Though Saul wants to undress his new lover himself, Miriam insists upon removing her own clothes, standing with her back to Saul to fold blouse and slacks, placing each neatly on a chair before proceeding. Saul marvels at Miriam’s softness, at the woman inside the scholar. He loves her small breasts and wide hips, takes to calling her his hidden pear, a pet name that makes Miriam blush but which she secretly enjoys.
Miriam is intrigued by the spareness of Saul’s body. She is grateful for the opportunity to examine his angles, his long limbs and fingers, this her first object lesson in male anatomy. Miriam’s shyness at her own nakedness momentarily disappears with the novelty of his. She is more interested in Saul’s scrotum than his penis, fascinated by the way its skin undulates at her slightest touch, how it shrinks with the cold and Saul’s increasing arousal, relaxing into a loose purse after making love, when it has soaked up the warmth of the sheets and their bodies.
The two bond over their mutual lack of family ties: Saul from his disownment, Miriam from the car accident that orphaned her as a college junior. Both want children. Miriam has inherited her parents’ idea of procreative legitimacy, wants to compensate for her only-childdom. She sees in Saul the househusband who will enable her parental ambitions without disabling her autonomy. In Miriam, Saul sees the means to a book-lined study and a lifestyle conducive to mystical advancement. They are both absolutely certain these things equal love.
When Eliza knocks on her brother’s door Saturday morning, he is trying to abstract the reflection of his chest in the mirror. If he can pretend that his chest belongs to a stranger, he may be able to judge it objectively rather than through ugly-colored glasses. His sister’s knock sparks a comprehensive blush, the pale skin from forehead to stomach turning shades of sunburn.
Aaron hesitates before opening the door. To shirt or not to shirt? He and Eliza used to see each other topless all the time. That was before being six years apart meant anything, when their small, pale chests were indistinguishable in the tree-strewn sunlight of the backyard. It was before Aaron had learned that a small, pale chest can be a liability, that six years apart is an expanding universe with a brother at one end and a sister at the other.
But Aaron wants to play Shirts against Skins without chickening out if he’s picked for the wrong team. He wants to feel comfortable in just his bathing trunks. He decides he’d better answer the door the way he is.
Shirtless, Aaron looks even more breakable than usual, as if caught in an act better accomplished from within a cocoon. A thin vein descends the left side of his neck and across the skin of his upper chest like a crack in a windowpane. Eliza tries not to act surprised at the sight of it. Though she hasn’t given Aaron’s chest much thought, she assumed it still looked the same as the last time she saw it, which, now that she thinks about it, was a really long time ago. Since then, her brother’s nipples have grown. There are curly black hairs. The hairs are sparse and thin, as if sapped by their struggle to grow so dark from such pale skin.
Aaron’s chest hairs call to mind other body hairs, hairs that make Eliza decidedly uncomfortable. She shifts her focus to her brother’s face. When she looks up, however, she realizes that Aaron has been watching her watching his chest. She looks down again, this time at his feet, which she notices are also hairy.
“Um, I was wondering if you could drive me somewhere,” Eliza says to the tuft below the first knuckle of her brother’s leftmost toe.
Years and years before hairs and spelling bees, Aaron drives Eliza places all the time. Their two modes of transport are the living-room couch and the fallen-down tree in the backyard, one for when it’s raining and the other for when it’s not. While both agree that the log is better for making their destinations feel more authentic, Eliza has a special fondness for the couch, where she can sit beside and not behind her brother, taking head on the dangers that come their way. And there are always dangers. In addition to being navigator Eliza is official spotter of the alien monsters and sea squids and pumas with which they regularly engage in furious and bloody battle. Eliza likes letting her brother lead the attacks. Aaron knows all the secret moves of the ninja and Jedi and has even taught her a few. Eliza takes for granted her brother’s availability for these and other games, has no cause to question his lack of additional playmates, ones perhaps a little closer to him in age. It is Aaron to whom Eliza turns after a bad dream has scared her awake, the warmth of his bed assurance that she will be protected should her night crawlers return.
