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Part One

LEV

The first time I noticed my sister acting funny was also the first day of May. I remember it perfectly because it was the third funny thing that had happened that day. I don’t mean funny like hilarious, jokey, a real shtick. I mean it as in weird.

The first thing happened at Normal School. Ms. Davidson said a new month meant a new beginning and that’s why we’d be start­ing a new unit that day. The unit would be that every kid in grade five had to keep a journal from now until the end of the year, since it would improve our writing skills and also we would be happy we had this to look back on when we were fifty. She ran around the class giving out skinny blue notebooks with skinny blue lines on all the pages. Ms. Davidson was always running around giving things out, which made you wonder why she didn’t just say Take one and pass it on like all the other teachers, but which made you also kind of like her.

Then Gabe Kramer raised his hand and said, “But a journal’s only fun to look back on if you had cool things to write about,” so she said, “And?” so he said, “And we don’t,” so she said, “You can just write in it like you’re talking to a friend,” so he said, “What­ever.” He didn’t really have a choice because at the end of the year Ms. Davidson was going to look in everyone’s journal to make sure we wrote in them. She promised she wouldn’t actually read them because a journal is a Very Private Thing, she would just sort of take a peek, which was good because it meant I could write about all of Dad’s qualities and not just the ones that would make him seem like someone she might someday want to marry.

That was another thing Ms. Davidson was always doing, she was always talking about Very Private Things. She had a long list of them, which included but was not limited to: did she have a boy­friend, was red her real hair color or did she dye it, was she older or younger than thirty-two, why did she ride her bicycle to school instead of drive, how much money did she make in a year, and who did she think should run the government, the English or the French.

We spent most of the period decorating the covers of our jour­nals with photos that we cut out of magazines. Then Ms. Davidson said we had until the bell rang to write the first entry, but I had to go to the bathroom. On my way there I passed Gabe Kramer’s desk, so I peeked over his shoulder and saw the words this is dumb this is dumb this is dumb this is dumb written out about five thou­sand times. I guess I stood there for a second too long because sud­denly he twisted around in his seat and stared at me. He looked so mad his face was the same shiny orange as the plastic chair he was sitting on.

But the real funny thing happened when I came back from the bathroom. I passed Alex Caufin’s desk, and he was leaning over his journal and smiling, so I peeked over his shoulder, too. I thought maybe he was doing the same thing as Gabe Kramer, cheating. What he was writing was this:

01001001011001100010000001111001011011110111010100100000 01100111011001010111010000100000011101000110100001101001 01110011001000000111100101101111011101010010011101110010 01100101001000000111000001110010011001010111010001110100 01111001001000000111001101101101011000010111001001110100

Line after line after line of numbers. There must’ve been at least eight thousand! I stood there staring, but Alex didn’t notice me. His tongue was sticking out from between his teeth, he was so con­centrated. The secret theory that this put into my head was that maybe Alex was not cheating after all. Maybe he was writing a real journal, and maybe he was writing it in code.

The second funny thing happened on my way home from school. I was walking past Mr. Katz’s house. Mr. Katz lived down the block and the reason why his name was Mr. Katz was not because he had lots of cats, it was because he was a Hasidic Jew. There were lots of Hasidic Jews in Mile End. You could usually see them walking around in long black coats and fur hats, even in summer. When it rained they wore funny-looking plastic bags over their hats that looked like shower caps, probably so the fur didn’t get wet and start smelling. Mr. Katz was religious like them but he didn’t really act or dress like them. Even though he had the same black pants, his were always wrinkled. Instead of a stiff white button-down shirt, he had a dirty white T-shirt. On top of that he wore the long white fringes that were supposed to be worn as an undershirt. Long dark curls dangled from the sides of his face, but instead of letting them bounce around, he tucked them away behind his ears like pencils.

When I turned the corner, I saw him sitting near the old oak tree on his front lawn surrounded by toilet paper rolls. He had a paintbrush in his hand and he was painting the rolls brown. I said, “Hello, Mr. Katz,” and he said, “Hello, Lev,” and I said, “What are you making?” and he said, “It’s a secret,” so I said, “Okay.” I watched him paint for a while. His clothes were all covered in brown splotches, but he didn’t care. His round face was smiling. It was really sunny and I didn’t feel like going home right away, so after a minute I said, “Can I help?”

I felt bad for Mr. Katz because other people in the neighborhood sometimes made fun of him. Even now, I could see out of the cor­ners of my eyes that the Hasidic women pushing strollers were cross­ing to the other side of the street to avoid him. When their curious five- and six-year-olds tried to run toward him, the mothers pulled them back with a tug on their sleeves. Hipsters crinkled up their noses as they passed, like they couldn’t stand the smell of someone so uncool, even though they were the ones leaving trails of cigarette smoke and loud music leaking out of their big headphones. Luckily, Mr. Katz didn’t seem to notice the wide circles all of his neighbors were making around him when they passed.

