Sons of the 613 (2 page)

“Because I want my trip to I-ta-ly!” she says, jabbing the knife in my direction with each syllable. The knife point drops to target the potato I'm holding. “I think that's clean enough.”

I look at the potato, which now has a bowl-shaped divot in it.

“Here. Peel,” says my mom. The potato is swapped for a carrot. Peeler is supplied. I peel.
BOOM.
A small metal mixing bowl, resting unstably on a scrap of vegetable matter, rocks subtly and settles into a slightly different position. I glance over at my father. He's now leaning with his back against the long counter near the table, brow furrowed, drumming his fingers on his bald spot, the other hand pressing the phone against his ear. They have to know. I have to tell them. Now. I have to. Deep breath.

Mom, Dad .
.
 .

Boooom.

I can't.

“Mom, I don't think you should go.”

“I've got to get my hair done. You know, this is when I really miss New York, where I could find a competent stylist who—”

“Mom, my fart mitzvah is coming up in three weeks!”

“We'll both be back in plenty of time for—Did you just call it your fart mitzvah?”

“What if I'm not ready?”

“I don't want you calling it your fart mitzvah, Isaac. You're going to slip up and say it in front of the rabbi.”

“What if I'm not ready?”

“‘Fart mitzvah.' Honest to God. Herb, did you hear this? Did you hear what he's calling his bar mitzvah?”

More hand flapping from my dad.

Boom boom
BOOOM.

“Mom, what if I'm not ready?”

“So what are we paying that tutor for?”

TO NOT SHOW UP!!!!
I nearly scream. That secret is the specific source of much of my fear and all my guilt. Because that's what Yoel, the tutor, has been doing: not showing up. He's some sleepy-eyed Israeli guy with a shaved head and sunglasses who wears too much cologne. He came to the first two sessions, and then he basically . . . stopped. Each week he calls my cell about ten minutes after we're supposed to have started: “Hallo. Yitzhak? Theez eez Yoel.” Then he explains that he can't make it this time but zee nest time for sure.

I can't say I've minded. Who wants to sit there with a bored, patronizing sabra practicing my Hebrew when I can be blowing s*** up on the Xbox? Except, it just kept happening. Each time. And soon the weeks were flying by.

“He seems like a very nice man,” my mom is saying, scraping a mound of vegetables into the giant soup pot.

“Who?”

“Yoel. Your tutor.”

“Um . . . yyyes.”

You've probably gathered that I haven't done a very good job of communicating my situation to my parents. How was the session today? my mom asks each time, when she gets home in the evening. Fine, I always say. Except there are no sessions. And the longer I've waited to tell them, the harder it's gotten, and I've been feeling guiltier and guiltier, and now there's no time left and I'm not ready and I'm realizing that the person I've been lying to the most is me.

Booom.

My mother glances over at me. “Are you all right? You look ill.”

“I'm fine.”

“Isaac, you feeling okay?” My dad, from across the room, his radar instantly locking on to any hint of infirmity.

“I'm
fine.
”

“Judy, maybe I should stay,” he says, covering the mouthpiece. “I'm concerned—”

“‘Concerned about this patient,'” she says, finishing his favorite line for him. “I swear to God, Herb,” she says, shaking the knife at him this time, “if you don't go, I'm divorcing you. Here.” She tosses another carrot to me.

I don't know if you're Jewish or know how a bar mitzvah works. You have to memorize a lot of things that you'll be chanting. A
lot
of things. In Hebrew. I'm going to brag for just a moment now and say that I'm a very good student. I'm in AP English, AP history, and pre-calc. School comes easy to me. I was assuming that the Hebrew would come easy as well. It hasn't. It hasn't come at all, and there are only three weeks left, and I'm going to end up like Eric Weinberg, but worse.

True, his spectacular collapse was ultimately traced back to bad whitefish salad, something that eventually caught up with several other members of the bar mitzvah party. But I don't need food poisoning to make me throw up and faint onstage. I just need my own brain, undermining me like it always does. I've told you about my nonfunctioning Panic immune system. Give me an even semistressful situation and it's like someone has cast a spell on me, filling me with stupid. I start to sweat and shake and can barely get my mind to work, and the few words that make it from my brain to my mouth tend to come out in the wrong order if they come out at all.

A flurry:
boom boom boomboomboom
BOOOM.
The bowl resettles.

“How is poor Eric Weinberg doing?” asks my mom. “I hope the other kids aren't being mean to him.”

I glance over at her. Sometimes I'm not sure if she's from this planet, or this universe. She might as well say,
I sure hope that gravity isn't in effect right now.

I should give you some background: I live in Edina, Minnesota. There are 597 kids in my seventh grade class.
Four
of us are Jews. Everyone else has a name like Peterson or Jensen or Swanson or Schultz, and they look like the perfect blond Aryan youth in the old Hitler posters. I feel like a troll at an elf party.

So just the fact that you're Jewish and have to have a bar mitzvah is embarrassing enough. Being the kid who threw up, pooped in his pants, and passed out at his bar mitzvah is a total nightmare. Being that kid and having it all somehow end up on YouTube is a nightmare deep-fried in apocalypse sauce. It's still a mystery who put it online. All I know is that it was all over school in about a millisecond, and last I checked, the video had over twenty thousand hits. Twenty thousand! In two days!!

Do you know that painting
The Scream
? If you don't, you should check it out, because that's what Eric has been looking like at school—the character from
The Scream,
if that character had finally stopped screaming from sheer exhaustion. That, or Gollum from
The
Lord of the Rings,
except a Gollum who's gone a few rounds with a Harry Potter dementor. In the hallway, I caught sight of Eric, shrunken and haggard, hugging the walls as he stumbled from class to class. I avoided him like the plague.

