by Sigal Samuel
When I finished, I went to Sammy’s room and saw her standing over the candles in the window just like the other night. The floorboard creaked and she turned around, but this time she didn’t get mad. Her cheeks were wet. I went and stood next to her. She lit one of the candles and gave me the match and I lit the other one. She waved her hands over the flames—one, two, three—then we covered our eyes and she whispered the blessing. I didn’t know the words but I said Amen when she was done because that’s what you say. That’s what Dad used to say, back when he would hurry home to watch Mom light the candles, which was something he stopped doing a few months before she died. She cried the first time he didn’t show up and I worried that her tears would put out the flames and she’d have to light them all over again.
Sammy wiped her cheeks and we went back to the kitchen to finish making the pizza. While it was baking, I had an idea. I went to the pantry, found a bottle of grape juice, and brought it back to her. Before we ate, we said the kiddush over the grape juice. Normally people said the blessing over wine but I knew Dad would be mad if we drank wine, even though he mostly never made rules about what we should do because he said parents should trust kids to learn for themselves instead of imposing their own authority. Afterward, Sammy washed the cup so that Dad wouldn’t suspect anything, and I put the bottle in the back of the fridge.
Then we watched the last two shows on the TGIF lineup. We’d missed the first couple of shows but I didn’t really care because one, I liked doing Shabbat with Sammy, and two, they were almost always repeats anyway.
That night, before falling asleep, I made another list in my journal.
THINGS THAT MAKE MY SISTER SAD:
1. Memories of our mother
2. Answering machines
3. Her old bicycle
4. Swing sets
5. How her hair gets frizzy when it’s hot out
6. Watercolor paintings
7. Musical instruments
8. The smell of perfume
9. Jenny (?)
On Monday afternoon, me and Alex spent our recess on the patch of grass behind Normal School. All the other kids were running around, throwing balls and chasing each other. Sammy, who used to always spend recess with Jenny, was wandering alone on the far edges of the lot. A couple of teachers paced around us, looking up at the sky or chatting.
Alex ignored them all and started teaching me about astronomy, which he said was something you should really know about unless you wanted to be a total ignoramus. “Do you want to be a total ignoramus?” he asked. I figured this was one of those cases where silence is worth two coins, so I just stood there while he told me about all the different kinds of stars and showed me pictures in the new astronomy book his mom got him for his birthday.
“Proxima Centauri is the closest red dwarf to our solar system, but it’s still 4.2 light years away.”
Somewhere behind and above us, we heard a voice like a low growl. “Nope,” it said. “The closest red dwarf is way closer than that.”
We whipped around. Gabe and Dean loomed over us with crazy smiles on their faces.
For a second, Alex looked too surprised to say anything. Then he pointed at a chart in his book and started to say no, Proxima Centauri was definitely the closest, it said so right here, but he didn’t get to finish because all of a sudden Dean was grabbing the book and ripping out pages.
Alex froze. Papers fluttered away from his body like birds. I could tell he was fighting hard not to cry because his whole face was turning bright red.
Gabe said, “Well look at that, now there’s a red dwarf right here on Earth.”
Dean dumped the shredded book at Alex’s feet. Then he and Gabe started to walk away.
But Sammy was walking toward us. Alex looked from her to them and something in his face changed. “Hey!” he shouted at their big, wide backs. “You think you’re so great? Just wait until the science fair, you losers, we’ll show you!”
Gabe and Dean turned around with a scary slowness. “Oh yeah?” Gabe sneered. “What are you going to do, turn from red to purple? Go from four-eyes to eight-eyes? Grow even shorter than you already are?”
“We’re going to talk to an astronaut on the International Space Station!” Alex exploded.
I blushed with embarrassment, knowing this would only make things worse.
Gabe and Dean were already laughing, doubled over and slapping their knees. They pretended to need a second to catch their breath. Finally Gabe said, “Yeah, great, can’t wait for the big day, this won’t be humiliating for you at all,” and they left.
