by Allen Zadoff
“What are you doing?” Sweet Caroline says.
She’s standing in the kitchen doorway. I swear, the girl has elephant ears.
“Nothing,” I whisper.
“You’re taking Mom’s phone.”
“I’m plugging it in for her.”
“The plug is on the counter. You’re putting it in your pocket.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“He’s not our Lord.”
“He’s someone’s Lord. You could have a little respect for that.”
“Not now, Caroline.”
She sucks in a quick breath. Her cheeks puff out, and she picks at the corner of her lip.
“Don’t pick,” I say. She picks until she bleeds. It’s as gross as it sounds.
“Don’t tell me what to do!” she says. She pulls on her lip even harder.
“Sweet Caroline,” I say quickly. “Very sweet.”
She relaxes a little and comes into the kitchen.
“Why are you stealing Mom’s phone?”
“I’m prepping it for her. For the morning. She asked me to.”
“So I can tell her you’re doing it?”
“Tell her whatever you want,” I say.
“I will. First thing in the morning.”
She starts to leave.
“Wait—”
“What?”
“I’m stealing Mom’s phone,” I say.
“Why?”
“I’m in trouble.”
That perks her up. Sweet Caroline loves trouble. Especially other people’s.
“What kind of trouble?” she says.
“The kind that gets you thrown out of school.”
“That’s not a problem.”
“Why not?”
“You hate school.”
“I can’t get expelled. I have to do college applications in a few months. How can I explain something like that?”
“You can always do a year in Israel. They’ll take anyone.”
“Very funny,” I say.
Sweet Caroline hops onto a chair at the kitchen counter.
“So, what happened?” she says.
“It’s a secret.”
“I love secrets.”
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“Of course not,” she says. “But how can I keep a secret if I don’t know what the secret is?”
Before I open my mouth, I know it’s a mistake.
It’s always a mistake to tell secrets to Sweet Caroline. It’s like the Miranda warnings. Anything you say may be used against you. Only in Sweet Caroline’s case, it will be used against you. But how can I keep this secret without her help?
I know I shouldn’t say anything.
But I do.
“You’re in trouble, Sanskrit.”
I open my eyes. Mom is standing outside my room with my door cracked open. We don’t open each other’s doors in our house without permission. It’s part of Mom’s respect-the-individual policy.
I sit up, panicked.
“What kind of trouble?” I say. I’m imagining all manner of terrible things. Sweet Caroline ratted me out. Professors from school came to the door.
“You’re late for school,” Mom says through the tiny crack.
Most mothers wake you up before you’re late for school. At least this is what I’ve been told.
“You overslept,” Mom says. “Sorry.”
The clock says 8:15. I sit up in bed.
“Will you drive us?” I say.
“Sweet Caroline already left. You know how she is.”
Right. Sweet Caroline sets two alarms, then wakes up before both of them. It’s the definition of anal adolescence.
“She didn’t bother to wake us up?” I say.
Mom shrugs. Sweet Caroline’s still a perfect little girl in her eyes. A perfect little girl who goes to a psychologist. But we’re not supposed to talk about that.
“Of course I’ll drive you. Just let me hop in the shower.”
Mom closes my door.
That’s when it hits me. Mom can’t drive me because the school thinks she was in a car accident. If we pull up smiling and waving, it’s going to be a disaster.
“Mom!” I shout.
I jump out of bed. The air is cool on my bare legs. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I see a scrawny kid, a miniature version of Dad. I think of Dad crammed into his home workshop surrounded by clutter. The last time he had a date was the middle of the last decade. That does not bode well for my future.
“Mom!”
I hear the shower running in the bathroom down the hall.
I rush back into my room and slide on yesterday’s jeans. Choosing clothes is hard enough on a good day. On a bad day it’s better to just sniff yesterday’s pants and put them back on. Fewer decisions. Less room for error.
The pocket is heavy. I reach in and pull out Mom’s phone.
Last night comes rushing back to me.
I make sure Mom is still in the shower, and I turn on the phone. It takes a minute to warm up, and then the NEW VOICE MAIL window starts to pop.
“Did you call me?” Mom says. She’s suddenly in my door, dripping wet in a towel.
I jam her phone into my pocket. The e-mail indicator chimes.
“What’s that?” she says.
“Nothing,” I say. “Hey, Mom, forget the ride. I’m going to walk with Herschel this morning instead.”
“You never walk with him anymore.”
“That’s not true,” I say, even though it is.
“Hasn’t school already—”
“I just called him. He’s late, too,” I say. “Funny coincidence.”
“Alright then. I have to run. I’ve got a level I-II at 8:30 and I can’t be late.”
“Good luck.”
“Don’t forget our prenatal class this afternoon.”
“I’m there. I promise,” I say.
And unlike Mom, I keep my promises.
Mom smiles and pats at her thigh with the corner of the towel.
“By the way, have you seen my phone?”
“Haven’t seen it,” I say.
Mom shrugs and disappears down the hall. Five minutes later she’s out the door, and I’ve got a choice to make. Do I go to school and lie all day? Or do I lie once and stay home?
