Imaginary Men (2 page)

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Authors: Enid Shomer

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors), #Literary Collections, #Literary Criticism, #test

BOOK: Imaginary Men
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Page 6
Around us, buzzers and bells rang as less skillful players made their machines go tilt. His score climbed rapidly: 500, 900, 1,200.
"His best is 42,000," Asher said.
"Shut up!" Barry hissed. "I can't concentrate."
But he was concentrating. The lights of the machine reflected off his glasses, giving him a powerful look, as if the colors were zooming out from his head, like Superman's X-ray vision.
"Shit!" he cried, as the silver ball dropped into an alley.
"Double shit," Asher said. "Piss."
There was almost nothing as satisfying as hearing them curse. I had no desire to do it myself. My mother's speech was filled with euphemisms like heck, darn, and shoot. Naturally, she disapproved of indelicate language, which for her also included speaking Yiddish in the presence of non-Jews, something she considered rude and old-fashioned. On the other hand, nothing pleased her more than to hear a gentile use the word "goy" or Sammy Davis, Jr., say "
schvartza
."
Some older boys draped themselves around our machine and lit cigarettes. They had thin, sharp noses and stiff, oiled pompadours. They were what we called "rocks."
"Who's the slit?" one of them asked.
"His sister," Asher said.
They glared at me. "This is no place for girls," the same boy said.
I moved to the next machine and dropped my dime in.
"Give me a drag," Barry said.
"Yeah," Asher said. "I want to hotbox it."
The older boys passed their cigarettes to them. Barry and Asher inhaled deeply and made the tips of the cigarettes glow bright red. The idea was to see how long an ember you could make.
Afterward, they bought peppermint candies to sweeten their breath. I had been scared to go to Rudy's alone. When I returned home, it struck me that Barry and Asher might have been afraid, too. But together they acted like they could take over the whole world.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Do you think the teachers at school were diplomatic about my brother's name change? They kept remarking on it, or forgetting it momentarily, so that the two names were strung together into a hor-
 
Page 7
rible long new oneBerylbarry. This marked the beginning of my brother's difficulties at school.
In those days bad behavior wasn't called hyperactivity or social skills deficits. It was called simply "discipline" and occupied an intimidating square outlined in bold black on our report cards. That fall, his grades changed from SP for Satisfactory Progress to UP, Unsatisfactory Progress, with remarks in the discipline box like "talks too much," "constantly disrupts the classroom,'' and "challenges the teacher."
Things went from bad to worse. Finally, during Passover that year, he crumbled some matzohs he had brought to school as snacks and dumped them inside Sheila Green's jumper. Sheila had to be sent home. Her mother told my mother her skin was red and irritated. Mother said yes, she was sure that it was, because no cracker in this world had edges as sharp as a broken matzoh. Barry was suspended from school for two days. I remember how agitated my parents were about this incident. Could it be the teachers had said something derogatory about the matzoh in the first place? Did they know it was a ritual food? And most important of all, what was Barry thinking, desecrating the matzoh like that? On the eighth day of Passover, Mother threw out the leftover matzohs, something she had never done before.
The next afternoon, Barry came home from Asher's house and went up to his small attic bedroom and cried. Mother and I both heard him. He didn't cry the way I didsilently into a pillow until it was soggy and cold. His tears were always accompanied by temper tantrums. He beat on the wall with his fists and wailed.
"Barry!" Mother shouted up the stairs. "What's wrong?"
"None of your business." His voice was muffled by the closed door.
If Dad had been home, he wouldn't have dared to answer her like that. She looked crushed and then, gradually, angry.
"Come down here this instant!" she yelled.
No sound from his room. She mounted the stairs and pushed the door open. Then she dragged him by his shirt collar down the steps into the kitchen and poured him a glass of cold milk to calm him down.
"What is it, Beryleh?" she asked quietly.
"Barry."
 
Page 8
"Barry, then."
"Mrs. Levandowski heard about the matzohs." He choked up a little.
"And?"
"She kicked me out of the house."
Mother was silent for a moment. She glared at me so that I wouldn't say anything. "She'll get over it," she said.
"No, she won't. She said I can't come back." Barry sipped at the milk.
Though there was always a lot of yelling and screaming in our family, there was very little of the kind of quiet terror I imagined Mrs. Levandowski to be capable of. In our house, no matter what anyone said, we all knew that the person didn't really mean it. The glue that held us together could not be dissolved by a flare-up in temper, no matter how severe. It was a special kind of permissivenessperhaps a Jewish permissiveness. We were made to feel guilty, but we never doubted that we could redeem ourselves. There were no absolutes, only a kind of ongoing tug-of-war run by parents who almost never stuck by anything they said if we pressed them hard enough. I could not imagine my mother ordering a child from her house. It was far too rude and arbitrary. But Mrs. Levandowski was another case. She reminded me of my Russian Grandma Bellaa stubborn and strict woman who stuck to a gallstone diet long after her gall bladder was removed and whose favorite food was laxatives.
"Just like that?" my mother asked. "What else did Mrs. Levandowski say?"
My brother looked up from his glass of milk. "I already told you."
"I mean, I want to know her exact words." Mother was always asking for people's exact words, as if she could insert herself into another person's head if she had enough information.
Barry gazed out the window toward the alley that separated Asher's street from ours. I looked out expecting to see one of the neighborhood kids there, but it was empty. "She said she was ashamed for me. About the matzoh and all."
"Oh." Now mother was getting indignant. "Who is she to call names?"
"She didn't call me any names. She just said I couldn't come to the house."
"We'll see about that," Mother said.
 
