by Méira Cook
But this was years in the future, decades! The past blew a gale from the left and the future crashed down on us from the right. The present moment was just a fragile bubble caught in the middle of these cross-currents of wind and water. We dared not reach out to touch that iridescent soap bubble with its oil puddle colours. Instead we waited, as we had always waited, our hearts freighted with misgiving.
The Shayowitz bar mitzvah was held on a Saturday morning during the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We knew these days by many names: they were the Days of Penitence, the Days of Remembrance, the Days of Judgement, and the Days of Awe. Only Rabbi Zalman, with his customary sense of calamity, referred to them as the Ten Terrible Days.
“Feh, what kind of career is that for a Jewish boy?” Mrs. Silverstein would ask, reminding us of the punchline to an old joke concerning three Jewish mothers who get together to boast of their sons’ achievements.
“My son is a famous surgeon and president of his medical association,” says the first.
“My son is a law professor at Harvard,” says the second.
“My son is a rabbi,” says the third.
“A rabbi!” we would chorus. “What kind of career is that for a Jewish boy?”
It was a joke we never tired of, an oldie but a goodie, funny because true. Our rabbi was a shining star in the firmament of his people’s glory, yet we did not want our sons to grow up to be rabbis.
The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, fraught as they were with religious significance, our yearning to turn away from deceitful ways toward repentance and forgiveness, were not an ideal time to plan a bar mitzvah. But Michael Shayowitz had turned thirteen in September and that was all there was to it. And we have already recalled Bella Shayowitz’s snazzy event with its abundance of food and deluxe décor. Between you and me, I wasn’t crazy about the red velvet tablecloths with their black satin runners that Bella had selected for her luncheon and that Linda Shapiro, the proprietor of Linda’s Linens, had warned her against, but no one asked my opinion. I was supposed to be Bella’s best friend but even to me she was a puzzle.
If I have given myself away then forgive me. These are the Days of Awe when one is obliged to be truthful. And if I speak for myself occasionally, it is only provocation — red velvet, satin runners! — that tempts me to break faith with the community.
Four days after my dear friend Bella Shayowitz’s magnificent event, we sat once again in the synagogue on Kol Nidre night, the holiest night of the calendar. Every year our rabbi stood on the bimah and preached to us.
“Think of the changes this year has brought forth,” he instructed.
We thought of our children, the grace and awkwardness of their wings. We thought of the memory rooms in which we had lived all this year, the whirr of the projector on the walls, and our hearts — the hearts of mothers — beating out a rhythm of “How did it happen?” and “Where did it go?” and “Not yet, not yet, not yet!” Once there was a crease in time when our children still teetered on the brink of who they would become. That was the year our sons turned thirteen. That was the bar mitzvah year.
“Everything changes,” resumed Rabbi Zalman, “except faith and good deeds which bind us to the Almighty.” And he also said, as he reminded us every year, “Tonight the world lies open to our wonder. Tonight the universe is waiting.”
We would sit in the sanctuary on Kol Nidre night, the hair on our arms standing on end and the blood thudding at our temples. Truly, the world hung in the balance: a word, a prayer, would cause the scales to dip or rise.
Early the next morning we would hurry through falling leaves, the glamour and gold spangle of autumn. When we arrived at the synagogue we’d linger for a moment in the cloakroom, hanging up our jackets and warming our hands on the radiators. In our minds the leaves still spun and whirled in drifts. Usually we had no time to think of leaves. What were they to us but the rubbish we raked from our lawns or the muck we scooped from our eaves? But on this day, we couldn’t help noticing the helpless beauty of the leaves.
Then we heard the sound of chanting and hurried into the sanctuary.
All day we bound ourselves to the rise and fall of the cantor’s voice. Nothing passed our lips but prayer. Not a sip of water or a bite of food, not a frivolous word. The more we fasted and prayed, the more insistent the voices grew. They were only whispers but their fervent longing was the helium that wafted them up to the temple’s high-arched dome. All day the prayers rose until the susurrus of our mingled words became too powerful to be constrained. Bless our sons and our daughters, we prayed. Bless our grandchildren. Bless Leah and Rose and Molly. Bless Harry and Oscar and Nathan.
