“Of course I would be careful.”
“We’re different in that way.”
“You’re reckless?”
“I’m loyal.”
“Loyalty doesn’t require recklessness,” Julia said, as if she were taking Jacob’s side, which she didn’t feel like doing, especially without knowing what they were talking about.
“Yes, it does.”
“And no one is helped by a loyalty that makes the situation worse,” Jacob said, wanting Julia to feel that he had her back.
“Unless the situation is going to get worse anyway. Your father would agree with me.”
“Which only proves the sanity of my argument.”
Tamir laughed at that. And with his laugh, the rising temperature was halved, the pressure relieved.
“What’s the best sushi in Washington?” Tamir asked.
“I don’t know,” Jacob said, “but I know it isn’t as good as the worst sushi in Israel, which is better than the best sushi in Japan.”
“I’ll probably stick around here while you guys go out today,” Julia said. “I’ve got some things to catch up on.”
“What kind of things?” Tamir asked, as only an Israeli would.
“Bar mitzvah stuff.”
“I thought it was canceled.”
Julia looked at Jacob. “You told him it was canceled?”
“I did not.”
“Don’t lie to your wife,” Tamir said.
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“He keeps saying it?” Julia asked.
“You can’t see it,” Jacob told Julia, “but he’s nudging me right now. So you know.”
Tamir gave Jacob another invisible nudge and said, “You told me that with Isaac’s death, the earthquake, and what happened between the two of you—”
“I did not say anything,” Jacob said.
“Don’t lie to your wife, Jacob.”
“What, about Mark?” Julia asked. “And did you tell him about your phone?”
“I hadn’t told him about anything that you just told him about.”
“And it’s none of my business,” Tamir said.
Addressing only Julia, Jacob said, “What I told him was that we were talking about how to modify the bar mitzvah, in light of, you know, everything.”
“Modify what?” Sam asked.
How do children do that? Jacob wondered. Not only enter rooms silently, but at the worst possible moment.
“Your bar mitzvah,” Max said. And where did he come from?
“Mom and I were talking about how to make sure the bar mitzvah feels good within the context of, you know.”
“The earthquake?”
“What earthquake?” Benjy asked, without looking up from the maze he was drawing. Had he always been there?
“And Great-Grandpa,” Jacob said.
“Dad and I—”
“You can just say we,” Sam said.
“We don’t think we can have a band,” Jacob said, taking over the parental side of the conversation in an effort to demonstrate to Julia that he was also capable of delivering difficult news.
“Fine,” Sam said. “They sucked shit anyway.”
It’s very hard to have a productive dialogue with a thirteen-year-old boy, as every gently broached subject becomes an Ultimate Conversation, requiring defense systems and counterattacks to attacks that were never launched. What begins as an innocent observation about his habit of leaving things in the pockets of dirty clothes ends with Sam blaming his parents for his twenty-eighth-percentile height, which makes him want to commit suicide on YouTube.
“They didn’t suck,” Jacob said.
Still focusing on his maze, Benjy said, “When Mom parked the car, it wasn’t right, so I picked it up and put it in the right place.”
“Thank you for that,” Julia said to Benjy. And then, to Sam: “There’s a nicer way to put it.”
“Jesus,” Sam said, “I’m not allowed to have an opinion anymore?”
“Now, hold on a minute,” Jacob said. “You chose them. Mom didn’t. I didn’t. You did. You watched the videos of half a dozen bands, and it was your opinion that Electric Brigade should be the band for your bar mitzvah.”
“They were the least pathetic of three totally pathetic options, and I chose them under duress. That’s not the same as being a groupie.”
“What duress?”
“The duress of being forced to have a bar mitzvah when you know I find all of this shit to be bullshit.”
Jacob tried to spare Julia from having to be the one, yet again, to object to bad language: “Shit to be bullshit, Sam?”
“Is that poor usage?”
