Homo Superiors

by L. A. Fields

  With maturity fast approaching, and a probable growth spurt in the works, it was time to trade out Noah’s old kiddie twin bed for a full-sized one. The small one Nadine took apart on her own, so that the delivery men would have room to set up the new one. Noah tried to help her at first, but it was a frustrating, finger-pinching task, and she snapped at him, “Leave me to be!” Her command was punctuated by the clang of a dropped wrench.

  Noah and Nadine were in a wary state around this bed. That swap—the old for the new—externalized their situation too plainly. All spring Dad had been talking to his friends about what to give Nadine as a severance bonus, trying to feel around for a fair number. Aunt Clarice, on Mom’s behalf, kept suggesting next steps for her, other families she knew with young children. Or something fun, perhaps? Vacation! Travel! Maybe she could go into business for herself, huh? It was leading inexorably to one final thing: Nadine’s dismissal.

  Noah bounced happily onto his new bed, a fresh comforter thrown over it to give him an idea of the change it made in the room. Navy and gray stripes, the heavy, shiny wooden bedposts at all four corners—it looked so grown up, so distinguished. He loved it.

  “Up!” Nadine snapped at him after Dad and Aunt Clarice left the doorway. Dad had congratulated Noah on growing up so fast (not really a personal accomplishment of Noah’s, but still praise, and still appreciated), and Aunt Clarice took a couple of pictures to show her sister, who didn’t think she could handle the stairs today to see the room herself. There was talk of installing a stair lift for Faye, a seat that could motor her up and down with all the speed and mobility of the elderly or paraplegic, but she insisted on getting along without it—said she’d be a literal Lazy Susan and refused.

  “The bed is not made yet,” Nadine told Noah louder, since he didn’t listen to her the first time. “Hurry, get up!”

  Noah was fluffing around over the plush new spread like a dust-bathing sparrow—flapping left, then right, then clutching the blanket so he became a burrito. When he was fully encased like this, wrapped up and defenseless, Nadine lost her patience entirely, grabbed him by the ankles, and yanked.

  Noah came crashing bodily to the floor, the breath knocked all the way out of him, his back in a seizure of spasmodic horror. He’d landed right on his coccyx, and for a moment he felt no pain, and for a few more moments he could not speak of the pain.

  “Oh, thanks very much for letting me do my work,” Nadine said sarcastically, stepping over him while unfurling a fitted sheet. It wasn’t until a whistling teapot sort of wail started to leak from Noah that Nadine turned to look at him, and in turning, she finally noticed who else had made it into the room.

  Noah’s mother, arms akimbo, hands in the small of her back, must have decided this was too big a milestone to miss because of a few steps. She held Nadine in a furious glare as Noah started to worm his way towards her, but Faye could do nothing to comfort him, not even bend down closer to wipe the tears that had started oozing up into his eyes.

  “Help him up,” Faye ordered, and Nadine did, her expression lemon-sucked and resigned.

  Returned to the bed, Noah gently tried to straighten out his back, but lying flat was no good. He curled onto his side, fetal and helpless.

  “I think you should gather up your things and go,” Faye said. “Mr. Kaplan will call you later with a decision about what’s to be done.”

  Nadine stood affronted for a beat, then rolled her eyes and departed. It was an inauspicious end to nearly a decade of service, and a lifetime of rearing for Noah. His mother was quick to make that relationship seem insignificant.

  “I’ll get Aunt Clarice to get you some aspirin and my other heating pad, hmm? I’ll take care of you,” Faye said, sitting down and rubbing her son’s back. “You’re too old for nannies now anyway, so I expect that’s the last we’ll have of Miss Nadine.”

  Noah squirmed his head onto her lap and closed his eyes. “Okay,” he said. The muscles along his lower back felt screaming hot under skin that was cold and clammy. His mother shifted haltingly to accommodate his head, and he wondered for a moment if this was the kind of pain she was in all the time, and how she could think of anything else if it was. Noah told her, “I love you,” and he knew it was true, but all he really felt at that moment was, This hurts, this hurts, this needs to stop hurting.

  “I love you too, my baby,” Faye said, and Noah knew that it wasn’t what she was thinking either, but he couldn’t blame her. Her pain was his fault anyway; he understood.

  8

  WHEN RAY WAS TWELVE, TRACY had him on a strict reading schedule. A book a week or two hundred pages (whichever came first) in four core subjects every month: literature, history, science, and civics (or as it was put to Ray, current events). Math concepts and piano lessons happened throughout the month, but these reading projects took up most of his time. Literature he found the least hateful, because at least sometimes the books had an interesting story, and current events wasn’t wholly bad—that was mostly news articles: war and political scandals counted towards his page minimum. Science reading was the worst. Sometimes Tracy would allow a series of documentaries in lieu of a book, but very, very rarely.

  Ray had to generate five pages of analysis a week based on his studies. It was not really in addition to his regular homework, because almost any subject coming from his teachers could be incorporated into Tracy’s demands, but at a certain point it became insulting to Ray. It wasn’t as if he was some moron who hated to read, so why did it have to be shoved so unpleasantly down his throat?

