The Trouble with Good Ideas

by Amanda Panitch

  He?

  A pause where I imagined Dad shaking his head. “It might be time to get a lawyer or something involved,” he said. “The courts can appoint you or Marvin as a guardian, couldn’t they? Surely there must be doctors who can make a judgment? We could call one of the assisted-living facilities on our list.”

  I blinked. Then blinked again. Something had short-circuited in my brain, and I couldn’t stop blinking. Assisted-living facilities? That meant nursing homes, and I knew what nursing homes were thanks to hearing about them from my old friend Aaron from Schechter, whose great-grandmother was in one. The only old person we knew who could possibly use a nursing home was Zaide. And Zaide did not need to be in a nursing home. Just because he was old didn’t mean he had to go live with all the other old people.

  I pushed open the kitchen door, lifting my chin high into the air to make myself look taller and therefore more authoritative. “Zaide does not need to go to a nursing home,” I proclaimed. In my imagination, this was where the conversation ended. Both my parents nodded vigorously, saying that of course I was right and how could they have thought otherwise.

  In real life, it did not work out quite that way. Mom just sighed at me and looked even older. This close, I could see the gray saggy pouches beneath her eyes. “Leah, number one, they’re called assisted-living facilities now. A lot of them are very nice. Nicer than that telephone building, for sure. And two, this is not a conversation for you.”

  No matter how nice it was, it wouldn’t be Zaide’s home. I lifted my chin even higher. My parents could probably see up my nose now, no matter how hooked it was.

  Ugh. Now I was thinking about my nose.

  “Why not?” I asked. “He’s my family, too.”

  “This is an adult conversation. Are you an adult?”

  “My bat mitzvah is this year. Then I’ll be an adult.” At least in the Jewish religion.

  “But you haven’t had it yet, have you?”

  I had not. I scowled at Mom and Dad. They knew that was a sore point, that they’d pulled me out of Schechter and moved me away the year before my bat mitzvah. It was too far to go to regular Hebrew school at the temple, and the only temple closer to our new house was an Orthodox one we didn’t want to go to because they were too observant. Our “relaxed” rules in regard to Shabbat and keeping kosher wouldn’t really fly. So I’d be preparing for my bat mitzvah in ten months by schlepping the two hours once a month to have a private lesson with the cantor and using recordings of him singing my haftarah and Torah portions to practice for when I’d get up in front of the congregation and do it myself.

  And we’d moved here specifically to be close to Zaide. If my parents sent him away, all of that would have been for nothing. Nothing at all.

  “I’ll have my bat mitzvah in less than a year,” I said. “It’s not like I’ll change that much in less than a year.”

  “We’ll see,” Mom said, but her words had an air of finality to them. Like instead of We’ll see, she’d said We’re finished. And Zaide would be going into a nursing home.

  But Zaide was fine. Just because he’d had one bad day when he forgot something didn’t mean he should be yanked from the home he’d lived in for a million years and shoved into a nursing home. If I had to go to a nursing home every time I forgot something, I’d get sent away after every single test at school.

  Aaron had told me all about the nursing home his great-grandmother was in. It had been a terrible place, according to him. Everything was white, from the walls to the floors to the hospital beds, and it smelled like a mixture of mothballs and Lysol and vomit. Some of the old people were friendly and would smile at him, but others didn’t do anything but stare vacantly at the wall or the television set. My parents could call it an assisted-living facility all they wanted, but you couldn’t change what something was by changing its name. Otherwise all of my lunchtime turkey sandwiches would be pizza. They were just trying to cushion the blow. Make me feel better.

  I couldn’t picture Zaide in a nursing home. I backed out of the doorway, my heart racing. I’d go over to his house and warn him. Maybe we could run away together, two Jews in cowboy hats on the lam. I didn’t know why I pictured cowboy hats, but it seemed right. “I’m going to Zaide’s!” I hollered back to my parents. I slammed the front door behind me on my way out, hoping it made my parents’ teeth rattle.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHEN I GOT TO HIS house, Zaide was up on the roof.

