I remember that he wrote his shopping list backwards, in Hebrew, in tiny, birdlike marks before driving out to Tagus Hills, the new shopping center with the new supermarket, and then he stood in the area beyond the cashiers, the tight carpet striped green and yellow with starbursts of white splashed across it, and squinted at his list as if he needed assistance. Women stopped, asked him if he was lost, drawn in by his wispy beard, and he pointed to the list and said that his elderly mother had jotted it down, poor thing, old country, you know, mind going fast. Most would cluck their tongues and move on, mimicking his nervous motions when they gained safe distance, but every fifth or tenth (he didn’t care) would reach out and touch his wrist with their fingers. Later, when he woke in their bed, when he looked across the room and saw a brassiere hanging over a chair or remembered the whoosh of breath that had escaped from the woman’s mouth as he had taken up position, he thought of the list still tucked into his pocket. Hebrew. Who would have guessed? Porter, of course, was a name that had been designed by his great-grandfather, an American sleight. Tagus.“Take that, goyim,” he thought, and stroked his wispy beard, and stroked the bare hip of the woman who had fallen for it.
©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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