Mr. Katz looked at me and said, “Sure you can help, if you want to be a good boy and do a mitzvah, grab that roll and start paint­ing.” So I sat down on the grass next to him and started painting. It was not because I wanted to do a good deed, like they were always teaching us to do in Hebrew School. It was just because I liked Mr. Katz. I wondered what he was making.

The third funny thing happened at dinner. Sammy looked nervous and was acting weird. For one thing, she was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, even though it was a boiling hot day. Then when Dad asked her to pass the potatoes, her hand shook a little bit. She passed the bowl and he said, “Samara, is everything okay?” and she said, “Yes.” But there was something else she wanted to say, a tiny word, I could see it in the corner of her mouth.

“So,” Dad said between bites. “What did you learn in Hebrew School this week?”

All of a sudden, Sammy’s face turned red. She opened her mouth like she was about to say something, and her eyes got really bright, which made me think it was going to be something important. But then she just poked her peas with her fork and said, “Nothing.”

Dad raised his eyebrows, then asked what she was learning in Normal School. But she didn’t answer right away, so even though I know it’s rude to interrupt when someone else is speaking, I said as fast as I could, “We started a new unit in Language Arts today and the new unit is we all have to write in journals!” Then, because I knew this was a fact Dad would like, I added, “Ms. Davidson said she’s going to check to make sure we wrote in them but she won’t actually read them because a journal is a Very Private Thing!” Then, because no one else was speaking, I took the opportunity to say, “Ms. Davidson is highly intelligent and very funny and also she smells super nice,” since one time I saw Dad sniffing an old perfume bottle of Mom’s, which made me think that smelling nice was something he thought was an important quality.

“Well, good,” Dad said into his water glass.

Sammy looked at me like I was crazy.

Then he asked her again what she was learning in Normal School. “We just finished 1984. I got an A on the essay. Now we’re doing King Lear.”

“Lear! That’s great. So, maybe this weekend you and I can start going over the text together? Give you a little head start? Why settle for an A when you can get an A-plus, right?”

“Right,” she said.

“Fantastic,” he said. “You’re sure everything’s okay?”

“Yes,” she said, and the corner of her mouth drooped under the weight. I took a closer look at my sister. The tiny word that she wanted to say but didn’t say was no.

Every Thursday in Hebrew School we had to do a quiz. Mr. Glassman, our teacher, who was also my next-door neighbor, asked us ten questions about the Torah. Instead of grades, he gave us comments like Tov or Tov me’od or, if you scored a perfect ten out of ten, Metzuyan.

One day in May, my quiz came back to me with the word Met­zuyan scribbled across the top. After class, Mr. Glassman invited me over for tea and rugelach. He always did that when I got a really good mark in his class. I had been to his house four times that year.

I liked Mr. Glassman a lot but I didn’t really like going over because one, whenever I went Mrs. Glassman opened the door and pinched my cheeks and said, “Look at that punim!” and then spent about nine gazillion hours quizzing me on math while her hus­band waited on the welcome mat, and two, the air in that place had a weird feeling. I don’t mean a weird smell, I mean a weird feeling. Like it was heavier than normal air. Like if you wanted to get from the front door to the kitchen, or from the bathroom to the living room, you practically had to go scuba diving. It made you wish you had a really small oxygen tank you could carry around in your pocket at all times, which is something I definitely would have bought if I had the money and if it existed but it didn’t, I checked. The one good thing about going to the Glassmans’ was that when Mrs. Glassman was finally done talking in the doorway, she’d say, “Now if my husband would just move his tuches into the kitchen, I could bring you boys what to nosh on,” and then she’d give you a big bowl of rugelach, which was my favorite dessert.

While I was squishing the warm chocolate out of my fourth piece of rugelach, Mr. Glassman looked up from his tea and said, “Lev, soon you will be thirteen. Bar mitzvah age.”

“That’s not for one and a half more years!” I said, licking my fingers.

“Still, for a smart boy like you, it is never too early to start pre­paring. Or too late. Take your sister, for example.”

“What do you mean?”

“She has been working very hard on her Torah portion.”

“What Torah portion?”

“For the bat mitzvah.”

