Seven rows of eight things or . . . eight rows of seven things. Like cars or . . . oranges. Seven rows of eight oranges is . . . like . . . a lot. It’s like . . . a wall of oranges.
“Would you
please
turn around, Dana, Kristen, Jackie, all of you,
right
now. I’m coming over there next. In two minutes I want to see what you’ve accomplished today. Will you be ready for me?”
Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one . . .
Mrs. Carnegie kneels back down and stares at my work. “What are you—tell me what you’re doing right now,” she says, blocking the girls with her back.
“I’m drawing seven rows of eight things. These are oranges.”
“I see. Okay. Did you learn any multiplication at your old school?”
I nod.
“Can you tell me what two times two is?” she whispers.
“Four?”
“Good. Can you tell me what four times four is?”
Not without drawing more oranges, but ya know what I can do? I can sing the “Four Questions.” You know, from Passover. “‘Ma nishtana halila hazeh mikol halelot—mikol halelot. Sheb’chol halelot . . .’”
“I’ll be right back,” I hear her say, and she storms off to scold the girls up front.
I watch her go and then look down at the page. My cheeks and neck tingle with fearful embarrassment. I’m going to be in the third grade before this day is over. My father will die. And then he’ll kill me. I’m the stupidest person in this class. I just got here and everyone in this room is going to know.
“Pssst.”
When I look at Jon he’s got the same piece of paper taped to his knee. His first message is crossed out and underneath it just says
Jane practiced
153
hours.
“One fifty-three,” he says without sound. “Write it.”
One’s “thing”—(1) A point of personal interest; a hobby, sport, or avocation that succinctly defines a person. (2) A brief coupling of words used to evoke someone’s personality in a small-talk setting:
Billy’s thing used to be soccer; now it’s masturbation.
(3) A laconic summation of one’s character and interests used for the purpose of categorization and judgment. See also “What do you do?”
I choose to lie when my father asks about school. I’d be stupid if I didn’t. Like in class, there are right and wrong answers to every question he has. But unlike class, I know the answers he wants: (1) Yes, Dad; (2) Very; (3) Always; (4) All of them; (5) Every day; (6) Constantly; (7) Oh, yes; (8) A
lot.
(9) Yup;
(10) Of course me. The answer to that is . . . me. As he and I join the family in the dining room for Shabbat, he flattens a yarmulke on my head, and kisses the corner of my eye. “Now that,” he says, “is what I like to hear.”
When the first blessing comes to an end, both candles are lit. My mother stares at them before sitting, a hint of a smile. My father lifts his cracked leather prayer book and opens to a page marked by a frayed violet tassel.
“Thank you, Claire,” he says, his voice softened, lethargic. “Lovely as always.” He places his glasses back on his face and smooths the page with his palm. “You shall love the Lord your God, with all your mind, with all your strength and with all your being. Take these words which I command you this day upon your heart. Teach them faithfully to your children, speak of them in your home and on your way, when you lie down and when you—”
“Aaaaf
ffffflllooo
” is the sound that leaps from Asher’s mouth. He sits frozen before facing my father, his head still lowered in a cave of brown hair. My father slowly closes his book and removes his glasses.
“Sorry,” Asher says, straightening his yarmulke, and sneezes a second time. “
Affffloooo
.”
My father rests his chin on his fist and glares at the top of Asher’s head.
“Just . . . continue,” Asher says, and sniffs. “Keep reading. I sneezed.”
“Abram,” says my mom. “He said he was sorry. Come on now.”
“Asher interrupted,” Dara announces, chewing on the tip of her ponytail.
“Mind your own business,” Asher says to her.
“Mommy, I’m hungry,” Gabe says from his booster chair, rubbing his eyes.
And the silence resumes. I look down, can see my face in the reflection of my large white plate. I tap the handle of my spoon, counting each of the seconds of this poisonous silence. Fourteen . . . fifteen . . . sixteen . . . and my father reopens the book.
“You shall love your God . . . with
all
your mind . . . with
all
your strength . . . and with
all
your being. Take these words which I command you this day . . .”
