When I reached the front of my line, a stocky woman, perhaps seventy, invited me to sit opposite her at a plastic folding table. She took my papers and started filling out a series of forms.
“Atah medaber ivrit?” she asked without looking up.
“Sorry?”
“Lo medaber ivrit,” she said, checking a box.
“Sorry?”
“Jewish?”
“Of course.”
“Recite the Sh’ma.”
“Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai—”
“Do you belong to a Jewish community?”
“Adas Israel.”
“How often do you attend services?”
“Maybe twice a year, every other year?”
“What are the two occasions?”
“Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.”
“Any languages besides English?”
“A little Spanish.”
“I’m sure that will be very useful. Health conditions?”
“No.”
“No asthma? High blood pressure? Epilepsy?”
“No. I do have some eczema. At the back of my hairline.”
“Have you tried coconut oil?” she asked, still not looking up.
“No.”
“So try it. Military training or experience?”
“No.”
“Have you ever fired a gun?”
“I’ve never held a gun.”
She checked a number of boxes, apparently feeling no need to ask the next sequence of questions.
“Can you function without your glasses?”
“Function highly?”
She checked a box.
“Can you swim?”
“Without my glasses?”
“Do you know how to swim?”
“Of course.”
“Have you ever been a competitive swimmer?”
“No.”
“Do you have any experience with knot tying?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
She checked two boxes.
“Can you read a topographical map?”
“I suppose I know what I’m looking at, but I don’t know if that qualifies as reading.”
She checked a box.
“Do you have any experience with electrical engineering?”
“I once took a—”
“You cannot disarm a simple bomb.”
“I mean, how simple?”
“You cannot disarm a simple bomb.”
“I cannot.”
“What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without eating?”
“Yom Kippur, a while ago.”
“What is your tolerance for pain?”
“I don’t even know how one would answer that question.”
“You answered the question,” she said. “Have you ever been in shock?”
“Probably. In fact, yes. Often.”
“Are you claustrophobic?”
“Hugely.”
“What is the greatest load you can carry?”
“Physically?”
“Are you sensitive to extremes of heat or cold?”
“Is anyone not?”
“Allergic to medications?”
“I’m lactose intolerant, but I guess that’s not really what you were asking.”
“Morphine?”
“Morphine?”
“Do you know first aid?”
“I didn’t answer about morphine.”
“Are you allergic to morphine?”
“I have no idea.”
She wrote something down, which I tried, without success, to decipher.
“I don’t want not to get morphine if I need morphine.”
“There are other forms of pain relief.”
“Are they as good?”
“Do you know first aid?”
“Sort of.”
“That will sort of be a comfort to someone sort of in need of first aid.”
While perusing the paperwork I’d filled out in line, she said, “Emergency contact information…”
“It’s there.”
“Julia Bloch.”
“Yes.”
“She’s who?”
“What?”
“You didn’t fill in your relationship.”
“Sure I did.”
“So you used invisible ink on that one.”
“She’s my wife.”
“Most wives prefer permanent marker.”
“I must have—”
“You are an organ donor in America.”
“I am.”
“If you are killed in Israel, would you allow your organs to be used in Israel?”
“Yes,” I said, allowing the s to skid for a hundred feet.
“Yes?”
“Yes, if I’m killed—”
“What is your blood type?”
“Blood type?”
“You have blood?”
“I do.”
“What type? A? B? AB? O?”
“You’re asking for giving, or receiving?”
Finally, for the first time since we started speaking, she looked me in the eye. “It’s the same blood.”
HOW TO PLAY SUICIDE GROWTH RINGS
For left-handedness, or twins, or red hair, to run in one’s family—as all of those do in mine—there need to be multiple occurrences. For suicide to run in one’s family, there needs to be only one.
I received my grandfather’s death certificate from the Maryl and Department of Records. I wanted to know that I knew what I already knew. The coroner’s handwriting was as good as typeset, the opposite of a doctor’s: asphyxiation by hanging. He killed himself at approximately ten in the morning. The certificate said that it was Mr. Kowalski, the next-door neighbor, who made the report. That my grandfather’s name was Isaac Bloch. That he had been born in Poland. That he hanged himself with a belt wedged between his kitchen door and its frame.
But when I was imagining it in bed that night, I saw him outside, hanging by a rope from a tree. The grass in the shadow of his feet slowly died and powdered to a little patch of dirt in an otherwise wild, overgrown garden.
Later in the night, I imagined plants ascending to meet his feet, as if the earth were trying to atone for its gravity. I imagined palm fronds holding him up like hands, the rope slack.
Even later—I barely slept—I imagined walking with my grandfather through a redwood forest. His skin was blue and his fingernails were an inch long, but otherwise he looked like the man at whose kitchen table I used to eat black bread and cantaloupe, the man who, when told not to change into his bathing suit in public, asked, “Why not?” He stopped at a massive overturned tree and pointed at the rings.