I stopped licking my hand and put it down on the table. For a few seconds, I just stared at Mr. Glassman, his wrinkled face and straight gray hair and clear gray eyes. I knew that a bunch of girls from Hebrew School were having a group bat mitzvah in a month, but I didn’t think Sammy was going to be in it because one, a bat mitzvah was something girls did when they turned twelve and Sammy was already thirteen, and two, when she was twelve Dad told her she wasn’t going to do it since she was too young to tie herself to a religious tradition since she didn’t really know how to think about religion yet. Did she understand how ahistorical it was? How antifeminist? No? No, see, she was too young to understand. He wanted his kids to have a grasp on their culture, to know where they came from, that was why he was still sending us to Hebrew School, but that was it. Until we were old enough to think critically we were not in a position to be making any lifelong religious commitments. Even now, I wasn’t really sure if that was true, because I was only eleven and a half but I was proud of being Jewish and I liked being in Mr. Glassman’s Torah class. But I didn’t want to tell Dad he was wrong because Mr. Glassman said the Talmud says a word is worth one coin but silence is worth two.

That night, after dinner, Sammy rinsed the dishes and I loaded them into the dishwasher while Dad put away food in the fridge. I started to tell Sammy how much I liked Mr. Glassman. Then I said, “And boy does he like you, he keeps telling me I should follow in your foot—” but all of a sudden she shot me a sharp look full of fear or maybe anger or possibly surprise or then again it could have been a warning and the sentence hung unfinished in the air.

The next morning was warm and sunny. At recess I saw Sammy laughing with her best friend, Jenny, in the lot outside Normal School. Then I looked into the nearby park and spotted Mr. Katz. He was wearing his usual wrinkled black pants and white T-shirt and singing a happy tune to himself while he picked leaves off the trees and stuffed them into a big green garbage bag. I wanted to ask him what he was doing with all those leaves, but then I noticed that Gabe Kramer and Dean Toren were getting ready to corner Alex again.

Alex was one of those kids who got made fun of a lot, I guess because he was short and skinny and always reading a book about brown dwarfs and red giants and stuff like that. His habit of keep­ing a book in front of his face at all times, even during recess, even when he was walking around outside, didn’t help much. That was what he was doing right now, pacing back and forth with his glasses buried deep in the pages, like all the kids playing basket­ball and dodgeball and hopscotch didn’t even exist. Even though Alex’s behavior was a little weird, I knew he didn’t have any friends and none of the teachers were watching and I didn’t want him to get beat up, so I went and stood next to him on the patch of grass where he was reading.

When Gabe saw me, he nudged Dean and whispered into his ear and the two of them left Alex alone. Gabe probably thought I was going to tell on him for cheating with the journal, which I wasn’t, but he didn’t need to know that yet. I stood next to Alex until recess was over, and it must’ve been a good book because as far as I could tell he never even noticed I was there.

After school, I started walking down Saint-Viateur in the di­rection of Mr. Katz’s house. Even though I never usually prayed outside of Hebrew School, because Dad said prayer was just an ex­ample of magical thinking, I decided I’d try it as an experiment on my way over there. I’d ask God in my head to let me find Mr. Katz on his lawn so I could figure out what he was up to.

I prayed while the warm golden smell of bagels drifted through the air around me, making my stomach growl. I prayed while cool guys wearing skinny black ties with dark jeans climbed up twist­ing staircases, which were painted green and yellow and red, to get to their second-floor apartments, and girls with funky jewelry and short shorts climbed down past them to unlock bicycles and pedal away. I prayed while teenagers listened to loud music at bus stops and old homeless men dug through the garbage searching for cans and small dogs barked outside Italian coffee shops and tour­ists snapped photos in front of bright graffitied walls.

The voices around me started to change: less French and En­glish, more Yiddish. Now little boys were running past with curls bouncing at the sides of their faces and fringes trailing out from under their shirts. Their mothers, wearing long skirts and sleeves and wigs, rushed to keep up. I walked by the Judaica store, which was selling silver candlesticks and shiny kiddush cups, and the Hasidic yeshiva, where men studied Torah for hours on end. All along the street, tiny yards and iron balconies overflowed with kids’ stuff, pink tricycles and blue toy cars. Two bearded men wear­ing black hats and coats stood on a stoop, arguing in Yiddish and drawing circles in the air with their thumbs. I turned the corner onto Hutchison, still praying.

When I finally got there, the first half of my prayer got answered but not the second. Mr. Katz was sitting on the grass with all the leaves he’d picked lying on the plastic bag. The funny thing was, he was painting them all green, even though they were already green. When I asked him why, he just said, “Not green enough.”

It was 8:15 on a Friday night and Sammy wasn’t in the living room. Weird. On Friday nights we always watched the TGIF lineup, which started at exactly 8:00. I tried my best to be patient, but when she still wasn’t there at 8:30 I went to her room to get her, because it was boring watching TV alone and also she was the one who always made the popcorn.

