Shrug

by Lisa Braver Moss

  “Well, kind of.” Hildy ran the toe of her white sneaker against a seam of the vinyl floor tiles. “It’s just that, see, there’s also a Beatles movie called Help!, and all the other kids—”

  “Pure crap,” my father pronounced, turning back to the customer, hovering a little too close, as usual, as he waved the Schwann catalog. “Brahms wasn’t all that prolific, you know. Four symphonies, the two piano concerti, the one violin concerto, but no concerto for solo cello. . . .”

  Without even blushing, Hildy shrugged and came over, first grabbing a copy of Newsweek from the vertical rack behind us before flouncing back down. She started flipping the pages from the back toward the front, which was for some reason how she always read magazines. I handed her the Junior Mints. She took them but didn’t look up.

  I got that left-out feeling I often had when Hildy read, especially if it was about stuff that was hard for me to understand. Which, let’s face it, was practically everything that was in magazines. Current events, politics, government—it all made my eyes glaze over. Or maybe my brain. Life was such a struggle already; why would I want to find out about things that would only make me feel worse once I knew about them? Wars. Famine. Torture. Disease. I could learn about all that once I grew up.

  When Hildy was reading, she got into it so completely that she practically went into a trance; nothing else mattered. My mother would complain that if Hildy’s nose was in a book, the house could be burning down and she wouldn’t notice—which was kind of true. Take now, for instance: what was that shouting coming from over across Bancroft? Hildy’s eyes stayed glued to the page as I twisted my body around and squinted through a small horizontal rectangle of filthy window in the space between the upper magazine racks. A crowd seemed to be gathering near the steps of the student union building, where some crazy preacher guy named Holy Hubert was always yelling about sin and doom and flaming hell. But today it wasn’t Holy Hubert. It was these two guys with bands around their arms, and a couple of other guys shouting at them. It didn’t look serious—yet. Shrug. I was certainly familiar with the concept that shouting could lead to hitting.

  But then the men who were being shouted at turned and left. I twisted back around on my perch, still a little uneasy but mostly relieved. Hildy didn’t even look up. How was she able to be so unconcerned most of the time? Also, how could she flip through the magazine pages so fast, and backwards, no less? I couldn’t help thinking maybe my mother was right about Hildy being kind of a bullshit artist. “No skimming,” I intoned, mostly to make fun of my mother, but also partly to get Hildy’s attention.

  Hildy looked at me, flared her nostrils. “Skimming is like sucking the sweet juice out of an orange and—”

  “—throwing away the nutritious pulp!” I finished, and both of us laughed. Then I kept laughing, until I realized I was kind of crying. “Mom still won’t take me to the doctor,” I lamented.

  Hildy rolled her eyes, flipping to the previous page. “Bitch.”

  “Don’t call her that,” I said halfheartedly.

  “Wait, let me guess. Stop being so self-conscious, Martha! No one’s looking at you.”

  Of course, my mother was right that no one was looking at me: who would look at someone with a stupid shrug? But I went along with the joke, because there were still tears in my throat, and imitating my mother while contorting my face into a mean expression would help me hide the tears from Hildy. “You want to be beautiful? Be natural,” I mimicked.

  “My God, your perceptions are—”

  “—so lopsided!” we finished together, giggling. This was my mother’s comeback any time we disagreed with her.

  “Just a bunch of big fat excuses for her never helping us,” Hildy declared, polishing off her candy and using her index finger to fling back her silky blond hair, which she parted in the middle and wore all the way down to her waist. Sometimes she let me put her hair in braids and would keep it that way all day so that later, when she unfastened it, her hair would be transformed into this amazing cascade of wheaten waves. Besides the fact that she didn’t have a shrug, Hildy had beautiful dark brown eyes and stylish granny glasses. How had she gotten my mother to buy those glasses? Maybe my mother was hoping they’d actually make Hildy look like a grandmother.

  “Hey, Jules?” called Bob from behind the cash register, pushing his glasses up toward the bridge of his nose. “You know anything about a demonstration out there?”

