by David Adjmi
The sweater was an oversize fluorescent orange Ton Sur Ton featuring a pixilated, faceless worker in overalls climbing a ladder to nowhere. I got the last one on a spur-of-the-moment shopping trip. “I bought it at Lester’s,” I said, trying not to communicate my overwhelming sartorial pride.
“I love Lester’s,” cried Yvette.
I could feel her admiration for me building in quantum leaps and bounds. She became more voluble, telling me about her summer in Deal, and some ride she and her cousin went on at Great Adventure that broke and left her gushing blood, and how her cousin got blue food coloring all over the cat. I admired her sudden prefaceless glides between topics, how her every remark was topped off with the omnipresent smirk—which I took as an index of flirtation. Was my makeover working? Was this love? Would Yvette share with me the marble-floored mansion in Deal I’d one day own? Would she have cusa b’jibin and kibbeh waiting when I got home from a long day at the electronics store?
As she continued her rambling monologue I studied her strangled cadences, I practiced making my own speech more nasal so I could sound like her. I tried pronouncing words like my jaw had been dislocated. I blew out my vowels so that I sounded practically inhuman—but the inhumanity felt grandiose, almost galactic. When the bell rang we left for our separate classes. I felt I’d matured in some unspecific yet profound way. It felt like a giant leap—almost too giant, like I’d taken a huge gulp of oxygen.
After school, Howie and I met up at a kosher pizza place under the elevated Q train. “So,” he said, picking his teeth with an imaginary toothpick in spontaneous imitation of my mother, “are you gonna ask Yvette out on a date, Daaave?”
“What if she doesn’t like me?”
“You said she did.”
“I said maybe she liked me, I’m not positive of anything.”
Howie told me he’d heard that Yvette, in seventh and part of eighth grade, dated and endured a violently emotional breakup with Harry Beyda—a popular, pageboy-hairstyled Syrian boy who was also a terrible bully and one of my main tormentors in grade school. The stakes felt impossibly high now. Yvette wasn’t some shoddy, garden-variety SY; she’d dated high-ranking boys In The Community, and my status could be raised by affiliation.
That week I arranged, vis-à-vis Yvette’s cousin Shelly, in a series of twisty back-and-forth conversations (many of which involved Shelly, and Yvette’s best friend Sharona Goldkrantz—who wore the same bleachy-looking lipstick as Yvette and had the same boots and white cowboy jacket) for Yvette to be in the lounge that Thursday after lunch so I could ask her out. I was terrified (despite the cousin’s repeated insistence that Yvette liked me and wanted me to ask her out) that she would reject me—that, even though the Adjmis were a Good Family, ours was a bad branch, and she would find out, or she would hear about my hideous reputation from grade school, that I was a weirdo and a loser. My mind raced with catastrophic outcomes as I waited in the lounge for her on one of several carpeted rotundas. I was dizzy and sweating; my heart beat violently. I could feel my recently reapplied Clearasil liquefying over my face into a filmy medicinal sheen. Eventually Yvette appeared at the entrance of the lounge. She walked toward me with her mischievous cockeyed smile, the fringe of her cowboy jacket flapping with each step. When she arrived at my rotunda she stood looking down at me, the low-angle perspective accenting her chinless physiognomy. She seemed to want me to stand but I nervously made an impulsive unshakable decision to continue sitting, thinking it would make me seem assured.
“How a you?”
“Good,” I replied. “What’s new with you?”
“Mrs. Fleischman gave me a demerit,” she said, still standing. The height discrepancy was starting to become awkward.
“How come?” I asked.
“Cause she’s such a disgusting wachshe!”* she exclaimed quite suddenly. “I hate playing kickbawl.”
“Me too. I hate gym,” I said, bristling inwardly at my own ineptitude for small talk. With my last comment, I had inadvertently segued our less than thrilling conversation into a hideous, awful silence. Yvette shook her bangles around, then pulled her frayed hair back into a ponytail. “So,” she said, pointedly, “you wanted to ask me something?”
With considerable effort, because I still believed I would be ridiculed, I stammered something in my clammy sweat about going to a movie. She scrawled her number on a slip of paper in purple ink. “Cawl me,” she said, and, loose-leaf binder in tow, exited the lounge. My heart rocketed through my chest, so profound was my joy at having been found desirable by anyone, much less a girl who represented a totemic form of Syrian femininity.
