Dreidels on the Brain

by Joel ben Izzy

  “When?”

  “They don’t know. Then the operator came on the phone and asked her to put in fifteen cents and she didn’t have any change, so she had to get off. But she said she’ll call us later. And that we should eat the TV dinners in the freezer.”

  “But he’ll be fine, right?” said Kenny. “I mean, this is temporary, isn’t it?”

  “Not exactly,” Howard said. “The doctor said he’ll ‘probably’ wake up. That means he might not.” Howard let this sink in. “Comas aren’t good. He might die.”

  I did not want to hear that, and started to cry too. I thought about how mean I’d been this morning with the Neck-O-Matic.

  “But don’t worry,” Howard said. “He probably won’t.”

  We stared at the phone, waiting for it to ring, but it didn’t. So we stared at the Phone-O-Matic, but it didn’t do anything either.

  “I know!” said Kenny. “Let’s listen to Dad’s voice on the Phone-O-Matic!”

  We all agreed that that was a good idea, so Kenny set it up. I went to the next room to dial it from the other line. It rang a couple times and then there was a loud click. Soon I heard my dad’s voice.

  “Hello dere! How you doin’? This is Bob talking, but I’m not really here. But don’t hang up, because you’re talking to me through the magic of my new invention, the Phone-O-Matic—patent pending! It’s hooked up to two tape recorders, one you’re hearing right now with my voice and the other I’ll listen to when I get home. Now it’s your turn to talk—go ahead and try it—and don’t . . . be . . . frightened!”

  There was a loud click as one tape recorder turned off, and then another as the second recorder turned on. It seemed like I should say something, so I said, “Hi, Dad. This is Joel. We just wanted to hear your voice. Bye.”

  I went back to the kitchen. “Maybe we should light the candles,” Kenny said. Howard and I nodded in agreement. “And let’s put the TV dinners in the oven, like Mom said.” We agreed with that too. “And then, as long as we’re having TV dinners, we should watch TV, while we wait for her to call. It’s Wednesday—Star Trek is on.”

  “No,” said Howard. “We shouldn’t watch TV. We should pray.”

  “Let’s pray first, then watch TV,” said Kenny.

  “No,” said Howard. “We should just pray.”

  They turned to me to cast the deciding vote. I didn’t know what to say. The idea of the three of us praying together was weird. Then again, it seemed that not praying might make God even madder. I’d been thinking all day about the little prayer I’d uttered last night asking God not to let my dad come to the assembly. He certainly wouldn’t, if he was in a coma. Or dead. I didn’t want my prayers to kill my dad, the way Eric Weiss’s prayers may have killed Rabbi Buxelbaum. We had to do something.

  “How about this,” I finally said. “Let’s light the candles—and say those prayers—then watch TV.” That seemed the safest way to go, since Star Trek is, believe it or not, a Jewish show. Even though Gene Roddenberry isn’t Jewish, the two other writers are. And the actors are Jewish. Captain Kirk—Jewish. Chekov—Jewish. And Mr. Spock—especially Jewish. You can tell because when he holds his fingers in the Vulcan greeting, he’s actually making a secret Jewish symbol, called the sign of the Kohanim, the priestly class of Jews who descended from Moses’s brother Aaron. It’s the letter Shin—same as on the dreidel. Except on the dreidel it’s bad, but here it’s good, because it stands for one of the eighteen names of God. Yep, God has eighteen names, but they’re actually nicknames, because God’s real name is top secret, and no one can pronounce it, but if you could, you would have magical powers. When Leonard Nimoy—who plays Mr. Spock—was a kid in temple one day, the rabbi did the blessing of the Kohanim, which comes at the end of the service. Everyone is supposed to look down, but he looked up—and saw the rabbi holding his hands that way. It stuck with him, and he thought to himself, If I ever play a Vulcan on TV, I’ll make that my special sign!

  So watching Star Trek seemed to be as good as praying, or maybe better, because praying doesn’t seem to work, at least when I do it.

  “All right,” said Howard—who also likes Star Trek, and kind of looks like Mr. Spock. “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll light the candles, then pray, then eat our TV dinners while we watch Star Trek.”