  “Can’t I pick a book I want to read?” Ray whined to her often, his body going to noodles as he beseeched her from across the dining room table, where after his first session he was made to sit always with his back to the window, so there was no chance of his mind wandering to anything pleasant. “This isn’t even required for school or anything, it’s just for, you know, my enrichment, right? So why can’t I pick sometimes?”

  Tracy only took him seriously once, when she let him make up a list of choices under each of her subjects for review. Every other time after that, however, she threw her glasses down against that beaded chain and squeezed the bridge of her nose, as if the question was so beyond stupid that it physically pained her.

  Ray had taken such care with that list too. He cleared a whole Saturday for the preparation of it. Tommy was outside doing summersaults over a spitting sprinkler, Allen and Eric were out at the movies probably with dates, his mother was twittering away on the phone with her friends, planning some potluck charity thing, and Ray was inside, like a nerd, compiling data.

  His list was a research report in itself, as neat and thorough as one of Tracy’s own syllabi. He left civics alone, since he didn’t prefer a book on government powers or whatever to entreatingly short news articles from the paper. For science he picked a couple of popular books at the top of internet searches for space exploration, deep sea life forms, weapons manufacturing (like guns, bombs, he wrote, related to world conflict, civics crossover?), the lives of scientists like Einstein or astronauts, and maybe a book on code breaking and spying (although he knew this to be a long shot—spies were way too interesting to be educational).

  History was an easier list. He liked World War II and apparently so did everybody else, because there was a glut of WWII books to be found, an embarrassment of countless riches. He listed books about the war, about the key players, about the true horror show: the secrets of the death camps. Being somewhat Jewish himself, he got a perverse shiver out of the subject, the same sort of feeling he got when looking at a swarm of insects, but amplified to human levels of revulsion. That was probably asking too much; real gore wasn’t going to slip by Tracy.

  Under literature Ray wrote up an extravagant Christmas list of titles. For detectives he just put down fictional names: Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Peter Wimsey, whole series he could consume in no time. And cowboys, so many, and these could easily be history subject crossovers: Billy the Kid, Jesse James
, Butch and Sundance, the O.K. Corral. Literature’s a wide subject, right? It didn’t just go Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, and then halt, right? He wrote down stuff that Tracy must embrace, like canonical, old stuff. An oldie but a goodie, that’s how Ray thought of each topic he listed in the other third of his list: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, the Beat Generation, but even those mindful, conservative choices were shot down with the rest of them.

  “Trash,” Tracy said. “Violence and prurience, look that word up. These subjects were shallow entertainment in their own time, and they’re the same today. It’s not worth our time.”

  Ray crossed his arms and locked his lips between his teeth, holding in an outburst. Our time? Please. Tracy got paid for her time, and Ray’s time was totally forfeit. His brothers were never drilled this hard, they were meatheads, morons, but Ray was cursed with potential. Potential he had to fulfill. So screw his time, his whole lifetime, apparently.

  “Can I at least read this stuff in my free time?” he gritted at her.

  Tracy smirked, and she spoke with relish when she said, “If you have enough free time for that sort of garbage, then I’m not doing my job.”

  Ray half-sneered back at her but stayed quiet. She baited him, she messed with him, she really did. Sometimes Ray could deal with it, like it was an inside joke between just the two of them, the smart ones. Not for his weight-lifting brothers, his function-flitting mother, or good old disappearing dad, just the people dialed in enough to get sarcasm, and back-handedness, and irony. But this casual send-off of Ray’s wish list? Giving him just enough rope to hang himself, just for her own amusement? This wasn’t about putting on a show for the family, this was private and this was personal.

  This put him off Tracy for good.

  9

  WHEN NOAH WAS THIRTEEN HE became a man. His brothers bitched for weeks when they had to study for their bar mitzvahs, but Noah found the task of grasping a little Hebrew to be incredibly rudimentary. He was already perfectly fluent in English and German, and had even set himself a task as a child to learn the word for ‘hello’ in every single language. He had a knack for cataloguing and data organization that served him well in both his studies and his hobbies: languages, birds, coin collecting for a bit, and now geography (his aim at the moment was to memorize the capitals of every country).

  The stuff at temple was no big deal, and Noah didn’t have enough friends for a party, or enough optimism to try and have one anyway (somehow the kids at middle school found out he’d gone to a girl’s school for a while, and that was it for friends until at least high school). The only real highlight of this occasion was the long-promised dinner with Dad. His brothers each got theirs: a whole meal, a real restaurant, one-on-one with Dad for the whole night. It would not be cancelled, it would not be rearranged, it would not be cut short. Noah had been left jealous twice as his father explained to them each time before: “This is important. This is the first time someone’s expecting you to be a man, and with that expectation comes a certain level of respect.” It was a dry pitch, but it was a big deal. Rumor from his brothers was that the occasion came with the option of trying some of Dad’s wine, and he’d get to talk about himself the whole time without Dad’s face freezing into that I’m listening manic, nodding grin.

  Mom always assured Noah that Dad’s incredibly fake listening face wasn’t due to a lack of interest.

