Don't Wait Up

by Liz Astrof

  My brother came in, one eye open and trained on the ceiling, afraid he’d pass out from what he imagined would be my head wrapped, cartoon-style, in a huge white bandage with a giant bloodstain on it. But he stayed.

  I drifted into and out of sleep. Our cousin Pam came by. “Thank you for the pillow shams you got us for our wedding,” I slurred, adding, “oh no, wait, you got us the candlesticks.”

  My friend Amy passed through. I told her she looked skinny, knowing she’d gone out of her way to come by.

  The five hours immediately following the surgery passed in what I soon understood was a morphine-induced bliss. What followed was seventy-two hours of the opposite of bliss; the worst and most blinding pain I’ve ever felt in my life before or since, including childbirth.

  My brain was swelling, and my head was exploding, making me puke the only thing that was left in my system—acid. The blood on my brain from surgery caused incessant hiccups that made my head hurt even more. I barely clocked Dr. Sung coming in and out, squeezing my hand and telling me I’d be “okay, okay?” I don’t remember saying “okay.” I was not okay.

  It was hell. After they took my catheter out, I couldn’t pee on my own, so my whole body filled up with fluid—I looked like a Thanksgiving Day parade float. I had a giant neck brace and two holes in my head where a metal halo had been screwed in to keep it straight during surgery. I was a wreck and completely exhausted.

  Todd had gotten a sign-in book for visitors. He set the flowers and balloons people sent and dropped off so I could see them whenever I woke up and made a list of who sent what, so I could not send them thank-you notes.

  On day two, Dr. Wesley King came by, joined by Dr. Sung. I could now see them more clearly and had the strength to place my hand on the side of my bed, open, ready for squeezing. They wanted me to get up and walk. Just down the hall. We made it almost to the hallway.

  Impossible. For someone who’d always been running, two steps suddenly sounded like torture. But Todd helped me out of bed. Holding my IV rack with one hand and Todd’s arm with the other, we set out for the hallway. We almost made it there.

  After that, I fell asleep and when I woke up, Todd wasn’t there. I called for the nurse. “Excuse me? My husband’s dead,” I croaked out.

  She told me he’d just run home to get some stuff. He was gone for all of twenty minutes, and I missed him terribly. I was overwhelmed with relief when he came back. My brain was swollen, but not too swollen for me to realize that “in sickness” I had developed an unhealthy attachment to Todd. I had slowed down long enough for him to catch up, and now, if he were to leave me or drop dead, I would be leveled. I was beholden.

  After a few days, I was able to enjoy an episode of Oprah and pee on my own—two clear signs to Dr. Sung, Dr. King, and my health insurance company that I was ready to leave the hospital. With eighteen stitches in the back of my head, the giant neck brace, and the two beginning-to-heal holes in my head, I went home with Todd, to the apartment I thought I’d never see again.

  Unable to run, I got into bed in the middle of the afternoon, where we finally celebrated our one-year anniversary by watching Jackass without having to pause for headaches.

  Julie and I are no longer friends, for reasons that are clear to her.

  Are You There, God . . . ? It’s Me, Jeff’s Sister

  * * *

  It’s 6:33 p.m. on a Friday evening and I’m pacing frantically in a supermarket parking lot, looking up at the sky, searching for patches of blue sky that will tell me if the sun has begun to set because if it has—even a little bit—it will be Shabbat, and my brother won’t be allowed to receive voicemails, emails, or texts until sundown tomorrow.

  This is just one of the many, many rules I’ve gotten used to over the fifteen years during which Jeff and his wife Stephanie have grown increasingly religious to the point of what is now Orthodox Judaism.

  The list of rules is long and has—as far as I can tell—very little to do with actual religion, especially on Shabbat.

  To the uninitiated (and even if you think you know how crazy Orthodoxy can get), these are just some of the things that are considered “work” from Happy Hour Friday to Saturday at wine o’clock:

  • Tearing paper: So that if I bring a birthday present over for my nephew’s birthday, he has to wait until sundown to open it.

