by Melissa Bank
I thought, Robert will.
My father’s voice sounded more normal when he said, “Your bat mitzvah wouldn’t have to be like Rebecca’s.”
He kept his eyes on me. “We won’t make any plans until you say so,” he said. “But I’d like you to try Hebrew school.”
It was more of a request than a command, and I was lulled by his respectful tone. I said, “Okay.”
“Good,” he said.
Another moment passed before I realized that I’d agreed to go to Hebrew school.
My mother appeared at the screen door. “Would you like a piece of fruit or anything?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d like a cushion for this goddamned chair.”
“Maybe next year,” she said. Then: “Robert’s waiting.”
My father looked at me. He said, “Are we finished, sweetheart?” and I said that we were.
. . . . .
My mother gave me a lift to Hebrew school. She brought Albert along to make me feel better and said that she wouldn’t mind a little music, meaning that I could tune the radio to a station I liked.
I said, “Thank you anyway.”
We drove in silence. The sun was still strong and the sky a summer blue, and I thought of the vacant lot and of Danny saying, “I can’t believe summer’s over.”
We turned up the long driveway. The synagogue was pretty if I covered my left eye and just saw the old mansion part, where the offices were, and not the ugly new addition—a submarinelike tunnel of classrooms plus the actual temple with its trapezoidal stained-glass windows.
At the entrance, my mother said, “You know, Aunt Nora and I weren’t allowed to have bat mitzvahs. They were just for boys.”
I turned a blank eye to my mother, informing her that her words were irrelevant to me.
“Well,” she said, forcing a smile, “I’ll pick you up at five-thirty.”
I said my most wretched, “Good-bye.”
After I closed the door, she said, “Sophie?” and for a second I thought that maybe she would say something comforting, or even, I don’t want you to suffer: Let’s go. Unlike my father, she was capable of reversals.
She said, “Did you want to thank me for the lift?”
. . . . .
The classroom was brand-new and modern, with petal-shaped desks, a skylight, and Hebrew letters in fluorescent colors tacked above the blackboard—probably an attempt to make us think that Hebrew was groovy. Instead, the room reminded me of the Muzak version of a rock song. I took the last seat in the last row so I could be closest to the door.
The teacher was writing on a pad and seemed oblivious to the dozen twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who faced him. I exchanged silent greetings with the ones I recognized from regular school, even Leslie Liebman, whose hands were folded on her desk.
The bell rang, and just when it was getting strange for the teacher not to start the class, he stood. He wrote his name on the board and faced us.
Very slowly, he said, “I am Moreh Pinkus.”
I’m sure we all thought that moreh was his first name and were surprised to hear him say it to us; it wasn’t until the second class that we learned that moreh meant teacher in Hebrew.
He was probably in his early thirties but seemed much older, as the very religious sometimes do. He was almost bald, which made me wonder if he’d glued his yarmulke on. He seemed to shuffle because the trousers of his suit were too long. I would have thought he was Orthodox, but he didn’t have long curls in front of his ears or the beard that I thought was required.
After introducing himself, Moreh Pinkus rummaged through his briefcase for what turned out to be the attendance sheet. He read it over, and even then hesitated before speaking; it occurred to me that he didn’t trust or like his voice.
He called my name first: “Applebaum, Sophie?”
“Here,” I said.
He looked up at me for a long moment, so long I wondered if he’d divined how much I didn’t want to be there. But he did the same with the next person and the next—calling the name, studying the face—until he said, “Muchnick, Margie?” and there was no answer.
It seemed possible that she had dropped out or was in the other class, and I hoped that she had or was. Margie Muchnick was one of the girls who lived on or around Foxrun Road—the Foxes, they were called—and though I wasn’t one of their main victims, nobody was immune; they’d nicknamed me Sofa and tortured me about Eric Green.
Moreh Pinkus repeated, “Muchnick, Margie?” and she walked in and said, “Here.”
Inexplicably, she sat at the desk next to mine.
