The Things a Brother Knows Read online

  But I’ve never laced up my boots to fight in some desert country half a world away.

  I don’t even own any boots.

  When I really think about it, I guess what burns most about hearing my mother calling me baby is the sad truth that nobody ever calls me baby but my mother.

  I think about telling her to stop. That no self-respecting seventeen-year-old goes around getting called baby by his mother. But she smiles at me right then, just barely, and I don’t have it in me to dash the look of fake hope on her face that is the perfect companion to the smell of spring in a spray bottle.

  She deserves this moment, right? She deserves to stand here folding her laundry. Not allowing the anticipation and excitement to overwhelm her, but still smiling, just a little, knowing that tonight, her son is finally coming home.

  It’s good news. There’s no two ways about it. It’s great news. It’s the best news any mother folding laundry in any living room in any town in this or any country could ever possibly hope for. But I don’t know which son she’s thinking of. The one who left three years ago, or the one he’s become while he’s been gone.

  I take the shirts from her outstretched hands. “Thanks, Mom.” I start to walk away and then stop. “Anything you need me to do?”

  My question shocks us both, I think. Me, because I can’t remember the last time I offered to do anything around the house, and Mom, because of all the days to change things up, today is not the day. She’s tethered to her routine by a very fine thread.

  “No thanks, baby.”

  I reach into her row of piles for the stack of cloud sheets. Boaz’s room still has the same aviator theme she designed for him when he was little. She painted the airplanes on the walls herself. Hung the planets from the ceiling.

  She did my walls with starfish, clown fish, hammerhead sharks and an octopus. That octopus scared the crap out of me. I was that kind of kid. Scared of an octopus, but even more scared to admit it to anybody. Pearl and I painted over my walls four years ago in a color she picked out called November Rain.

  “Are you going to put these sheets on his bed?” I ask.

  She pats the pile tenderly and then worries a corner of the top sheet between her fingertips. “Bo always did love these sheets.”

  We call him Boaz. Everyone does. Boaz, my parents say, is a good Hebrew name. It means “swiftness,” “strength.” They always fought the impulse most people had to Americanize it. But a month or so into his service, letters started arriving home signed Bo.

  Then they stopped arriving altogether.

  Now I say, “You want me to do it for you?”

  A puzzled look.

  “Put the sheets on his bed. I can do it if you want.”

  She waves me off. “No, no. It’s okay.” She returns to her folding. Her humming.

  And I return upstairs to Pearl with my caffeine.

  She’s searching through my closet. Pearl likes to steal my clothes. A car pulls into the driveway and she freezes with a worn-out flannel shirt in her grip.

  It isn’t Abba. He came home half an hour ago to ride me about not cleaning the gutters.

  My heart beats sharply. Like it might slice its way right through my chest.

  I go to the window and lean out.

  The light is just leaving the sky, but I can still make out the trunk of Dov’s lime-green Caprice Classic. It’s the car I learned to drive in. Boaz too, although he somehow managed to look cool behind its gargantuan steering wheel. It takes three full rotations just to make a right turn in Dov’s Caprice Classic. I figure I’m as prepared to captain a boat now as I am to drive a car.

  Dov is seventy-six years old, with a face like a rumpled suit, untamable white hair and sideburns he’s had for so long they’ve finally come back in style. Nearly two decades of living in the States has done nothing to soften his matter-of-fact Israeli gruffness. There’s nothing soft about Dov—no soft edges, no softer sides. He’s built like a badass garden gnome.

  Dov has been coming for dinner at least three times a week since Boaz enlisted. He always arrives with the New York Times folded under his arm, but he never talks about the war anymore. He’ll take to his favorite chair in the living room, the red suede armchair, and he’ll carry on about drilling in the Arctic. The riots in France. The section of Interstate 90 that’s closed due to a crumbling overpass.

  “Can you believe this mess? What a shande!”

  Lately, he could even work himself up over a game of baseball.

  He knocks. Loud.

  “C’mon in, Dov.”

