Where to find it? The Pumpkin story spans the pages 215 to 232 in the original print edition.
Alex tells us of Kay Campbell, an All-American girl with whom he had a sexual relationship in college. He called her The Pumpkin because of her skin tone and the shape of her body. He thought, one day if married, he could integrate into White Protestant America. Later he expressed bitter regret for losing her.
My wholesome, big-bottomed, lipstickless, barefooted shikse, where are you now, Kay-Kay? Mother to how many? Did you wind up really fat? Ah, so what! Suppose you’re big as a house—you need a showcase for that character of yours! The very best of the Middle West, so why did I let her go? Oh, I’ll get to that, no worry, self-laceration is never more than a memory away, we know that by now. In the meantime, let me miss her substantiality a little. That buttery skin! That unattended streaming hair! And this is back in the early fifties, before streaming hair became the style! This was just naturalness. Doctor. Round and ample, sun-colored Kay! I’ll bet that half a dozen kiddies are clinging to that girl’s abundant behind (so unlike The Monkey’s hard little handful of a model’s ass!). I’ll bet you bake your own bread, right? (The way you did that hot spring night in my Yellow Springs apartment, in your halfslip and brassiere, with flour in your ears and your hairline damp with perspiration—remember? showing me, despite the temperature, how real bread should taste? You could have used my heart for batter, that’s how soft it felt!) I’ll bet you live where the air is still unpoisoned and nobody locks his door—and still don’t give two shits about money or possessions. Hey, I don’t either. Pumpkin, still unbesmirched myself on those and related middle-class issues! Oh, perfectly ill-proportioned girl! No mile-long mannequin you! So she had no tits, so what? Slight as a butterfly through the rib cage and neck, but planted like a bear beneath! Rooted, that’s what I’m getting at! Joined by those lineman’s legs to this American ground! 1Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, (New York: Random House, 1967; Reprint edition, 2002), 217-218.
In 1950, just seventeen, and Newark two and a half months behind me (well, not exactly “behind”: in the mornings I awake in the dormitory baffled by the unfamiliar blanket in my hand, and the disappearance of one of “my” windows; oppressed and distraught for minutes on end by this unanticipated transformation given my bedroom by my mother)—I perform the most openly defiant act of my life: instead of going home for my first college vacation, I travel by train to Iowa, to spend Thanksgiving with The Pumpkin and her parents. Till September I had never been farther west than Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey -now I am off to loway! And with a blondie! Of the Christian religion! Who is more stunned by this desertion, my family or me? What daring! Or was I no more daring than a sleepwalker?
The white clapboard house in which The Pumpkin had grown up might have been the Taj Mahal for the emotions it released in me. Balboa, maybe, knows what I felt upon first glimpsing the swing tied up to the ceiling of the front porch. She was raised in this house. The girl who has let me undo her brassiere and dry-hump her at the dormitory door, grew up in this white house. Behind those goyische curtains! Look, shutters!
“Daddy, Mother,” says The Pumpkin, when we disembark at the Davenport train station, “this is the weekend guest, this is the friend from school whom I wrote you about-”
I am something called “a weekend guest”? I am something called “a friend from school”? What tongue is she speaking? I am “the bonditt,” “the vantz,” I am the insurance man’s son. I am Warshaw’s ambassador! “How do you do, Alex?” To which of course I reply, “Thank you.” Whatever anybody says to me during my first twenty-four hours in Iowa, I answer, “Thank you.” Even to inanimate objects. I walk into a chair, promptly I say to it, “Excuse me, thank you.” I drop my napkin on the floor, lean down, flushing, to pick it up, “Thank you,” I hear myself saying to the napkin—or is it the floor I’m addressing? Would my mother be proud of her little gentleman! Polite even to the furniture! 2Ibid., 219-220
A memorable weekend in my lifetime, equivalent in human history, I would say, to mankind’s passage through the entire Stone Age. Every time Mr. Campbell called his wife “Mary,” my body temperature shot into the hundreds. There I was, eating off dishes that had been touched by the hands of a woman named Mary. (Is there a clue here as to why I so resisted calling The Monkey by her name, except to chastise her? No?) Please, I pray on the train heading west, let there be no pictures of Jesus Christ in the Campbell house. Let me get through this weekend without having to see his pathetic punim—or deal with anyone wearing a cross! When the aunts and uncles come for the Thanksgiving dinner, please, let there be no anti-Semite among them! Because if someone starts in with “the pushy Jews,” or says “kike” or “jewed him down”—Well, I’ll Jew them down all right, I’ll jew their fucking teeth down their throat! No, no violence (as if I even had it in me), let them be violent, that’s their way. No, I’ll rise from my seat—and (vuh den?) make a speech! I will shame and humiliate them in their bigoted hearts! Quote the Declaration of Independence over their candied yams! Who the fuck are they, I’ll ask, to think they own Thanksgiving! 3Ibid., 223-224
Kay and I climb into the back seat, with the dog. Kay’s dog! To whom she talks as though he’s human! Wow, she really is a goy. What a stupid thing, to talk to a dog—except Kay isn’t stupid! In fact, I think she’s smarter really than I am. And yet talks to a dog? “As far as dogs are concerned, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, we Jews by and large-” Oh, forget it. Not necessary. You are ignoring anyway (or trying awfully hard to) that eloquent appendage called your nose. Not to mention the Afro-Jewish hairpiece. Of course they know. Sorry, but there’s no escaping destiny, bubi, a man’s cartilage is his fate. But I don’t want to escape! Well, that’s nice too-because you can’t. Oh, but yes I can—if I should want to! But you said you don’t want to. But if I did!