“Impoverished. And try to believe me when I tell you I would have been every bit as happy not to pay the utterly mediocre Electric Brigade five thousand dollars to play bad covers of bad songs.”
“But the rite of passage is nonnegotiable,” Sam confirmed.
“Yes,” Jacob said, “that’s correct.”
“Because it was nonnegotiable for you, because it was nonnegotiable for—”
“Correct again. That’s what Jewish people do.”
“Not negotiate?”
“Have bar mitzvahs.”
“Ah…I’d completely misunderstood the whole thing. And now that I realize we have bar mitzvahs because we have bar mitzvahs, what I really feel moved to do is marry a Jewish woman and have Jewish children.”
“You need to slow down,” Julia said.
“And I definitely don’t want to be buried,” Sam said, the Ultimate now within sight. “Especially if Jewish law requires it.”
“So be cremated like me,” Max said.
“Or don’t die,” Benjy suggested.
Like a conductor zipping up a piece of music, Julia gave a quick and stern “Enough,” and that was it. What was so scary about her? What about that five-foot-four woman, who never inflicted physical or emotional violence, or even saw a punishment all the way through, terrified her husband and children to the point of unconditional surrender?
Jacob broke down the breakdown: “The thing we want to be sensitive to is the appearance of enjoying life too much in the face of Great-Grandpa’s death. Not to mention the earthquake. It would be in poor taste, and also just feel bad.”
“The appearance of enjoying life?” Sam asked.
“I’m just saying that some sensitivity is required.”
“Let me tell you the right way to think about it,” Tamir began.
“Maybe later,” Jacob said.
“So no band,” Sam said. “Is that enough to make sure we don’t appear to enjoy life?”
“In Israel we don’t even have bar mitzvah parties,” Tamir said.
“Mazel tov,” Jacob told him. And then, to Sam: “I might also skip the sign-in board.”
“Which I always wanted to skip,” Sam said.
“Which I spent three weeks making for you,” Julia said.
“You made it over the course of three weeks,” Jacob corrected.
“What?”
“You didn’t spend three weeks making it.”
“Why do you think that’s an important clarification?”
He all of a sudden didn’t, so he changed course: “I think we should also consider editing the centerpieces.”
“Why?” Julia asked, beginning to understand that he was taking things from her, not Sam.
“I’ve never understood the desire of American Jews to speak words you don’t understand,” Tamir said. “Finding meaning in the absence of meaning—I don’t get it.”
“They’re…festive,” Jacob said.
“They’re elegant.”
“Wait a minute,” Sam said, “what’s left?”
“What’s left?”
“Exactly,” Tamir said.
“What’s left,” Jacob said, resting his hand on Sam’s shoulder for the instant before Sam recoiled, “is you becoming a man.”
“What’s left,” Julia said, “is being with y
our family.”
“You are the luckiest people in the history of the world,” Tamir said.
“We’re trying,” Jacob said to Sam, who lowered his eyes and said, “This sucks.”
“It won’t,” Julia said. “We’ll make it really special.”
“I didn’t say it will suck. I said it sucks. Presently.”
“You’d rather be in a fridge like Great-Grandpa?” Jacob asked, as surprised as anyone by his words. How could he have thought them, much less vocalized them? Or these: “You’d rather be trapped under a building in Israel?”
“Those are my choices?” Sam asked.
“No, but they are your much-needed perspective. Look at that,” Jacob said, pointing to the muted TV, which showed images of massive earth-moving machines, tires with ladders built into them, pulling apart rubble.
Sam took this in, nodded, averted his eyes to a place yet farther from where they would have met his parents’.
“No flowers,” he said.
“No flowers?”
“Too beautiful.”
“I’m not sure beauty is the problem,” Julia said.
“The problem,” Tamir said, “is that—”
“It’s part of the problem,” Sam said, talking over Tamir, “so lose ’em.”
