by Yuvi Zalkow
“I can still eat a Passover Seder,” I said. “But you don’t have to be Jewish to eat and drink like that.”
My mother teared up and put her hand to her chest. “You’re breaking my heart,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her, “but that’s how I feel.”
At the time, I thought this was the most mature way to communicate. This was my new understanding—to stick the knife inside, with no sense of timing or grace, and wiggle it.
It was then that I noticed my father hovering outside the living room.
When he walked in, he was shaking a finger at me like he had been giving this speech long before coming in to the room. “So you think you’re no longer a Jew?” He spoke quietly—the voice he saved for when he was too angry to yell.
“Yes,” I said, pretending to be confident.
“Well I’ve got news for you,” he said. “If you’re on an airplane and your plane gets hijacked and they get one look at your passport and see that your name is Yuval and that you were born in Israel, then I don’t give two shits what you believe in. You’ll be killed like a goddamn Jew.”
No one said any more in that discussion. We each left the room and went to separate parts of the house. It’s not that what he said sat perfectly right with me, but I never again tried to claim that I wasn’t Jewish, no matter what I believed in.
Chapter Ten
Honey My Ass
So here is how it goes: Julia isn’t home as usual. I’m at home and restless as usual. The novel is going poorly as usual. But unlike usual, she leaves her purse on the kitchen table. I don’t know how this can be, and for a second I think to worry that something has happened to her, but then I come to the conclusion that she must be fine because if anyone is going to get in trouble, it will surely be me.
So I eat a roast beef sandwich beside her purse. Her purse is black and has lots of compartments. I got it for her thirty-three-and-one-third birthday, which she found strange. But she loved the purse.
After the roast beef sandwich, I’m still hungry, but I decide not to make another. And I keep staring at her purse. I can’t stop looking at it. And then I think about Save Me, Julia. And I can’t stop thinking about Save Me, Julia. And so I try to leave the room. I try to pretend to write like usual but all that appears on the page is Save Me Julia Save Me Julia Save Me Julia Save Me Julia Save Me Julia Save Me Julia Save Me Julia.
And so I go back to the purse and I do exactly what I should not do.
Inside, just as expected, there are overflowing receipts that she’ll eventually throw away but can’t bring herself to toss quite yet. For the first time in our relationship, this habit annoys me. And so I keep pulling out receipts.
I get down on the kitchen floor and pour out her entire purse. It’s a big mess of receipts and dollar bills. There’s a wallet and a cell phone and some lipstick and eyeliner and a checkbook.
I spread everything out so no two items are on top of each other and it is then that I find a few crumbled napkins.
And on the napkins is that same crazy handwriting. Only this time, the phrases are even more obscure:
• Julia’s Sexy Toes
• Julia and Her Babies
• Julia’s Honor System Snack Box
I stare at these napkins, expecting to find the magic explanation to all my marital problems buried within these words. I look for a pattern. The S’s are all so big and the J’s are all so small. It must mean something. The man is surely a Jew hater. Julia’s name is written quickly, as if this man is very familiar with her. And the phrase, Sexy Toes, is written all wiggly, like the man has just been sucking Julia’s toes.
I could make up a million stories about these napkins. But I’d have confidence in none.
#
I first notice Julia’s black pumps right there on the floor. And then her stockings. And her dress. And there she is. Standing above me, watching me rummage through her purse.
“Honey,” I say. “You’re home.”
“Honey my ass,” she says. And she has a point.
Chapter Eleven
Alcohol and Steroids
I’m not saying that you would get yourself into this mess. But even so, what would you do in this situation? You could respond by getting angry at your tall, gentile wife. You could accuse her of sleeping with other men: “You whore!” you could announce. Or you could respond to her by apologizing for invading her privacy: “I’m so sorry for going through your purse. I’m ashamed of myself.” Or you could mix these two responses. You could say: “I shouldn’t have been going through your purse but what the hell are these napkins about?” Or you could dodge the whole issue and get to something deeper: tell her that you want to have a baby.
All these responses seem reasonable. But I choose none of them. I use a different kind of response, which involves curling your body around your beautiful wife’s legs and saying directly to her black pumps, “I didn’t do it.”
She takes in a deep breath. I can hear it all the way down on the cold floor. Then she shakes me off her foot and leaves the room.
#
I do eventually get up, and I do eventually find my wife in the bedroom. It’s our bedroom, but at the moment, it feels like hers. She is sitting on the side of the bed and I sit next to her and she lets me.
I’m holding the napkins in my hand even though I don’t remember picking them up. I sort them in alphabetical order because I don’t know how to begin, and Julia is staring at the wall, doing a good job of not helping me out. She is angry. I can tell by how stiffly she sits. But she is still giving me an opportunity to say something. An opportunity that I hardly deserve or know what to do with.
Maybe she doesn’t want me to talk. Maybe she’s ashamed about whatever she is involved in. It’s all too much to think about. Her napkin-based affair.
“I’m worried about Shmendrik,” I tell her. “He isn’t looking so good.” I put my hand on Julia’s lap. “He can’t beat this thing with just alcohol and steroids.”
