Dad walked over to her. “Don’t be scared,” he said gently. “Just let me see.”
When Wai Po took her hand out of her coat, Mom gasped. My grandmother’s hand was swollen to nearly twice its normal size. One of her fingers, the one with the ring from Wai Gong, looked blue, like the finger of a dead person.
“Let’s stop by my office, shall we?” Dad said.
Since Dad worked at the hospital, they bent a lot of rules for us in the ER. Wai Po didn’t have to wait for a room; they took her right away. They also let us stay back with her, even though there was a sign saying only one family member could stay with the patient. I wondered whether Scott’s mom or dad sat with him when he went to the hospital.
Wai Po sat hunched over on the gurney. We let Mom take the only chair. She was looking greenish—she hates blood and other medical stuff. Safta stood in the middle of the room, crossing her arms. She didn’t want to touch anything because of germs.
The doctor walked in and said hello to Dad. Her badge said Dr. Fisher. Then she examined Wai Po’s finger for about a minute and said, “We have to get this ring off to relieve the pressure.”
“You can’t get it off,” said Wai Po. “My finger is too swollen.”
“We have a special device just for cutting the ring,” explained the doctor. “We’ll get it off in a jiffy. I promise.”
“No.” Wai Po pulled her hand back against her body. “You must do it another way.”
“You could lose that finger if we don’t remove the ring,” said Dad. “It’s cutting off the circulation. We could be looking at gangrene, and then …” He didn’t say the rest, but we knew.
Mom made a sort of burping noise in her throat. “Lauren, why don’t you take Mom to the waiting room,” said Dad.
“I think I’m going to go sit in the car,” said Safta.
“Fine, go,” said Dad. That left Dad, Wai Po, Dr. Fisher, and me.
Dr. Fisher softened her voice. “There’s nothing to worry about, Mrs. Lin. There’s no risk of the ring cutter hurting you in any way. Do you want me to show it to you?” She sounded like she was talking to a little kid.
“No one is cutting this ring,” said Wai Po. She tucked her chin low and I saw that she had tears in her eyes.
Dr. Fisher sighed. “We’re running against the clock,” she said to Dad.
“Give us a minute,” said Dad. He ran his hand over his head. Then he motioned for me to step outside the curtain with him.
“Got any ideas?” he asked.
“Me?” Dad must be feeling really desperate, asking me for ideas. Unfortunately, How do you get your grandmother to change her mind? was not a question that came up in Trivial Pursuit.
“I can’t make your grandmother do anything against her will,” he said. “But we can’t let her lose her finger over that ring.”
One of the nurses entered through a side door, letting in a gust of cold air. For that moment, we could hear a dog howling. Bao Bao.
Dad shook his head. “See if you can get him to stop. And if you think of anything, let me know. Soon.”
When I walked out to the parking lot, I found Safta holding Bao Bao at the end of a makeshift leash. He had stopped howling. “First he wanted out of the car,” said Safta. “And now he wants to go in the hospital.” Bao Bao strained at the end of the leash, which Safta had made out of her purse strap. “Stop it, Boo Boo. You’ll choke.”
I told Safta that we hadn’t made any progress with Wai Po. “Oh my,” she said, twisting her own wedding ring. “I know what she’s feeling. I haven’t taken off my wedding ring since your grandfather passed.”
“You should come talk to her,” I said. “You actually know how she feels.”
Safta shook her head slightly and looked away. “I wouldn’t do any good.”
“Sure you would,” I said. “You have lots in common.” When she didn’t say anything, I added, “We’re running out of time.”
Safta sighed. “Who’s going to watch the dog?”
That gave me another idea.
When Safta and I headed back into the hospital, Safta told me to put my shoulders back and walk with purpose. “No one will stop you if you look like you know what you’re doing,” she told me.
It was a wonder I wasn’t already a spy, with Safta and Wai Po being so sneaky.
“No,” Wai Po said when she saw us. She held up her good hand to hide her face. “Go away.”
“But we brought you a special visitor,” I said. I opened my coat.
