13
“So Mayer,” Adam Martens said, “how come you never told me yer joosh?”
If in his mind, Isaac said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” and walked invincibly away, then in the second-floor hallway of Laurel Highlands Junior High School he looked at the speckled linoleum and muttered, “I don’t know.” Elementary school had passed, for Isaac, as a largely undifferentiated blur, unmemorable and accidental, friendships determined by proximity, the coming and going of days like the cycling passage of time before the invention of history. In the evenings, he’d help his mother do the dishes while she had her extra glass of wine; in the mornings, Abbie would drive him down the mountain and drop him off at school, bellowing some aria or other and conducting with both hands as he steered with his knees.
Now everything had a brittle intentionality to it. Kids from all of the different elementary schools mixed together, and friendship was a matter of secret affinities that he didn’t understand. How could you know what anyone liked until you became friends? It was as if the other kids had developed a form of telepathy over the summer and self-organized based on some Linnean principles of common interest to which he had no access. They’d all grown larger, and he felt tiny. On the first day, he’d said hello to a girl in his homeroom whom he’d known since the first grade. She looked at him as if he had worms growing through the flesh of his face and said, “Gawd.”
Since then he’d kept his head down and moved with a discretion bordering on invisibility. He spoke only when called on, although Mr. Krupp, his English teacher, had taken an obscure liking to him when Isaac was the only student who could name the eight parts of speech. In fact, he’d forgotten interjection, but he divided verbs into lexical and auxiliary, and this caused Krupp to actually get down on his knees in front of the class and cry, “Be still my heart, boy. My life isn’t wasted after all!” Everyone looked at Isaac and laughed at him, but he felt, hazily, for the first time that year, as if he belonged to something. Krupp, meanwhile, ignored the laughter and kept going. “But you forgot,” he said, and he climbed onto an unoccupied nearby chair and hollered, “INTERJECTIONS!” The chair slipped sideways and Krupp went sprawling across the floor. “No, don’t help me, I’m fine,” he said. He conducted the rest of the class lying on the ground.
Most of the kids thought Krupp was a weirdo, not only for his behavior, his habit of mock-weeping when students were wrong (i.e., frequently), his occasional decision simply to play audiobooks unrelated to any particular lesson plan for an entire class period, excerpts from literature and biographies that edged into the inappropriate and indecent—Isaac, particularly, remembered a segment from a history of Catherine the Great which wavered on the edge of the pornographic in its depiction of her sexual awakening—but also for the fact that they frequently arrived for second period to find the room darkened, the blinds drawn, and Mr. Krupp at his desk with his head on his arms in the dusty twilight. Alone among all the teachers Isaac ever had, Mr. Krupp kept his desk at the back of the room, and the kids would file in and sit uncomfortably at their desks until—sometimes as much as ten minutes later—their teacher would begin talking at them from behind. Once, one of the girls flipped the light switch as she walked into the room, and Krupp moaned and cried, “The light! The light!” Isaac, of course, recognized some of these symptoms from Sarah, who rarely left her bedroom before ten thirty, and who’d forced Abbie, much against his grand natural vision, to install heavy curtains on her windows.
It was in Krupp’s class that he met Jake, who was seated beside him based on Krupp’s obscure system of seat assignment. He based it on what he called “the small serendipities which are the numina, the true, old gods of education,” to the bewildered class on the first day. Jake’s last name was Isaacs, and this struck Krupp as impossibly fortuitous. Jake was one of only four black kids in the school, and while he seemed generally and effortlessly popular—he was funny; he played soccer—he was sometimes treated by kids and teachers alike with a certain anthropological curiosity that Isaac had noticed and found extraordinary and inappropriate. Jake was also in the honors track, and this was treated with open curiosity, including by most of the teaching staff. Jake took it all with a resigned humor that seemed to Isaac to be quite impossibly graceful. He quickly became Krupp’s other favorite when, after a section in which they read bowdlerized excerpts from Moby-Dick, he’d answered Krupp’s searching, “Call me blank? Call me blank?” with “Crazy!” Krupp’s eyes widened and he looked as if he didn’t know whether to chuckle or to die. Then Jake said, “I’m just messing with you Mr. K. It’s Ishmael.”
“Be still my heart,” said Mr. Krupp. “Boy, I could kiss you.”
“We should probably get to know each other first,” Jake said.
“Mr. Isaacs,” Krupp said, and he wiped a real tear from his eye, “I may reconsider my thoughts of suicide. Thank you.”
