Since You Left Me (3 page)

I pull it out. I’ve got a tiny one the same color as my hair so you barely notice it.

“Where’s your mother?” the dean says.

I look across the table of professors, all of them staring back at me. Professor Hirschberg glares at me below a severe unibrow. The dean sighs.

“We’ve talked about this numerous times,” he says. “The Family Contract …”

I think about all the times I’ve made excuses for Mom, all the embarrassment I’ve suffered.

I’m ready to take the hit again. I always take the hit.

I’m about to apologize on Mom’s behalf, when I’m overcome with anger. No more hits. No more embarrassment.

I don’t tell the teachers that my mother forgot or that she’s stuck in another appointment.

Instead I say, “There’s been a terrible accident.”

The entire room gasps. Professor Schwartzburg, my English teacher, clutches his chest. He’s been doing that a lot lately. In fact, there’s a betting pool on the next professor to have a heart attack, and Schwartzburg is in the lead.

I say, “I don’t have all the details yet. I’m waiting to get an update from the hospital.”

I don’t know why I’m saying any of this, but I’m not exactly in my right mind. When I think about it later, I realize I should not have used the word
terrible
to describe the accident. It’s hard to recover from
terrible
. If you say
accident
and you want to backtrack later and claim it was a fender bender, you’re okay. But it’s very hard to get from
terrible
back to
minor
.

But I tell the professors Mom was in a terrible accident, and after the initial shock and several
oy vey
s, Professor Feldshuh leaps up and takes matters into his own hands.

“I’ll give you a ride to the hospital!” he says.

I say, “No thank you, sir. I have a ride.”

All the professors are on their feet then, reaching for me, patting my shoulder, offering their support, and asking if there’s anything they can do.

“I have to go,” I say. “Right now.”

“I’ll pray for you,” Professor Skurnick says.

She puts a hand on her chest and pats herself. I make a quick note to check her rank in the heart attack pool.

Then I rush out of the room.

The Israeli office lady jumps out of my way.

I run back through the gymnasium. There are startled reactions all around me. Maybe they think something awful happened in my conference, like I’m being suspended or expelled.

I can’t worry about it right now.

I keep my head down and rush out the door, inadvertently slamming it behind me.

Professor Schwartzburg says you should never end a sentence with an exclamation point. He calls it overkill.

But in life, ending with an exclamation point feels good.

I just never knew it before.

I hate my mother
.

This is not a very Jewish thought to be having. Some might say it’s a sin. After all, the commandment tells us,
Honor your mother and your father
. As Herschel says, “They’re called the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Suggestions.”

Honor. Maybe that was easier to do three thousand years ago.

It’s not easy now. Not with my family.

I’m sitting in the dark in our kitchen waiting for Mom to come home. I’m supposed to be honoring her, but I hate her. I make a list in my head: Top Reasons I Hate My Mother. When I get to number twenty, I stop. The list is supposed to make me feel better, but the more things I add, the angrier I get.

I say out loud, “I don’t care if my mother never comes home. I don’t care if she was in a car accident for real. I don’t care if she’s gone forever.”

Who am I talking to?

Not
HaShem
. You’re not supposed to say bad things about people to God.

You don’t wish your enemies dead, much less your own mother. Jews are craftier than that when it comes to their prayers. Jews wish their enemies
well
. For example, in Yiddish you say,
gey gezunt
, which means something like “Go in good health.” You might say that to a friend or family member you love. But you can use the same phrase for someone you hate. If you say
gey gezunt
to someone you hate, it’s like telling them to go to hell.

Maybe
HaShem
will appreciate that I’m speaking directly rather than cloaking my real thoughts in euphemisms. Maybe I’ll get some credit for honesty.

But probably not.

Probably he’s going to be pissed, and he’s brewing up a special tragedy for me.

That’s if I believed in God in the first place. If God doesn’t exist, what does it matter what you say? You could say anything, do anything. And the 613 Jewish mitzvahs, the rules that every devout Jew is supposed to follow and around which we organize our lives? They might be just a waste of time.

