In the Land of the Living (3 page)

“Don’t torture yourself on account of him,” Isidore said.

“The old fart would let me work in a coal mine before he gave me a nickel.” Burt let loose a wild laugh.

“There are a hundred other things you could do,” Isidore said.

“There are a hundred things
you
could do, Izzy.”

“And you.”

Burt seemed not to hear and cursed his father up and down. He picked up the rusted crowbar they’d found on the little hill in back of the house. The snow had melted and there it was one day, the weapon, and they remembered the bad fight—something to do with a hot dog—and they wondered if Ezer would feel bad when he saw it. When Ezer came home Isidore asked him why he had the crowbar in the first place, and for what job, and Ezer said he didn’t remember ever seeing it and that it probably belonged to the Polanskas. Isidore put it outside with the trash, but the garbage men had not taken it away, and there it was again, like an albatross that can’t be gotten rid of. So Burt picked it up and whacked the trash cans in the guts with it until they were badly dented. A couple of terrified squirrels raced up the tree behind the house and a startled dove flapped away off the roof. Somewhere during the tantrum, the buttons popped off Burt’s shirt.

“Ah shit, I shouldn’t have done that,” Burt said, examining the shirt. “Now I gotta sew this up.”

“Don’t do it, Burt,” Isidore said. “He’ll go crazy.”

“I don’t have that many shirts, Izzy. I have one good one left clean, and tomorrow night I got a date.”

“I’ll give you one of mine.”

It was about the middle of April and it must have been a Monday that Burt tore up his shirt because they washed the garbage trucks on Tuesday mornings. Burt collected up the shirt buttons he could find in the dirt beside the garbage cans, and then he entered the house with his shirt hanging open and his big chest exposed. He went into the closet and took the sewing kit down from the shelf. It seemed he made sure to commence work on the damaged shirt in the most public manner possible, disposed on the front of the living room couch, as though he wanted Ezer to find him there.

That April at the end of Isidore’s junior year was a warm one that sweated up the sticky carpet in the lightless upstairs hall, and refreshed the fusty air of the living room with small and faraway sounds of cars on wet pavement and kids at the playground, and refreshed the kitchen air with new air that smelled like it had come even farther, from mountains and meadows somewhere. The fresh air and the strange sight of Burt sewing at his shirt while he was still wearing it cast a pall of instability on the living room, and Isidore went out of it, into the kitchen, and turned on the oven.

The squabbling over the sewing kit had over years imbued it with unnatural significance—like a house where someone famous once lived, or a much-sought-after treasure chest that’s discovered not to have any treasure in it. The kit was a square wicker basket with a lid, painted pink—it had of course belonged to their mother—but over the years the basket had changed complexion from pink to the color of flesh. A long time ago Isidore played with the buttons inside it. How many and how varied in size and color were those buttons, unfastened and heaped on the floor of the kit, under the clear plastic tray full of needles and thread. In a house that was frequently out of toilet paper, it was a marvel to see so much of anything accumulated in one place. Burt and Isidore had once played a game with the buttons where they flicked them across the dining room table at each other. But Ezer, who frequently used the sewing kit in the evenings to mend his socks, did not like this debit on his button ledger. He warned the boys to stay out of the sewing kit, and Isidore did stay out (and made fun of his father behind his back: “Keep away from my buttons! Keep away from my buttons!”). Since it had been their mother’s, however, the boys privately agreed it was theirs now, and the warning to stay away of course caused in Burt more interest in the sewing kit rather than less.

Isidore heard his father’s bicycle chain clanking and the kitchen door opened.

“Burt!” Isidore said, but it was too late.

“Where is Burt?” his father said.

Isidore didn’t answer or raise his eyes from the meat loaf on his plate. His father went down into the living room. Isidore followed him with his dinner half-eaten on the plate.

Ezer did not yell, “Keep away from my buttons!”

He didn’t yell anything. He approached the couch, and stood over Burt, and Burt calmly continued with the hopeless project of fixing his buttonless shirt, which he was still wearing. Still, Ezer did not yell. Burt put the end of the thread into his mouth without looking up at his father and tried again to guide it through the eye of the needle. Ezer took the lid of the sewing kit and held it firm, watching.

“And now we will see,” Ezer said, “if a boy who cannot remember his verses and cannot carry a hot dog from the icebox to the stove can sew even one button.”