  “I don’t like this,” Drew whined, handing me the candy bar with one bite taken out. There were wet tooth marks in the foil. “It’s stupid,” he added. “Stupid-head candy!” When I got up to throw the wrappers and uneaten chocolate away, I had a clearer view of what was going on across the street. There were more people gathered, and the two men with armbands each had a megaphone.

  4

  speaker

  Suddenly one of the two men started shouting. It was hard to be sure of his words, because his voice had that sound of someone holding the megaphone too close, but I thought I heard “mongrels!” and then “Aryan race!” Then the other man chimed in: “Enemies of the Reich!” Shrug.

  Hildy had slipped the Newsweek back into its slot and stood next to me, reaching out for my hand on one side and Drew’s on the other, as angry shouts began coming from the gathering crowd. I glanced around behind me. There were a few customers, including, I noticed, a handsome graduate student named Herschel who worked next door at Prufrock Books and always wore a Jewish skullcap on his head. No one was buying anything; everyone had migrated to the window and was glued in place. Everyone, that is, except my father, who was unable to hold still.

  “The shop is closed,” he shouted abruptly at no one in particular, and tossed the unlit pipe that had been dangling from his mouth down on a coffee-stained Schwann catalog. A few ashy flecks spilled out.

  “Dad, what’s going on?” Hildy asked.

  He locked the register, dashed over to the Spoken Word section, and riffled through quickly, scanning records until he found what he was looking for. Then, coming over toward the turntable, he took the record from its inside paper covering and flung it on the turntable without any of his usual care, letting it spin around and around without putting the needle on.

  “What’s Dad doing?” Drew tugged at Hildy’s sleeve.

  “Gimme a hand here, wouldja?” my father yelled at Bob, as if he’d already asked half a dozen times. “Cover me,” he barked at Herschel, apparently expecting Herschel to keep an eye on things even though he didn’t work there. A few customers left; half a dozen stayed and looked scared but uncertain. I shrugged twice in a row.

  Bob followed my father’s lead, helping him untangle some wires and trailing him to the back of the store, where a giant dusty loudspeaker had sat, partly blocking the bathroom door, ever since some student with no money had traded it to my father for a stack of jazz records. The two men dragged the speaker over to the doorway, my father pivoting it so that it faced outward, near those tiny, inexplicably pinkish frosted glass panels on the sidewalk—for electricity or phone connections, I guessed.

  My father adjusted the angle from outside and inched his body back inside. “They want free speech? Well, they’ll get it!” my father shouted from the turntable. “I don’t give a good goddamn if I blow this thing out.” He put the needle on one of the tracks, listening and skipping around while the volume was low, and then cranked it way up. A powerful yet calm voice spoke about fighting on the seas and oceans.

  “What is this?” Hildy murmured admiringly. I could tell the admiration was not so much for the orator as for my father.

  “Winston Churchill,” replied Herschel from behind us. I looked up at him. He was smiling out of one side of his mouth.

  “Keen!” Hildy exclaimed. “See, Drewy?” She leaned down and gave Drew a big grin. “Dad is making those mean men stop saying bad things.”

  Sure enough, the two men now seemed disoriented. Along with the crowd, they were looking over in our direction, trying to
figure out what the noise was and where it was coming from. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds. . . .

  The crowd roared in appreciation. Some of them clapped and cheered, or waved at us, and we waved back. There aren’t that many situations I can remember where I felt proud of my father, but it was one of those times, and I realized this was the version of Jules Goldenthal that Hildy always saw: someone bold and creative and heroic.

  When the speech was over, people from the crowd started pouring into Smoke and Records, and when I looked back over across the street, the two men had disappeared into the confusion.

  “Dad, that was just—boss!” exclaimed Hildy.

  “You got ’em, Jules!” Bob agreed.

  I could tell my father was thrilled. “The hell with ’em, the bastards!”