Eliza’s first day of kindergarten, Aaron pilots her through the doors of McKinley Elementary with sixth-grade flair. He points out office, cafeteria, and library, describes a secret short-cut to the playground swings, and explains the trick to evading as long as possible the teacher’s end-of-recess whistle. Eliza starts kindergarten assured that her six-years-older brother has vanquished all school-born monsters, squids, or pumas. Aaron, who can take Eliza to Neptune or to the bottom of the ocean. Aaron, who can impale an attacking mastodon with one hand while fending off a Cro-Magnon with the other. Aaron, whose sister’s gilded image of him will last four more months before the real world strips it from him.
Since Aaron earned his license, no one has asked him for a ride anywhere. This is probably for the best, as Aaron is an extremely cautious driver, viewing the car as an extension of himself and, therefore, open to attack at any moment. Another person in the car might send his wariness into overdrive.
“If Dad won’t take you, then he probably won’t let me take you either,” Aaron responds to his sister’s request. Aaron started talking softly so long ago that he has forgotten it was originally a conscious choice. Though Eliza has grown used to it, she can remember running through the backyard armed with thwacking sticks while Aaron screamed, “
BEWARE
, Space Demon, for it is I,
CAPTAIN
A, who have come to
BLAST
you into the 13th GALAXY!”
Aaron feels too weird being in front of Eliza without a shirt, but putting one on now might only draw attention to the fact that he was shirtless before. Besides, he really wants to be able to walk around for hours naked from the waist up, even outdoors, and not think about it.
“You’re not listening,” Eliza complains, tossing a sock in Aaron’s general direction but hitting him in the left nipple, an unintentional bull’s-eye. “The bee is in Norristown this afternoon. I need a ride.”
Aaron opts for a shirt after all. “What bee?” asks the blue pocket tee being pulled over his head.
Eliza is grateful for the clothing choice. T-shirted, Aaron seems less like a flip-book construction — bird head, man body, goat legs — and more like her brother again. “I
told
you already. The district bee.”
“Don’t you have to win your school bee or something to be in that?” Aaron’s voice is a little louder now that his nipples are hidden.
Eliza rolls her eyes and smiles.
“God, Elly, how did you do
that
?”
Her face falls.
“I mean, God, Elly, that’s great!”
“I guess.” Eliza’s voice has become as soft as her brother’s.
“No, really.” Aaron puts his hand on Eliza’s shoulder. He’s really, really glad he decided on the shirt. “I’m totally impressed. I bet Dad’s in Dad-heaven. He loves that stuff.”
Eliza gives a small shrug and realizes she’s about to cry. She decides it’s time to talk about the envelope.
Eliza follows Aaron downstairs to their father’s study. Even though the door is open, Eliza feels odd stepping over the threshold. She envies the ease with which Aaron enters, as if Saul’s study were just another room.
The room is dark except for a circle of yellow light over Saul’s desk, which illumines an airborne sea of dust. Saul is engrossed in a leather-bound book with stiff pages that, when turned, creak like old bones.
“Hey, Dad?” Aaron’s voice is swallowed up by the dust born of innumerable book pages and spines. To Eliza, the air itself seems heavy with knowledge. Aaron tries again, this time louder.
Eliza recognizes her mother in the way Saul suddenly turns his head toward the sound.
“Hello, Aaron! I was just reading about the mystics’ migration to Israel. Of course, it wasn’t officially Israel yet, but — ”
“Dad, did you get an envelope from Elly this week?”
At first Saul’s eyes are blank, as if not even his daughter’s name holds meaning. “Envelope? Was I supposed to receive an envelope?” Eliza feels her stomach tighten and realizes she is unable to speak. With her eyes she implores Aaron to continue.
“Elly says she won the spelling bee.”
Saul’s face lights up. “Why, that’s wonderful! The class bee. You know, when I was thirteen — ”
“
No,
Dad.” Eliza’s voice is impatient. “Not just the class bee. The
school
bee.” Eliza watches the dust ride the currents of her breath.
“Well, that’s just… .” Saul looks at Eliza as if she has suddenly borne a delicious fruit from her navel. “This is quite a surprise!”
“But I already
told
you. You’ve known all week.” Eliza spits the words. “And you haven’t said
anything.
