So just the fact that you’re Jewish and have to have a bar mitzvah is embarrassing enough. Being the kid who threw up, pooped in his pants, and passed out at his bar mitzvah is a total nightmare. Being that kid and having it all somehow end up on YouTube is a nightmare deep-fried in apocalypse sauce. It’s still a mystery who put it online. All I know is that it was all over school in about a millisecond, and last I checked, the video had over twenty thousand hits. Twenty thousand! In two days!!
Do you know that painting The Scream? If you don’t, you should check it out, because that’s what Eric has been looking like at school—the character from The Scream, if that character had finally stopped screaming from sheer exhaustion. That, or Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, except a Gollum who’s gone a few rounds with a Harry Potter dementor. In the hallway, I caught sight of Eric, shrunken and haggard, hugging the walls as he stumbled from class to class. I avoided him like the plague.
I’m not proud of it, but there it is. Obviously, being seen with him would mean instant social death. I may not be that high up on the social ladder, but there’s no way I’m going to plummet back down to Eric’s current level, a dank, sunless dungeon populated by creatures like Tim Simonson, who still snacks on stuff he digs out of his nose. That, plus I don’t want to risk catching Eric’s bad luck.
In some ways I should thank him. What happened to him shocked me out of my complacency, stripping bare the lie I’ve been living for the past six weeks. I need to change course now, to find a way to get ready.
The first thing I had decided to do: reveal everything to my parents, spill my guts. Maybe they’d postpone the bar mitzvah or let me convert to some other religion. Anything. I had been, in fact, working myself up to tell my mom, until the very moment that she told me she’d be going with Dad on his trip. But now it’s all spinning out of control, all going nuts.
Boom boom BOOM. BOOOOM! Something final and decisive about the last one.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” my mother says.
“You all right?” seconds my dad.
“I’m fine.”
“Do you need to go sit on the toilet or something?” asks my mom.
“Mom, I’m—”
“Go sit on the toilet if you have to,” says my dad.
“I don’t need to sit on the toilet!”
“Well, what’s wrong with you?”
“Mom, I really—I don’t know, I just don’t think I’m ready, and—”
“Give me that carrot.”
“Are you sure you have to leave? I mean, what if there’s a problem?”
“How could there be a problem? You’re a grownup. Josh is here. He’s a very different person from what he once was,” says my mom.
“But my fa—my bar mitzvah! I still might need help!”
“Look,” my mother says to me. “If you need more practice, Josh will help you—he loves that stuff.”
Oh, God.
“Right, Josh?” my mom says to my brother, who has strolled into the kitchen on cue, absently tossing a heavy medicine ball up and down like it weighs nothing. He’s sweating and breathing hard from hitting the heavy bag, which is what was vibrating the bones of the house.
“You’re big on the Jew stuff,” says my mom. “You can help Isaac, right?”
Josh grins that big predatory grin of his.
“Of course!” he says. “Stick with me, little bro. I’ll take care of you.” And he dots the end of the sentence by chucking the medicine ball at me.
“Great,” I rasp from the floor, my body curled around the medicine ball that is embedded in my stomach. “Great.”
CHAPTER TWO
A SHORT DISCUSSION OF MY BROTHER, HIS VOLATILE NATURE, AND HIS DOUBTFUL PARENTAGE
“The tutor hasn’t shown up AT ALL?!” says Josh. “I’m going to KILL HIM!”
He slams his fist down on the kitchen table, and the place settings all jump about an inch off the Formica surface. I cower in my chair.
It’s Saturday afternoon. My parents decamped for Italy this morning. About ten minutes ago Josh made me recite my haphtarah for him.
“You can’t remember any of it?” he asked after my third attempt ended in miserable failure.
So I spilled the beans.
Josh was not happy.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” He slams the table again. “WHY?!” he roars.
I don’t respond. Instead I leap from my chair in pure panic and flee out the sliding door to the back deck, heading for the yard.
