by Yuvi Zalkow
While the nurse checks Shmen’s vitals, the rest of us sneak out of the room and plan how we’re going to force Shmen
to get back on track. Ally will make him go to his various doctors. Julia will force him to perform his physical therapy. And I will force him to eat better and drink less. We talk about Shmen as if he’s a childish shmendrik and I want to protest. But I’m also scared about what will happen if we don’t do it this way.
Julia and I are cordial to each other, though it’s not easy. Every minute the feeling is different. I either want to hug her or give her a good kick in the face. Sometimes two kicks. And sometimes two hugs.
The doctor says he’s lucky he didn’t die this time and that his life expectancy can either be a little shorter than average or a lot shorter, depending on how he plays it. The doctor then takes off to get more Fritos.
Before they release him from the hospital, I go back into the room to say goodbye to Shmen. I tell him that I’ll be visiting him at home soon. And that I’m going to force him to stay in better health once he gets out.
“Okay,” he says with too much enthusiasm. “Sounds like a plan. I’m in full agreement. Totally on board. I’m with you. Yep. I smell what you’re shitting.”
THE POOP REPORT
My editor told me to send some of my stories out for publication in literary journals. She said that I needed a more impressive publication history during this long hiatus between books. She also suggested that if I worked really hard, we could get my novel published in next year’s fall list. And so I sent out that story I wrote back in Chapter 4, the one about Shmen’s pooping problems that I wrote from Ally’s perspective. And I got it published at a website called www.poopreport.com— “All the poop that’s fit to print.”
“If you search the web for ‘Yuvi poop report,’” I tell my editor, “it’ll take you right to my story. Isn’t that cool?”
Responses to my story accumulated on the website. The first response was: “This story blows.” The next couple of people also felt that it blew. One person said that it lacked poo-etry. But a few people liked it. One person said that the writer had poo-tential. One person—bless her soul—said it was sweet. And then fifteen more people hated it. And even though I billed it as fiction, everyone treated the story as if it were true and as if I were the woman narrating the story. Loads of people said that I should dump my deadbeat boyfriend and find a better man.
I was tempted to tell them that this was a piece of fiction and that they should stop giving all this personal advice. And then I was tempted to explain that Shmen was worth all the effort. And then I worried that I must have portrayed him inaccurately. And I felt like a terrible writer. And then I regretted the arrogance in me that attempted to write this from Ally’s perspective.
My editor told me that sending stories to the Poop Report was as helpful for my career as taking a shit. And when I disagreed, she said to me, “Kush meer in tuches,” all proud of her Yiddish research.
I was impressed with her for that—she was a more capable editor than I had originally figured. So I said, “Here’s a more advanced one: Aht noheged kmoh safta sheli dofeket.”
“What’s it mean?” she asked.
“You tell me,” I said.
Chapter Twenty
Telephony
I thought I was dreaming about another one of those forever-ringing phones that I can never get to. In my dreams, I always have some kind of disability that prevents me from doing what I need to do. If I need to pick up the phone, then I have no hands. If I need to scream for help, then I have no voice. But this is a real phone that is really ringing and when I pick up the phone, there is a real person on the other line.
It’s worse than a real person. Her voice is serious and impatient before we’ve even begun. It’s like she’s talking to a credit card company about canceling her card.
“So what is it?” I say. I take a deep breath and try to relax my chest.
“I need a favor,” Julia says.
“From me?”
“For Shmen.”
“Okay,” I say. “What do you need?”
“Can you take him to the hospital for his colonoscopy?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’d love to.”
She gives me the details and I’m glad to do it. In fact, I was already wishing I could be there for him. And I’m even thrilled to hear her voice. Even her cold and serious voice. I want to crawl into the telephone line and hide under her vocal cords.
“Are you going to be busy fucking someone again while your brother is in the hospital?”
Click.
TENSE
“Please, Yuvi,” my editor said on the phone. “This is getting a bit ridiculous. It’s a mess. So his wife left him and may be cheating on him. So what? You promised me a death and I’m already twenty chapters into it. I don’t see how you’re going to pull it off. There is no movement.”
My editor was breathing heavily. I imagined her falling from a skyscraper as she spoke to me. She wants a movement. She wants a death. She wants a lot of things. But she doesn’t want what I give her.
“The italics are driving me crazy,” she said. “What’s the point? They’re distracting. And how do you sustain a slow-moving front-story with all that italicky whining about your past? There is no way you could sustain this story for three hundred pages.”
“I take it you don’t like it so far.”
“It’s all falling apart,” she said. “And how come you’ve suddenly started writing all the parts with the editor in italics?”
“What about eBooks?” I said. “What about iBooks? What about uBooks? What about the Kindle? You’re stuck on page numbers. Three hundred pages doesn’t even make sense, electronically speaking. Pages are ancient history.”
