by David Adjmi
Masha was a math teacher but did this on the side, zigzagging between lunchroom benches with her wireless microphone to rouse the students in prayer. Though her voice (off-key and grating and tinged with an unappealingly thick Long Island accent) was uniquely unsuited for a cappella singing, Masha Bendikowski made up for that with the almost military sense of pomp she brought to the proceedings. On this one particular day Howie and I had only just sat down to eat (we’d been corralled into doing a time-consuming errand for Little Chaya in the office) when, midconversation, we found ourselves peering quite suddenly into a magnification of frosted hair and burgundy lipstick. Masha was singing with a bizarre avidity; she was practically screaming. She was so close to my face that her microphone was jammed nearly up my nostrils. The spectacle of it was so preposterous, so wildly invasive that Howie burst out laughing in her face—and his laughter set off my laughter, we couldn’t help it, just as we couldn’t help it during school ceremonies and during discussions of the television miniseries Holocaust; it was beyond our still novitiate capacities as sixth graders. But that didn’t stop Masha Bendikowski from seeking reprisal.
After school we found her approaching from the corner of East Eighth Street and Avenue I, walking toward us in slow deliberate steps like she was holstered for a duel. Her wrists sagged limply, her prairie skirt shifting in pleats with each step. Her hair was the epitome of 1980s Jewish hair, streaked with silver and black. Her fingernails were so long and glossy they seemed part machine. Each element felt so blown out and artificial that when one put them all together it was like a surrealist painting, like something from out of a dream. “If it isn’t the Dynamic Duo,” she said, in her Roslyn, Long Island, patois. She called us Disgusting Individuals, and castigated us for laughing “in the middle of a prayah” (her accent at times mysteriously veered toward something from Gone with the Wind), and asked us repeatedly how we dared, how we dared! Her voice was pitched high up in the nostrils, and as she spoke she lifted and lowered her hands in languid, almost Kabuki movements, which only augmented the dreamlike surreality of the encounter. When she was done browbeating and shaming us, she spontaneously administered a punishment assignment right there on the corner of East Ninth Street: we were each to handwrite the entire birkat hamazon, she said, and to deliver it to her personally the following day at lunch.
Afterward, Howie and I ruminated on the unfairness of the punishment. He claimed it was arbitrary that we’d run into her at all, that laughing wasn’t criminal or even against school rules. On these grounds we refused to do the assignment. He was certain she’d forget about the whole thing anyway, but the next day at lunch we found a pair of waggling wrists and hypertrophically long fingernails coming at us. “So,” she began, before breaking out in a giant sarcastic smile, “may I have your punishment assignments, Disgusting Individuals?” We told her we didn’t have it. Since we defied her, she said, we each had to write out the prayer ten times now. “Keep making things worse for yourself, gentlemen,” she said. But Howie was dogged about not doing the punishment assignment. He’d become preoccupied with the lack of fairness of the punishment—and though I suspected the consequences would be grave, I agreed to stand with him. I admired him for his principles, and, in truth, I sort of liked the whole adventure of it. The intrigue with Masha was as titillating as it was unfair: our lives were beginning to deliciously abut the melodrama of soap operas and the intrigue with Hildy Tasimowitz.
Howie spent all his free time working himself up about how he would never give in. He appropriated the phrase “Disgusting Individuals” and used it whenever he could. Howie’s mother was, as ever, thoroughly complicit with her son, plotting and scheming along with him. She agreed he shouldn’t do the assignment, that he should fight Masha Bendikowski to the bitter end. I hadn’t even bothered to apprise my mother, who was a conformist and morally very conventional; I had to defy injustice on my own. Which is not to say I was not frightened: Howie’s lying and rock-throwing and thievery unnerved me, and I was not entirely convinced of the rightness of his actions (though he repeatedly and very confidently asserted that he was right, that he was standing up for a principle, for fairness) but I would go along with him, because I loved him, and because I wanted him to be right.