The strength of our prayers seemed to lift the temple so that we hung in the limbo between heaven and earth. All over the city, all over the country, we imagined such prayers wafting upward, the air humid with our yearning. What a roar they would make at the portals of heaven. Surely the angels themselves would come forth to welcome our prayers. In the evening when the shofar blew to end the fast, we woke, dazed, as if from a dream. The sacred world had fled, leaving us with our workaday concerns, our ordinary hunger and lightheadedness, the usual jokes that we made at the end of every Jewish holiday. They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!
And every year, whether we broke our fast with bagels and lox, with brisket and kugel, or with a nice slice of honey cake and a cup of tea, we would resolve to hurl ourselves into the New Year. The world was waiting for us. All we had to do was begin! There, in the fresh-cut morning, in that wilderness of apple trees and dinosaurs, of Adam and Eve swinging through the branches, the days passed as slow as evolution, taking their own sweet time, but the years were gone in an almighty flash. A million years, an eon, an ice age!
And then it was tomorrow. Tomorrow we would begin.
Ten
Grover Park Fields FC
“Catch the game last night?” I say to Coach Bob, but he’s too busy setting up a drill for the team. Coach Bob is all about defence, which is a natural outcome of the fact that his kid is the team’s goalie and a lousy one at that. “They gotta get through nine players before they score on you,” he tells his son after the last game — a rout akin to the sack of Rome if you can imagine the decline and fall of civilization played out in miniature across a choppy green rectangle on an early fall evening. Couple of dozen eleven-year-old boys but only one of them is bawling.
A word about Coach Bob: he’s a teacher at Ridgehaven High across the way, and what he teaches is sex ed. That might be why his son is so messed up or it might be that Coach Bob’s last name, and consequently the last name of young Cody over there is — wait for it — Bubel. Look, I know all about the heartbreak of last names, being one of a long line of Boychuk men who’ve gotten used to the nuanced bullying that goes along with unfortunate end rhymes (suck, fuck, upchuck) and lame peckerhead references. But Bubel? Come on. The soccer kids call him Coach Bob, and sometimes just Coach (as in, “Aw, Coach!”), but he will always be Bubel to me. Coach Boob for short.
Back to the game now or its bloody aftermath, and I’m trying to get the kids into line for the traditional high-five, “no hard feelings” walk-through. I know it’s going to be painful. Fact is, we are so low in the standings that we can only make the city playoffs if at least four other teams perish in their entirety, perhaps in a tragic air crash over the Rockies or by sharing their germy water bottles. Ah, but nobody ever promised that being assistant coach of a less-than-stellar soccer team would be anything other than yet another punishment inflicted upon me in this, the very first year of my glorious divorce.
A year, according to my ex, that is perfectly suited for making my peace and making amends. Making time, as she puts it, as if time is something you can make, like dinner or promises, one of which I consistently failed to make and the other of which I consistently failed to keep. I’m just quoting here so bear with me. Matter
of fact my ex —Mrs. Catherine Boychuk as she still likes to be known, although you’d think she’d drop the Boychuk like a hot perogie — is why I’m here now, assistant to the worst soccer coach in the history of the league, even including Coach Whatchamacallit who gets less restrained with every sip he takes from his personal water bottle, but you gotta love a man who’ll call out a ref over ugliness. (The ref’s ugliness, that is, which he claimed was distracting his boys.) His name will come to me in a minute.
So, anyway, one day my soon-to-be ex tells me that her colleague, Robert, who is this amazing father and role model, no offence, has signed up to coach his son’s rec team. Trouble is he needs an assistant coach in accordance with league rules, so what do I say?
“No offence taken,” is what I say.
Apparently the staff at R. H. High are pledged to support one another even if it means making the rest of the world miserable: the folks who aren’t lucky enough to work at that lousy battery farm for over-stimulated adolescents, for instance. Ridgehaven High is no sort of haven and it’s built on level ground that is as flat as the rest of this two-dimensional city, but that’s what I mean by names and the trouble they cause. Anyway, when I asked her why I still had to take instructions from the woman who told me that the only things I could successfully make were bets (my job), and a fool of myself (extracurricular), she just stared at me as if I was one of her high school students.