  Sometimes grandfathers choose to go by their first names because they think Grandpa makes them sound old, but not Dov. “I know I’m an old son of a bitch,” he’d say. “That’s why I don’t want some little pischer calling me anything new. All these years now, I’m used to my name.”

  Abba calls him Dov too. As a boy growing up in Israel, he never had the chance to call his father Abba. That’s why he chose to be an Abba himself instead of a Dad like all the other fathers all over this country.

  Dov doesn’t move any farther into the room than the doorway.

  “Good evening, Miss Pearl.” He’s crazy for Pearl.

  “Hiya, Dov.”

  “Will you tell your friend here to get a haircut?”

  My long hair is a subject of which Dov never seems to tire.

  Pearl shrugs. “Get a haircut, Levi.”

  I go over and give Dov a hug.

  “You look like a lady,” he says as he gives me a few good pats on my back. Then he leans back and looks me over. He squeezes my cheek. “A pretty lady. I’ll give you that.”

  Dov joined the army when he turned eighteen, but he’d be the first to tell you it was different from what Boaz did. Everyone in Israel serves in the army. Abba did. Even my grandmother did. It’s what you do when you turn eighteen. There’s no choice, so joining the army doesn’t make you brave or crazy. It doesn’t turn you into a hero or a freak. It doesn’t make you somebody who has something to prove.

  It only makes you just like everybody else.

  Dov goes downstairs and Pearl starts packing her things.

  My phone rings. I don’t even have to look to know it’s Zim. If Pearl is standing in front of me there’s only one person who could possibly be on the other end of this call.

  I hit Speaker.

  “Yo.”

  “Yo.”

  “ ’Sup?”

  “ ’Sup?”

  “Wow,” Pearl says. “What scintillating conversationalists you gentlemen are.”

  “She’s there?”

  Zim and Pearl have a little healthy competition going on about who’s my better friend, a ridiculous sort of contest when you consider the prize.

  “Hello, Richard.” Pearl calls Zim by his real name just to get under his skin. And Zim retaliates by pretending the only reason I hang out with Pearl is because we’re having sex. Which is, just to be clear, totally not true.

  “So I don’t want to interrupt whatever unmentionable acts you two are up to, but I just thought Levi should know that none other than Sophie Olsen, hottie extraordinaire, came up to me after third period and asked if he was related to the guy Bowers talked about at morning assembly.”

  “So?”

  “So? Dude. She knows who you are. And she knows enough about who you are to know that you’re friends with me. And I don’t mean to build you up just to tear you down, but that’s about as exciting as news gets in your social world.”

  Can’t argue with that.

  When Pearl takes off, I settle into a game of chess with Abba. We play pretty regularly, and pretty regularly he gives me a good whupping. It’s how we spend time together without having to actually talk.

  A few minutes into the game I hear the front door open. Pearl always leaves something behind. Her sweater, her backpack, her cell phone. Once she even managed to forget her shoes.

  Then I hear a voice.

  Hello?

  It takes an extra
beat to reach me, like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. My brother’s voice.

  It’s a hesitant hello, like the speaker isn’t quite sure he’s stepped into his own house.

  Mom reaches him first. She hasn’t bothered to change from her afternoon of cleaning, and she throws her arms around him. Abba and I get up; Dov runs in from the kitchen. We all stand around him, well, them really, because from the way she’s holding on to him, it’s hard to tell where Mom ends and Boaz begins. We stand around grabbing for some part of him, even if only to touch the cuff of his jacket. I feel Dov’s grip on my shoulder. We gather in a huddle.

  And then, slowly, wordlessly, we cave in on each other, seized by a relief so deep it renders us boneless.

  And in this moment I’m able to imagine what we look like from the outside. Soldier Returns to Loving Embrace of Family.

  In this moment, we are that image.

  In this moment, I allow myself to believe that everything will go back to the way it used to be. He has returned.

  We have returned.

  TWO

  HE DOESN’T COME OUT of his room for three days.

  In a way, I can relate. There have been times when I wished I could shut my door and never open it again, except to let in Pearl. Or Zim.