“This, here, is my parents’ wedding. It was an arranged marriage. It worked. And here,” he said, pointing at a different ring, “is when Iser fell from a tree and broke his arm.”
“Iser?”
“My brother. You were named for him.”
“I thought I was named for someone named Yakov.”
“No. We just told you that.”
“How does Iser become Jacob?”
“Iser is short for Israel. After wrestling with Jacob through the night, the angel renamed him Israel.”
“How old was he?”
“And here,” he said, pointing at another ring, “is when I left home. With Benny. Everyone else stayed—my grandparents and parents, my other five brothers—and I wanted to stay, but Benny convinced me. He forced me. And here is when Benny and I got on different boats, one for America, one for Israel.” He touched a ring, and let his long fingernail slide outward toward the bark as he spoke. “This, here, is when you were born. Here you were a boy. Here you got married. Here is Sam’s birth, here is Max’s, here is Benjy’s. And here”—he touched his fingernail to the rim of the trunk, like a record needle—“is right now. And out here”—he pointed to a spot in the air, about an inch outside the trunk—“is when you’ll die, and here”—he gestured at the area slightly nearer to the trunk—“is the res
t of your life, and here”—he pointed to just outside the trunk—“is what happens next.”
I understood, somehow, that the weight of his hanging body had pulled the tree over, making our history visible.
HOW TO PLAY SEVEN RINGS
I could never anticipate which religious rituals Julia would find beautiful and which misogynistic, morally repugnant, or simply foolish. So I was surprised when she wanted to walk the seven rings around me under the chuppah.
In our preparatory reading—her preparatory reading; I gave up fairly quickly—she learned that the rings echo the biblical story of Joshua leading the Israelites into Canaan. When they came to the walled city of Jericho, and the first battle they would have to fight on their way to the Promised Land, God instructed Joshua to march the Israelites around the walls seven times. As soon as they had completed the seventh ring, the walls came tumbling down, and the Israelites conquered the city.
“You hide your greatest secret behind a wall,” she said, with a tone that suggested both irony and earnestness, “and I will surround you with love, and the wall will topple—”
“And you will have conquered me.”
“We will have conquered ourselves.”
“All I have to do is stand there?”
“Just stand there and topple.”
“What’s my greatest secret?”
“I don’t know. We’re only beginning.”
It wasn’t until we were ending that she knew.
HOW TO PLAY THE LAST WHOLLY HAPPY MOMENT
“Let’s do something special,” I suggested a month before Julia’s fortieth birthday. “Something unlike us. A party. A blowout: band, ice cream truck, magician.”
“A magician?”
“Or a flamenco dancer.”
“No,” she said. “That’s the last thing I’d want.”
“Even if it’s last, it’s still on the list.”
She laughed and said, “It’s sweet of you to think of that. But let’s do something simple. A nice dinner at home.”
“Come on. We’ll make it fun.”
“Fun for me would be a simple family dinner.”
I tried a few times to persuade her, but she made clear, with increasing force, that she didn’t want “a big deal.”
“You’re sure you’re not protesting too much?”
“I’m not protesting at all. The thing I most want is to have a nice, quiet dinner with my family.”
The boys and I made her breakfast in bed that morning: fresh waffle, kale-and-pear smoothie, huevos rancheros.
We whispered wishes to the elephant at the zoo (an old birthday ritual, origin unknown), collected leaves in Rock Creek Park for pressing into the Book of Years (another ritual), ate lunch at one of the outside tables of her favorite Greek restaurant in Dupont Circle. We went to the Phillips Collection, where Sam and Max feigned interest so earnestly and poorly, Julia was moved to tell them, “I know you love me. It’s OK to be bored.”
It was getting dark when we made it home, with half a dozen bags of groceries for dinner supplies. (I insisted that we not shop for any other meals, even though there were things we needed. “Today,” I said, “will not be utilitarian.”) I gave Sam the key, and the boys ran ahead into the house. Julia and I unloaded the bags on the island and started putting away the perishables. Our eyes met, and I saw that she was crying.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You’re going to hate me if I tell you.”
“I’m sure I won’t.”
“You’ll be extremely annoyed.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s an annoyance moratorium on birthdays.”
And then, really letting the tears come, she said, “I actually wanted a big deal.”
I laughed.
“It’s not funny.”
“It is funny, Julia.”
“It’s not that I knew what I wanted and hid it from you. I wasn’t trying to be disappointed.”
“I know that.”
“I meant what I said at the time. I really did. It wasn’t until right now—not even when we entered the house, but right this second—that I realized I really wanted a big deal. I did. It’s so stupid. What am I, eight?”
