The Schwa Was Here

by Neal Shusterman

  “The Caribbean’s too humid anyway,” Dad says, and returns to his raking. Watching him reminds me that things have not been normal in our home—and by normal, I mean loud. See, one thing you need to know about my parents is that they love yelling at each other. Even when they’re expressing affection, they do it at a volume that can bring down enemy aircraft. “Whadaya mean you love me? I love you more! What are you gonna do about it, ha?” But ever since my dad’s heart attack six months ago, it’s all been daisies and sunshine. Any conversation that might raise blood pressure is avoided like the plague.

  “We’ve become very midwestern,” says my sister, Christina. “It’s disturbing.”

  My brother, Frankie, is convinced it will pass, and normal volume will return. Frankie just finished his second year of college and works selling time-shares in the Bronx to really, really stupid people—because anyone who would buy a time-share in the Bronx has got dog intelligence, at best.

  “You can’t pass up a deal like this,” Frankie tells them. “It’s a full-service resort—and subway convenient.” One thing I can say about Frankie: He could sell anything to anyone. He’s the number-one salesperson at Bronxe Pointe Vacation Villas, so I figured he could tweak Mom just enough to get her aboard the Plethora of the Deep.

  “I’m not a miracle worker,” was all Frankie could say.

  I convened that evening with a few of my friends in my attic, which had become a hangout spot in our neighborhood on account of the little attic window has a very revealing view of Ann-Marie Delmonico’s bedroom. This was not something I advertised or took advantage of much, but word got around anyway. What also got around was that Ann-Marie Delmonico’s attic window has a very revealing view of my bedroom, too. For reasons that should be obvious, both Ann-Marie and I now follow a strict closed-curtain policy. It’s what you call a mutual understanding, like the way most nations, except the crazy ones, promise not to nuke each other.

  That being the case, any view from my attic is entirely in the imagination of the viewer. Which leaves my friend Howie out in the cold, since his imagination is a field of tumbleweeds, without even a breeze to make ’em roll.

  So there we were in the attic, me, Ira, Howie, and this new guy, Hamid, all of us comparing and contrasting various complaints we had about our parents. While the others seemed to have plenty of gripes, I only had one at the moment: my mother’s inconvenient cruise-a-phobia.

  “That stinks, right?” Hamid said when I told him. “My father hates flying, so we never go anywhere we can’t drive. I’ve never even met half my relatives, right?” Hamid ends most of his sentences with “right?” as if he needs to double-check with you to make sure he actually has an opinion.

  “You don’t know how lucky you have it,” Howie says. “Not meeting my relatives is not an option, and there’s no end to it not being an option.”

  Ira, by the way, was videotaping the whole thing. He had taken to making a video log of his entire waking life and then editing it down to webisodes that he posted online. At the last count, they’ve been viewed twice, both times, I think, by him.

  “I’ll get more people watching once I get to Israel,” Ira said. “People like controversial places.”

  “When are you going?” I asked.

  “Next week,” he told us. His family was going on this big Holy Land extravaganza with their temple that would end with his sister having her bat mitzvah at the Wailing Wall, with like fourteen thousand other Jewish-American kids whose parents opted out of the big gigantic party thing in favor of something more meaningful and less expensive.

  “My parents are all freaked out,” Ira said. “They think we’re going to get blown up the second we get in the shuttle bus from the airport.” Then he turned to Hamid. “No offense.”

  Hamid is Muslim—half Palestinian, in fact. His parents and Ira’s parents are part of an ethnic dinner group.

  “No offense taken,” said Hamid. “As long as you promise to give the finger to some random soldier in Gaza, right?”

  “Good as done,” said Ira. They tapped fists and all was well. This is why I love America. No matter what our cultural upbringing, we can all be equally idiotic in peace and harmony.

  “So that leaves three of us stuck in Brooklyn all summer,” Howie said, a bit satisfied with the fact.

  “Actually,” said Hamid, “my family won’t fly, but we’re driving up to Niagara Falls and taking a train across Canada.”

  Howie’s all disappointed. “Y’know, more people die on trains than in airplanes.”

  “Or by being blown up,” added Ira.

  Hamid sighed. “I know, right?”

  “Well,” says Howie, “at least we got each other, Antsy! We’re both in the same boat.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “which is no boat at all.”

  Just so you know, Howie’s had a rough year. First, his dad gets arrested for tax evasion and thrown into jail. Then, while stripping down for his prison jumpsuit, the guard notices a weird lump on his back that no one saw before, because no one in Howie’s family looks at his dad that closely. Turns out he had a tumor that would never have been discovered had he not evaded his taxes and gone to prison.

