Since You Left Me

by Allen Zadoff

  I feel good, I feel powerful.

  But as soon as I get outside, I start to feel bad again. I rush through Brentwood with my head down, afraid someone from Mom’s yoga studio will see me. Would Mom even care if she knew I was walking around in the middle of the day? I could make some lame excuse and she’d believe me. You can tell Mom just about anything, and she’ll buy it. That’s because you have to pay attention to notice a lie, and then you have to be willing to do something about it if you do. Mom doesn’t qualify in either category.

  But even she would freak out if she knew I was telling people she was in an accident. And if I got thrown out of school, I don’t know what we would do. How would we pay for college if not with Zadie’s money? Forget Brandeis. I’d be taking the bus to Santa Monica Community College every day.

  When I get home, I go into my room and take Mom’s phone from under my mattress. When I turn it on, she’s up to thirty-eight messages. I need to make the phone disappear.

  I could just put it in a closet, but Mom might be smart enough to use the Find My Phone app, or find someone smart enough to do it for her. That means I have to do away with the phone for good.

  I pop out the SIM card and snap it in half.

  Then I think about Sweet Caroline. I can’t trust her to do the right thing, even for twenty dollars. I need some leverage.

  I head down the hall to her room. If she finds out I went into her room without permission, there will be hell to pay. Not that I want to spend much time in her room. It looks like the Disney Store threw up in there.

  I check around her doorframe for traps. Sure enough, there’s a piece of string near the bottom of the door-jamb. If you open it, the string falls out. Then she knows someone was in her room. She learned that trick from a book about the Mossad that Dad bought us one Hanukkah.

  I open the door and catch the string so I can put it back after.

  To my surprise, she’s redecorated since the last time I was in here. The Disney stuff is gone, replaced by gymnastic posters.

  Sweet Caroline loves gymnastics. I keep hoping she’ll break her neck on the parallel bars, but so far I’ve been unlucky on that front. Why can fate wipe out an entire village in Southeast Asia that’s minding its own business, but my sister can do death-defying leaps on gymnastics equipment and stay healthy? It’s not fair.

  I stare at a giant photo of the Israeli rhythmic gymnastics team in some kind of sexy human pyramid. Just what I need. More girls in tights. Between Sweet Caroline’s meets and Mom’s yoga classes, I’m having a tough adolescence.

  It’s kind of gross to get turned on in your sister’s room, so I get down to business, looking through drawers, sliding open the closet, checking the shelves. There’s nothing interesting, or at least nothing I can use against her. I think about where I would hide something that I didn’t want anyone to find.

  I check under her mattress. I search under the bed.

  I look between her books.

  I’m ready to give up my search when I see an Old Testament on the shelf. A birthday gift from Herschel last year. Just what every little girl wants. A Jewish Bible.

  I open it, and a paper falls out. It’s covered in sparkly stickers. I recognize Sweet Caroline’s handwriting. I start to read. Bingo.

  It’s a love letter written to someone named Levi.

  Every time she writes his name, she dots the i with a heart. Sickening.

  Sweet Caroline + Levi. Levi + Sweet Caroline. Over and over again.

  What is it with our family? We don’t fall in love; we go insane.

  I slip the letter into my pocket. I have leverage against her if I need it.

  Sweet Caroline is in love. That seems impossible. She’s only twelve years old. How would she know what love felt like, anyway?

  “Excruciating.”

  That was the word Ms. Shine gave at the end of the spelling bee. It was down to Judi and me by that time, and since we kept spelling everything correctly, the words kept getting more difficult. Finally, we got to excruciating, which is a crazy word for second graders, but it shows you how smart we were. Or how smart we thought we were, because when Judi got the word, she smiled like she had it nailed, then proceeded to spell it wrong. She put in an shi instead of a ci.

  Sucker.

  Now it was my turn.

  I had a lot of experience with excruciating. I’d studied it the night before.

  All I had to do was get the word right, and I’d win.

  I looked towards Judi. Her fists were clenched and there was sweat on her forehead. Her face was covered in freckles. There was even a freckle on her lip I hadn’t seen before. Freakish.

  It was obvious that she was nervous, but what did I care? I was going to crush her.

  I started to spell the word, but I made the mistake of glancing at her again.

  Something was different.

  She had the same freckled face, but now she didn’t seem so ugly to me. The idea of winning didn’t feel fun anymore. It felt almost cruel.

  I realized I wanted Judi to do well in the spelling bee. I still wanted to win, but not if it meant she had to lose.

  So I blew the word. On purpose.

  When it went back to Judi, she spelled it correctly. And she won.

  “Hah! Got you!” she said, and she smiled at me.

  I didn’t care because for the first time in my life, losing made me happier than winning.

  After that, Judi liked me. We became friends. We studied together. We competed with each other. We pushed each other to do better.

  Sometimes I was number one and she was number two. Sometimes the order was reversed. But it didn’t matter because we were the two smartest kids in class.

  When Valentine’s Day rolled around, Ms. Shine made us write cards to everyone in the class. We walked around and put them in baskets on the front of the desks.

  When Judi passed by, she didn’t put anything in my basket. She whispered, “Check your cubby.”

