by Sonia Taitz
This doesn’t seem right, but Davey doesn’t know what to say.
“Now tell me about your mother,” Shy says, continuing. “She must be such a lovely lady to have you for a son. She’s of the Jewish persuasion, you mentioned?”
“You don’t really sound like a cowboy anymore,” says Davey. He is thinking about the delicacy of Shy’s earlier phrase, “rather ugly conclusion,” and the elegant word “cunning.” And what is this interest in whether someone was “of the Jewish persuasion”? He has only mentioned that his father had a Jewish mother. And that is only because Shy had asked if he was Protestant.
“Oh, I’ve been around all types in my day,” Shy is saying.
“Haven’t you mostly lived in Cheyenne?”
“Where? Yeah, of course I have, mostly. I mean, there’s plenty of good land there, I can tell you. No need to go far to find the wide open spaces.”
“Then why did you come here?”
Long silence. A bumblebee hangs low in the clover.
“To be honest, and I want to be as honest as I can, I’ve come back to claim my lady love.”
“Back? You’ve been here before?”
“I mean ‘back East,’ as the saying goes.”
“A lady love? But you just said they—you know, women, were all—you know—kind of untrustworthy—”
“Yeah, most of them are sly little vixens that’ll turn on you like that. There’s no good in them, David. They’ll break your heart. But I need this particular one. I wanna see her again. Dreamed about her for years and years, and then fate brought me here in my wanderings.”
“Why do you need to see this person so much?”
“Give her one last chance, you know? We all have the right to repent, am I right? Confession, last judgment, extreme unction?”
“I don’t know those words.”
“You don’t know the word ‘confession’? The word ‘judgment’?”
“Yeah, those particular ones I do, but—”
“I want her to confess—do you get it now? A wrong was done to me, but forgiveness is always possible, you see?”
“Yeah, I see. Uh-huh.”
Davey is starting to feel uncomfortable, particularly as one corner of Shy’s wax-tipped moustache is beginning to slip downward, toward the earth. He can see a trace of his upper lip, and how it wiggles and flaps as he forms his strange words. And then Davey can no longer hear the words. It is just wiggle and flap and paste and wax.
He is frightened of Shy, and stands up.
What time is it? Almost 5:30? He has lost track. His mom will be at the gate, parked in the van and waiting for him. She will be worried about not finding him.
Davey wipes the grass off his pants and runs, dropping what remains of his Ponipop. He is relieved when he sees his mother, comfortably familiar in her T-shirt and yoga pants, hair tied back with a plastic barrette. She has stepped out of the car and is searching for him.
When she sees her son, Jude’s face opens wide with a smile that is as warm as sunlight and as pretty as the first birds of spring. Anyone can see that, even Shy, who stands not far away, seeing but unseen.
Judy and Collum, Age Fourteen
Now that a year had passed since her bat mitzvah, Judy Pincus was starting to keep secrets from her father. It was impossible not to. It was impossible to grow up and into someone new without keeping secrets from those who insisted that you stay the same as before. The same as they were. Who wanted you to remain exactly as they had taught you to be. Especially from a father who thought so much and so hard and so definitely, and who never stopped teaching and preaching.
The home: first and primary source of all brainwashing and literal domestication. Love me, be like me, think like me. In the end, living wood is turned into petrified stone. But this would not happen to Judy, who kept parts of her brain to herself and for herself, culs-de-sac of delicious, liquid emotional privacy. Feelings of love were one such area, a separate and distinct religion that Judy held too sacred to share with agnostics like her father. Yes, agnostics—though he professed to be “religious,” and was of course loyally wedded to Judy’s mother, his wife, he seemed to know nothing about surrender without reason. If he had ever done so, he’d forgotten it. (And forgetting was death and betrayal.)