For our first date we saw Against All Odds at the Kingsway, and afterward went for salads at the new Greek diner on East Seventh Street where, over the theme song from Against All Odds (which she played on repeat at the tiny jukebox in our booth to keep the pathos from the movie alive) Yvette rhapsodized about the movie—how romantic and tragic it was, how stunning Rachel Ward looked, how mysterious the character was, how she loved when people in movies had mystery like the Amish people in Witness. I was hardly listening to her; I was fixated instead on exaggerating my vowel sounds, thinking about my cologne and hair, wondering if I used enough styling mousse. My self-involvement—meant as a safeguard, a way to ensure my presentability—had the contrasting effect of making me more null and blank. I wanted her to believe in my worth, the worth that attracted her the previous year to Harry Beyda, but since I had none, I had to produce an illusion of worth in inferences—like the “mystery” she inferred from the Rachel Ward character in Against All Odds. I was removing my personality feature by feature until I developed an eerie but genial emptiness, like a house stripped of furniture.
At the end of the night I walked her home and we stood together in awkward silence on her front step. I knew I was supposed to initiate a kiss or hug, but I had no impulse to do it—and anyway kissing seemed improvident and somehow blasphemous: we were subjected to a lot of mixed messages at the yeshiva. We were meant to prepare ourselves for marriage, but sex was also dirty, and girls couldn’t wear skirts that showed any knee—and human contact, even platonic pats on the shoulder, made people squeamish. The line between religious etiquette and natural sexual curiosity felt unclear. Maybe kissing was like being “on drugs” or eating shellfish or an unkosher Snickers bar and it made you revolting and subhuman. I’d heard rumors that some girls were “sluts”—Corky Laniado for instance—but what did that really mean? Did they have actual sex with people? Florence Goldbaum supposedly gave Ralph Haddad a hand job at the UA Sheepshead Bay cinema during a screening of Mad Max beyond Thunderdome, but when the rumor came back to her Florence screamed, “It’s not true, it’s not true!” and she covered her eyes and burst in hysterical sobs right in the middle of the lounge. After that day she seemed tainted to me. I’d sneak glimpses of Florence in class as we studied Rashi or Zionism and imagine some sexually transmitted infection lurking subcutaneously. Sex seemed ugly, almost criminal; it was so humiliating for girls to be subjected to it. At the same time I was envious of Florence, because I myself wanted to give Ralph Haddad a hand job—or something in the family of hand jobs, I wasn’t sure what. After hearing the story about Florence I fantasized about Ralph during class and hated myself for my fantasies. I’d been trying to ignite libidinous feelings for girls since I was nine, when I found that ripped-up-copy of Club magazine under Stevie’s mattress, but the giant breasts couldn’t get me going the way Lee Majors did with his tracksuit. Of course I would never do anything about my attraction to boys, it wasn’t even a remote possibility—and even if I had the chance, which I never would, I could “get AIDS and die” (a refrain heard frequently in those days). If homosexuals died of AIDS I didn’t want to know about it, just as I didn’t want to hear the sodomy jokes Mrs. Wasserstein made in law class when discussing Bower v. Hardwick—though I laughed with the rest of the class when she told them. And if there were homoerotic undercurrents to my friendship with Howie, thes
e were safely bedded in a dark continent of denial: a denial we fortified for each other because it was a form of survival. When we rented porn tapes from Avenue J Video we feigned boredom at all the huge cocks. And in seventh grade Howie blindly shoplifted a copy of a porn magazine from the twenty-four-hour store, which turned out to be a copy of all-gay Honcho. When Ari Blume caught him with the Honcho in his locker he gave Howie the nickname “Honcho Villa,” but the nickname only lasted for a week and then people forgot about the Honcho—and so did I. It didn’t mean anything, because homosexual people weren’t real, or if they were, they existed as part of some other untoward pervert reality that would never intersect with my own. I was the boy in the plastic bubble. If anything pierced the bubble, pierced the germless world I inhabited, I might die. And though I didn’t like life particularly, I still wanted to survive it. I wanted to be good, and moral.
I kept asking Yvette out on dates, even though I had no idea how to be on a date, or whether dates were even supposed to be any fun. I saw them as a sort of prestigious job I’d gotten by accident. I started to see that the concept of a girlfriend was far more appealing than its concrete realization. Having a girlfriend felt moral, like prayer and religion, like swabbing the dirt off your face with cleansing pads, but that was it. After a few weeks the novelty of Yvette’s boots and pin-straight hair wore off—even that nasal voice whose cadences I held so dear started to grate. Maybe I was too fixated on protocol to get to know her beyond her love of Phil Collins and Wham! and her loosely defined aspirations to become a fashion designer (or model, she hadn’t yet decided) but our dates were boring. Yvette subconsciously picked up my weird gambit of making myself blank; after a while neither of us wanted to make a gaffe or stain anything with too much personality—what if we said something abnormal, or strange? When we slow danced at her birthday party to “Careless Whisper” (at the strenuous urging of Sharona Goldkrantz—I experienced a sudden temporary resurgence of shyness about dancing publicly) we bobbed rhythmlessly like two wobbling helium balloons whose strings were tangled. I looked up and saw Sharona staring at us from the sidelines with her oversized sweater and huge lips, slathered in bleachy makeup and sipping her Diet Sprite. Her eyes gleamed with invidious desire: when would she experience a love like that?