  We put our TV dinners in the oven—I got turkey, my favorite, with the foil you fold back while it cooks so the apple-cranberry cobbler gets browned. Then we set up the menorah, lit the candles, and said the blessings. Howard got out the prayer book from his bar mitzvah and announced there was a prayer for healing, which he read aloud. Kenny and I said, “Amen,” but Howard wouldn’t leave it there. He looked up and said, “God, you should wake up our father. So he doesn’t die.”

  That added-on part didn’t seem like much of a prayer to me. For one thing, I know that whenever Howard tells me to do something—even if it’s something I already want to do—it makes me feel like doing the exact opposite. But Kenny and I said “Amen” again and nodded in agreement, then we took our TV dinners out of the oven and sat down to watch Star Trek. I was hoping it would take my mind off my dad, and it did—for a while. It was a great episode: Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock travel back through time so they can change history to prevent The War. As I watched it, I kept thinking that I wanted to travel back in time—to last night, in my parents’ room—and say, “Dad! Take these pills! Otherwise you’ll go to sleep and maybe not wake up!”

  Even the Star Trek episode backfired, because they only succeeded in delaying The War, so the Nazis developed their own atomic bomb and won! It was horrible. They were trying to figure out how to fix it when the phone rang. We all ran to get it, but Kenny got there first, picked it up, then kept saying, “Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . . uh-huh. I see.”

  When he finally hung up he said, “Dad’s still asleep. They hope he’ll wake up tomorrow. Mom’s staying at the hospital tonight. She’ll call in the middle of the night if he wakes up.”

  We sat thinking about that a while, then went back to watching TV, but by then, Star Trek was over. We never did find out how Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock stopped the Nazis, and finally, Kenny and Howard went to bed.

  When I got to my room, I reached under my bed, where I have a shoe box with all my impromptu magic tricks, which are the ones you can do at a moment’s notice. I sifted through and found my lucky deck of cards, the ones with the blue backs. Herrmann was up too, running on her wheel, so I sat next to her cage, took out the jokers, and shuffled the cards.

  These are regular cards—not marked in any way. I stared at the back of the first card. “Red,” I finally said, then put it to one side. The next card: “Also red,” and put it on top of the first. Then the next: “Black,” and started another pile.

  This isn’t a magic trick—though there is one that looks just like it, called Out of This World, where you choose a volunteer and they guess the color on the face of each card without looking. One by one, they go through the whole deck and, lo and behold, get every single one right. They’re shocked, convinced they have psychic powers. I saw Doug Henning, this hippie magician with long hair who dresses in rainbow clothes, do it on The Merv Griffin Show.

  But this isn’t that. This is about real magic. I have tried this again and again over the past couple of months, counting each time to see how many I got right, then writing down the number on the inside of the top of the shoe box. By the simple law of averages, I should get about half the cards right. The more I do it, the closer I should get to the average of twenty-six. But here’s the thing: My average is twenty-nine and a half. And one time I actually got thirty-eight right—my record. There’s no explanation for this besides magic. And if I can believe in magic, I can believe in God.

  I counted the cards. Twenty-seven right, twenty-five wrong. Not very good, hardly better than average. But I decided to stop there. Because I really want to believe in magic. And
I want to believe that rabbits’ feet are lucky, and that Houdini the rabbit made it to that enchanted meadow, that there actually is buried treasure in the Bixby School sandbox, and that somewhere, on the far side of Chelm, someone is giving away apples.

  And even if none of that is true, I really, really want to believe my dad will wake up.

  THE FIFTH CANDLE: Shlemiels and Shlimazels

  Thursday, December 16

  Last night, I couldn’t fall asleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw either red or black playing cards, then looked up to see that the red ones were held by Captain Kirk, with a sly smile on his face, while the black ones were held by Mr. Spock, who never smiles but just says “Highly illogical,” which the whole business with the cards was. Whenever I opened my eyes, I saw the ceiling of the den, which is covered with glow-in-the-dark paint and phone dials and bits of tape, all the rejects from Omni-Glow.

