by Yuvi Zalkow
Until I heard Adam Silver yell, “Hey! Look! Ezra peed in his pants!” Adam yelled this out even though he knew that Ezra had gotten him Mousetrap for his birthday, as he’d asked. And just like that, all ten of us jumped Ezra Roth.
Imagine this: (1) My best friend red-faced and ashamed, completely silent, sitting in the corner with his knees in the air higher than his slouchy body. (2) Nine children trying to spread Ezra’s legs, boys and girls laughing and making fun of how wet he was. “What a baby!” they yelled. (3) And then me, one little boy, crying and trying to squeeze Ezra’s legs together, whining, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” like the act of closing his legs could make this whole unpleasant scene disappear.
Throughout all this craziness, Ezra didn’t say a word; he just let his legs open and close like they weren’t part of his body. Eventually, Adam’s mother ran into the room and broke up the party. She took Ezra with her while Adam’s dad tried to distract us—he did an impeccable imitation of John Belushi as a king bee from Saturday Night Live, which none of us understood. A few minutes later Ezra walked out of the bathroom with a pair of Adam’s sweatpants—Adam’s favorite pair, apparently.
I wouldn’t explain to my mother why I was crying so badly when she picked me up. When we got home, she had to call Adam’s mother to get the story. And then my mother looked at me, all confused, as if she wished I had wet my pants as well, so as to explain my hysteria.
The next day, nobody said anything, not a word about this whole event. Even Ezra acted like nothing had happened. And so I kept my mouth shut. But I cried that next night as well. When my mom came into my bedroom, I told her that I had a cold, and so she gave me some chewable Tylenol, a remedy she used for many of my bouts of angst.
Ezra would later become a highly acclaimed surgeon. He’d be famous for his success in performing high-risk operations on children. I’ve been toying with calling him one of these days. It’s a little tricky to know how to phrase something like, “Remember that time when you pissed in your pants and I was trying to force your crotch closed? Because I think about that all the time!”
It’s not that I’m scared to call him. I don’t call him because I know what he’ll say: “I guess I just don’t remember that.” It’s not because he has blocked out the event. It’s not because he is in denial or has some part of him that is stuck in his childhood. It’s not a deficiency. He doesn’t remember because it wasn’t a memorable event for him. It was one of a thousand blips along the road of his childhood. Ezra Roth is a man who has to go up to a young couple in the waiting room and say to them that he has just seen their five-year-old son die on the operating table. And then he has to go back into the operating room and do it all over again with another child. Ezra Roth can’t afford to dwell on how he pissed his pants in 1980.
I don’t have to do the things in a day’s work that Ezra has to do. Some days, I don’t interact with a single person. But I do often think about Ezra Roth. And sometimes I even think about Adam Silver’s dad in those days when he looked so happy. And I imagine the sound of balloons squeaking when twisted into absurd shapes, expecting them to pop.
Chapter Thirteen
Family
A few weeks into living with the knowledge that napkin men don’t exist, I catch Julia moping on the couch.
It’s a rare sight to actually catch Julia feeling down. For Julia, feeling down causes her to move faster, to do more, to be more than her already-complete self, to save twenty families rather than just ten. Down keeps her up on her feet. As for me, down is down. So when I see her in the living room lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, looking nearly as helpless as me, I’m pretty damn scared.
“Julia,” I say. “What happened?” I expect her to tell me a story of how one of her alcoholics has died, so it scares me even more when she reaches out for my hand and pulls me toward her. Her hand is warm and sweet and soft and I don’t know what to do with it.
She says to me in a quiet and scratchy voice, “When my mom would try to get Joel and me to bed, she’d do this thing where she’d have us hide under the sheets. She’d leave the room for a few seconds, and then she’d run in and tickle us through the sheets.”
I put my hand in Julia’s hair and scratch her head. “It sounds awfully scary,” I say.
“It’s one of the happiest moments I can remember.”
It takes an adjustment in my mind to make this scene happy. I have to make the sounds and colors and smells a little bit different. I have to change the mood of the characters. I have to think of Joel and Julia so pleased to be hiding together. I have to put that gorgeous giggle on Julia’s face. And suddenly, I can picture the scene just as sentimental and beautiful as she meant it.
“I want a family,” Julia says to me. “I want to have a family.”
I stop scratching her head.
There’s the fact that we haven’t had anything that approaches baby-making sex in years. There’s the fact that our communication is nearly as tangled and broken as Shmen’s large intestine when the surgeons pulled it out of his body. There’s the fact that Julia didn’t exactly say that she wants a family with me, she just wants a family. I might not be in the picture at all. And there’s the fact that I feel a terror somewhere deep in my chest when thinking about being responsible for another thing that breathes.
I could ask her to expand on what she wants. I could discuss this subject further. I could explain my various thoughts about family—some positive and some terrified. But what I do is something more self-involved and more cowardly, something less sincere and less open to discussion.
I say, “I don’t want a fucking kid because I’ll be an asshole like my dad.” And then I walk out of the room. I walk out of the house and don’t come back for hours.
