by Galia Oz
“What is the story with socks? Could someone please explain it to me?” asked Mom. (This was one of her pet peeves.) “You go out and buy a pair of socks. But the minute you get home, they make a secret deal, and each one goes its own way. While one of them is dancing around with the clothes in the washing machine, the other one decides to hide in a pillowcase and is never seen again. There’s actually no such thing as a ‘pair of socks,’ and anyone who says there is doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” That was what Mom said. She could be really cute sometimes. I just wished she had more patience.
At night, I lay in bed and thought about Shakshuka, and I couldn’t sleep because of all the things I kept imagining, and I also felt cold, even though the windows were closed. I sat up and stared hard, straight ahead, like Brody’s grandmother, but not at the wall. I was looking at the picture of the angry chicken that was hanging there. And my thoughts went round and round in my head like the ingredients in a food processor when we pour them in to make a cake.
There was that moment when you could still see the flour, the Smertz sugar, the eggs, and even the lemon peel that Mom grated super thin for lemon zest—and then suddenly there was no flour, no eggs, no Smertz sugar, no bits of lemon—it was something new. And that was what happened to me. My thoughts mixed together until they turned into batter. Then I thought that I should go to Danny’s house. If he kidnapped Shakshuka, she might be there. I was sure that Brody would come with me.
How could it be that Effie saw Danny and Duke running but she didn’t see Shakshuka? And why were they running in the first place? Maybe one of them was holding Shakshuka and Effie just didn’t notice.
I snuggled down under the blanket and managed to fall asleep. But I was still cold. Ever since Shakshuka disappeared, I’ve been shaking and shivering with cold all night long.
We didn’t actually adopt Shakshuka. It was more like she adopted us.
Mom was sitting with the twins in the yard of our building, and suddenly we saw her—she was a tiny thing covered with spots and stripes. She wasn’t scared at all and she came right up to us and gave Max a kiss in his mouth, and Mom didn’t have the heart to push her away. Later we went in the house and she stayed outside, but when Mom started making supper we could hear her barking, telling us that she was hungry too, and Mom told me that if the noise didn’t stop, she’d catch that dog, iron it flat, and turn it into a bath mat.
I managed to sneak out some food and then it was quiet again. In the evening, Dad came home and he made himself some shakshuka—that was the name of this recipe for poached eggs in a yummy tomato sauce—and the puppy barked at him too, until he finally gave her some, and that was when we started calling her Shakshuka, and she turned into a real dog, only one without a collar or a proper dog tag. If the dogcatcher found her without a dog tag, he would lock her up because he’d think she was a stray. And if ten days passed and no one came to claim her—never mind. Forget it.
Two days after Shakshuka disappeared I sat in class and tried to draw a picture of her. But how could I? On her left side, she had this kind of light Smertz path that curved between two hill-shaped spots, one gray and one so light gray, it was almost blue. On her right side, she had a big mess of spots and stripes. Her tail was striped all over, and one of her ears was white with a bit of black. I couldn’t remember what the other ear looked like.
After school, Brody and I decided to go do some detective work at Danny’s house. When the bell rang we packed our stuff and tried to sneak out as quickly as we could, before any of the kids from our neighborhood decided to walk home with us. But Adam, who was standing in the middle of the classroom, explaining to some girls that if you dip a chip in water before you eat it so that it gets all soggy, it will cure your cold—well, it seems he had heard a little too much.
“Where are y-you g-g-going?”
“Nowhere,” we said. “Home.”
“To look for your d-d-dog?”
“Forget about it, Adam.”
Adam said, “Okay. D-d-did you know that I also have a d-d—”
Brody tried to help Adam finish his sentence. “Dinosaur? Doorbell?”
Adam motioned with his hand to make Brody stop, but he wouldn’t. “Dragon? Dishwasher? Donkey?”
I grabbed Brody by the sleeve and dragged him away before he could start making donkey noises.
Adam ran after us as far as the classroom door. He wouldn’t shut up.
“But mine’s a b-boy. I m-mean, he’s a m-male.”
“That’s great, Adam, congratulations,” said Brody.
“What? Does he have a new baby brother?” I asked Brody as we rushed through the school gate, surrounded by a bunch of noisy first graders.
“Who?”
“Adam.”
“Why would he have a new baby brother?” asked Brody.
“I don’t know. Isn’t that what he was telling us?”
“H-how sh-sh-should I kn-know what Adam w-was s-s-saying?” said Brody. Brody said mean things, but he never actually did anything mean. Sometimes I didn’t understand how that was possible.
Mom was also a bit like that. Last night she was in a pretty good mood for a change and she asked me what I would want to be if I wasn’t a girl named Julie. I said I didn’t know, and she put her arms around me and said I wasn’t a girl named Julie, but a sweet cake made totally out of chocolate. And she gave me a hug and tickled my stomach, as if I was Max or Monty, and she said, “You see? All this is made out of chocolate!”
And then I asked her what she’d like to be if she wasn’t Mom, and she thought for a minute and said if she wasn’t Mom who worked at the bank and had taken a long time off to stay home with the twins, she’d be an explorer or a sea captain. I tried to imagine her as a sea captain, holding Max in one hand, a pair of binoculars in the other, with a pacifier hanging around her neck, and I thought it was pretty funny.
