Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (3 page)

Kenny’s birthday was in February. He was fifteen too, finally. I didn’t know what to get him. He only liked two things, and there was no sense trying to find a better pot connection than the one he already had, so I went to the record store. He had nearly a hundred tapes by this point,
but a lot of them were incomplete or fuzzy recordings, and he—a late-comer but a purist—owned almost nothing on CD. There wasn’t a lot of Phish to choose from, except for one double live album I knew he already had, but there was a ton of Grateful Dead stuff. Studio albums, “official bootlegs,” best-of comps. Then I saw it: 2/11/69 at the Fillmore East in New York City. They’d been opening for Janis at the time, and this package had two discs marked
EARLY SHOW
and
LATE SHOW
. The eleventh was his birthday. I wasn’t sure if he would already have the show on bootleg, but if nothing else it’d be a sound quality upgrade from the tape version. I bought it, took it home, thought about wrapping it, didn’t, switched it from the clear plastic bag it had come in to a brown paper one, pulled it back out of the brown bag, dug around in the kitchen junk drawer, found a Sharpie. I pulled the shrink wrap off so I could write directly on the case.
Fifteen years later & there you were,
I wrote, and put the thing back in the brown bag.

On the day itself, Mrs. Beckstein picked him up from school an hour early to go take the test for his restricted license. I waited at the house with Angela. We were on the living room couch, side by side, staring at the TV, unaccustomed to afternoon sobriety. She was flipping channels, paused briefly on MTV, a video for some angry song the old her would have cherished. “Stupid,” she said, to herself I was pretty sure, then went back to flipping—CSPAN, Jesus station, Spanish Jesus station, Home Shopping.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Huh?” she said.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“No, I mean what’s the question?”

“Well, you’ve like, changed.”

“That’s not a question.”

“Yeah, I guess not.”

“I don’t really know how to explain it,” she said. “It feels a lot like traveling. Movement. Some urge like birds get.”

“Whales. They go far, right?”

“I don’t know, maybe, yeah. I like birds better. I want a tattoo of a bird. Something that flies over the ocean.”

“Don’t get a seagull,” I said. “They’re scavengers. They smell.”

“Something else then.”

Her lips were dry and not as soft as I’d imagined. She exhaled through her nose, a tickle skittering across my face. “Don’t do that again,” she said. “They’ll be back any minute.” And they were.

Kenny had passed the test. He had his learner’s permit. I congratulated him, then gave him his CD. “Hey cool,” he said. “Let’s go throw it on.” I knew the songs now, some by their opening riffs and others not until I heard the lyrics, but I got there, usually. Kenny told me the names of the ones I’d never heard.

I was in the cafeteria, sitting by myself because lunchtime was when Kenny did most of his dealing. It was the end of March. I had forgotten my lunch that morning, and was eye
ing the line, trying to decide if it was worth getting involved in. Dawn plopped herself down next to me. She smelled like sour sweat and old smoke. She tented her meaty fingers. “We’re losing her,” she said.

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“The fact that you didn’t ask ‘who’s her’ just proves how right I am.”

“So Angela Beckstein’s too cool for us lately. What do you want from me?”

“I have a ritual—”

“Oh Christ, here we go—”

“But I can’t do it by myself.”

“Aren’t you a little old for playing pretend?”

“It’ll bring her back to us.”

But what was there, really, to bring Angela back from? She was a person who had made a decision, a change, probably for the positive—at least if measured by any standard other than our warped own. I’m sure her parents, for example, were sleeping better than they had in years.

Here’s what Dawn couldn’t stand: Angela was dating Zak Sargent, who had grown into exactly the kind of cartoon character his name suggested. He’d become what we’d all always known he would. And Zak was a whole package. New friends, a suite of attitudes and hangout spots—the new life Angela had told me she was looking for. She was out over the ocean now.

I hated Zak Sargent, too. I hated what he represented,
and I hated him for everything he’d ever done to Kenny, so much of which I’d witnessed or turned my face away from, and of course because now he had Angela. Zak Sargent would spend most of his life having and doing and getting whatever he wanted. I knew that. It was a great sick truth. Zak Sargent had led the pogroms of childhood, and since me and Kenny were best friends again, I lived every day with the knowledge that I would have joined those raiding parties if they’d only been willing to include me. But they hadn’t, and with nothing on which to base a claim for some portion of guilt, how could I ever hope to be forgiven?

