Disarmed

by Izzy Ezagui

  I always loved that story of their meeting, and I thought a lot about that whole idea of fate. I sometimes looked at my mother doing dishes or talking to a friend, and I tried to see her that way, as though for the first time, laughing on a playground of eighteen noisy kids. And I tried to imagine how this would happen for me someday. I won't know her. I won't suspect I'm about to meet her. Some weird, circumstantial accident will bring us into each other's orbit. Something like a late bus or an ocean wave that drops her in my lap. Something I'd later be able to trace back endlessly through a series of moves and decisions that I had no idea had been leading me to her, a story I'd be able to share with my own kids. That's comforting. That's cool.

  But there's something about my father's story that has always troubled me, too, or made me wonder. Yes, some elements of destiny were surely at work, and God has that covered—the Book of Life and all. But what about something I once heard a rabbi at my old school in Miami say, something I couldn't quite grasp when I was ten: Agency. Agency means that whatever God throws our way, we still have to act on it, create the vessel. We have to exercise our will. We always have choices, and we can go one way or the other. So my father could've flown home wistfully wishing he'd talked to my mom. He could have forgotten her and married someone else, and maybe he would have had a perfectly happy life with perfectly good other kids who looked something like me but with freckles and ginger hair. Or maybe he'd always sense something big was missing, that he had at some point hooked a left instead of right. That he hadn't fulfilled his destiny.

  That's not what happened. Instead, he told his friend. He used his agency. He said, “There's something about this woman, I tell you. Something—I can't explain.”

  “I got this,” his friend told him. The next day, Yankel sent his British wife to share the revelation with my future mother. They were on the playground again. She leaned toward my mother and dropped the bomb. “Reina, you knocked that fellow's socks off yesterday.”

  “Izzy, would you believe I wasn't observant enough for her? Of course you'd believe. I wasn't. I was a nice guy, not–too-terrible-looking, a little chunky maybe. But not her cup of tea. Plus, I was Canadian. Let's say she turned me down. She wasn't interested.”

  If it ended there, my father would have told some other son some other story of some other mother. But a year later, the same British woman, my father's friend's wife, invited my mother over for a cup of tea. And when my future mother entered the living room, she found said tea; and behind the steam wafting from a mug, there was my father, sitting on the couch, with a silly grin on his face, and dancing eyes, eagerly awaiting an audience. By then, she had significantly “mellowed” (my father's way of putting it), and decided to give this guy a shot. “It didn't hurt that now I had fringes poking out of my slacks and a kippah on my head,” he said. “You see, she liked that I came with strings attached.” He laughed. “Get it, Izzy? Because tzitzit were poking out of my—”

  “—I get it, Dad!”

  HAND IN (LATEX SURGICAL) GLOVE

  March 2002. What I like about my nurse is that she tells the truth. She said it would sting when it was going to sting. She said it would hurt, and it hurt—but I was ready. A few months earlier, when I broke my arm, a different nurse treated me like a three-year-old looking for a lollipop. Before the shot, she said, “Mosquito bite.” Are you kidding me? I was thirteen—not three. I was ready, like my Uncle Julio had been when leukemia landed, to face the world without having to climb the Boloney Wall adults put up as a rampart, thinking they're protecting you. I've talked with friends about this. They all agree. We're not stupid. We know when a divorce is imminent. We know when Grandma's headed for the grave. And, spoiler alert, we know that Fluffy's not romping on a farm upstate.

  I knew about the leukemia. I knew my mother's older brother had very little warning. After months of inexplicable exhaustion, he went for “tests.” Adults going for tests is even scarier, apparently, than the tests we kids have to take every other day. The doctors found his blood “teeming with cancer.” I remember hearing that word coming from the kitchen. A terrible word, teeming. I looked it up. Endless whole-body scanners; a swarm of “mosquito bites”; the constant tang of the powdery surgical gloves on every doctor, nurse, and radiologist who touched him. I'd been to hospitals. They're kind of exciting if you know your stay will last no more than an hour. The vending machines in every hall are always loaded with treasure. honey buns were my favorite. But a long-term habitation would be terrible.

