by Allen Zadoff
“You don’t pay anything.”
“You know what I mean,” Mom says.
There’s no way Mom could afford my school. Tuition this year was nearly thirty thousand dollars. Without Zadie Zuckerman’s money, I’d be a public school kid, and Mom would be panicked about paying for college in two years. Mom hated Zadie Zuckerman and she refuses to admit his money is still running our life. It’s not just my education money either. If Zadie hadn’t bought this house when my parents got married, we’d be living in an apartment in some crappy suburb instead of the posh slums of Brentwood.
And if Zadie hadn’t survived the Holocaust, none of us would be here in the first place.
Not quite true. Mom would be here, but the rest of us wouldn’t.
“I think you can relax about all of this,” Mom says. “They don’t throw students out of private school.”
“We signed a contract, Mom.”
Mom’s phone powers up and buzzes several times.
“How many calls …?” Mom starts to say, and then looks at me. “You called me twenty-five times?”
I’m thinking I called Mom about five times. That means there are twenty or so calls from school. A couple dozen messages asking about her accident.
It’s time to tell her what happened before I get in real trouble.
I’ll tell her the truth and we can figure out how to deal with the situation together. That’s what parents and children are supposed to do. Problem solve. Talk it out.
“I only called you a few times,” I tell Mom.
“Then who are all these people?” she says.
She holds the phone towards me like I’m going to decode it for her. Then she looks at it again.
She squints, trying to decide which message to listen to first.
I have to tell her now. It’s always better to hear bad news from the source rather than second-hand. I know from experience. I learned about my parents’ divorce when the process server handed Mom papers at the house one afternoon after I’d gotten home from school.
Mom starts to press her phone—
“Mom, when you didn’t show up at school, I might have said something I shouldn’t have—”
Mom tosses her phone on the table.
“I can’t deal with this right now,” she says.
It vibrates against the wood, another call coming in.
“It’s too much. I need my music,” Mom says, and heads for the living room.
I brace for an onslaught of yogic chanting. Mom puts it on every time she gets overwhelmed.
Her phone buzzes away on the table.
I turn it off.
I go into the living room. Mom is lying on a yoga mat on the floor, the chanting playing in the background.
Mom can practice yoga in the living room because we barely have any furniture. I have a bed, so I’m not exactly neglected, but if you want to relax in our house and you’re not sleeping, you have to sit on a pillow on the floor. I’d kill for a soft chair. Cool leather that warms up when you sit in it for a while. If I told Mom I wanted a leather armchair, she’d accuse me of animal murder. But I figure you can make a leather chair out of a deceased cow. You don’t have to kill it and steal its skin like Mom says. You just let it die peacefully and quietly, then you use it as a resource. Would the Great Spirit be angry about that?
Great Spirit. That’s Mom’s phrase.
Mom opens her eyes, her meditation ended.
“I’m back,” she says. “Back and better than ever. Now, what did you want to tell me?”
“About tonight at school—”
“Sanskrit. I said I’m sorry I missed your conference. Can’t we let bygones be bygones?”
“It isn’t bygone. It’s by-here.”
Mom lifts her legs, presses with her hands, and effortlessly lifts herself up into a headstand.
Which leaves me looking at her butt.
“Mom. I’m trying to talk to you.”
“I’m listening,” she says.
“But you’re upside down.”
“Upside down is a matter of perspective. How do you know you’re not the one who’s upside down?”
“Because gravity is my friend right now. It’s your enemy.”
“It’s both of our enemies. I’m just using it to my advantage.”
This is our little game. Who is upside down, who is right side up? What’s it all mean?
“I’m very upset—” I start to say.
“My son,” Mom says, cutting me off.
It’s formal and weird, but it does the trick. I’m a sucker for my son.
I take a step towards her.
Mom smiles at me from her headstand. People don’t look the same upside down as they do right side up. Sometimes they look like monsters.
“Please don’t be angry with me,” Mom says. “I’ll call school tomorrow and talk to them. I’ll beg them for forgiveness. I’ll get on my hands and knees—”
“It’s not funny, Mom—”
“I’ll tell them you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to them. The best thing that’s happened to the Jewish race since sliced matzoh.”
“We’re not a race,” I say.
“Whatever we are,” Mom says.
“I don’t want you to call,” I say, because I can’t have her calling school before I tell her what I did tonight. Then it occurs to me that maybe I don’t have to tell her at all. I could just go into school and deal with the situation myself, leave Mom out of it entirely.
The more I think about it, the better the idea sounds to me.
“I’ll take care of school,” I say.
“Are you sure?” she says.
“Positive.”
“Thank you, honey. Maybe you’ll do a Dog with me before bed?”
Mom wants me to do the yoga pose Downward Facing Dog. I hate the Dog.
“Pretty please,” she says.
I sigh, go down on all fours.
“Now tuck into a crouch,” Mom says, going into teacher mode.
