by Joshua Braff
“What is this?” my father says. “No. No.”
I turn to him.
“What is this?”
The card is blocking his face. Gabriel laughs and I hear his footsteps running down the hall. “I mean it, mister,” Megan says.
“Which one, Dad?”
“Piss!” he screams, and flings the card into the air. It floats for a second and then tail dives into my turntable on the dresser.
“What’s wrong with it?”
He doesn’t answer. “No, Jacob!” he says with the next card already in front of his face. “Look at this. You don’t mention the gift, you don’t have a third line to balance it out, you don’t—”
“Which one do you have, Dad?” I stand and walk toward him with a look of stunned confusion.
He lowers the card from his face. “Get the hell away from me.”
“Why?”
“Step back. Just . . . step . . . back.”
“I just want to see—”
“You want to see what, Jacob? Your work? Your mind at work? Spell the word generous. Spell it. Now.”
“Why are you getting so angry?” I say.
“Spell the word!”
“G.”
“Fantastic, keep going.”
“G-e-n-e-r, um . . .”
“Um, um, um,” he mimics. “Dictionary! What’s it for? To stand on? Find ‘generous.’Pick it up!” he screams.
I lift the book and begin to thumb for the Gs. My stupid hands quiver on the pages.
“Now!”
“I’m looking.”
“Is it in there? Maybe it’s a dud, it’s not in there.”
Generate. Generation. Generator. Generic.
“I found it.”
“Marvelous. Does it say, g-e-n-e-r-i-s?”
“No.”
“So . . . when the Mendelsons read your card and see that my son spells like a retard, what should I tell them? Isn’t my boy super?”
“I’ll rewrite it.”
“And this one. No mention of the gift, no third line to balance it out.”
“Which one, Dad?”
“Which one, Daddy?” he barks. “Like it fuckin’ matters.”
“Why are you yelling?”
“What did you say?”
I don’t answer. I place the dictionary back on my desk.
“No. What did you just say? Are you a goddamn baby?”
“No.”
“How old then? Just tell me if you’re an infant so I can understand. I want to. I want to understand.” He lifts another card. “Garbage!” he says holding the stack high, his lips tightened and white. “You want to please me, is that what you want? Is it?”
I slowly nod.
“Answer me, you—!” My father is now sitting up on the bed, waiting for a reply, his teeth clenched. “Answer me!”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes. I want to please you.”
He smiles wickedly and shakes his head. “It’s . . . sad to me, Jacob. Pathetic. You became a man last week, do you even know that? Can you comprehend this? This is embarrassing, this slop. Don’t you feel it? Look at these. I see nothing witty or snappy like we’ve talked about again and again. And you wrote, ‘Your one of my best friends,” spelled y-o-u-r. Are you . . . trying to do these crappy? Maybe that’s it. Maybe you want to prove that you’re an idiot. Are you an idiot? Are you?”
I squeeze my eyes closed and feel tears rising.
He bunches the next card into a ball and throws it toward me. It hits my Incredible Hulk pencil sharpener and falls onto the carpet. When I glance at him, his face is pinched and furious, struggling. He sits up with a jolt from the bed and runs his fingers through his scalp. He clenches a fist of his black hair and yanks once, hard. “No!” he screams, his pain stoking the fire.
I swallow as my face and neck fill with this familiar tingling—the predator is loose. I sit still, locked in my chair, knowing that what’s begun cannot be tied off. It is fear that now owns me, fills me like an injected drug. And the effects are quick and potent and steeped in shame. I hear Megan’s voice outside in Gabriel’s room, and I face the door. My father pops to his feet with the cards in his hand and walks toward me.
“I’ll do them again, Dad,” I say, with my eyes lowered. When I look up at him he winds up with a small skip and throws his hand toward the wall as if hurling a brick. He does not let go of the cards. He does this again and then again, flinging his arm as hard as he can with a deadened pop in his shoulder, a guttural gasp. Trapped in his rage I watch the lunatic dance. He punches his own leg with a closed fist and his knee buckles, nearly toppling him to the floor.