“Well, I don’t know about losing them,” Jacob said, “as they’ve already been paid for. But we can ask if it’s still possible to shift the design toward something more in keeping with—”
“And let’s ditch the monogrammed yarmulkes, too.”
“Why?” Julia asked, hurt as only someone who had spent six hours choosing a font, palette, and material for monogrammed yarmulkes could be.
“They’re decorative,” Sam said.
“OK,” Jacob said, “maybe they’d be a bit gauche, considering.”
“Gauche they are not,” Julia said.
“The problem—” Tamir began, again.
“And it probably goes without saying,” Sam said, as he always did when he was about to say something that did not go without saying, “that we’re not going to have party favors.”
“I’m sorry, I have to draw a line,” Julia said.
“I actually think he’s right,” Jacob said.
“You do?” Julia said. “Actually?”
“I do,” Jacob said, not liking that mimicked actually, actually. “Party favors imply a party.”
“The problem—”
“Of course they don’t.”
“Party favor, Julia.”
“They imply a social convention, the lack of whose fulfillment would imply extreme rudeness. Jacob.”
“Social convention at the conclusion of a party.”
“So we punish his friends for plate tectonics and the death of Sam’s great-grandfather?”
“Punishing thirteen-year-old children is encumbering them with garbage bags full of tourist tchotchkes from places Sam’s distant and uncared-about relatives live and calling it a favor.”
“You imply an asshole,” Julia said.
“Whoa,” Barak said.
Where had he come from?
“Excuse me?” Jacob said, exactly as Julia would have.
“I’m not chanting Torah,” Julia said. “We know what these words mean.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“It was always there.”
The television filled with tiny flashes, like fireflies trapped in a jar.
“The problem,” Tamir said, standing up, “is that you don’t have nearly enough problems.”
“Can I state the obvious?” Sam asked.
“No,” his parents said simultaneously—a rare unity.
There was a woman on TV, of unknown ethnicity or nationality, pulling at her hair as she wailed, pulling with enough force to yank her head left and right. There was no ticker across the bottom of the screen. There was no commentary. There was no cause offered for her suffering. There was only the suffering. Only the woman, her hair gathered in the fists she beat against her chest.
ABSORB OR ABSOLVE
When Isaac should have been well into his decomposition in the ground, he was still maintaining freshness in a human crisper in Bethesda. Only for Isaac could the end of misery be the extension of misery. His final wish—made known both in his will and in far too many conversations with Irv, Jacob, and whoever else might be entrusted with the task—was to be buried in Israel.
“But why?” Jacob had asked.
“Because that’s where Jews go.”
“On Christmas break. Not for eternity.”
And when Sam, who was along for the visit, pointed out that he would get far fewer visitors over there, Isaac pointed out that “the dead are dead” and visits are the last things on their brain-dead minds.
“You don’t want to be buried with Grandma and the rest of the family?” Jacob asked.
“We’ll all meet when the moment is right.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Jacob didn’t ask, because there are times when meaning itself means very little. A dying wish is such a time. Isaac had arranged the plot two decades before—it was expensive even then, but he didn’t mind being grave-poor—so all that was required in order to fulfill his last and most lasting wish was to get his body on a plane and work out the logistics on the other side.
But when the time came to drop Isaac’s body in the mailbox, the logistics were impossible: all flights were grounded, and when the airspace reopened, the only bodies the country allowed in were of those prepared to die.
Once the ritually mandated window for a burial-in-one-day had passed, there was no great rush to figure out a solution. But that’s not to say that the family was indifferent to Jewish ritual. Someone had to be with the body at all times between death and burial. The synagogue had a crew for this, but as the days passed, enthusiasm for babysitting the cadaver waned, and more and more responsibility fell to the Blochs. And that responsibility had to be negotiated with the responsibility of hospitably hosting the Israelis: Irv could take them to Georgetown while Jacob sat with Isaac’s body, and then in the afternoon Jacob could take them to the Air and Space Museum to see To Fly! on the perspective-swallowing IMAX while Deborah had the exact opposite experience with Isaac’s body. The patriarch with whom they begrudgingly skyped for seven minutes once a week was now someone they visited daily. By some uniquely Jewish magic, the transition from living to dead transformed the perpetually ignored into the never to be forgotten.