Margie was short and solid, dressed in a baggy sweatshirt, jeans, and black high-tops. She had a round face and wore her red hair in two bunches, big fat frizz balls. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were almost white, and she had the yellow-brown eyes I imagined a fox might have.
I didn’t acknowledge her, let alone mouth, Hi, as I had to my other un-friends. I pretended not to see her, just as I did when I ran into any of the Foxes.
There was an embarrassing silence while Moreh Pinkus waited for her to apologize for her lateness; then he looked down at the attendance sheet and read the next name.
To make up for Margie’s rudeness, Leslie Liebman helped Moreh Pinkus distribute our Hebrew I textbooks.
Margie flipped through the lessons and exercises. “Fascinating,” she said.
At the blackboard, Moreh Pinkus wrote out the Hebrew alphabet; slowly, slowly, slowly he said the name of each letter, pronounced the sound it made, and waited for us to repeat after him.
It was hot, and Moreh Pinkus removed his suit jacket and draped it around his chair. When he returned to the board, I saw that he’d missed a belt loop. I noticed, too, that he wore a wedding ring, and I thought it might not be a bad idea for Mrs. Pinkus to look her husband over before he left the house.
I tried to focus on Moreh Pinkus, but it was hard.
Margie pushed her sleeves up, revealing a wristful of baby bracelets—seed pearls interspersed with tiny alphabet cubes on a chain that turned your wrist green—last year’s symbol of friendship. I’d lost mine in the ocean, but now, just as Moreh’s wedding band revealed that he was married, my bare wrist seemed to announce that I was friendless.
I kept wishing Margie hadn’t sat next to me. I wondered if it would attract too much attention for me to change desks.
She herself solved the problem. She had a coughing fit—a loud one—and you could tell it was fake. I thought that she was trying to amuse herself or to get our teacher to turn away from the board. But she was just setting up the pretext for her escape: She left the room, as though in need of water.
I felt better as soon as she’d gone. With the rest of the class, I repeated after Moreh Pinkus, but the Hebrew letters refused to enter my brain. I fell into a bored daze, which I interrupted only to check the wall clock and will its audible minute hand to tick faster.
I pretended to take notes, looking up at the board and down at my notebook, while I wrote out the words to Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” I lingered over “God said to Abraham kill me a son/Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on,’ ” which seemed pertinent.
It wasn’t until I had to go to the bathroom that I realized how long Margie had been gone. She’ll be back in a second, I thought. I wrote out all the words to “I Shall Be Released,” until I was desperate to be released myself. I left the room.
Margie wasn’t at the fountain or in the hallway; nobody was. To be safe, instead of going to the bathroom two rooms up, I went to the one across the temple, all the way down the hall, past the classrooms, the lobby, and the gift shop.
I opened the door to the powder room and tried to appear calm when I saw Margie. She was sitting sideways, her legs slung over the arm of one of the fat, maroon velveteen chairs that faced the mirror. “Well hello, Sofa.”
I said, “Hi, Margie,” and went through the second door, to the stalls and sinks.
I planned to say nothi
ng as I passed back through the powder room on my way out, but she said, “Can you believe this?”
Assuming that she meant the misery that was Hebrew, I said, “I know.”
She said, “Do you have any candy or gum?”
“Sorry.”
She took out a pack of cigarettes and asked if I wanted one.
I hesitated, but when she handed the cigarette to me I took it, and when she lit the match I leaned forward. I imitated my mother accepting a light from my father and exhaled as she did, ceiling-ward.
Margie held her own cigarette between her teeth like a killer; she was imitating someone, too—maybe the Penguin from Batman.
It was fascinating to see myself smoke, but I forced myself to turn away from the mirror in case Margie was observing me. I kept my eyes on the wallpaper, maroon-and-silver ladies with swirls for hair, such as you would see in a Peter Max print. Then, looking at the swirly wallpaper, I felt seasick. I pretended I’d dropped an earring in the shag rug so I could put my head between my legs.
“Did you lose something?” she said.
