Chair-groan, chair-groan, chair-groan, chair-groan — aggressive squeak-ing. I revolved to face Benji. He revolved, too, but not to face me. He looked, instead, at Ben-Wa Wolf, the source of the chair-groans — which hadn’t yet ceased — and so did most of the rest of the Cage, including the teachers and Botha.
“Aggrassive squeaking,” Botha said.
Ben-Wa stopped. He said, “I’ve had my hand up for—”
Botha interrupted him. “Stap one, Mr. Wolf. That’s what you get for agrrassive squeaking, isn’t it? Stap one and tan minutes til you’re called on, plus—”
“I—”
“Tan minutes til you’re called on, Mr. Wolf, plus another two mannits edded for each word you speak. ‘I’ is a word, so that’s twailve mannits.”
Ben-Wa chewed his lips, shut his eyes to the wrinkling, crossed his legs at the knees like a lady being interviewed. A bunch of kids giggled. Someone said, “Ben Gay.” I didn’t see who.
“Face ford, all you,” Botha commanded.
I counted to seven and did it.
To Eliyahu, I wrote, Thank you for the butterscotch. I folded the note, but then I unfolded it and wrote, Don’t write “You’re Welcome” back to me. It is not worth risking a step to toss a note that says “You’re Welcome.” Or even “Thank you.” I’m only writing “Thank you” this once so you’ll know I’m not thoughtless. From now on, though, if you give me something in the Cage, assume that I am thankful. I will do the same with you. Dream of victory.
Over the wall.
I untwirled the wrapper of the butterscotch and put the two biggest pieces in my mouth. I fought off my teeth. My teeth wanted to chew.
A fly buzzed into my carrel, then left. Then came back.
And then the note came back. It said: You’re welcome — I will write that just once, too. But I mean it. I carry many discs of butterscotch in my pockets. It is something I learned in Brooklyn — I would give butterscotch to Bathsheba Wasserman, who is the love of my life. When I give away discs of butterscotch, it helps me remember Bathsheba, who I hope to dream about instead of victory, or maybe as a kind of victory, the best kind, loving her. Either way, I should thank you for helping me to remember. Bathsheba is so very beautiful, with black eyes and ringlets, and dresses so long she hovers when she walks away from you. Even as I fail to describe her well, and even amidst these humiliating conditions (what is that teacher’s PROBLEM with the tiny white-haired boy?! he looks like a nice boy, no?), I have joy. And now a snooze.
I tucked the note in my pocket. I would save it in my Documents lock-box and, on the twentieth anniversary of their wedding day, I would give it to Bathsheba, along with a drawing I would ask June to make of Eliyahu as a boy. Bathsheba would weep tears of happiness and all of our sons would practice stealth in the yard together, speaking Hebrew to each other. This would be in Jerusalem, behind the limestone house where my mother was a girl. We had pictures. One was in a frame on the living room wall. My mother is sitting under some blossoms in it, eating a Jaffa orange that her father is peeling apart the segments of and handing to her. It was the first picture I ever saw of my grandfather, who was a very dark-skinned person who died the same year I was born. I’d seen it a million times in the frame on the wall, but one time, when I was three, I saw my mom stare at it, and I looked at it more closely and I asked her, Who is the man?
It is the earliest conversation I can remember.
My mom said, “He is my aba.”
I said, No he is not.
She said, “Why do you say that?”
I said, He is not Jewish.
She said, “He is.”
I said, No.
She said, “I do not lie to my son.” But I didn’t believe her and she knew it, so she showed me his medals. The letters engraved in them were Hebrew. I couldn’t read it yet.
“You see?” she said to me. “He was a soldier in the Six-Day War, in the Yom Kippur War, and in Lebanon. He was a hero. Do you see how young I was! Just older than you.”
I said, Why was he a hero?
“What?” she said.
What made him a hero?
“He kept the people he loved from being killed by others.”
How? I said.
She said, “Speak in sentences to your mother.”
I said, How did he stop the others from killing?
My mother said, “He killed them first.”
I can never remember when my father came in the room, or where he was sitting or standing, but he was there by then and they had a fight. I do not remember what they said to each other, either, just that it was loud, and that while I cried the tears magnified everything, and my mother looked browner than me, and my father pinker. After they finished fighting, we all got ice cream on Devon, and then we went to Rosenblum’s Books, where they bought me a Chumash with a leather-colored cover. I read half of Bereishis in English before I went to bed, and in 14, at the part where Avram arms his 318 servants and takes war to the five armies under Chedorlaomer, who had captured Lot, I could see Avram put his fist to the ground and the desert cracking open to swallow his enemies and I could see his face. It was the face of my grandfather and I saw that it was good.
The fly whacked himself against the inner walls of my carrel. The buzzing and the ticking D’d my A like crazy, so I turned the wrapper inside-out and rubbed a streak of butterscotch dust across the desk. The fly put his hose down and fed on the thinnest part. I moved my hand and he flew to the wall, clung on a fiber. I remained still until he returned to the streak.
A minute before the end of the period, a girl on the other side of the Cage said, “No!”
Then someone else said, “Aww!”
“Quoydanawnsinz!” Botha said. “Sit down!”
I revolved. There was a half-circle of students standing around Ben-Wa Wolf. I could see his white hair through the gaps between the hips.
The whole Cage had revolved.
Botha told the standers to get back in their seats. They shifted. That is when I and everyone saw that Ben-Wa Wolf was wet. He was crying without tears and without any throat-sounds — only with his breath — and his hand was raised. His hand is raised, I thought, and he wet himself, I thought. His right hand is raised and his piss is dripping into the carpet, I thought, staining the carpet, I thought, his hand in the air.
The end-of-class tone sounded as Botha approached Ben-Wa with a pass. “Go to the nurse and clane up,” he said.
Ben-Wa ignored him, revolved his chair slowly til he faced the center of the Cage. He said to us, “This isn’t normal. I am eleven years old. This is not normal at all. Can you believe this? I can’t believe this. Can you believe this?”
No one answered him.
It was the worst thing.
“Ben-Wa,” said Botha.
“It was past twelve minutes. Why couldn’t you call on me?” Ben-Wa said. You could hardly hear it, but you couldn’t help but hear it.
Botha shook the pass until Ben-Wa finally lowered his hand and took it.
I thought of a song, a terrible, cloying, cute little meansong:
Hey Ben-Wa Wolf/ Why’s your hand in the air?/ You’re crying and soaking/ Piss streams from your chair/ I wonder and wonder/ And wonder and wonder/ I wonder and wonder/ What makes you so scared?
I had to press my tongue to my mouth-roof with my eyes rolled up while I dug a thumbnail into my neck to make the song go away. There were always songs and they always rhymed and everyone laughed when they sang them. No one sang any songs this time. The day’s last teachers came in and sat at the cluster. It was English. Mr. Meineke, Ms. Kost, Miss Beepee, and Mrs. Anoko. Ms. Kost assigned me a Kurt Vonnegut story called “Harrison Bergeron.” Flowers had me read it two weeks before and I loved it. I read it again there, in the Cage, and loved it less. The ending was cheap. It happened too fast.