I swallow a yawn through my ears and stare at the braided challah I will bless when the time comes. It’s been my role on Fridays nights for as long as I can remember; the
hamotzi
is what they call it. My dad says I read Hebrew better than most of his friends. He likes to have them over so he can watch their faces as the words roll from my trained tongue. There is nothing else I do in life that is so assured to please him, no other triumph so rewarded. He calls it my gift, my “thing.” As he reads the prayer he runs his hand through his pitch-black hair and scratches his scalp. Shabbat has always seemed to exhaust him or remind him of the workweek he’s somehow escaped. His sluggish movement and melancholy tone may also be an offering to the plight of his religion, an homage to perpetual atonement and unceasing pogroms. Any deviance from the respectful pace he seeks is a blatant declaration of our lack of historic empathy. Our advantage is that we’ve been trained since birth to sit as statues at this table. Our disadvantage is that we are children. The penalty for religious indifference in our home has forever been clear. It is rage.
As he finishes he slides his prayer book over to Asher without looking at him and leans back in his chair with folded
arms. Asher brings the book into his lap and begins. “Shma Yisroel—”
“Clarity . . . please.”
“Adonai Eloheynu, Adonai Echad. Here oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.
Ve-ahavta et Adonai Elohecha
. . .
bechol levavcha
. . .”
Five days into public school and Asher has a circular cut on each of his four right knuckles. The gauzy bandage my mother uses goes halfway up his wrist and makes it look worse than it is. He says some “freckled fat fuck” with braces kept mumbling “faggot” as he passed him in the hall. He couldn’t even hear the kid the first few times and thought he was saying “bag it” under his breath as he passed him. But then the kid enunciates better so Asher throws a punch and the kid’s mouth explodes and there’s blood everywhere and this sniveling freckled fat fuck tries to get him expelled. Asher comes an inch from getting booted but squeaks out a suspension with probation and five hours with a social worker named Don. My father almost breaks his own foot, kicking Asher’s bed frame. He threatens boarding school and even makes some calls but says he can’t find any that are run by Yids. The day after all this happens, Asher convinces me to ditch our very first day of Hebrew school at Temple Beth Tikvah. We ride our bikes to a 7-Eleven instead and he buys us both Slurpees and a magazine called
Twat.
“. . . Ochtovtom al mizuzote beytecha uvisharecha
.”
My father takes the book back and flips to another marked page. “Do not. Do . . . not imagine that character is determined at birth,” he reads. “We have been given free will. Any person can become as righteous as Moses, or as wicked as Jereboam. We ourselves decide whether to make ourselves learned or ignorant, compassionate or cruel, generous or miserly. No one
forces us, no one decides for us, no one drags us along one path or another; we ourselves, by our own volition, choose our own way.”
I’m still ten good minutes away from blessing the challah and I decide to play a game I call “the Unthinkable.” If I were to lift the bread as I utter the blessing and hurl it in a tight spiral at the refrigerator. If I were to ram my nose into the braided loaf or sit on it or have it drop from my butt like an enormous turd. If I put it in my mouth and thrashed my head back and forth like a Doberman, leaving nibbled bits of challah bread in our soup bowls and the creases of our laps. Or if I molded it into a big breaded schlong and bumped it repeatedly against Asher’s forehead.
And my father sings, “The sun on the rooftops no longer is seen. We come now to welcome the Sabbath, our queen. Behold her descending . . .”
Just before I do the hamotzi, my father will ask each of us what we’re grateful for this week. In the past it’s been easy to say the right thing: I’m grateful for Mom, for Dad, for the weekend, for the food Mom made for dinner. But lately he’s been disappointed if our answers are what he deems “thoughtless.” Asher says he’s grateful for his skateboard for three straight weeks in October. My father calls him into his bedroom after dinner. He explains how ridiculous it is for someone to be grateful for a piece of fiberglass on wheels. “I’m grateful for my
skate
board,” my father mimics as he removes his cuff links. “I’m grateful for the little wheels and the little stickers I put on it. I got a question for ya,” he says. “What do you think Anne Frank would be grateful for?”
“Anne Frank?”
“Yes, Anne Frank. If she didn’t die of typhus in Bergen-Belsen and had the chance to be grateful?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, try.”
“I don’t know.”
“You think she’d say something as moronic as a skateboard? Do you? You think she’d take the time to acknowledge the . . . the . . .
wheels
and . . . all the new stickers. Somehow I don’t. I just don’t see it.”