  • Spending money or accepting food that was bought with money spent by a Jewish person on the Sabbath (i.e., me) or arrived in a vehicle (driven by me): So that the cupcakes I bring for my nephew on his birthday go to the nanny. Who can’t be paid that day, because Jeff can’t spend money.

  • Pushing buttons and using electricity: So that when it’s so dark at my brother’s house at noon on a Saturday that my two-year-old daughter falls headfirst down the stairs, we have to wait until the third star is in the sky to turn on a goddamn light to see if she cracked her head open.

  • Operating a phone: Also out of the question. So should we ascertain that my two-year-old daughter has in fact cracked her head open, nobody can call an ambulance or doctor anyway.

  • Driving: So that when we can’t call an ambulance, and I’m busy cradling my daughter’s dented head and holding down a flap of her skin, no one else can take us to the hospital.

  • Holding down a flap of skin: After much consultation, this is also determined to be “work.”

  • • •

  YOU’D THINK TELEVISION wouldn’t stop for crap like this, right? That Jeff would find it impossible to get a job when he’s only available 24/6 . . . Right?

  Wrong. Instead, studios and networks make allowances for him, and he makes it work. He’s that talented. He’s that valuable. Not to mention the fact that it would be religious-based discrimination. Literally no one was on my side.

  Unfortunately, fate loves a challenge, and on this particular Friday my brother’s lifestyle was finally being put to the test in the time-sensitive form of a #MeToo accusation. And no matter how talented or valuable he was, Jeff needed to hear about this and act on it. Fast.

  Jeff had gotten a deal to develop shows at Warner Bros. That meant job security for two years—something as rare in our business as, frankly, a comedy writer in LA living in an Orthodox neighborhood in a house that’s been blessed by a rabbi with a blowtorch. The news of his deal had made the industry trades, which was great. The only problem is that online versions of the trades have comments sections where jealous, angry, and bitter people spend their working hours anonymously spewing resentment.

  That Jeff’s good fortune drew every unsuccessful writer-troll out of the ooze was expected and not taken too seriously by anyone but Jeff who, like anyone else, didn’t want to hear he’s a “hack” or, even worse, “lucky.”

  I was in the checkout line flipping through the latest issue of US Weekly, when I got a text from my friend Danielle, who’d worked with Jeff many times. That comment about your brother is a joke, right? she asked. It has to be.

  I quickly looked online and saw that in between the “Hack!” and “Awesome News!” comments was one from an anonymous woman, saying that Jeff had harassed her and other women in the past.

  To me and fellow writers, judging from the rush of texts I was suddenly getting—more and more asking “Is this a joke?”—the thought of Jeff harassing a woman was and is absurd. When the #MeToo movement first gained momentum, and more and more men we knew professionally were being outed as predators, Jeff and I would joke about how the closest my brother had ever come to misconduct was asking his assistant to wake him up from a nap by sticking her head in the door and yelling, “Jeff! Wake up!” and possibly poking his shoulder with a book if that didn’t work.

  I’d known from my own experience as a female comedy writer that there was a standard of lewd behavior we’d all been exposed to. Comedy rooms were notoriously like frat houses where one or two or (at most) three female writers were forever subjected to conversations about what the guys would “do to” the actresses on the show, or wh
at they’d done the night before to their girlfriends, or to themselves (the most likely scenario of all). The X-rated doodles on their legal pads and on the dry-erase board where we came up with stories . . . it was all par for the course.

  And I can’t say I wouldn’t laugh a lot, because I did. I knew these guys, and they were like brothers to me—disgusting, loyal, flawed brothers. For a very long time, that mentality was what you signed up for, as a woman in comedy.

  But since #MeToo, I’d started seeing things a little bit differently. There was in fact an “over the line”—blurry as that line could be at times. Maybe, just maybe, Jeff—the last person I would imagine, or he would imagine—could have harassed someone by stepping over the blurry line into something that would qualify as a #MeToo charge.

  I didn’t know. What I did know, however, was a major rule in Orthodox Judaism stipulated that a married man is forbidden to physically touch a woman other than his wife or family. I learned this one day a few years previous when Jeff had been about to be greeted by Kristin, a close mutual friend of ours. He flat-out rejected her outstretched arms as she was coming in for a hug, opting to wave from a short distance away instead.