My wife puts her head against my shoulder. Slowly, piece by piece, her body begins to slump, and she cries. And then it’s not just crying. It’s wailing. And I realize that I’ve never witnessed her cry for more than a fraction of a second. Usually, when she cries, she walks away fast, goes into the bathroom, flushes the toilet once or twice, and comes out asking me about lunch or overdue library books. Protestants have this uncanny ability to flush their problems in one toilet visit. Even the baggage she carries about her mother stays in the bathroom most of the time. But now Julia cries like it’s all she knows how to do. And I squeeze her into my shoulder and chest. We’ve never been in this situation. And so I keep squeezing her. I rub her back. I let this woman cry.
HOW I KILLED HER MOTHER
It finally happened. Her mother finally left her father. There was no question that it was necessary. What took Julia until fifteen to realize (and run away from) took her mother until fifty-nine.
Her mother was beautiful—the way her gray hair rolled past her shoulders like some kind of rainstorm and the way her cheeks swelled from a laughter that could have been from a joke either minutes or decades passed. But there was little laughter for this woman who left a man after spending so many years of her life serving his needs. After you cut off a problem limb, what do you use to replace it? For her mother, it turns out that it required a flask full of Monopolowa—potato-based and only $16 a liter.
Julia had just bought a new house. Two-car garage. Three bedrooms. And she was single again. Loads of space. Why not invite her mother to live with her? They loved each other. They watched Marlon Brando films together. They ordered Picasso and Van Gogh prints. They danced to Frank Sinatra together. They bought season passes to the museum and to the symphony. They could share the gas bill and complain together about the neighbor’s pro-Republican front-yard signage.
But it turns out vodka couldn’t completely fill her mother’s missing limb. It took Julia herself to fill the hole. And why
shouldn’t Julia help? It was a chance for them to get reacquainted as two adults.
Her mother could dance the way a weeping willow sways in a breeze. And she was great about listening to Julia complain about working too many hours as a marketing manager at whatever corporation she was working at. Julia could even tell such unmeaningful stories like how her coworker Joseph started sleeping with her other coworker Joseph. Her mother would listen.
As a loyal daughter, Julia kept away from dating men for a year, made sure her mother had settled into her new life. That kind of change isn’t easy. But it’s not easy to be single and taking care of Mama when you’re thirty either.
After the first date that Julia went out on, she thought her mother’s worry was a normal concern. After all, the man had sent a suspiciously large bouquet of flowers the day before and who knows what that could have meant. And so it seemed okay that her mother drank a little too much that night and that she was in tears when Julia came home.
But every time Julia went out, she had to confront another panic, even over men who were tediously unthreatening. Julia’s brother could go out with drug addicts and her mother didn’t care, but for Julia, even a librarian was dangerous material. Her relationships fell apart before they could start. But after all, she did love her mother more than these men of questionable intentions. And so she accepted this predicament. That she’d have to calm her mother frequently, that sometimes she’d have to chase her mother down the street, that sometimes she’d have to hear her mother call her a whore. Her poor mother, she thought. All those years with a man who read the TV Guide more than he spoke with his wife.
When we met, she had already learned to preface the first date with a warning about her baggage: “It’s like I’m carrying around the Empire State Building in my purse.” But baggage or no baggage, a girl who could so easily outwit me, who could practically tolerate my neuroses, who could sneak a hand on my lap while telling me about Brando and Sinatra was a woman that I wanted to stick with. That night I was completely unconcerned about her 365,000-ton purse.
We learned to work around the issues. We saw each other when we could. But our trysts were short and they ended abruptly; we had to sneak around like fifteen-year-olds. Within six months, it began to bother me. I was dying for her to spend the night at my place. I was dying for us to take a trip together. I grew to resent her beautiful damn mother, who called every time I got even one finger in Julia’s pants.
Julia realized that something had to change. Maybe she wanted more than one finger in her pants. I had plenty other fingers to spare. So she told her mother, “You need to let me have my own life.” Her mother couldn’t say no to something this reasonable, so she said, “Yes,” even though inside her chest, she was yelling NO in languages that she had never spoken before. I know this feeling.
Julia and I finally got our time alone together, though Julia noticed the signs of her mother’s collapse. She saw the poorly cleaned vomit stains on her mother’s bedroom floor. She smelled the fermentation on her mother’s skin. She noticed the way her mother had trouble remembering the things that seemed unforgettable.
Julia has not once blamed me for anything that happened to her mother, even though I feel this burden any time that Julia gets sad. That perhaps it was me that killed her mother. Because it was me that convinced Julia that it was okay for the two of us to go to Oaxaca. It was me who convinced Julia at the airport that she didn’t need to worry about the unlocked cabinet with the vodka in it. I remember it clearly, how I took Julia in my arms and said with an insincere sort of confidence, “Honey, it’ll be fine. Your mother can take care of herself,” and, for that blissful week in Mexico, we left all 365,000 tons behind.