I tuck, but I feel my body fighting me. My head would like to do what Mom wants, but my flesh resists. It doesn’t like being folded up. It wants to expand. It wants to breathe freely.
“Can you roll over and up?” Mom says.
I try, but I don’t have enough strength in my core. That’s what Mom calls your middle section.
“Sorry,” I say, after I fall twice.
“It’s okay, honey,” Mom says. “You’ll get it eventually. It’s not about perfection. It’s about the fact that we keep trying.”
She’s making an effort to sound patient, but I hear the frustration. Mom’s a yoga teacher. She should be able to teach her son yoga.
“Do a modified,” she says.
I do a modified headstand, first leaning forward, then climbing my feet up the back of the wall behind me. When I’m nearly upside down, Mom says:
“I have to tell you what happened tonight at the Center.”
Mom works at the Center for Yogic Expression in Brentwood. It’s more than a yoga studio. It’s a movement. A community. A way of life. Forty other things, too, at least according to their brochure.
“It’s so exciting,” Mom says. “Maybe you’ll understand why I forgot about your conference.”
I doubt it, I think. Then I say, “Tell me everything, Mom.”
That earns me a huge smile. Mom loves it when she’s the center of attention.
“We had our monthly meeting, and they asked me to teach a prenatal class!” Mom says. “Can you believe it?”
“Is that good?”
“It’s amazing. So many things are coming towards me right now—in my personal life, at work. I’m very open to receiving gifts from the universe.”
“What’s happening in your personal life?” I crane my neck to look at Mom from the headstand.
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be personal,” she says with a wink.
Does Mom have a new boyfriend? The idea makes my stomach turn. Mom isn’t know
n for her primo choices when it comes to love. Every few months she crashes and burns with some loser, and Sweet Caroline and I are left to pick up the pieces.
“I want to tell you about the prenatal class,” Mom says. “I finally get to share my maternal experience and my yoga training. Mommies and babies in a class, Sanskrit. How exciting is that?”
“If it’s prenatal, they’re not babies yet.”
“They’re still babies. They’re just interior babies.”
“There’s no such thing, Mom.”
“I don’t mean it literally. I mean life, Sanskrit. They are alive in there, and I can get them started on yoga at a critical time in their development.”
“They’ll be born doing Salute to the Placenta.”
“That’s funny, sweetie, but I’m serious about this. You can affect a child in a very positive way if you intervene early. I wish I’d known about yoga before you were born.”
Mom didn’t become a yoga freak until after the divorce. Does she think there’s something wrong with me that yoga would have made better?
“Is that your big news?” I say. “That’s why you missed my conference?”
“It’s only the first part,” she says, “and part two is the best part, because it’s about you.”
“What about me?”
“I need your help to teach the class.”
“I can’t teach yoga. I can’t even do yoga.”
“You don’t have to teach. I want the ladies to see us together, see how we interact as mother and son.”
“Why me? Why not Sweet Caroline?”
“Sweet Caroline hates yoga. Besides, she’s busy with her friends.”
“And I’m not?”
“You’ve got more free time. Anyway, I want the ladies to see what it’s like to have a boy.”
“What’s it like?”
“What kind of question is that?”
The weirder a conversation gets with Mom, the more she acts like everything she’s saying is obvious and you’re an idiot for not getting it.
“So you want me to help you teach a prenatal yoga class?”
“Not want. I need you,” Mom says. “I can’t do it without you.”
That makes me feel good, even if it is crazy.
“The first class is tomorrow afternoon. We could go to dinner after,” Mom says. “We can break my juice fast together.”
“Just you and me?”
“You, me, delicious food, and an adjacent bathroom.”
“Too much information,” I say, and Mom laughs.
I try to remember the last time Mom and I did something like that. I don’t come up with anything.
“Does that sound good?” Mom says.
“I’ll check my schedule. Yup, I’m free,” I say.
“Sanskrit,” she says, and she smiles.
Just my name and a smile. Nothing else.
I feel dizzy from it. Or maybe it’s the headstand.
I think about school and everything that happened earlier tonight. I try to feel how angry I was, but I can’t right now.
“I knew I could count on you,” Mom says. She effortlessly drops out of her headstand.
“Bathroom again,” she says, and she scurries off, her bare feet slapping on the wood floor.
I drop out of my headstand, and I get the spins. I close my eyes, get down on all fours like an animal.
I wait for the world to stop moving.
For a second I think it’s not going to happen, I’m going to be in permanent spin, a comet spiraling forever in the darkness of space.
Then my head slows, the nausea passes, and the room comes back to stillness.
I’m not lost in space. I’m in our living room without any chairs.
“It was a snowball rolling down a hill.”
That’s what Herschel says a few minutes later when I call him from my room. I have to keep my voice down because Mom hates for me to use the cell phone when I’m in the house. She hates for me to use it at all. She’s afraid the radiation will affect my brain. For similar reasons, she won’t buy me a laptop because she doesn’t want me to put it on my lap in case I want to have kids in the future. It’s crazy.