Sammy was quiet, biting her lip. She gave us a little nod, then wandered off in the opposite direction, toward no one, toward nothing.
I felt so mad, all I wanted to do was kick something. I tried to remind myself that Mr. Glassman said the Talmud said you were supposed to be slow to anger and quick to forgive, but I couldn’t help it. I decided then and there that we were going to win first prize in the science fair, even if it meant I had to go over to Alex’s house every single day for the rest of the year.
Up in Alex’s room after school, we tiptoed through the maze of silvery radio guts on the floor. He went straight to his computer and sat down. I asked what he was up to and he said he was researching the space station’s orbital schedule, what else would he be doing? He had to find out what time the astronauts would be flying over Montreal so that we could establish contact!
I said, “Great, but what am I supposed to do?” so Alex pointed at a poster board and some markers and said, “Why don’t you make the backdrop for our presentation?” I sat on the ground and drew a replica of Alex’s ham radio, making sure to get the shading just right, which was something Jenny had taught me the year before because she was really good at art. She hadn’t been over in a while and I missed her. Another thing me and Sammy had in common.
After a few minutes, I got bored, so I wandered over to the telescope and pressed my eye to the lens. I saw the sky. A bird. A roof.
“Hey! Do you ever use this thing to spy on people?”
“I’m a scientist.”
“Okay.”
“From a long line of scientists.”
“Okay.”
“Scientists don’t spy.”
“Okay.”
“They observe.”
“I think it’d be cool to be a spy!”
Alex sighed. “You’re not supposed to touch the lens like that,” he said, taking the telescope and showing me how to hold it.
I brought my eye close again but not too close this time. The neighbors’ windows sparkled in the afternoon light. “Hey, look! It’s Mr. Glassman’s house! And look there—that’s Mr. Katz, sitting under the tree on his lawn!”
I moved aside to give Alex a turn and saw his blank face and right away realized that never in his whole life had he thought to look down at other people instead of up at the sky. He shifted the telescope to the right, then brought his eye up to the lens and gasped.
“What? What? What do you see?”
Alex kept still and said nothing. His face and the tips of his ears went bright pink. I tried to be patient but inside I was going crazy so I pushed him out of the way to see for myself. But just as I got up to the lens, something hard hit me right above my eye.
“Ouch!” I said, clapping a hand to my forehead. I could feel the skin pushed aside from a small dent where the telescope had hit me.
Alex danced around, flapping his hands like a bird. “Sorry, sorry, sorry! Are you okay?”
I took a deep breath and told him yes. “Is there a mark?”
Alex bit his lip and nodded. But he said the cut wasn’t deep, and there was only a little blood on my hand, and I could tell he felt really bad, so I just asked if I could have a Band-Aid. He got me one and while I was putting it on we heard Alex’s mom calling from downstairs.
When we got to the kitchen, Alex gave her a hug and then introduced us. She said to call her Lesley. She was still wearing her hospita
l clothes, and three thoughts flew into my head: one, she was a nurse, which meant that two, she must be a highly intelligent person, and three, she was very pretty and young-looking. Her red hair and bright green eyes shone in the light.
Even though her eyes had dark circles under them, she asked if we’d like her to fix us dinner. Alex said, “No, it’s—” but before he could finish his sentence I said as fast as I could, “Yes please that would be great I’m starving!” even though I was not. She smiled and said that in that case she would throw something together right away, and how did I feel about spaghetti, meatballs, and roasted-butternut-squash-and-apple soup? Excellent, I said. I felt excellent.
While she cooked, me and Alex set the table and he tried to get me to understand the difference between a pulsar and a quasar. Even though it sounded interesting, I stopped listening, because I was busy watching Lesley and I needed to pray to God. My prayer was Please please please please please and I prayed it so many times that it started to feel like my heart was saying it, one please with every beat.
An hour later, Lesley put a steaming bowl of orange soup in front of me. It looked creamy and bright, and it smelled delicious, but there was only one way to be sure. I picked up my spoon and brought it to my mouth.
That’s when I knew for sure that God was real.
