How to Get Along with Women (4 page)

Yes! I said. Lock-Up!

At first we played with a stopwatch. We used the rope to tie the doors shut. Did Asher know, I wondered, that Houdini was Hungarian? I flexed my knuckles.

Big whoop, Asher said. I hate to break it to you, but you don't look anything like Houdini. You don't even look Hungarian, if you ask me.

He handed me the watch and went into the storage room. I laced the rope in and out between the hinges and then wrapped it around and around the doors, front to back. I wanted to secure the knots by stretching the rope out and tying it to the TV stand, but Asher protested. I can't reach all the way out there! he said. And what if I lurch the rope and the TV breaks?

I tied three knots and shook the doors with my hand to make sure they were tight together. We counted down from ten. When we got to “one,” I pushed the button on the watch and Asher started trying to get out. My knots weren't all that good but they were on the outside of the doors so he had to reach his arms under and up to get to them. The real trick was figuring out how to hold your body to get maximum arm length under the doors. His first time through took him four minutes and three seconds. Then it was my turn. We counted down and I hit the deck, lying on my back and reaching up with my neck twisted a little and my shoulders right against the bottom of the doors. I made it out in three minutes twenty. We practiced back and forth like that. We found a little chalkboard in a corner of the storage room and used it to keep score. I beat Asher three times out of every four.

I have nimble fingers, I said, wiggling them in his face. He looked like he was losing interest so I let him win the next one, then came back for a final time of two-minutes-and-three.

Asher wiped out the chalkboard with his sleeve.

Hey! I said. I had been hoping to save my best score for the next time; it was pretty rare for me to be better than Asher at something. On our way upstairs I turned to him and suggested a rematch the following Saturday.

Nah, Asher said. We need to play it different next time. Like this, it's too easy.

I said that I hadn't noticed it being all that easy for him, but I was game to try something new.

One of us should be a guard, Asher said.

Like a jail, I said.

Like in a war, he said.

What I knew about war came from my own family. In the end pretty much everyone was on the German shit list. My father's uncle, the owner of a prodigious nose, was once asked to step into a Budapest alleyway and prove his heritage by unzipping his pants. Anyone with a foreskin was basically okay. He was Transylvanian nobility.

The village communists surrounded our house the night the Germans came in, my father said, nodding his head to any nonbelievers in the crowd. They wanted to protect us! My father's family resettled in the mountains over Innsbruck. I'm sure they drove there in a car, but I liked to picture them hiking across a meadow wearing hats with little feathers like the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music. After they were gone, the Germans hung my father's uncle in effigy and put his furniture out in the rain. The village peasants used it in their living rooms if they had the space or in their farmyards if they didn't.

Like Hungary, Latvia was an Eastern Bloc country, but it was worse for two reasons: one, they were Slavs. I wasn't really sure what this meant, but the word sounded to me like the English slaves and so I knew that they had to be lower than Hungarians, who were horse-conquering Mongols. Two, Latvia was part of the USSR, which meant they were really Russians.

What I knew about Russia was that it had snatched Hungary up at the end of the war when Roosevelt was too busy being Stalin's friend to bother pushing him out. I knew what 60 Andrássy was: the four-story building in downtown Budapest where secret police interrogated anti-communists. On our last visit I'd gone shopping with my aunt Judit. We were walking west to the Oktogon metro station when she grabbed at my hand, pulling me along to make me go faster. I landed on both knees on the sidewalk, but my aunt didn't stop pulling. We were right in front of 60 Andrássy. Her father-in-law had spent two months there under interrogation in the 50s. It's a museum now, with a basement full of old torture devices, but in the 80s people were still afraid to walk by. My own great-grandfather had been sent to Siberia during the First World War.

His hands always shook a little, my father said, for the rest of his life. Like this: he held his hand out over the dinner table so that I could watch it tremble.

Okay, Asher said. War.

It was maybe two weeks later. The weather outside was still that kind of late spring rain that really hurts when it hits your face.

