You inhaled your egg, I said.
My mom pinched my shoulder and I passed her the walnuts. We ate yogurt without speaking til I saw she wore fatigue pants and said so. She explained she was staying home with my father. I told her she could have slept in with him. She said not to talk nonsense because who would make me breakfast. I told her I would’ve made breakfast and she sneered at cold cereal and microwaved starches, praising flame-heat and animal protein by implication. I thanked her for making eggs. Then she told me what she’d heard on morning radio. She told me Patrick Drucker had died in the night.
Good, I said.
“That is not nice to say.”
I have to say nice things about him now?
“You should not dance on anyone’s grave. It could have been your father.”
It could not have been my father.
“We are lucky it was not your father.”
If hypothetical death is on the table, I thought, we are at least as unlucky Drucker hadn’t died younger, before my father ever met him. But she wasn’t really talking about luck. It was just an expression, and though I didn’t agree with what she said, I did with what she meant.
I said, I’m glad it wasn’t Aba.
She kissed me on the cheek and handed me my lunch. I looked inside the bag. A sandwich in foil, a box of peach-apple fruit drink, and baggies of carrots and pretzel sticks.
“Do not give away your carrots,” she told me.
Tracks were being rehabbed and the el moved slow. Near the front of my car, which was barely half-full, two women in headscarves I’d seen around my neighborhood threw me the Look of The End and whispered. They often walked along Devon, each with a grocery bag, a mother and daughter chattering. Whenever one saw me, she’d bite down on her lip, tug the sleeve of the other, and they’d lower their voices. I’d always taken them for typical haters of Maccabees — nothing I wasn’t used to near home — and decided, on the el, that that’s all they were; that the reason they appeared less harmless than usual was I wasn’t accustomed to getting hated on the train. I turned my eyes to my lap, read My Life as a Man.
By the time we’d gotten to Davis, our car — the last — was empty except for some high-schoolers. The women got off first, the others, then me. By the exit, the women stepped aside for the rest of them, but I didn’t see that til I came down the stairs, and by then the last high-schooler was out on the sidewalk. I went to the turnstile the younger woman blocked.
Excuse me, I said.
“You are Gurion,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”
I pointed to the mother, said: You’re this woman’s daughter. I need to get to school.
“Do you know who my son is?”
I had no idea who her son was, and I didn’t like her questions. She could have just told me the answers. I read the stories in her face.
I said, Moshe Levin.
“That’s right,” she said, “I’m Michal Levin,” and though Moshe’s grandma grasped her hamsa between thumb and pointer, the mother was not impressed at all. Neither was I. Only a schmuck would pick on David Kahn for his stutter, and retinal detachment via pennygun or no, Moshe had finked to Headmaster Kalisch. He’d told on David, on me, on all of the Israelites. I knew he didn’t mean to rat on anyone but David, but his ratting on David got me booted from Northside, and a rat was a rat was a rat was a rat. Moshe Levin was a rat-fink schmuck.
“Do you know what I think of you?” said the mother. “Do you want to know what I think of your injured father?”
Even before the No! rushed through me, I knew I would disobey it. I knew that if I didn’t disobey it — if instead I who’s-there’d her frenzied maternal knock-knock — she would spit some version of the following punchline: “I think your father is suffering for your sins, and you, in turn, are suffering for his.” And maybe that was true, but even if it was, I didn’t think I was obliged to hear it from her, so I sinned just as hard as I needed to sin in order to shame her into silence.
In superformal Hebrew, I said to this mother: Maybe ocular damage is not always so much the outcome of projectiles as of cruel words that invite projectiles, Michal Levin. And maybe such ocular damage is not merely the cause of psychological trauma, but its effect as well. Maybe Moshe wouldn’t be so quick to pick on younger boys with speech impediments if your husband wasn’t always bullying him. Maybe he wouldn’t pick on anyone if the one person who could protect him from your husband ever did so. Probably you should forget about my father and concern yourself with Moshe’s.
At which point Moshe’s grandmother struck me across the jaw.
Though I showed her my other cheek, it was not because I loved her.
You should have taught her that before she had a son, I said.
And the daughter struck me, and my sense of righteousness multiplied, hardening my bones, swelling my lungs.
Your Moshe may redeem you yet, I said. When I call, he’ll follow. Get out of my way now. We’re all shored up, you mothers and I.
I barely made the Metra. By the time I got on, the upper level was full, and I had to share a seat on the bottom. The woman I shared with smelled like a cantaloupe and she made it impossible to read. For the duration of the ride, she chewed granola from a bag and, though graciously muffled, her crunching was audible, and oat particles gathered on her lap unswiped.
In Deerbrook Park it was drizzling coldly. Coming up the sidewalk, I saw Flowers by the hoodoo shrub, sweeping dead bugs off the walkway into envelopes. I was half across the drop-off circle when the bus pulled up and honked. Flowers must have heard it, but he kept his eyes on concrete.
The bus wouldn’t leave as long as the driver saw me, so I waved and he shrugged and I continued toward Flowers, saying what I had to say.
I said, I’m sorry I said fiction was lies — I didn’t mean it.
“That’s what you’re sorry about?”
And when I said we weren’t friends anymore, I said. I take that back.
“And?”
And nothing, I said.
I revolved and went to the bus.
“I’m still pissed at you,” Flowers said to my back.
That wasn’t up to me, though. Maybe getting slapped had made my voice a little wooden, and the apology’d come out less sincere than it could have, but I’d apologized for exactly as much as I’d felt apologetic, and Flowers gave me nothing, wooden or otherwise. I boarded the bus still pissed at him, too.
Three people called my name. The first two were Dingle and Salvador Curtis. I didn’t know the third guy, but Dingle and Salvador were near the back of the bus and this third guy was closer, so I took the seat behind him.
“I’m Ally Kravitz,” he said. He put out his hand and I left it hanging. A blue pelican was embroidered on the tit of his shirt and when he saw I wouldn’t shake he touched it. “Pinker called me last night,” he said, “and so did The Levinson. Pinker called to tell me that you were the Gurion, and then The Levinson called to say the same thing, just in case I’d thought Pinker was yanking my banana.” He unzipped his bag and showed me a pennygun. “Show him,” he said to a boy across the aisle. “That’s Googy Segal,” Ally Kravitz said to me. Googy Segal’s face was a tiny, pointy face beneath a big blonde bubble of coarse-looking curls. I’d noticed him before; he was hard not to notice. Pop-eyed and ruddy-cheeked, even in repose, he always looked startled. In greeting me, he hissed out a quiet, lilting sibilant — the high, lipless whistle little kids playing war use to imitate incoming missiles. “Googy’s shy,” Ally said. “He doesn’t like to speak much. Words cause him trouble if gets too excited — Go on, Goog, show him. Show him the you-know.” Googy pulled a pennygun from the spy-pocket of his jacket, then put it back in and zipped up fast.