The Things a Brother Knows (2 page)

This is my safe place.

I say this even though the slope is pretty steep, and today I imagine, on that movie screen in my head, what it might feel like to lose my balance. To slide right off. To disappear over the rain gutter jammed with too many leaves.

If I fell, I’d land on the brick patio. And that wouldn’t feel so great.

Boaz put in that brick patio. He knows how to do stuff like that. I remember the smell of the cement. The way it dried under my fingernails after I ignored his warning and slipped my hands into the bucket while it was still wet.

Pearl lies back and puts her arms behind her head. She speaks out of the side of her mouth that isn’t holding the cigarette.

“Wanna catch a movie later? There’s nothing I want to see, but the guy selling popcorn is seriously hot.”

“I don’t like popcorn.”

“So I’ll buy you some Milk Duds.”

“Milk Duds hurt my teeth.”

“So how about some—”

“Pearl. I can’t go to the movies.”

“Fine. Be that way.”

Pearl knows this afternoon isn’t really like other afternoons. Everyone knows. But she’s not trying to engage me in any sort of deep conversation about my feelings or whatever, because Pearl is a halfway decent friend.

It’s been thirteen months.

That’s the last time he came home.

He must have had some breaks in there somewhere, some leave time. But he chose to do something else with those breaks, and we don’t know what it was, or who he was with, or where he went, because somewhere along the road he’d decided that communication with the family he left behind wasn’t a priority.

Pearl cocks her head and narrows her eyes at me from behind her square-framed glasses. “Do you want to get out of
here? Come over to my house for dinner? Mama Goldblatt is making a tuna casserole. Our house smells like a pet store.”

One thing, and there aren’t many, that Pearl and Zim have in common is that they both wear the wretchedness of their mothers’ cooking like some sort of badge of honor. But for all that Mom’s gone through these past three years, she’s still a great cook, which may be why my friends hang around my house for dinner so often. It sure can’t have anything to do with the cheery atmosphere.

I take in a greedy breath of Pearl’s secondhand smoke.

“I’d love to, really, but I think my attendance is mandatory here tonight.”

She reaches out and steps on my foot with her own. I hadn’t even noticed I was jiggling it like a toddler with a hyperactivity disorder.

“Levi. It’s gonna be okay.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. It’s just one of those things friends are supposed to say to each other. I’m just trying to do my job here.”

“Well, thanks.”

We climb back in through the window and I head downstairs in search of caffeine. Without cigarettes it’s all I have left.

Mom’s in the living room folding laundry. Organizing the piles into perfectly lined rows. I don’t remember her always being such a neat freak, but sometimes it’s hard to sort out the then from the now.

Then
she was a stay-at-home mom who did freelance graphic design out of her little office in the garage.
Now
she
does much more of the staying home and less of the graphic design.

She’s been on edge for the last three years, and she likes to say that cleaning is to her what golf is to businessmen. It relaxes her.

If that’s true, I’d hate to see what she’d be like without all the laundry.

“Here you go, baby.” She hands me a stack of folded T-shirts.

I’ve always hated when Mom calls me
baby
. Boaz never seemed to mind. And anyway, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to infantilize my brother.

I’m a different story. Until pretty recently, I was waging an uphill battle on the road to manhood. I still have hair to my shoulders, but that’s by choice. Luckily the height and weight issues are finally starting to sort themselves out. I’m probably five nine now if I’d stand up straight, and at long last, I think I weigh more than Zim’s dog.

But I’ve never laced up my boots to fight in some desert country half a world away.

I don’t even own any boots.

When I really think about it, I guess what burns most about hearing my mother calling me baby is the sad truth that nobody ever calls me baby but my mother.

I think about telling her to stop. That no self-respecting seventeen-year-old goes around getting called baby by his mother. But she smiles at me right then, just barely, and I don’t have it in me to dash the look of fake hope on her face that is the perfect companion to the smell of spring in a spray bottle.

She deserves this moment, right? She deserves to stand here folding her laundry. Not allowing the anticipation and excitement to overwhelm her, but still smiling, just a little, knowing that tonight, her son is finally coming home.

