by Zoe Fishman
“Wait, you know what?” said Jackie. “Here.”
She flipped open her laptop and typed quickly. Seconds later, the printer hummed, emitting a single piece of paper. She handed it to Teddy.
Movie Night Change
“When Harry Met Sally”
No Dinosaurs This Evening
“Go take this to Morty. He’ll get the word out. Lord knows how he does it, since no one here knows how to use a damn computer, but he does. Probably has some kind of Morse code system designed specifically for hearing aids.”
“Okay, sure. Thanks.” Teddy stood up. “What apartment?”
“Four-oh-nine.”
“Got it. See you later?”
“Yessir. Close the door behind you, okay?”
Teddy made his way to the elevator. Dinner was winding down in the cafeteria. Teddy could hear the clinking of utensils on plates and the faint murmur of voices, the scraping of chairs and walkers on the wood floor.
He got out on the fourth floor and made his way around the circular hallway to his destination. From inside 404 a woman shouted into what Teddy hoped was a phone; from 407 the familiar opening bars of Law & Order.
His mother loved that show. He stopped outside Morty’s door, remembering the softness of her pink cotton pajama–clad legs underneath his head as he draped himself over her on the couch, wondering if nine was too old to snuggle with your mom but doing it anyway because she seemed so sad.
“You gonna stand out there all day?” barked Morty, opening the door with an unlit cigar hanging from his lips. Surprised, Teddy dropped the paper.
“How did you know I was here?” he asked, bending to pick it up.
“Kid, I know everything. Come on in.” Teddy did as he was told, excited to see where Morty lived. “And I already know about movie night; I got the word out.”
“Of course you do,” said Teddy. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. Myself, I’m not such a fan of rom-coms, but that one’s pretty good. I like the writing; it’s quick.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Teddy was surprised by the size of Morty’s apartment. He’d known it was going to be small—he could tell by the number of them per floor—but not this small. The entryway was just a beige carpeted square of space outside the white kitchenette, which housed a tiny stove, refrigerator, microwave and sink, along with a few cabinets top and bottom, all in white. The kitchenette looked out onto a living room: more beige carpet, a lumpy green couch, a honey-colored wood coffee table, a black leather recliner, a flat-screen on a narrow table against the wall. Beyond that was what Teddy assumed were the bed- and bathroom. The entire space could have fit into his kitchen, Teddy thought.
“This is living, huh?” asked Morty. “Welcome to my humble abode, and by humble I mean, can you believe the rent I pay for this?” Morty sat in his recliner, the unlit cigar still in his mouth. “But what am I talking about? What does a ten-year-old know about rent?”
“I’m almost thirteen,” retorted Teddy.
“I know that, just pulling your leg. Have a seat, make yourself at home,” said Morty. Teddy sat.
On the white wall were hung two photos in gold frames.
“May I?” asked Teddy.
“Be my guest.”
Teddy got up and walked over to get a better look. “Is that you?” he asked Morty, staring in wonder at the young, handsome man who smiled back at him in black and white.
Morty was in a tuxedo, and next to him: a woman in a wedding dress. She was smiling too. And pretty. Black hair frozen into those old-timey waves, a white lace gown that rose high on her slender neck, sparkling eyes.
“The one and only,” replied Morty.
“And your wife?”
“Bernice. Love of my life.”
“She’s pretty,” said Teddy.
“Pretty? Please. Try beautiful. A perfect ten. A knockout. No idea why she went for me, but she did.”
“You don’t look so bad yourself here either, Morty,” said Teddy.
“Well, thanks, kid. I cleaned up nice.”
In another photo, this one in color, Morty and Bernice stood in front of an enormous brick apartment building, holding a baby boy.
“You have a son?” asked Teddy, leaning in closer to get a better look.