  I knew, without them saying so directly, that I would have to say good-bye to Uncle Julio—that he would have to say good-bye to me. “Months?” my mother whispered from the kitchen.

  “I'm sorry, Reina,” my father said softly.

  Kids get good at deciphering the whispers of grown-ups. So much of our existence depends on that which is whispered.

  So no more awaiting my uncle's brief cross-country treks to Miami. No mornings resting my head on his stomach as he slept on our black leather couch, concentrating on the concert of gurgles, half laughing and half astounded at the alien dialect of his intestines. No more sitting at the kitchen table with him before anyone else woke up, watching him drink black coffee and scrunching my nose at the bitter smell. No more awaiting the same exact line of questioning he employed every time without fail:

  1.“So, how are you getting along with Jasmine?” (Brothers and sisters must stick together—you have no idea how important this is.)

  2.“How are your grades in school?” (How are you going to get a free ride to UCLA like your mother? Don't think you can just look an educational opportunity in the eye and turn away from it.)

  3.“Tell me about your friends.” (What's in your heart?)

  See, we're not stupid babies.

  Once, Uncle Julio took point two to a dramatically new level, promising to buy me a rocket-red Ferrari if I graduated from college. To seal this oath, he removed from his luggage a large model for motivation, candy-apple-colored, shining in the sunlight streaming through the window. “Izzy, you keep your eye on this, and sooner than you think, you'll be looking at the real one in the driveway. You have no idea how fast life moves.”

  He would die within the year. The shortest year of my life.

  He would leave behind his wife, my aunt Denise. He would leave my cousins, Jake and Suzanne. He would leave my mother and their mentally challenged sister, Sara, with only the scale models of what his life might have become. How many lives in ruin at the randomness, the speed of mutating cells? But none suffered the loss worse than my grandmother Susana. For her, the loss of her firstborn left a screaming chasm where once stood a rock. She could not fill this hole with weeping. She could not cover it over with memories. She could not build a bridge to the other side with comfort from a god she probably left on that island to the south, if she'd ever known Him. The only way out was into the hole with her whole self.

  She died a year later, hours after a drunk driver plowed into the car in which she and my grandfather were riding. What if that light on La Cienega and Olympic had stayed red just five seconds longer? I consoled myself with the knowledge that—even if I would never tell anyone this—she must have welcomed the chance to escape, to drive headlong into that tunnel carved out by her son's departure, to join her baby wherever we all go.

  Is it better to die from a busted-up body or a broken heart? Either way, at thirteen years old, it's becoming harder to understand the idea of God's plan—to understand that everything that happens, as my father assures me, happens for a good reason. What good reason did HaShem have to rain that rubble down on my mother; my mother, who'd dedicated her life to Him, and brought us all along for the ride, so certain in her belief that He would shelter us from all such pelting out of the blue? What can I do to protect her? What can I do to prevent more pain? How to be a good son? How to take the place of a big, gurgling, loving man like my uncle? What hope? What God?

  HAND TO GOD

  January 9, 2009. I have n
o memory of this exchange, but months later my mother tells me about our discussion when she first arrived at the hospital. “Izzy…Izzy, can you hear me? Come on, wake up now.”

  My eyes dart around the room. A recovery room. I find her face. I smile. “Ma.”

  “Oh, Izzy…I'm so sorry.”

  “Ma.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know I have to go back, right?”

  “God willing, Izzy,” my mother says.

  She looks behind her to unleash a rebuke on whoever blessed my journey back to combat only a day after my injury. She's surprised to see that no one else is in the room. She's more surprised at the calm that follows, despite knowing all too well the hand I've been dealt.

  But the hand!

  The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh,

  As he swung toward them holding up the hand

  Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

  The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—

  Since he was old enough to know, big boy

  Doing a man's work, though a child at heart—

  He saw all spoiled. “Don't let him cut my hand off—

  The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!”

