I swing an invisible bat to a smattering of applause.
“There it is . . . there it is. He plays Little League for the
Knights of Columbus. He pitches too. Show everyone a pitch,” he says into the mike. “Come on, one pitch, here it comes . . . wind up and . . . del-i-ve-ry, yes, beautiful.
Sandy Koufax,
ladies and gentlemen. And no, he will
not
pitch on Yom Kippur.”
Some laughter for the joke. Some applause for the pitch. I step back.
“And this,” he says, lifting her into his arms. “This is my girlie.”
Applause.
“She swims like a fish. The butterfly.
Always
top three. You can all come and see her race. The Jewish Y on Kingston Avenue. This is my Dara, folks. My one and only girl, my little flower. Dara everyone!”
Applause.
“Now—although he needs no introduction whatsoever—and I . . . I’d never say I saved the best for last because it’s . . . a silly thing to say, but, here he is, my baby, Gabriel. Gabriel Green,” he says over the applause. “He’ll be three in April. I made him with my own two fists! Isn’t he beautiful?”
My father waves Gabriel’s hand to the crowd. He turns and tucks his face into my mother’s neck. “Can sing ‘Matchmaker’ perfectly, all the parts. Can we have a little of that, beautiful boy? ‘Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.’ Come on, Gabey.”
Gabe shakes his head hard, his face still hidden.
“All right, a little stage fright. So . . . we’re so very happy every one of you is here. We love all of you, we truly do. If you need
anything,
just let us know.” He covers the mike.
“Should I do a
hamotzi?
” he asks my mother.
“They’re already eating,” she says.
“People, people, one more thing. My son,
Jacob,
is going to bless our food in Hebrew.”
The burn in my stomach is startling. My father hands me
the mike and kisses the top of my head. “Relax,” he says. “It’s just the
hamotzi
. Every word’s a jewel, right? Every word.”
The head of the microphone smells like ass. “Baruch—”
“Louder,” he says.
“Ata—”
“From the beginning.”
“Baruch . . . ata, Adonai, Eloheynu, melech haolem, hamotzi, lechem min haaretz.” And the crowd says, “Amen.”
My father lifts me from my armpits and floods my face with machine-gun kisses. His dark beard is like Brillo and rakes at the fair skin of my cheeks and neck. I smile through the bristles and the devouring of my face.
“One more thing,” he says, after my feet touch the ground. “If you haven’t had a tour of the house, meet me here in two minutes. I’ll be your docent so don’t be late.
Enjoy!
”
Some final applause.
He kneels to switch off the amplifier, then stands to face us. “Not too bad, not too bad.”
The room grows crowded again with the rumble of voices. Asher yanks his tie off and runs up the stairs. My father watches him. “Where
you
goin’?”
My mother puts Gabriel on the floor and begins to remove his jacket.
“
Asher?
” he yells.
I walk over to the banister and look up.
“Where’s your brother going?”
“I don’t—”
“Just takes off,” he says, facing me, and begins to coil the microphone wire. “Not too bad, Claire, right? Poem read well.”
“It was fine.”
“Could you hear me in the kitchen?”
“No, not really. It was muffled.”
“Are there people still back there?”
She nods and folds the jacket over her arm.
“Could
they
hear me?”
“I don’t know, Abe.”
My father licks his thumb and wipes something off Gabe’s cheek. “Why do you think—I have to beg for a spin, a little spin?”
“Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom,” Dara says.
My mother grips my sister’s hand and faces my dad. “I’ve told you I don’t like that, Abram. When you do that. Haven’t I?”
“A little spin.”
“Mo-
mmy,
” Dara says, her knees touching.
“Go right now, baby, you know where it is.” Dara runs into the dining room and disappears among the bodies.
“Claire?”
She turns to him.
“I see nothing demeaning in it.”
My mother ignores him and reaches for my tie. “You can take this off now,” she says, and picks at the knot. “You hungry?”
“Claire?”
She faces my father with both hands on my tie.
“The poem,” he says. “You’ve said
nothing
. . . about the poem.”
Tzitzit—You shall have it as a fringe so that when you look upon it you will remember to do all the commands of the Lord and you will not follow the desires of your heart and your eyes, which lead you astray.