The following afternoon all hell broke loose. When accosted by Masha Bendikowski during lunch, Howie (who was by now perfectly comfortable speaking for me) told her point-blank that, as there were no school rules that forbade laughing, we were not going to do the punishment assignment, to which Masha replied that he was to go to the principal’s office immediately (parsing that word out into multiple syllables to cement her authority), but Howie, now possessed by some uncanny, disquieting calm—the same calm he displayed hurling rocks and marauding nursery classrooms—said he wasn’t going to the principal’s office, and that he was eating his lunch. I could see Masha Bendikowski felt matched. He was only eleven but Howie was spookily self-possessed.
Sensing my intrinsic weakness, and in an attempt to cut her apparent losses (she had to enforce something, after all, she couldn’t just shrug it off) she now demanded I go with her, but Howie intercepted even that demand: “No,” he said assuredly, “don’t go with her. She can’t force you.” And with that he sat back down with his plate of pizza, but Masha by this point had had quite enough of his rank insubordination. She grabbed Howie by his collar, yanked him up from the bench by it, and shouted, “YOU’RE COMING WITH ME, YOUNG MAN!” Howie’s plate of pizza fell mid-yank, spattering his clothes with tomato sauce, and for a moment it seemed that she knew it had gone too far—that she might pull back a little, help him clean the pizza, finesse it without losing face—but instead, Masha doubled down on bad instincts. She began yanking and twisting the collar of his shirt, which made Howie swat at her hand. He was battering at her with his small fist and shouting for her to GET THE HELL OFF A HIM! The spectacle of an obese eleven-year-old boy attacking a middle-aged woman attracted the horrified gaze of at least half the lunchroom but Masha had to address his insolence, she had to maintain her surety and sense of mission, so she proceeded to drag Howie by the flimsy yellow cotton of his shirt through the stadium length of the lunchroom as he shouted and wept crazily and repeatedly smacked her hand in his attempts to pry it from his collar.
Once they’d gotten up the stairs, he calmed down, and we walked in civil silence to Rabbi Bressler’s office. Masha proceeded to explain the situation to him as she chewed her small pink rectangle of Dentyne in circumspect diagonals, and when she was finished with her précis made a whole bunch of rhetorical threats about school plays, and privileges, and holiday breaks.
“I don’t know if these boys have earned the privilege of going on the Philadelphia trip, Rabboy Bresslah,” said Masha (referring to an overnight outing that was coming up) to which Howie rather violently rejoined, “If I wanted to go to Philadelphia my mother would drive me and we’d be there in three hours!”
After a tiny stunned silence (because he really was staggeringly brazen, and it was momentarily unclear whether his brazenness merited further punishment) Rabbi Bressler and Masha Bendikowski decided there was nothing either of them could really say to that; he was indifferent to their threats and straw-man arguments—he had no intention of playacting the humiliation and sad penitence they seemed to want. My esteem for Howie went up at that moment, and I knew—despite his ransacking of basements, and smearing of gels, and jettisoning of rocks from roofs—I knew he was splendid.
After back-and-forth deliberation it was decided that because of our actions we’d be suspended, that the suspension would go on our permanent records—but I didn’t care, because there was integrity in our actions. Howie was fighting for fairness. He was forging his own moral code in a society that was phony and empty and morally bankrupt. And I was fighting right along with him—even if my fighting was otiose and an inert bookmark for some noble battle I might someday fight in the future—even so, I was by his side. I was his abettor, his supporter. I didn’t
care about consequences. I didn’t care about punishments. Standing alongside him, I could feel my own flame of integrity burn brighter and brighter.