“It’s up to you G-Damn-It Andrew Boychuk, to make time for your only son now,” she finally said.
Making my peace, making amends, making time. I don’t know what she’s on about mostly, but you gotta love a woman who takes the Lord’s name so goddamn seriously.
Coach Louis was his name, by the way. The water bottle tippler? Louis Grenouille, we called him. It just came to me now.
So anyway, there we were lining up, and there was Coach Danny di Secca back of his boys and already moving down the line, giving our team the high five, the odd head tousle, the consoling, “There’s a boy.” Look, it’s easy enough to be the coach of a winning team: you keep your boys in line, you keep your gloat in check. You say, “Keep your grandstanding for the ride home, guys.” But we have this saying at work: Winning never feels as good as losing feels bad.
“Never a truer word, eh Boychuk,” as my boss often says. Yup, never a truer word, but the truth of the matter is that we folks at Automatic Off-Track don’t really care. Win or lose, it’s all the same to us — you pays your money and you places your bets. Video horse racing is a clean game, and the way to keep it clean is indifference.
Anyway, what I was trying to say is that when I looked around for him, Coach Bob was still on the bench patting down his brat. He’s a short guy, Coach Bob, with a short guy’s chippiness, a marsupial paunch, and an unfortunate regard for sweatpants. He comes by it honestly, being, as I mentioned, a high school sex ed teacher with a minor in “guidance” and a corresponding four-pack-a-week habit. The kind of man, as they used to say, who can neither do nor be. Luckily he can’t teach either, so the kids are mostly unaffected by his lousy, tuneless existence. Yup, you got it, he’s a bad Sinatra cover in a pair of stretched-out sweats and a cheap haircut. Do be do be do.
As for me, I’m proud to say I’ve never worn a tracksuit in my life. I come to practice straight from work so I’m always suited up, which makes me look like the coach of a professional soccer team. “Fake it till you make it, eh Boychuk,” is another thing my boss likes to say. So I wear my suits, and yell at the kids for turning up to practice with grass stains on their jerseys, and bench them for trash talking. Try to, anyway. Kangaroo Bob has seniority over me, coach-wise, and what he likes to say is, “Cool your jets there, buddy. They’re just kids.”
True that, I want to say. They’re kids, not crybabies. But Coach Bob is still on the bench cuddling his very own crybaby, the amazing diaper boy. I mean, Cody’s eleven years old and you can see the snot-rope from here.
The only thing I can ever think to tell my boy in the way of what you might call a life lesson is, “Never let them see you cry, son,” and God help me if it isn’t the only thing he seems to remember because he sure as shooting doesn’t give a thought to slide tackling or automatic red cards for swearing at the ref, in both of which he’s kind of made a name for himself. I don’t mean a real name, obviously, just a general blur of aggression and speed, a short red fuse blowing himself out on the field, a Look out, here comes the kid! kind of thing, which is both flattering and insulting insofar as all the refs have him on a short leash.
His real name, by the way, is Frankie.
By this time, Coach Danny di Secca has moved all the way down the line to get to my boy and you can see he’s getting ready to compliment him on the two goals he scored: top shelf, left foot no less. They were damn good goals, had a beautiful arc to them, the kind that threads the needle high over the keeper’s head and before you can say, “I think it’s goin’ in, boys,” it’s already there. There’s a ball bulging out of the far corner of the net, and our team is rushing the kid, and their team is hanging their heads and kicking at the grass.
I know di Secca. He’s a good coach, the kind of guy who can see potential in the beauty of a perfectly curved goal. Even if the ref throws it offside two seconds later and both times. And it wasn’t the kid’s fault that his team was employing their classic knife-through-butter defensive strategy. I mean Frankie’s a redhead, see. Like his G-Damn-It provoking mother. You have to take some things into consideration — kids being crybabies is one of them, naturally, and now I see Coach Bob’s son, running up to join his team, the tears spackling his cheeks.