Jake always made a point of greeting Isaac, but he still seemed, to Isaac, unapproachable; kind but distant; friendly only out of general disposition. But later in the school year, he helped Isaac twice in very short order. First, in health class, which was conducted by one of the appalling gym teachers whose constant hassling of the boys who avoided showering after phys ed harried Isaac almost as much as his awkward interactions with his peers. Mr. Dubinsky’s boys’ health class was conducted with an air of backslapping barroom grotesquerie that Isaac found both embarrassing and terrifying, and although Dubinsky touched vaguely on the subjects of sex and hygiene, his principal interests were in the application of first aid, and his examples were all drawn from hunting accidents. Isaac, who’d already embarrassed himself by asking if the four-point deer that Adam Martens had bragged about bagging was a buck or a doe—he didn’t understand what the points referred to—would never have chosen to speak, but he was called out of the pleasure of his own inattention by Dubinsky saying his name sharply and, evidently, for at least the second time. “Mayer!”
“Yes, Mr. Dubinsky?”
“I asked, what do you do if you’re out hunting with your buddy and he gets bit by a snake?”
“He gets bitten by a snake?” Isaac repeated.
“Yes. A poisonous snake.”
Isaac reflected briefly. With most teachers, with most adults, he was able to read the response they desired in the questions they asked and the way that they asked them; adults, really, were absurd in this way, unsubtle and indiscreet as a big TV. But Dubinsky’s world was alien to Isaac, who never knew what the hell the hairy monster was getting at. So he filtered every action and adventure movie he’d ever seen, and he said, “I don’t know. I guess maybe you’d suck the venom out of the wound.”
And Dubinsky, without missing a beat, smirked and said, “Yeah, well, what if your buddy got bit on his penis?”
Isaac flushed and felt as if he were going to piss in his pants, and the rest of the class howled, and Dubinsky grinned as if he’d just wrapped a good set in Vegas. Then unbidden from the back, someone said, “Man, that’s fucked up, Mr. Dubs.”
“What did you just say to me, Jake?” Dubinsky glared toward the rear of the room. Isaac was unable to turn. He stared down at the desk.
“I said that’s a fucked up thing to say.”
“Young man, you better not be using that language with me, unless you want to take a trip down to administration with me. And I don’t think you want that.” He crossed his arms.
Jake shrugged. “I mean, you can take me down there if you want, but I don’t know if Mr. Genarro wants to hear how you’re talking about sucking boys’ penises or whatever.”
The class was quiet, and everyone but Isaac stared at Dubinsky, who’d now turned pretty red himself. Dubinsky uncrossed his arms and turned and walked back toward the blackboard, though as he went, he shook his head and muttered, ostensibly to himself but loud enough for everyone to hear, “Typical black.”
Isaac wanted to thank Jake, but after class he found the thought of revisiting that moment of mortification, even in thanking someone for ending it, too awful, and he ducked out as was his habit. A few days later, it was Adam Martens. Martens closed his locker and leaned against it and said, “So, Mayer, how come you never told me yer joosh?” Martens was tall and horrible and occasionally, apropos nothing, would fix smaller boys in his stare and say, “Worthless,” and then laugh to himself and walk away.
“I don’t know,” Isaac said.
“Like, don’t you believe in Christ or nothing?”
“I don’t know,” Isaac said. “No.”
“So then, how do you pray? If you don’t believe in Christ.”
“I don’t know, Adam. We pray to God.”
“God is Christ.” Martens shook his head. “It’s obvious.”
“Not to us. We believe something else.”
“Yinz probably say just a bunch of spells and shit.”
“We don’t say spells.”
“Well,” Martens shrugged and pushed himself away from the locker. “I don’t stand next ta no juice.”
It later occurred to Isaac that he had no idea how much or little of this Jake overheard, but there he was, suddenly, passing by, and stopping to say to Martens, “Man, leave the dude alone, Martens, you redneck motherfucker.”
“Whatever, worthless,” Martens said. He flipped them off. “See you queers later.”
“Thanks.” Isaac kept his eyes fixed on Jake’s feet.
“Shit, man. No problem. He’s a degenerate.”
Isaac finally let himself look at Jake, and he found himself smiling, although even that seemed like something he should be wary of. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“You know so. Anyway, I heard him at lunch the other day. He’s just pissed that you didn’t invite him to your bar mitzvah even though you invited Sandy and Aiden.”
“Sandy and Aiden are Jewish. They’re like the only people who I invited.”
“Yeah, but Aiden and Martens play baseball together.”
“Well, I don’t think I can invite someone who doesn’t stand next to Jews.”
Jake grinned. “Shit, you ought to invite me. I mean”—his smile grew—“I’m just a typical black, but I do stand next to Jews. Plus, I could get down with some spells and shit.”
“Really?”
“Shit, yeah. Sounds cool. I’ll wear my Farrakhan tee-shirt.”