” She feels the pressure of tears against her eyeballs but forbids herself to cry.
“Eliza. Elly-belly. I didn’t know. How could I have known? When did you tell me?”
Eliza’s face is pink. “The
envelope.
I put it under your door on
Monday.
”
The room is silent. For the first time Eliza notices the papers that cover the floor like snowfall. Saul grins.
“Then it must be down here somewhere.”
Saul, Aaron, and Eliza sort through the drifts of paper. It is Aaron who finds the envelope, smudged from Eliza’s hands and taped where she had torn it.
“Is this it?”
For a split second Eliza pictures opening the envelope and finding nothing there, the letter having been absorbed into the dense piles of paper around it. She stifles the urge to snatch the envelope from her brother.
Aaron realizes that his standing mental image of Eliza is three years out of date; in his mind she is still a shy second grader quietly insistent upon matching her socks with her shirt every morning. He wonders when she started parting her hair on the left and if she’s always had the nervous habit of sucking in her cheeks.
The way Saul reaches for the envelope reminds Eliza of first-time Torah bearers, stiff-armed with their fear of mishandling the sacred burden. She likes that he uses a letter opener instead of his fingers. The smile that appears momentarily erases years of report card trauma.
“This,” Saul says in a reverent voice, “is a beautiful thing.”
Eliza is halfway through kindergarten when she sees her brother get beat up. What was thought to be a drill has, with the arrival of the McKinley Fire Department, been elevated to the level of a small, real fire. Though the tray of chicken fingers was extinguished long ago, certain protocols need to be followed, granting the students at McKinley a spontaneous recess while the fire department goes through the mandated motions. Eliza, as an A.M. kindergartner, was not expecting to experience recess until first grade and feels particularly lucky to have been given a sneak preview.
Eliza is waiting her turn at the swings. She is fifth in line, but the
BONG
BONG
BONG
of the alarm has been off for a while now, the firemen are returning to their trucks, and she is beginning to doubt that she will get a turn before everyone is sent back to class. She decides to abandon the line to investigate the noises coming from behind the line of evergreen bushes across the grass.
She thinks it may be Holly Ermiline and Gina Gerardi, whom she thought she heard talking about collecting red berries from the bushes in order to paint their fingernails, which Eliza thinks is a pretty stupid idea since she’s heard that the berries are poisonous. Even though she doesn’t really like Holly or Gina, she should at least tell them to wash their hands when they’re done.
As Eliza nears the bushes, she realizes there is too much sound and movement to be Gina and Holly. In fact she gets a sort of sick feeling in her stomach that tells her she probably doesn’t want to get any closer to the bushes at all. But it’s the kind of feeling that also tells her in a soft, persuasive voice to keep going, the same instinct that guides young, naive hands to the pretty red stove burner even though they’ve been told it is very, very hot.
Eliza can make out two figures standing over a third. Eliza’s first thought is
dog.
She’s seen boys throwing stones at a stray that hangs around the school. The dog, named Sucker by the stone throwers, slams into trees in its frightened attempts to get away but is always there the following morning, waiting for the next cycle of torment to begin. Eliza bristles at the thought of the dog being caught, momentarily forgets her size and age, and ups her pace to the bushes, ready to battle even Marvin Bussy for the sake of Sucker’s protection.
She is steps away from the bush when she sees a flash of skin and realizes that what she thought was a dog is not a dog, despite the whimpering sounds. She is close enough now to recognize the two standing figures as Marvin Bussy and Billy Mamula. They call themselves the B.M. team, which Eliza thinks is really gross but which Aaron tells her just confirms their place in the world as pieces of shit, which is the only time Eliza has ever heard her brother swear. Like most of the school, Eliza fears Marvin and Billy, but being both younger and a girl places her low enough on the elementary school food chain to allow her to call them names behind their backs.
Eliza’s willingness to face a conceptual Marvin Bussy evaporates at the prospect of encountering the actual one even though she knows she’d have to do something really bad to get him to pick on a kindergartner. She has never witnessed Marvin’s malice first hand. His cruelty, like sex, is something she has only heard about, something that only happens in places she doesn’t go.