Morty was thin and dapper, his dark hair plentiful and wavy, dressed in a short-sleeve white button-down and navy pants pulled up to practically his neck. A brown belt with a gold buckle circled his waist. He gazed at the boy lovingly, a broad smile on his face. Bernice, in a pink sleeveless dress, her hair looser and curlier than in her wedding photo, smiled at the camera. And the baby, chubby wrists and all, dressed in a red-and-white-striped T-shirt and diapers, was caught mid-giggle. Teddy grinned at them, their happiness contagious.
“I did,” replied Morty quietly.
“You did?” Teddy turned from the wall. Morty had taken the cigar out, was rolling it between his fingers.
“It’s complicated, kid,” Morty said.
“Try me,” said Teddy.
“His name is Michael. And when Michael was just a kid, not much older than you, his mother died,” Morty explained. “What kind of God gives an angel like my Bernice cancer?” Morty shook his head, his voice grave. “It was devastating. And Michael, well, he didn’t like the way I raised him after the fact. Says I was too distant, too this, too that. Not available enough. How available can a single father trying to put food on the table be? I tried my best.” Morty put the cigar down on the table. “Anyway. He has a lot of anger toward me. Stopped talking to me after he graduated college, a college I put him through, mind you.” Morty took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. “Now he lives in New Jersey somewhere, with a grandkid I’ve never met. Anyway. I should stop. You’re too young for this kind of talk.”
“But I’m not,” said Teddy. He crossed back over to the couch and sat down. “I had a sister. She died too.”
“Oh for goodness sake, Teddy. That’s just terrible.” Morty leaned forward and put his hand on Teddy’s knee. “I’m so sorry.” For the first time, Teddy noticed that Morty was missing half of his index finger.
“Well, she never really lived, actually,” Teddy continued, still staring at the nub where Morty’s fingertip should have been. “She died inside my mom, I guess. But we didn’t know until she was born.”
“Heartbreaking,” said Morty. “Just heartbreaking.” He sat back on the couch.
“Her name was Delilah.”
“That’s a beautiful name.”
Teddy nodded. “I don’t think I believe in God either,” said Teddy, as Morty handed him a Kleenex.
“Who said I don’t believe in God?”
“You did, just now, when you were talking about Michael,” said Teddy.
“I never said I didn’t believe in God. I just asked what kind of God does that? That I can’t tell you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in Him. Or Her. Beverly would have my head if she heard me call God Him.”
“Well, I don’t believe in Him or Her or whatever you want to call it. And that’s why my Bar Mitzvah just seems so ridiculous. Like, what’s the point? Read from some roll of paper in a language I don’t even understand to somehow prove that I’m a man? And who’s a man at thirteen, anyway? I barely have pubic hair.”
Teddy blushed, not quite believing the words that were tumbling out of his mouth in this spare apartment that smelled like leather and garlic. He had thought all these things, but he had never said them out loud before.
“Well, that’s more than I needed to know,” said Morty. He cleared his throat. “Listen, a Bar Mitzvah can be a lot of horseshit, sure. I’ve been to parties where parents forked out thousands of dollars just so they could look important. But I was Bar Mitzvahed, and my father and his father and his father, you see?”
“My dad isn’t Jewish,” said Teddy. “Just my mom.”
“Okay, same difference.”
“Well, not really,” said Teddy. “Women have o
nly been Bat Mitzvahed since 1922. I looked it up.”
Morty shrugged. “The point is, it’s a tradition. It’s about saying, you know what, I’ve studied until my eyes crossed, I’ve dragged my ass to Hebrew School more times than I can count, and for what? To honor my forefathers and foremothers by reading the same Torah they did. L’dor vador. You know what that means?”
“No,” said Teddy.
“Continuity,” Morty replied. “Generation to generation.”
“But what does that have to do with God?” asked Teddy.
“What am I, a rabbi?” asked Morty.
Teddy sighed.
“Listen, do I think God really gives a shit whether you get Bar Mitzvahed or not?” said Morty. “No. But I think the ritual brings you closer to God, just because for this year, this important year when you’re on the precipice of puberty, it forces you to make your Judaism a priority. When you’d rather be doing anything but studying the Torah or sitting here listening to an old-timer like me jabber your ear off, here you are. Talking about God. See?”