I decide to risk it at school.
“The universe is not what we think it is.”
That’s what Professor Schwartzburg says in the middle of English class that afternoon. Then he pauses as good teachers do, waiting to see if he’s hooked us.
He hasn’t. It’s English class. Why is he talking about the universe again?
We hate him for this.
Or maybe it’s just me.
I’m in a terrible mood from dodging questions about Mom all day. Herschel wasn’t kidding about the school community leaping into action. Everyone is worried. Everyone is asking about our family. Each question has put me in a progressively fouler mood and forced me to lie more. My usual patience with Schwartzburg’s philosophical musings is hanging by a thread.
“There is a great, mysterious force out there,” Professor Schwartzburg says. He adjusts his sports coat, yanking it down by the flaps.
“What we thought was the fabric of the universe is not the fabric at all,” he says. “There is something greater underneath—a force that has been there all along, but has been invisible to us until recently.”
He fails to mention there is a great, mysterious force in here, sitting four rows in front of me. It is in the form of a girl.
Not just any girl.
The Initials.
It’s hard to ignore her when I see her every day in Schwartzburg’s class. Four rows. That’s all that separates us. That means I’m treated to an exquisite view of the back of her head, her left earlobe, the flip of hair when she uses her finger to push it behind said earlobe, the left shoulder upon which the hair falls, and sometimes, if only for a secon
d, the side of her face as she turns to whisper to Talya Stein. I watch her lips moving from four rows away and try to guess what she’s saying. I imagine I am Talya Stein’s ear and The Initials’ words are for me, each one carried on a puff of sweet breath.
“You will not find this force in our physics or astronomy textbooks,” Professor Schwartzburg says. “Scientists have only begun to understand it. They call it dark matter.”
The Initials twists a flap of hair, spinning her finger around and around.
She might as well be spinning me.
The Initials is my great burden to bear. I have to see her each day, all the while knowing we will never be closer than we were in second grade. Our glory days have been over for almost as long as my sister has been alive.
If that isn’t a powerful force, I don’t know what is.
“Excuse me, professor,” Herschel says. “What does any of this have to do with Gatsby?”
We’ve been reading The Great Gatsby, which I’ve taken to calling The Great Goyim when Herschel and I are alone.
“What does anything have to do with anything?” Professor Schwartzburg says.
Herschel shakes his head, and his payis, the little curls that religious Jews wear in front of their ears, jiggle back and forth. Herschel is the only one who lets his payis grow in our school. He’s the most Jewish kid in Jewish school, and I am the least. Although my family is technically Jewish, without Zadie’s money I would never be in religious school. We’re like a lot of families in Los Angeles. Not seriously Jewish. More like Jewish adjacent.
Herschel’s family used to be just like us. They pushed him into Jewish school solely for the academics, and he hated it as much as I did. He lives down the street, and we’d walk to school every day bad-mouthing the hell out of the place.
Then Herschel went on a school trip to Israel along with most of the freshman class. He tried to get me to come along, but I told him the Jews spent forty years wandering lost in the desert. Why should we volunteer to go back?
Something happened to Herschel on that trip. When he returned, he took a cab directly from LAX to my house. I opened the door to find a bearded kid in a black suit and a fedora.
“Herschel? Is that you?” I said.
“We’ve got it all wrong, Sanskrit.”
“What do we have wrong?” I said.
“God. Judaism. It’s not what we thought it was.”
“What is it?” I said.
“It’s … life or death,” he said. “We have to find God. It’s our true purpose in this world.”
That’s when I knew I’d lost him. He left L.A. as my best friend and returned as Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof. Sometimes kids get flipped liked Herschel, but a few weeks of L.A. traffic and In-N-Out Burger help them come to their senses. But it’s been nearly two years since that trip, and the old Herschel is nowhere to be seen.
Now that Herschel is a super Jew, I’m all alone at the bottom of the religious pack, slightly below Tyler, who’s only Jewish on his mother’s side. He’s part of the executive committee’s diversity initiative. Actually, he’s the entire diversity initiative. They tried to recruit a few non-observant Jews when the economy slumped, but none of them lasted except him. It turns out that not a lot of non-observant Jews want to observe. Big surprise.
“Professor, I want to read Gatsby,” Tyler says. I notice he’s been paying close attention since we started reading the book. Something about Gatsby’s search for identity is very moving to him.
“Gatsby is all of us,” Professor Schwartzburg says, seeming to get his lecture back on course. “Just as this mysterious dark matter winds its way through everything.”
So much for back on track.
“I agree with Tyler,” I say, trying to score some points. “I’d like to get back to the novel.”
I’m hoping The Initials will turn around and see who said it, but she doesn’t. Back of her head. That’s all I get. Eight months of rear view. While it’s not a terrible sight, it’s only half of what I want.
“We will return to the novel, of course,” Professor Schwartzburg says. “By the way, how is your mother, Aaron?”
Another teacher who won’t use my first name.
“I’m waiting for word,” I say.