“Bao Bao!” Wai Po’s face lit up. Bao Bao leapt out of my arms and into her lap, and began licking her face. She stroked him. “Xiao pangzi,” she said. Little fatso, I translated in my head.
“Now,” said Safta. “What’s this I hear about you not letting them take care of you?”
Wai Po looked away. “This ring is very important to me. I cannot have it cut.”
Safta held out her hand, showing Wai Po her wedding ring. “I know how you feel. I haven’t taken this off since I lost my Joseph, may his name be for a blessing.”
Wai Po nodded.
“But if I can take mine off, you can, too,” said Safta. And just like that, she slipped off her ring and held it up. “Taking the ring off doesn’t mean you love him any less.”
Wai Po hesitated. “I was going to give this ring to Lauren,” she said, her eyes filling up. “So she would not forget me.”
Old people worry about some pretty strange things, I guess. I thought about the Thanksgiving dinner, the flying attack latke, the pinecone poops, and the world’s most embarrassing trip to the mall. “Wai Po,” I said, “and Safta. We have lots of memories. Even without the ring. We couldn’t forget you even if we tried.”
Wai Po actually smiled when I said that. And then Safta put her arm around Wai Po. “Did you know the sister of Mr. Pickens’s son’s wife is a jeweler? We’ll have that ring fixed up and no one will even know it was cut. Good as new.”
“And you’ll still have a finger to put it on,” I added.
Wai Po looked at my grandmother, and then at me. “Okay,” she said.
It was like all the doctors and nurses had been waiting for Wai Po to change her mind. As soon as I told Dad, they descended, carrying a tiny diamond-blade saw that looked like a can opener.
“We’ll just wait outside,” Safta said. She shuffled toward the curtain, holding her black wool coat tightly closed. We were nearly home free.
But as soon as the doctor approached Wai Po with the saw, Bao Bao sprang out of Safta’s coat like one of those people jumping out of a birthday cake. Everyone turned and stared.
And Bao Bao? Bao Bao ran. He slipped under the curtain and disappeared.
Dad looked from me to Safta and back again. “What the … who brought …” He struggled to form a question.
From the other side of the curtain, we heard someone say, “Hi, doggie!”
“Do you want me to lose my job?” Dad said. “GET THAT DOG!”
The ER was a maze of hallways and tiny rooms. Even though there were counters and stretchers in our way, you could see where Bao Bao was by people’s expressions and a few shrieks.
I was never going to catch him. And Dad was going to lose his job.
A woman in a surgical mask threw up her hands. “How’d that dog get in here?” I heard her ask.
We would have to cancel the bar mitzvah. I wasn’t going to become a man. And I was never ever going to have any kind of chance with Kelli Ann Majors.
I heard Safta running behind me. Then she stopped. She unsnapped her purse and pulled out a bag of dog treats. “Bao Bao,” she called into the air, pronouncing his name correctly for once. “Treat!”
What?
Bao Bao suddenly appeared and sat down in front of Safta. His whole bottom wiggled. “Pick him up,” said Safta. “Then we’ll give him the treat.”
I picked up Bao Bao, trying not to fall over from the thoughts spinning in my head. As we walked out of the ER, with Bao Bao happily munching on
a hot dog treat—not his regular brand—I put it all together.
“You’re the reason why Bao Bao has been getting so fat,” I said. “You’ve been giving him snacks!”
Safta didn’t say anything.
“Safta, you have dog treats in your purse, and you don’t own a dog,” I said.
Safta turned a deep shade of pink. “That dog,” she said. “Always bothering me, sniffing, barking. I decided I would put a stop to that.”
“By stuffing him with treats,” I said.
Safta pulled back her shoulders. “I am making a friend from an enemy.”
“So you like Bao Bao now?” I said, holding up the dog.
Safta reached out and carefully scratched Bao Bao behind the ears. “I’ve dealt with worse,” she said.
My bar mitzvah was only a few days away, and Safta was in full-on prep mode. The knishes, which were for a lunch at our house after the service, but before the Safta-inspired fancy reception, were all done and filling up the freezer.
