Free Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth Page A

which she has put her lips-for the first time in my life the idea fills me with revulsion! Take. I'm not thirsty. Look how you're perspiring. I'm not thirsty. Don't be polite all of a sudden. But I don't like ginger ale. You? Don't like ginger ale? No Since when? Oh, God! She's alive, and so we are at it again-she's alive, and right off the bat we're starting in!
    She tells me how Rabbi Warshaw came and sat and talked with her for a whole half hour before-as she now so graphically puts it-she went under the knife. Wasn't hat nice? Wasn't that thoughtful? (Only twenty-four hours out of the anesthetic, and she knows, you see, that I refused to change out of my Levis for the holiday! ) The woman who is sharing the room with her, whose loving, devouring gaze I am trying to edge out of, and whose opinion, as I remember it, nobody had asked for, takes it upon herself to announce that Rabbi Warshaw is one of the most revered men in all of Newark. Re-ver-ed. Three syllables, as the rabbi himself would enunciate it, in his mighty Anglo-oracular style. I begin to lightly pound at the pocket of my baseball mitt, a signal that I am about ready to go, if only someone will let me. He loves baseball, he could play baseball twelve months a year, my mother tells Mrs. Re-ver-ed. I mumble that I have a league game. It's the finals. For the championship. Okay, says my mother, and lovingly, you came, you did your duty, now run-run to your league   game. I can hear in her voice how happy and relieved she is to find herself alive on this beautiful September afternoon . . . And isn't it a relief for me, too? Isn't this what I prayed for, to a God I do not even believe is there? Wasn't the unthinkable thing life without her to cook for us, to clean for us, to . . . to everything for us! This is what I prayed and wept for: that she should come out at the other end of her operation, and be alive. And then come home, to be once again our one and only mother. Run, my baby-boy, my mother croons to me, and sweetly-oh, she can be so sweet and good to me, so motherly! she will spend hour after hour playing canasta with me, when I am sick and in bed as she is now: imagine, the ginger ale the nurse has brought for her because she has had a serious operation, she offers to me , because I'm overheated! Yes, she will give me the food out of her mouth, that's a proven fact! And still I will not stay five full minutes at her bedside. Run, says my mother, while Mrs. Re-ver-ed, who in no time at all has managed to make herself my enemy, and for the rest of my life, Mrs. Re-ver-ed says, Soon Mother will be home, soon everything will be just like ordinary . . . Sure, run, run, they all run these days, says the kind and understanding lady-oh, they are all so kind and understanding, I want to strangle them!- walking they never heard of, God bless them.
    So I run. Do I run! Having spent maybe two fretful minutes with her-two minutes of my precious time, even though just the day before, the doctors stuck right up her dress ( so I imagined it, before my mother reminded me of the knife, our knife ) some kind of horrible shovel with which to scoop out what had gone rotten inside her body. They reached up and pulled down out of her just what she used to reach up and pull down out of the dead chicken. And threw it in the garbage can. Where I was conceived and carried, there now is nothing . A void! Poor Mother! How can I rush to leave her like this, after what she has just gone through? After all she has given me-my very life!-how can I be so cruel? Will you leave me, my baby-boy, will you ever leave Mommy? Never, I would answer, never, never, never . . . And yet now that she is hollowed out, I cannot even look her in the eye! And have avoided doing so ever since! Oh, there is her pale red hair, spread across the pillow in long strands of springy ringlets that I might never have seen again . There are the faint moons of freckles that she says used to cover her entire face when