  I decided to try reading myself to sleep, and pulled out Zlateh the Goat. I turned to my favorite story, “The First Shlemiel,” which is about—you guessed it—the first Shlemiel. That’s another one of those great Yiddish words. It makes your mouth feel like it’s chewing on a bagel. When I was a little kid I asked my dad what it meant. He thought for a moment, then looked it up in The Joys of Yiddish.

  “It says ‘a shlemiel is someone who falls on his back and breaks his nose.’”

  That didn’t make much sense to me, so he added his own explanation. “The shlemiel is the one who spills the soup. And the one who the soup lands on—that’s the shlimazel.”

  Now I had two words I didn’t understand, so he explained. “A shlemiel is someone for whom everything goes badly. Everything he tries fails, everything he touches breaks.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Now I get it. So what’s a shlimazel?”

  “A shlimazel,” he said, “is a shlemiel who’s down on his luck.”

  Since then I’ve been trying to sort it out—and hoping against hope that my dad, while he may look like a shlimazel, and act like a shlimazel, isn’t actually a shlimazel. Because shlemiel stories have happy endings, but shlimazel stories never do.

  “The First Shlemiel,” which I’ve read a hundred times, explains that there was a first shlemiel, who lived in the village of Chelm with his wife, his baby, and a rooster who slept under the bed. Shlemiel was really lazy, and wanted to do nothing more than eat and sleep, so Mrs. Shlemiel did all the work, selling vegetables in the marketplace. One year, for Chaannakah, she made a pot of delicious jam to have on their latkes. Jam may not seem like a big deal to you, but it was a rare treat for the Shlemiels. The problem was that she didn’t want Shlemiel to eat the jam, and she knew that if she simply told him not to eat it, he’d end up eating it—because he was a shlemiel, and that’s what shlemiels do. The house was tiny, and there was no place to hide it, so she came up with a plan. As she was going to work she said, “Shlemiel, I have three things to tell you, very important.”

  “What’s that, Mrs. Shlemiel?”

  “First, whatever you do, don’t let Baby Shlemiel get hurt.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Shlemiel! I won’t let the baby get hurt. What else?”

  “While I’m away, don’t let the rooster out of the house! If you do, he’ll run away.”

  “Of course!” said Shlemiel. “And what’s the third?”

  “Last night, while you were asleep, I stayed up and made a pot of poison! It’s up there on the shelf.” She pointed to the jam. “Whatever you do, don’t eat the poison!”

  “My dear Mrs. Shlemiel,” he said. “You need not worry about me eating the poison. I may be a shlemiel, but I’m no fool!”

  With that, she went off to work, sure he wouldn’t eat the jam.

  And what do you think happened? Everything that wasn’t supposed to.

  When Baby Shlemiel took a nap, Shlemiel went to sleep too, and began to dream. But in his dreams, he wasn’t just Shlemiel—he was Shlemiel the King! King of Chelm, king of Poland, king of the world! How did such a shlemiel become king? In this case, he had a magic dreidel, and whenever he spun it, it landed on Gimel, so he won, and won, and won, until he was so rich, they made him king.

  Wonderful as his dream was, it was just a dream, and right in the middle of it, the rooster woke up and began to crow. To Shlemiel, who was asleep, the crowing sounded like a bell—and in Chelm, when there’s a bell, it means one thing: fire! He jumped up to see where the fire was, and knocked over Baby Shlemiel’s crib. Baby Shlemiel fell on his head and started screaming. When Shlemiel heard the screaming, he was sure there must be a fire, so he ran to the window and opened it up. But there was no fire outside, just falling snow. Then the rooster flew out the window—gone! Shlemiel tried to call him back, but it was pointless—like looking for last winter’s snow, as the old saying goes. Meanwhile Baby Shlemiel was still screaming, so Shlemiel picked him up and sang him the Shlemiel lullaby.

  Finally Baby Shlemiel went back to sleep. But now he had a big bump on his forehead.

  Oy! thought Shlemiel. I’ve done everything Mrs. Shlemiel told me not to do! I let the baby get hurt—and now he has a big bump on his head. She told me not to let the rooster out of the house—and now the rooster’s gone. Everything I do is wrong. I’m just a shlemiel.

