Watch Your Mouth Read Online Free Page A

to choose. She put hers in a clear bag while we toweled off, and by the time we hit the road, driving over the train tracks and spilling coffee on my jeans that Cyn could still taste on my legs come noon, Mrs. Glass had entered the Japa- nese Specialty Market where the imported rice wine was stacked neatly on shelves next to hand-calligraphed signs. She Jeeped back to Byron Circle and clopped primly past the hedges in her much-needed high-heeled shoes, the fish dangling from her wrist like a raw purse. The salmon soaked in sake all day long while Mrs. Glass mixed papier-maˆche´ at the Pittsburgh Opera and Cyn and I sped past Amish farms and fast-food restaurants. By the time Mrs. Glass had put the finishing touches on the coffin and began work on Die Juden and Cyn and I reached the city limits, the fish had a thick, somewhat gelatinous skin to it, which was to harden to a flaky shell when Mrs. Glass popped it into the oven along with a special ginger-honey paste she’d put aside the night before. That evening, with firework French horns from the orchestra, the Glass family eats the meal rav- enously and juicily, like we’re gutting something.
    “Quality food means quality time,” Dr. Glass announced in a simple recitativo, a harpsichord strumming behind him. I could tell he’d said this all the time.
    “Right, Dad,” Steven said, spearing a bean.
    “No, no,” his father said. “I want to explain to Joseph why we’re eating so well.”
    “Because it tastes good?” I asked. Cyn smiled and looked down at the cracked plate.
    He smiled and touched his beard, a beneficent rabbi. “No,” he said. “It’s because a good meal makes everybody happy. Ju- daism is a religion which places great spiritual importance on
    food—we fast to focus ourselves for atonement on Yom Kippur, we refrain from eating leavened bread as we celebrate attaining freedom during Passover and if we kept the strictest laws, we’d have a kosher kitchen, all the food becoming a ritual.”
    “We have a new rabbi,” Mrs. Glass said, “who Ben really likes.”
    “Just so you don’t think he always talks like this,” said Steven. “In the modern day, the evening meal is often the only time when the family can be together. The time should be quality .
    You know what Rabbi Tsouris calls it? Family-making .”
    Mrs. Glass, Steven and Cyn laughed at the same pitch as each other, as do the trumpets which along with the snare drum will be used throughout to indicate jollity. I pursed my lips into what I hoped was a non-mocking, attentive expression. Gramma spat out a bone.
    “Family-making?” Cyn asked incredulously. “It sounds like— well—” Foreboding from quivering violas.
    “Family-making,” the good doctor said, smiling blandly, nod- ding sagely. “Anyway, if we have quality food, the meal can achieve spirituality. So I feel a personal commitment to having really delicious food, every night.”
    “Actually,” Mrs. Glass said, “it’s me who has the commitment to having delicious food. I’m the one who gets up in the early morning to go to that fish morgue.”
    “But it’s my commitment,” Dr. Glass said. It was the first time I saw this in Cyn’s father: the implacable and irritating sure- footedness of those who are grandiose and wrong. “ You may make the food, but it’s me who really commits to having it be good.”
    Gramma coughed, wet and loud and startled me and I
    dropped my fork. She kept coughing; she hadn’t said a word for all of dinner and now she was dominating the conversation. Dr. Glass moved like he’d been trained for such scenarios, which of course he had been, but all he did was stand behind her and unroll his sleeves. I thought for one moment he was going to reach into Gramma’s mouth and pull out the troublesome bite, like veterinarians on public television who reach into the birth- ing cow, but he just stood there in medical readiness until she coughed it out by herself and it flew at the wall