  So. But the hand was gone already.

  1999–2000. Sure, good yeshiva boys are banned—well, let's say, strongly discouraged—from reading any secular poetry. You want poetry? Read the Psalms. I learn the lesson about contraband books at the start of this, my fourth-grade year. Rabbi Becker catches me with a book called Everything Men Know about Women: 25th Anniversary Edition by Dr. Alan Francis, in consultation with Cindy Cashman:

  Famed psychologist Alan Francis has written a landmark book on men's understanding of that most complex of creatures: women. Based on years of research and interviews with thousands of men from all walks of life, he presents the most complete picture ever revealed of men's knowledge of the opposite sex.

  “Fully reveals the shocking truth!”—Daily News

  Perhaps you can imagine the look on the rabbi's face when he clocks that cover as he ambles by, blathering on about the completion of Solomon's Temple in 960 BCE. I can count the fillings in his molars. The look is more regretful than angry. Clearly, he's failed me. And imagine his horror when, even as he yanks me by the elbow out of my seat, I'm smirking. Incorrigible!

  Then try to picture the Mole's two faces as I sit across that monster desk from her, my shoes scuffing the floor. For the first time this year, she cannot speak. Where will she ever find enough Lemon Zest to wash my soul clean? Maybe Costco.

  Now imagine her surprise when she creaks open the cover of the book, peers sidelong inside, as though some subway rat might be crouched in there, ready to pounce—and finds instead all 128 pages completely blank.

  I'm grinning from ear to ear. Fighting the urge to let loose some jazz hands. She glowers, though I can tell she's faintly amused.

  They can put me in prison. They can demand I learn by rote all kinds of prayers. But they cannot take away my sense of humor, my rebel soul. They can try—but they won't succeed.

  So I find that Robert Frost poem, “Out, Out—,” in a book of American verse that someone's left open on a table at Borders, a bookstore.

  Best not consider what Dov and his minions would say if they saw me reading poetry. Porn would be better. Poetry would further peg me as the outsider. I must eradicate whatever makes me unlike all the other boys.

  Suppressing my self becomes a full-time occupation requiring constant vigilance and cutthroat execution. I've got to try to keep them laughing. Maybe not Dov, but the others, chuckling enough to distract them from hating on me. My self-deprecating humor tends to head most of them off at the pass, blunting their attacks. Here's the thing, though. The shtick that worked so well at camp among the secular or non-Jewish kids doesn't fly so well in an Orthodox school. I had hoped my clowning would buffer me here, too, add a layer of protection to my sensitive skin.

  Not to stereotype, but all of those Ortho-kids are smart. All of them, relentless. Once, my mother asked me if I was being bullied. I didn't know how to answer. Most bullies in Jewish day schools aren't the type to give you wedgies and swirlies, to knock your head into your locker. I could defend against that. I'm more juiced than the average Jew, and I've always been tall. But bullies they are. The typical bully in this other world uses not his fists but his intellect to wreck you. His words. Advanced psyops that slowly make you think you're going crazy. You get a waterboarding of words that'll break you over time, until that afternoon you load your gun and shoot yourself in the face.

  So, sure, I can get a good laugh acting the class clown. And in the moment, this usually gives me a pass. But I know they're all laughing at me rather than with me. The self-deprecating jokes do not so much deflect the way Kevlar does. They just turn the aim inside. They make me my own bully. I, too, am on the outside of the circle, pointing and laughing at the lone weirdo in the middle. Still, it's better that I be the one to strangle my own soul. Genius, actually.

  But this kind of genius comes with a heavy price. Rabbi Becker, Mr. Martinez, and, worst of all, the Mole, don't suffer fools with glee. For every utterance I eke out, every prank I pull, the long arm of yeshiva law skull-bashes me on the yarmulke. The punishment's worth it—at first. I don't have a choice. I have to pass the time somehow, expend the bundles of my excess energy. This new school has added hours of study, hours of listening, and hours of praying, to a day that's already too long after twin monotonous slogs down the highway with my mother and sister. Transferring schools last year was like transferring prisons, and this one gave me one fewer day (Sunday) on furlough. You have to figure out who you are, or who you could best pretend to be, during such an endless and unpleasant sentence. It's that or you lose your self to conformity. It makes me detest the best little yeshiva bochers, all good little boys who make their mommies and their Mole so proud.