That thought makes me all the more depressed.

I don’t know what’s worse, a God who punishes you for doing the wrong thing, or a God who doesn’t care at all.

I pace back and forth in the kitchen. The clock says
9:30 p.m. It’s not unusual for Mom to be out so late and have her phone off. She teaches night classes sometimes or has meetings at the Center. We come home to some form of vegetarian stew in the refrigerator or a twenty-dollar bill on a plate on the table, partially covered by a napkin with a heart drawn on it. Mom’s not totally irresponsible. More like totally self-involved.

But for her to outright miss my conference with all that’s been going on at school?

That’s unusual.

Sweet Caroline wants nothing to do with any of this. She’s already in bed reading or doing homework, completely unperturbed by the fact that my life is falling apart. This is one of those times you want to present a united front as siblings. We could form a familial picket line, demand Mom be home at certain times, demand that she attend our events. Force her to stop cooking the stews. We could make this our last stand.

But Sweet Caroline and I haven’t stood together in a long time. I can’t even remember the last time we did anything together, just the two of us.

My phone buzzes.

It’s my eighteenth call since leaving school. None of them have been from Mom.

Six of the messages have been from Herschel’s number. Another four from the main line at school. The rest of them from numbers I don’t know. I listened to one, and it was a worried Professor Schwartzburg calling
from his cell phone. Teachers
never
call students from their own phones.

Which means my lie really had an impact. The phone vibrates and call number eighteen goes to voice mail.

On one level it’s nice to know people care. On another level, I’m not sure anybody cares. They’re doing a mitzvah, a good deed. In the face of tragedy, Jews snap into action. Someone is injured in a car accident, someone is sick, someone dies—we’re there with phone calls, kind words, and noodle kugel.

Jews love tragedy. It’s in our DNA.

It’s the day-to-day stuff that proves more challenging.

Just then I hear Mom’s key in the front door.

She walks in humming one of the meditation pieces she listens to constantly. I don’t know the name of it. It’s less a song than a chant that endlessly repeats itself until you either surrender to it or go insane.

Mom comes into the kitchen without noticing me. In one arm she has the Trader Joe’s tote bag with her yoga mat tied to its side, and in the other she has a big bag of fluff-and-fold from the dry cleaners. Mom lets the wash stack up until she gets overwhelmed, then she has no choice but to spend money to have someone else do it. At least it gets done.

Mom drops the laundry on the floor, hums her way over to the refrigerator, and grabs a miniature carton of
organic apple juice. She tears open the plastic on the straw with her teeth and pops it into the box of juice—

“Mom.”

“Oh!” she shouts, and jumps back. The box falls and shoots a splatter of droplets onto the floor.

“You scared me, Sanskrit,” she said.

She takes three deep breaths, centering herself like she always does. Then she grabs a wet rag to clean the spill. No paper towels in our house. They’re bad for the environment.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” Mom says. “It’s not good for your eyes.”

“I’m waiting for you.”

Mom scrunches her eyebrows. “Waiting for me to what?”

“Close the refrigerator door,” I say.

She swings the door shut. Then she shrugs.

“Look on the door,” I say.

“What am I looking at? Do we need miso?”

I flip on the kitchen light. I walk over and put my finger on the reminder card. Then I point to the Family Education Contract, stuck to the door with a karma boomerang magnet.

“Oh my gosh, is it Wednesday?” Mom says.

I nod.

“Sweetie, did I miss it?”

“You missed it.”

“I’m so sorry. I’m out of my mind with this juice fast. Honestly, I don’t know who I am right now. I’m running from classes to the bathroom and back. I’d give anything for a nice solid number two.”

“Maybe food would help.”

“Tomorrow,” she says, her face lighting up. “My eleven days is up. I can’t wait to chew something!”

Mom reaches down to clean up the spill. She doesn’t bend over like a normal person. She drops into a squat, her butt practically hitting the floor.

