Today, we talked about Coach Matt Huggins, the PE teacher for the seventh grade. He was a tall man of indeterminate age—somewhere on the far side of twenty. He had blond hair parted on the side and very white teeth, and he smiled at anyone, an easy smile that splashed you with light, a smile that made other students feel noticed but made me feel he was aiming it at someone else. His legs were as large as barbecued hams, and had a sinister quality, covered with dark hair. He wore green-tinted aviator glasses, which made him look as if he were about to pilot a plane, and Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. We discussed what Laila described as his immense sexiness, which she presented as a clear and incontrovertible fact. As we walked through the corridors of the junior high, the world was so mutable—Jake Tivoli’s face was soft as a rose and then it was covered by a beard, Stephanie Hall’s breasts now bubbled out of her tube tops and she possessed a laugh that sounded like a seagull’s cry—we wanted a proclamation, a fact where we could find shelter.
“You know it. He is hot,” said Laila, expertly, and we all listened to this.
“He made us run the Ironman today,” said Jennifer. “I almost seriously died.”
“You’re a weakling,” said Audra, and laughed.
“Perfect day for it. He probably likes seeing us sweaty,” said Laila, with the specific, eerie sort of pronouncement that disturbed us and woke us up.
“That’s gross, in my opinion,” said Audra.
“He is such a total fox,” said Jennifer.
“We are not actually using that word,” said Hannah, rolling her eyes.
“What word?” asked Jennifer.
“He’s foxy,” said Laila, huskily, and we all laughed.
Coach Huggins strolled through the cafeteria, waving to students, boys but mostly the girls. The wave varied; a flat hand, a thumbs-up, hey! There was a self-conscious, theatrical element to it; he seemed to be auditioning for the role of the affable coach on a television show. We watched where he would stop, which girl he would sit beside today.
“It’s going to be Avery,” said Jennifer; she liked predicting this.
He sat beside Avery Solon, who had recently taken up the cause of makeup—mascara, foundation, eye shadow, lip gloss—as though a naked face were an argument she intended to win. This meant extremely enthusiastic application—she wore so much orange foundation her face appeared to be made of clay. He bent toward her like they were continuing an important conversation. We pretended not to look. But we looked—at the way she laughed, leaning into him, an almost professional-seeming laugh emanating from her shoulders, and we saw him stroke her back, his hand like a slow animal, and we watched how Avery moved closer to him until she was sitting on his lap.
Two days later, when we got to Hebrew school, there was a security car in the parking lot. Bel-Air Security. A heavy graying man sat at the wheel, leafing through a copy of Consumer Reports and eating a bag of Cheetos. He seemed very engaged in an article about dishwashers. I doubted that he was capable of preventing us from skipping Hebrew school, let alone a barrage of terrorists.
“What’s that man doing here?”
“Security,” said Darlene.
“Why?”
“Because.”
She did not elaborate further. Darlene was often saddened that we were not advertising our bake sale to raise money for Soviet Jewry, or signing up more sponsors for the annual Solidarity March for Israel. We were never raising enough money for the Jews who were in precarious situations; sending money to them felt like a way of paying them off for our own luck. Darlene’s goal was to never let us feel too safe. She clipped news stories about Nazi or KKK groups meeting secretly across the United States. She passed the newspaper stories to us and asked, if we saw a gathering like this in our neighborhood, what were we going to do about it? Who would we write to? Call? The sky was hot and white over the Santa Monica Mountains. We passed around the articles about anti-Semites while voraciously consuming our powdered donuts or Twinkies.
“We are going to go on to timing the V’ahavta and the Kaddish today,” said Darlene, “but first we want to do something to connect with our brothers and sisters in Israel. Look at this.”
She turned on the overhead projector and the many faces from the newspaper flashed on the screen. Twenty-two of them.
We looked at the faces of the dead students.
“Now we will say their names.”
No one really wanted to say their names, as if they would stick to our tongues and choke us.
Shoshana.
Ilana.
Tamar.
Yaakov.
“Everyone. Pick one student.”
I studied the faces. Of course, we’d all tumble toward the prettiest one, or the one with the brightest smile, or the one who would somehow protect us from a fate like theirs.
“You are going to adopt one dead student and write to their parents. We need to support them.”
Darlene’s voice cracked and we sat up, alert; she covered her eyes with her hand for a moment. We sat in this bare room, empty except for the seventeen plastic-wood desks, Hebrew letters on bright placards on the wall. Now the room was heavy with various types of emotion. For the first time, ever, I thought it would be preferable to memorize a prayer.
“This is who you are,” Darlene said, shuffling through papers. “Pick one.”
Aaron raised his hand; his fingers trembled.
“Did any of them live?” asked Aaron.
“No. They are all dead.”
We were silent, absorbing this.
I stared at the faces and tried to imagine them waiting, alive, in the corner.
My mind felt restless when I tried to think of certain things—my sister breathing at night beside me, Coach Huggins standing on the square green field watching us run by. I often stared at people and wondered what was in their minds, but did not always want to know it.
We all reluctantly chose a student. I picked Ilana because she was smiling in the photo and she looked smart, like she could possibly escape.