After the birthday party I stopped calling Yvette. When we saw each other in the lounge at our separate rotundas we just smiled and looked away. There was no acrimony, only the tacit agreement that we’d made a boring couple. And when the dust cleared from my relationship, I saw it proved advantageous in ways that were lasting. Popular students still avoided me but I managed to move up a rank, from the most ignominious of pariahs to a middling, neither-here-nor-there stratum.
Howie, on the other hand, had become somewhat popular fairly quickly. He began dating a junior and it was a succès de scandale. Brenda was Syrian, but not quite In The Community. She lived in a part of Queens called Belle Harbor—an isthmus near the Belt Parkway populated mainly by Italians and J-Dubs. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was wealthy (her father owned a successful jeans brand) and that gave her cachet. She was slightly overweight, with gigantic breasts and short brown hair and a skinny upturned nose—the product of an impeccably wrought (maybe two, it was bruited) nose job. She and Howie were soldered together almost instantly. They twinned each other, just like Howie and I used to twin each other, but in this case they actually looked sort of alike: her face, like his, was oval shaped and wide; the stark domed prominence of her forehead matched his own. And they were together constantly. They made out in public on the front lawn (something of a scandal), they did homework together every night. Their weekends were crammed with activities: disco parties at the Beth Torah, Trivial Pursuit games. Howie spent time with Brenda’s family; they took him to dinner, gave him free jeans, tutored him in their likes and dislikes. He wanted to incorporate me into their relationship in some way but I was holding out for the infatuation to end, not simply because I felt myself being supplanted (though that was a very real and distressing factor) but because I could not stand Brenda. She was obnoxious and aloof, and given to florid expressions of disgust or disinterest: the very embodiment of a Jewish princess. But Howie seemed to like spoiled girls; he seemed to find their insolence refreshing. It was fun watching them vamp, listening to their histrionic complaints. He had that binocular ability to be at once distanced and intimate with people; their foibles could make him laugh without him feeling implicated. Maybe in some way Brenda echoed the captious theatrical intensity of his mother: her crabbiness, her endless grinding dissatisfaction.
His relationship with Brenda gave Howie a new platform. He started garnering the attention of SY boys like Nathan Kraiem and Isaac Sitt. He was the rare J-Dub invited to Seymour Dayan’s Saturday poker game—they even invited him to join a Syrian bowling league. He was quickly becoming a dazzling star in the homogeneous firmament of the Syrian Community. He was at sorties and Chinese auctions, fashion shows at the Sephardic Community Center, parties in Deal. He was invited to mansions, to Acapulco and Bermuda with people’s families.
As a way of staking my claim on him, I trumpeted my dislike of Brenda more and more, but for the first time since I’d known him, Howie was indifferent to my claims. He seemed to have quietly unshackled himself from my claustral opinions, my criticisms about his ridged brow and egg-shaped chin, my judgments about what he should do and who he should be. He loved Brenda. And it became bracingly clear he wasn’t going to honor the pact of hermetic, exclusive intimacy we established in the sixth grade (a pact he cajoled me to make, however wordless and implicit) because he was forging a new pact now, one with the larger social world. If I came along to his parties it was often to his annoyance. Despite my efforts to create a good impression, I remained visibly awkward in social situations. I was studied and wooden. I made constant faux pas. I required moment-to-moment approval for nearly everything I said and did, and I viewed every interaction as a gauge of my success or failure as a person. I was always stricken by some mysterious sorrow, some ugly inchoate new misery. And where I used to be able to count on Howie to comfort me in my states of fear and withdrawal, he was now turning against me in small, visible increments. He’d begun to interpret my bad moods as a form of hostile takeover, so he became hostile in turn, and the anger that used to be covered over with laughter was now full-blown rage. At first the rages shocked me. I’d seen him act out, but it was with other people—and even then, it was always under a patina of humor. Now he was just angry. And the angrier he got, the sadder and more saturnine and more low energy I became, which only served to stoke more rages from him, more chilly invective. In response, I’d wriggle between needy bids for approbation and long gambits of punishing silence—I had no other tactics at my disposal—but these only made things worse.