She got to my house at ten till midnight. I met her in the side yard and led her around back. She was wearing black jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt with silver buttons. It was tight on her. She had a small blue backpack slung over her shoulder.

“So where did you learn about this spell?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m past learning other people’s spells,” she said. “This is my own thing.”

The moon was three-quarters full. We walked past the picnic table and out of the bright perimeter established by the outside security lights. We stood near the back fence, in a pool of shadow cast by our lone oak. Bugs buzzed and whizzed. She started taking things out of the bag: a coffee mug with the cast of
The Muppet Show
on it, a pair of black fishnet stockings, a votive candle in a little glass, a fillet knife, a can of shaving cream. The fillet knife had a wooden handle
on which she’d drawn upside-down crosses and devil stars.

She pointed to the knife and mug. “These are our chalice and blade.”

“What about the stockings?”

“Our personal item. They’re a locus of essence. It’s how we target the spell.”

“You mean they’re Angela’s?”

“Yeah, obviously. What would a pair of my stockings do?”

“Where did you get them?”

“She left them over at my house one time.”

“And you never gave them back?”

“Does any of this matter?”

“You’re just sick is all.”

“Eat a dick, Brad.”

She drew a circle of power in the grass with the shaving cream.

“This way when we’re done you can clean it up,” she said. “It was this or spray paint, but we needed something.”

“Good choice,” I said. I had no idea how to be nice to her.

She knelt down in the circle, chanted a while in Latin, then motioned for me to join her. I knelt, too. We were facing each other, close enough to touch but not touching. She took a book of matches from her pocket and chanted—a rushed low garble with lots of edges—while she lit the votive. A fake ripe blueberry smell.

“We’re lucky there’s not much wind tonight,” she said, then checked her watch. “Three minutes till. It’s time.”
She unbuttoned her cuffs, rolled them up to her elbows, then instructed me to tie Angela’s stockings around her wrists. I tied her up loosely, one leg to each wrist, so the empty waist swung low between her arms and brushed the grass. She had full freedom of movement, and took the mug-chalice from my hands. “Pick up the knife,” she said. I did. “Okay,” she said, and unbuttoned the top three buttons of her shirt. She pulled the fabric back, and drew a short horizontal line with her finger across the flat space below her clavicles but above the tops of her breasts. “Not too deep,” she said, “but not too shallow either. I only want to have to do this once.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Nothing’s free in this world, Brad,” she said, “or in the other. You pay for what you take.”

We were in love with the same girl and neither of us was ever going to have her. I had come to terms with this. But here was Dawn, fat horrible Dawn, alive with her yearning, ready to face down the very universe on behalf of her unanswerable desire.

“I want to be the one,” I said.

“No, this part isn’t for you. It’s mine.”

“I’m not cutting you,” I said. I reached for her wrists. She pulled back but I grabbed the stockings by their crotch.
Angela,
I thought, and tugged so Dawn pitched forward, her face close enough to mine for kissing. I needed that scar for myself. “Do it to me or it doesn’t happen. It’s less than a minute to midnight. You’re out of time.”

I pulled my tee shirt off and tossed it outside the power circle.

She took the knife back and proffered the coffee mug, which I took by the handle. “No,” she said, “hold the bottom, with both hands, like you would with any other chalice.”

“Right,” I said. “Any other chalice. Got it.” She untied the stockings from her wrists and bound mine with them. Her movements were brusque and furious. She bound me tighter than I had her.

“Keep the chalice upright, keep the wound over the chalice, and try to catch more blood than you spill. I should have known you would ruin this for me.”

I closed my eyes, thinking that there would be more chanting first, but it turned out that the time for talk had truly passed. There was nothing but the smell of grass, night’s incidental music of bugs and dogs and distant cars, and Dawn’s breathing, which I realized I suddenly no longer heard. She was holding her breath, we both were, and a knife doesn’t make any noise at all, gliding over—through—your skin. Not even a
whish
. The sensation was of something slick and delicate, powerful yet deft, an ice skater perhaps. A swimmer. Then my vision seemed to prism, and the world became pain. I cried out—no, that wasn’t my voice, it was Dawn’s—and my eyes flew open and we saw each other and past her I could see lights coming on in my house. She had flinched, or if she hadn’t I had, and the cut was too high up, life was pouring out of me in drafts, and no sound escaped my lips but one like air leaking out of a bike tire. I still had
both hands on the chalice. I raised it up to my neck, and could feel it gaining weight in my hands. It was filling—quickly. I let it drop, heard it
thunk
in the grass.

