This Is Just a Test

by Madelyn Rosenberg

  “Good thing we don’t keep kosher,” said Dad when he opened the boxes and saw what was inside. We were too hungry to wait for a replacement.

  Hector, who knew about my generally pizza-less existence, put a slice of pizza on a plate and walked over to Wai Po. “Mrs. Lin,” he said. “Would you like to try a piece of Hawaiian pizza? It’s really quite delicious.”

  Up to this point, Wai Po had pretty much refused all non-Chinese food, but Hector had a way with old ladies. Wai Po smiled and reached for the plate. She took a small nibble of the pizza.

  “Finally, some American food with flavor,” she said, taking another bite. She finished the slice and then she fed the crust to Bao Bao. It was a certified miracle.

  “We can finally start ordering pizza again,” I said to Hector in a low voice. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  Hector grinned. “You owe me.”

  I was already dreaming about future pizzas. Maybe we could even get pepperoni. But that was down the road. In the present we were stuck with Hawaiian. Scott picked off the pineapple pieces and flicked them at me and Hector. I also picked off the pineapple pieces, but I could still taste the juice on the pizza, ruining everything. That left me with just the salad. I poured on a bunch of extra Bac-O bits, which, despite the name, didn’t contain any actual bacon.

  Then Mom walked in with Lauren, who was wearing her Walkman and singing under her breath. As soon as Mom saw the pizza boxes, her lips got kind of puckered, like we’d gotten lemons as a topping instead of the pineapple.

  “You ordered pizza?” she said to Dad. “We have leftovers in the fridge.”

  “Honey, David has his friends over. They don’t want to eat our leftovers,” said Dad.

  Lauren pulled off her headphones and grabbed a slice of pizza.

  “What button are you wearing?” asked Hector. Lauren had a large collection of buttons and she wore a different one each day. She was actually known for them at school. I didn’t know where she got them all, but it didn’t seem fair that she was a grade younger than me and was already known for something. I was not known for anything.

  “You can’t wear buttons while you play basketball.” Lauren said this like Hector, who didn’t play sports, would have no idea this was the case. “But I have one on my duffel bag.” She held up her bag to show us a button with a picture of E.T.

  “Cool,” Hector said.

  Lauren turned around and looked at my dad, who was still talking to my mom. “My team won tonight,” she said. “If anyone cares.”

  “That’s great,” said Dad. Then to Mom: “A couple of pizzas will not put us in the poorhouse.”

  Mom forced a smile. “Lauren played very well. She scored six points.” Then she said to Dad, “We’re on a budget, remember? For your son’s bar mitzvah? We could have put stamps on the invitations with that pizza money. Did you pick up that extra shift for next week?” Even though Dad had been Jewish twice as long as Mom had, Mom was doing most of the planning.

  “Thanks for caring,” said Lauren. She turned and ran upstairs to her room. When she slammed the door, it sounded like a firecracker.

  Dad didn’t say anything, which meant no, he hadn’t gotten an extra shift. I tried to jump in and help him. “They sent us the wrong pizza anyway. Wai Po even likes it. And, um, there are some pieces left over.” Don’t ask me why I thought that was a helpful thing to say.

  Mom shook her head. “That’s just great,” she said, though she obviously meant that it was the opposite of great. She turned to Dad. “Come help me in the living room.” I knew that was an excuse to talk in private, because there was nothing anyone could possibly need help with in our living room.

  My parents have tried to save up for my bar mitzvah, in some form or another, for the last couple of years. But now that my bar mitzvah was getting close, I didn’t think they had saved enough. I told them that I didn’t need anything fancy, but my dad said that my only job was to study hard and give a good speech; their job was to foot the bill.

  When they fought, though, I wanted to do more, especially since I was not destined to be a Talmudic scholar or anything. I wanted to give a good speech or even a great speech, for my dad. But, like always, I was never sure what to say, particularly to a roomful of people who thought that thirteen was an age where you should have mastered the English language enough to be able to impart humor and wisdom at the very same time. After my parents left the room, Scott, Hector, and I went into the basement so we could practice trivia and so that we didn’t have to listen to my parents fighting.

  I pulled out our Trivial Pursuit game, which was more fun than reading through the World Almanac. Plus, I was betting at least half of the questions from the librarian would be taken off Trivial Pursuit cards. Scott pointed his finger upstairs. “World War III, huh?”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said. “They’ll get over it.”

  Scott shrugged. “Unless they don’t. Your mom looked pretty mad.”

  “David’s parents are okay,” said Hector. “Let’s just play.”

  We set up the board. “As captain,” Scott said, “I should get an additional pie piece.” In Trivial Pursuit, you have to fill your playing piece with wedges from the six different categories in order to win. We called them pie pieces because they looked like multicolored slices of pie.

  “As captain,” I said, “you get nothing. If anything, you should have to earn an extra pie piece.”

  My favorite part of the game was when one question connected to another; it was like learning about the world in pieces until you got a big chunk of knowledge. For example: The name Pennsylvania came from William Penn and the Latin word for woods, silva. King Charles of England gave William Penn the land to pay off a debt to Penn’s father and called it Pennsylvania for “Penn’s woods.”