“Stop,” I say.
He stares at me, eyes wide.
“I’ll do them again.”
“Let me ask you something,” he says blinking, his jaw jetting forward. “Do you think these are done? Ready for the mailbox!?”
I swallow. I look at the cards he still clenches in his fist and then up at his face, bending over me. “Do you?” he hollers from his core.
“No,” I say, with a weak and wobbled voice.
“How long did you work on these?”
“How long?” I ask, embarrassed by the shiver in my voice.
“Yes, how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. Okay. The people you are writing these letters to—look me in the eyes.”
I look up at him. His face is inches from mine, his skin rattling on his cheeks. He can only hate what he sees before him. I think to put my feet flat on the floor and lean my head slightly back. I stare into the face I can barely see behind his beard and dark lenses.
“These cards, which you can’t . . . can’t give a shit about, are for people who purchased you gifts. You! How long do you think it took to buy, wrap, and hand you these gifts, schmuck? How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” he screams, jogging in a tight circle with his arms flapping. “Like a retarded chicken. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know nothing! Is that it? Is it?” he screams, kneeling in front of me.
“No.”
“Do you hate this, Jacob!? Do you hate it, do you hate it, do you hate me?” he roars so loudly it rings in my ears.
I try to breathe but I can’t. I look away but I’m weak and feel the tears, the flooding, rising up from my throat.
“Oh . . . crying,” he says, and rams his fist into his eye, grinding it into the socket. “Waaaaa! Waaaaa!”
I let myself go for a moment, though I know my cowardice feeds his rage. I suck for air in quick intakes of breath and gain a semblance of strength from my own mirrored empathy.
“Look at you,” he says. “My son. The bar mitzvah.”
I squeeze my eyes and clench my jaw, drawing from fury I cannot use. When I face my father he’s preparing to stab one of the cards, to pin it to my desk with the tip of a pen. He holds it like a dagger and jabs it twice with all his strength. The pen cracks in two and crumbles from his hand. He rifles through my drawer for another. I wipe my nose on my sleeve and try to suppress any sounds that could link me to theatrics. There’s a light knock on the door.
“Yes?” my father says in his normal voice.
“Everything okay?” Megan asks.
My father looks down at me. “Everything is fine,” he says, and gently closes the drawer.
“Time for bed, Dara,” Megan says, just outside the door.
My father hovers above me at my desk, his cranium shivering in bursts. I stay silent, my chin even with his belt. “I just hate that you make me this way. I hate it!”
“I know.”
“Ya think I’m gonna let you send . . . slop to the people I love? Do ya? Pull out a fresh card. Do it now.”
I reach for one and place it on the desk in front of me.
“To Lev and Rebecca Saperstein. Write it.”
I lift my pen i
n my hand and watch my fingers tremble. I write the word Dear and reach for the gift list.
“Lev!” You can’t spell Lev without looking? Here!” he screams, and grabs the pen from my hand. He begins to scribble the name all over my blotter and soon scrapes it into the desk itself, burying the pen tip deep into the wood. LEV. “See it! Are you looking?” he says, and presses his palm to the back of my head. I resist and he pushes harder, bending my face toward the scratched grooves.
“Sssstop!” I whine in a voice higher than my own.
“Stop.” And he does. He stops. He lets me sit up. I feel his tangled fingers in my hair as he gently tries to uncoil them. And in seconds he’s kneeling at my feet with ever softening eyes. “Jacob,” he whispers. “I’m . . . sorry. I’m . . . just . . .”
Asher shoves my door open and we both turn to face him. I can hear his music from down the hall thumping through his speakers, heavy and loud. His fingers and forearms are streaked with white paint and his wide eyes are pinned on the two of us. My father sniffs and slowly climbs to his feet. “Don’t you knock?”
Asher moves toward us while looking around the room like a cop.
