A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

“Imagine you’re going to another planet,” Jeff begins. “And you can only take three things with you. What would these three things be?”

  Tiffany Gottlieb, who is slated to appreciate Italian opera and not get lost in Milan, says she’ll take her family, her cat and her Walkman. Tiffany hates her older brother, Max. He has brain cancer. His head is shaved and black magic marker arrows indicate radiation sites. He is the city being bombed. And Tiffany Gottlieb wouldn’t take him, with his bandages, catheter, IV tubes, monitoring devices and emergency oxygen tanks anywhere. He’s terminal, a condition even worse than peripheral.

  Brooke Bernstein’s right hand fingernails are garnet; her left are iridescent blue. I assume this refers to her double language choices of Greek and Japanese. Her unmatched hands spread out like a fan on the thighs of her denim shorts. She’s taking both her families since her parents are divorced, her dog Justice, and her diabetes medications.

  Brooke Bernstein doesn’t have diabetes and she doesn’t have a dog. She loathes her new stepfather. He’s in the Russian mafia and slaps her mother on the face and pushes her against walls. Brooke keeps missing soccer practice and may be dropped from the team.

  “The desperation of old women,” Brooke revealed, summarizing her family catastrophe during a flashlight share and bond session. Obviously, it’s her mother’s fault.

  Bruce Tuckerman, in Moshe Dayan, says he’ll take the family Benz, in case there are roads on the other planet. He notes the importance of transportation historically, particularly the Erie Canal linking New York and Chicago, making Buffalo the 3rd largest city in the country. Barges are underrated, Bruce reminds us, reciting highlights from his history-of-taming America final report. We’ve all written this report, of course, and share his affection for barges. Then Bruce says he’ll take a suitcase of seeds to start agriculture, and the family videos, so they can remember how things should be. Agriculture and personal history can fit in the trunk.

  Everyone is taking their families, pets and Torah. Chelsea Horowitz is packing the classic pre-war Oxford dictionary, and the collected works of Freud in the original German. She has a duty to preserve their ambiguities and contradictions. She’s also taking a sub-zero down sleeping bag and flashlight. That’s at least 5 items, rather than 3, but no one notices. Then it’s my turn.

  “I’ll take O’Hare Airport,” I hear myself say. Each of its four separate syllables sounds strange and hangs in the hot-chalk lemony air. I offer only 1 item instead of 3. I can justify my 1 by the monumental amount of cement and engineering involved. By pounds alone, O’Hare should count for 3. Then I realize no one is listening. The Goldberg twins are asleep. Nurse Kaufman passes with a basket of damp hand towels. She takes pulses and gives out band-aids. Then we come to Scotty.

  Scotty Stoloff’s had nearly an hour to prepare his improvisational response. I hold my breath and my mouth fills with yellow air that’s thick and vaguely citrus sweet. I can’t see his green eyes because he wears aviator sunglasses. He has a gold hoop earring in his left earlobe and his nose is pierced with a gold stud shaped like a miniature bullet.

  In the flickering sunlight between Eucalyptus trees, his hair is streaked with bronze and red feathers. On a vision quest, he would find his guide as a hawk or golden eagle.

  “I’d take a kilo of cocaine, a Tec-9 with a sling of clips, and a Cray super computer.” Scotty informs us, removing his sunglasses. He glances at the circle of half-asleep liars with generous indifference. There’s no calculation in his green eyes or strain at the edges, no contempt or hostility.

  Scotty inhabits an alternative region. We’re remote and marginal to him. It’s a kibbutz, not a four-star hotel. Nobody gets life support here.

  I’m a 13-year-old without a declared foreign language and 37 infected mosquito bites who lost her face in O’Hare. It occurs to me that Scotty Stoloff may not come back to Camp Hillel next summer.

  The dinner bell rings and Spiritual Discussion is over. Rabbi just-call-me-Jeff and Dr. White have to rethink the format. During dinner, there’s a rumor bunks Golda Meir and Shimon Peres are not participating effectively.

  Bodies have on/off switches and mine is jammed awake. Scotty isn’t in any of my activities. In fact, he sits in the lotus position in the empty Rec Center basketball court practicing calligraphy in his journal. Sometimes he plays drums and shoots hoops.