  “You won’t even hug Kristin anymore?!” I remembered shouting at him, as if hugging Kristin would have solved world hunger. Now, I found myself thankful for what I’d previously regarded among friends as a “stupid rule.”

  Despite the anonymous nature of the comment in the trades, this was nonetheless a bona fide in-print accusation of my brother being a serial harasser. True or false, it could be career-ending all the same. It needed to be dealt with immediately—Sabbath or no Sabbath. Moses or whoever would surely understand.

  Jeff had yet to return any of my thirty texts. My calls kept going to voicemail, and now his mailbox was full—with voicemails from me. I knew he hadn’t heard about the charge because if he had, I would have gotten even more texts and calls from him. Jeff is admittedly impulsive, reactive, and emotional—one mediocre review, one network note on a script, one unreturned phone call or email, and Jeff comes unglued. He couldn’t handle the slightest criticism, never mind a #MeToo allegation.

  This was going to send him over the edge. And I needed to get the news to him before Shabbat . . .

  I found a big patch of blue sky and was about to breathe a sigh of relief—he could call me back—when a pinkish, orange-lit cloud floated by. Just like that, it was too late—the sun had begun to set, and Jeff was off-grid.

  Now I’d have to drive all the way to his house, in rush-hour traffic, to give him the horrible news.

  On my way there, I was in crisis mode, leaving messages for his agent, his lawyer, friends of mine in the know—anyone who might have an idea about what could be done. Could we get that comment removed from the website? How should we manage this? How would we keep Jeff from winding up in a jail cell next to Harvey Weinstein—or worse, writing kids’ shows?

  I was furious with everyone who didn’t seem to have a solution at the ready. Mostly, though, I was angry at Jeff—that in this day and age and in a time when everyone (me) was going to the mattresses for him, he wasn’t picking up his phone. He’d simply dropped off the face of the earth while his world was crashing around him.

  It’s like I was in Flintstone times, except even they were evolved enough to get on an elephant tusk and make a call when they had to.

  I had never been able to wrap my head around the fact that my brother had chosen this lifestyle. People who knew Jeff would always ask me, “Did you guys grow up religious?”

  “No!” I’d shout. “He caught it as an adult!” I spoke of it as if it was a “condition.” We grew up Reform Jews, which meant we were only Jewish on the major holidays. Bar and Bat Mitzvahs weren’t so much a rite of passage as a reason for our parents to show off to their peers with ice sculptures, chopped-liver swans, and overwhelmed centerpieces.

  My dad was religious only in that when the Mets were losing or our dog had shit in the house, he’d shout “Jesus Christ Almighty!” Also, when my mother left us, he raised his fists in the air and appealed “God . . . Whyyyy?” But that wasn’t so much about the end of their marriage as it was about my mom having taken off in his brand-new Coupe de Ville along with all their savings.

  Early signs of Jeff’s devotion, on the other hand, were pretty obvious. When we did have to go to synagogue, I’d pass my time counting light fixtures, spotting obvious toupees, nose jobs, and face-lifts in the crowd, and making endless trips to the bathroom. Jeff would follow along in his prayer book, sing along with the songs, and try to read the Hebrew. He also didn’t cry and fake an aneurysm or coma every Wednesday when we had to go to Hebrew school. I think he even . . . liked it.

  His real transition from what I used to regard as “Reformed Reform Judaism” into Orthodoxy began with his wife, Stephanie. She was born a non-Jew—though Jeff would say she was born with a Jewish soul, to which I would say, “Maybe she got mine.” Jeff was crazy in love with her, and she with him. Before they (predictably) got engaged, Jeff’s one request was that Stephanie convert to Judaism, so their kids could be raised Jewish. She agreed and, as they were in that stage of a relationship in which you still want to be around each other a lot, Jeff took the conversion classes with her. These classes, it turned out, were where things took a major turn for the religious.