  When we practiced with Trivial Pursuit cards, sometimes one question gave the answer to another question on the same card. Scott, for example, drew the Entertainment question Who portrayed US Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell in Roots II?, and just under it, in the History category, the question was Who founded the American Nazi Party?

  “I don’t know,” said Scott. “Adolf Hitler, Junior?”

  That got a laugh from Hector, but I felt weird about it. Being Jewish will do that to you with the Nazi questions.

  Scott drew another question, in Geography, and directed it to me, about the location of Dam Square.

  It sounded European but other than that, I wasn’t sure. “Berlin?” I guessed.

  “In a dam circle,” joked Hector.

  “Amsterdam,” said Scott. “Get it? Amsterdam, Dam Square?”

  Then the next question asked for the author of Winnie-the-Pooh.

  “Easy,” said Hector. “Winnie-the-Butt makes Winnie-the-Poo.”

  “That’s it,” said Scott, tossing his pizza crust into the box. “I’m done. Let’s watch the movie.”

  It had taken us forever to pick something out when Dad took us to the video store. I could always think of lots of things I wanted to watch when I wasn’t at the video store, but as soon as I walked in, I forgot all the titles. We had finally picked out Firefox, a Clint Eastwood movie about stealing a plane from the Russians.

  Unfortunately, we had failed to notice that we grabbed the VHS version of Firefox. Our VCR only used Betamax, the other kind of tape. I punched the power button to turn off the VCR and ran my fingers over the front where it read VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDER. It should have said VERY CRUMMY RECORDER.

  “What kind of idiot gets Beta?” Scott grumbled. “You get longer recording time on VHS.”

  “Beta has a better picture,” I said, repeating what my Dad had said when he had brought it home. This was a less compelling argument without an actual movie to prove my point.

  Scott flipped through our four TV channels.

  Channel 20 was showing reruns of Green Acres. NBC was showing Manimal, about a guy who could turn into different animals. CBS had a news special on unemployment.

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p; “Only ABC left,” Scott said. “This is our last chance.”

  The image on the television jumped and changed. “SAC, Omaha, Nebraska.”

  “That’s Strategic Air Command,” Scott said. A man, a general, walked through a huge plane.

  “I knew that,” I said. “About SAC.”

  “Remember it for the trivia contest.”

  “Hey, I know what this is,” Hector said. “It’s The Day After. We talked about it in history. It’s about what would happen in a nuclear war. Little kids aren’t supposed to watch and you’re not supposed to watch alone.”

  Scott raised an eyebrow. “We’re not alone, and we’re not little kids.” It was like he was daring us.

  I didn’t want to watch. The movie sounded serious, and I didn’t want to be serious. But I wasn’t going to be the one to say no, especially not in front of Scott. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s watch.”

  “They really did look like mushrooms,” Hector said when the movie was over.

  “Well, of course, you dope. They didn’t get their name because they look like cantaloupes,” said Scott.

  The Day After spent a long time showing nuclear weapons going off. At first, there was just a quiet boom and the cars and radios stopped working. And then you thought, Well, that’s not so bad. But then the mushroom clouds rose up and for a few minutes it was all explosions and screaming and X-rayed skeletons where people had been a second before. They were usually running when they died.

  “How could they not know what was happening?” I asked. That was one of the most upsetting parts. Some people knew to be scared, and other people didn’t know they were supposed to be scared until they saw a missile go up. I didn’t know what was worse: to have time to be scared, or not.

  Scott shrugged. “There was all sorts of information. It was just a question of who you believed.”

  “I don’t know anyone in Kansas, do you?” asked Hector. That’s where most of The Day After took place. I’d never been to Kansas, but when they showed all the people running around, getting groceries, and trying to hide in basements, I felt sorry for them. They could be people from anywhere. The only creatures that seemed impervious to the radiation were the cockroaches.

  “It’s a made-up movie,” said Hector.

  “But there really are missile silos in Kansas,” said Scott.

  “And there really are nuclear weapons,” I added. I had thought about nuclear war a lot, but I never thought about it the way the movie showed it—the way people died or got ugly and mean and sick. Mostly I’d thought about it the way they showed it in movies like War Games—like something that could happen if we weren’t careful, but something we could avoid if we were. Now it didn’t seem like we’d be able to avoid it at all, even if we were smart.

  “Do you think the part about people losing their teeth and hair is true?” asked Hector. He always carried a black comb in his back pocket and he wore his hair kind of swooshy, like David Hasselhoff, which was something you couldn’t do with hair that was part Jewish and part Chinese (but mostly Chinese).

  “That part is true,” Scott said. “Nuclear radiation isn’t a beauty treatment.”

  “Well, what about the Russian girls?” Hector asked. “They’d still be pretty, right?”

  “You’d go out with some Commie chick?” Scott reached over and whacked Hector on the head with a sofa pillow. He hadn’t been hanging out with us very long, but the way he whacked Hector, it felt as if he had.