  “He loves you kids, but he’s just not a big fan of kids in general.” Mom, accessible to talk to any time of the day or night, was letting Noah brush her hair the last time this talk occurred. “He’s only anxious to find out who you’re going to become.” She smiled at him via her vanity mirror.

  “Aren’t I already who I’m going to be?”

  “Well,” she said, taking his hand and pressing her pale lips to the back of it, “I hope so.”

  Dinner with Dad was at the same restaurant in the city where he took major clients, the one where he treated Mom on special anniversaries, and of course the location of this father-son tradition.

  Noah had heard about this place for most of his life. Aunt Clarice loved it for the famous people who could occasionally be spotted there, his father for the apparently world-class food, his mother for the ambiance of the room, the shimmer of it. She said it was like a carpeted ballroom in there, the perfect kind for someone who couldn’t dance.

  It was the light in the place that first impressed Noah when he walked in. There was a candle at every table, and low-hanging personal chandeliers above each one. The feel of the place was like being surrounded by a harmless fire, the lights orange and wavering, the floor a deep, plush ember.

  A crisp maître d’ lead them to their table. It was close enough to the front that Noah could hear a ringing phone sometimes, but it sounded mellow and unhurried. The menus were as fancy as diplomas. The food listed there was rich and exotic even to Noah, who grew up with very nice things. Eels and quail eggs and truffle shavings and caviar—food that used to be too good for him.

  Noah ordered something French just for the joy it gave him to know how to pronounce it. As they waited, Noah Sr. gave his son the most genuine smile of his life.

  “Thirteen,” he said. “What do you think about starting high school next year?”

  “Eh, it’s only about a year of work, no big deal.”

  Noah Sr. laughed. “Still going to try to test out early, huh? I don’t know why you’re so eager to stop being a kid. Once you start being an adult you can never stop.”

  “Sounds good to me. I’ve been young my whole life, I’m sick of it,” Noah said, mostly joking.

  His father laughed again, almost a guffaw, as a woman brought their drinks and greeted Dad by name.

  “Mr. Kaplan, a pleasure to see you again.” She tucked the silver drinks tray under one arm and shifted her hips like a slide rule to stand and chat. “This is another junior Kaplan I assume?” she asked, nodding at Noah from the top of a long and powder-soft neck.

  “You don’t know how right you are, Sarah. This is Noah Jr., our youngest.”

  “I prefer Noah the Second,” he told Sarah when she reached out to shake his hand. He had been waiting to say that for about four years. It made his father laugh all over again, but only made Sarah smile politely.

  “Wonderful. Your entrees will be out shortly,” she said, and left their table on slender heels that sank into the carpeting with every step.

  “Mom would have thought it was funny,” Noah murmured, eying his father’s wine glass and still trying to decide if he wanted any. His brothers said it tasted like juice left out in the hottest sun for days, sour and acrid (though not in those words—those are words Noah found for himself after he smelled the top of an empty bottle after a party at home).

  “Well, your mom’s got a rare sense of humor, you can’t expect everyone to understand you like she does.” Dad picked up his wine glass and started to swirl it around . . . self-consciously? He was always careful when he talked to his children about their mother. “She used to crack herself up all the time when we first met, especially when nobody else got the joke. Her laughing made me laugh, and she says that’s what made her like me so much at first, that I got her jokes.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, and I don’t really get yours either, but you’re both so funny when you try, you get that same cocky look on your face when you’re about to deliver a punch line. You remind me of her the most.” Noah nodded at his father; he already knew he was the most like Mom of anyone else in the family, even her sister. “Hey, it’s time for your first real toast. Here, you take this,” Noah Sr. said, sliding his wine glass discretely across the table and lifting a water glass for himself. “L’Chayim.”

  Noah took the wine glass, and felt that cocky look his father mentioned come across his face as he translated.

  “To life.”

  10

  When Ray was fourteen, he graduated from high school. He didn’t turn a tassel over a mortarboard
or walk through the ceremony, but he finished his classes, and got his diploma in the mail, and got accepted into college at the University of Chicago, so it was a done deal. He didn’t really want to do it so early, and didn’t really mean to, but every time Tracy saw an opportunity for Ray to test out of a class, she forced him to take it.

  “If you pass this test, you only have to take one more required math class,” she’d explain. Or she would say, “If you take this class at the school and take another just like it online, you could be done with your Social Studies credits in just one semester.”

  He knew he’d skipped his freshman year entirely, starting high school classes with the sophomores, and rising with them the next year as a junior, but he’d had no idea that Tracy was setting him up to graduate so quickly. One day over the winter break she came to him with both his parents in tow and laid out the whole plan:

  “You’d have to really cram over this last semester, you’d be taking almost a double load of classes, but at the end you’d be done. And if you can manage it, your parents and I have agreed you should get a big reward.”

  Tracy turned to look at his parents, Mom and Dad standing stiffly side-by-side in a way that said clearly this wasn’t their idea.

  “A summer abroad,” Dad said.

  “Europe, somewhere nice,” added Mom. “Please don’t go picking anywhere war-torn.”