“But I wouldn’t do anything too serious,” said Mom. “I’d let other people sail the ship. I’d just lie on the deck in the sun and drink rum all day long.”
“What’s rum?”
“It’s like wine.”
“That’s great, Mom.”
Mom looked really happy, as if the boat story was really happening. She kissed me in the place between my forehead and my nose, which was her favorite kissing spot, and said, “Now jump into bed. Did you brush your teeth?”
There was a high wall around Danny’s house and you couldn’t get in unless someone opened the gate from the inside. We walked all the way around twice before we saw that we could crawl under the barrier to the parking lot. Danny lived on the first floor, but we didn’t see anyone at his house. It was really quiet.
“Maybe I should whistle for Shakshuka,” I said to Brody. “If she’s inside the house, she may hear me and start barking.” When we were next to Danny’s window, I just couldn’t help it and I started singing:
“Little boy Danny does nothing but cry.
Why? Why? Why?”
And Brody finished it off: “ ’Cause he’s such a creepy guy!”
And then I saw him. He was standing by the open window looking straight at me.
Shoot! How could we forget? He was suspended!
Danny asked, “What are you doing here? Did you come to get back at me?” What was he talking about? He knew I wouldn’t dare hit him, especially in his own house.
Danny said, “Looking for a stone, Julie?”
I looked at Brody, but he didn’t understand what Danny was talking about either.
“I’m looking for my dog,” I said. I noticed that my legs were shaking, but I tried to stand still.
Danny said, “I don’t know where your dog is.” But he had this knowing smile.
Then my words just tumbled out. “They saw you running from my house. They saw you and Duke.”
Danny said, “So what? I didn’t do anything.”
“You’re a liar,” I said.
“You’re the liar,” Danny replied. “Why
did you tell Mrs. Brown that I threw the plant?”
I asked him again where my dog was, even though I knew he wouldn’t tell me. Then I started whistling for Shakshuka, and I whistled and whistled until there were tears in my eyes, and Brody dragged me away from there because there really wasn’t anything else we could do and anyway it had started raining, and I thought about the angry chicken on the wall in my room and I knew that I wouldn’t fall asleep that night either.
I was cold again that night and I asked Mom to turn on the heater, but I was still freezing and I could hear voices through the window that looked onto Brody’s apartment.
And then I saw an ambulance pull up next to our house. A couple of people went into Brody’s apartment building with a stretcher, and then they came out again. I strained my eyes to see who was lying there, but it was too dark.
But then it wasn’t hard to figure out who it was because the person sat up and tried to push everyone away and get off the stretcher and I could tell it was Brody’s grandmother. I could hear her telling them that she knew they listened to her all the time through the pipes, and asking if they were after her jewelry too, and she even slapped one of the people who were trying to calm her down.
What was I thinking about after they took away Brody’s grandmother and it was quiet again? About Danny and his annoying smile; and about this monster-creature I once saw in a cartoon that would get bigger and bigger every time it came up with a new way to take over the world; and about my hair, which only came to my shoulders now; and about Samson the great strongman, who lost his strength after they cut off his hair.
When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed that my mother’s food processor was making a really loud noise but nothing was getting mixed together. No matter how hard the machine worked, the ingredients for the cake wouldn’t turn into batter.
Brody didn’t come to school the next day. I guess no one in his family slept too well that night. I didn’t think anyone in the whole building slept well. Anyone except for Mom, who had finally managed to get the Munchkins to sleep after quite a few sleepless nights.
She laid them down, one on each side of her, in my parents’ big bed and then went to sleep in the middle, with pillows all around them so they wouldn’t roll off. Mom said that if you slept next to a baby, you woke up a little bit healthier. I woke up a little bit healthier after the nights I let Shakshuka sleep in my bed, but Mom didn’t know about that because I didn’t tell her because she never would have let me.
I felt weird at school, as if the food processor from my dream was still working in my head and making noise. I could barely concentrate in class. And since Brody didn’t come to school, I had to hang out with Effie at recess. After a sleepless night, I finally understood what it meant to be Effie—I was so tired I felt completely spaced out. To wake myself up, I helped her organize her schoolbag after a carton of chocolate milk exploded inside it. I thought she’d been carrying it around for about two weeks.
Then we sat on the bench beside the water fountain and tried not to listen to Adam, who was standing nearby driving a bunch of girls crazy with his stories. We were sure he was telling the one about how he was born on a plane on the way to Antarctica, and how the moment the plane landed they came out and covered him with about twenty coats made of polar-bear fur. But Adam was full of surprises, and what he actually said was that yesterday—for real!—he ate a chocolate-coated cookie and found a cockroach in it, and it was chocolate-coated too! All the girls laughed and Adam looked really pleased with himself, but I wasn’t sure he should have felt so good. And then I thought, well, at least when they laughed at him, they were paying attention to him. But nobody ever noticed Effie.
