Max has no idea what he is talking about.

Then the packages arrive, delivered by Gypsies. The truck says TRANSYLVANIAN PARCEL SERVICE, but I know these guys are Gypsies because what kind of delivery men wear scarves and earrings and make jokes about pulling one over on the gajos while hauling these enormous packages into the living room? I have to make sure the silverware doesn’t disappear.

Max and I are left staring at these two boxes the size of phonebooths, which are marked DO NOT OPEN UNTIL SUNDOWN but today is Tuesday so the Shabbat rules do not apply, so what the hell does this mean? I want to know.

Nevertheless, it is getting late and starting to get dark, and God knows what’s inside these packages, so we close the curtains. Then Max and I whack away at the first crate with hammers and big screwdrivers. Dirt pours out onto Momma’s immaculate living-room rug, and the lid comes off, and inside is a coffin packed in more dirt. To get that open, we have to remove a whole bunch of silver nails, which are probably worth something, so I put them carefully aside.

The coffin lid creaks open just like in the movies. As soon as Momma, lying inside it, sees the hammer in my hand, and I see her, we both scream so loudly we could split the eardrums of everybody from Jersey City to Canton, China. She clutches her chest and says, “Go ahead, drive a stake through your poor mother’s heart. You’ve already broken it!”

I let the hammer drop to the floor. It lands on my foot. While I’m hopping around in pain, I say, “I have?”

And Momma, she looks so weird, I should say terrible-her hair all frizzed up and tangled, her nails like claws, her face so pale and sunken like a balloon that’s lost most of its air, and her eyes so dark and somehow burning that I can’t look away from them. Momma, she turns to Max (who also drops his hammer but misses his foot) and says, “No mother, living or dead, wants to come home after so many trials and tribulations to find out her daughter’s still messing with a sheygets.”

“But, Mom-” I say.

“But nothing. When are you going to get a serious boyfriend, somebody with a future, somebody you can marry, one of your own kind?”

Max blurts out, “Who said anything about marriage?”

I stare at her, dumbfounded. Max is a bit of a doofus. He works in a flower shop and makes tie-dyed T-shirts on weekends and would have been a hippie if he’d been born a generation earlier. Maybe he’s not such a good prospect, but this is a stupid time to bring this up.

Apropos of not knowing what else to say, I get defensive. “But, Momma, I like Max.”

Max beams at me like a dope, “You do?”

I don’t bother to explain that much of the time I’m not entirely sure of that because Max does have his shortcomings. But before I can utter another word Momma gets out of that coffin, opens her mouth to reveal huge, dripping fangs, and slinks over to Max in a way that no respectable short, zaftig, middle-aged woman should, and says, “Well, if you’re going to marry him, he has to convert.” She pronounces it convoit, her accent having somehow grown a lot thicker.

I stamp my foot (not the one the hammer landed on) and shake my finger at her. “Momma, we’ve been over this before! Get used to it! Max doesn’t want to become a Jew!”

Momma’s fangs somehow arc out of her mouth the way a rattlesnake’s do and still (I have no idea how) she’s able to say, “That’s not what I have in mind.”

Now there’s a loud pounding from inside the other box. Momma pulls back, her fangs disappear back into her mouth, and she looks as close to normal as she is going to since stepping out of that coffin. She is Momma again and she’s giving orders.

“Marsha, let your father out. We need to have a family discussion. Max, you help her.”

So we let him out, carefully removing six more valuable-looking silver nails, which Momma cringes from and won’t even look at. Soon the coffin lid creaks open and there’s my father, dressed in black cape and black pants, white shirt, vest, medallion, and one of those bat-shaped ties I know Momma has always hated-it doesn’t go with the outfit-and his eyes are red and gleaming and he makes a claw out of one hand as if he’s trying to hypnotize me, and says in a thick, thick accent, “I vant to drink your blllooodd!!”

Then he trips over his cape and stumbles out onto the rug amid an avalanche of dirt that will be impossible to clean up. Somehow he twists around and lands on his butt, and there he is sitting in the dirt, staring up at me while his mechanical bat-tie flaps pathetically, only one of its wings working.

“Marsha?”

“Hello, Poppa.”

I help him up, taking him by the hand.

“Brrr! Poppa, you’re cold!”

“There’s a lot to explain.”

At our family conference, a lot that needs to be explained is explained. Max is there, holding on nervously to his hammer and screwdriver, as if that would do him any good. After all, he might become family, or at least Momma wants to allow for the possibility. Besides, he knows too much now.

“After all I’ve given up for you,” she moans, meaning me, not Max. She doesn’t care a rat’s ass about Max.

And I break in, saying that I had to give up a whole semester at Bryn Mawr to be here minding the house just in case she and Poppa should somehow reappear out of nowhere, and I did take care of Elvira and Vlad just fine, and I can’t help it if they hiss and run and hide when Momma comes near them. (They hide from Poppa, too; he’s really unhappy about that.) And she has the nerve (I almost say noive but stop myself) to tell me to stop kvetching when she, my mother, is the world’s greatest kvetch, a Niagara Falls of guilt poured out, a woman put on Earth by God to complain about how things aren’t right and make people feel guilty about them. I think the only reason she doesn’t want me kvetching is she’s afraid I may have inherited some of her talent for it and she wants to make sure that if anybody in this house is going to kvetch, it’s going to be her, no competition allowed.

And she says, “Besides, you’re not going back to that snooty school, anyway.”

And when I say, “What?” she explains that there have been some, uh, changes, like she and Poppa are technically dead now, but not in any sense that really matters; they’ll just have to keep different hours. Then she tells the whole story about how Poppa dragged her on this Children of the Night Special tour of Transylvania, and after days of wandering into one crypt after another, something happened and now they’re both vampires, which did not, I gather, change her disposition much, or stop her kvetching. Although she’s vague on the details, I gather that after some months of bouncing around in crummy coffins listening to Gypsy jokes, and reaching people’s necks, not with a stepladder, but by getting people to bend over to look at a map of Bucharest when she asked them for directions (even if she was in some other city), and realizing she was still being her old self, not svelte like the vampire women in movies, she kvetched all the way up the chain of command until Dracula himself couldn’t stand her anymore and had her and Poppa nailed up in special coffins with silver nails so they couldn’t get out. But even then she kvetched so much (he could still hear her; vampires have very good hearing), he finally gave up and shipped the two of them home.

She finishes deciding, “So the best thing for all of us, will be that I should bite you, and, ugh, your father can bite Max, and then we’ll all be a vampire family together.”