  He was so miserable that he decided such a life was not worth living. And do you know what happened then? That’s right. He ate the poison, which, of course, was actually jam. But he didn’t know that, though he did think it was surprisingly delicious for poison. He finished it off, then he lay down to die. But he didn’t die—he drifted off to sleep, dreaming he was Shlemiel the King.

  That must have been when I finally fell asleep, because the next thing I knew it was morning. I heard Howard and my mom talking in the kitchen.

  “What else did the doctor say?” asked Howard.

  “Well, there were three of them,” said my mom. “Dr. Kaplowski kept shaking your dad, saying that he should wake up any minute. But Dr. Robbins said he wasn’t so sure, that he knew of cases where patients go into shock and never wake up. Then the third doctor, whose name was Hardy, took out a safety pin and stuck it in your father’s arm to see if he’d respond.”

  “Did he?” asked Howard.

  There was a pause. “Well, not exactly. But . . . I’m sure he will soon.”

  I got out of bed and went into the kitchen.

  “Good morning, Joel. How did you sleep?”

  She looked more tired than I’d ever seen her. “Fine,” I lied. “Dad’s still in a coma?”

  “Well, the doctors don’t like to use that word. They prefer to say he’s asleep, just not waking up. Dr. Hardy says he might even be dreaming.”

  “Dreaming? That’s good, right? So when the dream ends, he’ll wake up?”

  “That’s what the doctors hope. Maybe some time today. But they also said that the longer he sleeps . . .” She stopped herself, and changed the subject. “Joel, what would you like for lunch today?” I could see she was packing some food in a paper bag—cottage cheese and rye bread and bologna. “Should I make you a sandwich?”

  This was freaky. She hadn’t made my lunch for three years.

  “When are you going back?” I asked.

  “Pretty soon. I just need to get a few things.”

  “We should go with you,” said Howard.

  “No,” she said. “There’s nothing to do at the hospital but wait. Besides, you shouldn’t miss school.”

  “But we’re not doing anything in school,” I said. “We haven’t done anything all week. We should go to the hospital to be with Dad.”

  That’s what I thought I should say, so I did. But I sure didn’t want to go. Like I’ve told you, hospitals are my least favorite places in the world—next to buses. The only thing worse would be a combination bus and hospital, a “buspital,” so you could be stuck in a waiting room and traffic at the same time.
>
  “Or maybe I should just stay home,” I said. “And wait for you to call.” But that didn’t feel right either. What would I do? Sit around and watch reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies? Pray during commercials?

  Kenny came in from his paper route. “Is Dad out of his coma?” he asked my mom.

  “No,” said Howard, answering for her. “He’s still asleep. And don’t call it a coma.”

  “But he will wake up,” said Kenny. “Right? From the thing that’s not a coma?”

  “We can’t be sure,” said Howard, settling into the role he loves, boss of the family. “So we all have to keep praying. I’m going to bring my prayer book to school and pray during recess.”

  “That’s right,” said my mother. “You should go to school, like normal, and try not to worry. I’ll bring the telephone numbers of the school offices, and lots of change this time, and the moment your father wakes up, I’ll call from the pay phone.”

  With that, she took her bag of food and drove off. Kenny and Howard rode their bikes to school. I fed Herrmann.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” I lied. “He’ll be fine.”

  I stepped outside to the tiniest hint of a chill in the air. Really, it would only feel cold to you if you had just been sitting by a fire and then went outside wearing no clothes at all. It wasn’t a winter maybe-it’ll-snow chill, but rather a summer enjoy-this-tiny-hint-of-coolness-while-you-can-because-it’s-going-to-be-hotter-than-hell-today chill.

  That’s why I was so surprised when I looked at the barometer and saw that the needle was still between 29 and 30, right on the edge of SNOW.

  I realized the stupid thing hadn’t budged since I’d started checking on the first night of Qchanukkah. I don’t know what it read before then, because I’d never bothered to look at it. I thought maybe the needle was stuck, so I tapped the glass cover. No movement. I tapped harder. Nothing. I hit it. Nothing. Finally I pounded it with the ball of my hand—and it shattered. A big shard of glass cut right into my palm, and the next thing I knew blood was running down my wrist onto the AstroTurf.