The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green

by Joshua Braff

  The Hebrew word for recess is hafsaka. It begins about an hour into my first class and will allow me a chance to leave the building unseen. Bagels are left for us during this time and the halls are quiet and unpoliced for the entire fifteen minutes. Twice before I’ve walked to Jon’s house three blocks away and put cream cheese on my bagel. A woman named Ida calls your house if you’re late. She’s got my father’s home and office numbers but he may not be at either. I’m probably going to need to run.

  “What are you looking for, Abe? Let me do it. You drive.”

  “I got it, Rone. I can do both.”

  The basement door beneath the sanctuary plops you out on Lemur Avenue. In theory I could be in Jon’s driveway about five minutes from the time the bell rings. Whether he’s there or not I’ll take his bike from his garage, ride to Carteret Savings, withdraw as much bar mitzvah cash as they’ll let me, and take a taxi to Newark’s Penn Station.

  “Abe, you’re swerving.”

  “I’m not swerving.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “NPR.”

  “You’re on AM.”

  The six fifty Amtrak for Providence leaves from track 6 unless it’s raining or snowing—I’m not sure why. Get on the train. Ride for three hours and fifteen minutes and have a room at the Narragansett Inn around elevenish. I block my face with my suitcase and stare at the back of my father’s head. He switches the radio off and yawns so wide his eyes squeeze closed.

  “How ’bout a little preview for Rona?” he says through it.

  “What?”

  “The Torah reading. Let’s hear it. A little preview for Rona.”

  He turns onto Glendale Avenue toward the temple and searches for me in the rearview. Rona starts to twist her rings when the silence gets long. “Piedmont in June,” she finally says. “Look at all this green.”

  “Jacob?”

  When I look up at the mirror his eyes are there. “Did you hear me?” he says.

  “Yes . . .”

  “Then let’s hear it. ‘Vaydabaaaaaaaare Adonai.’”

  Rona glances back at me and smiles with warmth. “Don’t feel like you have to do it for me,” she says.

  “Yes,” my father says. “Feel like you have to. I’m asking you to do it. We have two days to make this thing perfect.”

  “It’s okay, Abram.”

  “It’s not okay. He knows the beginning by heart, we’ve been doin’ it for weeks. Are you sick?” He cranes his neck to see me and reaches for my knee. “Anybody home? Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?” says Rona, trying to keep things light.

  My father faces her.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” she says.

  “You’d think I’d asked him to cut his chest open.”

  “It’s okay, Abe. Don’t get upset.”

  “I’m not upset!”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “All I want is a little of it,” he says.

  No. All he wants is his crank monkey to sing his girlfriend a little Torah ditty before he drops it off at Jew school for three hours. All he wants is what he wants and this time it’s inside my head. Naso, from Numbers 4:21–7:89: “Va’yidaber Adonai el Moshe lemor naso et rosh b’nei gershon gom hem laveit avotom l’michpachtom . . .”

  My father thumps the steering wheel with the heel of his palm. “Do you know it or not? We’ve got two days.”

  I know it like I know my own name. “I know it,” I say softly. “I’ll do it later.”

  “Great,” says Rona. “Later’s great.”

  My father slouches in his seat. “Great. It’s all fine with me,” he says. “I’m not the one who has to get up there and do it.”

  “I hear you sing beautifully,” Rona says. “I was telling your dad I know two other Libras who also read Hebrew very well. Does Jamie Berkowitz still go to your temple?”

  Rona’s got her back to the passenger door so she can talk and see me at the same time. She’s an attractive, middle-aged Jewish lady from Landview who once played Dolly to my father’s Horace Vandergelder. She has merlotish brown hair, overly attentive eyes, and enough memorized self-help clichés to sink a battleship. Married three times to “moronic male assholes” she’s now painfully open about the “festering matters of her psyche,” which were “virtually erased” after a series of epiphanies during her first “est-capade.” These matters included her father’s rampant adultery and her mother’s neglect and addiction and her sister’s chronic bulimia and her only son’s amphetamine issues and all of this I learn in the first six minutes of knowing her in a booth at Friendly’s. At the time she was in full tennis-club regalia—the visor, the head and wrist bands, the pleated pink skirt, and had a rock on her pointer finger the size of a plum. Today she’s in a gray suit, having come from yet another in a series of training sessions. By August she says she’ll be a certified “body catcher” and “confronter,” roles that assist the leader in these Werner Erhard Self-Training Seminars. Rona’s Lord God is a man named Randal, who leads the gatherings from a lawn chair on a portable stage. And ever since my father bumped into her at a Purim carnival this spring, he’s been quite smitten by Randal’s vision and the outcome of his drive-through redemption.