“How did the school thing go?” she says to me. She slurps hard from the juice pack.

“Not well,” I say. “It’s difficult to have a parent-professor conference without a parent.”

“Did you take notes?”

“You don’t get it, Mom. It didn’t happen.”

“Why couldn’t you do it and give me a report like you always do? Fill me in, honey. You’re good at that.”

“They don’t tell me how I’m doing. They need a responsible adult for that.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” She takes out her phone and looks at it. “Oops. My phone was off. I didn’t even realize it.”

She turns it on.

“Mom, this is really serious. They’re going to throw us out of school.”

“Why would they do that? With the amount of money we pay?”

“You don’t pay anything.”

“You know what I mean,” Mom says.

There’s no way Mom could afford my school. Tuition this year was nearly thirty thousand dollars. Without Zadie Zuckerman’s money, I’d be a public school kid, and Mom would be panicked about paying for college in two years. Mom hated Zadie Zuckerman and she refuses to admit his money is still running our life. It’s not just my education money either. If Zadie hadn’t bought this house when my parents got married, we’d be living in an apartment in some crappy suburb instead of the posh slums of Brentwood.

And if Zadie hadn’t survived the Holocaust, none of us would be here in the first place.

Not quite true. Mom would be here, but the rest of us wouldn’t.

“I think you can relax about all of this,” Mom says. “They don’t throw students out of private school.”

“We signed a contract, Mom.”

Mom’s phone powers up and buzzes several times.

“How many calls …?” Mom starts to say, and then looks at me. “You called me twenty-five times?”

I’m thinking I called Mom about five times. That means there are twenty or so calls from school. A couple dozen messages asking about her accident.

It’s time to tell her what happened before I get in real trouble.

I’ll tell her the truth and we can figure out how to
deal with the situation together. That’s what parents and children are supposed to do. Problem solve. Talk it out.

“I only called you a few times,” I tell Mom.

“Then who are all these people?” she says.

She holds the phone towards me like I’m going to decode it for her. Then she looks at it again.

She squints, trying to decide which message to listen to first.

I have to tell her now. It’s always better to hear bad news from the source rather than second-hand. I know from experience. I learned about my parents’ divorce when the process server handed Mom papers at the house one afternoon after I’d gotten home from school.

Mom starts to press her phone—

“Mom, when you didn’t show up at school, I might have said something I shouldn’t have—”

Mom tosses her phone on the table.

“I can’t deal with this right now,” she says.

It vibrates against the wood, another call coming in.

“It’s too much. I need my music,” Mom says, and heads for the living room.

I brace for an onslaught of yogic chanting. Mom puts it on every time she gets overwhelmed.

Her phone buzzes away on the table.

I turn it off.

I go into the living room. Mom is lying on a yoga mat on the floor, the chanting playing in the background.

Mom can practice yoga in the living room because we barely have any furniture. I have a bed, so I’m not exactly neglected, but if you want to relax in our house and you’re not sleeping, you have to sit on a pillow on the floor. I’d kill for a soft chair. Cool leather that warms up when you sit in it for a while. If I told Mom I wanted a leather armchair, she’d accuse me of animal murder. But I figure you can make a leather chair out of a deceased cow. You don’t have to kill it and steal its skin like Mom says. You just let it die peacefully and quietly, then you use it as a resource. Would the Great Spirit be angry about that?

Great Spirit
. That’s Mom’s phrase.

Mom opens her eyes, her meditation ended.

“I’m back,” she says. “Back and better than ever. Now, what did you want to tell me?”

“About tonight at school—”

“Sanskrit. I said I’m sorry I missed your conference. Can’t we let bygones be bygones?”

“It isn’t bygone. It’s by-here.”

Mom lifts her legs, presses with her hands, and effortlessly lifts herself up into a headstand.

Which leaves me looking at her butt.

“Mom. I’m trying to talk to you.”

“I’m listening,” she says.

“But you’re upside down.”

“Upside down is a matter of perspective. How do you know you’re not the one who’s upside down?”