Somebody’s Watching Me
ON THE FIRST day of seventh grade, Howie, without fanfare or flourish, arrived in school wearing a new shirt. The shirt was in the vein of abstract expression: it was patterned with stochastically arranged pinwheels, multicolored frets and zigzags. It was collarless, somewhere between a sweatshirt and a sweater; I thought it was magnificent. He looked like a different person in the shirt. He’d lost a bit of weight, and with the combination of the shirt and his new slimmed-down figure, Howie looked, for the first time since I’d known him, almost stylish. I hadn’t seen this coming. I knew his wardrobe by heart, his every ecru sweater, his assembly line of beige slacks, so I was—if not hurt, exactly—then somewhat stunned by this debut. He didn’t share his new acquisition with me in advance, and I felt assaulted by the newness. Now that Howie had this pinwheel shirt I felt a small crevasse open up, ever so slightly separating us. When I ran into him in the hall just before class we made superficial conversation. I waited for him to call attention to his makeover but he didn’t say a word about it. He didn’t ask what I thought of the shirt. He didn’t ask me to tender my approval. I tried to feel happy for him for being fashionable and losing weight, though I dared not introduce either as a topic of conversation—I would feel too vulnerable congratulating him when he seemed quite patently not to need my congratulations. He blathered on about sugar-free brownies and Tofutti ice cream but I couldn’t focus on what he was saying because of the shirt, because of the hidden registers of pain it tapped in me. I felt myself prowling for an advantage, some comparable treasure to flaunt in retaliation, but I owned nothing of value. I tried to hide my creeping envy. I tried slaloming around feelings that were invidious and unpleasant. I’d had a horrible summer, which was spent mainly without Howie, who’d been on vacation with his family—some dietetic spa in the Caribbean—while I’d been forced to go to a horrible Jewish day camp in Rockaway Beach. On weekends my mother toted me to Deal to visit with Claudia Terzi or my uncle Ralph with the expectation that these visits would “broaden my horizons” and expose me to new friends who might break my bizarre attachment to Howie. We spent our days at the Deal Casino, a club with a private beach where my uncle was a member. Syrian girls in gold bikinis and gold makeup strode languidly down the row of beach umbrellas with anodized expressions, their wrists garlanded with bangles, hair straightened to the point of lamination. I saw boys from school shooting one another with water pistols, swimming with their tans and Speedos, their bodies lacquered with Bain de Soleil. They were all developing muscle but I kept my shirt on, ashamed of my pale torso and flab.
Mainly I’d be ignored, but sometimes the boys would pepper me with rhetorical questions, things like “What are you doing here?” and “You go here?” and “Why are you here?” The questions implied that the Deal Casino was an inviolate sanctum, one I’d dirtied with my presence. Maybe everyone had some infrared capability, and there was some soiled, stained part of me I couldn’t see. I tried to hide from the boys. I urged my uncle the following week to move to a different, less populated section of the beach, but the boys found me there too. Something changed that summer: there was a new ruthless curation, a reordering of existing hierarchies. I felt spotlit under some new and very harsh criteria.
At school, Howie functioned as a buffer to social anxieties, but now I saw he could tire of my novelty. He could become fatigued by whatever abstract gifts I possessed. He could abandon me altogether. The pinwheel shirt seemed to herald something terrible. Would Howie become stylish? Would he supersede me? The fragile succession of these bleak thoughts led me to unspool in the middle of the hall.
“Why do you look like you’re gonna cry?” said Howie.
“I didn’t sleep good last night,” I said, trying to keep it together. I then noticed that the balled-up Brillo pad of his hair had mysteriously unknotted itself into a sharply angled pillar of spikes. “Your hair looks different.”
“My mother taught me how to burn my hair with a towel,” he said. “And I put on mousse.”
“What’s mousse?”
“Hair mousse. You never heard of Studio mousse?”
“Maybe I heard of it,” I said, but I hadn’t. I felt so deficient. I hated the way he posed the question. Howie stood with his hand on his hip—his posture seemed different, straighter. He seemed to have it all together; it was driving me crazy. “Where did you get that shirt?” I blurted, my voice involuntarily dipping into a register of hard accusation.
“Lester’s,” he said, and again there was a slight glibness in his tone, like it was no big deal—even though he’d never before shopped at Lester’s, even though his mother had only ever taken him clothes shopping at a discount outlet in Boro Park. Even though Lester’s—like Caraville and Deal and the Casino—was essentially the exclusive property of Syrians, and Ashkenazi Jews like him had no real claim on it.
