My mom said, “And what did you do?”
I loved my mom. She was always so interested.
I said, “I landed a glancing blow on his face.”
“This ended it?” she said.
My father exhaled loudly, made a fist around his chin = “I will wait this out, and you will both be aware that I am waiting.”
The blow pushed him back, I said, but he wasn’t out, and this crowd that was watching kept growing, so I grabbed the padlock off my locker.
“You did not,” said my mom.
I did, I said. I said, And I hooked the ring around a knuckle and blasted that kid’s lungs out with a blow to the solarplexus just before he would’ve knocked me over.
“Gurion!” my mother said.
He bent like he was praying, and I swept his legs, I said. When he went down, he hit all these metal baskets and it was so noisy everyone backed off, Ema. They were gonna crowd me up more, I knew it, but they backed off because of the noise and how the padlock gleamed.
“You are very smart,” she said.
“What the fuck are you telling him?” my father said.
In almost all of the books I have ever read, and many of the movies I’ve seen, when a husband curses at a wife, or a wife at a husband, it signals that they are fighting. That was not true about my parents, though. My parents were often a little bit explosive, always very loud, and when they’d curse it was usually with joy. When it seemed like they were fighting, they were usually playing. The loudness was fun for them. The back-and-forth way they’d become outraged with each other was a contest like the name-calling game that I’d play with Jelly during Group; neither one cared to win, they only tried to make the contest last. It is true, though, that when the subject of the outrage contest was Gurion, it would become a fight as often as not.
You could tell a fight from a contest by what they’d do with their bodies. During contests, they would touch each other, usually with pinches and gentle thumb-stabs, and they’d always look at each other’s faces when they were talking, like to say, “What then! What!” When they’d fight, though, they didn’t look at each other much, and instead of touching, they’d use a prop — usually a cigarette, sometimes an eating utensil — to occupy their hands, and their voices would become quieter. The problem was that most of their fights would start out as outrage contests, and even though the body-indicators made it pretty easy to tell the difference between a fight and an outrage contest, I had never been able to figure out what caused an outrage contest to become a fight. I knew it wasn’t cursing, though, so I didn’t get upset when my father said, “What the fuck are you telling him?” and then my mom said, “And why the fuck do you yell?”
“He hits a boy with a padlock and you call it smart!” said my father.
“That boy hurt our son, and there is no boy who saw it happen that will ever fuck with our son again, Foulmouth.”
“Unless our son fucks with another boy, himself, Toughguy, in which case that boy will have long since known to carry a weapon to defend himself against Gurion Maccabee because Gurion Maccabee is a crazed lunatic.” He said to me, “You’re not a crazed lunatic, but you are acting like one, and eventually you’ll be treated like one, and even if you were one, I would love you because you’re my son, and I would never want you to get beat up either, but this is not the way to act, the way you have acted, you are smarter than this, and you will act like a mensch, not a Philistine, you will use your gifts to avoid fights, not to start them — there are other ways to win.”
I said, That’s why I do Harpo Progressions. I said, I did one just today. To Mr. Botha.
That was excellent timing, for me to mention the progression right then. My father made his bottom lip fat and leaned at me. “Nu?” he said, faking impatience.
I said, Remember I told you about the protocol for getting in the Cage? With the passes and the clipboard?
“The gate, and the locks, yes yes go on.”
I was coming back from Brodsky’s office, I said, and Botha told me to hand him my pass like I didn’t know that I was supposed to hand it to him, like I hadn’t done that a hundred times already, and so I folded it before I handed it to him.
“He gave it back?” said my father.
He wouldn’t even take it, I said. I said, He told me to unfold it.
My father slapped the table and said, “Ha! Bureaucratic robot mamzer. So what? So you unfolded it, you refolded it…”
Yes, I said, and then I dropped it and he told me pick it up, and I picked it up and crumpled it, and—
“Get to the point,” my mother said. “This story does not entertain me.”
You think it’s hilarious, I said. I said, You’re looking down at the placemat’s dandelions to hide your face, but the corners of your mouth are crosshatching the rays off the corners of your eyes is how big you’re smiling.
My dad jabbed his pointer at my mom.
I said, I had to do something to the pass that couldn’t be undone because that was the only way to win, was to do something permanent. So I tore it in four places, and that’s how I won.
“Now that is smart,” my father said. “You used your head.”
“To what end was his head used?” my mother said. “What do you think you encourage?”
“His teachers are idiots, we can’t hide that from him, and there is little to do about it as long as he’s enrolled at that school,” said my father. “So what? Do I tell my son: ‘Obey these idiots’? Do I tell him: ‘Be docile in the mitts of fools, amid subnormals’? No. And no. I encourage him to subvert these idiots whenever possible, but without violence.”
“And how do you think he subverted the idiot, Judah? By tearing some paper? All he did was incur idiot wrath. This method is worse than ineffective — such a method undermines whoever is enacting it.”
My father grabbed her leg, and her knee hit the table-bottom. She said, “I am being very serious.”
“We can’t flirt when you’re serious?”
“You can flirt to me all that you want, but if I am being very serious, you cannot expect me to flirt back to you,” she said. And then, as if the over-immigranted English weren’t enough (my mother knew as well as anyone that people flirt with each other, not to each other; knew that the more she sounded like the earnest academic Sabra, the more endeared my father became), she flicked a blush-colored spot onto my father’s neck with her pointer.
“Are you paying attention to this, Gurion?” said my dad. “This is a useful lesson, here: when a female talks about flirting, the talk itself is flirting.”
“That is only partly correct,” my mom said. “For the smartest and the handsomest male in the world, a mention of flirting is almost sure to be a flirtation in itself, but when the male is not the smartest and handsomest, the rule fails to predict. Therefore, if a woman talks to this man about flirting, she may well not be flirting with him, for how can he be the smartest and the handsomest while also being the father of the smartest and the handsomest? He cannot.”
I said, Pssh = Stop looking at me that way.
My father said, “Your mother’s mostly right, Gurion, but she fails to tell you that when a female who you are flirting with is some kind of toughguy, and that female pulls your earlobe or flicks you on the neck rather than smashing your nose or belting you where it counts, both of which she, being such a hardnosed brawler, is capable, the neck-flicking or lobe-pulling is a sure sign that she is flirting with you, regardless of how smart or handsome you may be.”
My mom pretended to punch my dad in the nose and he kissed her on the knuckles.