“What do we say?”
Darlene wrote on the board: Dear family of
We all carefully copied that. But what then?
Darlene regarded us with a cool expression, as though she was troubled by our lack of skills in this region of sympathy. She sighed.
“Write you are so sorry to hear about the loss of X. We share your grief.”
We all wrote that.
“Can we say anything about us?” asked John Blum. “I just got on the Y’s traveling baseball team.”
“I just made the Area D orchestra.”
We looked at her, wondering if sharing our personal moments of triumph would be helpful. Darlene rubbed the eraser against her wrist.
“I don’t think this is what they want to hear,” she said. “It would seem like bragging. Say something that would make them feel we are thinking of them. Say something kind about the child who was killed.”
I looked at the photo of Ilana.
“How about—I think your daughter looks very nice and maybe good at math,” said Lisa.
Darlene held her chalk in the air. “Almost,” she said. She looked out the window, and she, too, seemed not to know what to say.
“How about something like: ‘We love you and the state of Israel. We will stand by you.’ That could be something they want to hear.”
We wrote that down. We wrote our letters, quickly. Everyone wanted to be done with the letters. I stared at Ilana’s face. I did not want her to be dead. The fact of her death kept bumping into my mind and sliding off. I folded my letter into an envelope and addressed it, but I had other thoughts about Ilana. I tried to smile at her face encouragingly.
She escaped, I thought. It made me feel better, for a moment, to imagine this. She crawled out from the pile of bodies and slipped out a window to run and get on a plane. The others were still writing their letters as I took another piece of
paper. Dear Ilana, I wrote. I hope you were able to get out of the school. You can find me at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School in Los Angeles. My locker is 541. If you come here, you can live with me. I can help you.
Darlene said she would mail the letters. Express mail, tomorrow.
I didn’t know exactly where to mail the second letter, but I put it on the pile, too.
The Hebrew school classrooms at Temple Shalom were located off the main synagogue. There were just twenty-eight students, grades five to eight. We were familiar with each other, as we began this routine as children. Our parents, many of whom grew up in the 1940s and 1950s and spent energy trying to press down any Jewishness in themselves, dropped us off here and sped away. But there was always a longing in my father’s voice when he picked me up—“So what did you talk about?”—he wanted to locate something in me that he tried to erase in himself.
It was assumed that, because we were dropped off here two days a week, in some way we were alike. I peered at my classmates, searching for some similarity between us, some of whom shared the wild dark hair that I had, some who did not. History always felt like it was breathing softly behind us, and for an anxious month when I was eleven, I thought that if we went through the wrong door in the synagogue we’d end up in the shtetl or the Warsaw ghetto or running from Crusaders or in a concentration camp. I did not want to open the wrong door.
But here we were. The air was clear and quiet, the scent of licorice lifting off the golden hills. There was a low-level tension between the public school kids and the private school girls who used Hebrew school as a chance to wear the Jordache jeans and platform shoes they were not allowed to wear during their school day. There was the slap of a basketball on asphalt during break and the distinct shouts of Aaron and Jessica bartering Wacky Packs and most of the boys gathering around Jeff’s radio listening to the Dodger game. Though we didn’t all really know each other, somehow these hours together, week by week, made us think we did.
The small group was a contrast to Jefferson Junior High. There were so many students it seemed that at first the school was filled with a whole new batch of strangers whenever I moved from one class to another. It was California, which meant that most of our parents or grandparents had come here from somewhere else—the Midwest, the East Coast, the South, Mexico, Japan, China.
There were threads of music rising from tape players, as though an anthem from a distinct nation: Elton John, “Bennie and the Jets” and “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”; Kool and the Gang, “Hollywood Swinging”; Joni Mitchell, “Help Me”; Jackson Five, “Dancing Machine.” Laila hated Olivia Newton-John but loved Steely Dan. Jennifer loved Elton John and bought purple sunglasses. Audra liked Stevie Wonder and thought Elton John’s outfits were idiotic. Inside the classrooms, thirty of us sat in long rows listening to the teachers drone on, trying to press facts about Spanish verbs, geometry, Dickens, and the American Revolution into our heads, and outside, there was the scent of flowers and the buoyancy of music and the glaring sun and also, in the bubbling rush of people in the school, the lurking sense that at any moment someone could yell something at you or grab you and I scanned the faces striding down the hallway, trying to figure out who we all were.
The teachers were nice sometimes or completely crazy. We sat at the lunch table evaluating them.
“Mrs. Murdoch’s gray streak looks like a skunk today,” said Jennifer.
“It took over half her head yesterday,” said Audra. “How does that happen?”
“And she forgot to collect our homework,” said Laila. “Third time.”
“What do you have in there?” asked Hannah.
It was the question that perked us all up. What grade did you have? It seemed that the sun had stopped right above us in the sky. Grades were important, for they would sort us. We all agreed on this.
“A,” said Audra, quickly.
“A-minus, but with an extra credit I’ll have an A,” said Jennifer, firmly.
I was quiet. I had a B-plus, which meant I wanted this particular conversation to end.