“I still need to make the rugelach,” said Safta, checking over her list.
I looked at Wai Po, who was sitting by herself in the living room, stroking Bao Bao with her good hand. Her other hand was still in a huge white bandage.
“What about the Chinese restaurant?” I asked.
Wai Po shook her head. “Too much money after the hospital,” she said. “It doesn’t matter anyway.” She nodded toward Safta. “She is making enough food for an army.”
But it did matter. Maybe if you’d told me a few weeks ago that I’d only have one kind of food at my bar mitzvah, I would have been happy. Now I knew, though. Real peace doesn’t come just from not having conflict. It comes from everyone feeling right with the world.
I went upstairs and grabbed Lauren. Then we trooped back downstairs together. “Will you tell us how to make stuff for the reception?” I asked Wai Po.
She didn’t even look at me. “What stuff?”
“Chinese stuff. We don’t need to order it from the restaurant. We can make it.”
Wai Po seemed to think about it. Then she said, “Too much work.”
“No,” I said. “Come on. You tell us what to buy and what to do, and we’ll do it.”
“Whatever it is,” Lauren said. “We can make it.”
Safta came out of the kitchen. “I can help, too.”
“You don’t have to,” said Wai Po.
“We’re machetunim,” Safta said, as if that decided it.
“What does that mean?” I asked. My Yiddish was about as good as my Chinese.
“It means that she is the mother of my son’s wife, so we’re relatives,” she said. “It means we’re family.”
Wai Po nodded.
We made shumai. And char siu bao with beef. Curry puffs. And eight-treasure rice. And then we stopped because Wai Po said that since she wasn’t feeling well, she would “take it easy.”
Shumai was a kind of dumpling, with a piece of carrot or a pea on the top. It looked fancy. “It should have pork,” grumbled Wai Po as she directed us on how to make the filling. “But ground chicken will do.” Safta was the best at making shumai. “You make a few thousand kreplach in your lifetime, and you know how to make a dumpling, no matter what you call it,” she said.
“When my hand gets better, I will make that,” declared Wai Po.
I wasn’t sure whether to call it the Treaty of Shumai or the Kreplach Concord. Whichever it was, I had negotiated it. And the Trivia Treaty—I’d negotiated that one, too. I hadn’t saved the world or forged peace between the Russians and the Americans, but I’d made peace in my own backyard. And maybe that was the place to start. I went upstairs and finally started to work on my paper for Mr. H.
“World Peace begins in your own backyard,” I began. For once, it didn’t sound like I was just writing a bunch of BS, the way I had for science. For once, I was pretty sure I was on the right track.
The morning of my bar mitzvah, Safta stopped by our house early. My stomach already felt like it was full of Pop Rocks and seeing my grandmother made me think we were late for the synagogue. I didn’t even have my socks on yet, and I had no idea where I’d put my tie.
“I have something for you.” Safta handed me a flat box, about the size of a magazine. But when I opened it, I found a long, whitish piece of fabric with blue stripes and fringes on the end.
“A tallis?” I said.
“I told you I had taken care of it,” my grandmother said.
I could tell it wasn’t new, because it had a couple of yellowy age spots on it. I tugged on the fringe and wound it around one of my fingers. That’s when I knew whose tallis it was.
“Grandpa’s?” When he was alive and we visited for Rosh Hashanah, I would sit next to him in the synagogue and play with those fringes whenever I was bored and got tired of counting the colors of different yarmulkes.
Safta nodded. “He wore this for his bar mitzvah,” she said. “He wanted you to wear it at yours.” She wiped her eyes, and then she gave me the pouch that went with it, velvety blue, with some of the velvety part worn off.
Wai Po came outside and cleared her throat. I wondered if she was going to give me something, too. But instead, she opened her hand.
“They fixed my ring,” she said.
I took the ring and examined it. The outside looked just as it had before, but the engraving inside had been altered, by a blow torch or something, when the jeweler welded the ring back together. Then I looked more closely.