“COME BACK HERE!”
While I’m running from my brother, I want to share some observations that might shed some light on our relationship, and why, exactly, I’m running.
First, I have a theory about my brother: Either he was adopted or I was, or both. My money is on him. There is just no way my parents could possibly have made him.
To begin with, he is six foot three, easily three inches taller than my dad. Also, my dad has a kind of pearlike shape to him, and the closest he comes to exercise is talking about how he used to play squash thirty years ago—“And I was pretty good, too,” he says while my brother rolls his eyes. My brother, on the other hand, is 245 pounds, about 3 percent of which is fat. He holds the Edina High School record for bench press, sit-ups, pull-ups, and squats. He was also undefeated—like, he never lost, not once—in wrestling. He won state. That’s how he got into NYU on a wrestling scholarship (he also got a full scholarship to Oklahoma State, a “real wrestling school,” as he called it, but my dad told him, How about just a real school?). Why Josh is back home from NYU after a semester and a half is a mystery. It’s all part of the Mystery of Josh, which I’ll get to in a little bit.
“Keep running, Isaac! I’ll see you in a few minutes!”
That’s him now, shouting to me as he comes down the steps from the back porch at a leisurely pace. I continue running across our broad, sloping backyard, aiming for the low wooden footbridge that crosses the creek, hoping to lose him in the acres of woods on the other side.
To continue: Josh’s nose has been broken, like, three times, he has a scar that splits his right eyebrow into two sections, he has a chipped tooth, and his left ear looks like it has been gnawed on, because it has. That happened during a fight with some punk-rock kid from Minneapolis who had a Mohawk. Josh needed a tetanus shot. Mr. Mohawk needed his jaw wired shut.
My brother likes to fight. I mean, he really enjoys it. They kicked him off the hockey team for fighting too much. How is it possible to get kicked off a hockey team for fighting too much? asked my dad. How is it possible we have a son who plays hockey? asked my mom. Jews don’t play hockey.
“You better go faster, Isaac. I’m coming soon,” Josh calls after me. I’m almost to the bridge. I twist to look back at him. He’s still by the house, doing some warm-up stretches.
I’m not sure about you, but pain bothers me a lot. The thought of pain bothers me. Pain doesn’t bother Josh at all. He doesn’t mind getting hit. I once saw him get in a fight with a big kid during a soccer game. He let the kid punch him first, and the kid hauled off and smacked him as hard as he could. All the kids surrounding them gasped.
My brother started to laugh. If that kid didn’t know he was in trouble then, he did a second later when my brother picked him up and slammed him onto the ground.
My mother likes to say that there is absolutely no crime in Edina—“except of course for Josh.” He has actually been arrested, for real. It happened after a traffic accident, when Josh was a junior in high school. Some guy, a college student—“some big stupid frat guy,” says Josh—rear-ended him and smashed up his brake lights. As Josh tells it, “The two of us then exchanged some words.”
They also exchanged some punches. “He came out on the worse end of the deal,” Josh likes to say in a matter-of-fact manner, which from someone else would be a pretending-to-be-modest manner. To be fair, witnesses later testified that the frat boy had attacked Josh first, and the frat boy turned out to be drunk
. But when the police arrived, the frat boy was the one lying on his back, moaning and bleeding, and Josh was the guy standing over him with bloody knuckles, swearing at him and telling him to get up. So it was Josh who got cuffed and hauled in. My dad had to bail him out. He was grounded for about a month after that and lost his car privileges.
I’m at the bridge, then over it, stumbling along the narrow, weed-choked path, the marsh grass nearly as tall as I am.
“Okay, Isaac, I’m coming now,” I hear him call. I try to accelerate.
Things Josh did in high school besides fighting: drove fast, played music too loud, drank beer and barely tried to hide it, nearly got expelled four times, had screaming arguments with my parents, wore out the patience of a long line of therapists, put his fist through several walls and one thick door, and threw the television through a window.
