Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison Page A

the tears. “Mommmm, please! ”
    “I only wanted to do right for you. If I knew why I was sent back, what it was for, maybe I could make you happy, my son.”
    “Mom, you’ll make me happy as a pig in slop if you’ll just go away for a while and stop snooping on me.”
    “I’ll do that.”
    And she was gone.
    When it became obvious that she was gone, Lance went right out and picked up a girl in a bar.
    And it was not until they were in bed that she came back.
    “I turn my back a second and he’s shtupping a bum from the streets. That I should live to see this!”
    Lance had been way under the covers. The girl, whose name was Chrissy, had advised him she was using a new brand of macrobiotic personal hygiene spray, and he had been trying to decide if the taste was, in fact, as asserted, papaya and coconut, or bean sprout and avocado, as his taste buds insisted. Chrissy gasped and squealed. “We’re not alone here!” she said. Lance struggled up from the depths; as his head emerged from beneath the sheet, he heard his mother ask, “She isn’t even Jewish, is she?”
    “Mom!”
    Chrissy squealed again. “ Mom? ”
    “It’s just a ghost, don’t worry about it,” Lance said reassuringly. Then, to the air, “Mom, will you, fer chrissakes, get out of here? This is in very poor taste.”
    “Talk to me taste, Lance my darling. That I should live to see such a thing.”
    “ Will you stop saying that?!? ” He was getting hysterical.
    “A shiksa , a Gentile yet. The shame of it.”
    “Mom, the goyim are for practice!”
    “I’m getting the hell out of here,” Chrissy said, leaping out of the bed, long brown hair flying.
    “Put on your clothes, you bummerkeh ,” Lance’s mother shrilled. “Oh, God, if I only had a wet towel, a coat hanger, a can of Mace, some thing, anything!! ”
    And there was such a howling and shrieking and jumping and yowling and shoving and slapping and screaming and cursing and pleading and bruising as had never been heard in that block in the San Fernando Valley. And when it was over and Chrissy had disappeared into the night, to no one knew where, Lance sat in the middle of the bedroom floor weeping–not over his being haunted, not over his mother’s death, not over his predicament: over his lost erection.
    And it was all downhill from there. Lance was sure of it. Mom trying to soothe him did not help in the least.
    “Sweetheart, don’t cry. I’m sorry. I lost my head, you’ll excuse the expression. But it’s all for the best.”
    “It’s not for the best. I’m horny.”
    “She wasn’t for you.”
    “She was for me, she was for me,” he screamed.
    “Not a shiksa . For you a nice, cute girl of a Semitic persuasion.”
    “I hate Jewish girls. Audrey was a Jewish girl; Bernice was a Jewish girl; that awful Darlene you fixed me up with from the laundromat, she was a Jewish girl; I hated them all. We have nothing in common.”
    “You just haven’t found the right girl yet.”
    “I HATE JEWISH GIRLS! THEY’RE ALL LIKE YOU!”
    “May God wash your mouth out with a bar of Fels-Naptha,” his mother said in reverential tones. Then there was a meaningful pause and, as though she had had an epiphany, she said, “ That’s why I was sent back. To find you a nice girl, a partner to go with you on the road of life, a loving mate who also not incidentally could be a very terrific cook. That’s what I can do to make you happy, Lance, my sweetness. I can find someone to carry on for me now that I’m no longer able to provide for you, and by the way, that nafkeh left a pair of underpants in the bathroom, I’d appreciate your burning them at your earliest opportunity.”
    Lance sat on the floor and hung his head, rocked back and forth and kept devising, then discarding, imaginative ways to take his own life.
     
    The weeks that followed made World War II seem like an inept performance of Gilbert & Sullivan. Mom was everywhere. At his job. (Lance was an instructor for a