  I leave my papier-mâché mask of a girl who removed her face before an Aloha flight to Honolulu. Her name is Lily and she hid her face in a potted Fichus tree next to an exhibit featuring states and their most significant minerals.

  Scotty is in the lotus position writing in his journal. I sit on the warm wood near him. “Your answer was so cool,” I say.

  “I liked yours too,” Scotty Stoloff replies. “Though O’Hare wouldn’t make my short list.”

  It’s a floor of wooden boards like puzzle pieces. I begin counting lines in the grain and the nubs of nail heads. 74 nails and 12 separate lines of grain in each board.

  “I prefer Asian airports. Chaos impresses me.” Scotty Stoloff closes his calligraphy book.

  “What about an Aloha Airlines flight to Honolulu?” I ask.

  “Hawaii is just another American state,” he explains. “It’s the next flight I like. Bangkok maybe. Or Hong Kong.”

  “In Hong Kong the umbrellas have red Peonies and birds painted on them,” I tell him.

  Scotty considers this. “Parrots?”

  “No,” I say. “Cranes.”

  Scotty nods. He opens his calligraphy book and writes Hong Kong=Cranes. Then I ask him what his foreign language is. I sit cross-legged. My yellow thighs’ sacs and infected scabs make me feel like a reptile.

  “Spanish,” Scotty replies, determined. He lowers his voice. “It’s the language of drug deals and arms smuggling,” he reveals, whispering. “Want to move contraband, learn Spanish.”

  When he asks what I’m taking, I say, “Canadian.”

  In the burst of our laughter, I feel yellow as Orchids from Madonna’s dressing room.

  Then we’re in the brutal glare of the dusty parking lot, waiting for our parents. We have our suitcases, backpacks, crafts projects, sleeping bags and pillowcases of dirty clothes in scattered piles. My crafts projects require an extra 2 cardboard boxes. I’ve made 16 papier-mâché masks of faces, and glued sequins and feathers on them. I’ve drawn black lines with arrows on their foreheads, indicating where the radiation should go. I suddenly realize my masks have no mouths.

  Cameras, binoculars and Walkmen fall randomly on the gravel. Batteries and tubes of lip-gloss lay abandoned on bleached stones. I see my mother’s red Jaguar approaching and run to find Scotty.

  “Are you coming back?” I look down at my sandals and count gray pebbles in the gravel. 46. I can count the brown ones next.

  He shakes his head no. “I’ll be in Bolivia by next summer,” Scotty reveals. In the sun his gold earring looks like it would burn my fingers if I touched it.

  Unexpectedly, he produces a sheet of notebook with his address in a script like calligraphy. He extends it to me and I take it. Then Scotty snaps my picture and says, “Hey, stay in touch.”

  I can’t see his green eyes through his sunglasses. There is just his black Sex Pistols T-shirt and how he enters a dark SUV and vanishes.

  My mother and Marty begin their interrogation. They talk and I fill in the blanks. It’s a multiple choice test. Camp Hillel exists to enhance me. Precisely how have I been transformed? My mother demands the first and last names of my bunkmates, in case she knows their parents. And the activities I selected? What new physical and artistic skills have I mastered?

  Marty asks if I can make a horse jump over a fence. My mother wonders if I learned to play the flute. Was I invited to a villa in Lake Como? Am I going to the Brazilian rainforest? Did I try hard enough with the Goldberg twins? Will I be going to Cannes on their yacht? Most importantly, did I distinguish myself in a manner resulting in a certificate or plaque they can put in a frame?<
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  My mother moves directly into the decision aspect. Am I going to stay with them? Of course, I’m going to choose Beverly Hills High over Alleghany Hills High, which doesn’t even have a computer lab, or audio-visual or theater arts electives. Girls are required to take Home Economics and demonstrate proficiency with meatloaf preparation, which is a blatant example of retrograde gender oppression. Not to mention the fact that they don’t even offer French, German or Latin. Chinese is not even on the horizon, not in my lifetime. They don’t offer Spanish either, anymore, because Mrs. Burdick is pregnant and taking a year off. I don’t mention this.

  “English is a foreign language there,” Marty says, driving. “Grammar is considered exotic.”

  “Like teeth. Know what a compliment is there? Nice tooth,” my mother says. She doesn’t smile.

