The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green

by Joshua Braff

  “I’ve been calling your name for five minutes. Why don’t you answer me?”

  “I’m in here.”

  “I see that,” she says, trying to look behind me. “Ya got Hebrew school, babe. Chop, chop, Dad’s on his way to take you.”

  Blow jobs have been on my mind a lot these days. I think about how glorious the concept really is and how fortunate we are that someone’s willing to do it. Jonny wins the race to fellatio. I’d been ahead on hand jobs 1 to 0, but who cares about that now. He gets one from this thirty-year-old lady in Mendocino, some wacky, hippy, California friend of his dad’s. He says they were drinking margaritas straight from the blender and before he knew it she was shimmying toward him and picking at the knot in his sweatpants. I asked him if he came too quick, but not because I always do or worry that I forever will or struggle with that helpless, can’t-stop-it-now rising that occurs when female fingers get so close to my pubic hair, but more just to know the details. He says he was doing fine until she put her pinkie on his butthole and “shoved a little.”

  “Are you even packed?” my mother says.

  I keep the door nearly closed and point at my suitcase on the toilet. “You mean that?”

  “Don’t be flip, Jacob. You know I don’t like that. If you’re angry with me just say it.”

  “Flip?”

  “Flippant. Don’t be flippant.”

  “Flippant?”

  She looks at her watch and sighs. “Will you wait outside for him today, please? I really just . . . don’t have the energy.”

  I nod and gently shut the door. I check the toilet and glance out the window once again. Asher’s holding his plastic-wrapped cap and gown. He takes two quick steps and punts it into the hedges.

  “Come on, babe,” my mother says from the hall. “He should be here already.”

  I splash water on my face and widen my eyes in the mirror. “What about Gabe and Dara?”

  “What?”

  “Where are Gabe and Dara?”

  “They’re at your father’s already . . . with Janice.” The new boarder. A Haitian nurse from Irvington who can already bless bread and wine in Hebrew and make grenade-sized matzo balls. My father’s in heaven.

  I grab my suitcase, open the door, and head for the stairs. My mother follows me down.

  “We’ll be in Atlanta until Sunday,” she says, “and then Boca for the night.”

  “Boca?”

  “Just a little R&R. You’re back with me as soon as we land. All three of you. I’ll come to Dad’s from the airport. Now, Asher’s gonna stay here and I want you to call him if there are any problems, all right?”

  “What’s in Atlanta?”

  “Same. An adoption consortium. Nathaniel’s the keynote.”

  After serving as a professional witness for a nationally publicized egg-donor case, Dr. Nate is in very high demand. It leaves them traveling a few times a month now. Asher gets to live here with his girlfriend when they’re gone, while the three of us get my father, a very recent graduate of some group called est. Last month he allowed a new woman friend, Rona, to shave his beard off while he wept in the woods during an Outward Boundish self-help retreat. “At least he’s trying” is the way my mother puts it.

  “I’ll call you when we get settled,” she says. “All right? And here, put this twenty-dollar bill in your room for emergencies.”

  I open the front door and toss my suitcase on the porch. It rolls a few times and settles upside down.

  “All right, Jacob?”

  “All right.” I take the money from her hand and squeeze it in my palm.

  “Can I have a kiss?”

  Beth sees me before the others do. She smiles and exhales a stream of smoke through her nose. We’ve hung out twice before and she’s been sort of flirty both times. I’ve come to think she knows she’s the queen of my skanky dreams. My mother kisses the back of my head. “Good luck in temple on Saturday. I know you’ll do wonderfully.”

  I ignore this and await what comes next.

  “When I get back I’ll . . . talk to your father again. No more of these after this one, okay? Last Torah reading. Promise.”

  I want to laugh but I don’t. Asher sees me and starts to walk over.

  “Okay?”

  “Right.”

  “I love you.”

  “Okay.”

  “‘Okay’? Just ‘okay’? You’re not gonna say it back?”

  “Fine. I . . . do, all right?”

  “Then say it.”

  “I do.”

  “So say it.”

  “I said it!”

  She walks in front of me and lifts my chin with her finger. “Why are you yelling at me?” she whispers.