The next day, during lunch, me and Alex went back to the library. We had to do more research since we’d need to carefully calculate the space station’s trajectory since it travels 240 miles above the Earth’s surface at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour. As soon as Alex sat behind his fort of books, I picked one of the books out of his pile and flipped to a random page. Behind it, I opened Fruit of North America and Beyond. I needed to narrow my list down a bit.
FRUIT THAT MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE BEEN ON THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE:
1. Apples
2. Oranges
3. Peaches (they came from China, and the Garden of Eden was probably in Israel)
4. Plums
5. Tangerines
6. Nectarines (belong to same species as #3)
7. Bananas
8. Pears
9. Grapes (probably not, since grapes make wine, which makes people drunk, not wise)
10. Strawberries (do not grow on trees)
11. Cantaloupes (same as #10)
12. Coconuts (how would Adam and Eve break the shell, since tools were not invented yet?)
13. Pomegranates
14. Watermelons (same as #10)
I was thinking about adding a new possibility to the list (15. Dates) when I heard a gasp behind me. I whipped around and saw Alex glaring at the page.
“You’re supposed to be researching the space station!” he said. “And instead you’re—you’re— What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said, closing the journal fast. But he’d already seen the title of my list.
“The Tree of Knowledge? What’s that supposed to be?”
“It’s—it’s the holy tree in the Garden of Eden. You know, the one Adam and Eve ate from? So they could get knowledge? I’m trying to figure out which fruit could’ve grown on—”
Alex snorted. “That’s not how you get knowledge, all at once, by eating some fruit off a tree! You get it through the scientific method!”
“No, you don’t understand, see . . .” I sighed. Alex was not Jewish, so I had to do a lot of explaining to get him to understand about the Tree. I told him about Adam and Eve and the fruit and the snake. But when I was done, Alex said that he was an atheist, which meant that he didn’t believe in God because he believed in science instead. I tried to convince him that God was real, but Alex said, “I don’t see any evidence, if God is real then where is He?”
“My neighbor Mr. Katz says He’s everywhere.”
“No, but, where exactly is He?”
Waving my arms in all directions, I said, “Up, down, here, there—everywhere!”
But Alex still did not look convinced. So then I told him about how the Jews were slaves in Egypt and God took them to the Promised Land and they built the Temple in Jerusalem and then it got destroyed so they built it again and then it got destroyed again but they still write their prayers on tiny scraps of paper and stick them into the Wailing Wall and then God answers them.
“You really believe all that?” Alex asked.
“Sure I do. Why wouldn’t I?”
Alex shrugged. He was watching Gabe Kramer, who had come running into the library, dribbling a basketball and laughing loudly. Then Alex leaned over and whispered, “If God exists, why would He always let Gabe beat us at basketball when we play in gym class?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but just then the bell rang and lunch period was over.
As we left the library, Alex said we should come back after last period, but I told him I couldn’t because I had to go to Hebrew School. He looked disappointed, so to make him feel better I reminded him about our secret plan that we had come up with after spaghetti and meatballs, which was to set up his mom with my dad so that we could be related and live in the same house forever. I told him to come over to my place in a couple of hours so we could drop some hints about Lesley at the dinner table. His eyes shone a bit but he still looked very impatient, and once I got to Hebrew School I understood exactly how he felt.
All through class, I waited for the right moment to ask Mr. Glassman what fruit was on the Tree, but it never came. Then, when we were finally sitting at his kitchen table about to pick up where we left off in the Genesis story, all of a sudden Mrs. Glassman took a break from the dishes she was rinsing and the proof she was working out under her breath (“If t then r and if r then t entails t if and only if r . . .”) and brought us a plate of apple slices. Mrs. Glassman never brought us fruit and I had the idea that maybe God made her bring it so I’d have an excuse to ask my question. Here was my chance. “Take!” she said, so I took.
I said, “Is it true that the fruit on the Tree of Knowledge was apples?”
“Absolutely not,” Mr. Glassman said. “There were no apples in that part of the world at that time.”
