Linger Awhile

18 Irving Goodman

11 January 2004. There isn’t just one reality, there are lots of them. No, there’s just the one and it contains all the others. It’s a polyhedron and each plane is a window to a different reality. What’s happening now is not the same kind of reality as some I remember.

When I was little we lived thirty miles away from Philadelphia and we used to drive in on Sundays to visit our relatives. My uncle Barney had a drug store at 12th and Poplar in what was then called a ‘colored’ neighborhood. There was a display window in which hung two amphora-shaped glass vessels suspended by chains. The one on the left contained a beautiful red liquid; the one on the right was filled with green. There is just such a drug store in a painting by Edward Hopper, with PRESCRIPTIONS DRUGS and EXLAX across the top of the window. There must have been a lot of constipation at that time. The Ex-Lax slogan was ‘When Nature forgets, remember Ex-Lax’. I don’t think Uncle Barney’s window said EX–LAX. He had many customers who came in with cuts from razor fights and said, ‘Fix me up, Doc.’

There was no soda fountain that I remember but I was often given chewing gum. The rooms behind and above the drug store were divided by bead curtains made of little pink and yellow glass sticks that clicked as you passed through them. They looked like candy. The lampshades also had little pink and yellow glass sticks hanging from them. In an upstairs bedroom lay my mother’s father whom we called Zayda (Grandfather). The room smelled medicinal. He spoke no English but gave me dimes. Tante Celia was Uncle Barney’s wife and Uncle Izzy, pronounced Easy, from my father’s side lived there also. Uncle Easy wore a truss. My cousins Daniel and Leonard and Bobby were there too. Did we play Parcheesi? There are flavours that one tastes not with the mouth but with the mind. I taste the flavour of those Sundays as I write this: the street lamps in the evening; the brilliant red and green vessels in the illuminated window. Their reality was not the same as what I have now.

My thoughts about Justine change from moment to moment. I was naturally offended by her rejection of me but I no longer am. To be called up out of the dead as she was must be a terrifying experience and her being must be an uneasy construct of shifting realities that might collapse at any moment into nothingness. I can’t imagine her memories.