I couldn’t speak.
When I felt better, I fidgeted with my earring and sat up.
I held the Marlboro until it had burned down low enough to be considered smoked and went to throw it in the toilet.
I stood there a moment, relieved to the point of elation: I hadn’t gotten caught smoking and hadn’t done anything Margie could make fun of or report to the Foxes.
In the powder room, she held out her hand in what I realized was an offer or challenge to thumb wrestle. I sat down again. We clasped fingers. Our thumbs tapped out the requisite side-to-side one-two-three.
Her nimble thumb danced while mine lumbered—hers was a swashbuckler, mine a polar bear. She pinned my thumb down hard.
“Best of three,” she said.
I tried to copy her fancy thumb work, but again she won.
After best of seven, I said I was going back to class, and she didn’t stop me.
She herself returned at the very end, when Moreh Pinkus was writing our assignment from Hebrew I on the blackboard. He faced us and asked if we had any questions.
Without raising her hand, Margie said, “Is this homework?”
He said, “Pardon?”
“We get homework from regular school,” she said. “We’re not supposed to get any from you.” I wondered if this was true—I hoped it was—but it seemed more likely that it was just another coughing fit.
“If you wish to learn Hebrew,” he said, in his interminably slow voice, “you will need to study.”
He dismissed us with a formal, “Shalom,” and a few of us mumbled shy shaloms back.
Margie walked outside with me, where all our mothers waited in station wagons. When she found hers, she turned to me and said, “See you ’round, basset hound.”
. . . . .
At dinner, my father said, “Well? Was it the torture you thought it would be?”
I said, “Worse,” and was ready to elaborate. I was hoping that if I told the truth, he would say that he was glad I’d given Hebrew school a try, which was what he’d finally said about tennis.
I could tell that he was both let down and a little angry; his eyes got tired, as they did when he looked over my report cards.
Robert rescued me by describing his first day of tutoring Doug Sloane, who’d been held back two grades; Robert imagined out loud how hard that would be.
It would be impossible, I thought, because you are a genius and Doug Sloane is mentally retarded.
Jack said that Doug’s older brother, who’d also been held back, was on the football team. This led to a description of a catch that Jack himself had made off of what he called “a long bomb” in practice. He drew a diagram of the play on a napkin we passed around.
My father turned back to Robert. “So you think it was wrong for Doug to be held back?”
Robert said, “I feel sorry for him.”
“I can understand that,” my father said. “But didn’t what you learned in fourth grade prepare you for fifth?”
For a while, they debated how the educational system might best serve Doug, and then Robert turned to me. “You know Doug Sloane, right?” Robert knew I did; he was just trying to include me in the conversation.
My mother jumped in: “Does anyone have any idea how high the adult illiteracy rate in this country is?” I doubted she herself knew. Like me, my mother didn’t learn facts or acquire knowledge; instead, she had feelings—insecurity about not being knowledgeable, for example.
She looked around the table; none of us knew how high the adult illiteracy rate in this country was.
She said, “Seventeen percent.”
I thought, Eighty-five percent of statistics are made up on the spot.
. . . . .
I hardly saw Margie in regular school. Flynn Junior High was huge compared to Surrey Elementary, and we didn’t have any classes together. The first time I ran into her in the hall, she said a solemn, “Shalom,” and I could tell by the way her Fox friends laughed that they thought she was imitating me instead of Moreh Pinkus.
Once, during her lunch and my math period, I looked out the window and saw her sitting on the high wall in the courtyard; the rest of the Foxes were stretched out single file, sunbathing, their shirts pulled up to get their tan stomachs tanner. Margie stood and said something that sounded like, “Good-bye, cruel world,” and jumped down and landed hard. None of the Foxes even sat up.
. . . . .
Unlike the other Hebrew-school teachers, Moreh Pinkus did not give us a break halfway through class; when Margie suggested it, he misunderstood and said, “Please use the restroom whenever you need to.” She left class immediately, and returned only to leave again.
