We, on the other hand, didn’t even get discussed. Not even Robert Scanlon’s team did. It’s like we were just something that had to be dealt with and moved over. Like earthworms in the dirt.
It sounded corny, but after practicing together, I realized that Hector, Scott, and I had specialties, kind of like one of those military adventure movies, where everybody has a specialty that makes the whole operation work. Hector had a near-encyclopedic knowledge of 1940s and 1950s television shows and entertainers, thanks to his grandmother and reruns, and Scott knew every world and state capital. Scott also claimed to be something of a history scholar, but honestly, he just guessed Hitler or John F. Kennedy on the history questions half the time, and got them right.
My specialty was sports and random information. The first NHL goaltender to be credited with a goal was Billy Smith with the New York Islanders. Siberian chipmunks camouflage their scent with snake urine. The average person farts fourteen times a day.
According to the rule sheet that Scott gave us, the questions were going to come from multiple sources including, but not limited to, the World Almanac, newspapers, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Trivial Pursuit. You received ten points for each correct answer. You lost ten points for every answer you got wrong. The winner was the first team to get to three hundred points, but Mrs. Axelrod, the school librarian and moderator, had a twist for the end. “If you are about to reach three hundred points,” the sheet read, “the team immediately behind you gets to select from which one of the following categories—Sports; Science; Art; Music, TV & Movies; US History; English; Math—your next question will come.”
For most of the game, we were in third place, behind two of the eighth-grade teams. But then we hit a lucky streak, ten correct answers in a row, pulling into second place. One of the eighth-grade teams had their final question, and we picked Math.
Mrs. Axelrod opened the envelope and read the index card inside. “What system of measurement begins with six zeroes and ends with 235959?”
I was stumped. It didn’t even make any sense. If this was the type of math we were expected to know in eighth grade, I was in trouble. The eighth-grade captain shook his head. “Latitude and longitude?” he said.
“Incorrect. Another team may answer for ten points.”
Ten points would get us to two hundred and ninety points. Hector raised his hand.
Math was not Hector’s best subject. I didn’t know why he was raising his hand. But before I could stop him, Hector said, “That’s military time.”
Mrs. Axelrod said, “That’s correct. I would have also accepted the twenty-four-hour clock.” She shuffled the envelopes. “Since you have reached two hundred ninety points, the other team will select the next question for you.”
The pimply captain of the eighth-grade team looked at us like the fish bait that we were. “You guys have been missing science questions all day. We’ll pick Science.”
Mrs. Axelrod opened the envelope. “Final question for the seventh-grade team, in the subject of Science. What is the sum total of eyes, ears, and noses on a common garden earthworm?”
The audience, made up mostly of team alternates, parents, and some kids waiting for the late bus, began whispering.
I couldn’t believe it. I’d memorized key British monarchs and rivers in China, but somehow, despite our similar lifestyles, earthworm anatomy had gotten by me.
Hector leaned in. “I think it’s one of those super-obvious answers. They probably have two eyes, two ears, and a nose like everyone else.”
Scott closed his own eyes. “Shh. I’m trying to think.” He had a thin mustache, and when he thought about questions, he liked to run his fingers over it. I did not have a mustache, but I also didn’t have pimples, so maybe it was a trade-off.
“Thirty seconds,” said Mrs. Axelrod.
Sometimes, you knew the answer right away, and there was no better feeling. You knew the right thing to say and you just said it. It was trickier when you didn’t know the exact answer, but instead you knew the range of possible answers. Then you had to start using the information you had on hand and work with your teammates. All I could think of was that book, How to Eat Fried Worms, where a kid ate a worm every day for fifteen days to win a bet. I loved that book in fourth grade, but I didn’t remember any reference to worm eyeballs. I didn’t remember anything about aural or visual perception. What did worms really have to perceive besides dirt?
Then it occurred to me—maybe they didn’t have eyes at all.
“Fifteen seconds.”