I felt smart all of sudden. Like I was keeping up with the times. Not that I really was. I had gone out of my way to find a cell phone that couldn’t do a single thing other than be used as a phone. I had gone out of my way to avoid any references to technology in this story. I still thought of my computer as a calculator and a word processor. But when you’re avoiding bigger issues, talking about technology is a convenient distraction. “Do you even understand why you’ve structured your novel this way? Do you know what you’re doing here?”
“Of course I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“And why,” she finally said, “have you put me in the past tense?”
Chapter Twenty-one
Fuck Me
“It’s not often that you get the opportunity to walk to the hospital,” Shmen said.
And so we walk to the hospital.
We even have extra time to make the walk more leisurely. He’s not due at the gastroenterologist for another forty-five minutes. And so we walk and we talk.
“Are you serious?” I keep asking him.
“Yep,” he says. “Not a drop.”
This is the fourth time I’ve asked this question. I’ve been having trouble accepting the good news. When Shmen said he hadn’t had a drop of alcohol, I expected him to say, “But I’ve picked up a cocaine habit instead.”
The walk to the hospital is about twenty uphill blocks of residential streets. There are dueling trendy coffee shops at all major intersections. I decide that my next failed book should be written from a coffee shop. Maybe it’ll come out different—the narrator might spend less of his time alone in his underwear.
As we walk, I’m happy in a way I don’t deserve to be happy, and maybe I’m this kind of happy because Shmen isn’t limping any longer. He walks like a regular person. He looks good even. He looks great. He tells me he’s started coaching Maddy’s soccer team. He tells me sex is so good with Ally these days that he doesn’t even bother masturbating. He tells me he only has to shit twice during the night. He tells me that he loves eating oranges cut like a grapefruit and grapefruits peeled like oranges.
I say to Shmen, “You were supposed to die in my novel. That’s how it was supposed to go down. I told my e
ditor that you would die and she liked the idea of your death. It would force me to have a story arc, she figured, which is something that doesn’t really exist in my book. But I couldn’t kill you.”
“I could die if you want me to,” he says. “It does make sense.”
“Don’t,” I beg him. “I wouldn’t survive it.”
“But I will die eventually,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “But don’t do it right now.”
Shmen nods, and I feel some kind of relief.
“So have you talked to my sister lately?” he asks. “Am I going to have to almost die again or are you two going to get back together?”
“We haven’t spoken,” I say. Julia and I have been apart long enough that on some days, or at least during some hours, or at least across some minutes, I don’t even think about her. I’m dreadfully accustomed to waking up and not having someone criticize my pantslessness. But the problem is that when I do think about her, it burns just as bad as ever, even worse, because things get more clear as they get further away. “I think,” I say to my estranged wife’s brother, “there’s a bigger problem.”
And just as I say the word “problem,” I feel the earth shaking. I look over to Shmen to see if he feels it too. I’ve never fabricated an earthquake, but it seems like something I would do.
Shmen has both arms away from his body as if he is also expecting to fall down at any moment.
And then a full-size upright piano rolls down the sidewalk, heading right for us. The thing is half a block away and is going faster than a slow car.
“Clear the way!” we hear someone yell. “Runaway piano!”
“Fuck me,” Shmen says, and he stands right there, watching this thing coming at us.
“This can’t be happening,” I say. But it is. So I grab Shmen’s hand and pull him toward an apartment building. We crouch there behind a row of bushes.
Shmen pulls me back up so that we can watch the sight of a runaway piano. The piano rolls down the street and then hits the curb on the other side of the street. It falls over into a front yard and breaks apart with a tremendous and melodious bang.
“Fuck me,” Shmen says.
We stare in silence for a few seconds. And then we start walking across the street. Shmen is walking faster than I am and when he reaches the center of the road, we hear the rumbling sound all over again.
Three more pianos all shoot down the street, and I once again grab Shmen and pull him off the road. They all crash onto the same yard. With three more melodious bangs. It’s a quartet of suicide pianos.
“Fuck me,” Shmen says.
Chunks of piano wood and strings and brass all over the yard. Some pedals have made their way onto this person’s welcome mat.
“It’s beautiful,” Shmen says. And we race across the street to see what a four-piano collision looks like.
RELATIONSHIP TROUBLE
“I tried to kill him with a piano,” I told my editor. There was silence on the line—as there should be upon saying something as ridiculous as what I’d just said.
“You what?” she finally responded.
“Runaway pianos,” I told her. “Four of them. But I couldn’t do it.”
“Are you joking? Somebody tell me this man is joking.” Even though we were the only ones on the line, we both waited in the hopes of this someone stepping in.
“Will you fire me?” I said. “Please?”
“You’re doing this to yourself.”
I’d been lost for a long time and it was not her fault.
We waded through our third silence.
“Yuvi?” she said. But this time it was her friendly voice, like when we first met, and not her why-can’t-you-write-a-normal-novel voice. “Am I still in the past tense?”
