Dreidels on the Brain

by Joel ben Izzy

  When my mom reached the end of the song, we all stopped, listening to the fading echo of the piano. Even after they’d all gone to bed, I could still hear it.

  “Is that what you want, God?” I asked. “Just the four of us down here? And my dad up there, your own personal shlimazel?” I shook my head. “Send him back. Please?”

  No response.

  I wonder if God’s in a coma too.

  THE SIXTH CANDLE: Sucker Bets

  Friday, December 17

  For just a moment when I awoke this morning, I thought it was summer vacation. The air was hot and stuffy, and my sheets were clammy.

  Then I remembered everything. No matter how hot it was, this was the dead of winter and my dad was in the hospital. I jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen to see if there was news.

  “Mom?” I called.

  There was no one home. Kenny and Howard were both gone, off to school already, and on the kitchen table was a note: “Joel—Went to the hospital. Cream of Wheat on the stove. I’ll call if your father wakes up. Love, Mom.”

  Sure enough, there was Cream of Wheat on the stove. Lumpy and cold. Outside, I could see heat lines rising from the asphalt, which gets soft on really hot days. The sky was “hazy,” as the weatherman likes to say, which is a euphemism for “smoggy.” Amazing to think that I’d begun this Ckhanukah believing it would snow, imagining I’d be building snowmen and making snow angels. Now it was so hot that even a thought of snow would evaporate.

  As I picked out lumps from the Cream of Wheat, I realized what I was: a sucker.

  That’s someone who falls for a cheap trick. I always keep a list of “sucker bets” with my impromptu magic. They’re not real magic tricks—more like a cross between an illusion and a crank phone call, like Kenny’s friend Danny always makes. He’ll dial a number and say, in his deepest voice, “This is the telephone company. We’ll have a repairman working on your phone line for the next half hour. If anyone calls you during that time, it is very important that you do not answer the phone—or they could be electrocuted!”

  Then he waits for exactly twenty-eight minutes and calls the same number. It rings. And rings. And rings. And rings. After about fifty rings, they finally pick up.

  “Hello?”

  And that’s when Danny screams as loud as he can.

  Prank calls are pretty mean, so I don’t do them. Sucker bets are kind of mean too, and I only do them when I have a heckler. That’s someone who thinks they know how the trick is done and shouts it out to everyone. When that happens, the only thing to do is invite them up for a sucker bet.

  “Sir,” I’ll say, “you seem very smart. In fact, extremely smart. I know, because I can read your mind. To prove it, I’d like you to take this pad of paper and this marker, stand way over there where I can’t see you, and write any word you want in big letters. Meanwhile, I’ll stand over here and write something on this pad of paper. And I will bet you one dollar that, whatever word you write, I will write the exact same word.”

  The heckler will go for it—they always do. I put down my dollar, they put down theirs, and then they walk to the far side of the room and hide the page to be sure I can’t see. I hide what I’m writing as well. Then, when they’ve finished, I put down my pen and say, “All right—you’ve written your word. Want to raise your bet?”

  They’ll usually go for that too, maybe even up to five dollars, or ten if the audience cheers them on. Then, when their money is on the table, you have them turn their pad over, and you see they’ve written something like “lasagna” or “gymnasium” or “Mississippi.” They stand there with a big grin.

  I smile back, and say, “Believe it or not, as promised, I have written the exact same word.” That’s when I turn my pad around and show them: “THE EXACT SAME WORD.” The audience will laugh, and the heckler will grumble—and lose.

  I have a bunch of bets like that: Tie a Knot Holding Both Ends of the Rope, Walk Through a Playing Card, and The Shell Game, which is a classic sucker bet you’ve probably seen. There are three walnut shells you slide around and the sucker has to guess which one has the little pea hidden under it. They think they know—but they don’t. After each sucker bet I ask the heckler if they want to go double or nothing. I always win, of course, and when we’ve gone four or five rounds, and they’re getting really mad, I always tell them, “Keep your money.” Then I whisper, “But don’t spill the beans.”