Her door was open a crack so I peeked inside. The room was dark except for two white candles burning on the windowsill.

Sammy put her hands over the flames and waved them three times, then covered her eyes and started whispering.

All of a sudden, I had a memory of Mom lighting the Shabbat candles when I was really little. I could see her pressing her fingers to her eyes and saying the Hebrew words. It made me feel weird because I almost never remembered anything about her, and re­membering one thing made me wonder how many other things I’d forgotten. Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Sammy knew more about Mom than I did because she was seven when Mom died and I was only five. But she didn’t like to think about Mom, it made her cry, which was why I never asked questions anymore. Except now I could tell that she was thinking about Mom, because she was acting like her, so maybe that meant everything was different and I was allowed to ask again?

I tried to tiptoe into the room, but one of the floorboards creaked and Sammy turned around and saw me. She looked first shocked, then embarrassed, then extremely mad. She came toward me and yelled, “Haven’t you ever heard of knocking?”

Then she slammed the door.

I went back to watching TV and tried to concentrate on the show but I couldn’t because one, it was kind of boring, and two, I kept wondering, why did Sammy look so embarrassed? And also how long had she been lighting Shabbat candles?

After a while, I fell asleep on the couch.

When I woke up again, it was because the noise of the TV had suddenly disappeared. The silence confused me, so I opened my eyes and there was Dad, standing over me and smiling. I could tell he’d just come back from the university because he had that tired look on his face and his briefcase in one hand. Holding the remote in his other hand, he plopped into the armchair and said, “Hello. Sorry I woke you. How come you’re not in bed?”

I yawned. “Fell asleep watching TV.”

“Nothing good on, huh?”

“Not really.” I twisted my neck and saw Dad flipping channels. “What are you doing?”

“Mmm? Oh, just seeing what’s on.”

“But I mean, why are you watching it on mute? You could turn the volume back on, since I’m up anyways?”

A funny smile came over his face. “It’s something I picked up from your mom, I guess,” he said. “You know, she used to like to find the stupidest shows on TV, I mean the most truly awful soap operas in the world, and then turn the volume all the way down so she could make up what the characters were saying. God, she loved to do that. I would find her sitting here sometimes, making up dialogue and laughing her head off.”

I froze. Dad was like Sammy, he almost never talked about Mom. Once in a while something would remind him of her and he would tell me some random fact, like the name of her favorite chocolate bar (Milky Way) or her favorite Beatle (George). But that was it.

Then I had a genius idea. Maybe if I did the voices for the char­acters on TV, it would make Dad so happy that he would want to tell me stuff about Mom all the time!

I concentrated hard on the episode of Star Trek playing on the screen. A Klingon guy was talking to a woman while their ship crashed through space, lights flashing like crazy all around them. I put on a woman’s voice: “Excuse me, sir, but your skin is breaking out. Your forehead looks like it’s got a mountain growing out of it! You should really try that new face wash I got you for your birth­day.” Then I switched to the man’s voice: “Um, can we talk about this later? Our ship’s about to crash!” Then I did the woman’s voice again: “Stop trying to change the subject. You’re always so sensi­tive!” Then the ship tilted over and the characters fell down, so I said, “Your turn, Dad!” But when the man’s mouth started moving again, Dad didn’t say anything. I looked over my shoulder and he was just sitting there, staring at me.

His eyes flashed with anger. The muscles in his face were all twisted up for a second, then they went flat again. He turned off the TV and got up. “It’s late,” he said. “Time for me to turn in. Good night.”

As his back disappeared down the dark hall, I caught a whiff of perfume coming off him. That’s when I understood why he’d gotten so mad. If he was still sniffing Mom’s old perfume bottle, sometimes even spritzing it on himself, that meant he still really missed her. It probably hurt him to be reminded of her, just like it hurt Sammy.

“Good night,” I whispered, but I don’t think he heard me. The door to his room was already closed.
 

The next day was hot and quiet. Most Saturdays, me and Sammy played Snakes and Ladders or Monopoly or Scrabble, but today she had her best friend over. Actually, Jenny was her only friend. Even though Sammy was one grade above her, they’d known each other forever because our dad and her dad taught at the same university and our families were friends. When Mom died, Jenny’s parents said they could watch me and Sammy after school every day so that Dad could work late and wouldn’t have to hire a housekeeper. He told them sure, thanks, why not.

Now Sammy was playing with Jenny in her room, and the door was closed, and I didn’t want to knock in case Sammy was still mad at me.