Page 9
"I don't want you talking to her for me." Barry stood up. "I'm not a baby, you know. And it's none of your business."
From there on, the argument grew familiar. I knew Mother would win but that it would take a long time to bring him around. She explained that when he beat his head against the wall it was her business, that the whole neighborhood was her business if she said it was, even Mrs. Levandowski. But she promised to be tactful. She promised not to get angry at Mrs. Levandowski. Barry made her swear that she wouldn't say anything to make the situation worse.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Once I saw a film of a house-raising in an Amish community. The sides of the house were laid out and nailed together on the ground. Ruddy men wearing overalls, straw hats, and carpenters' aprons swarmed over the wood frame like bees over a hive. Nails poked cheerfully out of their mouths instead of words. In the distance, other farmhouses they had built squatted like salt cellars on a great laid table. A field of summer corn swayed behind them, its deep treads and waves repeating the grain of the wood, the hanks of their hair. You could hear a communal hum of pleasure when the sides went up. This happened near one of those towns in eastern Pennsylvania like Paradise or Intercourse where tourists are always stealing the road signs.
Barry moved into Wildwood Estates right before his first child was born. All the streets bear the names of trees and woodland flowers. At the corner of Azalea and Bluet lived a profoundly deaf child whose parents arranged to have a special yellow sign like the ones used for dangerous curves and deer-crossings installed at the entrance to the subdivision. It said Deaf CAUTION Child. At least that is the way I always read it, because the word "caution" was sandwiched between the other two. I remember thinking that like all signs, it would become invisible after a while. But I liked the idea of a public notice for a single child. It seemed both extravagant and absolutely essential. I could imagine a neighborhood full of such signs: Blind Caution Child, Lame Caution Child, Shy or Fat Caution Child, Doesn't Understand Where Road Leads Caution Child.
Whenever Barry gave directions to his house, he'd always say turn
 
Page 10
right one block after deaf child. Then he'd take pleasure in explaining what that was.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Mother telephoned Mrs. Levandowski the next day. Barry stood right next to her, listening. I was arranging my dolls under the kitchen table in their own little fallout shelter.
"Sadie?" Mother said. "Sadie Levandowski?"
I had been to Asher's house many times to play the piano. I knew Mrs. Levandowski would be standing in the kitchen like Mother, most likely stirring or kneading something. She kept a kosher kitchen, which meant, basically, that nobody else could touch anything in it, not even Mr. Levandowski. There was no neutral zone for the uninitiated among all those cabinets, shelves, and drawers. I felt like a barbarian, stranded between the
milchadik
and the
fleshadik
. When I drank a glass of milk, I was afraid to set it down anywhere, even in the double sink. I always handed it back to her.
"Danken Gott, the whole family is fine," Mother said. "Yours?"
Of course when Mother said the whole family was fine, she was referring to about forty peopleall our aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents. Mrs. Levandowski had one cousin in Detroit, her husband, and son. The rest of the family had been killed in the War.
"Sadie, how would you like to come over for a cup of coffee?" Mother's voice was warm and sincere. "Sure, I have tea."
They decided on Saturday afternoon. Mrs. Levandowski preferred Saturday after shul because she'd already be dressed.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Barry was three years older than I. Three years in the life of a child is a crucial, heartbreaking span. It is the difference between counting on your fingers and long division, between being confined to a few streets and wandering freely through the neighborhood. People were always assuring me that three years would be nothing once we were grown. But at the time, it seemed that Barry would always be smarter, taller, and faster, that I would never catch up. Even when I tried to imagine the two of us in our dotage, Barry was a
 
Page 11
white-haired gentleman walking ten steps ahead, talking a mile a minute to the blank air in front of him, and I was an old lady scrambling to keep pace like our Grandma Bella, who couldn't get out of the way of her own great fallen bosoms.
I often sneaked into his room to see the Lionel train setup which occupied most of it. He always left little scraps of paper jammed into the tracks and wheels so that he could tell if I played with it while he was out. But I didn't need to turn it on. I'd stare at the miniature cows and sheep fastened to their painted green pasture until I felt myself settled peacefully in that tiny, immobile landscape. Then I'd comfort myself with the thought that along with more privileges, Barry also ran into more trouble. As a toddler, he had been kept on a leash. He had set the house on fire accidentally the year before during a paper drive. He was sicklier than I was. His eyes itched and watered, and he suffered sneezing fits. The doctor said Barry was allergic to himself but that he would outgrow it.
Several times in going through his desk I'd encountered his Hebrew books. That was one advantage I had over him. Because I was a girl, I didn't have to go to Hebrew school. Barry, like Asher, spent three afternoons a week at Agudas Achim synagogue to prepare for his bar mitzvah. The synagogue was walking distance from our house, but it was orthodox. Did the other members know that we ate hardshell crabs by the bushel in summer and ordered Lobster Cantonese at the Shanghai restaurant?
The thick black Hebrew letters reminded me of the symbols in cartoons when the character is exasperated and runs out of words. Though I had heard Barry read Hebrew out loud, I was still amazed that such foreign sounds could come from his mouth. Even my parents could not understand most of it.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The next Saturday morning was spent in preparation for Mrs. Levandowski's visit. My mother insisted that we make our beds and clean our closets just in case Mrs. Levandowski wanted to take the ten-cent tour. I always hated it when we had company, for then she would stalk the house anxiously grumbling as she checked for dust, fingerprints, smears, and stray hairs.
It has always struck me as odd that children become intimate with

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