  I turn away and can feel her staring at the back of my head.

  “Jacob, please look at me.”

  “Throw that thing in the air,” Asher says to Nicky, and lifts a stone from the driveway. “Try underhand.”

  Nicky lifts his cap and gown off the front lawn and begins to windmill it around and around.

  I hear my mother sigh.

  “Out over the street,” says Asher. “I don’t want to hit the house.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “What’s he doing?” my mother says.

  “Pull!”

  Nicky hurls the bag into the air and Asher fires the stone at it. It misses by a mile and bounces off the Kissler’s garage. They both laugh their asses off.

  “Jesus,” she says. “Asher! No more of that.”

  “Oh. Hi, Ma.”

  “No more. You’ll break a window.”

  “That’s it, Nick.”

  “I’m going inside, Jacob. Take care of your brother and sister over there, okay? I’ll call you when I can.” She kisses the back of my head again.

  Pause.

  I hear the door shut behind me.

  My brother retrieves the robe from where it lands in the street and walks toward me on the porch. “Looky here,” he says waving it. “Freedom in a bag.”

  I nod and sit on the front stoop.

  “It’s fuckin’ over,” he says, cradling the plastic bag in his arms.

  I lay my open hand on my knee so he’ll see the blood on my palm. He doesn’t look down.

  “Hey, I got somethin’ to tell you,” he says.

  He found an apartment in Providence. That’s what it is. There’s a bedroom for each of us and the bigger one has a view of the river. He gets it of course. Mine has a tapestry for a door and no closets but the toilet’s closer to me and his room can get noisy on weekends. Pack your shit and load it in Nicky’s trunk, he says. Write a note to Mom if you want but do it soon. I want to hit the highway by dusk. No, be ready to bolt by dawn. Be ready by noon tomorrow. Say your good-byes and be ready to fire up the engine by . . .

  “Little Greeny!” yells Nicky, and I face his way. He looks like a cross between Sid Vicious and Dennis the Menace these days: short, blond, boy-next-door meets aggressive, whiskey-loving nutcase with immeasurable issues and a passion for arena metal. He lives in an old, ignored Victorian with his extremely elderly grandmother and a piranha named Swallow. “New speakers, ya ready?”

  Brigitte and Beth put their fingers in their ears. Nick flashes devil-horn fingers with his pointer and pinkie and starts his ignition through the window. The engine roars and the bassy thump of Iron Maiden makes his windshield wipers hop. Asher takes a smiling swig from the bottle of champagne and his eyes meet mine. “Pretty fuckin rockin’,” he says, with a squinty, buzzed grin. “A Blaupunkt. Graduation gift from his dad.”

  I nod and look down at Asher’s cap and gown. He sees me admiring it and sends it spinning into the air. “Fuck yeaaaaaaah!”

  I watch it climb into the sky and dream that when it lands it’ll be mine. Like a lonely bridesmaid I scurry underneath but it hooks right and drops like a brick into the rhody bushes.

  “You didn’t wait for me to get a rock,” Nicky says, and pulls one from his pocket.

  Asher ho
lds the Korbel out for me. “You want a swig of this shit? Still cold.”

  “What’d you want to tell me?” I ask.

  He takes a long sip and offers me the bottle again. “Have some.”

  “I can’t. I got—” Beth is staring right at me—“Hebrew school,” I whisper.

  “Oooooh, you poor fuck.”

  “Why don’t ya come along?”

  “Um . . . can I have my testicles hacked off instead?”

  Asher got officially expelled from Beth Tikvah the day after he heard from RISD. Est training and all, my father still went berserk and flung a full coffee mug at his bedroom door. Luckily, Asher wasn’t home for all the fun. They’ve “talked” once since it happened.

  “Here I am wavin’ around this thing and you’re headed to that shit hole. How ya getting there?”

  “Ride.”

  “Mom?”

  “No. Dad’s on his way.”

  “Here?” he says, pointing at his bare chest. “Now?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  He runs his hand through his long hair and peers down the street for my father’s car. “I better get outta here. We gotta go!”

