The Things a Brother Knows Page 6

  She sighs. She reaches over and she takes my hand. She must still think I’m a small child. She was always kind to me this way. She showed me the sort of affection a sister might to a much younger brother.

  But now it’s just sort of awkward.

  Yet not so awkward that I let go, because it’s not so often, in fact it’s never, that I get to hold the hand of a girl like Christina.

  “How about Reuben and Amanda?”

  “You know my parents,” I say, but then I realize she doesn’t. She knows who they were before Boaz left. And that’s a whole lot different from who they are now. She knew them when Abba used to make Mom laugh. When Mom used to paint. When they’d listen to music together even though they have such different tastes, and sometimes, they’d dance in the living room and I’d cover my eyes because it was too embarrassing to watch. She knew them when there was a whole world we might talk about at the dinner table and nothing was off-limits, not politics, not war.

  “What can I do?” she asks. “Really, I’ll do anything.”

  Mr. Blond Goatee returns. So does Pearl. They’re standing next to each other, a few feet away, staring at us. He’s probably thinking: Why is this kid holding my girlfriend’s hand?

  And Pearl is probably thinking: He should have gone for the boob.

  “I don’t know. You could stop by again? Get him outside? Maybe take him for a drive. Get him out of the house and into the fresh air. Talk to him.”

  “I’ll give it a try. I’m probably not his favorite person in the world, so I can’t promise I’ll get anywhere, but I’ll give it a try.”

  She untangles her fingers from mine, but I can feel her hand, the warmth and softness of it, long after she wanders off under the arm of her boyfriend.

  I go to see Dov.

  I don’t call ahead. I figure my chances of finding Dov at home are pretty good. He never seems to do much beyond visiting us and loitering at the Armenian deli.

  I arrive at the building just as someone is leaving. I slip in the front door and walk up two flights of stairs to apartment G.

  I hear his voice from across the room.

  “Hold your horses! I’m coming! Just a minute!”

  Dov sounds harassed even though I only rang the buzzer once.

  “What, what?” he’s saying, but then he slaps on a broad smile when he sees that it’s me. “Oh, look. The Avon Lady came calling.”

  “Hi, Dov.”

  He kisses my cheek. “Come in, come in. Can I get you a coffee? A soda? A shot of whiskey?”

  “I’m good.”

  Dov’s kitchen, living room and dining room are all part of the same square space. He has a worn-out plaid couch and a TV. A round table with two mismatched folding chairs. His bedroom is dark. The window looks out onto the brick wall of the building next door. He sleeps on a single mattress.

  It’s the apartment of someone who long ago threw in the towel.

  “To what do I owe this pleasure?” He pats a spot on the couch next to him.

  I sit. Dov puts a hand on my knee.

  “I don’t know.”

  There’s a picture of my grandmother in a frame on Dov’s nearly empty bookshelf. Dov doesn’t keep books. He buys them used from the library and donates them back.

  The photo is black-and-white. She’s sitting on the beach under an umbrella, her hair tied back in a checkered scarf, caught mid-laugh. I wonder what that laugh sounded like. How she smelled. If she had soft skin.

  After she died, Dov left the kibbutz and moved to Boston to be near their only son. I was born six months later.

  We sit side by side on the couch without speaking. Somebody is screaming at somebody else in an apartment upstairs. A dog barks feebly from the courtyard below.

  Dov must have some idea of why I’m here. He’s not totally clueless. But Dov just sits. The picture of patience. A man who has nothing but time.

  I take a deep breath and let it out. “I’m worried about Boaz.”

  “Oh, motek. Of course you are,” Dov says. And then, “We all are.”

  “So why isn’t anybody doing anything?” My shirt is sticking to my back. I had to walk fourteen blocks from the nearest T stop.

  “Maybe I’ll take that soda now,” I say.

  Dov shoots up from the couch, happy to have a task. He roots around in his cupboards and then pours a generic brand of cola into a jelly jar with ice.

  “Listen, Levi.” He sits back down next to me. “We all have our ways of dealing with the shit life serves up. The terrible things we’ve seen. The pain of loss. Change. Whatever.” He turns my chin to face him. He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “We have to let him go through what he needs to go through. We can’t expect too much too soon. It’s not what we hope for, but it’s to be expected. We just have to wait.”

  “Dov,” I say, and I feel my cheeks redden, “I’m tired of waiting.”

  There’s a danger in what I’ve just said. Or at least in the way it sounded. I’m keenly aware from growing up around Dov and Abba that self-indulgence isn’t something to be tolerated. It’s a singularly American phenomenon, Dov and Abba believe—the child who thinks the world revolves around him.

  It’s not really what I mean, though. This time, for a change, I’m not really talking about myself. And maybe Dov gets that, because he doesn’t scold. Instead he says, “I know, motek. It isn’t fair.”

  “I know about waiting. It does nothing. No good at all. But it’s all anyone’s doing.”

  Dov looks at me carefully.

  “Your parents, you know. They do their best. They’re trying to give him the space he needs.”

  “I guess so. But … I think there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just … I think he’s up to something. He’s planning something. He’s going somewhere, and I don’t know why, or where, or what he’s going to do, but it doesn’t feel right. None of this feels right.”