“Maybe I’m thinking about God, but that doesn’t mean I’m any closer to believing,” said Teddy. “How come you believe?”
“I can’t tell you, kid. It’s just a feeling I have,” said Morty. “Or maybe it just gives me hope, to believe. After Bernice died, I had a tough time with God. I thought, How can this be? And I still do, I always will. But there’s been enough beauty and joy in my life before and since to keep the idea of Him—or Her—alive.”
Teddy looked at Morty, in his black tube socks and plastic slides, and just didn’t know. He wasn’t sure what he wanted as proof of God’s existence—maybe a burning bush?—but he wasn’t buying it.
“And what’s this whole becoming a man, becoming a woman thing about?” he asked Morty. “I feel like my childhood ended for me when my sister died, three years ago. When I was nine.”
“Fair enough, Teddy, but let me ask you this,” said Morty. “When you were nine, when you were forced to stare death and all its unfairness right in the face, did you have the wherewithal to ask these complicated questions or to think the thoughts you’re thinking now?”
“No,” Teddy admitted.
“So there you go. Manhood in a nutshell. Along with a couple of other unmentionables, obviously. It’s time, your forefathers knew it was time, and so you put on a jacket and tie, you read from the same script they read from, you have a nosh and that’s it. Next chapter.”
Morty pushed a button underneath the arm of his chair, and it slowly began to lift off its foundation, transitioning him into a perpendicular position to the ground.
“All right now. Chop-chop, it’s time for the show.” He shuffled toward Teddy and, without warning, wrapped him in a very warm and brief hug.
“I’m very sorry for what happened to your sister. I’m sorry for you and for her and for your parents, you hear me?”
Teddy nodded, feeling his chest tighten. “And I’m sorry about Bernice,” he said in return. “And Michael.”
Morty squeezed Teddy’s arm. “Thank you, I appreciate that.” He led the way out of his apartment, slowly, and Teddy fell into line behind him.
“I want an invitation to your service, kid,” said Morty over his shoulder. “And Beverly too.”
“Are you and Beverly . . . ?”
Morty turned around to face him, right outside the door to the movie room. He lowered his voice. “We are what we are, kid. Life gets lonely at this age, let me tell you. She’s a blessing in my life. Beauty and joy, kid, you see? When I thought my shot at that was long over. Is that God?” Morty raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
As Teddy set up the DVD player, he contemplated Morty’s thoughts on manhood. He’d never considered the transition to be so figurative, to be more about the way you looked at the world rather than the way you looked in it. It made much more sense to Teddy, Morty’s perspective.
What he really needed to do, Teddy decided, if this Bar Mitzvah was going to mean anything to him in the long term, was go back to the moment when Delilah was born but not born, when he learned what death was in the waiting room of that cold, sterile hospital, when he learned that she was gone, he would never meet her, she was never going to be. He needed to go back there and bridge that experience with the boy he had been then and the man he was becoming now.
It would take a little bit of planning, and he was not at all equipped for the journey, Teddy knew that, but it was also not impossible to both imagine and complete. He could do it.
“When Harry Met Sally!” cried a disgruntled Movie Night attendee at the door, who apparently hadn’t gotten Morty’s memo and was now eyeing the Scotch-taped flyer with great disdain. “I’m here for dinosaurs, damnit.”
Teddy exchanged a glance with Jackie, who sat with a bowl of popcorn on her lap, her shoes off to reveal neon-orange-and-black-zebra-striped ankle socks.
“My apologies,” said Teddy. “Let me explain.”
And so he did.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sylvie
Sylvie turned off the ignition and sat in the parking space marked “Visitor” in white stenciled letters, staring at the vast apartment complex. So much red brick. It went on and on, the same building after the same building save for the numbers on the doors.
She pulled down her visor and slid over the mirror’s plastic cover, examining her teeth for stray food. All clear. She slid the cover back, flipped the visor up, took a deep breath and opened the door.