  It’s one thing to get stuck on the losing side of a sucker bet. But what’s worse is to fall for it again. And again. And again. Like I had this whole Kchanikah, starting with the Gimels. And the snow. And the prayers, I thought as I stepped outside and into the blast of heat. You know what I was? A sucker. Not just a sucker—a shlimazel.

  I suppose that’s why, halfway down Kimdale Drive, I turned around, ran back home, and reached under my bed to grab the shoe box marked IMPROMPTU. I pulled out the list of sucker bets, which I put into my backpack. If there were going to be sucker bets, I was sick and tired of being the sucker. Then I decided to take the whole shoe box, with the rope for “The Professor’s Nightmare,” a deck of marked cards, my lucky deck of unmarked cards, flash paper, a pair of scissors and the thingamajig for The Cut and Restored Necktie, and a bag with fifty bronze coins for a trick I’ve been working on for Sunday’s show called The Miser’s Dream.

  With that, I headed to school. My backpack was heavy now, especially with all the coins. A couple years ago, Shell Oil ran a contest, which they called States of the Union, but was really their own version of the shell game. Whenever you got gas from a Shell station you also got a little white plastic package with an aluminum coin. On the coin was a picture of one of the fifty United States. The idea was to collect them and if you got all fifty, you’d get five thousand dollars! The problem, of course, was that some coins were really hard to get. Nearly impossible, we found.

  But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Each time we stopped for gas, my brothers and I asked for a coin for each of us, maybe another for good luck, and one for our little sister, who we explained was sick at home with typhoid fever. One guy heard that and gave us a whole box. And you didn’t have to fill up the tank; you’d get just as many coins for putting in a gallon of gas, which is only thirty-five cents. So we would go from one Shell station to the next, buying a gallon here, a gallon there.

  Before long we had hundreds of aluminum coins. There were tons of some—“Shoot, another Nevada!”—while others were really hard to get, especially Delaware—that single coin stood between us and five thousand dollars. So my dad, being the kind of guy he is, wondered if it was the same at Shell gas stations all over the country. Maybe, just maybe, there was somewhere with plenty of Delawares but no Nevadas. So he took out classified ads in newspapers around the country, offering to pay twenty dollars for a Delaware coin.

  The ads were in the papers for a while, and then this guy in Chicago wrote to say that he actually had three Delawares! You do the math—that’s fifteen thousand dollars! Enough to pay off the medical bills for my dad’s last operation and all the loans my parents had taken out since then. My dad called the guy, long-distance, and talked to him. He was legit! So my dad airmailed him a money order for sixty dollars, and tossed in a bunch of Nevadas we had lying around.

  Then we waited. Two weeks later, we got the package. We were so excited when we opened it—and out came three coins.

  Connecticuts.

  Connecticut? Who needed Connecticut? We had dozens of Connecticuts.

  We never did win the prize. And the guy never did send my dad’s money back. In fact, all we got for our efforts was one “instant winner” prize: a set of fifty bronze coins, one for each state. It seemed like a booby prize at the time. Neither Kenny nor Howard wanted the coins, so I got them. Now they jingled in my backpack, another sad souvenir of my dad.

  Because while stories have happy endings, I thought, life doesn�
��t—especially if you’ve ever done anything you shouldn’t have, like utter the wrong prayer or lie about a little sister with typhoid fever. The best you can hope is that something turns out to be not quite as horrible as it could have been, and when that happens, you call it a miracle.

  But even that doesn’t happen very often. In fact, it’s rarer than a Delaware coin. Because God, the great magician, evidently doesn’t like heckling. And loves sucker bets.

  When I got to school I saw that the sign had been changed. Someone must have found a bunch of extra s’s and exclamation points, because now, below WINTER HOLIDAY ASSEMBLY, it said SPECIAL SECRET SURPRISE!!!!!!