“I’m not a boy anymore, Tateh,” Burt said, and reached into the kit. “A pin, a pin,” he said. All the boys had observed their father pinning buttons into place before attaching them with needle and thread. “Let’s see, a pin, a pin,” Burt said, and rummaged through the tray of the kit.

“The pincushion, idiot!” Ezer said, squeezing the lid of the little sewing basket so hard that his knuckles turned white. Burt looked up helplessly.
“There!”
Ezer shouted again, and he snapped the lid down onto Burt’s hand. Burt leaped off the couch and screamed.

“
Ah! Ah!
You stabbed me, you
shtunk!
” Burt hopped off the floor and hopped again, holding out his finger, which had blood on the end of it. He made a fist of his wounded hand, and feinted toward his father, who didn’t move.

“My heart breaks,
zuninkeh,
” Ezer said. “Because you cannot sew a
button!
”

And instead of yelling any more, Burt hung his head—because he thought the things his father said were true; he thought he wasn’t good enough to sew a button.

“Don’t listen to his bullshit!” Isidore shouted, almost letting the meat loaf slide off the plate.

His father began to curse in Yiddish.

“You shut your mouth, you sick old Yid!” Isidore said. “Don’t make me any madder or I don’t know what I’ll do to you, I really don’t! I have had it up to here with your bullshit! You ride Burt and you ride him. Why don’t you ride yourself, you lazy bum? What the fuck did you ever do, you fucking lousy bum?”

“What did I ever do?” his father screamed, and added more Yiddish curses. “I came here. I made you an American. You are here because of me that I fight to be here, where you have such a luxury to complain over a little stick with a pin. What is it that
you
do, that it can’t be done in all the world? You
never
sleep in the cellar, without a roof, with black night and stars cold like knives whining and scraping at the cellar door! My father slept with a table leg so it wouldn’t be a Russian come and take our food and rape my mother and my sisters! You never hear the wind in Jedwabne at the cellar door, a sound it should make you believe in a devil and a
dybbuk!
Except that I, without help from nobody, no brother no father no God, hold tight to reason, not such
bubbe meises,
even in the darkness of Jedwabne, and I give to you this reason! I give to you America! And that is enough! That is a future, I give to you!”

With a cry of primal hatred, Isidore shattered the plate and the meat loaf against the wall.

His father stopped yelling and looked in disbelief.

“This you will clean,” Ezer said, “or you will find another house to sleep tonight.”

“You clean it!” Isidore yelled. “You’re lucky I didn’t put that plate in your fucking ear!”

“Nah, it’s my fault,” Burt said. “I deserved it. Don’t blame Izzy for that, Tateh. I’ll get you a new dish, Tateh. I will.” And he started up the uncarpeted stairs with his buttonless shirt hanging open and his shoulders in a miserable hump.

“Gimme a break!” Isidore shouted after him. “Did that ridiculous speech about the Jedwabne stars and Russian rapists make you feel sorry for him?
Nobody
deserves him!”

Burt went on creaking up the stairs.

“Don’t you care about anybody, you troll?” Isidore said to his father. His ears felt full of blood, but it was just his own heart pouring blood into his skull, a heart that wished to kill. “You think Mama would like what you did? But you, you’d eat your lunch on Mama’s grave, you
black hole.
”

Isidore looked forlornly at his ruined dinner and then collected his schoolbooks and left the house. He went to the pool hall where he sometimes bussed the tables and he opened his books on the green felt of a table in the back. Under its dim light, through which climbed tapes of boa-like smoke, he read about the Gold Standard Act of 1900 and the McKinley assassination. (Emma Goldman claimed innocence, the book said, not because she was sorry he got killed, but because McKinley was “too insignificant” for her to bother murdering.) He read till midnight, when he found himself leaning over the book, half-asleep, and the bartender told him to go.

In his dream, he was juggling balls of yarn in a house with big holes in the roof, and a pair of girls yelled at him from the bottom of some stairs, and he threw the balls of yarn down at them but couldn’t move his arms fast enough to hurl them with any aim or force. He also dreamed of a knife fight where he didn’t have a knife but only a blunt-tipped meat thermometer, and he was about to push the meat thermometer into someone’s chest when the alarm clock rang. It was 4
A.M
. and Burt lay sleeping on his back like a slain warrior with his mouth open and his Adam’s apple poking up unbeautifully. Izzy could hear the loud engine of their ride waiting on Meadowbrook, which looked like a road in a different world at this hour, a road through mist and purple darkness with curbs hard and cold as tombstones. They drove in woozy silence along that road. It led to the unholy terminus of the sanitation department, where a smell of ash and rotting food spoiled the dark air before the heat and light of the sun could begin to chasten it. They banged the trucks to scare off the crows and fired their hoses.