For Judy, the words “always” and “forever” still meant something. And love was a pilgrim’s voyage, full of risk. You couldn’t find the answers to its questions without melting, without risking the very borders that kept you safe at home. It was as voluptuous and secret as her own budding body and the feelings it gave her. She longed, in some way, to be possessed, consumed. So how could she share those longings with anyone, much less her mother (who aggressively stirred Judy a glass of pink Instant Breakfast each morning) or her father, who chose to confront all feelings with tenets and calipers? Could she put a mental grid on the dreams, night and day, that often took her, piercing her through and spilling her, like the blade-point of a jousting knight? Like all girls, like all true, unjaded lovers, she wanted to tumble backward, come what may.
That was not on her father’s agenda. No tumbling backward allowed, but rather a moving forward, productively, to maintain and restore what was good. Self-preservation—the Darwinian ideal, and certainly understandable in the logical sense. Who but a lover, a teen, or a nut would want to melt away? Even poets left their marks with black on white.
Normal people married their kind, distributed their values, and kept chaos at bay. For Jews, given their history, this was a greater challenge, and responsible parents took it on. Suicidality was not a great trait for tribal elders.
One of Mr. Pincus’s main tenets—and a logical one—was that Jews were a vanishing species, as special as white tigers. A vital corollary was that they must marry only other Jews. That way, and only that way, more Jews would be born, and the people would not die out. They would survive forever, which was what God wanted. To marry “out” was to be a traitor, if not a genocidal murderer, one of many who would always be defeated in the end.
An unfortunate consequence of her father’s marriage rule was that his child should not even consider dating non-Jewish boys. Most of the time, Judy found herself understanding, and even agreeing, with her father’s logic. He was saying that even her earliest dates should be cognizant of marriage. When one falls in love for the first time, one often does feel that it will last forever, and in rare cases, it does. That is how many people get to have sixtieth anniversaries. Judy could, indeed, imagine getting married to the first boy to whom she gave her heart, and never envisioned the years ahead as a series of broken hearts and promises, as they more frequently turned out to be. She had a premonition that her first love would be her last.
But where would she find this Semitic suitor? Try as she might, Judy couldn’t find any appropriate candidates. There were only nine Jewish boys in her entire freshman grade, and there was actually something wrong (for her) with every one of them. More precisely, there was nothing right with any of them. Five were too short and still had baby bodies, two had very bad skin, one seemed oblivious to his dandruff condition, and the one who was tall and smooth-skinned and flake-free was very immature. He snapped girls’ bra straps, for example.
Although Judy could be, and was, friends with most of these boys (though not the dummy who used lingerie like a slingshot), that was as far as it could ever go. Her heart did not flutter when they came into the room, nor did it pine when they left it. The idea of kissing them made her gag, and if you couldn’t even kiss someone, what was the point at all?
There was only one boy on earth that Judy could ever end up loving. Her fate was sealed on the day she first saw him. That boy was no Jew. If anything, he was the very opposite. His name was Collum Whitsun. He was Irish-American; he was a son of the streets; he was riffraff. Pure trouble.
Even his name was strange and different. And while all the Jewish kids seemed destined for at least a B average and a life as (at worst) an optometrist, Collum had be
en left back! Judy, though a well-bred Jewish maiden, wanted him just the same. Perhaps even more. She could even imagine dirt under his fingernails, the soil of hard labor and the oil of machinery. This was a boy who would wax his car and look good doing it. She could see him chopping wood with an axe, as in a fairy tale of woodsmen. And she would be his girl, the one who made him speak his halting words. For whom he’d drop the axe, wipe his hands, and tumble.
Oh yes, the boy had to tumble, too. And the harder he fell, the more the earth would shake. A giant would fall for a princess, she thought.
Judy Shana Pincus was surprised that she was the only girl in school who seemed to think like this, who saw this perfect boy step in front of her like a miracle. Why wasn’t everyone in love with Collum? Was he so magical that only she could see him? But all the other girls seemed to find him beneath them, and simply passed him by. They thought him rough and clueless. They thought him weird and even a little disgusting. And he gave off a “vibe” of nastiness. A chip on his shoulder that spoke of smallness and irritation.
Who needed that, besides Judy? Who saw the prince in that frog from the bog?