This is how my dad dealt with complicated subjects when I was a kid. Except when he walked out of the room, I always pictured that he had an unwavering feeling about the matter, that he was convinced of being right.
But I now understand that my father walked away from discussions with the exact feeling I get after walking away— an instant sense of regret, confident that I’ve dealt with the situation poorly, and wondering why the hell I always fuck everything up for no good reason.
LAYING EGGS
My father did this thing with children where he pretended he could lay eggs. After the first time he did it to me, I asked him to do it again and again. And he did this trick for years and years. I best remember when he did it to my little cousin, David. At the time I was maybe sixteen or eighteen and David was maybe six or eight. It was at my aunt and uncle’s place after dinner; we were celebrating someone’s birthday or mourning someone’s death or celebrating some Jewish holiday or perhaps atoning for our many sins.
My father came out of the kitchen and sat with David on the living room couch. “You know,” my father whispered. “I can lay eggs.”
David thought about this for a moment and then said, “Nuh-uh!”
“It’s true. I could lay one for you right now.”
“Only birds lay eggs,” David said. A boy who had clearly read a book or two about who lays eggs and who doesn’t. “Mommies make babies a different way. Eggs aren’t the way.”
“Now, normally I’d agree with you,” my dad said, “but I can sit here right next to you and lay an egg on this couch. I could make you an omelet with my eggs.”
“Show me,” David said, still skeptical.
My father scrunched his face tight. He opened his mouth and groaned loud enough for people in the kitchen to come into the living room to see what was going on. And then my father stood up.
“He did it!” David said, and he stood up off the couch and pointed and yelled. “He did it he did it he did it he did it!” David grabbed the egg and ran around the house showing everybody what my father had just given birth to.
We left the party soon after that, with David in the corner of the living room grunting, trying his best to lay an egg.
About two h
ours later, we got the call. My mother picked up the phone and listened to my uncle’s situation. “You need to get your tuches back there. David has already made kahkee into two pairs of pajamas.”
My father drove those fifteen miles for the second time in order to reveal his trick, which David would end up using on his own children twenty years later.
And that’s one of the things I loved about my dad. He had a charm that was powerful enough to cause you to shit your pants twice in one night, trying to lay a damn egg.
Chapter Fourteen
Shmuvi
“Dude, I need a favor.” It’s a reflex of mine to look for my checkbook when Shmen calls. But then he says, “I’m supposed to pick Maddy up from school today, except that my knee isn’t behaving.”
And as I try to formulate a question about the behavior of his knee, he says, “Someone needs to be at her school in twenty-five minutes.”
#
Ally has told me it’s a ritual that her daughter loves. She runs out of the school giggling whenever Shmen picks her up.
I don’t even know if she’ll recognize me. I’ve only met her a few times. But when I step into the school and look around the after-care area, this cute little blonde-haired girl runs up and hugs me. She squeezes me tightly and I’m tempted to explain to this girl all the reasons that I’m not such a huggable person: I’m a coward. I worry all the time. I’m a poor communicator. I can’t stop thinking about my dead father, even while my wife is trying to seduce me. I obsess over napkins. I can’t please my wife. I’m a narcissist.
But when Maddy stops hugging, I’m tempted to ask her to do it again.
“I guess you know who I am,” I say.
“Of course!” She holds my hand and begins to drag me out of the school. “You’re Joelly’s brother!”
#
Maddy is carrying a book with her called The Gorilla Did It. When I ask her about it, she says it’s great because it’s about a gorilla that wakes up a sleeping boy and convinces him to mess up his room. When the boy gets in trouble, he explains to his mother that the gorilla did it.
I start to wonder how I might use this phrase. For instance, if I’m standing on my desk in my underwear and my wife comes in, pissed off that I didn’t pick up the groceries like I promised, I could say, “It’s not me, the gorilla did it.” And when my wife puts her hand down my pants and feels that soft and scared little organ, I could say, “The gorilla did it!” When my editor asks for the novel, I’ll tell her, “The gorilla took it.”
It would solve a lot of problems.
On the drive home, Maddy tells me story after story about her day as if I were a part of her family and it makes me feel so glad to be around her. She tells me the rules of Everybody’s It Tag and she explains how boys smell more like dirt and how girls smell more like flowers and she tells me that her teacher’s father died last week and she tells me that her best friend has four cats, three ferrets, and twenty-seven tomatoes. And then she asks me how to spell Poop Mobile.
“Poop Mobile?” I ask. “What’s that?”
“It’s the truck that picks you up when you have to poop so bad that you need to go to the hospital.”
“Does Joelly ever go to the hospital?” I ask, trying to sound casual even while I’m scared to hear the answer.
“Not really,” she says. “And did you know that the Poop Mobile is made out of bulletproof glass?”
“Well that makes sense,” I say.
“And did you know,” she tells me, “you can’t spell husband without anus?”
Maddy pretty much controls the conversation the whole car ride home. She’s under ten and she’s more confident than the me that my therapist makes me write about when I’m trying to pretend I’m overconfident.