And if they had noses, they’d just be breathing dirt, so they probably didn’t have one of those, either. I debated whether I should say something. I was a great fan of the quote It’s better to be thought a fool than open one’s mouth and prove it.
Scott looked at me. “You got anything?”
No eyes, I thought. I opened my mouth, which I knew an earthworm did have, because they ate one third of their body weight in dirt every day. But nothing came out.
“I need an answer, please,” said Mrs. Axelrod.
It’s just a dumb contest, I told myself. Except for the people in the library, no one in the school probably even knew about it. But I wanted to win. I wanted to show the eighth graders that we hadn’t made it on easy questions, that we were a team to be reckoned with and analyzed. And ideally, I wanted to be the guy with the right answer.
Under the table, Hector held up five fingers.
“The sum total is … zero,” said Scott. He stroked his mustache. “Earthworms don’t have eyes, ears, or noses.”
Mrs. Axelrod looked at her index card. For a librarian, she sure did read slowly. “That answer is correct,” she said.
I was right! That is, I would have been right, if I’d said anything. For a second, we were all quiet. Then Hector screamed, “We did it! We did it!” and we jumped up and down like maniacs.
Scott threw Mrs. Axelrod’s remaining index cards up in the air as part of the celebration. They fell like confetti.
“Clean those up right now or you’ll be disqualified,” Mrs. Axelrod said. She made a face like someone had just used one of their fourteen farts, only nobody had.
“How did you know?” I asked Scott as we crawled under the table to pick up the cards. “About the earthworm.”
Scott tugged out a card that had slid under a chair leg. “I kept saying in my head, Earthworm eyes. Earthworm ears. Earthworm nose. None of that sounded right. Where would the nose even go? And I thought maybe it was because there were no such things.”
Then I really wished I’d spoken up. At least I had a reason for thinking what I did.
“But you could do that with anything,” I said. “Like, cricket knees, cricket knees. Or spider teeth. And those exist.”
Scott shrugged, but now I was all worked up again. This way, it didn’t seem like we won because of our knowledge; we just won because of dumb luck. And then Scott got all the credit.
“Well done,” said Dad. He shook our hands, like we’d just landed on the moon or something. “Way to get that last question, Scott.”
Hector’s parents and his little brother, Alonso, came over to congratulate us. “The trivia winners!” said Mr. Clelland. “Our smart boy.” He put his arm around Mrs. Clelland and squeezed her. The Clellands were what my mom called lovey-dovey. Scott rolled his eyes.
“With smart friends,” added Mrs. Clelland. “They’ve been practicing with the Trivial Pursuit Genius Edition, you know.”
The front of the Trivial Pursuit box actually said Genus Edition, but I didn’t correct her. Mrs. Clelland was not the first person to make that mistake.
“Hello, Ben,” Mr. Clelland said, shaking my father’s hand. “I’d forgotten you were a doctor. Did you come straight from work?” Dad was still wearing his scrubs from his hospital shift.
I kind of hoped that Dad would just let the comment go by this time, but he didn’t. “I’m a nurse, actually. Operating room.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Cl
elland. His smile became a little frozen. “A nurse.” Not for the first time, I wished my dad was in a slightly more manly profession. Like lumberjack.
“Where are your parents, Scotty?” asked Mrs. Clelland. Hector, Scott, and I cringed, collectively. Scott is not a Scotty.
“Working, I guess,” he said.
Mrs. Clelland nodded, though you could tell she thought they should have taken off work. She didn’t miss anything that had to do with Hector and Alonso, up to and including Picture Day at school.
The eighth-grade team that came in second came over and shook our hands. “Congratulations. Not sure I would have gotten that last one,” said the captain. That was a reward in itself—getting some recognition from the eighth graders, even if it was in that forced, good-game way, like in gym. Another reward: We’d have our names read over the announcements.
“Nice going, Scott,” Mrs. Axelrod said as we filed out. “Good luck at the county contest. It’s in January.”