We got the saloon door all strung tight and the rope tied hard against the banister to upstairs, to the real house. We stood on the outside of the doorway admiring our handiwork.

If you were trapped in there, Asher said, no way could you get out. You couldn't get out unless someone took pity on you.

Those two ideas—trapped and pity—pushed up against one another in my mind. They were compelling to the imagination. They were caves and bears and jails and jailers all at the same time. Once when I was only three the girl across the street locked me in her garage and hung an old carpet over the door. I screamed and screamed to get out but nobody could hear me. I probably screamed for half an hour before my mother noticed I was missing and ran across the street in her apron and rubber gloves and opened the door.

You can be in Siberia, Asher said. You be a Hungarian villager and I'll be a Russian soldier and the lock-up is Siberia.

We can't do that, I said and Asher said How come? and I said because he really was Russian and I really was Hungarian and where was the fun in that. He rolled his eyes like I was making him play dolls or something when really this promised to be a very exciting game with trapping and escaping and who knew what else.

Fine, he said. He lowered his chin kind of. So you be the Jewish village girl and I'll be an SS and the lock-up can be a camp. The lock-up can be Bergen-Belsen, happy now?

I said, Yes. Now we were getting somewhere. Asher got into character right away and pushed me into the storeroom and tied the rope tight. He twined the ends together and then made a final knot around the leg of an armchair, where I couldn't reach it. He didn't talk to me at all and I liked how fierce he made his mouth look.

I sat on my side of the saloon door and Asher sat out on the naugahyde chair. I could hear the noise of the television from upstairs where his mother was ironing and watching Airwolf. After a while I heard Asher's chair creak upright and he walked over to the door and peered at me through the hinges.

Don't chew the gum! he said.

I can't chew gum! I said. I'm a prisoner!

I really believed this. I was good at playing games. For a moment neither of us said anything. Upstairs, Asher's mother changed the channel to something with singing.

Now what? I said.

How should I know, Brainiac? Asher said. This is your stupid game.

War had been his suggestion. I didn't correct him. He was on his hands and knees on his side of the door, looking at me.

You should try to break out, he said.

What if I break the door?

I threw my hands up in the air like a hopeless person. You have to come in here, I said. You should come in here and order me around, or torture me or something. You have to torture me until I scream for mercy.

Asher shrugged, but he smiled a little, too. Torture as a notion was appealing enough for anyone our age and while he unpicked the knots I thought of all the stories my grandmother had forced on me while I was helping her to pull strudel dough nice and thin over the dining room table. How when the Russians came through they made the women kiss them, or they tied their knees together if they were trying to have babies. There were other stories, too: soldiers who fished around between your legs with a sword. When we'd been in Hungary, my teenaged cousin had made a gesture at me, a thing with his hands and his hips that I didn't understand, although I understood it to be unfriendly. I was lying in my aunt's room with my eyes mostly shut and he must have thought I was sleeping. For some reason that came to mind as well.

You have to tie my legs together, I said. You have to tie my legs and not untie them unless I kiss you. Asher set his jaw like he might say No, but then he didn't actually say anything.

I wanted to keep up the momentum. I had been watching The Thornbirds on television with my mother, at night when my father was out working. All that schmaltz. So I said, You have to make me kiss you like you're the last man on earth.

There was something deeply satisfying about this arrangement for both of us. Not so much the kissing part, although it was hard to resist. I liked feeling connected to an event. Here I was, an actual prisoner of war, about to escape or else not. Asher reeled in the rope from where it was hooked through the door. There was a lot of rope and he wrapped it around my legs about twenty times and then used the end of it to tie my wrists. I hadn't said anything about tying my wrists and I was glad to see him getting into the spirit of the thing. He took off his t-shirt and shoved it in my mouth. That really surprised me.

Pretend you're having a baby, he said.

I tried screaming into the t-shirt the way that women do on TV but something about doing this actually sucks the breath right out of you. It was hard to get any air in through my nose, lying on the floor all tied up and with Asher kneeling next to me. His collarbone stood out under his shoulders and he had tiny pink nipples. He shoved my shoulder.