The heat and humidity was suffocating, like a plastic bag over her head as she made her way to David’s apartment. This was her first day without a pill in almost three months, she had checked the calendar to confirm, and couldn’t quite believe it. That was a long time to be taking drugs.
Yeah, she said it. In her head, at least. Drugs.
Sylvie knew she was in trouble, but this was it. Her last hurrah. The Bar Mitzvah was less than a month away, and after that, she would get her ass into therapy. Okay?
Okay.
Number fifty-six. Brass numbers on a black door. She knocked.
He opened the door, stared at her, a bemused expression on his weathered face.
“Hey, David,” she said.
“Sylvie,” he returned. “Come on in.”
“Thanks.”
She followed him inside, noticing with relief that it did not look like a junkie’s lair as she had feared. The living room walls were a soft, subtle gray, the floors bare wood, the couch a darker gray, expensive looking, in the shape of an L. An oak coffee table that looked as though it had just been sawed right out of a tree, sanded just so. Sylvie recognized it as David’s work. He was talented, there was no question. Not a junkie. Or hell, maybe everyone was a junkie today; everyone was on some pill or another.
Sylvie didn’t know anymore. Her head was really pounding.
“Could I have a seat?” she asked. “Sorry, I’m feeling a little out of it.”
“Sure, of course,” answered David. “Can I get you some water or something?”
“Water would be amazing,” she answered, her mouth so dry it was like talking through mud. “Thank you.”
She stared at the enormous television hung on the wall, noticing that there were no pictures in the room, no art. She wondered if there were pictures of his son anywhere. Sylvie had lost a child she never had the chance to meet, but he had lost a child he had known, he had raised. That was worse, she thought, thinking about Teddy but then shoving the thought out of her mind with brute force. She would not think about Teddy or Paul.
Stay focused, Sylvie, she told herself.
“Here you go,” said David, returning with her water.
“Thank you,” she said. She tilted her head back and drained the glass in an instant.
“Everything okay?” asked David, looking concerned.
He was wearing camouflage cargo shorts and a tight navy-blue polo shirt, his feet bare. The uniform of someone much younger—he could almost fool you into t
hinking he was in his twenties if you didn’t look at his face.
His eyes were sunken into his sockets a little, like he hadn’t quite woken up. Wrinkles spread out from the corners of them like wings and across his forehead like the rake tracks in one of those Zen sand gardens. Sylvie had the same wrinkles, you were supposed to in your mid-forties, but there was something about the pallor of David’s skin—gray with an undertone of yellow—that put him almost but not quite nearly on his deathbed. And the patchy, salt-and-pepper stubble lining his jaw didn’t help either.
That wasn’t nice, Sylvie thought to herself, the deathbed comment; she took it back. Besides, somehow David had managed to hold on to all his hair, every last strand. The fact that he wore it in a coarse gray ponytail was unfortunate, but Sylvie understood his attachment to it. She wished he would cut it, though.
“So you want to take a look at those tables and chairs?” he asked, reminding Sylvie of her excuse to be there. “I apologize, I wanted to get them out of my storage unit in the basement before you got here, but time got away from me.”
“No, no, don’t apologize,” said Sylvie. “Happy to pop down to see them.”
“Cool,” said David. “Shall we?”
“We shall.”
“You have a really nice place,” she told David’s broad back, following him down the stairs at a close clip. You have a really nice place, can I buy some Oxys off you? That’s what she wanted to say, she needed to say. The sooner she got it out, the less weird it would be. But how?
“Oh yeah? Thanks,” he said over his shoulder. “I want to buy some art for the walls, but I dunno the first thing about art buying. My wife, she had the taste in that department. Took it all with her when she left too.”
They had reached the first floor. David turned around to face her, his sunken eyes glassy. He was stoned right now, Sylvie realized. He was probably always stoned. Why would he share his pills with her? This was a bad idea; she should just okay the tables and chairs and get the hell out of there, weather this withdrawal and go back to her real, chemically independent life.
“Paul and I, we can help you pick out some art,” she offered. “He has a friend, an artist here. We have a piece of his in our bedroom.”