bases to their elegant tips. Everyone who sees them gasps at their beauty, each one a work of utter perfection.

  And then the candles are lit, said Mudd. Fire scorches the wicks. Black smoke rises from their tortured bodies. They begin to melt, to weaken, to die. They cry out in anguish. What was once beautiful becomes grotesque, a dull pool of molten wax with no shape or form, no identity or character. The blue mixes with the red, the red with the white, the white with the blue, until there is nothing left of any of them but a dull colorless mass, which entombs the once-beautiful candelabra within its stiffening remains, destroying all that was perfect and good.

  She took Seventh’s hands in hers.

  The flame, said Mudd, is America.

  With her enormous finger, she delicately brushed the hair from his brow.

  And you, my son, she said, you are the beautiful candle.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sixth died from an unspecified disease. Flu, maybe. Maybe something worse. Nobody knew for sure. One day he was there, Mudd said, the next day he was gone. She wept when she told Seventh the story:

  She had done everything she could. She had called the doctor, called the hospital. They all told her the same thing: It’s just a bug; he’ll get over it. Rest and fluids, they said.

  I was alone, she said. I was terrified. Your father was off who-knows-where, while every minute our poor child inched closer and closer to death. I closed Sixth’s door, afraid you or your brothers would catch whatever he had. And then one night, the coughing stopped. The coughing stopped and I thought he was better, but in the morning . . . he was gone.

  Seventh was only four at the time of Sixth’s death, and didn’t remember much about it. All he knew for sure was that after Sixth died, the family was never the same again.

  And that he couldn’t have been happier.

  Sixth’s death was a devastating blow to Mudd, and something changed in her after. She weakened, softened. Once bellicose and abusive, she was now merely melodramatic and pathetic. She stayed in bed for weeks at a time. The family battles, which she often instigated, suddenly ceased. The house, once filled with shouting, was now blissfully silent. There was no love, but there was less hate, and for that Seventh was grateful.

  And for that Seventh berated himself.

  What kind of a person is happy their brother has died? he chastised himself.

  What kind of a person is happy their mother has broken?

  He knew what kind:

  A bad person.

  And so young Seventh resolved to be good, and he devoted himself ever after to saving his family, and to saving Mudd, and to saving all his people.

  Even if it meant destroying himself.

  * * *

  • • •

  Like most New Yorkers, the first thing Seventh did when he climbed into a taxi was turn off the damned taxi TV, jabbing furiously at the filthy touch screen until the screeching demon turned black and died. Of course because every other passenger did exactly the same thing, the screen itself was covered in every disease known to man, along with a few unknown, a screen you were required to touch, with a bare finger, if you hoped to silence it.

  This was the choice modern man was faced with, thought Seventh as the cab pulled away from the curb and headed for Brooklyn: succumb to the spiritual death of celebrity news and lame talk-show comedy, or expose yourself to the physical death brought on by whatever virus covered the screen.

  It was Jimmy Kimmel or the plague.

  Tough call.

  Seventh hated TV, and he wondered now if he learned this hatred from Mudd. Ever since he could remember, she had preached that television was the enemy of their people, a weapon of propaganda used to spread negative Cannibal stereotypes. The series she hated most was Gilligan’s Island, which presented the Cannibal people—headhunters, they called them—as easily duped face-painted savages dressed in straw hula skirts, their noses pierced with the ghastly bones of their victims.

  We’re the savages? Mudd would rail. Our people invented the wheel! We invented the knife, we invented the book! We invented fire! They toss their mothers into a filthy pit, six feet in the ground, in the dirt and the mud. To worms they give their beloveds, to vermin, to maggots. And we’re the savages? Lousy Sherwoods.

  Mudd was a hateful woman who, like other hateful people, insisted her bigotry was well-founded. It was impossible to say which people she hated the most—her hatred went through phases: she hated black people in the Eighties, Latinos in the Nineties, back to black people at the turn of the century, then Muslims and Chinese ever since—but whoever was in first, Jews were always somewhere in the top three. She called them Sherwoods, after the Jew she despised most of all, Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of Gilligan’s Island.