“You’re forty.”
“I am, aren’t I? I’m a forty-year-old who doesn’t know herself until it’s too late. And to make matters worse, I’m dumping it on you, as if you could respond with anything other than guilt or hurt.”
“Here,” I said, handing her a box of orecchiette. “Put these away.”
“That’s as far as your sympathy can reach?”
“What happened to the annoyance moratorium?”
“That’s a one-way street, and you know it.”
“Put the pretentious pasta away.”
“No,” she said. “No. Today, I won’t.”
I laughed.
“It’s not funny,” she said, banging the counter.
“It’s so funny,” I said.
She grabbed the box, ripped off the top, and poured the pasta on the floor.
“I made a huge mess,” she said, “and I don’t even know why.”
I told her, “Put the empty box away.”
“The box?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” she asked. “To create a depressing symbol?”
“No,” I said, “because understanding oneself isn’t a prerequisite for being understood.”
She inhaled, understanding something she didn’t yet understand, and opened the pantry door. Out spilled the boys, and the grandparents, and Mark and Jennifer, and David and Hannah, and Steve and Patty, and someone turned the music on, and it was Stevie Wonder, and someone released the balloons from the hall closet, and they jangled the chandelier, and Julia looked at me.
HOW TO PLAY EXISTENTIAL SHAME
The IKEA encounter with Maggie Silliman haunted me for years. She was the embodiment of my shame. I would often wake in the middle of the night and write letters to her. Each began the same way: “You were wrong. I am not a good man.” If I could have been the embodiment of my shame, I might have been spared it. I might even have been good.
HOW TO PLAY UNBROKEN RINGS
For his first trick, the magician asked Julia to pull a card from an invisible deck.
“Look at it,” he said, “but don’t let me see it.”
With a roll of her eyes, she obeyed.
“You know your card?”
She nodded and said, “Yeah. I know my card.”
“Now please throw it across the room.”
With an overdramatized windup, she hurled the invisible card. The gesture was beautiful to watch: the fakeness of it, the generosity of its spirit, how quick it was and how long it took, the movement of her ring through the air.
“Max. Your name is Max, right? Can you go fetch the card your mother just threw?”
“But it’s invisible,” he said, looking to his mother for help.
“Get it anyway,” the magician said, and Julia nodded permission.
So Max happily waddled across the room.
“OK, got it!” he said.
“And could you please tell us what the card is.”
Max looked to his mother and said, “But I can’t see it.”
“Tell us, anyway,” the magician said.
“And I can’t remember what the different kinds of cards are.”
“Hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds. Any number two through ten. Or joker, jack, queen, king, or ace.”
“Right,” Max said, and again looked to his mother, who again let him know it was OK. He examined the invisible card, held it right up to his squinting eyes. “It’s a seven of diamonds.”
The magician didn’t have to ask Julia if that was her card, because she was crying. Nodding and crying.
We ate some cake, we cleared out the dining room and did some silly dancing, we used paper plates and disposable cutlery.
The magician stuck around for a while, doing close-up magic for whoever would pay atten
tion.
“That was really great,” I told him, patting him on the back, surprised and repelled by his skinniness. “Just perfect.”
“I’m glad. Feel free to recommend me. It’s how I get my jobs.”
“I certainly will.”
He did the classic linked-rings trick for me. I’d seen it countless times, but it was still a thrill.
“My dad was the magician at my fifth birthday,” I told him. “He opened with that.”
“So you know how it’s done?”
“Broken rings.”
He handed them to me. I must have spent five full minutes searching for what had to be there.
“What happens if the trick goes wrong?” I asked, not yet ready to return the rings.
“How would it go wrong?”
“Someone takes the wrong card, or lies to you, or the deck falls.”
“I never perform a trick,” he said. “I perform a process. There’s no outcome I need.”
I told that to Julia in bed that night: “There’s no outcome he needs.”
“Sounds Eastern.”
“Definitely not Eastern European.”
“No.”
I turned off the bedside light.
“That first trick. Or process. Max really said your card?”
“I didn’t actually pick one.”
“No?”
“I wanted to, but I just couldn’t bring myself to.”
“So why did you cry?”
“Because Max still could.”
HOW TO PLAY NO ONE
The night I came back from Islip, I went straight to the kids’ rooms. It was three in the morning. Benjy was contorted into one of those almost inconceivably bizarre sleeping-child positions: his tush way up in the air, his legs rigid, the weight of his body driving his cheek into the pillow. He had sweated through his sheets and was snoring like a tiny human animal. I reached out my hand, but before I’d even touched him, his eyes sprang open: “I wasn’t asleep.”
“It’s OK,” I said, brushing his damp hair with my hand. “Close your eyes.”
“I was awake.”
“You were doing sleep-breathing.”
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