I hadn’t known there was a next level of competition, but I smiled like I had known all along. My mind raced. If we won at county, that would be even better than beating the eighth graders. We would probably get in the school newspaper. We would be presented with certificates at a school-wide assembly, which would definitely help our status. There might even be a trophy, and Kelli Ann would see us get it. I pushed that last thought away, trying not to get too excited. I just had one other question about the date.
“It’s not January twenty-first, is it?” I asked.
“I think it’s earlier than that. I’ll check. Big day, Mr. Horowitz?”
“You could say that.”
For the last year, I’ve had a pretty good idea of what I was going to be doing on January 21, 1984: being bar mitzvahed in front of about a zillion people. This was pretty funny to me, since I could barely start a book report more than a day before it was due. But I’d known for a year that the twenty-first was the day I was supposed to read from the Torah and become a man.
So far, my body hadn’t figured out the man part, though. I was the seventh-shortest person in the class (that included the girls) and while I had armpit hair (and a little BO) I didn’t have any leg hair. Also, I really wanted the salespeople who phoned our house to stop calling me “ma’am.”
I didn’t expect to spring into a fully formed adult when I had my bar mitzvah, though it would be nice to have something that showed I had this adult thing down. When my dad had his bar mitzvah, his voice cracked right in the middle of his Torah reading and everybody laughed, nicely. Dad said that instead of feeling embarrassed, he laughed, too, which was kind of a sign of growing up, or at least feeling more comfortable in his own skin. Or voice box.
The congregation threw candy at him, and then he went out to lunch with his mom and dad and brother and grandparents and his neighbor, Mrs. Levine. I’d always hoped that my bar mitzvah would be like that, because we lived in Virginia and not in New York, where bar mitzvah celebrations were like Ringling Brothers. But when Granny M, my dad’s mother, moved into our neighborhood, that changed in a hurry.
“Oh no,” she said, in a voice that suggested I had asked for ham and cheese sandwiches at the reception. (Ham and cheese sandwiches were as non-kosher as you could get, and even though we didn’t keep kosher, serving them at the reception—in Granny M’s mind—would be a pretty huge mistake.) “That’s not how it’s done these days.” You would think that she would be flattered that I wanted to do things the same way she’d done them for my dad, but she prided herself in keeping up with the times, even if all of the changes were not for the better.
After she said that, Granny M pulled out the tissue she always kept inside her sweater sleeve, and wiped a spot on the coffee table. My grandmother was slightly obsessed with germs, which was why she wanted a portable phone, even though they cost thousands of dollars. She thought pay phones were dirty.
But Granny M didn’t spend a lot of time on the phone. She spent a lot of her time “popping in” to visit us. She moved into our neighborhood six weeks after Wai Po moved in. That was not a coincidence, in spite of what she might tell you.
Granny M had always been perfectly happy living in New York. She called it “the world center of culture.” But when she heard that Wai Po was moving in with us, Granny M began to complain. She complained about the dirt and the noise and the traffic. They raised the price of subway fares. And wouldn’t it be nice if we all lived a bit closer?
“Well, I’m afraid we’re not moving,” my dad said, which he thought would take care of everything. But he had underestimated the power of Granny M. She could have gone to live in San Diego, which was clean and which was where my uncle Josh, aunt Tracey, and cousin Ashley lived. But Granny M said that if she was going to move to the West Coast, she might as well move to China.
I don’t think she meant anything by that.
Granny M (which was short for Marjorie) knew everybody. “You went to NYU dental school?” she’d ask a new neighbor who happened to be a dentist. “Do you know Dr. Grumman? He got his degree in ’62. Where do you practice? Brooklyn?” She’d dig until she found some connection between that person and herself, either by synagogue or by the niece of her best friend’s brother-in-law. It’s what she called “Jewish Geography.” If that were a trivia category, she’d win.
Anyway, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that shortly after Wai Po moved in, Granny M announced that she had a connection to our neighbors, the Dreightons. It turned out that Granny M’s neighbor’s son’s colleague was none other than Harry Dreighton, aka Professor Harold Dreighton, around the corner from us. I had heard that the Dreightons were moving to Japan for a year for Dr. Dreighton’s sabbatical, but Granny M had heard a lot more.