Numbers 15:39
There’s a soothing hum to the ride to Perth Amboy, especially when it’s raining. The rhythmic
ping-pong
of windshield wipers, rubber on glass, the dense stretches of puddles on this parkway road. It’s the week before my family leaves for Piedmont, New Jersey, and I watch my brother sleep on the van to yeshiva. We’re not even past Sayerville on this chilly-wet morning, and Asher is long gone. One of his nostrils is wheezing on the exhale and his mouth is open a slit. It makes me tired just looking at him. I scoot closer to him and barely touch the side of my head to his shoulder, the thickness of his gray coat. I know he gets embarrassed when people see me do this but I won’t wake him, no way. I’ll just rest here a second and no one will know.
I always dream in these quick and faraway pictures that blur in the white noise of this long ride. Like today, I wear no tzitzit in my mind and so have committed the greatest of all yeshiva boy sins—an actual desecration of God. I reach for the four tzitzit tassels in my dream and when I wake I’m doing just that, frisking my own chest for what I cannot find. And I don’t feel them. I don’t have them. I slowly open my eyes and reach under my shirt.
“Asher?”
He says nothing. I lift my shirttails out of my pants and stare down at my stomach. “Asher.”
A tzitzit is made up of four woolen fringes which are tied to the corners of a thin, white undergarment called an
arba kanfoth.
The garment resembles a tank top in that it has no sleeves but it’s really more of a poncho in that it’s open on the sides and drapes over the head. All males must wear one under sky blue dress shirts and each fringe that dangles from our pants must be kissed during
shaharith
, our daily morning prayer service. Every day at Eliahu Academy begins with a yarmulke and tzitzit inspection, which means a long-bearded rabbi in mid-head-bobbing prayer fondles each of the four strands. Failing this procedure is a
chilul
Hashem, or an act of great disrespect to God. This means detention and no way home without a ride from a parent. My father calls these breaches of faith “F jobs” and just loathes the embarrassment of fumbled rituals. I can picture where the stupid thing is sitting, washed and neatly folded in my sock drawer at home.
“Asher?” I say. “Ash?”
He sniffs and places a maroon prayer book between his head and the window. It’s the book he’s been studying from for months now, the
Humash
he’ll read from at his bar mitzvah on Saturday.
“I forgot my tzitzit.”
He doesn’t move. It’s as if he’s unconscious.
Our father has invited 350 guests to hear Asher perform his allotted Torah portion; Parashah Noach; Genesis 6:9–11:32; and his haftarah, Isaiah 54:1–55:5. Cantor Goldfarb says it’s a lengthy reading, longer than most, and for the last three weeks I’ve heard it rehearsed again and again through the door of my father’s bedroom. Being that our dad is a veteran actor of the Rockridge Community Theater, but not a strong reader of the Hebrew language, his instructions focus on the projection of voice, body posture, and something he calls “pizzazz.”
“
Bang
it off the back wall,” I hear him say over my brother’s singing voice as I lay in bed down the hall.
“Vayihee hageshem al haaretz—”
“You’re emitting from here, do you see me? Look at me, from here, from up here. I want it down
here.
See me. It needs to rise and—”
“Arbaim yom hazeh—”
“Better, better. Keep that strength. Good. Each a jewel and—right! Better. From here!”
“Ba’etzem yom hazeh—”
“Stop, stop, stop. Just stop.
Listen
. It
must
come from lower and rise, got it? From the diaphragm, from way down, from here, touch it. You’re all the way up here already and trust me, no one wants to hear it in your nose, okay? How many times do I have to say it? Fifty? Now find it down here and bring it all up, up here and appreciate each vowel, taste each bump, each swing. Now let’s go again—please. From ‘Vayihee.’”
It was past midnight when Asher left my father’s room the night before. I listened for his footsteps to pass my room and for his bedroom door to finally click closed. I have never seen my brother so drained, so distant, so emptied by the months of
invasive attention. There is not an ounce of this ritual he is doing for himself, not a day he doesn’t wish it would all disappear. But when it does end, this Saturday morning, when the bar mitzvah has finally come and gone, our family will leave Rockridge, and Asher and I will enter public school for the first time in our lives. We have never been anything, he and I, but students under God: yeshiva boys.