  Not to jump or anything. He had to go up there sometimes to fiddle with the old-fashioned antenna that kept his TV working. Thanks to the telephone company that used to be there, a sturdy, bolted-down metal ladder ran up one of the brick walls, so it was easy enough to climb up (not that the ease had ever convinced my parents to let me do it). Really, just the fact that he could climb up on his roof at ninety-three years old was enough to demonstrate that he definitely didn’t need a nursing home.

  A few years ago, I’d thought it would be funny to yell, “Don’t jump!” Except it had startled him, and he actually almost fell off the roof. So now whenever I saw him up there I just waited till he came down.

  So I waited. But I had kind of a bad feeling in my stomach the whole time, like I really had to go to the bathroom. It hadn’t been there before—it must have caught up with me once I stopped. Because what if he gave me that look again? What if he yelled at me like I was some stranger instead of his great-granddaughter?

  My phone vibrated in my hand. I glanced down. Lexy had finally responded to my sad echoes in the group chat. Sorry babe!! Naomi got us addicted to Clicksnail. I’ve been on that like all day. Love you lots tho, with the floating hearts emoji. I knew what Clicksnail was; it basically let you send photos to one another covered up in filters and stuff, like half the other apps out there. But I wasn’t allowed to put apps on my phone. My parents wouldn’t let me. They said I was too young and it was too dangerous. Phone calls and messaging only, and I wasn’t allowed to have a password on it, so that they could look at it anytime. They hadn’t ever done it, because they trusted me, but I knew that they could. Maybe they’d make an exception for Clicksnail. If Lexy and Julie were on it, surely it couldn’t be dangerous.

  Suddenly the ladder clanged. Zaide was climbing down. He didn’t see me until he stepped onto the ground, and then his face broke into a huge smile. Even with his small amount of yellow teeth, it was the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen. “If it isn’t Leah Roslyn,” he said.

  It’s an Ashkenazi Jewish tradition not to name a baby after a relative unless the relative is already dead. Apparently, death might get confused or whatever and take the baby instead of the older relative, which I think says more about how stupid death is than anything else. Also, if I were an old person, I’d sneak into all the hospitals and write my name on all the birth certificates. Death would never find me then!

  Anyway, I was named for my mom’s mom, Zaide’s daughter, who died before I was born. Her name was Roslyn. Sometimes he says she lives on in me.

  I waited until we got inside and Zaide poured himself a steaming cup of tea. (What is it with adults and tea?) I shifted in the kitchen chair, feeling the stuffing poke my behind from where it stuck out of the tear in the seat. I wanted to fold my hands on the tabletop in front of me, but the table was sticky and gross. “Zaide, I have something important to tell you,” I said, then stopped.

  My eyes traveled to the calendar on the wall, which changed every month to a different picture of me and/or Matty and/or Jed throughout the years. The current picture was of me and Matty and Jed as little kids from some Saturday a long time ago, our faces scrunched up in hysterical laughter over a caricature an older second cousin had drawn of us.

  A lump rose in my throat as I continued. “I heard Mom and Dad talk about taking you to a nursing home. We have to show them that you don’t need it.”

  Zaide was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “This isn’t for you to worry about, Leah Roslyn.”

  Despite his w
ords, a tendril of relief twined its way through me at the sound of my name again. See, Mom and Dad? Everything was fine. He knew exactly who I was. “I think it is, though,” I told him. “We should make a plan together. A game plan. Like in chess. We know what the king and queen are planning on doing, so we need to set up our defenses, right?”

  Zaide took a sip of his tea, even though it still had to be way too hot. His lips must have been burned. When he put the cup down, his face showed no expression. “Leah Roslyn, do you know the story of the Golem of Prague?”

  This really was not the time to be changing the subject. But once Zaide got something in his mind, you just had to let him talk it out. “It sounds a little familiar,” I said. Maybe one of my teachers had said something about it. There were a lot of things I didn’t remember from school.