  People were congratulating my father, shaking his hand. After the Churchill, my father had put on Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man with the speaker still facing outward, and we all stood around and basked solemnly in the good feelings. Then my father lit his pipe and looked at me and Hildy and Drew as if he were seeing us for the first time all day. He winked and smiled, and we all smiled back.

  The Copland was just ending as Hazel, a cute little lady with blond bangs who worked further down Telegraph at See’s Candy, wandered in wearing her white uniform and hat. “Hello, good-looking,” she said to Herschel, “what’s going on? I sure heard a lotta commotion on my way over here.”

  “Well, ma’am,” he replied, “you just missed seeing Jules Goldenthal singlehandedly break up a riot.”

  What was amazing was how quickly things returned to normal. Within ten minutes, Bob and my father had dragged the speaker back inside. Not exactly back in its place, of course, because the only thing my father put away methodically was records (well, with the exception of the chaotic tall stack of LPs next to the turntable). They angled the speaker in behind the last record case, where it only partially blocked the wooden ladder leading up to the tiny mezzanine back there. Then my father put side eight of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on the turntable—the Karl Münchinger recording, his favorite—and picked up his pipe, put it back in his mouth, and lit a match. The burning sulfur stung my nose.

  An old man hobbled into the store. I thought for sure he was going to congratulate my father, but it turned out he didn’t seem to know what had just happened. “I’m looking for a recording with Mischa Elman,” he said in a thick European accent. “The Khachaturian violin concerto, do you have it?”

  “The Elman recording?” my father snorted. “That thing is a monstrosity!”

  If the man noticed my father’s contempt, he didn’t seem to care. “Well, do you carry it?”

  My father sighed and shook his head as he retrieved the record from the section of twentieth-century Russian composers. Smoke and Records was a “full-catalogue” store, meaning that my father stocked virtually every classical and jazz LP there was, even the ones he hated. “You insist on spending your money on this abomination—fine!” my father growled. “But lookee here, Professor. This purchase is not returnable for any reason, you understand? Particularly aesthetic!”

  As the professor was leaving with the record, my father couldn’t resist his captive audience. “Academics,” he muttered loudly, turning toward the customers and us kids. “Members of the establishment. Well, you know the old joke—BS stands for Bull Shit, and MS stands for More Shit. And PhD means—the shit is Piled Higher and Deeper!”

  Drew beamed, delighted by my father’s use of a bad word; Hildy grinned; a couple of customers giggled uncertainly. All I could do was wince and hope the professor was out of earshot. My mother hated that joke. She’d had to fight to go to college, she said, because her parents didn’t understand the value of education and only wanted her to study things like bookkeeping and sewing. My mother had even majored in education in college. Which is pretty ironic, but more on that later.

  Mein Jesu, gute Nacht, lamented the Stuttgart chamber chorus. My father’s pipe dangled from his mouth as his arms began waving, his body swaying in broad conductor’s movements, as if the music depended on it.

  5

  socks

  The first time my mother kicked my father out of the house, I’d just started seventh grade, so I was already pretty anxious. It was hard having to run around to different rooms between classes, not to mention juggling all the homework. Plus I had to make sure not to act too worried in front of my parents, both of whom would call me “anal” if I fretted over which assignments were due on what day. Anal! They never ran out of ways to be completely gross. It’s funny, they hated each other—well, for sure my mother hated my father— but they were so similar in how they felt about me.

  By now you’re probably thinking, Wow, her parents are full of crap! I’d love to tell you I know this, have always known it, in every fiber of my being. The trouble is, some of my fibers are weak. So in between the times when I’m thinking, Wow, my parents are full of crap!, I’m always wondering, What if they’re right about me, and no one else loves me enough to tell me? I mean, couldn’t that be the explanation, since they know me better than anyone else does? Even now, sometimes without even realizing it, I look for ways in which they were right, and are right. They’re smart, and unlike me, they’re very sure of themselves.

  Right before I started seventh grade, Berkeley decided to integrate the schools. In elementary, the white kids mostly went to schools in the hills and the black kids mostly went to ones west of Shattuck Avenue, because where people live is pretty segregated, not just by race, but by what people do for a living. The working-class people live in the flats, the professors and doctors and lawyers in the hills. Stephanie’s family is an exception—they live in the flats—but their house is this big old Victorian on a huge corner lot with a beautiful garden, so it kind of doesn’t count as the flats.