Moreh Pinkus went through the Hebrew alphabet, but now the class called out each letter’s name and pronunciation without his assistance. I seemed to be the only one who hadn’t memorized the alphabet, the only one who’d forgotten to do the homework, the only one who hadn’t learned the vocabulary words. It was just the second week, and I was already the Doug Sloane of the class.
When Margie came back to the room, I left.
In the hall, I heard my name and turned around. It was my first-grade teacher, Miss Bell.
I was thrilled that she remembered me.
She told me that she didn’t teach anymore; she assisted the rabbi now. She was on her way to his study, and I walked with her.
I said, “Do you like your new job?”
She said, “I miss students like you.”
When she asked who my teacher was and how I liked Hebrew, I remembered my father’s disappointment in the truth. I told Miss Bell that Hebrew and Moreh Pinkus were great.
Then she took a left through the temple and I took a right to the powder room. I was washing my hands when the door banged open, and Margie said, “Get a paper towel.”
On it, she drew the blanks and noose for hangman.
I didn’t mind playing; what I minded was not having a choice. I was better at hangman than thumb wrestling. Margie hung herself again and again. Still, she kept saying, “One more.” When I got up to go, she offered me the rest of her cigarettes if I played one more game.
I did, but I wouldn’t take the cigarettes.
“Come on,” she said. She told me that she had an endless supply; her parents bought their cigarettes by the carton. She said, “They don’t care,” which I assumed was her bravado way of saying they wouldn’t notice. She pulled a cigarette out for herself and then threw the pack at me.
I caught it almost by accident. “Okay,” I said, “thanks,” and got up to leave.
“Sophie?”
It was a shock to hear Margie say my real name. It took me back to a time when I hadn’t been afraid of her at all—fourth grade, Girl Scouts. I remembered waking up in a tent, and that the clothes I put on were warm because her mother, the troop leader, had told us to put them at the bottom of our sleeping bags.
When I turned around, Margie had a cigarette dangling from each nostril.
. . . . .
We had a string of Indian-summer days, and everyone hung out in the courtyard. During math, I saw a group of boys, possibly eighth- or even ninth-graders, talking to the Foxes who sunbathed on the wall. Margie sat at the very end. She was making faces—mimicking the boys—for her own amusement.
The next time I checked the courtyard, I didn’t see Margie. Instead I saw Eric Green—or, that is, I caught a glimpse of his blond head. Through breaks in the crowd, I saw that he was walking his bicycle—a white ten-speed Peugeot—but I couldn’t see much else until he got to the archway. Then I had a clear sight of him from behind; he had his arm around the narrow back of a girl I didn’t know, and one finger through a belt loop of her jeans.
I was almost grateful when the math teacher, Mr. Faye, pulled the shade down and closed the window.
. . . . .
In Hebrew school, Moreh Pinkus called Margie’s name twice, as he had that first day, and then marked her absent.
It seemed possible that he hadn’t learned any of our names, except those of his star pupils: Mitchell Cohen, a shy genius who reminded me of Robert; and Leslie Liebman, whose hand remained perpetually in the air, the Hebrew word—or, as the class progressed, sentence—pursed in her prissy lips.
When anyone else raised a hand, Moreh Pinkus said a reluctant, “Yes?” But he preferred calling on “Mr. Cohen” or “Miss Liebman,” whose answers were guaranteed to be correct.
Those of us who never raised our hands seemed invisible to him. He didn’t even look up when I left the room.
I went down the hall to the lobby and browsed at the display case ambitiously called the gift shop, never open. There was nothing in that case I wanted—not the menorahs or the Jewish-themed jewelry, not the illustrated children’s books about Jewish holidays or history—but I scanned the case as though it might contain a Bob Dylan album I didn’t have or the cross-stitched peasant blouses I liked.
Then into the powder room. I was slouched down in one of the cushy chairs when I heard pounding coming from the bathroom.
I pushed the door open. Margie was trying to get dimes out of the Kotex machine.
