“You will make fun of my language?” she said. “I am fluent in four and hold a Ph.D. and people pay me to speak, it is how I heal them. You, in junior high school, know three languages, one of which is dead, you spend the money that people pay me to speak to them, and you will make fun of me? It is not nice. I do not find it to be very charming.”
Aramaic isn’t dead, I said. Not exactly.
“And if I say a carbine when I cannot possibly mean a carbine, then you should know that I meant a cannon, smartperson. It was a cannon for making helicopters drop. Do you think no cannon could weigh two Gurions?”
You blew up helicopters with a cannon? I said.
She wasn’t paying attention anymore. She was pouring matzoball soup from a styrofoam cylinder into three bowls. She said, “I must carve the chicken. Kiss my cheek and bring the long knife.”
She’d never told me she used to blow up helicopters.
If chicken is a certain level of wet, it squeaks between my teeth and my tongue gets heavy. I swallow that kind of chicken as fast as I can, trying not to picture the chewed-looking meat that dangles near the throats of roosters like earlobe. Sometimes I swallow too fast, but not usually, and when I coughed at the beginning of dinner, it was not because chicken choked me. Apple juice had entered the wrong pipe.
“You are inhaling your chicken,” my mom said.
It was juice in the airpipe, I told her.
“Yet you are inhaling your chicken,” my mom said.
It’s wet.
“Don’t talk that way at dinner,” said my father.
She asked, I said. And plus if I was actually inhaling the chicken—
“She didn’t ask,” my mother said. “She observed. And ‘inhaling’ was meant figuratively and you know this, you are being a wiseass today.”
I said, Your observation was wiseass — it was a question, disguised. It was, ‘Why are you inhaling your chicken?’ That’s a question.
She said, “Not a question, Gurion, a request: Stop inhaling chicken.”
That’s a command, I said.
“When the request was not met, it became a command, but never was it a question,” she said. “There is never good reason to inhale chicken, and so there is no purpose in asking you why you have inhaled chicken.”
Whenever my mom was upset with me at dinner, we’d have a conversation about our conversation. I thought it was because she’d spend all day practicing FAP, which is a kind of psychotherapy where talking is called verbal behavior. If you were my mom’s client and you told her, “I want to kill myself,” she would not tell you, “You should not kill yourself,” or “If you kill yourself, you will never be able to decide to kill yourself again,” and she’d never ask, “When do you plan to kill yourself?” or “How do you plan to kill yourself?” or even “Why do you want to kill yourself?” This is what she’d ask: “Why are you telling me that you want to kill yourself? What do you get out of it? What is it that you are trying to elicit from me by telling me you want to kill yourself?” Since I’d been old enough to remember conversations at dinner, no fewer than thirty people had told my mom they wanted to kill themselves, and this is how many of those people killed themselves: zero.
I said to her, Eyelids.
It was a little bit cheap of me, but I didn’t feel like having a conversation about a conversation.
My dad said, “That is very impolite.” He cracked a chickenwing in half.
I rubbed my eyes with my thumbknuckles and my eyes made squishing sounds.
My mother told me, “It does not affect me, Gurion. And it would be cruel of you if it did.” She said that flatly, but her upperlip kept trying to smile itself because she liked it when I teased her. She didn’t want to have a conversation about a conversation, either. “Did you hear what I said to you?” she said.
I did simultaneous eyelid flips and she spit chicken into her napkin and pushed her plate away, laughing.
“You are so mean,” she said. “How can you be so mean? Your father, he is not mean.”
My father, his mouth full of chicken, jabbed air with his pointer in the direction of my mother.
“I am mean?” she said. “I am not mean!” she said. “Gurion, do you think I am mean? Is that why you told your principal to call your father instead of me?”
Yes, I said.
“Because you thought I would be mean to you? I am not mean to you. I am your mother and I love you.”
My father touched a sideburn and lifted one eyebrow = “How ironic that my wife is upset with my son over this tiny aspect of a larger phenomenon about which I am upset with her,” and said, “Your son’s winding you up for kicks, so relax a little. This Brodsky called of his own volition. When he called I told him that he was to call you, that you were the one who handled such calls, and Brodsky said he knew of the arrangement, but that he was hoping for a different approach, which, as you would likely expect, led me to wonder aloud: ‘Different from what?’ He then explained that by different, he meant different from the approach my wife takes when he calls to tell her that our son has been in a fight. And then I wondered: What fights has my son been in? Of course, that latter wondering was performed silently.”
“If you are angry at me,” my mother said to my father, “please do not be coy about it.”
He slid his knife beneath the skin of a breast and sawed and pried til the skin came off in one piece, and then he set it on my plate. I liked the skin when it crackled. This skin flapped. I poked it. My dad said, “That was not coyness, Tamar. That was a question: Why is it I’m not told my own son is getting into fights at his new school?”
My mom pulled her plate back onto the placemat to fork meat, but dropped the fork and said “Uch,” and touched her eyes to make sure they were still there, and put her hands in her lap to stop checking on her eyes. Then she said, “If there was something for you to be concerned about, I would have told you. The fighting is normal.”
“It is not normal,” my father said to her. “Do not tell him it is normal. It is not normal to fight,” he said to me. “You are surrounded by delinquents and idiots. They’re the ones for whom it’s normal, and what’s normal for delinquents and idiots is what? Is delinquent. Idiotic.”
“They start up with him, Judah,” my mother said. “He should be picked on?”
“Are you picked on?” my father said.
I said, Not exactly. I said, People start up with me, though.
“They started up with you today?” he said.
I said, Kind of. I said, I towel-snapped the neck of this one boy the Janitor and he called me a name.
“Why did you towel-snap his neck?”
There wasn’t exactly a reason, I said, but he wasn’t a nice kid. Him and his brother used to make fun of Scott Mookus. I don’t think he’ll do that anymore, though. We’re friends now. But after I towel-snapped his neck, he said I smelled and was a B.D., so I towel-snapped his eyes and spit on his foot. That’s when his friend Ronrico charleyhorsed me from behind and kicked me in the ribs.
“You see?” my mother said. “It was just some snaps of towel, and then the second boy came.”
“The second boy,” said my father, “came to protect his friend from our son.”
I said, That’s not true. I said, He came to avenge his friend. It wasn’t protection. I wasn’t fighting the Janitor anymore — he wasn’t getting up.
“The second boy came from behind, Judah,” said my mother.
Yes he did, I said.