by Joshua Braff
“Practice in there, all right?” he says. “Tell me you will.”
I look closely at the skin where his beard once was. I look into his eyes.
“Thank you for the butterscotch,” I say to Rona, and step out of the car.
“You’re very welcome,” she says. “I hope it helped.”
When I get out in the parking lot I see my father is also standing. He starts to walk toward me.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
“I thought I’d walk you to the door,” he says, and I flinch as he puts his arm around me. He leads me quickly down the back steps and inside the temple lobby through two sets of glass doors. And the second we get inside, he stops and swivels me to face him.
“What the hell’s goin’ on?” he says calmly. “Huh?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you even know how many people are unable to do what you do? This is your gift, Jacob. Hank Greenberg hit baseballs. Chaim Potok—”
“I’m gonna be late,” I say, lifting my watch.
“Don’t interrupt me.”
“If I’m late they—”
“Do you have any idea—any—how proud it makes me to see you up on that beema? Do you?”
I keep my eyes from him.
“Ask me how proud it makes me. Ask me how it feels to see all those people reacting to you, reacting to my son’s voice.”
I say nothing.
“Ask me, Jacob. Ask me how much I love you when you’re up there.”
A woman walks out of the ladies’ room and my father steps back from me and smiles. She grins back and heads down the hall. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three . . .
“Now. For a person who’s . . . struggled so much in school, it’s key that you realize where you shine and where you don’t. I know my own limitations. None of us has all cylinders humming. None of us can be all things great. I learned this truth from Randal.”
I look at my watch and then down the hall.
“There are so many, many things to absorb during these hours with this man, but . . . the thing that stayed with me most—the one phrase that kept popping up for me—was something that reminded me of you. Of you. Can I share it with you? Is your throat okay?”
A classmate named Jonah walks through the glass doors with a cherry Fruit Roll-Up hanging over his lip. He waves at me with his head and my father waits for him to pass by.
“Randal says, ‘Wherever you are today, you’re there because you put yourself there.’”
My father looks up and down the hall, and takes a step closer to me. “Again. Wherever you are today—meaning, wherever you find yourself at this moment in your life—you’re the one that put yourself there.”
“Dad.”
“Crap grades? Learning disabled? Rebellious? Angry at God? Angry at me? Sore throat? I don’t care. You can try and rattle me in front of anyone ya want with your ailments and your subtle, cutesy games. But you cannot blame me for your own life. Understand? So let’s try one more time. I want you to know and hear . . . that wherever you are today . . . you’re there because—”
“Dad?”
“What?”
“I’m in Hebrew school!”
He blinks a lot and steps back to fold his arms.
“I’m in Hebrew school today.”
“So what?” he says. “What’s your point?”
I glance out at the parking lot and see Rona looking back at me through the window. “I’ve never . . . in my whole life . . . put myself in this building. You put me here. You did.”
The head shaking begins slowly and soon becomes a zoney stare. “You can’t even grasp this fundamental idea,” he says.
“Abram?” says a voice from down the hall. It’s my teacher, Rabbi Seth.
“Oh. Hello, Rabbi,” my father says. “Shalom.”
The bell rings just above my head and my father is startled. He looks up at the gray device and would dent it if he could.
“Two days till Naso,” the rabbi says. “We ready?”
“More than ready,” my dad says, with a bounce on his toes. “And if he’s not, he will be.”
“We’ll work on it today with the others,” he says. “Let’s get to class, Jacob. Ya need a yarmulke in here, buddy.”
I check my pockets for one and look up at my father. In the game of the Unthinkable, I tell him I won’t be on the beema on Saturday. I tell him about recess and Penn Station and my hope to meet up with Asher by noon tomorrow. I tell him in all the years that I’ve been praying to God, I’ve never truly believed I was heard. And I tell him in the all the years I’ve been letting him down, I’ve never truly believed I was dumb.
My father pulls a yarmulke from his coat pocket and spreads it flat on my head. “We’ll talk later,” he says softly. “Understood?”
I slowly lift my hand into a wave and nod at him. “Good-bye, Dad,” I say.
He blinks at me skeptically but I don’t look away.
