Twerp (8 page)

“Yes, Rabbi, I can feel it ….”

The Jewish thing is a much bigger deal for Lonnie on account of his mom. She was in a concentration camp. The Germans cut her tongue in half. She had four surgeries, and now she can talk all right—except it sounds painful. Kind of forced and wet. Plus, she’s got an accent,
so it’s hard to understand her. Not that she talks a lot. She’s real nice to us, though. She’ll fix Lonnie whatever he wants, even if it’s a half hour before dinner. She’ll whip out a box of Mallomars like it’s nothing. My mom says we should be ashamed of ourselves, taking advantage of Mrs. Fine. But I don’t look at it as taking advantage. That’s just how she is. Good-natured.

My mom plays mah-jongg with Mrs. Fine. There’s about seven or eight ladies who rotate in and out of their games. It’s a loud game, mah-jongg. Especially if you’re trying to fall asleep in the next room. There’s the clatter of tiles, plus the sound of ladies yelling “One crak!” and “Two bam!” Mrs. Fine sometimes has trouble getting the words out, and it slows down the game. But the rest of the ladies don’t seem to mind.

I know it bugs my mom, though. There was this one night when Mrs. Fine kept getting stuck and saying how sorry she was. Later that night, after the game was over and the ladies had gone home, I heard my mom crying in bed, and my dad telling her not to dwell on it. There was nothing she could do for her.

Mrs. Fine goes to temple every Saturday morning. She’s there whenever I’m there—which is about once every month or so when Rabbi Salzberg gets after me about it. But even when I’m not there, I know Mrs. Fine is because she walks past our house going there and back. I’ve
never known her to miss, not even once. She used to drag Lonnie with her, and he used to drag me, but now he’s old enough to be left alone, so she goes by herself—Mr. Fine doesn’t go with her because he’s too busy at the candy store.

But you should see Mrs. Fine in temple. It’s a big deal for her. She doesn’t just bow her head and peek at her watch like the rest of us. She gets worked up. She knows the entire service backward and forward. She sits in the front row with her eyes shut tight, mouthing the Hebrew words even before the rabbi says them out loud. She rocks back and forth, like she’s in a trance. She clenches and unclenches her fists. Then, toward the end, when the rabbi gets to
Shema Yisrael
, she jerks her head back, and she’s got this real alive expression. It’s like she’s in a fight, and she’s getting whaled on. I don’t know why she goes, to be honest. I don’t know what she gets out of it. As far as I can tell, it just makes her sad.

Lonnie’s dad, like I said, doesn’t go to temple too often because he’s working at the candy store. He’s plenty religious, though. When Lonnie got a dog three years ago, Mr. Fine named him Lord. Can you believe that?
Lord!
What kind of name is that for a dog? It’s almost an insult if you stop and think about it. To God, I mean. I’m sure the dog doesn’t care one way or another. He’s a Shetland sheepdog, which is a slightly smaller version of a collie.
He’s a good dog, not too barky or drooly. But the name ruins it. I mean, how can you say, “Sit, Lord! Sit! Roll over, Lord!” without it sounding funny coming out of your mouth?

The last time I went to temple for a good reason was Lonnie’s bar mitzvah. He said his haftarah all right. No major errors that I could tell. After he finished, Rabbi Salzberg walked across the stage, put his arm around Lonnie’s shoulders, and told him what it means to be a Jew: going to services each Saturday, keeping kosher, marrying a nice Jewish girl, bringing up nice Jewish children. The entire time, Lonnie had a
yeah, right
look on his face. I could tell he just wanted to get down off that stage and get on with his life.

But ever since then, he keeps getting dragged into minyans. That’s when old Jewish guys get together to say prayers—not even in temple. They get together in one of their basements—and then they sit around for an hour and talk about stuff like what it means to be a Jew. (Jews talk about that
a lot
.) I’ve never been to one because you’re not allowed until after your bar mitzvah. That’s another reason I’m not looking forward to mine.

