Portnoy’s Complaint

And did my mother oblige? Did Sophie put together the two tits and the two legs and come up with four? Me it seems to have taken two and a half decades to do such steep calculation. Oh, I must be making this up, really. My father… and a shikse? Can't be. Was beyond his ken. My own father- fucked shikses? I'll admit under duress that he fucked my mother… but shikses? I can no more imagine him knocking over a gas station.

But then why is she shouting at him so, what is this scene of accusation and denial, of castigation and threat and unending tears… what is this all about except that he has done something that is very bad and maybe even unforgivable? The scene itself is like some piece of heavy furniture that sits in my mind and will not budge-which leads me to believe that, yes, it actually did happen. My sister, I see, is hiding behind my mother: Hannah is clutching her around the middle and whimpering, while my mother's own tears are tremendous and fall from her face all the way to the linoleum floor. Simultaneously with the tears she is screaming so loud at him that her veins stand out-and screaming at me, too, because, looking further into this thing, I find that while Hannah hides behind my mother, I take refuge behind the culprit himself.

Oh, this is pure fantasy, this is right out of the casebook, is it not? No, no, that is nobody else's father but my own who now brings his fist down on the kitchen table and shouts back at her, "I did no such thing! That is a lie and wrong!" Only wait a minute-it's me who is screaming "I didn't do it!" The culprit is me! And why my mother weeps so is because my father refuses to potch my behind, which she promised would be potched, "and good," when he found out the terrible thing I had done.

When I am bad and rotten in small ways she can manage me herself: she has, you recall-I know I recall!-only to put me in my coat and galoshes-oh, nice touch, Morn, those galoshes!-lock me out of the house (lock me out of the house!) and announce through the door that she is never going to let me in again, so I might as well be off and into my new life; she has only to take that simple and swift course of action to get instantaneously a confession, a self-scorification, and, if she should want it, a signed warranty that I will be one hundred percent pure and good for the rest of my life-all this if only I am allowed back inside that door, where they happen to have my bed and my clothes and the refrigerator. But when I am really wicked, so evil that she can only raise her arms to God Almighty to ask Him what she has done to deserve such a child, at such times my father is called in to mete out justice; my mother is herself too sensitive, too fine a creature, it turns out, to administer corporal punishment: "It hurts me," I hear her explain to my Aunt Clara, "more than it hurts him. That's the kind of person I am. I can't do it, and that's that." Oh, poor Mother.