One night, during some social outing I’d become sullen and dramatically introspective as a way of trying to filch some measure of attention or ardor I felt had been displaced from me, and in the car service on the way home he lashed out. “What is your problem?” he said. “Why do you just sit there? Why don’t you speak or do anything? You’re like a brick. Why do you have to be so fucking annoying?” The more I tried to resuscitate our friendship, the more disinterested Howie became. I was over at his house all the time but he’d ignore me. He’d talk on the phone to Brenda or one of his other friends, and I’d sit in the living room while his parents spoke German and watched Night of 100 Stars. I felt unloved; I felt it the way a wound throbs. I’d been trying to flash signals from that dark and lonely place inside myself, but the signals didn’t transmit. The conditions for love were so opaque—I had to do something, but what?
My sister and mother’s relationship hit a new apex of violence that year and I was desperate to avoid my actual home. Once she moved back in, Arlene became the de facto housekeeper. My mother gave her a whole bunch of household duties, and if Arlene didn’t do something to my mother’s satisfaction, my mother would lose her temper. Arlene w
ould try harder to please her, but my mother would nitpick and nitpick (because she couldn’t stand all the mess, why couldn’t Arlene understand that?) and eventually my sister, who only knew one-upmanship since no one practiced or taught her diplomacy, would scream hysterically at my mother, and doors would slam, and threats would be issued. Over the course of a year, the threats got more and more desperate, until one day during a melee over a vacuum hose, when Arlene had been pushed to her breaking point, she said, “Maybe I should just commit suicide!” to which my mother heatedly replied, “You want to kill yourself? Go ahead!” to which Arlene rejoined “I WILL!” at the top of her lungs. She grabbed her purse, marched across the living room, slammed the door to the house, and took off in her little broken-down silver car with the maroon interior. I was terrified for my sister’s life. A few weeks earlier, in the heat of some other violent affray, Arlene even told my mother to SHUT UP (which no one ever said to my mother, it was the one forbidden utterance); she was crossing pernicious thresholds, which made me think that she in fact really would try to kill herself—she could buy a gun, she could slam her car into a tree or drive to Brighton Beach and drown herself in the ocean like James Mason in A Star Is Born, which I’d just seen on the Million Dollar Movie.
The vacuum-hose fight pushed Arlene to find a job. She started working part-time for Eddie Antar (who owned the Crazy Eddie chain of stores, he was our second cousin) and quickly saved enough money to move to her own apartment—a cockroach-infested one-bedroom near Avenue V, but at least it was hers.
When she and Lauren left, I became the sole and unwilling reservoir for all my mother’s overflowing sorrows. Her need for cleanliness had gotten more obsessive in the intervening years, her cleaning more and more an act of aggression. She was driven toward a standard of cleanliness that eluded me: it verged on a hospital-grade, germless asepsis. A single plate in the sink constituted a mess, and messes infuriated her. She’d recite apothegms to me about cleanliness and godliness. If I neglected to shower, she’d bunch up her face in an expression of revulsion: “You stink!” she’d bleat, loudly and unapologetically, so everyone could hear. “That shirt is disgusting!” she’d decry—usually in front of her friends, to show them she hadn’t raised me to wear ugly shirts. She had no patience with my adolescence, which she took as an affront. Any salvos of independence on my part were deemed acts of treachery. If I were moody or sad she’d barrage me with harsh retaliatory insults. The margin for error was impossibly slim—she wasn’t going to let me get away with that bullshit! She raided my room, read comprehensively through my diaries. She went through my wardrobe and threw out clothes she didn’t like. I’d regularly hunt down a lost pair of pants or shoes only to find she disposed of them in the trash. I retrieved clothes and shoes from garbage cans to her withering putdowns. “I don’t care!” she’d snap defiantly. “That outfit is disgusting.” She grew fond of chiding me in the form of abstract threats, she had all sorts of little sayings at her disposal: “Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness,” “You better get your act together!” She meant to chasten me but I only got more detached. I hid in my room but she’d stalk me like a predator. There was a lock, but the door was never fixed from when my father broke it off the hinges, so she could bang it open without turning the knob—which she did, frequently. I’d look up and there she’d be, attacking me with the impetus of a crescendo. If I raised my voice she’d raise hers louder. If I slammed my door she’d shout on the other side that I was a piece of shit. My mother was unflaggable, but we were at a deadlock because I would never consent to her supremacy.
