The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green

by Joshua Braff

  The lane changes are the most frightening. I lean my head forward to look in the side mirror. It’s offset, a reflection of the door handle.

  “Annie orders a pastrami on white bread with mayonnaise, and oh my God, I just roared at that. Just genius. Not a soul in that theater got that joke because we were in goddamn Memphis and who would get it but a Jew, right?”

  “Are you . . . watching the road?”

  “You’re not even listening.”

  “I heard you.”

  “Maybe it’s not a good time. I thought you’d be excited.”

  “I’m in pain.”

  “I know. I know. I was just excited to tell you. I can see you’re in pain.”

  “I just want to be there.”

  “The guy says next year everyone and his brother will have access to any movie you want. Beta tapes, right in your home.”

  The tires whine on a curve and my body leans heavy on the door.

  “But that’s for your TV. This’ll be on a big screen, right in our living room, like a huge slide show. It’ll be so great. You can invite anyone you want, all your friends. No one will forget it, I promise you. We’ll do popcorn, those hot-dog things, you name it. We’ll invite everyone. Sound fun, sound good? I’m doin’ this for you guys.”

  I nod.

  “I’m gonna invite the whole cast from Annie Get Your Gun. An all-Annie party. And maybe—bangin’ this around this morning—before we start the movie, we’ll do the opening number right there in the living room. It’s been lookin’ real tight in rehearsal. Jocko’ll play piano, we’ll have mikes set up, it’ll be a smash. The only question left is invitations. Should we, shouldn’t we. What do you think? I picture Woody Allen glasses or . . . a movie camera or something. Movie night at the Greens. Asher’ll throw something together, don’t you think? Kid wants to be an artiste so bad. I’ll put him to work.”

  The car leans on its left tires now. I start to slide.

  “So I got the projector for Saturday night, the fifth, and it’s a go. The only question left is, Whoooo’s got a better daaaaad than you-hoo?”

  Oh, he’s a jewel. A crisply cut jewel. An onyx, a ruby, a hamantasch-shaped sequin.

  “Jacob?”

  “No one, no one.”

  “Bingo! So let me hear your vote. I can get any film. I say Annie Hall. Funny. Especially for Jews. Poignant. Cerebral.”

  I see the hospital sign. We’re close. We’re close.

  “J?”

  “What?”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I agree.”

  “My God. It’s really hurting, isn’t it?” he says.

  “I broke it.”

  “Think positively. Could be sprained.”

  “Doesn’t feel sprained.”

  “Oh, shoot,” he says. “You have Hebrew school today, don’t you?”

  I face the window.

  “I’ll call them from the hospital and tell them what happened. They’re sticklers for attendance over there, aren’t they?”

  Silence. Shit.

  “Jacob?”

  “Mmm?” I say through closed lips.

  “I won’t get into it now but . . . are things going better over there? The grades, the homework? How’s that Heroes of Israel class coming? Looked good.”

  I nod. I see the hospital.

  “J? Did you hear me?”

  I nod again. I see the red sign for the ER. The pain medicine I’ve been thinking about for the longest hour and a half of my life is in that building. There’s relief for me in there.

  “We’ll talk about all that later,” he says, and pulls into a parking spot. “Let’s get ya fixed up.”

  I’m nauseous again. Hospitals make me nauseous. Black suture thread and bloody mop water and cream-colored throw-up bins. “I might be sick,” I say.

  “You want to vomit?” he asks.

  I stop and bend in the parking lot for a minute. “I might breathe through it,” I mumble.

  “You’ll feel better if you get it up.”

  The words “get it up” do me in. I dry-heave, then hurl twice, back to back, my stomach clenched. I spit and try not to step in it.

  “Atta boy.”

  Kill me.