“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “It’s not you. It’s me.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Israelis Are from Atlanta, Palestinians Are from Cleveland
Part 1
When your brother-in-law is getting a colonoscopy, it’s not the kind of thing you can sit and watch with popcorn in your hand, cheering on as the fiber optic camera explores what is on the other side of your brother-in-law’s anus. So you go to the waiting room and you wait. Alone.
Alone is fine. You should be familiar with alone. You are no stranger to alone. But the hospital waiting room makes you want to cut yourself all over your body. It’s a kind of lonely far lonelier than alone. The couches are vomit green. And there is a round table in the middle of the room with no chairs in sight. And there are two TVs at opposite corners of the room, up at the ceiling, and they are both showing the same nightly news with the same upset grandmother in the same old terrycloth robe crying about the same busted-up piano that lies crushed all over the sidewalk.
Even though things feel better for you, the hospital is the kind of place where your world is supposed to go from bad to worse. It’s the point in the movie where some force—whatever it is—presses down on you to test your strength. And you are not a man of strength. So you eat your Fritos in fear of the whatever.
And while you fear the whatever, a man comes into the waiting room and sits next to you. Of all the vomity couches in all the waiting rooms in the world, he chooses yours. Part of you wants to thank him for the company. And part of you wants to run for the hills.
His skin is dark. Middle Eastern dark. Just like your skin. And you see that his hair—though much fuller—is just as blacker-than-black as yours. He’s got thick black stubble, the kind that could destroy an electric razor. And even though he doesn’t look at you, even though he is watching the grandmother cry about the precious piano, you know that all he is doing is looking at you.
Maybe he is Israeli, you think. Maybe he has a mother from the land of Israel just like you.
“Damn,” the man who is brown-like-you says. “This room is depressing. I hate hospitals.” And he looks at you, for the first time, officially, and he smiles a little, and it’s not symmetrical—the left side rises more than the right—and you enjoy that.
And then you two make hospital small talk. You talk about food and bad television and dirty clothes and upright pianos and grandmother robes, taking good care to talk around the reason each of you is in the hospital.
His accent is only just a hint. It’s small, like he has lived in the States since he was five. But it’s there. And you recognize it. Or to be more accurate, you recognize what it’s not. It’s not Israeli. And so when he asks, “Where are you from anyway?” you get scared.
The response doesn’t come from your brain. It’s a reflex that is sent straight from the nerve endings in your spine. “Spain,” you say. In some situations, you emphasize your Jewish background to the point of absurdity. In other situations you hide it at all costs. One part Fear. Two heaping spoons of Shame. Stirred in a thick sauce of Terror.
It’s a terror you’ve had since you were a child. Even though you never talk about it, even though you’ve lived an easy and simple life where you can afford to write about piano collisions fearlessly in your underwear, you’ve still got this terror deep in your bones. Since you were born. Since before you were born. Your father had it growing up in the only Jewish family in the small town of Division, North Carolina, and his father had it living in pre–World War II Poland, and his ancestors had it in the pogroms of Russia. Your mother had it living in Israel, and her mother had it living in Palestine, and her ancestors had it when they escaped the Spanish Inquisition. And you. Even though you have no experience to back it up, you have this terror too.
Your brown comrade says, “So you’re a Spaniard,” with a little disappointment. More than just a little.
“Yep,” you say with a false sort of confidence even the vomity couch knows is a lie.
“I’m Palestinian,” he says. He says it so enviously easily. Like we’re living on a planet free of prejudice and stigma and terror. And you see his dark eyebrows go serious as he says it. Like he has recited a verse from a precious text.
But underneath the seriousness, you see a hint of his smile. Like he is experimenting with his stance on the issue. And underneath the smile, you see a little twitch, a little shakiness. Like he went through quite a bit to get to this point of confidence and his demons are not as far away as they might initially seem. In any case, you admire his confidence and you wonder whether you might learn from this.
But when he says, “I thought maybe you were also,” you interrupt him with an unwavering, “No.”
“My mom’s from Spain,” you say. “Portugal, actually. Right on the border there,” and you point to a fictitious map floating between you two.
Where did this come from? You’re not a liar. You didn’t think you were a liar.
“Well, I grew up in Cleveland,” he says, “so I guess I’m not really Palestinian.”
“I grew up in Atlanta,” you say, “so I’m not really…” And you close your eyes. Which direction do you want to go? How thick is that Shame and Terror reduction? You take in a deep breath and blow it out. Let the whole shameful world in and out of your system as this man waits for you to finish your goddamn sentence. In a regular story, this moment should only take a moment. But for you, there is so much space in this moment that there is even room for one of those italicized back stories that your editor tells you to avoid like a gastrointestinal plague.
ITALICIZED BACK STORY
Your first girlfriend—the Southern Baptist, the one who damned you to hell before and after you both lost your virginity—she was a beauty. Adopted by a God-loving Southern family, she was of Chinese descent, but raised with an accent that more aligned with Roswell, Georgia, than Shanghai or Beijing. But she had cheekbones that were higher than her pastor’s pulpit and lips that were hotter than the words of God.