It’s good news. There’s no two ways about it. It’s great news. It’s the best news any mother folding laundry in any living room in any town in this or any country could ever possibly hope for. But I don’t know which son she’s thinking of. The one who left three years ago, or the one he’s become while he’s been gone.

I take the shirts from her outstretched hands. “Thanks, Mom.” I start to walk away and then stop. “Anything you need me to do?”

My question shocks us both, I think. Me, because I can’t remember the last time I offered to do anything around the house, and Mom, because of all the days to change things up, today is not the day. She’s tethered to her routine by a very fine thread.

“No thanks, baby.”

I reach into her row of piles for the stack of cloud sheets. Boaz’s room still has the same aviator theme she designed for him when he was little. She painted the airplanes on the walls herself. Hung the planets from the ceiling.

She did my walls with starfish, clown fish, hammerhead sharks and an octopus. That octopus scared the crap out of me. I was that kind of kid. Scared of an octopus, but even more scared to admit it to anybody. Pearl and I painted over my walls four years ago in a color she picked out called November Rain.

“Are you going to put these sheets on his bed?” I ask.

She pats the pile tenderly and then worries a corner of the top sheet between her fingertips. “Bo always did love these sheets.”

We call him Boaz. Everyone does. Boaz, my parents say, is a good Hebrew name. It means “swiftness,” “strength.” They always fought the impulse most people had to Americanize it. But a month or so into his service, letters started arriving home signed
Bo
.

Then they stopped arriving altogether.

Now I say, “You want me to do it for you?”

A puzzled look.

“Put the sheets on his bed. I can do it if you want.”

She waves me off. “No, no. It’s okay.” She returns to her folding. Her humming.

And I return upstairs to Pearl with my caffeine.

She’s searching through my closet. Pearl likes to steal my clothes. A car pulls into the driveway and she freezes with a worn-out flannel shirt in her grip.

It isn’t Abba. He came home half an hour ago to ride me about not cleaning the gutters.

My heart beats sharply. Like it might slice its way right through my chest.

I go to the window and lean out.

The light is just leaving the sky, but I can still make out the trunk of Dov’s lime-green Caprice Classic. It’s the car I learned to drive in. Boaz too, although he somehow managed to look cool behind its gargantuan steering wheel. It takes
three full rotations just to make a right turn in Dov’s Caprice Classic. I figure I’m as prepared to captain a boat now as I am to drive a car.

Dov is seventy-six years old, with a face like a rumpled suit, untamable white hair and sideburns he’s had for so long they’ve finally come back in style. Nearly two decades of living in the States has done nothing to soften his matter-of-fact Israeli gruffness. There’s nothing soft about Dov—no soft edges, no softer sides. He’s built like a badass garden gnome.

Dov has been coming for dinner at least three times a week since Boaz enlisted. He always arrives with the
New York Times
folded under his arm, but he never talks about the war anymore. He’ll take to his favorite chair in the living room, the red suede armchair, and he’ll carry on about drilling in the Arctic. The riots in France. The section of Interstate 90 that’s closed due to a crumbling overpass.

“Can you believe this mess? What a
shande
!”

Lately, he could even work himself up over a game of baseball.

He knocks. Loud.

“C’mon in, Dov.”

Sometimes grandfathers choose to go by their first names because they think
Grandpa
makes them sound old, but not Dov. “I know I’m an old son of a bitch,” he’d say. “That’s why I don’t want some little
pischer
calling me anything new. All these years now, I’m used to my name.”

Abba calls him Dov too. As a boy growing up in Israel, he never had the chance to call his father Abba. That’s why he
chose to be an Abba himself instead of a Dad like all the other fathers all over this country.

Dov doesn’t move any farther into the room than the doorway.

“Good evening, Miss Pearl.” He’s crazy for Pearl.

“Hiya, Dov.”

“Will you tell your friend here to get a haircut?”

My long hair is a subject of which Dov never seems to tire.

Pearl shrugs. “Get a haircut, Levi.”

I go over and give Dov a hug.

“You look like a lady,” he says as he gives me a few good pats on my back. Then he leans back and looks me over. He squeezes my cheek. “A pretty lady. I’ll give you that.”

