My mother did not love NPR. She said, “These mamzers. One story about the violent Jews of Israel, and then another about the ethical Jewish defender of Constitutional rights.” She drew fire into the end of her cigarette. “This seems like balanced press for the Jews, yes, Gurion? The balance is an illusion. In the first story, it is the bad Jew, they are telling us, who harms those who would destroy him. And in the second story, it is the good Jew who protects those who would destroy him. It is the same argument both times: the Jews should let themselves be destroyed. I could kill them for how they use your father.”
No one uses Aba, I said.
“You are right,” she said. “I spoke with too much force.”
She kissed her hand three times — loudly, rapidly — and touched the crown of my head with it, and then we were quiet.
I kept trying to fix my eyes on a single tree along the highway so it wouldn’t blur when we passed it, but all of them blurred.
My mom had lit a cigarette just before we pulled into the Aptakisic parking lot and was still smoking it on the way to the front entrance when she tried handing me a paperback. I was spaced out, looking at the school’s outer wall. A WE DAMAGE WE bomb spanned six bricks above the bushes. I still didn’t know what exactly it meant, but it had to mean something, and I liked that. I could see my mom’s hand insisting with the book in my left periphery, but my eyes were doing a nice soft-focus on the bomb and I didn’t want to break the trance.
My mom wagged the book and the pages flapped, sharpening everything. “To read in ISS,” she told me.
Thank you, I said.
I took it from her hand. It was Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, one of his only three books that I hadn’t read yet, unless you counted the autobiographies, which I didn’t; I was determined never to read those. I didn’t want to know what was true and what wasn’t when it came to Roth, or any other writer of fiction I liked for that matter, but him especially. As long as the information I’d learned about him and what he believed did not come directly from him, I could ignore or embrace it at will, and it couldn’t then interfere with the fictions he made — at least not that much — nor with what others made of those fictions, which was also important. Sometimes at least.
I said to my mom, I thought you said Roth was an antisemite.
“I have never said that,” she said.
We stopped before the doors of the front entrance so she could finish her cigarette.
I remember, though, I said. I said, You argued with Aba about it once. You said, ‘Roth is bad for the Jews.’
“He is,” she said, “bad for the Jews. But that does not make him an antisemite. He loves the Jews.”
But you argued—
“Ask Aba what I argued. You misunderstood. That can happen when you hear conversations you were not meant to hear. In the meantime, I just gave you a book by Philip Roth that I liked when I was younger, a book I rushed to the bookstore to buy for you this morning while you were asleep so that you would have something to read in ISS, so—”
So thank you, I said.
“You are welcome,” she said.
That is when Jerry the Deaf Sentinel came outside. He said, “Ma’am, I have to let you know that there is no smoking permitted on school grounds.”
“Good morning,” my mother said, flashing teeth. She flicked ashes and took a drag.
Jerry waited til she took another drag to say, “I’m going to have to ask you to extinguish your cigarette.”
“Very shortly,” she said. “First I must finish it.”
“Then I’m going to have to ask you to leave the school grounds, Ma’am.”
“And now you have done so,” said my mother.
“Ma’am—”
“Sir,” my mother said, “I do not know who you are, or what authority that beaten felt crest on your pocket is meant to represent, but I am confident — I am certain—that I am not within the, the, the — what is the word, Gurion?”
Reach, I said.
“Not reach,” she said. “There are more syllables.”
Jurisdiction is too fancy, I said. I said, You want to say jurisdiction but reach has more force. Reach sounds like punch.
“Pow!” she shout-whispered, mock-swinging a fist at my chin.
“Ma’am—” said Jerry.
“I am certain, sir,” said my mother, “that I am not within the reach of whatever authority it is that you represent. Stop bothering us.”
And Jerry said, “I really don’t know how to respond to that, ma’am.” His whole face was twitching, but especially this one jumpy muscle under his left eye. He didn’t seem angry, though, just confused.
“Maybe you should let it go,” my mom said. She said it in her concerned voice, the same voice in which she must have said the same thing a thousand times before to clients.
“I’d like to let it go,” Jerry said, “but I’ve gotta do something.” He kicked his left heel with the toe of his right boot, concentrated on the pavement.
My mom exhaled some smoke. “How would you usually respond?” she said.
“There’s no precedent,” Jerry said. He raised his head, and I saw his eyes twinkled a little. The muscle under his left eye had gone still, as if the twinkling were an outcome the earlier jumping had manufactured. It was not entirely surprising to me, the way Jerry was acting. My mom is seriously pretty, and not the way everyone else thinks his mom is pretty because she is his mom and he gets confused because she is nice to him, but truly pretty, and in an uncommon way, at least in America; to be addressed by her at all, let alone in the concerned voice, makes people weak, even me sometimes, and I see her every day. “I’m Jerry,” Jerry said.
“No precedent at all?” my mother soothed, ignoring the introduction. “Would you have me believe,” she said, “that your superiors have failed to establish a protocol for dealing with those who illicitly smoke cigarettes on school grounds?” The cherry was almost down to the letters. Probably three more drags.
“There’s a protocol,” Jerry said, grinding his kicking-toe into the pavement. Then he spoke the largest string of words I’d ever heard from him: “I’ve followed the protocol, but when it comes to what to do about someone who, after you’ve followed the protocol, continues to smoke, there’s just nothing in the manual. If you were a student, I suppose I’d go inside and write you up.”
“That is what you should do, then,” said my mom.
“But that’s just silly,” said Jerry.
“Maybe it is you who are silly, Jerry,” said my mom.
“Maybe!” Jerry said, eyes gone wide and hopeful at the sound of his name on her lips. He choked on something that would have bloomed into laughter if he wasn’t a robot.
“Look at this contraband,” said my mom. Jerry leaned forward. “The fire,” she said to him, “is burning the letters. There is more tar under the letters than I am willing to inhale.” She dropped the cigarette and stepped on it.
Then she stepped past Jerry and held the door open for me. Carved into the door’s pneumatic pushplate was another WE DAMAGE WE. I ran a finger over it, barely touching it, and the dry topskin of my fingertip perforated whitely from the roughness of the engraving. I wondered what Ronrico had used to make the words so mean — a nail? a key? If you held a guy by the hair on the crown of his skull, I was thinking, and pressed his forehead hard enough against the bar, the words would make the forehead bleed, and the guy would be marked by them. In a mirror, his scab would read WE DAMAGE WE.