  A HEAVYSET SECURITY guard with folded arms points to a sliding check-in window with his head. My father approaches it alone. I sit in a red plastic chair that’s attached to a row of red plastic chairs. I can smell the medicine that will end my pain. It’s cold and lemony and will squirt from the tip of a long and daunting needle before filling my veins with love. My father laughs out loud and claps, spinning once before reapproaching the window. “That’s funny,” he says. My luck. She must be attractive. One of those Playboy nurses with the cleavage and the lipstick and the surgical gloves that snap. I need a shot, an X-ray, and a cast, and he’s winking and spinning. In seconds she’ll be invited to our home to watch Annie Hall in its entirety. The Green House Cinema. Come one, come all. I look up at the fluorescent ceiling and shut my eyes. Just weeks before we left Rockridge my father invited every Jew he knows to our house. The Chases, the Feigelsons, the Edel-mans, the Glucks. After he fed them he packed them all into our tiny den to watch a grainy and never-ending Holocaust documentary that he’d rented through the temple. I fell asleep years before Hitler took over and woke to a house full of drained and teary guests. “Never again,” they kept saying as they stood on line to embrace him, “Never again.”

  “He fell off a—Jacob? What did you fall off?” he says, his elbows on the window sill.

  “The uneven bars,” I say. Uneven, uneven. I have to get this lie straight.

  “He fell off the uneven bars in gym,” my father says. “At Piedmont Junior High.”

  Who breaks their arm punching walls? Maniacs and criminals, that’s who. I have to call Jonny and tell him. Uneven bars. Uneven bars. I’ve never even been on the uneven bars. Maybe boys don’t use them. I should have picked a different one. A vault or something.

  “Thirteen,” I hear my father say. “Bar mitzvahed on November first. A proud, proud day for his papa,” he says glancing my way. “A man in the eyes of Israel,” he says, with a slight bounce on his toes. “Thank you, thank you. He was fantastic.”

  “Dad?”

  He turns to me.

  “How long? Ask how long.”

  “How long does he have to wait? . . . Okay. Thanks so much, Anita. You’re a doll.”

  My father steps away from the window with a clipboard and walks toward me. “Nice woman,” he says, still smiling, returning his license to his wallet. “Grew up minutes from what used to be called the Grand Deli on a street that was then known as—”

  “Dad?” I muster.

  “Yes?”

  “Is she gonna help me?”

  He licks the fat of his thumb and hones in on a patch of dried vomit on my chin. I turn my face as the thumb comes soaring toward me. “No,” I say. “Get away from me!”

  There’s an awkward and silent beat between us. It takes a snapped wrist to talk to my father like that. “Did she say how long?” I try to change the subject.

  “Seconds. You need to relax.”

  “I’m trying. It kills.”

  “It’s happening. They know you’re here.” He sits next to me and carefully drapes his arm along my shoulders. He leans in to kiss my cheek. “You do have some vomit on your chin.”

  “I don’t care. I’m in pain.”

  “Well . . . Anita said it would be a minute.”

  “You said seconds.”

  “A second, a minute.”

  “It aches.”

  “I know. I know. I’m trying to take your mind off it.”

  We sit in silence. My father does the paperwork. I hear the pace of a soap opera on a TV in a nearby room, the room they send you to after you return the clipboard. The electric doors swoosh open and a woman in a long white apron walks through with her hand wrapped in a bloody paper towel. I look away, feeling queasy. A trail of deep red droplets fo
llow her to the window. I pray I’m taken before her.

  “Hey, listen,” my father says, signing his name. “I don’t want you to think about the thank-you notes for a couple of days, okay?”

  I close my eyes.

  “Just forget about ’em until we get you back on your feet.”

  I try to flex my fist.

  “In a few days, if you’re ready, I’ll help you get them done. We’ll do ’em together. Knock ’em out in a night or two, okay? Bang-bang over with, all right?”

  I say nothing. I try to move my arm in the cold pack.

  He takes a deep breath that evolves into a yawn. “Noo wwa, wwa, waaaa none, none of my friends will think they’re late when they find out what happened to you. And if they’re wondering where their thank-you note is, well . . . too bad. You fell off the uneven bars and you might’ve sprained or even broken your wrist, and you need a few days. That’s it. End of story, right?”

  I lean forward to see if Anita is still in her booth.

  “I’m just sorry you didn’t get ’em done earlier, had ’em off your plate weeks ago. But . . . we’ll get ’em done. How many you have left?”