I tasted blood, felt it boil out of my mouth, up over my lip, and down my chin. Dawn tried to stand, her legs buckled, then she got hold of herself and half-stumbled out of the power circle. Running would make things worse for her. They’d find her and there would be so many questions with no right answers. I knew a feeling of bright lift, even as my body sank to the ground. I was a balloon within myself, tethered by a skinny, frayed cord. Ear to the earth, I could hear feet thundering closer—my parents, no doubt—and realized that the witch had been right about everything, and I was glad to have helped her, though we had screwed the thing up so badly. Come to think of it, however, I didn’t know enough about this stuff to declare our failure with any certainty. And if we
had
succeeded? What would there be for Angela to come back to? I hated to think we might have made things worse for her—we loved her, after all—and I concentrated my attention away from what was happening—it wasn’t hard—I was only being shaken, and Mom was screaming—to puzzle out the question, but someone far away was slipping the soft bonds from my wrists and this action unstrung the tether as well. In the midst of absolving brightness I saw the beautiful answer and it was Kenny. The brother and sister would always have each other.

My little brother Rusty was on the back porch, lighting up.

“Hey,” he said.

“Rusty,” I said. “The smoking.”

“This is what Mom and Dad made you come home for? To try some weird bonding shit against my smoking?”

“They didn’t
make
me come home. It was a choice. I wanted to come.”

“Ran out of money, you mean.”

“What’s with the smoking?”

“Do you know how many Jews there are at my high school?” Rusty said.

What happened is the family moved because my father lost a job and my mother got one. They left Miami, where
we had always lived, and came to this suburb of Nashville. I think they picked it because it had the good school system for my brother, who hates his full name, Russell, and so goes by Russ in all circles except the family, where he has always been and will always be Rusty. Everyone agrees the move was hardest on him—especially him. Me, I say what’s one suburb to another? We didn’t actually live
in
Miami. Not like South Beach, Calle Ocho, and everything. We lived in a middle-class suburb called North Miami Beach, in the shadow of a wealthier suburb called Aventura, with the real city somewhere maybe half an hour south. These places were all part of the “greater Miami area,” which was understood to be among the biggest Jewish communities in the country. Fourth biggest, people always said, though I don’t know where they came by that number or who was in the top three. I was ten years old before I made a non-Jewish friend. (Her name was Marie Hahna and I fell right in love.)

“How many Jews are there at your high school?” I asked my brother.

“Eleven,” he said. “And three of them are done after this year.”

“Wow.”

“You know what I heard one kid say to another?”

“What?”

“Three down, eight to go.” Rusty smiled, a pleasureless near-grimace. He drew smoke and then blew it out slowly. It hung close about him like a morning mist.

“Oh come on, they didn’t.”

“Did.”

“And this is a reason to smoke?”

Rusty’s more right than he knows, about why I’m home. Or maybe he knows exactly how right he is and I’m the one who doesn’t know.

When I called to ask for a little helping hand my father wouldn’t even get on the phone, though I could hear him in the background. Boy, could I ever. Shouting and shouting. My mother, though no less disapproving, fostered a sort of muted respect for the time I had spent—in her words—
finding myself
.

She sent the money. Here I am.

In Miami, where everyone was a Jew, you didn’t think about it. It didn’t matter. It was assumed. You put in your time: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. Drone along with the congregation, slur the memorized phonetic Hebrew. Hello, Mrs. Nussbaum—
mazel tov
about your daughter. Forget black hats, wigs, holes in the sheet. We were Hannukah-and-lox Jews, not the Kashrut-and-Shabbos kind. But now we lived in a city with a mere four thousand Jews and a paltry three synagogues (my mother’s figures). So my parents were finding
themselves,
making cultural overtures, like enrolling my brother in Youth Group and buying the
Schindler’s List
deluxe box with the director’s cut and survivor interviews.

Through some program at their new synagogue they had donated a small but not miserly sum to aid Jewish “settlers” in Israel, a designation I took strong issue with. Soon enough my father and I were standing on opposite sides of the kitchen table, on the edge of a blowout over Palestine.

“That bastard,” my father said. “The one you read. That Chomsky, that—Jew-hating bastard!”

“Chomsky’s Jewish,” I said.

“A self-hating Jew, maybe,” he said. “Like you.”