“What?” asked Jennifer, now alert.
“I haven’t checked,” I said.
“You had a B-minus on that infinitive quiz,” said Laila, who had an exhaustive memory for such things.
“Oh,” said Audra, who had mastered a kind of regal pity, “so you probably have a B.”
“Plus,” I snapped, before I could stop myself, “I have at least a B-plus.”
Hannah leaned back, smirking a bit; Laila shrugged and majestically twisted her long golden hair. I jumped up and went to my locker, stepping around the students rolling on the lawn like casualties in a war. I had a secret: in my locker, I stored some extra clothes for Ilana. An old sleep shirt and shorts and flip-flops. While I was somewhat embarrassed that I had done this, I was also a little proud, for I wanted to take some, any, action; I felt I was preparing for her arrival. When I had trouble focusing in class, I imagined her trudging up to the locker, perhaps at night, her clothes smelly from her long trip; I imagined her wandering through the junior high school to my locker, changing her clothes right then, and slipping on the shirt and shorts I had left for her. She would thank me; she would be grateful that someone believed she was not doomed but could get out of that classroom. I saw her letting out a breath when she had the right clothes, turning around in the warm, honeyed silence, trying to decide what to do next.
My house sat amid a cluster of other ranch houses that all sprang up, simultaneously, around 1960. They had the same basic floor plan, and if you shut one eye and squinted, sometimes they all blurred.
At night, after dinner, my family gathered in the den and watched the news. There was the news about Ma’alot and last month the terror attack at Kiryat Shmona, also in northern Israel. There was, right after Ma’alot, the shoot-out downtown with the LAPD and the Symbionese Liberation Army, who had kidnapped Patty Hearst. As we watched, the walls of the house felt thin. “Little Israel,” my father said. “All these enemies around it. Not knowing if your bus will blow up or not. Can you imagine living like this?” He stared at the TV, leaning forward. He taught American history at Santa Monica High School, and his classes were growing bigger each semester, the students uninterested in the topic, sometimes taunting him when they were bored, and recently one threw an eraser at his back when he was writing something on the board. He labored under a principal who he believed favored other teachers, giving them more honors classes and classrooms with lights that always turned on. My father tried generosity and being helpful—giving her tins of cookies for Christmas, volunteering to run the College Prep club and the History Buffs club—but nothing made him feel appreciated. “All these countries,” he said, “want to exterminate it. But the Israeli people never give up.” He liked using the word “exterminate,” and mentioned it often. He wanted the Israelis to teach him something.
I practiced my V’ahavta. My parents liked hearing me practice, liked the sound of the words they did not understand.
“V’ahavata et adonai elochecha,” I droned. It was oddly calming to say the words, especially in that the meaning was so abstract and actually dull—You shall love the Lord Your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your might. How did anyone even do this and why? I wondered if I loved my family the correct way. I wanted to be good at love and I didn’t know if I was.
The campus was aglow; the pointy flamingo flowers, the elephant palms, it was late May. The cafeteria outside, tables parked on the damp concrete, had the musty odor of a swimming pool. I somewhat admired Laila’s clarity in her longing for Coach Huggins, even if it unnerved me; I was trying to understand the logic of my own longing, which fell over random boys in my class. They inhabited my dreams for a few weeks, then vanished. I was not clear why I was drawn to one or another. Tom Laughlin barely resembled a boy; he wasn’t one of the large muscled types with beards, who seemed as remote and freakish as apes. He was skinny and had large red
lips; he could almost have been a girl. His hair was feathered and blond and was much more beautiful than mine. He balanced on a skateboard as though he were standing on ice. He smelled strongly of pot, a sour lawn, a fact I tried to ignore. I sat behind him in algebra and he tipped his chair back so far his hair almost fell onto my papers. I thought of him so fiercely during the day my forehead hurt.
We watched Coach Huggins walking around on lunch patrol. It was a warm day, and many girls were wearing halter tops, some that resembled mere handkerchiefs tied with strings in the back.
“I have to tell you all something,” said Laila.
We leaned closer to her.
“I sat on Coach Huggins’s lap after gym yesterday,” said Laila. “I needed him to sign my late slip. He said, sure, he held his leg out. I sat on it. He signed it and he was staring at me and he said, ‘You’re beautiful.’”
We all listened to that.
“No, he didn’t,” said Hannah.
“Yes, he did,” said Laila. She sat up and touched her hair, gently, perhaps the same place he had touched it. Was she beautiful? It seemed an important word, a goal that we all were supposed to want. But he had decided this, somehow, walking across the trampled soccer field.
Audra was sitting very still, and then she said softly, “Ick.” I was glad she said that.
“Come on, it’s a compliment,” said Laila, flipping her hair so it fell on the left side of her head.
“Are you getting an A in PE then?” asked Hannah.
“Probably. He wants me to come to his office and talk about extra credit I can do.”
Coach Huggins’s office was a small room in the gymnasium. There was just room for a desk and a bulletin board, and on the walls were lots of magazine pages ripped out—mostly photos of young women athletes posing in wet swimsuits or with a tennis racket, arm stretched into a serve.
The New Order Page 12