He’s much calmer now that he’s twenty, but you can see why I’m running.
I take a branching path, one that roughly parallels the twisting course of the creek. A few hundred yards downstream is a dense copse of trees and vines, the sort of place where I might be able to hide and figure out my strategy. Maybe I can sleep there. Or wait until sundown and then get my bike and ride to Danny Wong’s house. They’d have to take me in. Or I could go to the Fitzgeralds’ house and use their phone, call my mom, and explain everything. I decide that would be worse than letting Josh catch me.
I stop to listen, panting, and don’t hear anything. This is ridiculous. He’s not actually going to hurt me. Then I remember the time at Lake Calhoun when the guy bumped into Josh and cursed at him. Afterward, when the guy’s friends were dragging the guy off, Josh said to Lisa, “Sorry you had to see that. Sometimes I just get so angry . . .”
I start running again.
I guess girls are attracted to Josh’s sort of behavior, because he’s had a ton of girlfriends, most of whom my parents didn’t like (typical question from my mom to my dad: “So, who’s this latest little whore?”). I think, but I’m not positive, that they caught him having sex in his room late one night.
Josh will be returning to school this fall. This makes my parents very happy. New plan: to become a lawyer (“So I can sue doctors,” he tells my dad).
Last year I finally got up the guts to ask my mom if—considering how different Josh was from the rest of us—well, if he was maybe adopted.
“No,” said my mom, “I screwed the doorman at our building in New York.”
Here’s a suggestion I have for any mothers out there who have a sense of humor like my mother’s: Save it. It’s gross and shocking, and your son will be appalled. I certainly was. My mom quickly realized that I was disturbed by what she said, but if anything she seemed exasperated with me—like me being grossed out was my fault.
“Oh, c’mon,” she said impatiently, “Look, somewhere along the line one of our ancestors probably got raped by some Cossack.” Which wasn’t much better, but whatever. “So just the right sperm hits the right egg”—still very gross; why always so gross?—“and we end up with Josh.”
And me?
You know the old Looney Tunes cartoon where the guy finds the frog, and the frog starts dancing and singing show tunes? Except every time the guy tries to get the frog to perform for someone else, the frog just sits there? That frog is my brain. For a certain select group of people the frog will come out and perform. For the rest of the world, and especially when I need him the most, the frog is AWOL. Rrrrrribbit. Don’t worry, says my mother, you’ll bloom. Soon everyone will know how funny and smart you are. But if you’ve seen that cartoon, you know that the guy ends up putting the frog back into the box and burying it again.
My legs are getting weaker. I trip over a hidden knot of intertwined roots and stumble forward, catching myself with my hands. I pause again, gulping air, listening. Nothing. More running.
Josh loves our little sister, Lisa. He adores her. He’s constantly giving her piggyback rides and paying attention to her and buying her little presents, even when it isn’t her birthday.
He doesn’t love me. He doesn’t even like me. When I first learned the meaning of the word contempt, I realized that it’s what he feels for me. I actually wrote that on a weekly vocabulary quiz for Mrs. Jensen’s fifth grade class. “Contempt: what my brother Josh feels for me.”
Josh has since made an appearance in several other vocab quizzes as an example for the following words: Mercurial. Volatile. Ruminative. And conundrum. As in, “My brother is an inscrutable conundrum.”
Because that’s what he is to me: a mystery. I don’t know what he thinks, what he does, who his friends are, where he goes at night when he comes home at sunrise, why he left college, what he’s doing home now without a job. He’s a mystery, a closed door. And I think most of the time I’m like a ghost to him, someone who barely registers in his consciousness.
The path has taken me back close to the creek, which is about fifteen feet off to my right. The tangle of trees is up ahead of me. I’m maybe twenty seconds away from safety. I look over my shoulder. No sign of Josh. I’m fine.