Rabbi Seth walks a few steps down the hall but stops to wait for me. My father leans forward and gives my forehead a gentle kiss. “Every word a jewel,” he says. “Go make it shine.” He then turns and walks up the stairs toward the parking lot. The rabbi calls my name but I ignore him, to watch my father leave. And in the seconds that his car is gone and I no longer see him, I search my mind and heart, for what I’ll now be without.
Holy High
“All night, seas of flame raged and tongues of fire darted above the Temple Mount. Stars splintered from the baked skies and melted into the earth, spark after spark. Has God kicked his throne aside, and smashed his crown to smithereens?”
“Thank you, Rifkah,” says Rabbi Seth. “Translation, please.”
“Call halila ratchu yame lehavot vaheshtarbvu l-shonote . . .”
Rifkah Feldman holds a powdered mini doughnut between her thumb and pinkie and taps her foot to the rhythm of her words. Behind her head the Israeli flag hangs in permanent half-mast from a wooden pole in the corner. And all along the walls are dated travel posters for Netanya, Haifa, and Elat; a grainy Wailing Wall. Room gimel, or number three, is what they call this tiny basement classroom. It’s down here, twelve feet beneath the beema, amid the stacks of musty prayer books and chalk-dusted yarmulkes, that I sit for nine hours a week and stew under an endless drip of superbly useless metaphor.
I rip a piece of paper from my notebook and write “Dear” in pencil at the top. Rifkah stops midsentence to glare at me. I broke her concentration.
“Sorry,” I offer, and she eventually resumes. As long as I’ve know her, she’s been a big-boned, curly-haired princess with a raisin-colored mole beneath her second lump of chin. She touches it as she speaks in her nasally buzz and reads quickly to impress and remind us of her fluency. Like the droves of lazily entitled Jewesses that go to my high school, Rifkah will make an ideal and horrific first wife for some dentist looking to marry his mom. Within days of the wedding, her lifelong obsession with food will surface and she’ll be forced to rationalize it as her “traditional” role in her loveless marriage. When the dentist finally leaves her and her two yeshiva boys, Ethan and Shelly, he’ll soon start humping a hygienist with an ass that could crack a walnut.
I look down at the letter on my desk and check my watch. Sixteen minutes until hafsaka. Dear Dad. Dearest Dad. My Dear Dad. DEAR DAD.
There are only three of us today and twelve in the entire school when it’s full. No one attends Hebrew school after their bar mitzvah but the impenetrably forced and the squarely devout. Rifkah, for example, chooses to be here, like an outpatient in a mental ward who can leave at any time but won’t. Jonah Bernbaum, on the other hand, would rather be bleeding. He, like me, attends only because his father pumps him full of a clear and odorless poison called “Jew guilt,” which gnaws at and festers in our Eastern European bone marrow. I’ve known Jonah since the fourth grade and have always admired his hatred of our circumstance. He’s an actual boy genius with translucent skin, a smudgy-sad mustache, and eno
ugh visible ear wax to induce nausea. Forever frail and bookish, he now says “fuckin’” a lot around me and speaks in a forced and jive-ish slang that makes him walk with a little hop. I think he likes me because I let him be this nerdy, streetwise Heeb without laughing or reminding him that he’s four foot ten and wearing sandals with tan socks. After earning a ridiculously high IQ score in the middle of the fifth grade, he achieved some celebrity when the Newark Star put him on the Sunday cover. But when you’ve seen him devour his own sneeze to avoid the ridicule of his classmates, you know he’s about as lonely as a tube sock full of semen.
Rifkah takes a sip of Diet Pepsi and swipes her mouth on her shoulder. She then flips the page she’s reading and begins from the top. “The fear of God was upon the distant mountains and terror seized the sullen rocks of the desert.”
“Okay, thank you, Rifkah,” says Rabbi Seth. “Who’s next?”
I look down at my letter again. When I’m done, it will explain everything. That I’m safe. That I’m fine. That there’s no need to worry about me. I lean forward in my desk chair and press my pencil to my note.
Dear Father, . . .
“Jonah,” says the rabbi. “Please read. “
I look over at Jonah and then up at the clock. Fourteen more minutes until hafsaka.