  I sit in the sticky silent company of my grandfather.

  Waiting.

  “There are resources, Levi. Things we can look into if it gets to that. This I’ve talked about with your parents. But we’re not there yet. He was screened before his release, and he’s been deemed healthy. And for now at least, we need to give that the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Okay.”

  Dov puts his hand on the back of my neck. He grabs my hair with his fist and gives it a tug.

  “You’re a good boy, Levi,” he says. “A good, good boy.”

  Just like she promised, Christina stops by. It’s a Saturday afternoon. Mom and Abba are off at a movie. It’s the thing they still do together, go to the movies. It doesn’t matter the topic, the style, the genre—for them, each and every movie is an escape.

  I’m sitting on the steps when Christina arrives, watching Zim’s little brother mow my lawn. It used to be my job, but I guess Mom got sick of nagging me. Then Mini Chubby Zim, who gets his entrepreneurial streak from his older brother, went and started a neighborhood lawn-mowing business. Not that I want him out of a job, and God knows the kid needs the exercise, but as I sit here I think, No more.

  From this day on, I mow my own lawn.

  Christina checks her reflection in her rearview mirror before stepping out of the car. She’s wearing a tank top and cutoff jean shorts that highlight the miraculous length of her legs. In her bare feet she still stands a good inch taller than me.

  She sits down and pushes up her sunglasses. I’ve never been so close to that butterfly in all my life and it takes superhuman strength not to reach out and touch it.

  “For the record, his name is Max,” she says. “And he’s really very nice.”

  “Who?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Oh. Him.”

  She takes a long sip from the iced coffee she brought with her.

  “You know, when Boaz and I were together … that was years ago. I mean, so much has—”

  “You don’t need to
tell me this,” I say, even though I’ve more or less demanded she explain herself by acting like her jilted lover. Jesus, I’m pathetic.

  “I know. It’s just that—”

  “Look,” I say. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

  We sit like this on the steps for a while, long after the lawn is done.

  “So? How should we do this?” she finally asks.

  “I hadn’t planned that far ahead.”

  “Should I go up to his room?”

  I think about the stale air. The mattress on the floor. The tangle of clothes and sheets. The maps everywhere.

  I think about that day I walked in on them.

  “No, let me. You stay here.”

  It’s cool inside the house. Quiet. My eyes take time adjusting from the brightness of the day. I put the pads of my fingers to Boaz’s door. I scratch lightly with what’s left of my compulsively bitten nails.

  “Boaz?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Hold on.”

  He comes to the door. He cracks it open and then fills up the space.

  “What’s up?”

  “Christina Crowley is here to see you.”

  I don’t know why I use her last name. Like there could ever be another Christina.

  “I know,” he says.

  “You do?”

  He gestures over his shoulder. “I saw her car.”

  That he bothers to pull up the shade and look out his window strikes me as a gigantic leap in the right direction. Funny how quickly the little things become the big things.

  “She’d like to see you.”

  Boaz shifts uncomfortably. He moves something from one hand to the other and then holds it behind his back. A shoe box. I recognize it immediately. The black and red top and the picture of a clown in comically large shoes. It’s a box from Marty Muldoon’s. They used to give out Tootsie Pops with your sneakers and they went out of business around the time I grew too old to shop there anymore.

  Boaz used to keep that box in the back of his closet. Inside he put everything too special to sit unprotected on his shelf. The kinds of things he didn’t want anybody, mainly me, to touch.

  I have to admit, I looked for that box once Boaz left home, but like so much else, it had gone missing.

  “She’s out on the front steps,” I say. “Waiting. I’m going to my room.”

  Five minutes pass before I hear Bo’s door open. I hear him on the stairs. I hear the creaking of the screen door and then I hear it close again. I wait for the sound of Christina’s car starting up, the sound of my brother finally going somewhere, but that sound never comes.

  He’s only gone about half an hour, and when he comes back he goes straight to his cave. I hustle down the stairs and catch Christina just as she’s about to pull away from the curb. Boaz’s window looks out to the front, and now that I know he actually lifts his shade, I feel the need to make this quick.

  “So?”

  I can see that she’s been crying. Puffy eyes and splotched cheeks. She wipes her face with the hem of her tank top and in the process I catch the briefest glimpse of her bare stomach.

  It strikes me now that seeing each other again couldn’t possibly have been easy for either of them. I have nothing, no point of reference. No way to know how that must feel.

  “Well, thanks,” I offer.

  I also, clearly, have no understanding of how to talk to girls who’ve been crying.

  “For what?”

  “For getting him out of the house.”

  “We went for a walk,” she says. “He wouldn’t get in the car. I wanted to take him to this place we used to go, this spot in the woods near the pond, but he refused to get in my car. I asked if he still had something against my driving. He used to be the worst backseat driver. Always criticizing. But no, he said he wouldn’t get in anyone’s car. No car at all.”

  “Okay …” I have no idea what else to say.

  All I know is I want to reach out and stroke her cheek, to erase the redness, the puffiness, the sadness.