Dov joined the army when he turned eighteen, but he’d be the first to tell you it was different from what Boaz did. Everyone in Israel serves in the army. Abba did. Even my grandmother did. It’s what you do when you turn eighteen. There’s no choice, so joining the army doesn’t make you brave or crazy. It doesn’t turn you into a hero or a freak. It doesn’t make you somebody who has something to prove.

It only makes you just like everybody else.

Dov goes downstairs and Pearl starts packing her things.

My phone rings. I don’t even have to look to know it’s Zim. If Pearl is standing in front of me there’s only one person who could possibly be on the other end of this call.

I hit Speaker.

“Yo.”

“Yo.”

“ ’Sup?”

“ ’Sup?”

“Wow,” Pearl says. “What scintillating conversationalists you gentlemen are.”

“She’s
there?”

Zim and Pearl have a little healthy competition going on about who’s my better friend, a ridiculous sort of contest when you consider the prize.

“Hello, Richard.” Pearl calls Zim by his real name just to get under his skin. And Zim retaliates by pretending the only reason I hang out with Pearl is because we’re having sex. Which is, just to be clear, totally not true.

“So I don’t want to interrupt whatever unmentionable acts you two are up to, but I just thought Levi should know that none other than Sophie Olsen, hottie extraordinaire, came up to me after third period and asked if he was related to the guy Bowers talked about at morning assembly.”

“So?”

“So? Dude. She knows who you are. And she knows enough about who you are to know that you’re friends with me. And I don’t mean to build you up just to tear you down, but that’s about as exciting as news gets in your social world.”

Can’t argue with that.

When Pearl takes off, I settle into a game of chess with Abba. We play pretty regularly, and pretty regularly he gives me a good whupping. It’s how we spend time together without having to actually talk.

A few minutes into the game I hear the front door open. Pearl always leaves something behind. Her sweater, her backpack, her cell phone. Once she even managed to forget her shoes.

Then I hear a voice.

Hello?

It takes an extra beat to reach me, like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. My brother’s voice.

It’s a hesitant
hello
, like the speaker isn’t quite sure he’s stepped into his own house.

Mom reaches him first. She hasn’t bothered to change from her afternoon of cleaning, and she throws her arms around him. Abba and I get up; Dov runs in from the kitchen. We all stand around him, well,
them
really, because from the way she’s holding on to him, it’s hard to tell where Mom ends and Boaz begins. We stand around grabbing for some part of him, even if only to touch the cuff of his jacket. I feel Dov’s grip on my shoulder. We gather in a huddle.

And then, slowly, wordlessly, we cave in on each other, seized by a relief so deep it renders us boneless.

And in this moment I’m able to imagine what we look like from the outside.
Soldier Returns to Loving Embrace of Family
.

In this moment, we are that image.

In this moment, I allow myself to believe that everything will go back to the way it used to be. He has returned.

We
have returned.

H
E DOESN’T COME OUT
of his room for three days.

In a way, I can relate. There have been times when I wished I could shut my door and never open it again, except to let in Pearl. Or Zim.

“What’s he doing in there?” Zim asks me in the courtyard before first period. He’s got do-nut powder on his cheek. I’d reach out to wipe it off, but people at school probably already think we’re a couple.

“I don’t know.”

“Geez.”

“Yeah.”

“Remember that time he took us skateboarding? In that emptied-out swimming pool? And the lady whose house it was came chasing after us with a mop?”

“Yeah.”

“A mop! With a sponge at the end!”

He’s laughing now and powder is flying out of his mouth.

“That was awesome,” he says.

“Yeah, it was.”

“Can I come see him? I mean, he used to be kind of like a
big brother to me too, you know? He sort of taught me how to be one.”

Zim’s little brother, Peter, is Mini Zim, except that he’s really chubby.

“You’re a better big brother than he is, Zim.”

Zim looks at me like I’m crazy, and I hate to see this look coming from him. I know I’m not supposed to say stuff like that, and I’d like to think it’s okay to say it to Zim, that he understands, but even he doesn’t.