I liked for things to ricochet, but as soon as I’d backhanded that pebble, I worried Emmanuel and Samuel would think I was a show-off. I’d never worried about being a show-off before. I didn’t even know the word “show-off,” but I knew the idea from Torah: Moses wasn’t allowed into Israel because he’d acted like a show-off in the Sinai, during the second water-from-the-rock miracle. The stakes were not that high here, and I had performed no miracle, just an impressive feat of timing and aim, but I had, at least partly, performed the feat to impress them with my timing and aim, when I could have just as easily done it for better reasons: to let them hear a new sound or witness the rare and pretty physics of a missile striking a missile.
They didn’t treat me like a show-off, though. They kept doing what they’d been doing with the pebbles, totally straight-faced. I thought maybe they hadn’t seen, but after Samuel had whipped a couple or three more, he said, “Can you do it again?”
I said, Maybe.
“Try.”
So I did it again. CLACKSH.
They stopped monkeying with the pebbles and slapped me on the back.
Can we be best friends? I said. I really liked them. I said, I think we should be best friends. We all prefer to play slapslap correctly and judging by what I’ve seen this morning, here on the playground, I believe a love of real slapslap is a deeply meaningful affinity to share; the kind of affinity from which friendships of great longevity have the opportunity, if not the impetus, to grow.
Samuel said the beginning of a “Yes,” but Emmanuel cut him off. “Are you a scholar?” he said.
Are you? I said.
“Yes,” they said.
“But that doesn’t make you one,” said Emmanuel. He said, “You have to worry about what things mean. Especially things in Torah.”
I do, I said.
“Like what?” said Emmanuel. He wasn’t acting mistrustful, just cautious.
You know when Jacob tricks Isaac on his deathbed? I said.
“What about it?”
First of all, I don’t think he really tricks him.
Emmanuel said, “A number of great rabbis would agree with you” = “You are not impressing me with originality.”
I said, But I think maybe Adonai gets tricked. By Isaac, though, not Jacob.
“That is a very compelling statement. What would make you say such a thing?”
“He’ll have to explain some other time,” Samuel said. “First bell’s about to ring.”
I’ll explain at recess, I said. I said, But what you asked me was to tell you what I am worried about, which I can do very quickly: I am worried that if Isaac did trick Adonai, then not only would it seem to indicate that Adonai can be tricked, but that maybe He should be tricked sometimes, and I am worried because I don’t know how to trick Him.
“Listen,” said Emmanuel. “You explain this to us after school. At recess, I want you to find Rabbi Salt, the principal of Judaic Studies. He is a very smart man. He teaches second-, fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade Torah Study. We’re in fourth-grade Torah Study, Samuel and I, instead of third-, because Rabbi Salt was our teacher last year and he double-promoted us. You need to go see him at recess and get promoted out of kindergarten Torah Study because it’s Rabbi Unger, the headmaster, who is a fool, who teaches kindergarten Torah Study, and you will learn nothing from him but foolishness. I am certain that if you search him out, Rabbi Salt will promote you, at least to second-grade Torah Study, and in the meantime, Samuel and I have Torah Study right after lunch, and we’ll try to convince him to promote you twice again so you can study with us.”
“You know, you’re really socially stunted sometimes,” Samuel told him.
“You’re always saying that, and I never know why.”
“Right. Exactly. Tell him you’re his best friend, already.”
“Why don’t you tell him?”
“He already knows I am, Stunted Stuntedy.”
“I am, too, Gurion,” Emmanuel said.
And I saw that it was good.
We went to Assembly in the multipurpose room together, to line up behind our teachers and pray and be counted.
Territory
No Chicagoland junglegym could beat Schechter’s bigtoy. The bigtoy’s creator, except for (years later) Philip Roth, is the only person I ever wrote a fan letter. Unlike Philip Roth, who thought I was a prankster,******** the bigtoy’s creator was dead. I didn’t find that out til I’d written the letter, though.
How I found out was I approached Headmaster Unger to acquire the creator’s name and address, and Unger told me he couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he knew he was dead, that he’d died on Schechter’s campus on a summer’s day in ’97 or ’98 while overseeing the bigtoy’s construction, but that if I wanted, he (Unger) could look through some receipts to find the name of the man’s company, and from there I could look the name up in the yellow pages and find the company’s address. I asked Unger why he thought I would be interested in something like that, and he told me that although he hadn’t seen the letter I’d written, he knew I must have put effort into writing the letter, and he thought I would prefer not to waste the effort. I still didn’t understand, and I said so. Unger said he was thinking I could send the letter to the creator’s construction company. But the letter, I told him, wasn’t written to the creator’s construction company; it was written to the creator, and I didn’t get why anyone would deliberately send a letter to someone to whom that letter wasn’t written. “So as not to waste effort,” Unger snapped at me. But the effort was already wasted, I told him. Since the letter wasn’t written to the company, to send the letter to the company would just waste more effort: the effort of looking up the address in the yellow pages, the effort of writing it on the envelope, of printing the letter out, of affixing the stamp, and not least of all the effort of whoever in the company would read this letter which didn’t concern him or anyone else at the company still living.
Unger, though able to muffle the contemptous hrumph that his nose made, seemed unable to silence it entirely, and I got the sense that we’d been having a metaphorical kind of conversation without my knowing it, and that I’d insulted him somehow, but at the same time I didn’t feel bad about insulting him, if that’s what I’d done, because that nose-noise — especially because he seemed to have purposely failed at silencing it (how hard is it to hold back a hrumph?) as if to indicate that the place from which he just realized he had to condescend to me was so many miles high that he couldn’t, despite all his efforts, even pretend to get fully down to my level — indicated, if nothing else, that his was an M.O. of total penility. If he hadn’t made that noise, I probably would have eventually taken the name of the company from him, and even sent the letter, all the while trusting that Unger’s being an elder of mine granted him access to an understanding of the world that I did not yet have. Instead, I thanked him and returned to lunch.
It might be better that the bigtoy’s creator never read that letter anyway. Having recently reread it myself, I see now how it would’ve been possible, even likely, for the creator to misconstrue my sincere praise as backhanded. It would’ve all depended on what kind of guy he was. The attribute the letter claimed to be most important — the one that made the bigtoy great — was not, I don’t think, an attribute the creator even knew about, much less one he intentionally designed.