  “I’m embarrassed,” my father says to her. “He’s never done this before.”

  “It’s fine, Abram.”

  “You can’t sing two lines, Jacob?”

  “I have a sore throat,” I say.

  My father’s neck pivots toward me as if I shot a gun. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Abe. It’s okay.”

  “Rona. Please.”

  “He said his throat hurts.”

  “I heard him.”

  “Hold on,” she says. “I think I have a sucker.” She reaches into her Louis Vuitton and heads for the bottom.

  I see the back of my father’s head shiver with frustration but he is somehow able to speak with calm. “How ’bout if I start it and—?”

  “My throat hurts,” I whisper.

  Our eyes meet again in the rearview. I look away from him, out the window, and begin my escape from the top: (1) hafsaka, (2) sanctuary door, (3) Jonny’s bike, (4) bar mitzvah cash, (5) Penn Station, (6) New Rochelle to Stamford. Stamford to Bridgeport . . .

  “Found it,” says Rona, lifting a mashed butterscotch above her head. “Here, J, this’ll soothe your throat.”

  I slowly reach for it. “Thank you.”

  My father faces me as I plop the thing in my mouth. Like a furious two-year-old, he cannot have what he wants. He’d do the stupid Torah portion himself but his Hebrew ranks in the third grade. Of all the academic balls I’ve fumbled at his feet I’m somehow cursed with the gift he most admires. To stand amid the stained glass of this holy house of God and combine the texture of the Judaic language with a musical performance is his wettest dream. The best he could pull off was president, the only secular role on the beema but one that still allows him a pulpit to address the audience. Someone has to announce upcoming calendar events and gift-shop hours and whether anyone left her umbrella under her seat. I used to get a certain pleasure from being able to do what he could not. Read and sing from these ancient scrolls. Even the most hunched and hairy-eared shoolies were impressed with my ability to lead them in prayer. But as I became the little blond sidekick to the nasi-at-large, I soon saw my kudos rerouted to their source. My manager, my trainer, my liaison to God. After all, it is he who gave me life. He who gave me Judaism. And he who gave me the gig. So it only makes sense, dear congregants, that the achievement would be his.

  “Let’s start over,” he says. “Okay? Hi, Jacob, how are you? You’ve met Rona. Great. Would it be possible for us to hear a little of Saturday’s Torah portion? Ya see, it’s been three days since I’ve seen you and I’d like to tell you how it sounds with a day and a half to go. I’d like to know how much more rehearsing you’re going to require. These are not ridiculous requests. There are over a hundre
d people coming to this thing.”

  There might be six if he didn’t send out invitations. Reading from the Torah or wearing tzitzit or keeping kosher or wrapping tefillin are all known as mitzvahs, or acts of obligation, in Judaism. Refusal to perform what is obligated by God would turn my father inside out. He knows the congregants all heard about Asher. Expelled from the Jew school for what they called kcheebul amanoot; or, in English, some pretty wacky vandalism. My father’s horrified by this, can hear the gasps of the temple board members in his sleep. But this nasi, this temple president, has a second son who can chant from the Torah. A fair and blond-haired son who can sing the language more beautifully than most. So he needs me. He needs his trained yeshiva boy to blast that room and let all those people know how devoted we are to performing mitzvahs. I am my father’s salvation for Asher’s crime; I am his very hope to stay on this stage. And as I sit here with this sucker in my mouth, flying toward more Hebrew school, the only thing I can think to do is get my ass on that train. I click the butterscotch against my two front teeth, and then bite it with a crunch.