Come on, Asher said. Do something. Try and escape. Try it, try it, he said and he kept shoving at me. I was choking a little and I couldn't stop him pushing me because I was all tied up. We were both doing what we were supposed to do but the way he was pushing at me was the same way you kill a bug that you're a little afraid of. Where you need to get it into the Kleenex but it might jump on your hand and really scare you. He started yelling, You want me to untie you, you want me to untie you, pig? and I nodded my head and made some sounds into the t-shirt but then he changed it like we planned and said, I'll untie you but you have to kiss me, get it?

I didn't want to kiss him. I just wanted the t-shirt out of my mouth and I started shaking my head. I had tears in my eyes because I couldn't breathe and I could see Asher starting to panic because I wasn't playing along.

You have to say yes! Asher said. You have to say yes or I can't let you go!

I kept shaking my head and crying and Asher pushed his hands on my shoulders and my head banged off the hard ground and he started to cry too. He ripped the shirt out of my mouth.

His mouth was dry and mine was all wet from drooling into the shirt. I coughed against his lip. What the two mouths had in common was not wanting to be there, but we didn't know how else to end the game. If we'd just stopped it would have felt like hitting pause on a tape recorder. No matter what other game we played, the ending to Lock-Up would have hung over our heads like we'd stolen something and had to figure out how to put it back.

It was hard to stop crying. I was sucking at air in big gulps in a gaspy, sorrowful way. Jesus, Jesus, shut up! Asher said, working his fingers over the knot around my hands. My mother's going to hear you! Shut up, shut up!

I coughed a lot while he was untying me. Asher's mother called out: she wanted us to come upstairs and help her fold bedsheets. I turned back for a second on the way up. Asher's t-shirt was all wrinkled and spitty in the middle, where it had been bunched in my mouth, and he was trying to flatten it down against his chest. The whole upstairs was warm from the oven; his mother was baking something. I sat on the couch and folded the pillowcases into squares and stacked up the squares on the coffee table. Asher sat next to me. We didn't look at each other. I was afraid if I looked at his mother I'd start crying again. I didn't want to go back downstairs and I didn't want to go home either.

Asher's mother said, What you playing in the storeroom for? All that dust gonna kill you!

When it was dinner time Asher walked me back to my grandmother's. It was still raining so we had our hoods on. I kicked him once and then he shoved me and I said, Don't. We got in the wrong elevator by mistake. It was Shabbat. One of the elevators was pre-programmed to stop on every floor, so you don't have to press buttons on the sabbath. All the way to the fifteenth floor, the doors lurched open and closed.

Are you okay? Asher said.

I looked at myself in the mirrored walls.

This elevator sucks, I said. Oh no, I pushed a button! God's going to kill me!

It was your stupid game, he said.

When I got inside I went into the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. I didn't know why I was sick.

I make you a cream-of-wheat! my grandmother called through the door.

The floor was cold and I sat there for a while with my hands on the white toilet seat. The whole room smelled like Oil of Olay. When I was little I used to go through the drawers and put on all the creams and draw pictures on my legs with the lipsticks, under my pants. The ends of the lipsticks got blunt and mashy and I hid them under a million tissues in the garbage. Once I stuffed my t-shirt with balled up Kleenex to see what I would look like with breasts; when I tried to flush the tissues, the toilet overflowed and I lied and said I'd used the Kleenex to mop the floor.

Asher was waiting around for me to come out but I wanted just nothing, I wanted him to yell Goodbye! through the door so that I could be alone in the bathroom, maybe forever. I heard him tell my grandmother about the elevator. I think she's sea-sick, he said.

Down near the base of the toilet there were some yellow stains. I could smell the cream-of-wheat boiling in the kitchen. My throat was harsh from crying and then vomiting. My grandmother's icon of Mary sat there on top of it all: her body held open and her red heart all lit up like an eye.