“Hey Frankie,” Cody says, “congratulations on your automatic disqualifications.”
There’s this thing Frankie does that thins my blood. He smiles. It’s a quick, cold, businesslike smile. It’s a smile that measures the distance between himself and the world then adjusts for perspective. It’s a smile that says, What kind of no-hoper expects to win on a three-year-old filly called Well Ya Never Know? It’s a smile that directs itself to the folly of ageing jockeys and bad track records and long shots that pay out once in a blue moon. But hey, what are the odds of running off-track in blue-moon season?
At the airport hotel where we run Automatic Off-Track, we see all types come and go, but there’s only one type of punter has any traction in the long run. He’s the sort with a face like a clock, bland and symmetrical but no expression to speak of. He studies the form and he places his bets and he watches the races on the video monitors. That’s all. After the race he collects his winnings or he tears up his ticket. Stays an hour at the most — he’s probably on his lunch — and he’s back again the next week. Thing about this type of bloke is you can’t tell to look at him what the score is. Win, place, show, or lose — seems like it’s all the same to him. Seems like not showing what he’s feeling is the gamble, although gamble is not a word we are inclined to use at Automatic Off-Track.
There’s this guy, for instance. Comes in one day with his clock face and his fire-sale suit, and makes a bundle off the Saratoga Pick 4, just like that. Sixty-dollar shoes and bad orthodonture. Scraps of toilet paper still stuck to this morning’s shaving nicks. The boss has to come in and cut him a cheque. So, okay. He folds the cheque into his wallet, hangs around for a couple more races, then leaves.
“Bye fellas, see you next week.”
“Same to you, Mr. Meek.”
That’s how we found out his name, incidentally. On account of the cheque: Mr. Gordon Meek. Ha, not a bad start to inheriting the world, Mr. Meek.
My boss once told me this story about the fellow who owns the Airport Inn where we rent office space. Rich bugger, and lucky as they come. You’d know his name if I told you, everybody does, but I’m not supposed to say because of employee confidentiality. Turns out he has a stake in Automatic Off-Track, too. But it seems this guy was once so down on his luck he had to borrow money from
his in-laws. And when his father-in-law tried to sandpaper him for being such a terrible businessman, prone to misfortune and an all-round unlucky number, Mr. Lucky just smiled.
“Good luck, bad luck, who can say?” he said.
Next day the father-in-law’s dead of a heart attack, the mother-in-law has a massive stroke at his funeral — dead before she hits the ground. They could have rolled her in with him and buried them both together — and the entire inheritance goes to their only daughter who, fortunately, is crazy about her husband.
“Good luck, bad luck, who can say?” My boss shakes his head at this brilliant insight but I want to point out that Mr. Lucky’s in-laws weren’t so damn fortunate to have known him. Instead I smile and agree that some folks have got more money than they can comfortably say grace over. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I know all about men smiling when they don’t mean it. Hell, I do it about a thousand times a day. I just did it now, when I was talking to my boss, and I probably do it in my sleep, I’m such an obliging bastard. But it’s scary to see that exact smile on the face of a freckled boy with a cowlick the colour of maple leaves.
“Now then, fellas,” says di Secca, and he wisely chooses to tousle the boys’ heads, because who knows where Cody’s hands have been. Halfway up his nose, it looks like.
So that was the game against Northern Pirates and here we are at practice again, me making small talk with Coach Bob, something to pass the time, while a dozen eleven-year-old boys sweat man-makers and burpees and star jumps, before getting down to the serious business of all-out defence drill, which is the only way we’re going to win a game this season. Strengthen the defence line so that nothing but offside passes and mosquitoes can get to our big boob between the posts. Ollie the Goalie, over there.
That and a kick in the pants.
“Catch the game last night?” I ask Coach Bob again, but he just looks at me as if to say, One game at a time, sport, and this is the one. I watch Coach Bob setting up the cones for his patented Lutz two-on-one defence drill. He keeps glaring at me, as if to say, Why don’t you start the boys on their warm up? But I wait him out — personally, I’m against the unspoken bond between men. If he wants me to do something, let him go ahead and ask.