So I said, I fell in love with a beautiful girl today, and she is an artist.
“And what happened to Esther Salt?” said my mother. To my father, she said, “You get him this caller ID he begs you for, he gets a new girlfriend.”
“Casanova,” said my father. “Is she in the Cage with you?”
I said, She’s in normal school, in seventh grade.
His relief lit him up. He really thought the Cage was bad. “An older woman,” he said. “An older woman!” He winked at me, clicked his tongue.
“What is her name?” my mom said.
Eliza June Watermark, I said. She’s red-haired.
“That is a very interesting name,” my mother said.
“Who cares, Tamar?” said my father. “He says he’s in love with her. That’s all that matters. It’s all that matters, Gurion.”
“It is not all that matters, Gurion.”
“He’s ten years old,” my father said.
“Ten years old so what? Ask him what he plans to do with her. What do you plan to do, Gurion?”
I’ll marry her, I said.
I didn’t understand what they were arguing about yet.
My mom slapped my dad’s shoulder.
My dad slapped her shoulder back. He said, “We’ll see how he feels about Eliza June Watermark when he’s old enough to get married, Conniptionthroat.” My mom’s carotid throbs when she’s worried.
“Eliza. June. Watermark,” said my mother. “It puts George William Saunders to shame. Ryan Todd Jones cowers. Ashley Elizabeth Johnson quietly swallows every Tylenol in the house. I think, Gurion, that Eliza June Watermark may be the single most goyische name I have ever heard in my life.”
I said, Oh! I didn’t know what you meant before. She’s definitely an Israelite.
“Her mother is Jewish?” said my mom.
I guess, I said.
“You guess?”
I said, Maybe her father is, too. I said, I don’t know for sure, but Hashem would never fall me in love with a girl who wasn’t an Israelite, Ema.
Both my parents laughed, then, and both at the same thing, but for different reasons; my mother because what I said signified the exact way she wanted Gurion to approach the world — like it was all arranged for him, the smartest and the handsomest; and my father because of how foolish he thought it was for Gurion to approach the world that way. And even though they were laughing at me with condescension, I started laughing like I thought they were laughing with me. But I was only pretending to think they were laughing with me. I pretended because their laughing was keeping them from fighting, and that is what I was laughing at.
And then soon enough we were all laughing at the same thing, for the same reason, in the same way: first at how we kept laughing, and then at the sounds of the laughing and the way it warped our faces and made our jaws ache. Finally we were laughing at laughing, the nonsense of it, how when you first start laughing it seems like you’re laughing because something is funny, but later, as you continue to laugh, you see that the funny thing is funny because you’re laughing at it.
After that, we were quiet and my father went to the pantry. He removed an oily block of halvah from its butcher-paper package and halved it. He cut the first half into three slabs, and re-wrapped the second one. “For tomorrow,” he said, “for lunch.”
My mother crumbled her slab and spread it on white bread. My father broke pieces off with his fingers and I used a fork. We ate halvah and sucked at our teeth.
I said, What is halvah made of?
“Have you ever failed to ask that question when we have eaten halvah together?” my father said.
I said, What is halvah made of?
“How many times can you ask the same question?” my father said.
I keep forgetting, I said.
He said, “It’s mostly sesame seeds. Got it? Halvah: what’s it made of?”
I forget, I said.
“Do you see what he’s trying to get at, Baby?”
“You,” said my mom.
“It doesn’t work!” he shouted, faking an angry face, dealing out the next day’s halvah.
After I smoothed its dent flat with the round side of a hammerclaw wrapped in t-shirt to prevent scratching of the finish, I refastened the mailslot-lid with the envelope slasher. I grabbed my grey hoodie from my closet then, and attempted scripture. I typed
There
and the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number in the ID box.
Hello? I said
“Did you shave your chinhairs yet?” It was June. She was whispering.
I said, June!
“Did you?” she said.
I told her I didn’t.
June said, “Good. I was being mean when I said you should. And not because you have a reputation. I’m not scared of you. And maybe I like your reputation. I was mean because it was styley at the time. Sometimes I’m mean because it’s styley. That was not an apology. There’s no reason I should feel sad for being mean to you. I am glad I originally told you to shave, even though I’m taking it back now. Anyway, your chinhairs are very ugly, and that throws the rest of your face into relief. That was a styley compliment. Don’t return it. And don’t call back, I hate the phone, goodbye.” She hung up.
I couldn’t tell whether I was really not supposed to call her back, or if it was like shaving the chinhairs — if I was supposed to disobey her.
She had said “yet” about the chinhairs. She’d said, “Did you shave your chinhairs yet?” which meant she thought that if I hadn’t shaved them, then I was going to shave them = she’d thought I was going to do what she’d told me to do unless she stopped me = she was expecting that I would do whatever she told me to = she wouldn’t tell me not to call back if she thought it would make me call back = she didn’t want me to call back.
And I hadn’t corrected her “yet.” I hadn’t said that I’d never considered shaving my chinhairs, even though that was true. All I’d said was that I didn’t shave my chinhairs. The “yet” could have been implied by me, or not, from where June stood.
At the same time, though, maybe I had June’s “yet” wrong. Maybe the “yet” was to pre-empt the need for trickle-caulking. Maybe she knew all along that I wasn’t going to shave the chinhairs, and she only called to tell me not to shave them so that it would seem like I was obeying her because that way she could avoid having to save face the next time she saw me, when I would still have my chinhairs despite her original wish. And if she knew that I would have disobeyed her to begin with, that meant that she expected me to disobey her, and so then telling me not to call back = telling me to call back.
If calling back was like shaving the chinhairs.
The biggest problem of all was that the chinhairs might have had nothing in common with the potential callback. What I knew for sure was that I wanted to call her back — I didn’t even get to wish her goodnight or sweet dreams — and because I wanted to call her back, maybe I was just looking for a reason to call her back despite how she told me not to.
I was confused. I had to write scripture.
I typed the word is and the screen looked like:
There is
And the phone rang again. I picked it up before the first ring terminated.