Lester’s was in fact the height of Syrian glamour. Everyone wanted the cachet that came with carrying their signature yellow-and-black plastic bag. The store existed in a particularly dilapidated and unsavory stretch of Coney Island Avenue, across the street from what was once a porn theatre and was now a McDonald’s, but amid this gray wasteland Lester’s grew into a mini empire, ultimately usurping an L-shaped piece of real estate that extended all the way around the block. It became a haven for SYs. The clothes were chic, and it was well known that Syrians didn’t have to pay tax. But even with the tax break, Lester’s was one of the places my mother couldn’t afford—or if she could, I was asked to skim from the ugly piles of sale clothes from the Boys and Husky section, and she would try to convince me how great I looked in bad outfits. If I balked, she’d guilt me into liking things: “There’s nothing wrong with that shirt!” If I vetoed a pair of pants she’d override me and ask practical questions, like, “Does it fit you in the tushy?” On every car ride home I’d feel sick, knowing I would be made to wear more unstylish clothes. I had no control over what I wore and how I looked. My clothes were shitty; my shoes were ugly. I was sent to school in wrinkled flannels and corduroys worn to nubs. I was roundly criticized by my classmates for my awful sense of style. I was asked why I dressed “like poverty” and condemned for not owning sweaters. I couldn’t participate in the Izod-Polo wars (an internecine fashion battle that erupted in my homeroom class) and was exempted from all considerations of wealth and pomp.
My lack of control over my appearance and the reactions it garnered had become a near-constant source of anxiety. I couldn’t hide and I didn’t belong anywhere. And now Howie could shop at Lester’s, and supersede me, and he wasn’t even Syrian; it wasn’t his heritage, it was mine—and though I wanted to reject it, once he embraced it I felt blindsided. I felt I was being robbed of something, like I’d been mugged.
The conversation with Howie was dislocating, but everything in my life felt dislocated that fall. Everything was in flux. Transformations were happening all around me in their carbuncular oiliness and ugliness. People I’d known for years were now strangers. Nechama Polin cut off her long braid and now had a short bob and the faint hint of a mustache. Alisa Goldman had a mustache too. Joshua Fogel’s face lengthened and thinned incomprehensibly—he looked like he’d contracted some weird illness that somehow made him more handsome. Ugly people became suddenly beautiful. People who were beautiful morphed into troglodytes. It was unpredictable, a kind of corporeal roulette. Bodies began to leak unwanted oils and secretions. They produced rotting smells. There were bumps and pustules and protrusions. My own face had broken out in hideous welts of cystic acne, and I’d recently sprouted hair from my nipples—a harbinger itself preceded by the appearance of two tiny lozenges under the aureoles that I thought were tumors.
I spotted them in the bathroom following my shower and, sobbing in terror, sprinted downstairs to my mother. “I have cancer!” I screamed. The followin
g morning she took me to see my pediatrician. I sat on a sheet of rustling paper loosely placed and crinkling loudly on the examination table as Dr. Deutsch felt the tumorlike masses. He then gazed at me over the crescent-like downturn of his giant nose. “That’s not cancer,” he cackled, “you’re just in puberty.”
The instant he uttered the word I felt sick. There was something proprietary in his tone, some perverse ownership over my body he was asserting with his terrible cackles and grimaces. I felt stripped of my humanity, like I’d been called a whore, and Dr. Deutsch was a sadist administering the puberty—inciting it as part of some secret unethical experiment. When he saw my reaction, he patted me on my naked shoulder and laughed even harder. I looked up and could see the gray hairs jutting out from the ovoids of his laughter-distended nostrils. My mother sat on a tiny black stool and lit a cigarette while I put my shirt back on. In the clinical office, with its puke-green walls and jars of tongue depressors, I could feel the ghosts of all the other children told of their puberty like they were specimens, mealy worms spawning uncontrollably in a glass cage littered with pencil shavings. We were on a relentless treadmill of human evolution; this was the ugly and dehumanizing overture to some terrible opera to come.