True, Collum had a distinct body odor (perhaps he bathed less than the norm, especially now that the hormones were running in some precociously masculine individuals), but Judy actually liked the way he smelled. It was a musky smell, like the warmth of a bed after you left it. She liked his dirty blond locks, which were not as fluffy as clean hair, but heavier, like a pelt, and swirly. Like hair of a boy that had swum in a lake, and emerged, shaking it out like a dog. Like a mutt. Big hands and feet. Shaggy.
Most of all, she adored his blue eyes. There was no word in the dictionary, nor, in Roget’s Thesaurus (Judy checked) to fairly describe how beautiful Collum’s eyes were, and how much she loved looking not at them, but into them.
One way of approaching their hue was to say that it contained more than one color. They weren’t just blue, but orange-flecked and gray-rimmed. And not just blue and orange and gray, but sometimes red with provocative moodiness. Collum’s eyes spoke. They demanded, they pleaded, they entered you and caught you up in an ancient drama your body recognized before your brain did.
And he was a boy who returned stares. When Judy looked into his eyes, he looked into hers. And the more his eyes met Judy’s, the more her heart (and legs) melted. It was the way he looked out of them, and pierced you. Collum needed only to lift his eyes to laser-beam right into your soul. In doing so, he’d leave a hole that only he could fill.
Judy was a stare-returner. Maybe it was as simple as that. She wanted to know and be known. Collum reached deep into her, even to the private culs-de-sac she kept from her parents. They mated with their eyes, like true animals. Like actual white tigers, that rare breed. These lovers were rarer than Jews, even. They saw each other, and knew what lay ahead. Capture—and no release. A bite and a spill, and it’s over. Collum had nothing to lose, and Judy (who had more to lose) wanted to lose it all. She really wanted to.
No hope for Judy. She was a goner from the age of fourteen, lost to a feral boy who would want her as much as she wanted him. And who wouldn’t let go.
At first Collum did not realize what was in store for him, Judy-wise. He had his own problems that predated any story with this particular girl. His pains preoccupied him, although he’d noticed her already, in passing. She seemed to be a goody-goody. She already needed glasses, and sometimes wore them. She was pretty, but he hated the glasses, and bookish people made him sick. They had no use for him, anyway. He hated school; it was only a bit better than being at home, which was hell.
Collum would come to school guarded, enveloped in what seemed to be a private anguish. That pelt of hair, clearly uncared for. The posture of defense. And the face always hidden, chin down. To Judy, the first person who ever tried to see him, his malaise seemed like poetry, like depth.
Their first conversation occurred outside school, as Collum ran up the steps, thumbs locked under his backpack straps, head tucked downward:
“Your shoelace is untied,” she said, voice higher than usual.
He slowed down only slightly, and swiveled his head in her direction.
“So what.”
Amazing. A challenge. Jewish boys (most any sane boy) would at least have taken a quick, cautious look downward. Most would have then taken a moment to kneel and tie their laces. They didn’t want to fall and hurt themselves. What is more embarrassing, after all? To bend and tie your laces—or to sprawl helplessly on the asphalt and maybe tear your pants, not to mention your knees?
Collum’s entire being implied that to fall and hurt himself would not really matter, not really register at all. As though he could endure worse, and had, and could endure more, and had.
He ran ahead of her and into his homeroom, disappearing.
Judy of course caught him. It wasn’t all that hard. Collum was lonely, and no one had ever seemed to have paid any attention to him. His grades were less than mediocre; he didn’t play team sports or a blaring band instrument. What he could do really well was look interesting. Part of this was what God had given him, an uncanny physical beauty which was just beginning to emerge. And part was what God had cursed him with, a pain (born of a brute of a father) that roiled inside the heart of the boy.
“Can’t you hear me?” said Judy.
“Huh?”
She was standing right in front of him, blocking his way up the staircase.
“I said HI. I’m JUDY. OK???”