“Hey,” I said. “I don’t hate myself, or the Jews. Now, what the Israeli government does on the other hand…I don’t see how hating that or them has anything to do with Elijah, the fifth commandment, or us.”

“Have you read the Dershowitz editorial I forwarded you? It explains everything. Everything.”

The kitchen window looked out on the deck and there was Rusty, his back to the house, smoking. His friend Dara was there, too, facing us, maybe even watching us through the window? I wondered if she could she hear the fight. Dara was the prized only child of someone important at the synagogue. Her roots went back to its founding in 1843. My parents viewed the friendship as a profitable one. I wondered if she thought I was winning the argument.

“Dershowitz,” I said. “Now there’s a right-wing SOB I want to listen to. He’s pro-
torture,
for the love of—”

“He’s Jewish, at least,” said my father. “You should hear the voice of your own people sometime. Might wake you up.”

“CHOMSKY IS JEWISH!” I said. “Remember ‘self-hating’?”

“Stop this,” my mother said. We paused. “You two are here all day while your brother is at school and I’m working, and my parents are coming in at one o’clock on Wednesday.”

We greeted this information with silence, my father especially.

“Therefore,” she continued, “one of you will have to pick them up. Or you can both go. To be honest, I don’t care. Just get them here.”

My father was increasingly home-bound, so much so it made us uncomfortable, which is not to say that he didn’t keep busy. He wrote letters to the editors—all of them—about Israel and Palestine. He cleaned the house.

Actually, the cleaning had become sort of worrisome, too. It was so thorough, almost as if he were trying to say that if he could no longer work in an office then by God he would keep such a spotless and ordered home that the family would come to see how his lost job had been a good fortune in disguise.

If you ask me, the worst part for Dad about my brother smoking was not the ruination of his young body or the ongoing disrespect of his doing it, but the white flecks of ash that clung to Rusty’s clothes. That, and having to constantly change the air fresheners. There was a plug-in plugged in to every spare outlet in our house. He had even unplugged some lamps.

Like Jews raising swine on elevated platforms in the Holy Land, Rusty obeyed the letter of his father’s law. He never smoked in the house. But Dad was convinced that the smell clung to his clothes, that he left bits of odor and ash everywhere he sat, soiling the couch fabric, the cushions on the kitchen chairs, everything. He may even have been right, in fact he probably was, but that wasn’t the issue anymore. The house stank, not with cigarette smoke but with synthetic bouquets of every variety. It was potpourri without end, amen, and we all lived in its invisible, cloying crush.

My father decided he would cook a genuine Jewish brisket for the in-laws’ first Tennessee meal. They were coming up from West Palm Beach and he thought the brisket would make for the perfect pastiche of Jewish and Southern tradition, to the extent that either could be embodied in a slab of beef.

Between that and cleaning the house, his day was full. So there I was, cruising down I-65 at the wheel of the family Volvo.

I was like a kid again, all nerves, afraid even to change the radio station until I was off the highway and stopped at a light. I hit a preset and the country music was swapped out for some guy who must have written his senior college thesis on Green Day, croon-yelling about a girl who had done everything wrong, and how broken up and drunk he was because of it.
It’s no wonder Rusty’s miserable. This mopey stuff just crushes your soul and—

I realized that my opinion of the latest rock music was
sounding suspiciously like my father’s old attacks on what I’d listened to at Rusty’s age. This creeped me out. But I was getting off track. The goal was to bond with my brother, not critique his taste. If I could remember how the chorus went I could bring the song up later in a conversation. Maybe that would be a cool thing we could talk about. I started to sing along, willing the words to stick.

As the song faded out I registered a chorus of car horns. The light had changed and I had missed it. I hit the gas too hard and almost plowed into the guy in front of me. But didn’t. I was getting the hang of things all over again.

At the next light I chanced a look into the glove box and sure enough there was a stray cigarette buried under the registration. Do I know my brother or what? I punched in the car lighter, one eye on the traffic light, killed the AC, and lowered the windows. The smells of cut grass and motor oil poured in, along with a lot more sunlight than I had counted on. You sit behind tinted windows for a while and you forget what the day is. I scanned the horizon. It was luscious country, all rises and slopes and green, with a few half-finished planned communities and strip malls, but still. It was mild, as blight goes—enough to make you worry for the future, but somehow not enough to wreck such a sweet summer day. I gawked at every horse in every pasture. The lighter popped back out and I touched it to the cigarette, thinking maybe this was the way into Rusty’s head. I took a drag, started coughing. My eyes watered. The light changed. The horns started in again.