“I asked you a question,” my father says.
“I heard you,” he says. He looks down at the embedded word LEV and swipes his fingertips over the wood. “It’s enough for tonight.”
“Turn around,” my father says, flinging his hand at him. “Just leave. The voice of reason. Doesn’t even knock. Go on, get outta here.”
“Enough. Okay? No more.”
My father blinks and folds his arms. “I said get out.”
Asher steps toward him with his own churning jaw and looks so geared to pounce that I reach for his arm. “Asher,” I say. “Stop . . . wait.”
My father broadens his rounded shoulders and actually smirks. “You seem angry,” my father says in a softened tone we know well—a voice laced with practiced condescension. “Can you tell me why that is, Asher? Can you tell why you’re so very angry?”
“Bedtime, Dara,” says Megan, glancing inside my room. “Let’s brush those teeth.”
Asher looks over his shoulder as my sister runs by. He then turns and reaches to switch my desk light off before walking from the room. As he leaves he swings my door wide open and it bangs against the wall. I want to tell him to stay, to wait, but I’m afraid to make things worse. When he’s gone, my father sits on the edge of my bed with his face in his hands. Megan’s out of his view but still stands just outside. “You okay?” she says without sound, her face pinched, even frightened. And it’s so strange, but as I stare back at her, my instinct is to defend my father, to protect him, to list every kindness and every altruistic breath he’s ever taken. I look away from her and begin to lift the crumpled thank-yous off the carpet. My father claps loud, twice, and I flinch and face him.
“Get some sleep now,” he says. And I wait. Just wait. For my door to click closed.
Shattered
Tantrums make the morning feel like the dead of night—always. I shower in steaming water and let the stream beam down on the back of my neck. Megan stands behind me in my mind. She wants to know what happened the night before and she will not let it go. I tell her we disagreed is all, and that I’m fine, everything’s fine. She says she doesn’t believe me and I feel her fingertips against the ridges of my spine. I turn the shower off and step out of the tub. I grab a towel and cover my head and face. If she asks, she asks. It’s all in how you present yourself. If you’re fine she’ll think you’re fine. I smear the steam off the mirror above the sink and press my chin to the glass. “I’m fine. See me? I’m fine.”
Meg’s in the kitchen, sitting, waiting, tapping her foot. I smile and say, “Hi.” She’s got no makeup on and wears her silver-framed glasses and a ponytail. She says she’s driving me to school before she even says hello and hands me Asher’s jacket like she thinks it’s mine. I throw it on the table and follow her to the driveway. It doesn’t look good. What happened in there? Are you hurt, what’d you do, did he touch you, can I help, what was that, who is he, where’s your mom, does she know, I can help, let me in, blah, blah, blah, blee, blee, blee . . . “Put your seat belt on,” she says, for the first time ever, and reaches over me to loosen it.
“I can do it,” I tell her. “I’m not an idiot.”
She waits a second, and sits back in her chair. “I know you’re not,” she says. “Sometimes it sticks.”
The car is an elderly blue Dodge with a red cap-and-gown tassel holding the glove box closed. There’s also a Popsicle stick somehow “clogging” the heating system and a hole the size of a baseball between my feet. I warm my hands under my armpits and lean forward to see the driveway through the floor.
“How’d ya . . . sleep?” she says, as she starts the car.
I nod but keep my eyes from her. I look for something to cram through the hole while we’re moving.
“Look a little out of it this morning,” she says, and waits for a reaction. “A little sad. Am I wrong?”
I choose to ignore this as she pulls out of the driveway. There’s a penny in the front pouch of my book bag and I drop it through the floor. The road swallows it up and I turn to see it tinkling around in the street. Megan rolls her eyes, trying not to grin. “No more.” she says. “It’s not funny.”
“It’s not?”
“No.”
“Then why are you smiling?”
“This isn’t smiling.”
“It looks like it.”
“It’s not. Trust me.”