  “Would you please,” he says, “just . . . finish that candy.”

  We ride in silence and it’s making Rona tense. She can’t seem to get comfortable. She faces me once again and asks how I’m feeling. I tell her the candy is helping and try to think of something else to fill the quiet. “So,” I whisper, holding my throat, “you were in training today?” She takes a long and smiley deep breath, and prepares to talk.

  “I was. Has your father told you about it?”

  I nod. “A little.”

  “I really don’t want to come off preachy . . .” she says.

  Jesus Christ. An est pitch. I asked the woman about her day.

  “. . . but if you ever decided to do this for yourself and the lives of those you love, your days on this earth will be altered forever.”

  My father broadens his shoulders and consciously breathes out his nose. The topic excites him and it may just cool him off. “Can you hear her?” he says, facing me, a finger on the wheel. “Is it too windy back there?”

  I shake my head.

  “Go ahead, Rone. You’ve got all of him. He’s listening. Listen well, Jacob. With your ears.”

  Listen with my ears. (1) Hafsaka, (2) New Haven to Old Say-brook, (3) Old Saybrook to New London, (4) New London to Mystic.

  “Firstly, J, a huge and confusing misconception in our society is the notion of victimhood.” Rona’s got this memorized. She speaks in the robotic rhythm of an untrained actor. “But I’m here to tell ya that there just ain’t no victims out there. Weird, huh? Maybe. But that’s what you’re gonna learn first. And ‘compassion,’ that ever-popular word of ours? You can get rid of that too,” she says, balling up nothing like a mime and tossing it over her shoulder. “Now, I see the way you’re reacting to the things I’m saying. ‘No compassion? No victims? You’ve gotta be missing a few cards from your deck, Rona.’ Am I right?”

  I slowly nod.

  “But compassion, Jacob, is reserved for victims. And there are no what?”

  My father looks back at me. He looks at the road. He looks back at me.

  “Victims?” I say.

  “Right,” she says and claps. “Because if you take responsibility for your own life than aaaaaaaall the horrible things that have happened to you become your own responsibility and the reason for this is that . . . you . . . alone . . . what?”

  My father looks back. He looks at the road. He looks back at me.

  “Um . . .”

  “Caused them to occuu-uuur,” she sings with hands high.

  “You see?” my father says, shifting in his seat with excitement. “Only when we accept this, only when we realize that every being creates their own lives—”

  “Their own realities, Abram.”

  “Lives, realities—either one, no?”

  “Randal says ‘realities.’”

  “Okay . . . only when we realize that we create our own realities are we in a position to resolve the issues that plague us.”

  “Right, Abe.” Rona hops up on her knees to face me. “Before I found est and the wisdom of Randal, I was in a bad, bad marriage, Jacob. I used to look out at the world and just feel helpless every single day I woke up. And along with my own horrible sense of self, I’d acquired the taste of all the many miseries of our society that we see on the news and read in the paper and I could taste it, taste it right on the end of my tongue. Right here,” she says, pointing at it. “And I was vulnerable, partly because I’m a Gemini—sure, goes without saying—but more because I’d been stripped of what Randal calls my ‘birth-skin.’”

  Before Rona came aboard in the spring, my father was dating all the time. He overbooked Saturday nights almost every week and told the three of us to help him manage the overflow. There were dozens of conversations like: “If L calls don’t tell her I’m with D. But if H calls tell her I’m with P or R but only if she asks. If P calls, tell her I’ll call her tonight but never mention D.” I panic on the phone once and tell a woman named Viv that he’s in the bathroom when he’s really out with Nancy or Bettrice or Donna Bickinstein. She calls back four times. “Just put him on, Jacob.” “He’s pretty sick, Viv,” I say, knocking on his closet door.

  “. . . and Randal has to laugh at this because what he says is, ‘What is . . . is, and what ain’t . . . ain’t. And there just ain’t no in between.’”