“Oh my, that smell,” my grandmother said, pulling away from my hug. “What have you been doing—smoking?”

How do you explain this kind of thing to a grandma?

“You know, during the war,” my grandfather said, “I was quite the smoker. Of course we didn’t know then what we know now. Modern medicine and so forth.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said, “tell Rusty. He’s the one who needs to know.”

“It’s so
green
out here,” my grandmother said. We were cruising. “And the hills are just—”

“I know,” I said. “Don’t you love it?”

“Prime real estate,” my grandfather said knowingly. Before retirement he had headed some firm. Their golden years were shaping up just right.

“So how is everything?” my grandmother asked. “It’s been so long.”

“It’s been okay,” I said. “But you’re pretty up to date. I mean, you talk to Mom twice a week, and I’m assuming you read my letters.”

“I read them,” my grandfather said. “She won’t go near a computer. ‘That machine,’ she calls it. Like it’s dirty! But I read her your letters.”

“Sometimes he reads me your letters,” my grandmother said. “But I won’t go near that machine.”

Sooner or later they would offer to buy me a suit. For job interviews. They would not ask me about my time away.
They were good people, good grandparents, but had their prerogative for sure.

Maybe you think my father didn’t want to pick up his in-laws because he didn’t like them. Oh they had their differences, sure. Jewish mothers, in-laws, all the clichés you can imagine just roiling together, lolling to the surface like matzo balls in soup. But I think it’s that having my mother’s parents around drives home how he doesn’t talk to his own father anymore. I don’t know what they fell out about, but they don’t speak. My other grandpa is eighty-something. When I think of it, I call him. He sounds far away and confused, down in Florida near Dad’s sister and the place we left. Grandpa and Dad didn’t even say good-bye.

Rusty was upstairs, in his room. I let myself in. “They’re here,” I said.

“Don’t ever come in here without knocking,” he said.

“Did you ever even ask any of your friends if you could stay with them?” I said. “You didn’t, did you? The Weissbergs have got the room. They’d have taken you. We’ve known them how long?”

“What would have been the point of asking?” he said. “Dad kept going on about breaking up the family. ‘What with your brother off and gone already,’ he kept saying. If I had asked the Weissbergs it would have been worse. Because they would have said okay and Dad would have wanted to say okay, but he wouldn’t have been able to, or he’d have said
okay and then had to take it back. Either way it’d have killed him.”

“How can you know that?” I said.

“How can you not know that?” he said.

And he was right, was the thing. My little brother, Rusty, with his restricted driver’s license and his smoker’s cough, had it pegged. It would have gone just like that—him screaming “I’ll never” with all the teen angst he could muster, which was plenty. And he would have lost. Our father could be the most stubborn and solipsistic of God’s creatures, even if it left him lonely as a goat. The isolation was a kind of fuel, I think. And though the two of them were in that regard nearly identical, in the end it wouldn’t have been a battle of wills. It had been a question not of wanting but of suffering, and the still-deeper truth of the matter was that it had not been a question at all. And so now, maybe, Rusty was going to smoke himself to death just to spite them.

Dara dropped by. My mother introduced her parents. My grandmother invited her to stay for dinner. My father groaned. My mother turned and gave him a look.

“What?” she said. “There’s plenty.”

It wasn’t that he had anything against Dara. To the contrary, he thought she was a very good influence—I’d heard him say so in just those words (not like Rusty’s layabout bum of a big brother, seemed to be the implication). It was the presumption he objected to, his in-laws inviting somebody to dinner in
his
house!

Dara, smart girl, went off to find Rusty, who was out on the back deck again.

“It’s good that Rusty has such a nice little friend,” my grandmother said to me.

“His little friend is not so little,” my grandfather said. I couldn’t help but laugh. It was true. Dara was seventeen, a looker even though she dressed down. Or maybe that was just when she came over to our house. I tried to imagine what she’d look like primed for a night on the town. The kids, I had been told, made a popular hangout of the Sonic Burger down Hillsborough Road, where they’d all meet up after the school football games.

Okay, so maybe
some
things were different from Miami.

“Does Rusty date that girl?” my grandmother asked.

“No,” my mother said. “Or—well I don’t know exactly, but don’t bring it up with him, okay?”

“If Rusty doesn’t date that nice girl,” my grandmother said, turning to me, “then you should ask her on a date.”