  My family is an exception, too—or at least it was. We lived in the hills, but that was because my mother’s parents had bought some old warehouses in Manhattan when they were worth hardly anything, and then sold them and made piles of money. I guess if your parents are rich and you need to buy a house, they give you a bunch of money, even if you moved all the way across the country to get away from them.

  Anyway, now the Berkeley schools had decided to bus all the kids so we could be integrated. Which sounds great and much more fair, but in reality it made everyone a lot more jumpy. I hate to admit this, because it makes me sound prejudiced, but I was anxious about getting beat up by the black girls, who seemed to know how to crack their chewing gum in the exact way that would be the most intimidating. I heard that in the girls’ bathrooms, mean black girls pulled white girls’ hair or slapped their faces or took their wallets or made them hand over their watches, all for a lot less than having a shrug. So I avoided the bathrooms.

  Then in PE, I overheard two tough-looking black girls talking about me, and when they saw me standing there at the lockers, they tried so hard to be nice to me that I was scared it was part of an elaborate plot to beat me up after school. But they kept being nice, for the whole year. Which was not true of the tough white girls, with their big hair and overdone mascara and cheap frosted lipstick. All through seventh and eighth grade, a little clique of them would do these exaggerated shoulder movements when they saw me coming, laughing the whole time as if they were the first ones ever to think of ridiculing me.

  So I just kept trying to avoid everything that was scary. I’d start my day in Orchestra, where I was second chair, second violin. I wasn’t very good on violin, but I always knew what note we were supposed to be on, and could tell whether my violin was in tune even if the teacher, Miss Transom, didn’t give us the note with her pitch pipe. The first violinist, a bossy eighth-grade girl, was supposed to lead the tuning, but I always started before we had the official pitch, and soon, everyone was following my lead, even the concertmistress.

  The idea of Orchestra as a relief from scariness is kind of hila
rious, though, since Miss Transom was apt to throw her conductor’s baton at people who messed up the beat or didn’t come in at the right measure. Frankly, it’s a miracle no one ever got their eye poked out because of her temper. And here’s the kicker: the next day, when Miss Transom saw the kid who had gotten her so mad the day before, she’d smile and call him or her “cookie-dunk” and act as if nothing had ever happened.

  It wasn’t like that at home, of course. Once my father started hitting my mother or Hildy or Drew or me, “cookie-dunk” was not in our future. Not that my father stayed angry after his shit fits, exactly. He just kind of sulked, as if he’d been wronged and everyone owed him an apology. And of course, my mother acted as if we all owed her an apology. She never remembered afterwards how hard we kids had tried to make my father stop—unless it was by way of saying, “You couldn’t stop him because that’s the kind of goddamned louse he is. Now you finally see what I’m up against.”

  This time, the fight started because my father had tripped on Hildy’s sneakers, which she’d taken off and carelessly left toward the middle of the staircase instead of putting them definitively to the side. “Whose are these?” he demanded. Hildy quickly moved the shoes and said over and over how sorry she was and how she’d never do that again. But he was still angry, and then my mother called him a louse for not being able to calm down like a normal man, and then he came up way too close to her and said, in a surprisingly quiet voice, “You fucking bitch.” His posture was threatening, and the veins stood out in his neck.

  Hildy and Drew and I tried to pull my father away, but my mother shouted right into his face that she was sick of tiptoeing around him. Then she kind of let out all the stops. It wasn’t her fault that he had low self-esteem because of his not making it in the army, and not making it in college, either. It wasn’t her fault that his parents had worshipped and coddled him to the point of crippling him. She was goddamned glad they’d stayed in New York instead of moving out to Berkeley, which they had wanted to do. She was goddamned glad she’d put her foot down about it, so that geographical distance prevented my father’s parents from doing even more psychological damage than they already had.