  The first year out he only seems to date stewardesses. My theory is that he had all these pent up years traveling with a fantasy, and suddenly it was legal to mount these women with their coffee-stained smocks pushed up to their necks. I think there were about five from various airlines and each of them fell in love in minutes. To them he’s like this fleeting assemblage of everything they’ve ever wanted in a man but couldn’t find: affectionate and present and glowingly receptive to whatever came out of their mouths. They saw a cuddly and attractive accountant with the listening skills of Gandhi. He saw a lunch cart with its hair in a bun and two nights to burn in Newark. They all get gooey with how they’re treated, how they’re touched, and how it all might very well blossom into retirement. Just before Rona there was a People Express employee named Valerie. I saw her hamburger-brown uniform thrown over the shower rod one morning. She’s in her thirties, from Tuscon, wears tons of glittery blue makeup on her eyes and knows every single Abba lyric. She brings her six-year-old son, Dakota, to our house during a three-day layover, and he, like all the stewardess offspring, hits it off great with Gabe and Dara. And not long after, like most of them, Valerie’s enamored and slowly moving all her crap into the house. But just when her presence starts to seem less weird, she informs my dad that she’s a born-again Christian. He hangs in there for a few more weeks (he did convince my mother to convert to Judaism) but then asks her point-blank, during “gratefuls” at Shabbat dinner: “If Hitler were to confess his sins, would he be forgiven for the atrocities he inflicted on the Jews?” Valerie thinks about it. She gives an answer. My father listens. After he zips her suitcase, he calls her a taxi and waits with her in the front hall. I watch him pace a bit in the driveway that night after the cab pulls away. He loosens his neck with a few head rotations and soon comes inside. Within the hour he and Adina Meyer are on their way to Sardi’s and balcony seats for Jackie Mason. He never goes goyim again.

  “. . . a learning curve in which all this useless pain can be lifted in two glorious weekends of self-reflection and ‘mind maintenance.’ And after I wept in front of Randal and thrashed about on the carpet of the Oak Room at the Parsippany Hilton, I felt this huge burden of guilt lift from my ‘I-cage’ being, me, wrapped in my birth-skin, and my “You-cage” being, all the desperate and seemingly hopeless people who suffer because I now understood that they . . . were responsible . . . in a way . . . for all their own derailments. They, Jacob, had created their own realities. Just as I had created mine.”

  This is a much more elaborate pitch than my father’s ever done
. He just says he’ll give me the money for admission and I’ll come out with a whole new respect for our relationship.

  “So, to get back to your question, I’m training to be a ‘confronter,’ which means I’d stand nose to nose with you and say absolutely nothing as Randal paces back and forth, playing the roll of the ‘bull-baiter.’ This is when he shouts in your face and breaks us down into the children we all are inside.”

  “At the time I hated it,” my father says, craning his neck to face me.

  “Your father cried like a baby,” she says, stroking his earlobe. “We’re all so afraid of the school-yard bully. But he too is inside us, all of us, scratching away at our birth-skins.”

  “He was stripping me of my dignity,” my father says.

  “Yes. Or your locked-up I-cage. Your father became, in essence, a piece of garbage in Randal’s hands. But in a good way.”

  I see the temple.

  “Ya see, Jacob . . .”

  (1) Mystic to Westerly, (2) Westerly to Kingston.

  “. . . Randal feels that the brain is a self-perpetuating machine, programmed to repeat the same mechanistic responses to similar situations facing people in their daily lives. And so, what he’s ultimately saying is that true enlightenment is knowing you are a machine. Whether you accept this or not, it is so.” Rona reaches out for my hand and I slowly give it to her. “He then tells you to accept the true nature of your own mind. Assume responsibility for creating everything that occurs in your life, and in doing so . . . you will become whatever it is you want to be. In a word, Jacob, you will be perfect. Just the way you are.”

  My father wipes his eyes on his sleeve as he pulls into the Beth Tikvah parking lot. Rona smiles and drops her head on his shoulder.

  “All you have to do is show up,” he says. “I’ll pay every dime of it.”

  “I’d love to see you try it, Jacob. I’d love to see you give this to your father and to yourself.”

  “Oh, he’ll be there,” says my dad. “I can tell he’s interested. He’ll be there.”

  I slide on the interior toward the door and reach for the handle. Before I open it my father says, “Hey,” and I stop.