As soon as I enter the house I begin (on the sly, and somewhat to my own surprise) to sniff: what will the odor be like? Mashed potatoes? An old lady’s dress? Fresh cement? I sniff and I sniff, trying to catch the scent. There! is that it, is that Christianity I smell, or just the dog? Everything I see, taste, touch, I think, “Goyish!” My first morning I squeeze half an inch of Pepsodent down the drain rather than put my brush where Kay’s mother or father may have touched the bristles with which they cleanse their own goyische molars. True! The soap on the sink is bubbly with foam from somebody’s hands. Whose? Mary’s? Should I just take hold of it and begin to wash, or should I maybe run a little water over it first, just to be safe. But safe from what? Schmuck, maybe you want to get a piece of soap to wash the soap with! I tiptoe to the toilet, I peer over into the bowl: “Well, there it is, boy, a real goyische toilet bowl. The genuine article. Where your girl friend’s father drops his gentile turds. What do you think, hub? Pretty impressive.” Obsessed? Spellbound!
Next I have to decide whether or not to line the seat. It isn’t a matter of hygiene, I’m sure the place is clean, spotless in its own particular antiseptic goy way: the question is, what if it’s warm yet from a Campbell behind—from her mother! Mary! Mother also of Jesus Christ! If only for the sake of my family, maybe I should put a little paper around the rim; it doesn’t cost anything, and who will ever know?
I will! I will! So down I go—and it is warm! Yi, seventeen years old and I am rubbing asses with the enemy! How far I have traveled since September! By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion! And yea is right! On the can I am besieged by doubt and regret
[…][M]issing the historical Thanksgiving meal prepared by my mother, that freckled and red-headed descendant of Polish Jews! Oh, how the blood will flow out of their faces, what a deathly silence will prevail, when she holds up the huge drumstick, and cries, “Here! For guess who!” and Guess-who is found to be AWOL! Why have I deserted my family? Maybe around the table we don’t look like a painting by Norman Rockwell, but we have a good time, too, don’t you worry! 4Ibid., 224-227
Then he explains why he broke off his relationship with her:
Near the end of our junior year Kay missed a period, and so we began, and with a certain eager delight—and wholly without panic, interestingly—to make plans to be married. We would offer ourselves as resident baby-sitters to a young faculty couple who were fond of us; in return they would give us their roomy attic to live in, and a shelf to use in their refrigerator. We would wear old clothes and eat spaghetti. Kay would write poetry about having a baby, and, she said, type term papers for extra money. We had our scholarships, what more did we need? (besides a mattress, some bricks and boards for bookshelves, Kay’s Dylan Thomas record, and in time, a crib). We thought of ourselves as adventurers.
I said, “And you’ll convert, right?”
I intended the question to be received as ironic, or thought I had. But Kay took it seriously. Not solemnly, mind you, just seriously.
Kay Campbell, Davenport, Iowa: “Why would I want to do a thing like that?”
Great girl! Marvelous, ingenuous, candid girl! Content, you see, as she was! What one dies for in a woman—I now realize! Why would I want to do a thing like that? And nothing blunt or defensive or arch or superior in her tone. Just common sense, plainly spoken.
Only it put our Portnoy into a rage, incensed The Temper Tantrum Kid. What do you mean why would you want to do a thing like that? Why do you think, you simpleton-goy! Go talk to your dog, ask him. Ask Spot what he thinks, that four-legged genius. “Want Kay-Kay to be a Jew, Spottie—huh, big fella, huh?” Just what the fuck makes you so self-satisfied, anyway? That you carry on conversations with dogs? that you know an elm when you see one? that your father drives a station wagon made out f wood? What’s your hotsy-totsy accomplishment in life, aby, that Doris Day snout?
I was, fortunately, so astonished by my indignation that I couldn’t begin to voice it. How could I be feeling a wound in a place where I was not even vulnerable? What did Kay and I care less about than one, money, and two, religion? Our favorite philosopher was Bertrand Russell. Our religion was Dylan Thomas’ religion. Truth and Joy! Our children would be atheists. I had only been making a joke!
Nonetheless, it would seem that I never forgave her: in the weeks following our false alarm, she came to seem to me boringly predictable in conversation, and about as desirable as blubber in bed. And it surprised me that she should take it so badly when I finally had to tell her that I didn’t seem to care for her any more. I was very honest, you see, as Bertrand Russell said I should be. “I just don’t want to see you any more, Kay. I can’t hide my feelings, I’m sorry.” She wept pitifully: she carried around the campus terrible little pouches underneath her bloodshot blue eyes, she didn’t show up for meals, she missed classes.. And I was astonished. Because all along I’d thought it was I who had loved her, not she who had loved me. What a surprise to discover just the opposite to have been the case.
Ah, twenty and spurning one’s mistress—that first unsullied thrill of sadism with a woman! And the dream of the women to come. I returned to New Jersey that June, buoyant with my own “strength,” wondering how I could ever have been so captivated by someone so ordinary and so fat. 5Ibid., 230-232
Note: This page is one of several pages on Portnoy’s Complaint. View the list.
Endnotes