When he’d returned from washing trucks, Isidore washed himself, twice from head to toe, and ironed his shirt on the dining room table and got himself dressed. A warm shirt made him think of his mother, and even if she was mostly an idea now, he still felt sniffly and foolish. He went on anyway sniffling a bit over his cereal and made himself a lunch. He made it with the only food in the house now that the meat loaf was gone, some stale bread from the Invermere bakery and an avocado that was turning black, and he put the sandwich in a bag and took it to school. At lunch they laughed at his black avocado sandwich and passed it around and said, “Oh my God, look at that!” And the sandwich went around the lunch table and Isidore waited for it to come back to him. When the sandwich came back he said, “It’s pretty ugly, huh, this sandwich?” and the kid who had first taken it said, “No, it’s beautiful,” and Isidore raised the sandwich to his lips like he was going to eat it but instead of biting it he flung it into the kid’s face.

Before the next class he went and said hi to everybody he knew in the hallway. As he passed them at their lockers he touched them on the elbow or clapped his arm around their shoulders whether they liked it or not, even if he still smelled like garbage—he didn’t know and he didn’t care. And the guys said hey and the girls smiled; it was mostly a nice group there at Heights High and he was the president of his class, and it made him feel better about the black avocado and the broken plate.

He walked home with a girl named Ellie who lived on Chelton Road. The week before at Bonsdorf’s ice cream shop, he’d bought Ellie a root beer float, with Mr. Bonsdorf watching them benignly from behind the glass.

“He doesn’t realize we’re Jews,” Isidore said.

He liked her because she’d said it wasn’t stupid at all that he was going to apply to Harvard even though he had no money. He’d said he was hoping to go to Miami of Ohio and that it looked so beautiful in the brochure, just like what college was supposed to be, a million miles away from the Old Country of his father, and she’d said she was applying there too, and they said they’d get another ice cream together when they were down in Oxford, since they wouldn’t know anybody.

Isidore purposely avoided his own street, Meadowbrook, on the way home, but by some cosmicomic misfortune, they ran across Ezer anyway, pedaling up Tullamore Road on his green bicycle with knees rising and falling slowly, rising and falling, rising and falling, rising and falling, the heavy canvas bag balanced on his back and the toolbox strapped to his bike with the three-pronged canvas strap.

Ezer squeezed the brake handles several times, and the old bike jerked, shuddered, and groaned to a stop. Ezer steadied the rickety machine and pulled his sweaty shirt from inside the waist of his pants as though he were proud of it. “You will come home now, please, and do the wash,” he said. “And you will eat on a newspaper like a dog.”

“You know this guy?” Isidore said.

“No,” Ellie said.

“There is no plate for you,” Ezer said.

“Never mind him. He’s the Crazy Old Man of Meadowbrook Boulevard. Goes around sticking his fingers in kids’ ears.” Isidore wanted to lift up the manhole cover in the street and climb in.

Ezer jerked his head toward Ellie and said,
“Aroisgevorfene gelt.”
A waste of money.

Isidore was so tired his eyes burned, and his fingers were sore from wrestling the high-pressure hoses to keep them trained on the garbage trucks; his biceps ached, and he was so hungry and faint because he’d thrown his sandwich away that the ground seemed to be slowly rising like leavening dough.

When he came back to the sunny drive of the house on Meadowbrook, his father was standing outside the house on the steaming asphalt with a hose, watering the grass with a limp stream. The sweat itched on Isidore’s neck and chafed between his legs, and the air smelled of hose water and dead grass uncovered by melted snow. Isidore figured he’d see if Dennis was home yet and maybe cash his paycheck and buy them dinner somewhere. But once he was on the drive, which was bleeding silver rivers from the coreopsis bush in front of the spigot, the words
aroisgevorfene gelt,
a waste of money, pulsed in his ears and he walked up to his father without saying anything and shoved him so hard that he tumbled onto the wet lawn and his glasses came flying off and landed in the grass. His father sat up and looked down slowly at the wet blades of grass stuck to his elbow and then looked slowly up at Isidore and then slowly back at his elbow.