  “The good Lord works in mysterious ways,” my mother said when she heard, “but more so, the IRS.”

  Long story short, Howie’s dad was now in some super-experimental prisoner-only treatment that involves baboon glands. So far it’s had a high success rate in lab rats, but his family is understandably stressed. All that, plus his mom’s spectacular failure in anger management therapy, has left Howie one taco short of a basket case.

  For these reasons, Howie must be handled with less abuse than we normally give him. I usually don’t mind hanging with Howie when there’s someone else around, but one-on-one, he’ll drive a person nuts.

  “Spending quality time with Howie is a mitzvah,” Ira once said. “Like giving soup to lepers.”

  Still, the idea of Howie turning up on my doorstep every morning was not my idea of the perfect summer experience—but clearly neither of us was going anywhere.

  I got indigestion even before dinner that night, thinking about yet another summer with nothing to do. To be honest, my stomach hasn’t been right since spring break, when I visited some classmates in Sweden. Who knew not to drink the water? So now, thanks to my own personal “Stockholm syndrome,” my rumbling stomach registers on the Richter scale, and I half expect the guy from Caltech with the bowl haircut to come on TV and announce the magnitude.

  Anyway, it was while we were eating dinner that night that everything changed, and all because of my father. See, usually my father is a straightforward kind of guy, like me. He says what he thinks, even if it’s moronic and causes him a world of pain. My mom, on the other hand, has got this internal filter that screens out the stuff she’d eventually regret saying. I think Frankie and Christina inherited the filter gene, but I didn’t—which I guess has left me in a special bonding situation with my father. We spend so much time together in the doghouse, we can never get a dog because there’d be no room, except for maybe a Chihuahua, but have you ever seen those things? They’re vicious. Our neighbor got one, and it scares off the Dobermans.

  My dad’s neither a Doberman nor a Chihuahua. He’s more like a German shepherd. Smart, loyal, doesn’t take anything from anybody, but does not get subtlety, and is easily manipulated.

  So that being the case, Mom was totally unprepared for what Dad did at dinner that night.

  Dinner was going along fine until about halfway through the meal, when my dad reached up and scratched his chest right in the middle. It was such a slight gesture, you’d never notice it, unless of course you were my mother, who, like an eagle, can spot a sardine from a treetop a mile away and then intentionally ignore it because sardines are disgusting.

  She didn’t say anything about it the first time, or even the second time—but the third time my dad touched his chest, she said, “What’s the matter, Joe? You want me to get you so
me water?”

  “It’s nothing,” Dad answered too quickly. “I’ll be fine.” He cleared his throat, coughed a little, and shrugged.

  “Did you take your pill?” Mom asked.

  “What am I, a child? I don’t need you to remind me to take my pill.” He sounded irritable. My dad rarely sounds irritable over such little things—and this was another red flag for my mom.

  Through all of this, Christina and I were looking back and forth between them, wondering where this was going. Frankie, who loses brain function while eating, just shoveled down his chicken tetrazzini, oblivious to the unfolding drama.

  Dad took a few more bites of food, then put down his fork and looked at his hand, clenching his fingers into a fist a few times—kinda the way you might if you felt your fingers going numb.

  “Joe, you’re scaring me,” Mom said.

  “I told you, it’s nothing.”

  From there, the whole thing slipped into the standard “you’re-working-too-hard-you’re-not-taking-care-of-yourself” lecture, which my dad gets about every second Tuesday and which has probably kept him alive for the past six months since my mom is absolutely right. My dad usually listens to her when she tells him he needs to slow down. This time, however, Dad didn’t give in. He started making excuses and rationalizations. The manager’s just not pulling his weight at the restaurant, Frankie’s college tuition has gone up, and so on and so forth.

  By now even Frankie had looked up, probably because they mentioned his name. We now all realized that this was a duel. A line had been drawn in the sand of the Zen garden.

  “You need to take some time off,” my mom said, “period, the end.”

  “We cannot afford a vacation right now, so it’s out of the question.”

  “So spend some time around the house.”

  “Yeah, right, because that’s not stressful, is it?” My dad took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. Drop it.”

  The rest of the meal went on in silence. Just clattering forks, my mom slapping my hand for reaching over her plate for the salt. The usual.

  It wasn’t until we brought our plates to the sink that Mom said, “Antsy, tell your father about Mr. Crawley’s invitation.”

  I had already told him about it and was about to say so—but I stopped myself, because maybe I got a little bit of that mental filter after all.

  “Maybe we can go on that cruise after all,” my mom said.

  That’s the moment I realized that, for the first time in history, my dad was engaging in a secret, underhanded ploy. I gotta tell you, I was proud of him.