Jacob accepted the brunt of the responsibility, because he considered himself the most able to do so, and because he most strongly wanted to escape other responsibilities. He sat shmira—an expression he’d never heard before he became a choreographer of shmira sitters—at least once a day, usually for several hours at a time. For the first three days, the body was kept on a table, under a sheet, at the Jewish burial home. Then it was moved to a secondary space in the back, and finally, at the end of the week, to Bethesda, where unburied bodies go to die. Jacob never got any closer than ten feet, and dialed the podcasts to hearing-impairing volumes, and tried not to inhale through his nose. He brought books, went through e-mail (he had to stand on the other side of the door to get cell reception), even got some writing done: HOW TO PLAY DISTRACTION; HOW TO PLAY GHOSTS; HOW TO PLAY INCOMMUNICABLE, FELT MEMORIES.
Sunday, mid-morning, when Max’s ritualized complaints of there being nothing to do became intolerably exasperating, Jacob suggested Max come along for some shmira sitting, thinking, This will make you grateful for your boredom. Calling his bluff, Max accepted.
They were greeted at the door by the previous shmira sitter—an ancient woman from the shul who evoked so much chilliness and vacancy she might have been mistaken for one of the dead if her overapplication of makeup had not given her away: only living Jews are embalmed. They exchanged nods, she handed Jacob the keys to the front door, reminded him that absolutely nothing other than toilet paper (and number two, of course) could be flushed down the toilet, and, with somewhat
less pomp and circumstance than happens outside Buckingham Palace, the changing of the guard was complete.
“It smells horrible,” Max observed, seating himself at the reception area’s long oak table.
“I breathe through my mouth when I have to breathe.”
“It smells like someone farted into a vodka bottle.”
“How do you know what vodka smells like?”
“Grandpa made me smell it.”
“Why?”
“To prove that it was expensive.”
“Wouldn’t the price do that?”
“Ask him.”
“Chewing gum helps, too.”
“Do you have any gum?”
“I don’t think so.”
They talked about Bryce Harper, and why, despite the genre being too exhausted to raise an original finger, superhero movies were still pretty great, and as often happened, Max asked his dad to recount Argus stories.
“We took him to a dog training class once. Did I ever tell you that?”
“You did. But tell me again.”
“So it was right after we got him. The teacher began by demonstrating a belly rub that would relax a dog when it became agitated. We were sitting in a circle, maybe twenty people, everyone working away at his dog’s belly, and then the room filled with a loud rumbling, like the Metro running beneath the building. It was coming from my lap. Argus was snoring.”
“That’s so cute.”
“So cute.”
“He’s not very well behaved, though.”
“We dropped out. Felt like a waste of time. But a couple of years later, Argus got into the habit of pulling on the leash when we walked. And he’d just stop abruptly and refuse to take another step. So we hired some guy that people in the park were using. I can’t remember his name. He was from Saint Lucia, kind of fat, had a limp. He put a choke collar on Argus and observed as we walked with him. Sure enough, Argus stopped short. ‘Give him a pull,’ the guy said. ‘Show him who’s the alpha dog.’ That made Mom laugh. I gave a pull, because, you know, I’m the alpha dog. But Argus wouldn’t budge. ‘Harder,’ the guy said, so I pulled harder, but Argus pulled back as hard. ‘You got to show him,’ the man said. I pulled again, this time quite hard, and Argus made a little choking noise, but still wouldn’t budge. I looked at Mom. The guy said, ‘You’ve got to teach him, otherwise it’ll be like this forever.’ And I remember thinking: I can live with this forever.
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