“I was hoping the teachers would be discreet,” I say.
“They were discreet. They discreetly announced to everyone that you were in the midst of a major family crisis and could use the support of the community.”
“That’s discretion?”
“Jewish discretion. Did you get a lot of calls after that?”
“Not as many as you would have gotten.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Come on, Herschel. The community loves you. What happened when you broke your foot?”
“People were very supportive, thank God.”
“You said you got two hundred calls.”
“More like a hundred. But this is not a competition.”
“Of course not.”
“How many did you get?” Herschel says.
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen.” Herschel pauses, searching for the right thing to say. “That’s not insignificant.”
“It’s not a hundred.”
“It’s only one night, and only the junior class knows. Wait until tomorrow.”
I think about the entire school hearing the story of my mother’s accident.
Herschel says, “Not that there will be a tomorrow. You’re going to set the record straight, aren’t you?”
“I can’t. Mom doesn’t know what happened.”
Silence on the line.
“I tried to tell her. It’s just … It’s complicated, Herschel.”
“The longer this goes on, the worse it will be.”
I pace in my room, run my finger over the collection of Talmud on my shelf. My finger comes away covered in dust.
“What am I going to do?” I say.
“Are you asking me for advice?” Herschel says.
“Yes.”
“I won’t give it to you.”
“Don’t play this game now. I can’t take it.”
“No game. It’s not my job to tell you what to do,” Herschel says. “I’ve made that mistake before and I’ve learned my lesson.”
“Then give me spiritual counseling,” I say.
When Herschel tries to counsel me, I usually slap him down, remind him he’s not a rabbi but a seventeen-year-old kid who started wearing payis two years ago. But right now I keep quiet.
“The Torah teaches us that if you tell a lie, you become a liar,” Herschel says. “It’s a matter of character.”
“But there are extenuating circumstances. I mean, one lie in and of itself does not make me a liar, right?”
“If you commit one murder, you are a murderer. Why would a lie be any different?”
“Because nobody died from my lie.”
“Your soul died a little.”
“Oh, please.”
“You don’t think so?” Herschel says. “What if I had lied to the Nazis?”
“There are no Nazis.”
“But there were. Follow my logic.”
“Lied about what?” he says.
“Let’s say I was in Poland during the war, and the Nazis asked where my family was hiding, and I lied to them.”
“It’s still a lie,” Herschel says. “But I think God might forgive a lie that’s intended to save a life.”
“This is similar.”
“How so?”
“It’s a lie to save my college career.”
“College is not equivalent to a human life.”
“Brandeis is.”
“Very funny.”
“So you want me to tell the professors the truth? What about Yitzhak?”
Yitzhak was a visiting Israeli student who broke the Code of Conduct last year. He got expelled for plagiarism.
“They sent him all the way back to Tel Aviv,” I say.
“Actions have consequences,” Herschel says. “I know better than most.”
Herschel clears his throat. “Don’t change the subject. We’re talking about you. And ethics.”
I groan. Where is the old Herschel who used to give advice? That’s what friends do for other friends. They tell you what you should do when you’re in a bind and can’t decide for yourself. But Herschel has become some sort of sage who speaks in abstractions and biblical verses. It’s frustrating.
“It’s late now,” Herschel says. “Sleep on it, pray on it, and you’ll know the right answer in the morning.”
Thanks for nothing, I think.
But I don’t say it. I express my gratitude, hang up, and turn off the phone.
Pray on it.
What does that really mean? I can say the Hebrew prayers they teach me in school, but they have no meaning to me. I can use the English translations, but those just sound like gibberish. They all begin the same way:
Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe …
I sit on my bed. I think about all the different prayers I know.
Dr. Prem, the chiropractor that Mom sends me to, calls out to the Divine.
“Repeat after me,” he says. “I am willing, ready, and able to experience the Divine.”
But I’m not willing, ready, and able.
Mom tells me to access the Great Spirit.
None of those works for me.
I should be praying to HaShem. That’s what they teach us.
I try it in my own words. I say, “I’m sorry, HaShem, for lying about Mom—”
I can’t even finish the prayer. I feel like an idiot, alone and talking to myself in an empty room.
Is this what prayer is supposed to feel like?
Instead of praying, I get practical. I need to buy myself some time. But how?
Mom’s phone.
I open my door and slip into the hallway.
Mom and Sweet Caroline are in bed.
I make my way to the kitchen.
I navigate by moonlight shining through the kitchen window. I can see the black square of Mom’s phone still on the kitchen table where she tossed it. She often leaves it on the table and forgets to plug it in. Then she’s baffled when it’s not charged the next day. Usually I plug it in for her, but that has the unintended effect of making her believe there are power fairies who keep her battery at 100 percent.
I pick up the phone, slip it into my pocket—
