Mentsch

Minnie was no slouch at counterpunching. "At least you get meat. Even with our ration stamps and being extra nice to Ross the butcher, we’re lucky to have a bit of chop meat every week, seven points a pound--but it’s all right, we make do." Minnie wiped her eyeglasses with her apron. "At least one member of my family gets all he wants to eat. It’s like a knife in my heart when my children and my husband have to leave the table hungry. If they complain, I have to tell them to eat bread-and-butter--I’ll bet you never have to do that to fill your stomach."

"Ma, you’re making me feel bad about the party and all the great eats--I never should have come home." Sam began to hit hard, parried glancing blows, saving gut punches for their greatest effect.

"Bite your tongue!" Minnie snapped. "Don’t ever let me hear that talk from you again."

"Hey Ma, lay off--it’s enough, already."

Minnie leaned against the sink. Her face took on the sere appearance of an ancient sage. No one, except her first-born son, ever questioned her words or her authority. In this house she was the undisputed Queen, the fountainhead of wisdom...Sam had struck a raw nerve. She pointed a shaking forefinger at her beloved offspring, her voice trembled with emotion. "I can only hope that some day, some day my son, your child will say to you what you are saying to me today." Her shoulders quivered as she turned away.

Sam stepped back, shaken by the fierce bite of his mother’s onslaught. His was a conditioned response, forged by a hundred such incidents in his life. Whenever she attacked in force, he had always retreated--for a moment the room seemed to recede into darkness, his mother stood illuminated by a single beam of sunlight. Sam blinked his eyes. He looked at his mother as if he had never seen her before--she was changing before his eyes, shrinking, wrinkling, aging, becoming a person, not his mother. When he was small she had towered over him, physically as well as emotionally. She was all he could see or hear or smell or touch...she filled his world. She had never been smaller than he, either in size or strength.

Suddenly, with a stranger’s eyes, he saw her as an aging gray-haired woman, short, robust, with a stern visage; actually a little woman, with a super-sized air of authority--not his mother at all...not the mother who had shrieked her agony when he was born, monitored his every move, suckled, bathed, and diapered him. Not that mother. This was a little old lady whose strengths came from an inherited monumental ego, the absolute ruler of her tribe. Sam could see that she was an aging woman who couldn’t bear to give up her fading role as matriarch, who fought every threat to her domination with sharp words and bluff, a flashing eye, a stern, shaking forefinger.

Sam choked back laughter--but that would be throwing gasoline onto smoldering embers. The ferocious tigress who had led him by the nose for all his life was in reality a pussycat, who rubbed and mewed at his ankles for a comforting pat. The poor creature was begging for attention the only way she knew, dealing from strength, unwilling to accept the reality that each day as she got older, her children were becoming more independent, less needful of her direction. She could be pitied, tickled, kidded, and unquestionably loved, but never taken seriously, never feared again.

The glistening flash of revelation zapped Sam, infusing him with fresh strength, burning away one more childhood inhibition...he shivered. He would always love her, especially now that he understood her as one caring adult does another. It wasn’t the kind of love that looks for reasons or demands explanations. It was, perhaps, a genetic bequest over which he had no more control than the color of his eyes, or the shape of his ears. Because of that love, he would play the game, her game, but with different rules. Perhaps he had inherited some of that ego. Sam felt great! Can a snake feel so good when it bursts its skin and sheds the chrysalis of its former self?

At the same time he was struck by another thing he saw in his mother’s face, something he had only thought about before. In that instant he saw the pattern of his inheritance from Earliest Times, the same visage repeated over and over, the strength and determination and fierce love that had carried his bloodline from the dim past to that moment. That face expressed the living embodiment of centuries of selective breeding, of a dominant strain, a brutally tough survival gene, a flame that would not be easily extinguished. In that instant, Sam felt a compelling sense of both antiquity and contemporary coexistence. The sensation, never visited to him before, moved him deeply. Although the thought filled a split-second in the passage of time, he knew it was a key turning point in the years of his life.

Sister Lulu, her cheeks wet with tears, crept into the breach. She loved them both. "Sammy dear, we’re so glad you came home! Let’s not bicker." She kissed them. On cue, Sam became contrite--he knew how to jump when his mother cracked the whip, even though he knew it had become a fun thing, to preserve the illusion, to play her game.

"Gee Ma, I didn’t mean it," Sam said.

Minnie turned. Having enjoyed working through a pleasurable sulk, she was slower to make up, she blew her nose in her apron. "I’m glad you’re so happy in the Army. Believe me, civilian life isn’t much fun--I try to smile, but it’s a good thing you can’t see into my heart."

Sam chuckled. "You never change, do you?"

"What do you mean?" His mother’s expression took on a fusion of hurt and menace.

"When will you learn when to turn it off?"

Minnie looked into her son’s eyes, her face became solemn. She paused, marshaled her thoughts, knew exactly what Sam was saying. "My darling," she said, "you’ll have to use me up the way I am." It was the closest she ever came to surrender. Sam grabbed and hugged her, he kissed the face, so often washed with tears. "I wouldn’t want you any other way."