  The classes inspired them to start taking part in Jewish rituals like Shabbat dinner on Friday nights. It was kind of adorable at the time, but I kept waiting for Jeff to tire of his latest fad. Whenever Jeff was into something new, he was all in—everything from yoga to spinning, from Pinkberry to rock climbing and all the way up to dating hot girls who were psychos. Each time, a new trend would replace the current one in fairly short order. I figured Orthodox Judaism—to my mind, the weirdest trend yet—was no different.

  But I was wrong. So wrong.

  Instead of his yarmulke joining the cycling shoes, carabiners, and yoga mats banished to the trunk of his car, Jeff and Stephanie joined an Orthodox temple. They traded their old friends for more religious ones and started singing a lot. The magazines in their house went from good literature like InStyle and People to more limited fare like Jewish News and Israeli Times. Every flat surface in their house soon had a prayer book on it, in case someone needed to pray immediately.

  Jeff started wearing a black hat in public and a yarmulke full-time. They started separating milk and meat and only ate kosher food. As nothing in my house was blessed by anyone, Jeff’s family could only eat there if they brought their own food, utensils, and plates—even, on one memorable Thanksgiving, their own turkey.

  Finally, and in an act of full immersion into a world I couldn’t or wouldn’t comprehend, my brother moved his family to an entirely Orthodox neighborhood, detaching his personal life from the secular world and, in a very real way, from me.

  My brother. The one who had hidden under the bed with me whenever our mother went on a rampage. The one who had saved my life when I was eight and fell down our marble stairs as I was trying to pet our dog Schnoodle with one hand and balance a plate of food in the other. The person who would reassure me that screaming at my son in a public pool for soft-touching me is still better than what our parents did to us, and the person I would reassure back that squeezing his son’s shoulder in a movie theater to get him to stop making loud clucking sounds wasn’t abuse.

  We were and would remain best friends. That is, until from Fridays at sundown to Saturdays at sundown and for most of the month of October, when a lot of Jewish holidays take place (none of which is Halloween, which they don’t celebrate anymore). That was when he’d leave me for . . . God.

  I’d lost my brother to religion.

  He had always been my rock. My hero. And now he prayed at every meal, kept separate plates for milk and meat—(NEVER the two shall touch)—and used pre-torn toilet paper on Shabbat. My hero was . . . crazier than me.

  I used to challenge him on his beliefs, about the trajectory his fait
h was taking him. Thinking the whole thing was still up for debate, I questioned his devotion to a God that allowed to happen things like 9/11 and the Holocaust and genocide and cancer and baby deaths and making you love dogs with all your heart and soul when they’re only going to live for twelve years.

  “I mean, come on . . .” I remember saying. “You really wanna give up shellfish for this guy? You believe in all this?”

  “I do.” He didn’t hesitate. “Because to not believe in God is so much worse. To not believe there’s something bigger than us—that there’s not something after this life like the heaven that waits for you—it’s no way to live.”

  I was stunned to learn that my brother believed in heaven, a place I’d always regarded as reserved for Catholics. They got Christmas, Easter eggs, jelly beans, and heaven. Jews got smelly food, Hanukkah, and an undecorated wooden box in the ground when they died.

  I was never meant to go to heaven anyway—I’d counted on as much from the time I cheated on tests, stole change from my dad, pulled hard currency from Cathy’s wallet, biting into one of her gold ball necklaces to see if it was solid gold or not. It was not.

  Then there was the summer I worked at TCBY, where I lied about the waffle machine being broken out of laziness and where, when skinny girls would come in and order the fat-free hot fudge, I’d give them the regular. I was also definitely responsible for the deficit in inventory my boss faced, seeing as I was always making myself pies on which I’d write “You are fat” or just “PIG” in frosting before scarfing them down in the employee bathroom.

  My adult life was hardly sin-free, either. I lied to my kids constantly and parked in the red zone at Starbucks if I was in a hurry. I’ve lost count of the number of times I abandoned full grocery carts in the middle of checkout lines at the supermarket—to say nothing of my ignoring the “No Grazing” signs posted over the bulk bins (signs I’m pretty sure were inspired by my grazing).