Chapter Twelve
The Whole Megillah
Julia has basically cried into all the napkins before either of us remembers how this whole thing got started. She tells me about how she’s so worried about her brother and how he’s so stubborn about his health and how she’s scared to bug him any more about it. And I agree with her, because I agree with her. And after she has ruined the unfaithful napkins with her tears and snot, I take them out of her hands and put them in my pocket.
“Julia,” I say to my wife. “I need to talk to you.”
Her crying slows. And then it’s just funny breathing. And then I begin talking. “I’ve been giving Shmen money every month for his debts,” I say. “I’ve been pulling money out of what’s left of my parents’ inheritance without telling you. I’ve been cutting myself again.”
I can’t gauge Julia’s reaction because she’s still sniffling and I’m not sure if she’s upset about Shmen’s health or if it’s now about the money or about me or us or the purse or the napkins or the fact that I don’t like BLTs no matter how many times she makes them. I’ve lost track of the emotional steps and now I’m terrified of saying anything. This is why I once asked my wife if we could conduct our relationship through letters only. In person, there is too much to interpret and worry about.
But she does eventually look up at me and what I see isn’t the friendliest face in the world. “Since you’ve been going through my purse,” she says. “Did you notice anything addressed to you?”
“You mean like a napkin?” I say.
“No. I mean like a check.”
I leave my weepy wife at the bed and run into the kitchen.
I know exactly where I placed that check on the kitchen floor. I even remember acknowledging—in some foggy part of my brain—that it was addressed to me. So I grab the check and come back into the room. The check from Shmen is big enough that I assume it covers all that he owes me.
And, in a way, I’m disappointed. Just like that— poof—my horrible beautiful insane secret has disappeared.
“Have you known for a while?” I ask.
She doesn’t say anything. She stares at the wall as seriously as Orthodox Jews stare at the Wailing Wall when they pray. Except my wife and I aren’t the praying type. So I assume that she’s waiting for me to ask the real question. When they pray to that wall in Jerusalem, Jews sometimes put little crumbled pieces of paper inside the cracks. These have their hopes and wishes and dreams on them. I often wonder what kind of message I would put inside this wall, if I were the praying type. But I keep coming up blank. And so I pull the crumbled napkins out of my pocket and hand them to Julia.
“Who are you shtuping?” I ask.
She points to one of the restraints, which is still hanging from the bedpost. “Pretty much no one,” she says.
My gentile wife is more familiar with my culture than I give her credit for. She understands the nuance of the Yiddish language. For instance, she understands that spanking your husband is not technically shtuping. It falls more in the realm of meshuganah.
“Then who is writing these notes?” I ask.
“You don’t recognize the handwriting?” She gives them back to me.
I try to open one up and look at it but the ink is smudged and wet. “No.”
“Well then look at that check,” she says.
And that’s when it hits me. Shmen and his obsession with obscure band names. He can spend hours Googling for band names—that’s how he got fired from his last job. My wife is looking at me. I know she’s wondering how it’s possible an idiot like me could’ve scored a 1390 on the GRE. And so I try to think of something to say. I try to come up with some way to explain why I’ve been brooding for months about money and napkin dilemmas that don’t even exist. I need to give my wife an eloquent explanation for my madness.
And so I say, “Oh.”
“Jesus, Yuvi!” she says. She gets up fast. “This is how you live your life?” Julia grabs my pants and pulls them down enough to see the cuts on my ass. Then she lifts them back up. “No wonder you have no plot in your novel! You get fixated on the smallest things and can’t move forward.”
I know I deserve this, and so I sit down on the bed and take it. Julia is pacing the bedroom. I’m expecting a big, long sp
eech and I’m preparing to apologize. But instead of it going the way I expect and prepare for, she suddenly slows down. She walks up to me. My body tightens up and I squint, preparing for the explosion, hoping that if I wish hard enough, I might disappear. I’d even be willing to pray for it to work out.
And then Julia leans over me and she kisses me on the top of my head. “I sure do love you,” she says to me.
And that’s when I know that things are far worse than I ever suspected.
THE SMALLEST THINGS
The age: eight years old. For both Ezra and me. And for Adam Silver, whose birthday party it was. The setting: Adam Silver’s house. Adam’s father, dressed as a bad clown (with a sweet smell coming off his skin that I’d later connect to alcoholics), had just finished his performance and we were all sitting on the living room floor playing with the twisted balloon objects he had given us. He claimed that they were elephants and giraffes and houses but they were just tangled messes. Even so, his excitement while naming these tangled creatures gave us the authority to twist them up further and call them whatever we wanted: a racing car, a naked girl hanging from the jungle gym, Tyrannosaurus rex. We were loving it.
By we, I mean all the kids but one. The one not playing was Ezra, who had recently crawled over to the corner of the room and sat there quietly, hoping to disappear. Ezra had pissed in his pants so badly that his jeans were wet down to his knees.
But I didn’t see him in the corner. I was too wrapped up in the sound of twisting the narrow balloons around each other, and how amazing it was that they seemed unpoppable. There were boys at the party, there were girls at the party, but I actually don’t remember a single face or name. All I remember is Ezra Roth in the corner, whom I wasn’t even watching at the time.
