The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
Author:Joshua Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00
8.
This was the weather with which we began 1960: cold. All I wanted was to stay in my study, sitting in front of my typewriter atop my newly gained eight winter-break pounds, grading finals and trying to make some thoughts about antebellum deficits and debts. But unfortunately, I had a visitor coming. January is no friend to the social.
Judy went back to Corbindale High on Monday the 4th, but the college term didnât start up again until Monday the 18th, when the snows started up again too, intensified through Tuesday, and by Wednesday had piled up to half-a-foot.
There was no point in shoveling except to rid myself of the headache Iâd woken up with, so I bundled myself and, beginning curbside, did the dig, kick, scoop, dumping wide margins past the dead flowerbeds that lined the walk. By the time I got to the stoop, heaving, steaming, the curb was once again enrimed and I slunk inside to shower.
Coming downstairs flagrant with aftershave, the casement clock was chiming noon and I checked the window. The walkway was once again pure white.
In the kitchen, Edith had the knives out. Her apron strings cinched tight, she was wielding steel through cheeses, carving apples into broken swans.
âItâs bad out there. Maybe heâll cancel?â
It was almost distressing, the size of the spread sheâd put together. Who, after Christmas, could stand another calorie? Who had an appetite for anything, up to and including even banter? I wasnât sure what Edith was trying to prove, or to whom: whether she was going overboard to prove her wifeliness or my, or my Departmentâs, unreasonable demands. There was a crudité tray, dainty bowls of brittles and marzipan from the Amish, and some jiggly pâtés from that strange gourmet Scandinavian chalet out on Route 394.
ââHosting guest prospectives at a faculty-residence is a time-honored Corbin tradition,ââ I said, repeating what Dr. Morse had said to me, in a remark I was hoping would become a new private quip between Edith and myself. âOr was it âentertaining prospectives at a faculty-residence is a time-honored staple of Corbin hospitalityâ?â
Edith wasnât smiling.
âWhen I came up here to interview, you know where they invited me? The cafeteria.â
I went to pick up some type of blistered cracker, but Edith turned and flashed a blade and I relented.
I sat in the den with a book on Jacksonâs destruction of the national bank, mostly staring out the window at the white page of lawn. Every time I thought, I should get up once more and hoist the shovel, Iâd hear a car come down Evergreen and get woozy.
I felt like Judy waiting for a date, except that Judy never waited by the window. She had the dignity to wait up in her room.
Conventional wisdom makes Andrew Jackson out to be a hick Indian-slayer whose backwoods buddies stormed the capital for his inauguration and trashed the White House, tromping their muddy boots across the damask and vomiting all over the flocked wallpaper. The truth, however, is that Jackson
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