“You have to wear a button up.”
“Relax, Isaac.” Jake put his hand briefly on Isaac’s shoulder. Isaac blushed and felt himself start to get hard. “I’m kidding.” He clapped Isaac’s shoulder once more and headed to next period, and Isaac whirled and stared into his locker until it was safe to move.
• • •
For years, the Mayers nominally belonged to a Reform congregation in Pittsburgh, attending the occasional High Holy Day service, but generally giving practical Judaism a wide berth, not least because Abbie felt his own luminous experiences transcended any meaning to be found in the sing-song liturgies of ordinary secular Jews. But then Sarah decided that Isaac ought to become Bar Mitzvah, and, since it would be mad to drive in and out of Pittsburgh that frequently, she had them join Tree of Life synagogue in Uniontown, where Isaac found himself, suddenly, the sole Hebrew School student of Rabbi Patrick MacDowell, a former bank teller and Catholic who, having married a Jewish woman in his late twenties, first converted and then, at the age of thirty-one, dedicated himself to the task of becoming a rabbi. (The few other Jewish kids all went to temple in Morgantown, where there was a larger Jewish population, and this had been Sarah’s intention as well, but Abbie felt Morgantown to be entirely tainted by the presence of Phil Harrow, and insisted they stay local.) Now in his forties and a widower—his wife had had a rare and undetected cardiac condition—MacDowell presided over a congregation so demographically similar to the one from Abbie’s memories of his own youth that it tipped into uncanny parody. On their first Rosh Hashanah there, MacDowell had exhorted them in his dvar Torah to understand that though God’s requirements may seem perplexing, a call to something impossible, they reveal themselves in due time as something other than what we may once have thought them to be, for instance, him, a nice Scotch-Catholic boy, becoming a rabbi. While he spoke, Myrna Markoupolous waddled over and, having introduced herself in a loud, wavering voice, proceeded into a story about how the rabbi had failed to come to visit her in the hospital after she’d had a stent put in the year before. Sarah had been appalled; the rest of the congregation had ignored her; Abbie smiled too broadly and suppressed his urge to laugh, and Isaac, then twelve, stared miserably at the floor.
The following Thursday, after regular school, he’d begun studying the Torah portion he’d have to read the next year for his bar mitzvah, and MacDowell, who was a man with a fondness for arcane trivia, told the mortified boy that in the olden days, a boy’s bar mitzvah wasn’t necessarily on or about his thirteenth calendar birthday. Rather, the men of a congregation would take him to the baths and pull down his pants and count his pubic hairs, of which the required number was thirteen. MacDowell didn’t mean anything by it—he just thought it was interesting, a grace note in a symphony of unimportant but entertaining facts—but Isaac flushed and shoved his head into his arms to hide his embarrassed tears. He had the worst of it in being a slow physical but early sexual bloomer. Abbie wasn’t the sort who bothered with, or understood, parental controls on the internet. Isaac had been looking at porn since he was seven or eight, and now that he was in junior high, he perceived his own diminutive physique and total hairlessness below the head as an almost existential inadequacy. The summer before, Marco Larimer, who was seventeen, had told him it was cool because he looked like a girl. It had briefly pleased and then terrified him.
He was no closer to thirteen pubic hairs when he was called before the Torah on the Saturday after his thirteenth birthday, and yet, despite this disappointment, and despite his full conviction that this Judaism business was a dusty philosophy of superstitious collectivism wholly unsuited to Man’s fundamental individuality and heroic potential (Mr. Krupp, having found Isaac to be too precocious for seventh-grade honors English, had loaned him The Fountainhead), he felt actual pride in getting up and leading the service—it was, at least, an intellectual achievement to have learned to read Hebrew, even if only phonetically, and to have memorized all those monotonous prayers. And he felt equally pleased that he had made a friend who showed up to the permanently twilight interior of Tree of Life that Saturday morning, not out of co-religious social obligation, but because he wanted to be there.
And, Isaac reflected as he mumbled through his Torah portion, that he really should have invited Adam Martens after all, because Isaac had drawn the Tazria-Metzora, a long and dreaded Parsha that trolled through three chapters in Leviticus dedicated to the detailed discussion of ritual impurity, the impurity of women after childbirth (gross), and then the odd and supernatural appearance of Tzaraat, something between leprosy, athlete’s foot, black mold, and Morgellons disease, an affliction of skin and clothing and even buildings, which, when it appeared, required the attentions of a priest and an extraordinary ritual:
As for the live bird, he shall take it, and then the cedar stick, the strip of crimson wool, and the hyssop, and, along with the live bird, he shall dip them into the blood of the slaughtered bird, over the spring water.