  I look at my sun blistered feet but there are no pebbles or pine needles to count. I begin adding up the number of lines in the leather floor mats. Then I start to count the small beige stitches.

  “Look, darling,” my mother begins, voice soft. She turns around from the front seat to face me. She unlocks her seatbelt and leans closer. “Isn’t it time to get serious about your life?”

  Her hair is dyed blonder than usual. She wears her blue contact lenses with Aegean blue eye shadow and Adriatic liner. Her lipstick is called Millennium. I have the same one in my backpack. It’s red with a sheen that sparkles when lamp or match light touches it. It’s a special imported blend that resists water and retains its minute glowing silvery flecks like recessed lanterns.

  “I know your father told you things. And you probably told him we’ve become Republicans. That would inflame him. I understand the young automatically betray. And your father no doubt told you we ‘sold out.’ My mother laughs now. Her head swings back on her neck. “We didn’t sell out. We bought in.”

  “My father didn’t say that. About selling out,” I tell her.

  “What do they call it, then?” my mother presses.

  “They say you found the right life for you,” I reply.

  “Sweetheart, this is the right life for everybody,” Marty says. “Moses would throw his tablets down to come to this party.”

  I write Scotty that night. I tell him I’m going to O’Hare soon, and I have to make my decision. I explain the history of my parents’ band, how I was born, and then my father, who played guitar and wrote songs, fell in love with Madeleine, the other singer and songwriter. And my mother, who played keyboards, fell in love with Marty, the bass player. The band lived as a commune and my father and Madeleine are the last ones left.

  Marty became a producer and lawyer in Beverly Hills. I tell Scotty my father grows pot and Psilocybin Mushrooms under high intensity lights from Sweden in our barn in the Alleghany Mountains. Everyone in town thinks he runs an organic gardening business, but he actually sells drugs. I live in two places, but only feel at home in O’Hare.

  I am suspended between mutually exclusive possibilities. I navigate encampments from tree level. I’m the girl on the high trapeze. My wires are disguised and I have my own gravity, rules and variables. I’m expected to cross regions with no bridges, diagrams or candles, no drum rolls or spotlights. And somehow I do in seizures of vertigo and fevers no one notices.

  If an event can be explained, its mysterious origins and destiny wash away. It’s diminished and insignificant. I store details in unmarked Mason jars I hide — my parents’ divorce, my Gucci pink closet just for shoes, my father’s magic mushrooms in beds of dirt like babies in suspended animation, Marty’s gold framed album covers and mechanical accordion arm.

  If I don’t connect the dots, circumstances remain weedy and intangible. They have no longitude or latitude. They move electrically through time, which is like a river with ports and Lilac branches strung with votives and orangey paper lanterns. You can’t find this on a map and it has no landing strip.

  Scotty immediately answers my 9-page letter with a special delivery envelope. At the end of his calligraphy letter he’s added a PS in plain block letters. YOU’RE NOBODY’S CHILD. We write each other almost every day.

  I’ve come to the final week when my decision is due. My choice will shape my destiny. The farm is a squalid cul-de-sac, a village of peripherals. I am to go back to my father and Madeleine and pack my necessary mementos and then return for school in Beverly Hills in September.

  Of course I can visit my father and Madeleine whenever I want. I can spend my vacations and summers there, if I prefer northern Pennsylvania to French Polynesia or Italy. It’s just the matter of school, of being settled, on track and participating effectively.

  At night, the swimming pool is implausibly turquoise, as if painted and starched. It looks glutinous, like you could get stuck in it. I walk in and out of rooms, turning lights off and on, off and on. I count the crystal vases in the living room, 11. In the kitchen 18 copper pots hang from their antique copper rack. There are 29 rows and 19 columns of hand painted Italian tiles in the entrance hall below 5 skylights and 14 Fichus trees.

  I watch my mother and Marty play tennis. I’m suddenly afraid of the pool. I count my mother’s prescribed 50 laps. She actually does 34. The gardener subtracts 3 scorched Pink Camellias and adds 5 Hibiscus bushes in their place, 3 yellow and 2 red. He loads his truck with 6 different sized shovels and 3 green hoses coiled like ropes or creek snakes. I memorize his license plate.