So instead I turned around to face the door to Dad’s study. It was closed, too. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what had hap­pened the night before: how he’d told me something cool about Mom completely out of the blue, and how maybe, if I was lucky, he might do the same today. I went ahead and did something I hadn’t done in ages. I knocked.

“What?” He didn’t like being interrupted when he was working.

I opened the door a few inches and said, “Hi.”

Without taking his eyes off the book in front of him, he said, “Do you need something?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Sick?”

“No.”

“Well then? What is it?”

I didn’t know what to say. Finally, I said, “I’m bored.”

He sighed. Then he put a finger on the page to mark his place and looked up from his book. I couldn’t tell what it was but the let­ters on the cover were in Hebrew. There were a dozen other books stacked up all over the desk, and a million more on the messy shelves behind him. One of them, I knew, even had his name on it: The Unorthodox Kabbalah, by David Meyer. Near his elbow were a slice of toast and a half-finished cup of coffee, but I could tell he’d forgotten all about them. “Where’s your sister?” he asked.

“In her room.”

“What’s she up to?”

“Hanging out with Jenny. Painting or drawing or something.”

“Well, why don’t you ask them to play a game with you?”

“They won’t want to play with me.”

“You don’t know until you ask.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask.”

“Great.” He shot me a smile and looked down at his book. “Would you close the door?”

I closed the door.

In the hall, my eyes landed on a couple of picture frames that had been sitting on the same table for as long as I could remember. One showed Dad the year before Mom died, back when he was still religious and had a beard. He was sitting in his study with a book in his hand and a look on his face like he was itching to get back to it.

The other picture showed Mom around the same time. I picked it up and ran a fingertip over the glass. I traced her smiling eyes and her big, laughing mouth. I wished I could see more of her, but her long-sleeved dress hid every inch of skin, all the way up to her neck. Her hair was tucked away under a plain blue scarf. Still, she glowed.

The last time I saw Dad with a beard was ages ago, when I was five. Dad had bought a new book and he and Mom were having a big fight about it. I was in bed, so they thought I was asleep, but I could hear every word coming through their bedroom door. Then Dad stormed into the bathroom. I tiptoed into the hall and saw him shaving his beard, but he didn’t see me. A few days later Mom came home with her head shaved and a wig to wear over it instead of her usual scarf. I felt sad because one, I used to like playing with her long, shiny hair, and two, after she did that Dad didn’t say a word all day and then the next day it was too late to say anything because Mom got hit by a car and died.

For the millionth time, I wished she were still alive so she could play with me right now, and also so she could get Dad to come out of his study. Ever since she died, he mostly stayed cooped up in there. Somehow I thought if she was around, he would be happier and would want to spend a lot more time hanging out with me and Sammy. But she was gone, and his door was closed, and there wasn’t anything I could do to fix that—at least not right then.

I put down the photo, opened a closet, and took out the Snakes and Ladders board. But instead of knocking on Sammy’s door, I went into the backyard and set up the game on the grass. I rolled the dice and moved my token six spaces forward. I rolled again and landed on a ladder and shot up two rows. I rolled three more times and landed on a snake and dropped all the way down to the bottom again. When I got tired of playing against myself, I lay back and stared at the sky until my eyes started to close. The next thing I knew my ears were full of ringing and somebody was calling my name.

Inside, I followed Sammy’s voice to the front door. She was making small talk with Alex, who was glancing back and forth between her face and his shoes with a half-excited, half-terrified expression. “So, what do you like to do when you’re not at school?” she asked.

He mumbled something that sounded like “Look at the stars.”

“Cool,” she said. “I love looking at the stars.”

“Really?” He beamed. “But actually, I said ‘listen,’ not ‘look.’ ”

“You listen to the stars? How can you listen to stars?”

“They send us messages all the time,” he said seriously. “And I mean, if there’s intelligent life up there, don’t you think it would be trying to communicate with us?”

Sammy stared at him. His cheeks and the tips of his ears glowed bright pink.

“Hello,” I said.

“Oh!” Alex said, glancing at me. “Hi, Lev. Do you want to go play? Um, basketball?”

I blinked at the basketball in his hands. I couldn’t believe he was here, at my house, wanting to play sports. Because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I said, “Where?”

“At my place, I have a hoop in my driveway, remember?” Then I guess he realized that I’d never actually been to his place. “Well, you don’t have to, I just thought you might want to.”

I asked Sammy if it was okay. She shrugged and said she didn’t see why not. Then she turned back to Alex. “What did you mean, the stars are sending us messages all the time?”

“I can show you, if you want. I’ve got all the equipment set up in my room. You can come with us, if you’re not busy?” 

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