HER MOTHER (C)1998 Alan M. Schwartz A bright ray of hope in my life is that my sweetie's remaining family - her 76-year old mother - is a rabidly anti-Semitic Alsatian and my remaining family - my 76-year mother - despises Germans and French with Talmudic fervor. They have never met. We conspire to keep them apart, the Mom and the anti-Mom (though more likely each is a superposition of loathsome states until mutual observation), until our wedding day. Mutual massive cardiac infarcts or cerebrovascular blow outs would not be wholly unwelcome. Christian (honored in the breach) Bernice with her failing memory and Jewish (devout by omission) Rita with her failing corpus occupy opposite coasts. Rita lives in the shtetl, Brooklyn, 2800 miles distant while Bernice simmers 20 miles up the California coast. Rita cannot drive, which keeps her penned with my sister way north of LA when that family matriarch comes visiting. Over the decades I fastidiously trained mother to savor the absence of my presence. Bernice could drive her bright red Buick pimpmobile, but it is beneath her. My sweetie burns the telephone lines nightly and does a 40 mile round trip each weekend. It is by an expression of my love plus powerful personal detachment that I often accompany her to her familial manse, complete with epoxy/pebble driveway. Bernice has K-Mart sensibilities. The warning klaxon of a pathological household is a hidden kitchen garbage can. Manly men have them sized big and boldly displayed. Girly households have a petite little bag in its sanitary shield in its holder in its decorator pouch hanging under the sink, with the can of scented spray. Beware white carpets ("don't you DARE read the Sunday paper in the living room!"), multitudinous shelves covered with oodles of dust- sucking kitsch rubble, and bathroom soap that implants an unctuous scum in your skin. The epoxy/pebble driveway leads to all this and less, for glamorizing said home's internals is also a muddle of Japanese/Chinese/Turkish affectation. Add a hot tub off the main bedroom and the not infrequent visit by a grizzled, ah, stud and you have it all. Long Beach, CA and environs are economically depressed. That means your backing into a parking stall neat as a pin gets you a fat parking ticket just as your key leaves your car door. It is against the law, except where backing in is mandatory, and both depend upon what sign is mounted that morning. I offered to post Bernice as bail on the spot (for which act I paid later in the evening. Naughty me). Alas, even her corneas belong to Medicare. The meter bitch checked it out on her remote terminal before dropping a meaty Accounts Payable on the adjacent car whose front wheel touched a white line. We then proceeded to enjoy lunch in a commercial establishment as stomach acid and bile seasoned my every mouthful. Reminded me of my natal home, it did. My GI tract spent childhood trying to burst out of my navel and strangle me. Rita's kitchen was fastidiously noxious. We subsequently repaired back to epoxy/pebble splendor with celerity, for an elderly knee was being bothersome. The house was pinning both the hygrometer and the thermometer as California summer 1998 was humid Hell. I lunged for the thermostat with sweaty desperation; Bernice went to fire up the hot tub. It was like negotiating with a pit bull. Her white couch was sheathed in portable radiation shielding and I was allowed to sit down, away from the thermostat. I looked toward my sweetie, "Your mascara is melting." She looked at me and said, "I'm not wearing mascara." It might have been secondary to a minor containment failure of Third World biomunitions being smuggled into the Port of Los Angeles for nefarious deeds, or just a dab of putrefying California industrial real estate air. It could have been manifestation of an allergy, or ischemic tissue necrosis. Whatever it was, it was time to go home. We sat in pools of our own exuded bodily fluids in a broiling California freeway traffic jam as every dashboard gauge needle arced toward places unvisited since the Big Bang. I reminisced about how I abhorred each of the many dull, clouded facets of my distaff progenitor. My sweetie played counterpoint, detailing each ghastly aspect of her antecedent's vicious, smothering love. We could have sealed a pact to murder an entire city, or run naked and babbling amidst steaming hulks stalled along the stained concrete ribbon. "Marriage." "Absolutely." Revenge is a dish best served cold.