  “What’s up?” says Brigitte.

  “My fuckin’ dad’s on his way.”

  Brigitte hops off the car and walks toward me. I look at the hooks on the front of her bra and the baby oil she put on her cleavage. “Your brother’s getting cuter than you, Ash. Look at this pretty blond hair,” she says, and I feel her fingernails against my scalp.

  Nicky lets out an extended belch and says, “Real purty. And he got a reeeeal nice mouth too. Squeeeeel, squeeel like a hog, Jacob.”

  Beth and Brigitte both laugh.

  Brigitte circles me while fanning herself with her hand. “Ooh-wee. I don’t even care that you’re leavin’ anymore, Asher. You can just take off and do all that disappearing you’ve been dreamin’ about. Give your little brother and me some breathin’ room.”

  Quintessential Gitte. Obligated to the Nancy Spungen persona she’s honed for years, rumors often fly about the pills she’s popped and the dicks she’s sucked. The current gossip is that she blew her own brother, a coke fiend named Nigel who wears eyeliner and hiked-up kilts to school. Asher says he’d be amazed because Nigel’s a flat-out homo who can make himself gag just thinking about pussy. Now Brigitte cups my chin in her hand and gives me a lengthy Eskimo kiss and a peck on the lips. Her hair is Big Bird yellow at the moment and shaved nearly to the skin on one side. And there’s a cross pierced high in the cartilage of her ear that’s made the skin puffed and shiny with infection.

  “Lady killer,” she says, with a tiny slap to my butt.

  “Here, Nicky,” Beth says, and hands him the cassette she fixed. She tugs her miniskirt down on her hips with a snap and stretches her arms high above her head. Belly button, ribs, the body on this girl! When she walks past me she winks and I look away.

  “Um . . . hello?” she says.

  “Oh . . . hi.”

  “Stop flirtin’ with my girlfriend,” says Nicky. I push out a laugh and watch her open his car door.

  “He can if he wants.”

  “Get in the car, Beth. And you, little Greeny. Hose those lonely blue balls down,” he says, and pretends to punch me in the stomach.

  A car turns onto our street and Asher pulls his shirt on and squints at it. “That him? Let’s go Brigitte,” he says, clapping. “Right now. Fast.”

  The car gets closer to the house. It’s not my dad but it stops right in front.

  “Just clients,” I say. Dr. Nate sees patients in the basement of this house. This means I can sit on the staircase and listen to people air out their miseries past ten each night. The couple walk quickly across the lawn, she in front of him. It’s the Newmans—money’s tight, she’s the breadwinner, caught him napping in the afternoon with cereal milk in his navel, and she punched him in the chest. They walk along the side of the house and will enter from the rear.

  Asher blinks a lot as he approaches me and wraps his arm around my neck. “We have to talk and it’s gotta be quick.”

  I’m already packed. Just say when. Dusk? Noonish?

  “It’s not something I was planning on and—”

  “Just tell me.”

  He pulls away from the embrace and glances over his shoulder at the street. “I gotta leave,” he says, with his head lowered. “Tomorrow. In the morning. I was keeping it a secret because I wasn’t sure if—”

  “What did you say?”

  “I know. I should have told you. There’s this professor named Bovitz who said he’d rent me his attic if I showed up by Monday. There are so few places for the money I have, you wouldn’t believe it. I had to talk to the high school and all this crap . . . Anyway, they don’t give a shit if I’m at graduation or not. They said they’d mail me the fuckin’ diploma.” He chuckles and looks back at his friends. “Isn’t that . . . cool?”

  As I stand there in the driveway looking in his wide eyes, I tell myself it’s a gag. It’s got to be a joke. I start to smile and turn to face Nicky. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?”

  Asher looks stunned but more offended. “Kidding?” he says. “Why would I be kidding?”

  As my smile fades Brigitte comes into view behind him.

  “But I’m going with you,” I say.

  He glances over his shoulder at her and faces me again. “No,” he says. “No, I’m going alone.”

  In the blur of that second I turn and step toward the house. The words stick to me and expand as I try to outrun them, to be where I was.