Then I look to my right, at the creek, and at the lawns that slope down toward it. Josh is there on the other side, jogging effortlessly along on a parallel course with me, relaxed and unconcerned. He waves cheerfully. I stop running. What’s the use. Then, with no warning, he alters his course and accelerates and rockets directly at me, as if the eight-foot-wide creek isn’t there between us. And it might as well not be, because he’s suddenly airborne, and I watch with my jaw hanging open as his leap takes him in an impossibly high trajectory over the water to land practically next to me.
I stare at him, dumbfounded, my chest heaving.
“Don’t . . .” I say, pausing to get more oxygen to my brain, “hit me.”
But he doesn’t hit me. Instead he places a hand on my shoulder. I flinch anyway.
“Isaac,” he says, “we have to talk.”
CHAPTER THREE
AN UNFORTUNATE PLAN IS CONCEPTUALIZED
“What’s the first thing you say up there onstage during your bar mitzvah?” asks Josh.
Above my head, the grass is rising and falling with each step Josh takes.
“Josh, would you please put me down?”
“Nope. What’s the first thing you say up there, other than all the Hebrew stuff?”
“I don’t know.”
The grass is over my head because Josh has me slung over his shoulder and is carrying me back to the house. To be honest, it’s actually not that uncomfortable, now that I’ve stopped struggling.
“What you say,” says Josh, “is ‘Today, I am a man.’”
“Oh. Right. Which is pretty stupid.”
“Yeah, I’d say so. Are you a man?”
“Um . . . no?”
“No, you’re not. You’re still a boy.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s a simple statement of fact.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.”
An orange lawn sprinkler drifts by overhead, followed by an abandoned chewie toy. We must be crossing the Elofsons’ yard. Josh could carry me like this for an hour in any direction and the scenery would look about the same: huge suburban lawns, wooded areas, broad, quiet streets, parks, golf courses, more lawns. The Golden Ghetto, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. My parents make fun of it and tell me how sheltered and coddled I am and how much better New York is. But I was born here, and I’ll be honest—I like it.
“You know,” says Josh, “when our ancestors got bar mitzvahed, it really meant that they were men, that they were ready.”
“Yeah, and they died when they were, like, seventeen.”
“That doesn’t matter. The community saw them as men. They saw themselves as men. I don’t think you can honestly say that about yourself.”
“Again, thanks.”
I spot a new-looking golf ball partially hidden in the lush grass. Dave Erickson must have been practicing his chip shots again, making his way from yar
d to yard along the creek. No one minds around here.
“And I’m not talking about your voice being low or having hair on your balls.”
“Josh . . .”
“I’m talking about being a man, the things that make you a man.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
I’m not exactly sure what those things are to Josh, but I’m a bit worried I might be finding out.
An upside-down rosebush passes on my right. We’re now in our backyard. The swing set comes into view, and then the garden, and then we’re walking up the twelve wooden steps to the back porch. From my vantage point I realize that they could use a coat of paint.
When we get to the porch, Josh flips me off his shoulder and deposits me neatly into one of the patio chairs.
“Don’t move.” He heads to the sliding door and pauses. “You want a lemonade?”
He reemerges a minute later with two tall lemonades, the condensation beading on the glasses. He hands me one, pulls a chair around to face me, and sits.
“Cheers.” He knocks his glass against mine.
“I want to make something clear,” he says after a sip. “I’m not blaming you.”
“For not having hairy balls?”
“You know what I mean. It’s really Dad’s fault. He’s not a bad guy, but I mean, what is he going to teach you? How to identify a Bach recording?”
I wince at the reference. Two years ago I had come home in tears, having learned an important life lesson: When the music teacher plays some classical music and challenges his students to identify it, don’t be the kid who eagerly shoots his hand up and says, “That’s Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations.” And absolutely don’t dig yourself in deeper by adding—with the total certainty of someone who’s parroting his father—“It’s really the best rendition.”
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