  “What’s he doing in there?” Zim asks me in the courtyard before first period. He’s got do-nut powder on his cheek. I’d reach out to wipe it off, but people at school probably already think we’re a couple.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Geez.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Remember that time he took us skateboarding? In that emptied-out swimming pool? And the lady whose house it was came chasing after us with a mop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A mop! With a sponge at the end!”

  He’s laughing now and powder is flying out of his mouth.

  “That was awesome,” he says.

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “Can I come see him? I mean, he used to be kind of like a big brother to me too, you know? He sort of taught me how to be one.”

  Zim’s little brother, Peter, is Mini Zim, except that he’s really chubby.

  “You’re a better big brother than he is, Zim.”

  Zim looks at me like I’m crazy, and I hate to see this look coming from him. I know I’m not supposed to say stuff like that, and I’d like to think it’s okay to say it to Zim, that he understands, but even he doesn’t.

  It’s not like Boaz was a bad brother. He never tied me to a tree in my underwear or shaved off one of my eyebrows or any of those sorts of things. He taught me how to do some stuff, like how to draw optical illusions and how to give the perfect middle finger. He bought me a book about the Beatles once and it wasn’t even my birthday. There was the day he got his driver’s license and he came home from the test with Mom and he raced right to my room and asked me, all excited, where I wanted to go.

  Anywhere, he said. I’ll take you.

  The North End, I answered. I picked the farthest place I could think of, an Italian neighborhood in Boston, right at the ocean’s edge. I was twelve. All I wanted was to be alone with my brother. And maybe get an ice cream.

  The North End, he said. You got it. And I went for my jacket. In the time it took me to grab it, the phone rang. It was a friend of his, I don’t remember who. He turned to me, and looked at the jacket in my hand, and said he was sorry but we’d have to go to the North End tomorrow. And we didn’t.

  So Zim is looking at me like I’m crazy. But he doesn’t see, because he can’t. Even if we share a birthday and even if he is one of my two best friends, he can’t know what it’s been like to be Boaz’s younger brother.

  Just then Sophie Olsen walks by.

  “Hi, Levi,” she says. And she gives this little wave.

  “Life,” Zim says under his breath, “is so totally unfair.”

  When I get home from school, and I’m sitting on the floor of my room, I hear the toilet flush. Not your typical earth-shattering event, but today it comes as confirmation.

  He’s alive in there.

  Our rooms share a bathroom. He used to lock my door from the inside and then leave it like that, and it used to drive me crazy, because there I’d be, dying for a piss, locked out of my own bathroom. So I’d pound on his door, and he’d have that locked too. He’d say in this high-pitched voice, Who is it? like it was some big mystery, and then he’d make me go through this whole round of questions before he’d agree to go back and unlock my door.

  When I hear the flushing it occurs to me that I could probably open my door—I’d bet he’s forgotten about the lock—and pretend I didn’t know anyone was in there. I could make some lame excuse about how all that time having the bathroom to myself, I’d forgotten how to share. That might lead somewhere, to something resembling a conversation.

  But I just wait for the sound of his door closing.

  I mean, it’s not like nobody’s trying. Mom knocks. Several times a day. She cheerfully calls out, Boaz? Honey? Bo?

  He shouts back, I’m sleeping.

  Not that I’ve never wanted to shout at Mom like that. Sure I have. In the days before I had a phone with an alarm feature, Mom used to have to wake me for school. She’d pull the shades and sing a little song.

  Wake-ee-up-ee-oo-my-little-Levi …

  I wanted to grab something and hurl it at her.

  But I didn’t. And Boaz does. This is just what he’s doing when he uses that voice with Mom. He’s hurling something her way, something heavy enough to hurt her.

  He never used to use that voice with her. He used to be affectionate. He’d hug her or hold her hand in public long after I’d be caught dead doing either. He called her “Ma.”

  I can see how it hurts now as she walks down the hall, but then she’ll perk up, because after all, he’s home. And home holed up in his room all day not talking or eating beats being thousands and thousands of miles away, in danger’s path. Not writing or calling.