“I have a crush on a boy,” she says.
“You do? Already?”
“What do you mean already? He is my fourth, if you count D avid.”
“Let’s count him,” I say.
“Me and Jeffrey are going to buy a four-bedroom house. We’ll need three cars so that we can always have one for our friends. And we want three kids—two girls. We’re going to Hawaii for our honeymoon.”
“Wow,” I say. “You’ve got more plans than I’ve ever had.”
I glance her way and see that she is pondering this observation. That she has it more together than a so-called adult. “Where did you go,” she says, “on your honeymoon with Aunt Julia?”
“Oh,” I say. “We went to cremate my father in North Carolina.” It comes out without me thinking about it. I see Maddy try to parse my answer. But, fortunately, not try too hard.
“Does North Carolina have a beach?” she says.
“Better you should tell me more about you and Jeffrey,” I say, scared of what I might tell her next.
As I’m sitting there enjoying her breathlessly told stories, she asks me if Aunt Julia is still mad at me.
“Mad about what?” And then I realize I’m using a seven-year-old to get to the crux of my relationship issues.
“You know,” she says. “About your problems.”
“Which ones?”
#
I take a few wrong turns, which suits Maddy just fine. I could take a 2,500-mile wrong turn and she’d have plenty to talk about.
“Tell me about when you and Joelly were kids,” she says.
I think about explaining to her how I didn’t grow up with Joel. That we’re not related. I think about explaining the difference between blood relatives and in-laws.
And then I say, “You know Hawaii is actually made up of seven different islands.”
#
When I finally drop Maddy off at her mother’s barn, Ally gives me a big hug. It’s a more adult version of Maddy’s hug but just as comforting. We agree that the four of us should go out again. And then Ally says something else: “You should come back here soon. Just you. When you have time. I want to show you my horses.”
Ally isn’t a tall woman. She is probably five feet tall in regular life. But standing beside her barn, as she points to it, as she wears those big boots, as she gives me a half smile, she seems a foot taller than me. Her hair is messy from whatever it is she does in her barn.
It feels like she’s coming on to me. A secret. In a barn. Just me, her, and the horses. How can that not be wrong? But I know that I’m misunderstanding something. Sometimes I just feel too dumb to understand this world.
When I was a kid, my dad kept a jar sitting on the bookshelf that said “Great Truths” on it. When I asked him what that meant, he said it was a joke, because no truth is greater than another. For years, I walked around our house wondering what was so funny about that.
“Yes, I’d like that,” I say to Ally, “but right now I’ve got to meet Julia.”
Which is a “Great Lie.”
My dad kept nothing but paperclips inside that jar of truths. I wonder what Ally keeps inside that barn of hers. But I still leave. I leave faster than you can say Oy veyshmir.
But as I’m running away from Ally and her barn, I still manage to hear a nice goodbye from Maddy. She says, “See you later, Shmuvi!” And she says it like Shmuvi has always been my name.
THE GORILLA DID IT
My brother Joelly was five years old when he realized you could use a black permanent marker to draw all over every piece of furniture in your parents’ house. I was eight at the time, old enough to know that when my dad got home, my brother would be in sincerely deep shit.
I tend to think the world is a dangerous place to be. Even when things are going well, I’m trying to anticipate how soon I will get screwed. This holds true for my jobs, my relationships, my friendships, my finances, my family. I feel helpless against the world and am always expecting that meteor to crash onto my house. When an ex-girlfriend told me she had been lying to me for months and sleeping with another man—a bigger, stronger, richer, more handsome man—I wasn’t angry or offended. I accepted this fact gracefully. Because that is how the world wo
rks. In that same conversation, I even thanked her for not being more cruel.
But my brother saw things differently. He saw the world as something amusing, something that could be played with. Even when dealing with my father—a man who could get so angry you’d have to steer clear of him for days at a time—my brother looked for ways to make the relationship interesting. He could be in control of a situation, even at five.
Earlier that day, my mother had read to us. After reading this book, my mother began cooking dinner, I began playing with my Legos, and my brother began drawing all over every piece of furniture in the house.
A nasty aspect of my being scared of the world is that I sometimes want those who live so casually and comfortably to be punished. And when I saw what my brother had done and that gorgeous smile of his, black marks all over his face and shirt, I stepped away and savored the notion he would have to pay for this joy.
When my father came home, he went straight to his office to drop off his briefcase. I heard him yell out, “What in the hell happened here?”
My father ran into my room with the marker he found on the floor. “Did you do this?” he yelled. You could see the veins going through his temples. He shook the marker in his hand and then threw it on the floor.
“No,” I said. “I promise.” And I prayed for him to leave my room.
He then ran into my brother’s room.
“Who did this?” I heard him yell. And I suddenly regretted all my evil thoughts about wanting my brother to pay for his sins. It was terrible to think of my brother receiving my father’s wrath alone. So I ran into my brother’s room as well, thinking he could use my help. I didn’t have my brother’s wit, but I was another body to stand in the way.