  “It was the sixteenth century, in Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic,” he said. Which was in Europe. I had to bite my lip not to be like, Duh, I know where Prague is. “In Prague in the sixteenth century, our people were under attack.”

  Again, I had to bite my lip. In all the stories from the old days, we Jews were always under attack, always being exiled or murdered or burned. Some kids grew up with family stories about being related to royalty or farming on the prairie. I grew up with stories about how my ancestors hid in attics so that they wouldn’t die, and By the way, Leah Roslyn, one day you might have to do the same because the world is never truly a safe place for us. My friends and I used to talk about the non-Jews we knew who could hide us if the day ever came.

  “Jews were forced to live in the poor, crowded ghetto, where the streets crawled not only with sickness but horror. Men would sweep the streets and terrorize them—even the women and the elderly—with no one to protect them,” Zaide continued. “One day, the rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel grew tired of it all, and he made a plan. He gathered a pile of clay from the banks of the local river, he shaped it into a person, and he recited prayer after prayer. At the end, he pushed a paper inscribed with the shem—the true name of God—into the clay figure’s mouth.

  “And its eyes opened.”

  Zaide clearly meant this to be a shocking moment. I wasn’t especially shocked, but I made an appropriately shocked-sounding gasp.

  Pleased, he went on. “The rabbi called his creation a golem. At first, the golem protected the Jews of Prague from the angry mobs. It threw itself in front of weapons because its clay flesh could not bleed, and it carried people to safety on its back, running with inhuman speed.” Zaide’s face darkened. “But it could not last forever. The golem … it…” He trailed off into silence. His throat worked, his Adam’s apple going up and down. It was like he was thinking of a way to say something he didn’t want to say.

  When he finally spoke again, it was with an effort. “The people could not all be saved. Eventually the piece of paper with the shem … was torn from the golem’s mouth, and the golem crumbled into dust.” Zaide paused. “They had to save themselves.”

  I realized I was sitting on the edge of my seat. “And then what?”

  Zaide steepled his fingers before him. “The rabbi gathered the broken bits of the golem and the scrap of paper and stowed it in the attic of the synagogue. Through the years, it passed through many different hands: visiting rabbis, traders, thieves.” He raised his eyebrows. “By the 1900s, people thought it was lost. Until a young boy discovered a mysterious packet in the cellar of a synagogue in Knyszyn, Poland.”

  I gave an uncertain laugh. I knew Zaide was from Knyszyn. He had fled Poland around the time of the Holocaust, when more than six million Jews and millions of other “undesirables” were murdered by the Nazis and their supporters because they were Jewish or Romani or even gay. He had made it out in time with his parents and two older brothers. Most of his cousins hadn’t. His own Matties and Jeds.

  “It was a dangerous time to be a Jew in Poland then,” he said, his eyes misty. “My parents were talking about fleeing, but we didn’t know where to go. Most countries wouldn’t take us. So I formed a plan of my own.”

  He described how he’d wet the clay he’d found in the packet and combined it with the dirt from his own village, forming it into the shape of a person. Stuffed the shem in its mouth. “And it opened its eyes,” Zaide continued. I raised an eyebrow skeptically. “I had big plans. Oh, I had big plans. I was going to use the golem to save our village from the Nazis, then save all the Jews in Poland. When the nearby villagers came to attack, the golem fought them off.”

  Zaide shook his head. I wanted to shake my head, too. Did he really think I would believe this? I wasn’t a baby anymore. I no longer thought the tooth fairy swapped my teeth for money so that she could build a massive castle in the clouds out of tooth bricks. “I thought we would be safe. I let the golem’s presence lull me into peace. Let me think we would be okay and we wouldn’t have to leave.” His face darkened, as if there was a storm passing behind his eyes. “But … those were deceiving thoughts.” His Adam’s apple did the same thing as before, like he couldn’t get out what he wanted to say. “We … we barely made it out in time.”

  I waited for Zaide to continue, but he only settled back into his chair and took a sip of tea. “Is that it?”

