Your Student,
Ben Brodsky
Miss Pinge was peeling a spotted banana. She held it close to her face to hear the hiss of the skin tearing. In the middle waiting-chair, where I fell in love with June, a thin kid wearing tzitzit and a black fedora was chewing on the ends of his peyes. I wanted to be dressed just like him, but couldn’t for another two years and seven months, when I would become a man. My father didn’t want me to dress like a Hasid, or even wear a keepah — he didn’t say these things, but it was easy to tell — and I had to honor him. Once I was a man, I would still have to honor him, but not at the cost of breaking the Law. My father used to be Hasidic himself, and that is why I thought for a second that I knew the kid in the middle waiting chair — it was from a picture in our family room. It’s a picture of my dad, at his bar-mitzvah, sitting on a stone bench in the sun outside the Kotel in Jerusalem. He’s not chewing on his peyes in the picture, but wind from the Al Aqsa side is blowing the left one against his lips, so it looks like he’s chewing it. I missed my father, even though I just talked to him on the phone. I wanted to have lunch with him. My old schools were much closer to my house, and sometimes he’d come by with my mom and take me out for lunch. The last time was my third — my second-to-last — day at Martin Luther King Middle School. My dad was working at home and my mom had a sudden cancellation, so they took me to Foxies in Skokie. We had cheese fries and root-beer from a glass bottle and my mom was going to let me skip the rest of the day but my dad said I couldn’t and he drove me back.
I tried to snap the leaf from Brodsky’s fan-tree in half and it folded. I didn’t want it anymore. What I couldn’t break was already broken. The thin kid was looking at it, so I set it on his knee. He said the H’Adama blessing. Then he put the leaf between his lips and bit a piece off the tip, chewed.
The kid said to me, “I am Eliyahu.” He swallowed some leaf and took another bite. “So that it shouldn’t turn brown,” he said. It sounded like a question and he nodded to the leftover piece = “The leaf agrees.” He held it just under his chin, like Miss Pinge and her banana. “You’re Jewish?” he said.
I’m an Israelite, I said. I said, Does that taste good?
“You say you’re an Israelite.” His hat was tipped to the right, but not rakishly. Rakishly has to be on purpose. He put the leaf to his lips, then took it away. “It tastes green,” he said. “I’m also an Israelite.” He bit the leaf and gave it another nod. “And so it seems we’re both Israelites,” he said.
I wasn’t crazy for the whole “I’m weird, don’t you want to know why?” bit he was working with that leaf, but I hadn’t ever heard of an Orthodox kid in a public junior high school, plus I liked the way he talked.
Miss Pinge drew a hole in the air with the banana. She said, “Eli’s a new student here. He’s originally from the Big Apple.”
“It’s Eliyahu, already,” said Eliyahu. “Eliyahu is the name my parents gave me. And it’s not the Big Apple. Even if it was, what a shmaltzy thing to call a place. Would you like I said Miss Pinge from the Windy City?” He talked like an old man. He said, “I’m Eliyahu of Brooklyn.”
Miss Pinge said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to say that.”
“What does it mean you don’t know how to say it? Ay Lee Yah Hoo. What’s so hard?”
“I’ll try to say it correctly,” Miss Pinge said.
I cocked my head at her = You’re being very accommodating.
But then I thought: He’s right. How hard is it to say Eliyahu?
I said, I’m Gurion.
He said, “Gurion? Your parents named you for a politician or a wild animal or what?”
Gur means cub. Like the son of a lion.
Are you good at Hebrew? I asked Eliyahu.
Miss Pinge said to me, “You better head back to the Cage.”
“What is this woman talking about?” Eliyahu said in Hebrew.
I answered in English. I said, It’s a classroom for B.D.’s. I’m attention deficient.
“People ignore you,” he said.
I told him, Ha! You’re smart. I told him, My conduct is disorderly and I’m hyper. Also I explode intermittently.
Eliyahu sat back and touched the top of his hat. “That’s not funny,” he said.
I said, You explode, too?
He said, “I asked you nicely.”
I’m sorry, I said.
I didn’t know why I was apologizing, but I didn’t want Eliyahu to be hurt by me. I liked how he seemed to assume we were friends. I thought it should always be that way among Israelites.
“It’s okay,” he said. He sucked on the leaf.
Pinge set her banana on the desk so she could write me a hall-pass. A hall-pass was one of my favorite things to have at Aptakisic. You could go almost anywhere with it. You held a hall-pass out in front of you and the guards left you alone, even if they’d seen you walk past them six times already. There were a lot of rules in the arrangement, but the guards only needed to follow one: If you have to think about a person, send him to the Office.
A hall-pass was the only thing that would prevent thinking in a guard if they saw you in the hall and it wasn’t lunch or a passing-period; even if you were throwing up or bleeding out of the head, they would send you to the Office if you didn’t have one. The guards were like fingers, like robots. Like the Angel of Death that spread the tenth plague in Egypt. God sent it to kill the first-born sons of Egyptians so that the Israelites would be freed from bondage, but the Israelites still had to put sheep’s blood on their doors so that the angel would pass over their houses. If there was no sheep’s blood on the door, the angel would kill your first-born son even if you were an Israelite because even though it was one of God’s fingers, it was still just a finger, and a finger’s just a robot, and all the robot knew was to kill first-borns where there isn’t sheep’s blood.