The catch is that you need at least ten Jews for a minyan, and the Jewish dads don’t get home early enough from work, and the Jewish moms aren’t allowed because they’re women, so it’s just the geezers and whatever poor
suckers they can rope into doing it. It’s the one time I feel sorry for the junior high schoolers. The weird thing is, Lonnie would be in junior high himself except he had to repeat sixth grade. I half think he flunked so he could wait around for Quentin, Eric, Howie, Shlomo, and me. But to get back to what I was saying, you should see the junior high schoolers duck for cover whenever the geezer patrol starts to scour the neighborhood, looking for that tenth Jew.

Lonnie keeps getting caught because he refuses to hide out. He just keeps on doing what he’s doing, and if the geezers find him, he takes his medicine. But he goofs on them afterward like no one’s business. He hunches over like he’s a hundred years old and clears his throat so loud you’d think he was about to cough up a lung, and then he starts saying, “
Oy
, de pain!
Oy
, de pain!” It’s downright hysterical. He cracks me up every time.

March 18, 1969

I know you don’t care about Mrs. Fine
, Mr. Selkirk. I know you’re still waiting for me to write about what happened with Danley Dimmel … and I know I’m not supposed to call him that, even though that’s what the entire neighborhood calls him. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe, if the world were perfect, no one would call him that. Then again, if the world were perfect, he wouldn’t have been born hard of hearing and soft in the head. He would’ve been able to say his own name, and “Stanley Stimmel” wouldn’t have come out “Danley Dimmel.”

But the world
isn’t
perfect, and that’s what happened, so that’s what kids call him. That’s what he calls himself. Even though he can talk all right now, on account of his hearing aid, he still calls himself that. It’s his nickname.
What I mean is, he
likes
it. You know how I know? Because I’ve heard him say “Stanley Stimmel.” I was walking past his house a couple of years ago, and he was sitting out on his stoop, which is all he ever does, and there was a substitute mailman, and he asked Danley what his name was, and Danley said “Stanley Stimmel.” It was clear as a bell, the way he said it: “Stanley Stimmel.” But he calls himself Danley Dimmel if he’s talking to a kid. I figure it’s a guy’s choice to be called what he wants to be called. So if he wants to be called Danley Dimmel, that’s what I’m going to call him.

But it doesn’t matter what I call him, or what I don’t call him, if you want to know the truth, because I don’t talk to him. No one talks to him, which is the reason he sits by himself on the stoop. That sounds mean, I know. You could be dramatic about it and say no one likes him. But no one
dislikes
him either. He’s just not the kind of guy you have an opinion about … and, no, it’s not because he goes to a different school. Quentin went to that school for a year before his mom raised hell and got him out, and you’ll never hear anyone say anything bad about Quentin.

It might be different if Danley were a couple of years younger. If he were closer to our age, and if he weren’t the size of an elephant, he might be hanging around with us in Ponzini. Who knows? He might be like Quentin, and
no one would say a bad word about him. But that’s not the way things worked out.

The way things worked out, no one cares about Danley.
I
don’t care about Danley. There, I’ve said it. You can flunk me in English, or do whatever to me, but nothing is going to change that. I wish what happened to Danley didn’t happen. But it did happen, and it’s not like I’m losing sleep over it. You want to know what I’m losing sleep over?

Eduardo.

Maybe that makes me a shallow person, the fact that I couldn’t fall asleep until after midnight for three nights in a row because I was lying in bed, worrying about whether I was still the fastest kid in P.S. 23. If that makes me a shallow person, then all right. I’m a shallow person.

When I got home from Memorial Field that afternoon I met Eduardo, I felt sick to my stomach. My mom’s stuffed cabbage had no taste, at least not to me. As I shoveled the last forkful down my throat, she asked me if I’d had a rough day at school. What was I supposed to tell her?
Yeah, Mom, you could say I had a rough day. But it’s all right because at least I’m still the second-fastest kid at school … unless Eduardo has a twin brother, in which case I’m the third-fastest
.

Do you want to know what I’ve figured out in the two weeks since then? The only thing people care about
is whatever they happen to care about. What I mean is, they care about their own stuff. Take you, Mr. Selkirk. You care about Danley Dimmel and what happened to him, and what I’m writing or not writing about it. You said so yourself in our talk on Monday. That’s
your
stuff.