  As I stood there puzzling it out, the bell rang, and I tried to remember which class I had first. God might not play dice with the universe, but I’m pretty sure that Mr. Newton plays dice with the schedule, because today we had classes in an order that we’d never had before, with Home Ec first. Luckily, all the girls, including Amy O’Shea, were in the music room next door, practicing Christmas carols—or, rather, “winter holiday songs”—for Monday’s assembly, which I didn’t even want to think about.

  That left about a half dozen of us boys in the classroom, which felt like the inside of an oven. Mrs. Hernandez opened a window, but that made it even hotter. A stick of butter she had brought out for a cooking project had completely melted.

  “Boys, it’s too hot to cook,” she finally said. “Do whatever you want, as long as you don’t get in trouble.”

  Nobody wanted to do anything but argue about how hot it was.

  “It’s so hot in here,” said Larry Arbuckle, “that we should turn on the oven to cool down!”

  “It is on!” said Eddy Mazurki. “And it’s not helping.”

  “It’s even hotter than summer,” said Billy Zamboni.

  “No, it’s not,” said Eddy. “It just seems that way because it’s winter and it’s supposed to be cold.”

  “No way, Jose!” said Billy. “You just think that because the heat has baked your brain! It’s so hot outside that you could actually fry an egg on the sidewalk.”

  “That’s just an expression,” said Eddy. “You can’t really do it.”

  “Yes, you can!” said Billy.

  “No, you can’t!”

  This went back and forth for a while, driving everyone crazy, before Mrs. Hernandez finally said, “Enough!” She went to the refrigerator, brought out an egg, and said, “Give it a try.”

  Mrs. Hernandez likes experiments, especially those involving food. Earlier in the fall Jimmy Bowen came in from the cafeteria with a rock-hard grilled cheese sandwich, which everyone calls Bixby Brick-and-Rubber. Everyone was tossing it around the room like a Frisbee when Billy Zamboni said he thought we could put a stamp on it and mail it. To our surprise, Mrs. Hernandez took it from him and said, “Let’s find out!”

  She took a stamp from her desk drawer, made labels with the school’s return address and her home address, then pasted them all on. Mary Wigglesworth agreed to put it into the mailbox near her house on the way home from school. Sure enough, a week later, Mrs. Hernandez brought it to school, the stamp postmarked and everything. Given the success of that experiment—and the fact that it was just too hot to stay in the classroom—frying an egg on the sidewalk seemed like a good idea.

  “But if anyone sees you, don’t say I gave you permission.”

  We went outside and gathered around a burning hot spot on the cement. Larry cracked open the egg.

  Nothing. Just gooey egg spreading out, running downhill.

  “Try again,” said Billy Zamboni. “Look—it’s even hotter on the asphalt!”

  We grabbed a second egg from the classroom and went out to a spot on the asphalt by the tetherball pole that was never in the shade. Larry cracked another egg. Nothing.

  “It needs oil!” he said. “You can’t fry an egg without oil!”

  We sent Jimmy back to class to get oil and another egg, then tried it again. Still nothing.

  “Butter!” said Larry. “Everything fries better in butter!”

  As they tried to fry eggs—almost a dozen of them—they switched from arguing about the heat to complaining about the dress code. An eighth-grade boy had been sent home because his hair was three and a half inches long, and another girl had been sent home for wearing something called culottes. It turns out they’re a cross between pants and a skirt, but have too much pants in them for the Bixby dress code.

  I kept out of it, listening instead to the girls practicing Christmas carols, which is what the songs are no matter what you call them, just like a coma is a coma. They sounded really good. I could just make out Amy O’Shea’s voice and found myself singing along with them, under my breath.

  The truth is, I kind of like Christmas carols, and I’m not the only Jew who does. After “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” they sang “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the Christian version of “The Horrible Song.” And who wrote it? A Jew named Johnny Marks. Then they sang “Let it Snow,” by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, both Jewish. The whole time we were out there trying to fry eggs—which never worked, by the way—the choir sang only one Christmas song that wasn’t written by a Jew, and that was “O Tannenbaum,” which is German for “O Christmas Tree.” But even that’s Jewish, because Tannenbaum isn’t just a Christmas tree, it’s also a name, and as Jewish as you can get. My mom has a bunch of cousins in Cleveland, half of whom are actually named Tannenbaum, so go figure.