  “So I said, Well, if you don’t ride around in cars anymore, how’d you even get home from the airport?” She readjusts the mirror.

  Then she turns to me. “He said he walked.”

  I remember the night Boaz came home. How he just appeared at the door. Suddenly. Silently.

  “He needs help, Levi. Beyond what you, or your family, or certainly I can give him. You all must know that.”

  “He’s been deemed healthy.”

  I can’t believe I say this. It sounded so lame when Dov said it to me and it sounds even lamer now.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not really sure.” I look up to Boaz’s window. I can’t tell for the glare of the sun if the shade is up or down. “You’d better go.”

  I straighten up and put my hand on the roof of her car. I give it a slap and she takes this as a cue to drive away without looking back.

  SIX

  I GET THE JOB AT VIDEORAMA and I break the news to Zim while watching him shoot baskets.

  He takes it pretty well.

  “That’s okay, man,” he says. “I’m still waiting to hear from the hair salon. I think my chances there are excellent.”

  The thing is, he’s not kidding. He’s not going to cut hair or anything, he’s just going to sweep it up off the floor, but he’s hoping if he proves himself, he may get the chance to wash it from time to time.

  “All that lady hair,” he says wistfully. “So totally awesome.” In case you hadn’t already figured it out, Zim is kind of a freak.

  Pearl got a job at Frozurt, this frozen yogurt place three blocks from Videorama.

  Finals are almost over. Then there’ll be a whole round of parties I’m likely to get invited to now that I’m a minor celebrity at school.

  I’ve been waiting for news of standardized test scores or a winning baseball team or some sort of PTA meeting to bump the following words, built out of magnetized black block letters, from the big white sign in front of the main entrance to the school:

  WELCOME HOME, BAY STATE HIGH GRADUATE

  BOAZ KATZNELSON, AMERICAN HERO

  It’s been up there ten days now. Like Bowers’s little morning assembly speech wasn’t enough.

  Suddenly I’ve become the guy everyone goes out of his way to slap on the back, or say hello to, or share information with about the big party after finals that might have otherwise been kept a secret from someone with my social standing. The whole situation just sort of creeps me out. I want those letters gone, but it doesn’t much matter what I want.

  I guess I understand why they’d put that up. Bay State doesn’t have much of a history of graduating eighteen-year-old marines. Most seniors go on to top colleges or at least low-tier colleges for spoiled rich kids.

  So the school is taking some sort of pride in him, and I get that, I do. But they don’t know what all this has done to him.

  I don’t mention the sign to anyone at home, but now Mom is dropping me off at school because she needs the car I usually drive. Zim is out sick with some totally manufactured ailment, so I can’t catch a ride with him, which means that on top of suffering the indignity of being dropped off at school by my mother, I’m staring down the dark tunnel of a do-nutless morning.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” She puts the car in park and gazes at the sign. “It’s wonderful, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I guess so.”

  “Well, I’m going inside to tell Judy how much we all appreciate this.”

  Judy Ulene is the principal. Only parents are allowed to call her Judy.

  “I’m guessing you haven’t told her yourself.”

  “No, Mom, I haven’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I know I’m getting accused of something here, but I’m not totally certain of what. Laziness? Thoughtlessness? Self-absorption?

  Any of these is way better than what I’ve got a f
eeling she’s really digging into me for: not supporting my brother enough.

  “Because,” I say. “I guess I don’t think that a sign is all that important.”

  The bell has already rung for first period and we’re parked in the loading zone. Some stragglers are racing full speed up the steps to the school, but time has slowed down inside this car.

  In some ways, we’re on the brink of having one of the first real conversations we’ve had in years.

  “Care to explain?”

  “Mom. Those words up there … they’re just empty words, put up by some underpaid janitor on a shaky ladder.”

  “That is your brother.” Spit flies from her mouth and hits the windshield.

  “No, Mom. My brother is home holed up in his room. He won’t do anything. Or say anything. Or go anywhere. He won’t ride in a car. Did you know that? He doesn’t need to be worshipped by people who don’t know him or understand him. He needs help.”

  Mom slumps down into her seat, and I start to feel bad for snatching this small moment of happiness from her.

  “What he needs is time,” she says. “Time to readjust. To remember who he was and what he wants his life to be. He needs us. To be with his family again.” Her voice has lost most of its size.

  “Don’t you think maybe what he needs is some psychiatric help?”

  “They screen all returning soldiers for mental health issues before they’re discharged. He passed. They said he’s healthy.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Look, he’s fine. He’s going to be fine. He has us. He has our undying love and support. He just needs time.”

  Mom turns to me, all optimism suddenly.

  I can’t quite figure her out. I mean, she’s a really smart woman. She grew up with really smart parents. There’s no reason for such a blind spot when it comes to Boaz, except that I guess she’s always had a blind spot when it comes to Boaz. He can do no wrong. Nothing can go wrong.

  She’s wearing the smile I’ve grown accustomed to. The kind that it takes some effort to believe in.

  “I’m going in there to thank Judy. And you, young man”—she reaches over and tousles my hair—“are going to go ask your teacher’s forgiveness for arriving so terribly late to class.”