  The doors spread open again and a man and three little girls walk in. I don’t see any gore or agony. I should at least be taken before them. The oldest girl steps in the last lady’s blood but doesn’t know it. I watch the bloody sneaker prints for a second, then look away.

  “Will you try Mom again?” I say.

  “Oh my gosh,” he says, popping up. “Phone, phone,” he says, neck swiveling. “I’ll be back.”

  The second he disappears the doors swoosh open again. It’s my mother and Dr. Nathaniel Brody. Her eyes dart around the room, frantic. When she sees me, her hand reaches behind her to grip Dr. Nate’s fingers. She runs over to me.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she says, and I hold back tears. She presses her cool cheek against mine and my nausea is somewhat quelled. “Where’s your father? Are you checked in?”

  “He’s calling you.”

  Dr. Nate sits next to me and flashes some tender eyes. He looks down at my arm. “Can you bring it up to your chest?” he asks, and then helps me raise it.

  “I think it’s broken,” I tell him.

  “Yeah . . . maybe. But you’re okay.” He smiles at my mom. “Even if it is. It’s just his wrist, Claire,” he says, and reaches to rub her back.

  “We didn’t know how we’d find you up here,” she says, her open palm on her chest. “We couldn’t get any details.

  “But he’s fine. He’s fine.”

  “Nathaniel drove a hundred miles per hour.” She looks at him and chuckles. “Or should I say flew?”

  “My tires never left the ground.”

  Dr. Nate’s a lot shorter than me and is bald on top. He also has a Wilford Brimley mustache and wears the required professor patches on the elbows of his corduroy blazers. After he began spending every waking hour with my mother, Dr. Nate’s wife and three-year-old daughter, Amy, began attending all my father’s parties. We see them a lot. He’s my mom’s mentor, research partner, colleague, and friend—a professor with tenure at Rutgers University. My mother says their grant allows them to write articles and textbook chapters on the intricate decisions of birth mothers and surrogate mothers and that they’re basically preparing themselves to be experts in the psychology of adoption. Dr. Nate is kind and soft-spoken, intelligent and confident—a practicing psychologist with an innate gift for listening. But it isn’t until this moment, with each of them by my side, that I realize what else he is to my mother.

  “Jacob?” says a heavy nurse in Fraggle Rock scrubs.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Want some relief, babe?”

  AFTER A SHOT of something in my butt, I feel delightful and free. My mother, father, and Dr. Nate all stand around me in my curtained sectional, waiting for the X-rays to come back. My dad pitches them both on the Annie Hall/Annie Get Your Gun extravaganza and encourages them to invite the entire research team from Rutgers. Dr. Nate says he likes the idea but that he’ll be in Atlanta at a conference on the fifth. My mother wrings her hands and says she wishes he’d checked with her first. She’d hoped to be at that same conference. My father nods and stares at them both. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. He rolls a metal stool over to the far wall and sits with his head turned, as if punishing them with his distance. I tell myself he won’t lose his temper as I watch his jaw churn forward. Not here. Not now.

  The doctor walks in and sticks up the X-ray for viewing. He wears a goatee and wrestling shoes and tells me to call him Lou.

  “He’s got a Colles’ fracture,” he says to the room. “It’s an unusual break for the way he fell. It’s in the radius bone, near its end. See that? There’s a natural weak spot in the bone where it widens right here, and because of the flare in the shape of it the broken piece is usually wider than the piece right next to it. See what I mean? So if the pieces don’t lock back together like a jigsaw puzzle, the bone can shorten like one of those collapsible drinking cups.”

  “Could that happen?” my mother says, stepping closer to the picture.

  “I don’t think so. The way it’s set will most definitely prevent that. . . . Soooo . . . I’m gonna need to ask you to leave for a moment or two. I’ll give Jacob’s hand a little tug which could be slightly painful, but it’ll then be lined up for proper healing. I’ll set it, put him in a cast, and you can all go home.”

  “I’d like to stay with him,” my mother says.

  “I’d prefer you didn’t,” Lou says.

  “But I’m asking you to let me.”