  Marty is in his office with the 22 framed record covers of the bands he’s produced hung on the creamy white wall behind his back. His 6 platinum record plaques hang across from his desk. He wears white tennis shorts and stares at his just-delivered FAX machine. He looks stunned.

  I try to remember the 10 Commandments. “Do you bear false witness?” I ask.

  Marty is surprised. “I’m an attorney. My license obviates such distinctions. I’ve never had a contract seriously challenged.”

  That night, my mother is stretched out in a chaise lounge by the pool. She’s drinking cognac disguised as root beer. I sit next to her. We wear identical tropical print bathing suits and I realize our legs match precisely. We have thin ankles and our tanned flesh adheres seamlessly to the bone like some newly invented millennial clay was poured over them. My mosquito and spider bites have gone into remission.

  “Do you steal?” I begin with my mother.

  “I would never steal.” My mother doesn’t hesitate.

  “What about the Millennium lipsticks you took?” I ask.

  At our last Diva Salon appointment, when her stylist wasn’t watching, my mother took 3 lipsticks from the shelf and slid them into her purse. Later she gave me one.

  “That’s not stealing.” My mother smiles. “That’s called slippage. I’m a regular customer. They expect established clientele to take samples.”

  “But is it wrong?” I want to know.

  “Stealing? Of course it’s wrong.” My mother bites her lower lip and a dent forms in the red gloss.

  Marty drives to the Malibu house for what may be my last weekend of the summer. He’s tan and wears a Dodger baseball cap. The convertible is down so I yell through wind.

  “Do you steal?” It’s the only Commandment I remember.

  “My pen is heavier than Pete Townsend swinging a guitar. It has more force than an enraged diva with her mic at max.” Marty’s eyes are on the Pacific Coast Highway. My mother is already in Malibu with Maria preparing the house.

  “I don’t draw up contracts, honey. I devise war plans.” Marty shows his ivory teeth. “I really build prison camps.”

  “But you did steal.” My voice is raised, competing with the salty wind. There are 5 of what my mother terms real restaurants and 8 traffic lights between Santa Monica and our house on stilts in sand. The night beach glistens with mica like tiny shattered stars.

  “You mean the commune days? Sweetie, those are times no one remembers, including me.” Marty is driving his birthday Porsche. He passes a house, swerves, and pulls over to the shoulder of the road. He st
ares at a house and his mouth is half-open.

  “Geffen’s having another party,” he says. His voice is a mixture of anger and stunned admiration. Perhaps that’s called coveting. That’s against the law.

  “You grew drugs with my dad. You traded drugs for guns and sold them to the Weathermen. You and Dad robbed an armory,” I point out.

  “That’s hearsay and inadmissible,” Marty replies. “We needed Marshall amps. Madeleine had Stevie Nicks’ dress designer on retainer. Retainer, no less. It’s ancient history. The rules were different then.”

  Marty’s words are spaced with precision like a mathematical equation proving the existence of gravity and why you can’t go faster than light, not even in a Porsche. Marty can say anything, with his stretched wide lips and teeth like infant tusks. He can take a lie detector test and pass it.

  “What about the dude in Les Miserables? 20 years in prison for stealing bread when he was starving,” I remark.

  “He’s got a malpractice action against his attorney. No question,” Marty decides.

  At the beach house, I walk along the lip of the ocean counting stray pebbles and pieces of damaged clamshells. Later, I’ll count beads of mica like miniature fractured mirrors beneath my feet. This is how you learn to walk on glass and not get cut. After dinner, I’ll carry a calculator and count sand particles.

  “Tell us your most memorable Camp Hillel experience,” my mother begins. Maria has prepared her special salad with avocadoes, crab and pecans. Marty cooks steaks on a grill on the terrace just above the slow slapping waves.

  “Spiritual Discussion. Scotty Stoloff said he’d take a kilo of cocaine and a 9-millimeter gun to outer space.” I’m wearing my Millennium lipstick. My mouth is encrusted with camouflaged metal discs. If the wrong person kissed me, my lips would make them bleed.

  “That’s disgusting.” My mother puts down her fork in slow motion. She looks like she’s just accidentally discovered gravity.

  “I’m calling the Camp Director now.” Marty stands up. “That’s absolutely unacceptable.”