  I can't even sit still for a single minute of any lesson. When forced to concentrate for longer than about forty-five seconds, I start to spaz. Strictness and stricture are supposed to bring discipline and order. But they only exacerbate my antics. Even if I know an answer, I always accidentally blurt it out. “Raise your hand, Izzy! Your hand,” snaps Rabbi Becker, for the umpteenth time. I keep forgetting. Soon we're in the realm of constant outbursts. We're in the neighborhood of “problem child.” We're dipping a toe (OK, we're hip-deep) into “special.” Nobody wants to be that kind of special, but I Just. Can't. Stop.

  Then, one afternoon outside the Mole's office, I overhear her saying to my mother over the phone, “ADHD? No, he's just chutzpadik. Insolent. Rude.” She's saying, no, such kids don't require counseling. They don't need subtle behavior modification. They need a nice patsh on the tuchas. And the occasional soapy snack.

  Spare the rod, and all that. And I quickly discover that parents of yeshiva boys rarely contradict their child's principal. If you get busted during English or History or, God forbid, Torah class, you're in for a stern talking to when you get home—or, in my case, when your mother comes to pick you up early after you've waited an hour under the eye of the Mole.

  Why is this happening to me?

  I am not a stupid kid. I've looked into the future. And, like Frost's boy whose arm refuses to decline a meeting with a buzz saw, I saw all spoiled.

  AN ARM AND A LEG

  Yesterday, a Friday in July 2008, we shipped out to B'kaot, our advanced-training base. The company's completed unpacking, and we've just been relieved for the Sabbath. When I get to my platoon's room—the first time we've had our own four walls since the start—I pick up my cell phone and see that I've missed four calls from my mother. There's no message. I call her back right away. “Hey, Ma, everything OK? You scare me when you call so many—”

  “Izzy.” The ways she says it stops my tongue like a dolphin caught in a net. One of my sisters must be dead. Or my mother's got breast cancer. Or the house burned down. Or—“Your father's in prison.”

&nb
sp; What?! It's the first time in my life when the facts are staring me in the face, but they just don't register. It won't be the last.

  Silence on the line for an awkward half minute. “Ma. What are you talking about? He just flew back to the States this morning. He can't be—”

  “It happened at JFK. Izzy, in front of all those people. Cops. The FBI, I don't know. They arrested him…right when he landed. I've got to go buy—and I have to get Jaz to the—”

  “Ma! Why—in God's name—would they do that?” I'm staring at a black scorpion with yellow markings—a deathstalker—as it crawls up the wall by the clock. Yellow means uh-oh.

  She reads me a headline from the New York Daily News: “A Brooklyn Developer Accused of Swindling Some 40 Crown Heights Families Out of Millions Was Ordered Held without Bail Tuesday Night after Returning from His Israeli Hideout.” Her voice sounds so small when she says, “I don't know any more than that.”

  “Shit.” I stare at the clock. “Shit. OK, everything's going to be fine. We're all going to be fine, including Ta.”

  “I'll let you know when he calls. Just concentrate on what you're doing over there, so you can stay safe.”

  She hangs up without saying good-bye. I leave the phone against my ear and watch as my potential deadly ride home skitters behind the new air-conditioning unit blasting overhead. I'm holding my breath, as usual. In the distance, some troops are bellowing in response to orders given so softly I can't hear them.

  The floor is falling out from under me. My mind begins to run wild. Arrested? What could he have done? There must have been some giant misunderstanding. I suddenly feel very, very trapped. Far away from my family when they need me most. What can I possibly do from here? “Concentrate on what you're doing over there”? “Stay safe”? Are you serious?