Such as the fact that the Dreightons were looking for someone to live in their house after the first renter dropped out at the last minute. Someone like their new friend, Marjorie Horowitz. She signed on the dotted line right away.
Ever since she moved in, Granny M had been trying to make sure my bar mitzvah was done right. This was because of her sister, Seal, which was short for Celia. They hadn’t spoken in years, but for someone she didn’t talk to, Granny M seemed to know a great deal about what her sister was doing. Seal just got back from a cruise. Seal got a new haircut. Most important, though, Seal’s grandson, my cousin Jacob, had a bar mitzvah done right.
So now done right meant out-of-town guests, a hotel ballroom, and a new three-piece suit for me. Granny M asked me what I wanted as a party theme, which was also something Jacob had. I told her I knew what theme meant in my English class, but I didn’t know what that meant for a bar mitzvah. I kind of hoped that that would deter her, but it only made her more excited.
“Do you like animals? Mitzi Shandler’s granddaughter had an elephant at her bat mitzvah. And Gert’s grandson’s bar mitzvah was based on that movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
I didn’t want an elephant or a giant rolling boulder at my party. I wasn’t sure I wanted a party at all, since Mom and Dad were so worried about money. Up until Granny M took over, I was planning on only speaking in front of our congregation, and maybe Hector, and now, possibly Scott. My father kept saying things like “a compromise” and “something in between.” But for Granny M, “in between” still involved official invitations. Plus, she said they had to be engraved, which made it sound like they would be made of gold.
My cousin Jacob had that, too.
On Tuesday evening, the night of our big victory, Granny M walked into our kitchen and Bao Bao let out a high-pitched bark, the canine equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. It was his trademark.
“Can you get that dog to shush?” asked Granny M. “He sounds like a fire engine.”
“He thinks you’re an intruder,” said Wai Po. “He’s defending us.” Wai Po put a little extra snap on the word us.
My mom tried to smooth things over. “I think Bao Bao is trying to welcome you! Bao Bao, hush.”
Wai Po grunted in
to her tea. Bao Bao looked at Granny M, gave one last bark, and trotted out of the room as if he’d accomplished something.
“I got the invitations!” said Granny M, taking a card out of her purse with a flourish. “I just brought one to show you.”
Mom pulled down her glasses and looked at the invitation.
It was blue, the color I had picked, and simple, because my mother said simple invitations looked “clean,” unlike my bedroom. There was a Jewish star at the bottom.
Please join us as our son, David Horowitz, is called to the Torah …
“What was the grand total?” my mother asked. She was still trying to decide if my grandmother’s helping was actually helpful.
“Seventy invitations didn’t come cheap,” said Granny M. “But this is on me.”
But all I could think about was seventy invitations?! If you multiplied that by the Yagers or the Rosmans, who had four kids plus two parents each, that would equal four hundred and twenty people. I could barely speak in front of two people. How could I speak in front of four hundred and twenty?
“That seems like a lot of invitations,” I said.
“Some of those people will be your friends,” said Mom.
“Do you have many Jewish friends?” asked Granny M.
“More like any Jewish friends,” I said.
There were only four Jewish boys at my school, and even though we saw each other in Hebrew school, it’s not like we talked very much. I was the only one who was half-Jewish and half-Chinese.
Lauren came into the kitchen. “Do I get to invite any friends?” She had on a button that said, EXPERIENCE IS WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU DON’T GET WHAT YOU WANT.
“Well,” said Mom. “This is David’s bar mitzvah.”
“So?”
“When you have your bat mitzvah, you’ll invite your friends.”
“That’s so unfair.” Lauren glared at Mom. “I’ll bet you’ll let David invite his friends to my bat mitzvah.” Then she stomped out of the kitchen.
“What about girls? You should invite girls.” Granny M said it like this was a rule.
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