  Abba’s about to blow. He’s not as patient or understanding as Mom. Or maybe the operative word is clueless.

  This morning, he slammed his fist on the breakfast table.

  “Benzona!”

  I love it when he swears in Hebrew. It never sounds like anything all that bad. For example, to my ear, benzona sounds like an Italian pastry. But then I’ll go look it up online.

  What he’d just said, in the presence of my mother, was “Son of a whore.” And he said this while he was looking up at the ceiling, at Boaz’s room. So … he’d just called Mom someone who has sex for money. Which was kind of uncalled for. I mean, the woman just made him an egg-white omelet, for Christ’s sake.

  Fortunately, I don’t think she ever bothers to translate.

  Abba ran his hands through his thinning hair. “When is he going to come down? He can’t stay up there forever.”

  “He just needs a little rest, Reuben. That’s all.”

  Sometimes I forget he’s home. I’ll be in class staring at the back of Rebecca Walsh’s silky hair, or in line at the cafeteria, or home watching TV, or in bed, or out on the roof, and I’ll forget.

  Then I’ll remember. Boaz is home.

  And I feel like a shitty brother for the forgetting.

  It’s Friday night. Shabbat.

  I hear the buzz of his electric clippers and then the shower in our bathroom.

  Dov’s coming for dinner and Boaz must finally be planning on coming downstairs. I think he knows if he didn’t, Dov would break down his door and seriously kick his ass.

  Dinner is something we were never allowed to skip back when the normal rules applied. We always came home in time for dinner.

  It’s Abba’s thing, dinner is, even if he never does the cooking. He believes in it as much as he believes in anything. He grew up on a kibbutz, and while he claims to have enjoyed the communal life—the freedom, the constant stream of barefoot children chasing after balls that belonged to the lot of them—he missed sitting dow
n to a family dinner. Most often he ate in the dining hall with his friends, and while this sounds like heaven to me, it left Abba with some sort of hole in him it’s our job to fix.

  Tonight the house is full of the smell of Mom’s roasting chicken.

  Dov never arrives empty-handed. He’s brought some food from the Armenian. That’s what he calls the little deli in his neighborhood. The owner, Mr. Kurjian, is the closest thing Dov’s got to a friend.

  “Give me whatever’s good,” he says and hands Mr. Kurjian his empty basket.

  Today it’s stuffed grape leaves, some pizzalike flat bread with spices, and a white cheese that’s too runny to cut with a knife.

  “Try this,” Dov says as I help him lay his goods out on the table. “It’s nice and salty.”

  Abba walks in and they launch into Hebrew.

  I pour myself a root beer. Take my time collecting ice cubes, lingering in front of the open freezer door. I try to pick out a word, a phrase, anything familiar. All those Sundays trapped in Hebrew school. Did I really learn nothing?

  Then I give up. I should just be glad they’re talking instead of pretending like Mom does. I can tell by the pitch of their voices that they know Boaz is not just catching up on sleep. That he isn’t going to open up his bedroom door, give a big stretch, rub his eyes and then snap to, like a bear in striped pajamas from an old black-and-white cartoon.

  When Boaz finally does come downstairs we all stop and stare. It’s just what I told myself I wouldn’t do, but none of us can help it. Mom fills the silence.

  “Bo, honey, do you want a drink? A slice of cheese? A carrot stick?”

  She reaches out and rubs his shaved head like he’s a little boy.

  His T-shirt hugs his chiseled chest. The tendons in his neck mean business. He hasn’t lost any touch of the desert sun on his empty face.

  He walks over to Dov, sticking out his hand. They shake like buddies meeting in a bar after work.

  We sit around the table.

  Mom takes a sip of her wine. “We’re so blessed.”

  Dov rolls his eyes. After Boaz left, Mom started going to synagogue almost every Saturday morning. It used to be she went only on the High Holidays, dragging Boaz and me along, but now Mom is Temple Beth Torah’s most reliable attendee. She’d go Friday nights too if she could, but that would get in the way of family dinners, and there’s no way Abba would stand for eating potluck style in the synagogue social hall.