  That’s where I found her card later. The one where she asked me to be her boyfriend.

  Judi and I did everything together after that. I dreamed about her. I smelled her when she wasn’t there. I heard her voice in my head.

  We were boyfriend and girlfriend for a week. The greatest week of my life.

  They say God created the earth in seven days.

  Six days. He rested on the seventh.

  He created me in the same amount of time. And destroyed me.

  Because after a week, something happened, and it was over. Judi wanted nothing to do with me anymore. She stopped talking to me. She walked by my desk without so much as looking at me.

  And I never knew why.

  One time I tried to ask her, and she burst into tears and ran away.

  It was over. A week of bliss followed by years of longing.

  Second grade. It was the Golden Age of Sanskrit. I had a best friend, Herschel, who lived down the street.

  I had a girlfriend, Judi Jacobs.

  I had parents. Plural.

  I had a kid sister, who was briefly adorable, innocent, and legitimately sweet.

  Zadie Zuckerman was still alive, and I wasn’t trapped in Jewish school.

  I had it all. And then I lost it all.

  I hadn’t studied history yet, so I didn’t know that all great eras end. Civilizations rise and fall. Cities prosper and decline.

  Families come together and split apart.

  Such is the cycle of life.

  Second grade is when I learned not to trust good times. They seem like they’re here forever, but they can come crashing down around you.

  Sweet Caroline doesn’t know this. She thinks she’s in love. She thinks she’s safe.

  I know better.

  “Mucous. Lots of it.”

  One of the ladies in Mom’s prenatal yoga class is complaining about it. From the head nods around the room, it’s obvious the other mommies-to-be know all about the mucous. I don’t see any boxes of tissues around, so I get t
he feeling that whatever is stuffed up, it’s not their noses.

  “Mucous is very natural,” Mom says. “It’s the body’s way of celebrating life.”

  “And phlegm is the throat’s way of saying good morning,” I say.

  A few of the women chuckle. I like making women in tights laugh.

  “My son is very funny,” Mom says, “but these are serious matters.”

  She smiles but I can tell she’s annoyed. She always smiles at me when we’re at the Center and there are students watching.

  “Rebekah, I think we’re freaking out your son,” an Indian woman says. She has dark, exotic features and a massive bulge in her middle.

  Mom walks a few steps towards me and wraps herself around my back.

  “Is that true, Sanskrit? Are you freaking out?”

  “Not at all. What’s a little mucous between friends?” I say, and the women giggle.

  Mom squeezes me even harder.

  “All this will be yours in fifteen years,” she announces to the ladies.

  “I’m sixteen,” I say.

  “And I’ve been there for every moment of it,” Mom says.

  She laughs and smoothes down my hair. I don’t see how it’s funny that she doesn’t know how old her son is.

  “Alright, let’s get started, ladies,” Mom says. She presses a button on the sound system and the music of a Japanese flute fills the room. Mom hits a gong on a platform behind her. The sound swells, then drops away, the last bit of tone hanging in the air.

  The women settle down on their mats. I told Mom I wasn’t freaking out, but the truth is that I am, at least a little bit. Not because of mucous, but because I’m in a room full of women barely wearing clothes. In the winter the Center is a little easier to take because the women wear full leotards with tights or long flowing yoga skirts. But as summer approaches, the yoga clothes get smaller and smaller. Some women in the room today are wearing tights, others yoga pants, and some are wearing those stretchy shorts like volleyball players wear. They’re like the bottom of a bathing suit, only there’s no beach and no water. There’s only me sitting ten feet away while they stretch with their legs wide open.

  Let’s just say I wear baggy shorts when I visit the Center. For my own protection and everyone else’s.

  “We’ll begin on our backs in a relaxed pose.” The ladies lie back.

  “My son is good at this one,” Mom says, earning another laugh from the ladies.

  I’m so glad I can be here to help Mom’s comedy act.

  I lie on my back. According to Mom this is called Dead Man’s Pose, but she doesn’t use that term today. I think it’s bad luck to talk about death with so many babies-to-be in the room.

  I look across at the sea of bumps. Some are little and some big, some wide and some narrow. I’ve seen pregnant women before, but never lying down with so few clothes on. When you see pregnant women out in the world they can look fat, but in tight yoga clothes you realize they’re not fat at all. There’s something growing inside them, and it’s running out of room and wants to get out.

  “Deep breath,” Mom says. “Let your worries and cares drift away on the music.…”

  I try to let my worries and cares drift, but they stick to me. First I worry about what’s going on with school, then I worry about my deal with Sweet Caroline, then I worry about what Herschel said on the phone last night, about how I’m hurting people with my lie. Maybe even damaging my character.

  Mom says, “Imagine there’s an empty space inside of you and it’s filling with warm, blue water. It is good. All is good.”

  All is not good, I think. Not for me, and not for these bumps, these babies-to-be. If they pop out into the world now, they’re going to find themselves in yoga class, trapped in Dead Man’s Pose with their obsessed mothers.

  Because there’s no escaping when you’re a baby.