  “I’d still prefer you wait outside.”

  “Is there someone who’s in charge here?” she says. “A head doctor I could speak to?”

  “Claire!” my father says, standing from his corner.

  Lou flinches and cranes his head toward my dad. “Whew, scared me. I didn’t see you back there.”

  “I’m his father.”

  Lou waves at him and pats his heart. “Hi, Dad.”

  “The doctor asked you very nicely, Claire. Why don’t you just let the man do his job?”

  “I’d merely like to stay in the room with my son. I’m asking nicely as well, and I certainly don’t need any assistance from you, Abram.”

  He’s frozen by this retort. He walks toward my mother and she steps away, closer to me.

  “Come on you two,” Nathaniel says with a grin. “This is no time for an argument.”

  My father blinks with exaggeration and folds his arms. He smiles at Dr. Nate. “You thought we were arguing? Is that your professional opinion, Dr. Brody?”

  Nate looks at my dad with a tilted smirk. “All right, Abram.”

  “Maybe you’d like to . . . be our therapist, Doctor. Help us bang out any snags we might come across in our relationship. Can ya help us out?”

  “Come on now,” he says. “Get past it.”

  “Come on where? Nathaniel. Where to?”

  Dr. Nate shakes his head and lifts his coat off the chair. “I’ll be outside, Claire.”

  My father turns to me and points at Nathaniel. “Who the hell is this guy?”

  Lou looks up at my father when the silence gets awkward. He then faces me. The Fraggle Rock nurse enters the room. “Hi there,” Lou says to her. “I need the plaster cart and five ccs of Xylo.” She nods and leaves.

  Dr. Nate follows her to the curtain. “See you in a couple of minutes,” he says to me at the door, and avoids my father’s stare. My mother doesn’t budge. When Nate is gone my father reaches for her elbow. She yanks her arm from him with force and I see it recoil high above her head, her eyes enraged.

  “What’re you doing?” my father screams in a whisper.

  She steps toward me on the table and takes my face in her hands. “If you want me to stay I will,” she says. “Just say it. They can’t make me leave.”

  “I’ll come get you in two minutes,” Lou says.

  She kis
ses my cheek and my right eye mushes against her face.

  My father waits by the curtain for my mother, his fingers clasped behind his head. With his eyes locked on her, he says something into her ear as she tries to pass by. She leans away from him.

  “Don’t be a child!” he barks, and the doctor faces them. “It’s grown-up time, Claire.”

  “You . . . uh . . . have any questions for me, Jacob?” Lou says.

  I wait for my parents to disappear behind the curtain. “No . . .”

  The nurse wheels the cart in and parks it at my feet. I watch her prepare the needle as the doctor snaps on gloves. “Take a deep breath for me,” he says, and inhales deeply through his nostrils. “I need you loose right now, all right? Don’t think about any of that stuff,” he says, waving at the curtain. “Hospitals make people nuts.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “Sure, sure. One more deep breath. Good, fill those lungs. Fill ’em up and blow it out slowly through your nose.”

  I exhale through my nostrils and look down at my hand.

  “Perfect. Now, how do you feel?” he asks.

  Embarrassed.

  “Embarrassed.”

  Lou smiles. The nurse hands him the syringe and he walks it toward me. “You shouldn’t. They’re just worried about you. Just as you’d worry about them. Ya ready for me?”

  I nod.

  “Okay, friend. Easy part. Just . . . a . . . prick.”

  Lucky

  Lulled and foggy from needle number three, they tell me it’s time to go home. My parents in the front seat, me in the back, I watch the speedometer flutter near twenty and listen to the drone of my father’s haughty words. The sermon reflects on what he calls the “distance” my mother’s created with her newfound life—a distance first hatched, he suggests, the morning she met her “little” mentor. Enunciating as if speaking to a room full of toddlers, the critique raises the question of how someone so attuned to familial dysfunction can justify “vanishing” from her very own home.

  “Vanishing?” my mother asks. “Twice a week I’m home after nine. The rest of the time I—”

  “Does Nathaniel get home before nine, ten at night?”

  “I’m not having this conversation now.”