  When the bell rang for recess, it was too hot to even complain about how hot it was, so we all stood around the drinking fountain pouring water over our heads. Talk turned to the fact that this should have been the last day before vacation, but wasn’t, and how horrible it was that they were making everyone come on Monday.

  I had figured that most kids would just find ways not to come, even if attendance was mandatory. But it seemed that everyone was planning to be there, because of the “surprise” they’d been promised. The rumor mill had been grinding along.

  “I heard that anyone who shows up will get their grade raised one letter in any class they want,” said Billy Zamboni.

  “No,” said Arnold Pomeroy, “it’s better than that. I saw a stack of report cards on Mrs. McGillicuddy’s desk. At the end of the assembly they’ll hand them out to everyone who comes, with pencils and erasers, so we can change the grades before our parents see them. It’ll be far out!”

  Yeah, I thought. And they’re giving away free apples too.

  I spotted Amy across the way, and even though she was talking to a gaggle of girls, I was worried that she might see me, so I snuck off to this secret place I know, a little alcove behind the back door of the wood shop. The door is blocked from the inside by the drill press, so no one ever opens it.

  Even though it’s in the shade, it was still about a hundred degrees. I sat on a cement step and leaned back against the door, my shirt soaked in sweat. Reaching into my backpack, I pulled out my impromptu box. I took a coin from the bag and produced it from different places—my ears, my mouth, thin air—then threw it into an imaginary bucket. That’s the one part of the trick I’m missing—Berg’s Studio of Magic sells a silver-plated Miser’s Dream bucket, with a hiding place for extra coins. But it’s thirty-five dollars, which is out of the question, so I’ll be using a coffee can.

  I was working on rolling one coin across the back of my fingers, which is really hard, when I heard a voice say, “So, is that it? Am I fired?”

  I looked up. It was Amy O’Shea. Great. The one person in the world I least wanted to see—and she looked upset.

  “What?” I asked.

  “If so, I’d rather you just tell me,” she went on, “so I can start looking for another job. I have to feed Daisy.”

  What was she talking about? And how did she even know where to find me?

  “So, that’s it. You’re firing me, right? As you
r assistant?”

  “No,” I finally managed. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because . . . of Wednesday. You were so mad at me. After the magic lesson.”

  I stared at her, truly baffled. She was wearing a Santa hat with a giant peace button on it. It was a crazy thing to wear on such a hot day, but she looked cool as could be. Don’t girls sweat?

  “So I’m not losing my job?” she finally said.

  “Amy . . . I wouldn’t . . . No, of course you’re not fired. You’re the best assistant ever.”

  “Then . . . why have you been avoiding me?”

  “Wait . . . Avoiding you? No. Why would I do that?” I may be a good magician, I thought, but I’m a crummy liar.

  “You know, you’re not a very good liar,” she said.

  How does she do that?

  “Tell me about it,” I finally said. “And I’m a rotten dancer too.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said, cheering up. “Dancing is something you learn to do.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Well, I never did.”

  “What you need is a good teacher—and the right music.”

  “Like what?”

  “Not Herb Alpert, that’s for sure,” she said. “Kind of square, you know? I have a better song—and dance—for the ABC blocks. I can show it to you and we can do it in the act instead of that . . . um . . . other thing you—”

  “Okay, okay, show me,” I said, not wanting to relive the Tevye incident.

  “All right, then, stand up.” I did. “First, move your head forward and back like this.” I did that too. “Now bend your elbows and flap your arms, like wings.” It felt silly, but she was doing the same, so it was okay. “Now kick your legs out and cluck. And look, you’re dancing the Funky Chicken!”

  Sure enough, I was dancing—with Amy! And we were laughing. “Your feet start kickin’, that’s when you know,” she sang, “you’re doin’ the Funky Chicken!”