He shall then sprinkle seven times upon the person being cleansed from tzara’ath, and he shall cleanse him. He shall then send away the live bird into the open field.
Rabbi MacDowell had said, “You might want to play down the particulars in your dvar, Isaac,” after Isaac had shown him his first draft. But Isaac had snuck them back in because he thought that Jake would be impressed.
Afterward they all went to the Uniontown Country Club to eat stuffed chicken breast and dance to DJ Don Electric, who interspersed selections of beat-less Evanescence songs with R. Kelly tracks and the Electric Slide. Adults whom Isaac barely knew gave him money, although his mother forbade him from opening the envelopes in front of anyone, and Jake told him that “that shit about the birds was cool as fuck.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said.
“You should tell fucking Martens that you guys, like, really do that.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. He laughed. “It’s like a secret ritual, you know. We don’t let any non-Jews see it.”
Then it was getting dark out, and the few kids’ parents had picked them up, and Jake had taken off with the pleasing near-promise of a very adult handshake and a “see ya soon,” and the congregants of Tree of Life had packed into their aging Buicks and gone home, and Isaac was sitting at his parents’ table while his mother gazed off and occasionally patted his hand and his father laughed too loudly with some men that Isaac didn’t know over by the bar. Arthur Imlak hadn’t come but had sent him an envelope with a thousand dollars and a note scrawled on the back of a business card: “Not all in one place.”
“Can we go?” he asked his mother.
“Ask your father,” she said. She looked at him and touched his face. “Abbie, I mean.”
“Yeah, Mom. God. I know who you mean.”
“Your tone, honey.”
“Okay.”
Rather than go to Abbie, who would put his big hand on his shoulder and yank him into some loud conversation that felt like a fistfight, he slipped out the side of the banquet room and down the service stairs on the side of the building with the intention of walking around the golf course for a while before returning to the club to gather his parents and force them to drive him home. There was a pond on the sixth hole with a tall willow tree where you could hear the oddly human cadences of frog calls at night. But at the bottom of the stairs, he found his English teacher leaning against a roll door in an alcove and smoking a pungent cigarette.
“Hey, Mr. Krupp!”
“Holy Jesus shit Christ!” He caught himself before he could complete the act of tossing away the joint, like a batter checking his swing. He put his whole body into recovering from it. “You scared the hell out of me, Isaac.”
“Sorry.”
“You want some?”
“What? Oh, I mean, I don’t smoke.”
Krupp gave a chill nod of his head, acknowledgment but not agreement. “This isn’t smoking, buddy. This is weed.”
“Well, it’s still smoking.”
“That,” Krupp said, “is just what they want you to believe.” He extended his hand and pinched fingers.
Isaac took a tentative and then a deeper hit and felt the fog bubble up into the previously undiscovered chambers behind his eyes.
“I’ve got to tell you, Isaac, that that . . . would you call that a sermon?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s called a dvar Torah, technically.”
“Whatever, buddy. That was a great piece of writing.”
“Thanks, Mr. Krupp.”
“Really.” He took a long drag. “Really. I mean, I’ve got to tell you, the way that you linked the, the impure men who were forced by the conventions of their tribe to live apart from other people with the heroic individuality of Howard Roark. I don’t know that I could have said it better. A truly impressive piece of oratory, young man.”
“Thanks. Can I have some more?”
“Oh, yeah. For sure. Don’t tell your dad, though.”
“You know my dad?”
“Sure. I mean, I met him. Yeah. Back in the day.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I thought I told you. Well, anyway, you’re a great kid. Or, I guess you’re not a kid anymore, right? You’ve got a real way with words. I’ve had a lot of students over the years, and I’ve rarely, if ever, been so impressed. Did you ever think about becoming a writer?”
“I guess. I’m not sure.”
“‘The afflicted man who dwells outside the city until he is healed represents the man of individuality who will not submit to the second-handers all around him and therefore insists on charting his own course in the world. What his inferiors believe to be a punishment, he knows to be a blessing,’” Krupp quoted and shook his head. “Just great fucking stuff, Isaac.”
“Thanks, Mr. Krupp.”
“Well,” Krupp said, crushing the roach beneath the collapsing toe of his old brown loafers, “I’ve got a gig tonight. If I were you, I’d wash my hands before I head back inside. Get the skunk off, if you know what I mean.”
“Thanks, Mr. Krupp.”
“I’ll see you Monday, Isaac.”
“See you Monday, Mr. K.”
Then Isaac, stoned for the first time in his life, walked back into the club and went to the handicapped restroom and found, after washing his hands for three straight minutes, that he’d been washing his hands for three straight minutes, and he smiled at his own face in the mirror, and Isaac laughed and discovered that he couldn’t stop laughing.