He seemed to be listening. Judy took a breath and continued:
“Some days, your shoes are untied. Sometimes they’re not. In case you’re deaf, I’ve been talking about your shoes every day. Today, though, they actually happen to be fine.”
“Yeah, so?” he tossed his hair with an attempt at defiance.
“So I’m trying to get your attention.”
“Look, I’m going to be late for class.”
“Yeah, so?” she said, echoing him.
“My—my dad—my father gets mad at me when I bring home too many notes from school.”
“But you’re never late.”
“How would you know?”
“I’ve been watching you.”
There was a pause before he spoke. A slight stoppage of time.
“You’re wrong,” he then retorted. “I was late a lot for a few months. Now I’m on time, and I better get going—” he pushed past her. Their shoulders brushed. He wasn’t that tall, not yet. But his shoulders were broader than hers, and stronger.
“OK,” said Judy, stepping aside, tingling merely from the touch of his shabby jeans jacket. “I’ll let you go.”
I’ll let you go? Who was saying these words? Judy had never spoken in this way to anyone before, much less a boy. And she herself had never been late. Why did she suddenly sound like a thug? Because love is a bully, and it makes bullies of many of us, especially the too-passionate ones.
“I’ll let you go,” she repeated, “but I want to see you after school.”
Collum stared hatefully at her for a second, seeing before him another persecutor. Get off my back, he thought. But at the sight of her eyes, his anger slid away. Right there, he saw a kindness, a patient attentiveness, which seemed almost holy to him. For just a second, he wanted to weep. And in the next second, he wanted to be with her, and this felt to him like joy.
This was Judy’s first look at those eyes, full-on. There was malice there, and there was also hope. A certain vulnerability that caught her and kept her from breathing normally. She was actually panting, she noticed, and he noticed, too. Was there a trace of a smile there? A molecule.
“OK,” he said, his gaze softening. “I’ll see you after school.”
Then he ran, head down, and disappeared into the safety of the cool school corridors.
After school, Judy waited, but Collum did not appear.
Oh, so that’s how you want to play it, she said to herself.
Her calming friend Nessa, who wore
thick braids that ended in covered rubber bands, came over. She and Nessa had bonded in the earlier grades, and while many of Judy’s other friends had frozen into one dismissive clique or another, Nessa had remained who she’d always been—a loyal go-along.
“Wanna—”
“No I don’t!” said Judy, too fiercely. She could see Collum running out of a side door, his shoulders hunched low. It was astounding to think that he was trying to avoid her, even more horrible to imagine that he had forgotten that she was waiting for him.
She watched him dart this way and that. She let him go.
“What did you say, Ness?” she then asked her friend.
“Wanna—”
“Sure! Let’s!” said Judy. Whatever Nessa wanted to do—whatever anyone in high school wanted to do—fine. Gossip, eat pizza, shun the uncool, agonize over hair frizz or the perfect scented lip gloss. Study for the test. Root for the team. Whatever.
“I just thought we’d go to my house for a while. That essay, remember?” Nessa looked at her friend tentatively. Judy was really good at English, but lately, she seemed just a little off. Nessa, like most girls her age who kept the braid and wore white underpants, would grow up to avoid odd people on principle. But this was high school, and there was that essay to finish.
“I said yes, didn’t I?”
“We can make real lemonade, too. My mom got a reamer. It takes all the lemon juice out really well.”
Perfect, thought Judy. Let’s spend the afternoon juicing lemons and writing our essays. She wasn’t being sarcastic. It was easy to turn away from a passion she’d only begun. Maybe she’d also stop reading Wuthering Heights, which the librarian had told her she’d love. It was only making things worse and wasn’t even on the curriculum.
For the next few days, Judy ignored Collum, but she did it in such a way that he noticed her doing so. He could wear his shoes with laces dragging; she would not say a word. He could be the first one into school, run here and there like a scared rat: So what? She was far too good for him. Millions of miles better, in fact. She was a nice Jewish girl, of the People of the Book. What was he? A savage. A guttersnipe. His grades were probably Cs—and he probably didn’t even care.