  He lowered the tea and looked at me calmly. “Leah Roslyn, sometimes a person must fight their own battles.”

  Under the lisp and the Yiddish accent, what he was really saying was Leah, stay out of it. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t fair, just him going up against my parents. It should at least be two against two. How were you supposed to win if you were missing half your pieces? “But—”

  He set his teacup down hard enough that a few drops of tea splashed over the rim and onto the table. That was why it was always sticky. “Your parents are probably looking for you. Don’t make them worry.”

  My cheeks burned. That was him saying Leah, go home. Why couldn’t people just say what they meant? “But I—”

  He stood up abruptly. Conversation over. “I love you very much, Leah Roslyn. I love your parents very much, too.”

  Even with everything they were doing to him? I trailed after him as he walked slowly toward the door. He might walk slowly, but he didn’t even need a cane or anything. My parents couldn’t put him somewhere where they’d just stick him in a wheelchair and where Matty and Jed and I might not get to visit. He’d waste away.

  Zaide bent over to open the door—he didn’t even moan the way Dad did about his bad back.

  Maybe Dad should be the one going to a nursing home.

  Hands closed over my shoulders. “It’s going to be all right,” Zaide told me. “Thank you, Leah.”

  I swallowed hard. I had to swallow hard to get over the lump that had risen in there sometime in the last few seconds. “If you meant that, you’d let me help you,” I told him, and I pulled away. I didn’t glance over my shoulder as I left, not at all. I didn’t care if he was looking at me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MOM AND DAD WERE WAITING for me when I dragged myself up the front steps and in through the front door, but I was not in the mood. “Excuse me,” I said, trying to barrel past.

  They didn’t move. Mom took a deep breath. “Listen. Leah.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and hugged them tight. “I told Zaide that you guys wanted to put him in a nursing home.”

  Mom and Dad sighed in unison. “Oh, Leah,” Mom said wearily. “I wish you hadn’t done that.”

  “Why not?” I said it like I was daring her. “If you’re going to do it, you should own it.”

  “It’s not that,” Dad said. “Leah. We haven’t made a decision yet. But if we did talk to Zaide about an assisted-living facility, it would be because it’s for his own good. It’s hard for him to be alone now, and it’s only going to get harder.”

  If it was hard to be alone, well, I had a solution for that, and it barely took me any time to think of it. “I can move in with him then,” I said. “It’s right down the block, so it’s not like I’d have to
worry about changing schools. I’d even be able to catch the same bus!”

  “Leah—”

  “And he has that extra bedroom nobody even uses.” I talked right over my mom. “So it’s perfect! Then nothing has to change.”

  Mom shook her head. “What happens when he wakes up and he doesn’t know who you are?” she asked. “Or—”

  “That was once!” I interrupted. And really, the situation hadn’t been entirely clear. Maybe he just hadn’t been able to see me.

  “It wasn’t once, Leah. There was that time last week, and twice last month, and—”

  “I don’t remember any of those,” I said loudly, anything to make her stop. My face was getting really hot, which meant it was getting really red. “He was fine today. I just got back from his house—his home—and he was totally fine.”

  “These things come and go,” Dad said. “But they keep getting worse.”

  I stamped my foot. “We moved all the way here so that we’d be here with him and he wouldn’t be alone. That’s why I had to change schools and everything.”

  Mom sighed again. “I know, and I’m sorry. We didn’t realize how bad it was until we actually got here and started seeing him every day.”

  “Fine,” I said, throwing my hands up. “Then why can’t he move in with us? We have an extra bedroom, too. It would be fun! Like a permanent sleepover.”

  Mom and Dad exchanged a glance. “We’ve talked about it,” Mom said, and her voice was cautious, like she was trying not to disturb a sleeping bear. “But Zaide will require special care as he … as his condition progresses. And I’m telling you, Leah, these places we’re looking at aren’t nursing homes like you’re thinking. They’re almost like hotels, except that they have people there round-the-clock to help them and keep them safe. Which is something we can’t offer at home. A full-time live-in nurse like that is very expensive.”