  “Jacob,” he says, and jogs up behind me. “Talk to me.”

  I shake my head, not wanting to speak, and pinch back tears that fight to rise.

  “Please.”

  I feel his hand on my shoulder and I yank away. When I get to the porch he snags the back of my shirt and stops me.

  “Just relax . . . and listen to me!”

  I see Beth on the lawn over his shoulder. She moves carefully as she stares at the wreck we are, and I turn from her view.

  “Hear me,” he says.

  “No.”

  “I said—”

  “You said you’d bring me,” I say as soft as I can.

  “I . . . don’t . . . have . . . a . . . dime. Mom gave me a thousand bucks and that’s it, that’s all I have.”

  “I have cash.”

  “No.”

  “Bar mitzvah.”

  “My cash, the only cash in question went into supplies and getting my ass to Rhode Island. I have to get there like . . . yesterday and get a fuckin’ job and a cheap as shit place to sleep. This is what I’m up against.”

  “You’re not listening,” I announce, walking closer. “It’s in the bank. It’s a lot.”

  “That’s yours.”

  “That’s ours.”

  “No,” he says, and glances at the street for my dad. “The man, the . . . fella on his way here? The guy who raised you? Remember him? He’ll ne-ver stop.”

  “Yes he will.”

  “You’re lying to yourself.”

  “He’ll give up.”

  “He’ll find you.”

  “No.”

  “With me. He’ll find you with me.”

  “No.”

  “And I’ve earned this.”

  “Listen.”

  “No, J!”

  I flinch from the bark and look up at him. He lowers his eyes to his shoes.

  “I have to go now,” he says. “I really have to go. He starts to walk away and I follow him and reach for his arm.

  “Wait . . . Wait.”

  He glances down at my hand on his wrist. “You’ve got to let go.”

  “I’ll get a job too.”

  “You live here.”

  “You said if you got into school.”

  “I can’t just . . . lift you outta here.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a crime.”

  “A crime? You’re my brother.”
<
br />   “It’s kidnapping.”

  “Let me to talk to Mom,” I plead. “Wait two days.”

  “I told you. I got to get there and be settled and find a place to live. Start painting. I can’t bring you. I can’t. Not now.” He leans closer to me and takes my cheeks in his hands. “Root for me,” he whispers. “Be happy for me. Ya know?”

  He takes a step backward and I’m surprised to see tears in his eyes. “It’s only Rhode Island,” he says with a shrug.

  “Let’s go, Ash,” Nicky says, and revs his engine. Brigitte pulls a bent mascara brush out of her purse and starts applying it on the move. “I’ll see you soon, J,” she says with weighty sad eyes. “I promise.”

  “Let’s go, Beth!”

  Asher holds my shoulders in his hands. “You’re my family,” he says softly, and leans close to my ear. “My brother.”

  I turn to see his face.

  “I’ll call you,” he says.

  I watch him run to the car and dive through the open passenger window. The thing screeches out of the driveway and I see sparks where it scrapes the curb. When Asher pulls his feet in, he climbs out the passenger window and rests his ass on the sill. He blows me a dramatic kiss that flings his arm above his head and I walk into the street so he can see me. And I can see him. Disappear.

  Erhard’s Prayer

  Out the back window of my father’s long car, I count the suburban sick-amores that line the north side of Stanyon Road. Like on Saber Street, some of them rise through the seam of sidewalk and grass and have all but crumbled the cement meant to keep them aligned. Rona Milkin sits in the passenger seat in front of me and speaks quickly about something—a luncheon gone awry, greens steeped in oil. My father nods with moderate interest and searches for discourse on his digital radio. From the speaker behind my head I listen to the smear of what he cannot find and vow to leave for Providence before it gets too dark.

  “Drenched,” Rona says. “A pool of it at the bottom of the bowl. So, I’m livid. The thing’s soaked. Okay? Soaked. Long story short, I tell him I’m not interested in who handles decision making in the kitchen. I’m interested in eating my lunch the way I ordered it.”

  “Good for you,” my father mumbles.

  “I knew the guy was trouble from the get-go. He was chewing something when he brought our waters.”