Jonah yawns and glances over at the time. “Um . . . pass,” he says.
Rabbi Seth rolls his eyes. “You can’t pass. It’s not a game show.”
Jonah rummages through his backpack and looks for something to read. “What do you want to hear?”
“I don’t care. Honestly. The Tanakh, the Scroll of Fire. Ya’akov’s reading his Torah portion. Pick anything and read it.”
“Fine. How ’bout this?” he moans, lifting a prayer book.
Rabbi Seth points at him. “Dynamite choice. From anywhere.”
“Anywhere?”
“Anywhere, Jonah.”
A rabbinical student in his twenties, Rabbi Seth Lerner wears Mets hats and faded jeans and calls the Torah his “drug of choice.” As long as we show up he lets us snack during class, put our feet up, and even curse if you can justify the context. Before Asher got expelled he’d say Seth was the “hippest Jewschoolteacher alive,” and liked to envision a menorah-shaped bong somewhere hidden in his house. But the rabbi finally stopped ignoring Asher’s attendance, or lack thereof. I was in the kitchen of my father’s house when my father answered the phone. “Twice?” he kept saying. “What do you mean twice? He’s been twice in seven months?” My brother was at my mother’s at the time, still floating from the acceptance letter he’d received the day before. In the morning I see the lock has been broken off Asher’s door. There are pencil drawings and paintings all over his carpet, crumpled but not torn. I lift them and spread them flat on his desk, trying not to fumble the chips of dried paint. I leave them all in a pile on his bed. When he arrives at my dad’s that day I don’t hear him until he’s in his room. When I get there he doesn’t see me at first. He’s just standing by his desk with a portrait in his hand.
“I need to talk to you,” I tell him.
He flinches and faces me. “Did he do this?”
“Rabbi Seth called last night.”
Asher slowly nods and looks down at the painting.
“He told Dad you . . . haven’t been in a while.”
Asher stares at it for a few more seconds.
“None of them are ruined,” I say, taking a step toward him.
He stops me with his hand and I see the muscle in his jaw move. “Don’t.”
“Some aren’t bad,” I say softer.
He then lifts the painting over his head with both hands and tears the thing in two.
I lie when my dad asks if I’ve seen him. And I lie when he asks where he is. In the morning Asher heads over to the temple, hours before Hebrew school, and decides to end his relationship with Judaism. The second I arrive that afternoon, Jonah is cackling and pointing at the top of the rabbi’s desk. “What’s so funny?” I ask from the doorway.
“It’s a giant dick!” he squeals. “A fuckin’ giant black dick.”
When I walk in and look down at it, I know exactly who’s been by.
“Look at the balls,” Jonah roars.
An erect and velvety drawn horse cock in pencil with veins the size of thumbs and a mushroom-shaped head. I spit on the drawing and smear it with my sleeve. There are four minutes until the bell rings and I just know there are more. Jonah says he’ll help me and we run from room to room. The human penises are done in chalk in rooms yod and dalet and are a little more cartoony. A flaccid one wearing tefillin has a bubble over it that says, “Please pass the white fish.” I grab an eraser and start wiping it off the board while Jonah just stands there, his mouth pinned wide with laughter. The chalkboards in rooms alef and bet are covered in tits. There’s no way I can get them all without a sponge and a bucket, but I try. As I work Jonah steps up to the board and pretends to lick each nipple. I’d never seen the boy genius so untamed.
“Jonah?” says the rabbi.
“I’m looking?” he says, still flipping through his prayer book.
“Forget it. We’ll come back to you. Jacob.”
I look up.
“From the top, all right? Ya singin’ it?”
I shake my head.
“Fine.”
I glance up at the clock and then down at my book. The last time. The very last time. “Va’yidaber Adonai, el Moshe lemor naso et rosh . . .”
Asher hid out at my mother’s house for a week after the expulsion was announced. It seemed he knew better than to come near my father and was counting on time to lessen the calamity. Stay away, I told him, you might as well wait a year. But he strolled on in one night, as if nothing had gone wrong, using an air of nonchalance I would not have recommended. We were all eating dinner when I heard the front door open.