  Can you imagine if I made a TV show that called Jews moneyhunters? she raged. A show where all the characters lived in terror that the evil Jews might show up? They’d lock me up. They’d throw away the key. But these lousy Sherwoods can say whatever they want about us.

  As the taxi headed across town, Seventh texted Carol.

  You good? he asked.

  Yep, she replied. You?

  Good, he lied. Heading into a meeting.

  Seventh hated lying to Carol, but he didn’t have much choice; she would have been surprised to hear that he was on his way to see his mother, given he told her when they met that his mother was dead.

  She died when I was a child, he said.

  How? Carol had asked.

  He shrugged. Nobody knew for sure, he said. One day she was there, the next day she was gone.

  Carol’s eyes filled with the boundless compassion he had fallen so deeply in love with.

  So you never knew what it was like to have a mother? she had asked.

  No, he had said.

  That, at least, was the truth.

  How was Reese this morning? he texted.

  Seventh recalled phoning Dr. Isaacson the night their daughter, Reese, was born, beside himself with anxiety and racked with doubt about his ability to be a good father.

  What does a father do, Doctor? Seventh had begged him. Tell me, please; I have no idea.

  You love her, Dr. Isaacson had said. Unconditionally. For who she is, not for what you want her to be.

  Seventh didn’t buy it.

  That sounds too easy, he had said.

  Then why do so few people seem able to do it? Dr. Isaacson asked.

  With no other option, Seventh and Carol decided to give the whole love thing a shot. Reese was six years old now, and the Unconditional Love Experiment, as he and Carol had referred to it, was thus far proving Dr. Isaacson right. Reese was already everything Seventh was not: confident, self-assured, brave.

  Carol texted back: She was great. Show starts at 8. You gonna make it?

  Seventh was determined to be the father his father had not been, and so, like every father determined to be the father their father had not been, there wasn’t a single event in Reese’s life he missed: birthdays, doctor visits, firsts of any and every kind. Most of these he attended happily, but school functions were brutal, and toni
ght was the Roosevelt Elementary talent show. Short of the even more heinous Grandparents’ Day, no school function was as dispiriting as the talent show. He wasn’t sure if that was because so few of the children had talent or because so few of the parents seemed aware of it. Or maybe it was just because the parents cheering their children reminded him of those things he had never received himself—love, freedom to be himself, encouragement to follow his dreams. It was difficult to be happy for the winners of the Functioning Family Sweepstakes when you grew up emotionally broke.

  Reese, having recently fallen under the spell of a YouTube influencer, had gotten into contortion. Backbends, chest stands, splits. For the talent show, she would be cramming herself into a cardboard box.

  She spends her time getting into boxes, thought Seventh. I spent my life trying to get out of one.

  He looked up; ahead of him loomed the Brooklyn Bridge, which he was never able to look at without remembering the childhood he’d spent on the other side of it.

  Of course, he texted Carol.

  I can’t wait.

  * * *

  • • •

  First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth grew up in what Seventh referred to as the BD era of the family—Before the Death, referring to the tragic passing of Sixth. Those early BD years were the years when Mudd was at her loudest and most domineering, years marked by terrible feuding and volatility, the house a war zone. Then Sixth died, and the fire went out of her. She was still manipulative, combative, and controlling, but that toxic stew was now seasoned with heavy doses of grief and self-pity. And so Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, and Zero grew up in a somewhat different family—AD, Seventh called it, After the Death—than First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth. The BD siblings (except for Third and Fifth) hated Mudd and couldn’t understand why their AD siblings did not, and the AD siblings (except for Ninth, Eleventh, and Twelfth) pitied Mudd and could not understand how their BD siblings could be so cold and uncaring.