  Wherever and whenever you’re born, you start getting brainwashed. Maybe you have a grandfather who desperately wants you to practice Judaism, or a mother who forces you to do yoga, or a father who’s spent ten years in a bedroom inventing something that still doesn’t exist and probably never will. And these are the adults in your life who are supposed to be teaching you how to do things.

  I look out across the bumps, and I feel bad for them. As soon as they pop out, the world is going to start pushing them in different directions, and what chance do they have?

  “Now let the water flow out of you,” Mom says.

  “I’m waiting for my water to flow,” one of the ladies says, followed by giggles.

  I imagine crawling up to the first lady’s stomach and telling the baby, “Don’t come out. It’s not safe. Pass it on.”

  That baby passes the message to the next, and on and on.

  “Roll over on your sides, ladies. Let me know if you need help,” Mom says.

  But if I tell the babies not to come out, maybe there are going to be thirty stillbirths in the class, and they’ll blame Mom. They’ll say that all these women came to a prenatal class that killed their babies. Mom will have a terrible reputation, and it will ruin her life. If her life is ruined, my life is guaranteed to be ruined.

  I decide I sent the wrong message. So I imagine going up to the first baby and saying, “Come out, but don’t believe everything they tell you. Pass it on.”

  Then I think that might also be a bad message, because all these kids will be born not knowing who to trust. That’s a terrible way to go through life, being surrounded by adults you can’t trust.

  That’s when I decide I’m not the best person to be giving advice to fetuses.

  “Mom,” I whisper.

  She shushes me.

  “Bathroom.”

  She gives me a disappointed look.

  “All this talk of water,” I say, pulling at my shorts.

  “Go ahead,” she whispers.

  I stand up. The ladies look at me.

  “Mucous break,” I say, and they giggle as I head for the door.

  “Sat nam.”

  That’s a mantra, a phrase you repeat over and over again in meditation. Mom told me it means something like, Truth is my identity. But truth is not exactly my strong point these days.

  It’s playing on a meditation CD piped into the bathroom.

  Sat nam. Sat nam.

  Anyway, Sat nam sounds more like, Sit down. Which is a pretty good mantra for the bathroom.

  It’s like the bathroom is inviting me to do my business.

  So I open a stall and avail myself of the invitation.

  The nice part about the men’s room at the Center is that it’s rarely used because there aren’t many men to use it. There are guys who take yoga, but the female to male ratio is something like a hundred to one. While this is easy on the eyes, it’s also easy on the men’s room.

  Privacy. When you share a bathroom with two women at home, you look for it wherever you can get it.

  Sit down. The mantra beckons me.

  I’m about to let rip when I hear the men’s room door open.

  I’m hoping this person is going to pee and get out of the bathroom fast so I can enjoy some quality time. But that’s not what happens. I hear the sound of fabric moving, and then whoever it is joins the sat nam chorus with his own sat nams.

  I clear my throat a couple times to make my presence known, but the chanting doesn’t stop. The guy actually starts to harmonize with the CD. The sound is beautiful and eerie, filling the bathroom with a spiritual chorus.

  The stall next to me opens. Fabric rustles, and a man groans and sits down next to me.

  Blue fabric spills under the wall of the stall, a robe or something that’s coming into my stall. I try to discreetly shuffle the fabric away with my foot, but there’s too much of it.

  With another groan, the person lets go a fusillade, so loud and uncensored that I let out a little shout.

  I kick the blue fabric over, and I stand up and fight to get my pants up.

  There’s another burst of bo
dy noise followed by more groans.

  It’s too much for me.

  I flush my toilet fast and push out of my stall. I’m washing my hands when a voice says, “Excuse me.” I ignore it, turn the water up.

  “Have you any tissue?” the voice says in lightly accented English.

  I don’t want to talk to a stranger in a men’s room stall. I turn off the water and head for the bathroom door.

  “Excuse me,” the voice says more urgently.

  “What?” I say. Now I’m annoyed.

  “Tissue. To clean oneself.”

  “You mean toilet paper?”

  “Please.”

  I look around for a roll of toilet paper, but there’s nothing. Damn it.

  I go into my stall and figure out how to remove the toilet paper from the holder. It’s that scratchy recycled stuff that Mom buys for the Center and the house. You wipe yourself, and it feels like your butt survived the Six-Day War. I yank on it until I free the roll from the holder.

  “I’ll throw it over the top of the stall,” I say.

  “Don’t throw it,” the man says.

  The stall door swings open.

  A strange man with a giant beard sits on the toilet, fabric spilling around him in every direction. I scream and drop the toilet paper. I race out of the bathroom.

  “Mom!” I shout as I run through the Center. I throw open the door to the yoga studio and it smashes against the wall with a loud bang.

  The pregnant ladies scream.

  “Mom!”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a strange man in the bathroom. He might be homeless. I think he broke in there or something.”

  “He may have wandered in,” Mom says calmly. “The homeless are not bad people, Sanskrit. They’re suffering. We’ve had this conversation.”

  “He opened the stall door, Mom. While he was on the toilet. That’s not right.”

  I’m emphasizing words so she’ll understand this is a crisis, not another opportunity to practice kindness and compassion with the less fortunate, particularly the less fortunate she’s not related to, which is her forté.