So then I asked, “Maybe it was oranges?” I thought this sounded like a good guess because I’d heard of Jaffa oranges and I knew that Jaffa was in Israel. But Mr. Glassman shook his head no. So then I asked, “Maybe bananas? Pears?” He kept shaking his head until finally I said, “Pomegranates?” Jews eat pomegranates on Rosh Hashanah, which made me think there was a pretty good chance that pomegranates were a biblical fruit.
Mr. Glassman said, “Possibly.”
“What do you mean, possibly, don’t you know for sure?”
“No, not even our ancient sages, blessed be their memories, knew for sure.”
He went to his library and came back holding a tall book with a brown cover that I knew was called the Talmud. He opened it up and read out loud, then translated into English.
“You see? There is disagreement amongst the sages. According to Rabbi Meir, it was a grape that Eve made into wine. Rabbi Nehemia says it was a fig. Rabbi Yehuda says, what are you, meshuggeneh? It was wheat! Other rabbis say don’t be ridiculous, it was a pomegranate, everyone knows the Land of Israel was overflowing with pomegranate trees at that time!”
When I heard that, I was really disappointed, because I knew I had failed Mr. Katz. If the rabbis didn’t even know what fruit was on the Tree, how was I supposed to figure it out? And how was Mr. Katz ever supposed to get Knowledge?
I looked down at the Genesis text, feeling sad and frustrated. “None of this Adam and Eve story even makes any sense,” I said. “Like this, here: And they heard the voice of the Lord walking in the garden. How can you hear a voice walking?”
Mr. Glassman’s clear gray eyes got very serious. “Do you really want to know, Lev?”
“Sure I do.”
“It will take me some time to explain.”
“I’ve got time.”
“I will have to tell you a story.”
“I like stories.”
He paused. “The answer to your question lies in the story of my wife’s brother.”
Out of the corners of my eyes, I saw Mrs. Glassman’s hands lose control over a soapy bowl. It slipped out of her fingers and clattered into the sink. She snatched it up again and kept on rinsing. But she didn’t take up her mumbling proof again.
Mr. Glassman glanced at her back and then started to talk in a quiet singsong voice. “Once upon a time, you see, my Chayaleh had a brother. A big, beautiful brother with big, beautiful eyes. Yankel, his name was, but she called him Yankeleh. He was everything to her then, sun and moon and stars. But he was a strange boy. When he was young, he didn’t laugh. He was . . . grave. A very grave and silent little person.”
Mr. Glassman was rocking back and forth as he talked. “At first, they thought maybe he was a simple soul—sometimes the Kadosh Baruch Hu makes them like that—but no, no. After a few years her parents realized what he really was: deaf. And he had never learned to speak.
“Thirteen years old, he was, when they moved to the village, and still he had not spoken one word all his life. But Chayaleh, she didn’t care, little things like that did not matter to her, she loved him. His big, dark eyes and long, dark lashes. Like a prince, he was. And a writer—Kadosh Baruch Hu, save us from writers! A writer of strange stories that he would scribble by the river, birds singing in the sky, sunlight in the trees . . . this was before all the tzures started.
“She followed him there once. She was ten years old. A little nudnik, she was. Couldn’t leave him alone even for two seconds. She found him standing in the water, his feet bare, his ankles blue with cold. And a smile on his face—ah, what a smile! But what did it mean? What did it mean, she asked herself, dancing from foot to foot, hidden behind the trees.
“First he was still. Then his lips were moving, but no sound was coming out. Then he was still. He was listening, she thought, only he could not be listening because he could not hear. And then his lips were moving again, smiling almost, inviting almost, and then! Then, all of a sudden, a fish was leaping out of the water! She saw it, the flash of color against his ankle, big and bright and blue before it disappeared. He had called out “Hello!” into the river and the fish had answered, the fish had kissed his ankle, the fish was saying, “Hello! I heard you.” Her brother, he was talking to the fish. He was talking to them and listening to them and she could see this, with her ten-year-old mind, already she understood this. And it stole her heart.