  “You’d have to learn Russian,” I pointed out.

  “Not if you speak the language of love.” Hector was joking. I think. “We could take another correspondence course,” he added.

  “I wouldn’t do it,” said Scott. “I’d rather die with honor.” This was easy for Scott to say—he’d already had two girlfriends while the number of girlfriends Hector and I had added up to a grand total of zero.

  I tried not to think about Kelli Ann Majors.

  “Girls are just not that helpful. Now or during a nuclear war,” Scott said.

  “It probably won’t happen,” said Hector. “That’d be crazy, right?”

  Scott shrugged. “The Soviets shot down that airplane full of civilians, didn’t they?” Right before school started, the Russians shot down a Korean Airlines flight that had strayed into Soviet airspace. The Soviets said they thought it was one of our spy planes. The Russians eventually gave back some shoes that had washed up from the flight. They showed them on TV. Some of the shoes belonged to little kids.

  “It’s a long way from shooting down one airplane to blowing up an entire country,” I said. “Right?”

  “Well, I’ve got good news.” Scott stood up and pointed out the tiny basement window. “We live ten miles from the capital of the United States. If the Russkies hit first, we’re going to be like those people in the movie and get a one-way trip to the X-ray room.” He smacked his hands together. “BAM. We won’t even know what hit us.”

  This did not sound like good news to me.

  “President Reagan wouldn’t let that happen,” Hector said. He ran his hand over the red carpet so that the path changed color and looked lighter. “He’d press the button first, right?”

  “The Russians pushed the button first,” I said. “In the movie.”

  “Well, that’s my next point,” Scott said. “Since both sides know that an attack from one side automatically brings about an attack from the other, no one will do it. That’s what’s supposed to keep any of it from happening.” He enunciated his next words carefully. “It’s called ‘mutually-assured destruction.’”

  I couldn’t help noticing that the first letters in “mutually-assured destruction” spelled m-a-d. And mad can either mean “angry” or “crazy.” Or both.

  “So,” said Hector. “The good news is the leaders of the two world superpowers are playing a game of nuclear chicken in which they’ll never press the button. And if they do, the good news is that we’ll be vaporized before we know it?”

  “Pretty much,” Scott said. “That’s why they showed the movie. To remind us.”

  “Or to prepare us,” I said. Nuclear war was on my list of things I knew probably wouldn’t happen but could: forgetting to wear pants to school, getting my leg chomped off by a shark at Virginia Beach, sneezing on Kelli Ann if I tried to talk to her during gym. Now that nuclear war seemed like a real possibility, it was front and center, competing with—and now beating—my bar mitzvah speech for the title of Thing I Am Most Worried About.

  The next day, everyone was talking about The Day After at school. Lots of kids said they couldn’t sleep, and the ones who could said they had nightmares. One girl even got sent to the clinic because she started crying about it and couldn’t stop. Every time I was near a window, I looked at the sky, checking for signs of a nuclear war. On the way home from school, I heard a boom and an echo. I froze and thought bomb before I thought garbage truck. That was when I realized I needed a way to keep doing regular life stuff while still being aware of what might happen.

  I decided that if the Soviet Union was going to attack us, it would be on a Tuesday.

  I had some almost scientific reasoning for this. My dad had told me that the emergency room was the busiest on Mondays, because people call in sick and then they need a note for work. That got me thinking that there were probably days the Russians were more or less likely to attack. They wouldn’t do it on a Friday—no one should attack on a Friday because you had the weekend to look forward to. And why screw up a perfectly good weekend on the planet by attacking on Saturday or Sunday?

  That left Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. My mom said that people at her office had a hard time getting started on Mondays. No one had any energy and the coffee machine was always broken. If you were going to make a huge decision like blowing up the world, you’d need a lot of energy and coffee. So that ruled out Monday. And everyone called Wednesday “hump day” because once you got over that day, you were headed toward the weekend. And who wouldn’
t want to hang on until the weekend? And Thursday was even closer to the weekend.

  That left Tuesday. Tuesday was always the busiest day at my house. If Mom was going to work late, it was usually a Tuesday, and even though Dad had different shifts, he always ended up working on Tuesdays. My teachers gave the most homework on Tuesdays. Lauren and I usually had Hebrew school and then I met with the rabbi on Tuesdays (except for this week, when it was canceled).

  If there ever was a day when ending life as we knew it seemed like an option, it would be a Tuesday.

  My theory was confirmed even further the next day, when Eisenhower Junior High held its first trivia contest. That was a Tuesday, and it did, in fact, change life as we knew it.

  Here’s a question:

  What’s the difference between a seventh grader and an earthworm? Every once in a while, earthworms get respect. When Hector and I had thought about who we could have on a trivia team, we never even considered any eighth graders. There was no point; we were beneath them. There were three teams of eighth graders at the contest. I could overhear them, sizing up everybody else.

  “They’ve got Finch—he’ll be killer on the science questions.”

  “Yeah, except I heard he’s not really good at chemistry; he just knows the periodic table. And look at them. They’ve got Margaret Medina. She reads all the time.”