“Wow. Serious today.”
“That’s right,” she says facing me. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Guess not.”
“Yeah. Guess not.”
I lean my head back against the seat and look away from her. Saber Street is strewn with sidewalk trees that stand in line like rail-thin soldiers. My mother calls them “suburban sick-amores” and seems to believe they’re more fragile than they look. She says she can tell from their dry, pinched-up leaves that they’ve ingested more exhaust than any tree should. And whenever we drive by she threatens to uproot them and haul them all off to the woodsy slopes of Vernon Valley. I tell her I’ll help her. I’ll help her unchoke the trees on Saber Street. But, Asher, he can’t help but laugh. He knows she’s got no time for rescuing trees. And I think she knows it too. Not enough time, not enough strength. She doesn’t even own a shovel.
Last night I hear her come in my room. I can feel the cool of the night air on her clothes right through my blanket, and then a kiss to the skin below my eye. She was making her rounds. Before she stands I clutch her lapel in my fist, but it’s a dream—so weird—there’s really nothing there. And then I hear “Jacob,” real soft, “Jacob.” And when I open my eyes I see my father standing over me. Protected by the darkness, I squint to fake sleep, my blanket to my chin. He stares down at me but he’s blind in this much dark, believes I’m long gone. He calls my name again and then rests on his knees beside me—starving for penance, permission to sleep. He leans his forehead on the mattress and waits before he whispers.
“I cherish you more than you’ll ever know.” And as always, the dramatic repeat. “More than you’ll ever know.” Another long pause and his head lifts. “We’ll get them done.” One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. “We’ll get them done together.”
As he slowly climbs to his feet, jostling the mattress as he goes, he leans over me to kiss my cheek. He holds it there for five long seconds, breathing through his nose. “Sleep tight now, baby boy,” he says. “I love you . . . I do.”
Megan stops the car at the traffic light on Glendale. She takes a deep breath and I can tell she’s staring right at me. “Last night,” she says, “was hard for me.”
Here we go.
“But something tells me . . . it was harder on you.”
I keep my head turned from her.
“I had a friend, in high school. Myra Sloan. Her stepfather used to hit her when she—”
I stop her with a laugh. “Is that what you think you heard?”
“I know what I heard.”
“He didn’t touch me, Megan.”
“I heard it.”
“No . . . you didn’t.”
She runs her hand through the dust on the dash, shaking her head.
“It’s not like that,” I say.
“Then what’s it like?”
“I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“But I do. Okay? I was up all night, thinking. Just laying there.”
“Thinking about what?”
“Let’s see . . . about leaving. About staying. About blowin’ a whistle, about . . . living with myself if anything ever happened to you, or Gabe, or Dara.”
“You don’t get it.”
“I trust my ears, J.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“I heard what I heard.”
I stare out the window as the light turns green. The car doesn’t move. “You can go,” I say.
“What?”
I point at the green. “Go!”
“Oh.” She steps on the gas. We pass Cimeron Field and the frozen duck pond and turn left on Stanyon toward the junior high. Neither of us says a word. My father’s usually more careful around Megan. I guess the culmination of issues was just too much for him this time: First, there’s this “disability” of mine—a catalyst for all types of failures that remind my father of every crap report card and teacher conference he’s ever suffered through. Second, you got these adoring peers of his—people he loves to impress and one-up with the accomplishments of his amazing children. And then you got me—a less than amazing son who actually wowed all these friends on the day of my bar mitzvah but can’t seem to thank them for showing the fuck up. I have no idea why my brain is this way. A special ed teacher named Doris says I learn things “spatially” and that I’m actually very smart. But I heard her say the same thing to Ronald Freed, and he wears a helmet with a chin strap wherever he goes.
Megan sighs like a bad actress. “You’re not gonna talk to me about this.”
I can see my school through the windshield and all the kids out on the front lawn. Megan stops the car in the parking lot driveway and I reach for the door handle.