When Effie and I walked away from Adam and the girls, we passed by Danny and Duke. Danny pretended to pick up a stone and throw it at me, but I ignored him. “Danny is so lame,” I told Effie. “Mrs. Brown’s standing and talking to the pregnant substitute gym teacher really close to him and he’s thinking about throwing a stone at me. If you’re going to be a jerk, you should at least be smart enough not to get into trouble.”
Effie didn’t answer me, and then I noticed she was staring at the pregnant substitute gym teacher, who looked as if she was going to have her baby in about fifteen seconds. “Hey, why is she so fat?” Effie asked after a long pause. “It looks like she swallowed the boys’ football.”
“Yeah, right, that’s exactly what happened. And now the ball’s growing bigger and bigger in her stomach. Don’t ask what’ll come out of there in the end!” I said as I dragged her away. Effie was the most spaced-out person I’d ever met. I didn’t know how she didn’t just float away.
In the afternoon, I went up to Brody’s apartment, but there were lots of people there because of what happened with his grandmother, so I turned right around to go back home, but Brody’s sister, Nina, grabbed me and pulled me inside.
We rushed past the million and a half people standing around in the living room and went out onto the balcony, where I saw Brody sitting beside his grandmother. He looked very serious, and I noticed that he was holding her hand. I’d never seen him like that with her. Usually he just waited for her to say something so he could laugh at her. Later, he told me that the doctors wanted to send her off to an old-age home, but he and Nina wouldn’t let them. In the meantime, they’d changed her medication and she was back at home.
When Brody’s grandmother saw me, her eyes got even bigger and rounder and she asked Brody, “Who’s the mademoiselle?”
“She’s a girl from my class,” he said.
Brody’s grandmother looked at me as if she didn’t really believe Brody, and then she said, “The most important thing, dear, is that you take care of yourself. And don’t go walking outside alone because terrible things happen around here. You could get kidnapped from here, from right out front in the yard.”
“I know,” I answered without thinking twice. “That’s what happened to my dog.”
Brody poked me with his elbow to tell me to shut up, but it was too late. Brody’s grandmother got all excited, probably because for once someone was agreeing with her, and she started telling me about how she was sitting on the balcony a few days before when she saw two thieves, and how those thieves threw a stone at a downstairs window.
“And even after I screamed and scared them away,” said Brody’s grandmother, “everyone said that it didn’t really happen. They said I’d seen it on TV. But I wasn’t sitting in front of the television when it happened. I was sitting on the balcony! Right here!”
I listened to her, and slowly I realized that she wasn’t making it up. This was one story that I knew for sure she wasn’t making up, and I didn’t care that Brody was sitting there making bored faces.
Suddenly the yard in front of our building did seem like a scary place. It wasn’t only that dogs and grandmothers got kidnapped there, but other bad things happened there as well. For a moment I could even imagine the people eavesdropping on Brody’s grandmother through the pipes in the walls, but I quickly dropped that thought because I realized it really didn’t make sense.
I couldn’t remember what else Brody’s grandmother said. I thought she was trying to convince us that the nice people on TV would never throw stones at windows. Then I quickly went into the living room and I may even have pushed aside a few people who were in my way, and then I ran down the stairs. I knew that Brody had seen the look on my face and that he would be worried, and I knew that he’d follow me in a minute to see what had happened, but I didn’t stop to wait for him.
I went into our apartment and jumped over Monty, who was lying on the floor by the door chewing on Mom’s mobile phone, and I flew into my room and pulled back the curtain. Now I could see that the window really was broken, and there was glass all over the floor. I wondered how I’d managed not to step on it last night when I was standing near the window watching Brody’s grandmother being carried away on the stretcher. Was it because it was too dark?
When Brody came i
nto my room, I showed him the glass.
“Why did you take off like that?” he asked.
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” I said to him.
“No,” he said. “What’s there to figure out?”
“You’re even dumber than you look,” I said. “This is glass. My window’s broken.”
“That’s great,” said Brody. “Do you have any other broken things you’d like to show me today?”
“Listen to me, you celery head. Your grandmother said that a couple of days ago there were thieves here and they threw a stone at a window. It was my window. Don’t you see what that means?”
“It means my grandmother didn’t make it up,” said Brody after thinking about it for a minute. “Which is very nice because it must be the first time in twenty years that she hasn’t talked nonsense.”
“But who threw the stone, dimwit?” I was so excited, I couldn’t stop calling him names. “Danny and Duke! They were here and they threw the stone at my window, and then your grandmother heard the noise and started shouting, ‘Thieves! Thieves!’ and they ran away. That’s why Effie saw them running like crazy on the street.”
“But where’s Shakshuka?” asked Brody.
“I don’t know,” I said, and by accident I cut myself. It was just a little cut, with the piece of broken glass I was holding.
“Maybe she ran after them,” said Brody.
“Yeah, she does that. She loves people who run really fast.”
“Listen,” said Brody. “They didn’t mean to kidnap Shakshuka. They just wanted to break your window for revenge. But when they saw Shakshuka, they whistled and she followed them.”
“It all fits!” I said. “Fact: Ever since Shakshuka disappeared, I’m cold at night. So Shakshuka must have disappeared the night they threw the stone at my window.”