“Asher?” Dara called, and I prayed it wasn’t him. My father glanced at me and tossed his napkin on the table.
“. . . b’nei gershon gom hem laveit avotom l’michpachtom.”
“Translation, please.”
Another look at the clock. “The Lord spoke to Moses. Take a census of the Gershonites also, by their ancestral house and by their clans. Record them and—”
“Ida,” Rifkah announces, pointing at the door with a doughnut. The temple secretary, Ida Gabirol, knocks and pokes her face in. As long as I’ve know her she’s worn a flesh-colored Band-Aid on her nose but today it’s gone.
“Come in,” says Rabbi Seth and hops off his desk.
“Sawry to interrupt Rabboy. Jacob’s father cawlled. He needs to go home right away.”
I stare at Ida’s face and slowly stand. “What happened?” I ask.
“He didn’t say. You live nearboy, correct?”
I nod while gathering my things.
“He said ya should wawk home and he’ll explain it awl when you get there. I hope everything’s okay, Jacob.”
“Yes,” says Rabbi Seth. He walks over to me and rests his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll call the house later, to check on you.”
I throw my book bag over my shoulder and walk toward Ida in the hall.
“Ya’akov?” says the rabbi, and I turn to face him. He lifts the letter I’d begun off my desk and holds it out for me. I walk back in the room and he meets me halfway.
“Good luck,” he says.
I slowly nod and take the letter from his hand.
THROUGH THE SANCTUARY and out the doors to the parking lot, I move as fast as I can down the driveway to Glendale Avenue. I picture my father on his knees with the phone at his ear and there’s fire and smoke and I don’t know if he can breathe. I listen for sirens but the drone of lawn mowers is all I hear, the sun still so bright. At the corner I turn on Saber and start running uphill past the climbing rows of mailboxes and square-shaped lawns. My mind says the worst, like someone’s dead, someone I love. I could see it in Ida’s face, a fire or a crash, some vicious news she knew.
“Yaw muthu is dead, Ya’akov. Huh plane went down.” She must have pointed at the smoke—she saw it first—white but barely visible. She turned to Nate as the plane’s floor began to buckle and saw floating sparks like fireflies, but thousands, raining from the vents. They gripped each other’s hands and nuzzled their heads before an explosion rocked the fuselage and the windows blew out. The fiery wreckage is on some farm in Upstate New York. I keep running up this hill past the Daffners and the Goulds and see Westlock up ahead. “It’s your brutha who’s dead, Ya’akov. His car flipped ova.” It happened on the S curves of Piedmont Avenue. He’s at the morgue right now under a sheet in a long silver drawer and they need me to identify him and say it’s him, it’s him, while covering my mouth and bending over his corpse. I lift his head with my hands and pull his cold cheeks up to mine—no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you promised, you promised we’d go, we’d leave here! A car drives by me and honks for some reason and I’m sure it’s my dad until I look and it’s not. There’s a cramp in my side, deep beneath my rib and I pinch it.
“Wrong!” I can hear my father scream. “It cannot be erased! It’s a crime! A crime against God. You vandalized a synagogue, you pig! Why?” He shoves him backward into the kitchen table and Asher’s hip smacks the edge. Every glass tips and spills, and Dara and Gabe both dart from the room. Asher says, “Calm the fuck down,” and keeps his hands high and in front of him as my father comes again.
“Get the hell out,” he says, into Asher’s face. “I want you out of my house.”
“Some chalk on a chalkboard, Dad. Chalk!”
“Ask me!”
Asher’s shoulders rise and drop. “Ask you what?”
My father leans his face into Asher’s. “Ask me if I love you right now,” he says with great calm. “Try it. Do . . . you . . . love . . . me?”
I can see my house. It’s lit in a summery, late-day orange and it’s not on fire. When I get to the corner at Westlock I slow to a walk and hear another car racing up behind me on Saber Street. I turn and see it fishtailing and for a second I think it’s Nicky and then it is, it is his car. He drives the right side of the Camaro up on the curb behind me and I jump to get out of the way. Asher is alive. I see him in the passenger seat and it’s not a dream. “Need a lift?”