I lean close to his ear and whisper once again. “Asher?”
He lifts his head off the book and looks down at me. “It’s simple,” he mumbles. “Wake me again . . . and I
rip
out your tongue.”
Sometimes it’s good to give Asher his space. Even me, and I’m very, very important to him. My mother says he came out with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck a few times and he’s been “trying to get free” ever since. He rests his head back on the window and tries to relax his eyes.
On his lap is a paperback copy of
The Man with the Golden Gun
. Roger Moore is firing a Walter PPK and stands bent-kneed between two women in string bikinis. Asher says the villain in this one has three nipples and goes by the name of Scaramanga. Waiting on the lawn this morning I remind him that Rabbi Belahsan doesn’t like books with naked girls on the cover.
Diamonds Are Forever
bought him a two-hour detention last year and a call to our father at his office. The two girls on the book jacket weren’t even in bikinis—they just had the silhouettes of their lips wrapped around the tip of a revolver. I glance down at the cover and slide my pinkie onto one of the ladies. She’s got a moon-helmet afro and skin the color of cocoa. I touch her breasts, her knees, the flat between her legs.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I flinch and pull my hand off the book. “Do you have your tzitzit?”
“You woke me up.”
“I don’t have my tzitzit.”
“Where the hell is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a bad answer.”
“But I don’t.”
“Dickhead.”
“Do you have an extra?”
“I don’t sell them.”
“What am I gonna do?”
“Where the hell is it?”
“At home I guess.”
He nods a couple of times and looks out the window. “You’re fucked.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Dickhead.”
“Don’t say that either.”
“Check right now,” he says.
I reach under my dress shirt, trying to feel it, praying to feel it.
“No?” he asks.
I shake my head.
Asher looks around at the four other kids on the van. “Take Ezra’s,” he says, and leans his head back on the window.
“Take
Ezra’s?
He’s five years old.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Do you have yours?” I ask.
He lifts one of the fringes from his waist and lets it drop to his lap. I stare at it for a second before facing the boy behind me.
“Hi, Ezra.”
“No!” he says, his
Fat Albert
lunchbox blocking his tzitzit.
I turn back around.
The van pulls to a stop in front of a green aluminum house, a few miles from the school. Seth Gimmelstein runs across his front lawn, his tzitzit hopping like the mane of a trophy horse. There’s a black bobby pin anchoring his yarmulke to his scalp and a sharp crease in his charcoal slacks. I would trade lives with Seth Gimmelstein right now, grow old as him. When he sits in the seat in front of me, I tap his shoulder and ask if he’s got an extra. He laughs with his mouth wide and asks if a dog ate my tzitzit. I’m in a great deal of trouble.
“Hey,” Asher says, staring down at me. “What’re you doing?”
I bring my lunch box on my lap and turn my back to him.
“You’re
not
crying.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Are you really crying?”
“No.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I’m
not.
Leave me alone.”
He sits up and slams his
Humash
onto Roger Moore. “Listen to me, all right? Are you listening?”
I nod.
“You’ll just . . . tell whatever Nazi they sic on you that . . . you’re moving away in a week and your tzitzit’s in a fuckin’ box on a moving truck, all right?”
Seth finds this hilarious. “Classic,” he says, his chubby shoulders jumping.
“It’s your birthday on Wednesday,” Asher says. “Tell ’em
that.
”
I face him and his eyes widen. “I’m not telling them it’s my birthday.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“But they don’t—”
“They don’t
what?
” he snaps. “Believe in birthdays?”
The van stops a few houses down from Seth’s. A seventh-grader named Mirium Levinson walks across her lawn with a Blow Pop in her mouth. Her red-headed brother, Noah, is six and runs to catch up to her. Asher sits taller in his seat and combs his hair into his eyes with his fingers. He fakes disinterest but I know he likes Mirium; all the boys like Mirium. In September she wore Tweetie Bird panties to school and couldn’t help but prove it by lifting the back of her pleated gray skirt. I could see the crack in her
tuchis
through Tweetie’s yellow head and I think about it every time she gets on the van now. Asher says she’s the “foxiest” girl at Eliahu because she grew “titties” over the summer and her butt bubbles out. He also likes that she flips off the rabbis when they pass her in the hall and can curse like a felon.