“Look,” Wai Po said. One of the letters in my grandfather’s name—the name the engraver had misspelled—had been cut out. The other letters were closer together now, making a word. “It says Shalom. The Hebrew word for peace.”
Safta and I stared at the ring. I didn’t know that Wai Po even knew any Hebrew. “It’s a sign,” said Safta.
“Yes,” said Wai Po.
“And you guys, you won’t fight today, right?” I said. “Because the ring says we should keep the peace.”
“David,” said Safta. “We don’t fight.”
“Not at all,” agreed Wai Po.
“That would be undignified,” Safta added.
“The Chinese word for peace is heping,” said Wai Po.
I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes you have to speak up for peace, but sometimes you just have to be quiet.
I drove to the synagogue with my parents and Lauren in one car. Safta drove Wai Po in the other. I’d been worried that they would bring Bao Bao so he wouldn’t be lonely again, but my mother talked Wai Po into leaving him home with the TV on for company.
At the synagogue, I said hello to a few people as they came in. Seal hadn’t arrived yet, but lots of other people had, including my uncle Josh, who told me that during his bar mitzvah he had mispronounced a word and said “toilet” in Hebrew by mistake. Seeing all those people made my palms sweaty, so finally Rabbi Doug took me to his study until it was time for things to start. “The Green Room,” he called it, even though his office was beige.
“I haven’t had anyone pass out on me yet,” he said.
“There’s always a first time,” I told him.
Rabbi Doug put his hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “You’re going to be fine. It’s the waiting that’s hard.”
I went to the bathroom, once more, just to be sure, and reminded Rabbi Doug to use my middle name. Then it was time.
My father helped me drape my grandfather’s tallis around my neck and showed me how to kiss the fringes. I hoped it would bring me luck and help me remember how to read the words.
“We are pleased for you to join us today as David Da-Wei Horowitz is called to Torah to become a bar mitzvah,” Rabbi Doug said.
That sounded funny. Until then I’d thought of a bar mitzvah as a thing—not as a person. Not as me.
A mitzvah meant two things. It meant commandment, and that I was of the age to accept them. And it meant good deed. I hadn’t done a lot of good deeds, but I was starting to. I hadn’t saved the worl
d, either. But maybe it wasn’t all on me. Maybe I just had to start going in the right direction. And maybe if I did, other people would follow.
I led the prayers that I’d learned and they didn’t feel as fumbly as they had on the rabbi’s couch. My voice started soft, but by the time I got to the prayer when we opened the ark, it was stronger. Rabbi Doug carried the Torah through the synagogue. I followed him, and waved a little when Scott, Hector, and Kelli Ann tried to get my attention from the back row.
Then I followed the rabbi back to the bimah, and we opened the scroll.
I will not say that it was perfect, but it was good enough that I felt like I’d kept my end of the bargain. When I was up there, the words didn’t feel like just nonsense anymore. They came together, and some of the English words I remembered flashed across my brain, too.
Rabbi Doug had made me read the translation before I ever read the Hebrew, and it all came back to me, about Moses on Mt. Sinai, and the whole mountain smoking—not because of a nuclear war, but because the Jews were getting the Ten Commandments. I had to explain it in my bar mitzvah speech, which came next.
When you’re reading a speech in front of a bunch of people, you become aware of everything. The way your voice sounds. A cough. You’re also aware of the fact that you wrote most of your speech at the last minute, which is maybe why it sounds a little bit like the paper you just handed in to Mr. Hudson. You are also aware of the fact that you have, hardly ever in your life, put this many words together without messing them up.
My ears were red from the second I said the words “Today I am a man.” This was not part of the paper for Mr. Hudson but it is the same start as almost every other bar mitzvah speech that has ever been written.
“For a long time I wasn’t sure what that meant,” I said. “But now I have a better idea. It doesn’t mean solving every problem in the world. But it means you have to try.”
Then I said some stuff about how the Ten Commandments were written to help us solve problems and keep the peace in our own communities and our own houses. I also listed commandments of my own.
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