Lonnie, on the other hand, cares about Jillian. That’s
his
stuff. It’s all he wants to talk about, all he wants to hear about. I wish I’d never written that letter for him, if you want to know the honest truth. I feel for him, for sure, but I knew nothing good was going to come of that letter, and I told him so, and he did what he felt like doing—or rather,
he got me to do
what he felt like doing—and now it’s turned out just like I thought it would. Worse, in a way. Because Jillian
still
hasn’t asked me who wrote the letter, hasn’t shown the slightest interest in knowing since I handed it to her last month. On the other hand, she’ll come up to me during a break and ask if I wrote down the homework assignment in math or if she can copy the notes I took in social studies. Even though she sat through both classes the same as I did. But as for the letter, not a word. It’s like the entire incident got erased from her memory. Which would be fine with me, except it didn’t get erased from Lonnie’s memory. Truthfully, I wish she’d just torn up the letter and flung it back in my face. That way, at least I’d know what to tell him.

The latest brainstorm he had was for me to ask Amelia
what to do next. That’s about the last thing I want to do, bring Amelia in on it. But Lonnie said that women understand one another, that there’s a secret language going on between them that guys don’t pick up on. He has no idea how squirmy that kind of conversation is because he doesn’t have an older sister. Or brother. Lonnie’s an only child, so he just figures it’s a five-minute talk, in and out, no consequences. But trust me. There are
always
consequences. Not for him. He just gets free advice. But Amelia will lord it over me for the next year, at least. That’s how it works.

I don’t even like to go into Amelia’s room. You know how normal seventeen-year-old girls like to hang posters of Davy Jones and Desi Arnaz Jr. and Bobby Sherman? Well, Amelia likes to tape up the posters and then scribble on them with a red magic marker. Like, she’ll scribble across Davy Jones’s face, “What a corporate lie!” and across Bobby Sherman’s face, “Ever heard of Vietnam?” Where she doesn’t have posters taped up, the walls are full of beads. That girl loves beads! Pink. Purple. Light blue. She’s hammered about a dozen nails into her walls at different heights and with different-colored beads hanging down from them. If she opens a window to let a breeze in, the entire room rattles. My dad cuts her a lot of slack, but even he jokes about it sometimes. He calls her the fortune-teller on account of what her room looks like.

So I had a bad feeling as I knocked at her door. She had a Jefferson Airplane record on her stereo, and I heard her scramble off the bed and turn down the volume right after I knocked. She must have thought it was our mom, who’s always telling her to turn down the stereo. The expression on her face when she opened the door seemed to say,
Oh, it’s just you
. But then, a second later, the expression changed. Maybe she could tell that I wasn’t there because I wanted to be there. Whatever the reason, her expression went soft. She swung her head to the left, which meant I had permission to enter her room.

I sat down on the bed, and she sat down on the rolling chair at her desk. She smiled at me in an agreeable way. But at first I didn’t talk. I couldn’t figure out how to start the conversation. Maybe five seconds passed, and she began to roll her eyes. “Are you a leprechaun?”

“What?”

“Are you here to do a jig for Saint Patrick’s Day?”

I blurted out, “I need advice.”

“What about?”

“It’s about school.”

“You didn’t get suspended again, did you?”

“What? No, it’s nothing like that.”

“Good,” she said. “Because that’s not you.”

“How do you know?”

“I know
you
, Julian. You’re not the kind of kid—”

I cut her off. “I just need advice. Are you going to help me out or not?”

“You’re not having problems with your homework, are you?”

“No, it’s not about homework.”

“Then what’s it about?”

I turned my head to the side. Even as the words were coming out, I didn’t want to say them. “It’s about … a girl.”

She got a huge grin on her face. “You’re putting me on.”

“C’mon, Amelia, I need advice!”

“This is
so
adorable,” she said.

“It’s not adorable. It’s serious.”

She rolled her chair closer. “Talk to me, little brother.”

I couldn’t even look her in the eye. “Would you back up a couple of feet?”

She laughed and rolled the chair in reverse. “How’s this?”

I looked up and nodded. “Better.”

“So what’s her name?”

“Jillian.”

“You’ve got the hots for her?”

“What? No!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say ‘the hots.’ That’s the wrong word for sixth grade.”

“It’s not me. It’s … a friend.”

“So your
friend
is really into this girl Jillian?”

“Don’t say it like that.”