I begin thinking of what I might say from the time school lets out on Fridays. I’m grateful for Anne Frank. I’m grateful for Jerusalem and Israel Bonds. I’m grateful for synagogues and shank bones and the chills I get when Jews win Oscars. But I’m most grateful that neither of you know that I’m the stupidest person in the fourth grade. You see, Mom and Dad, if Moishe eats 4 pieces of bacon on Monday and 12 shrimp on Tuesday and 48 links of sausage on Wednesday and 612 oysters on Thursday and 8,000 Christ wafers on Friday and—
“Jacob?”
“Yes?”
“It’s your turn,” my father says, resting his chin in his palm. “Tell us what made you grateful this week.”
“I’m grateful it’s the weekend . . . and . . . for you and Mom.”
“Thank you for that. What else?”
“And, I’m grateful that I made a new friend so fast. In Piedmont.”
“Jonny, right?” my mom says.
“Yeah.”
“He’s a sweetie.”
“Okay,” my Dad says. “Anything else?”
“No. That’s it.”
“Asher?” my father says.
My brother shifts in his chair but says nothing.
“Asher,” he repeats.
I glance over at him. He’s got his cloth napkin wrapped around his hand.
“Uh,” he says. “Let’s see.”
How about the Unthinkable? I ask him in my mind. He’d have so much to say: Um. Right. Hi. I’m supergrateful that neither of you know that I store about twenty mock firearms in the tunnels of our new air-conditioning system. In Rock-ridge I had to keep them buried in a box in the yard so this is really lucky. If you were to remove the grate in the floor of my room and reach your arm down and to the right, you’d feel the handle of a fake 357 Magnum with laser sighting. I also own three pump rifles, a BB gun with an attachable scope and over ten high-powered water pistols that can shoot up to thirty-five feet if it’s not too windy. And Jesus fucking Christ I’m grateful neither of you know how many porno mags I keep in the removable headboard of my bed frame. I’m also grateful you don’t know that I let Jacob look at them and that we read the filthy articles out loud to each other and laugh our asses off at all the variations of the words
penis, breast,
and
vagina.
Did you know that breasts are also known as fun-bags, honkers, headlights, and bezongas? So, I’m grateful I found a way to own the weapons I’m forbidden and I’m supergrateful for the publishers that print
Skank
,
Beaver Hunt
,
Cans,
and
Coozey Digest.
“I guess . . . I’m grateful it’s the weekend,” he says with his head lowered, nudging his fork.
My father reaches for Asher’s wrist and lifts his hand away from the silverware. “Can you just
leave
it?” he says with a hint of fury, and nods to show he’s still listening.
“Mommy, I’m hungry,” Gabe says, his forehead touching the table.
“It’s almost time to eat, sweetie.”
“Patience, Gabriel, please,” my father says. “Go ahead, Asher.”
“I’m done.”
“You’re done. He’s
done,
Claire. He’s grateful it’s the weekend,” he says, clapping once and turning his palms up.
Asher sighs and brushes the hair from his eyes. My father stares at him for a few seconds, attempting to spend his rage through his jaw. It makes his entire cranium vibrate. I feel for my brother right now. My dad’s all over him. It becomes increasingly tricky to keep from infuriating our father when he’s decided it’s you who grinds him. If this edging leads to a tantrum, depending on the severity, all will be wiped clean by the time the morning arrives—but never sooner. It’s then that my dad will apologize for despising our very presence in his home and quickly begin to douse us with a giddy and sort of hurried affection. We will often receive gifts in the wake of these apologies: impromptu matinees, trips to Toys “R”Us, movies, clothes, and rapid-fire tickling that takes your breath away.
“Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheynu melech haolem, hamotzi lechem min haaretz,” I say, lifting the challah.
And my father says, “Amen.”
With the blessing for the bread complete, it is time to eat. On nights like this, where one of us is in the hot seat, the boundary of silence is softened but still demands control. My mother speaks of her return to school and being a freshman at Rutgers at the age of thirty-seven. She’s a certified physical therapist but chose to go back to college last spring; a degree in psychology is her goal. She addresses the top of my father’s head, his soup spoon churning from wrist to mouth. Asher bumps his pot roast with his fork and lines his carrots up like he’s building a raft. I peek over at him but he doesn’t look my way.