“Keep your cell phone on,” Schwartzburg says, which is against school policy, but overnight I’ve become the guy who gets special treatment.
“Oh, it’s on,” I say.
“We’re here for you,” Barry Goldwasser says to me.
I hate Barry Goldwasser.
He’s the founder of the Mitzvah Minute Club, our school service organization. Their mission statement? Good deeds in under a minute.
They only do mitzvahs that can be done in under a minute. On one level it’s genius. You pick up a piece of trash, you help an old lady across the street, you offer a dollar to a homeless man. It doesn’t cost you much in terms of time, money, or effort. Goodness is spread across the barren and selfish landscape that is Los Angeles, one sixty-second burst at a time.
But if you think about it, you realize it’s total crap. What if I need ninety seconds of help? I can’t call the Mitzvah boys? If you’re going to help people, then help. Don’t put a time limit on it. That’s something my mother would do.
“Aaron, I hope you will lean on HaShem,” Professor Schwartzburg says. “What else can we do in these trying times?”
I can think of a lot of things we can do, but I keep them to myself.
Schwartzburg sighs and leans back against the whiteboard.
“HaShem,” he says, and clutches his chest.
The class leans forward. Either he’s having a spiritual experience or a heart attack. Stories of dark matter may not get our attention, but the potential stirrings of a heart attack do, especially after losing two professors to myocardial infarction in the last year.
“Are you in the heart attack pool?” I whisper to Herschel.
“That’s disgusting,” he says.
“I’m just saying Schwartzburg doesn’t look good.”
Herschel shakes his head. He’s too pious for a heart attack pool. I can’t really blame him.
Barry Goldwasser jumps up. He’s obviously not in the pool either.
“Are you alright, professor?” he says.
Just my luck. Barry is going to save Schwartzburg from a heart attack in under a minute, and he’s going to do it right in front of The Initials. He’ll become the hero of the junior class, and I’ll fade a little further into obscurity.
But Schwartzburg pulls himself back from the brink. He stands and brushes himself off. “Sorry. This situation with Aaron’s family has me flustered,” Schwartzburg says.
“It has us all upset,” Barry Goldwasser says. “We should do something for them.”
The students nod in agreement.
Barry looks at me, his face full of kindness and pity. I want to punch him.
The end-of-class tone rings through the school. Another English class is over without our having discussed English.
The Initials stands up. I look at the outline of her butt beneath the long skirt. Does she have on bicycle shorts, regular shorts, or leggings today? She bends over to get her books. I decide it’s probably leggings. And under the leggings?
“Hello?” Herschel says.
“I’m sorry. Did you say something?”
“I said that maybe I should talk to Schwartzburg. He seems upset lately. He’s lectured about dark matter three times this week.”
“Don’t talk to him.”
“He might need an ear.”
“He doesn’t need an ear. He needs an antidepressant.”
“You never want to get involved, Sanskrit. That’s not service. HaShem would have us be of service.”
“I’ve got enough problems. I can’t take on God’s problems, too. If HaShem is all-powerful, why does he need my help?”
Herschel looks at me with that pitying look on his face. He not only found God in Israel; he found
superiority.
The class shuffles out of the room. I notice Barry Goldwasser falls in next to The Initials.
“I saw you davening this morning,” he says. “Very nice.”
Davening. That’s what we do during the mandatory morning prayer service—rock back and forth as we talk to HaShem. I like to sneak peeks at The Initials davening through the divider that separates the guys and girls while we’re praying. She really gets into it, her eyes closed, her breath coming in little gasps.
“You shouldn’t be watching the girls during prayer,” The Initials says.
“Not the girls,” Barry says. “Just you.”
The Initials smiles.
Ugh. Another reason to hate Barry.
For the next few days, most of the school will be praying for the Zuckermans, asking God to help my mother, asking him to be with my family as we struggle through this trying time.
And me?
I’ll be thinking about other things like I always do during prayers.
Nobody would confuse me with a religious kid. That’s because I hate B-Jew, and I’m not exactly subtle about it. Not everyone loves the religious part of school, but even the most cynical of them can admit we’ve got great academics, a cool faculty, lots of extracurriculars.
None of that matters to me. I just feel trapped.
It’s because I never chose this place. It was chosen for me.
For that, I can thank my grandfather, Zadie Zuckerman.
“Your grandpa was a real mamzer bastard.”
That’s what my father said one day when I was ten years old. We were in Roxbury Park watching the lawn bowling tournament. It’s a Los Angeles tradition. Old men dress in white and lawn bowl in the middle of Beverly Hills. I guess the men reminded my father of Abe Zuckerman, my grandfather who we called Zadie. He had died a few weeks before. My father cried like a baby at his funeral, but the minute it was over he seemed fine, even happy.
“Your zadie was a tough old bastard,” Dad said. “A real survivor.”
“I know,” I say, but I didn’t know much. We weren’t allowed to ask about the war, and Zadie hardly ever mentioned it. He always wore long-sleeve shirts to cover the number tattooed on his forearm when he was twelve years old.