I'm not proud of it, but there it is. Obviously, being seen with him would mean instant social death. I may not be that high up on the social ladder, but there's no way I'm going to plummet back down to Eric's current level, a dank, sunless dungeon populated by creatures like Tim Simonson, who still snacks on stuff he digs out of his nose. That, plus I don't want to risk catching Eric's bad luck.

In some ways I should thank him. What happened to him shocked me out of my complacency, stripping bare the lie I've been living for the past six weeks. I need to change course now, to find a way to get ready.

The first thing I had decided to do: reveal everything to my parents, spill my guts. Maybe they'd postpone the bar mitzvah or let me convert to some other religion. Anything. I had been, in fact, working myself up to tell my mom, until the very moment that she told me she'd be going with Dad on his trip. But now it's all spinning out of control, all going nuts.

Boom boom
BOOM. BOOOOM!
Something final and decisive about the last one.

“Are you sure you're all right?” my mother says.

“You all right?” seconds my dad.

“I'm fine.”

“Do you need to go sit on the toilet or something?” asks my mom.

“Mom, I'm—”

“Go sit on the toilet if you have to,” says my dad.

“I don't need to sit on the toilet!”

“Well, what's wrong with you?”

“Mom, I really—I don't know, I just don't think I'm ready, and—”

“Give me that carrot.”

“Are you sure you have to leave? I mean, what if there's a problem?”

“How could there be a problem? You're a grownup. Josh is here. He's a very different person from what he once was,” says my mom.

“But my fa—my bar mitzvah! I still might need help!”

“Look,” my mother says to me. “If you need more practice, Josh will help you—he loves that stuff.”

Oh, God.

“Right, Josh?” my mom says to my brother, who has strolled into the kitchen on cue, absently tossing a heavy medicine ball up and down like it weighs nothing. He's sweating and breathing hard from hitting the heavy bag, which is what was vibrating the bones of the house.

“You're big on the Jew stuff,” says my mom. “You can help Isaac, right?”

Josh grins that big predatory grin of his.

“Of course!” he says. “Stick with me, little bro. I'll take care of you.” And he dots the end of the sentence by chucking the medicine ball at me.

“Great,” I rasp from the floor, my body curled around the medicine ball that is embedded in my stomach. “Great.”

“The tutor hasn't shown up AT ALL?!” says Josh. “I'm going to KILL HIM!”

He slams his fist down on the kitchen table, and the place settings all jump about an inch off the Formica surface. I cower in my chair.

It's Saturday afternoon. My parents decamped for Italy this morning. About ten minutes ago Josh made me recite my haphtarah for him.

“You can't remember
any
of it?” he asked after my third attempt ended in miserable failure.

So I spilled the beans.

Josh was not happy.

“Why didn't you tell anyone?” He slams the table again. “WHY?!” he roars.

I don't respond. Instead I leap from my chair in pure panic and flee out the sliding door to the back deck, heading for the yard.

“COME BACK HERE!”

While I'm running from my brother, I want to share some observations that might shed some light on our relationship, and why, exactly, I'm running.

First, I have a theory about my brother: Either he was adopted or I was, or both. My money is on him. There is just no way my parents could possibly have made him.

To begin with, he is six foot three, easily three inches taller than my dad. Also, my dad has a kind of pearlike shape to him, and the closest he comes to exercise is talking about how he used to play squash thirty years ago—“And I was pretty good, too,” he says while my brother rolls his eyes. My brother, on the other hand, is 245 pounds, about 3 percent of which is fat. He holds the Edina High School record for bench press, sit-ups, pull-ups, and squats. He was also undefeated—like, he never lost, not once—in wrestling. He won state. That's how he got into NYU on a wrestling scholarship (he also got a full scholarship to Oklahoma State, a “real wrestling school,” as he called it, but my dad told him, How about just a real
school?
). Why Josh is back home from NYU after a semester and a half is a mystery. It's all part of the Mystery of Josh, which I'll get to in a little bit.

“Keep running, Isaac! I'll see you in a few minutes!”

That's him now, shouting to me as he comes down the steps from the back porch at a leisurely pace. I continue running across our broad, sloping backyard, aiming for the low wooden footbridge that crosses the creek, hoping to lose him in the acres of woods on the other side.

To continue: Josh's nose has been broken, like, three times, he has a scar that splits his right eyebrow into two sections, he has a chipped tooth, and his left ear looks like it has been gnawed on, because it has. That happened during a fight with some punk-rock kid from Minneapolis who had a Mohawk. Josh needed a tetanus shot. Mr. Mohawk needed his jaw wired shut.

My brother likes to fight. I mean, he really
enjoys
it. They kicked him off the hockey team for fighting too much. How is it possible to get kicked off a
hockey team
for fighting too much? asked my dad. How is it possible we have a son who plays hockey? asked my mom. Jews don't play hockey.

“You better go faster, Isaac. I'm coming soon,” Josh calls after me. I'm almost to the bridge. I twist to look back at him. He's still by the house, doing some warm-up stretches.

I'm not sure about you, but pain bothers me a lot. The
thought
of pain bothers me. Pain doesn't bother Josh at all. He doesn't mind getting hit. I once saw him get in a fight with a big kid during a soccer game. He let the kid punch him first, and the kid hauled off and smacked him as hard as he could. All the kids surrounding them gasped.

My brother started to laugh. If that kid didn't know he was in trouble then, he did a second later when my brother picked him up and slammed him onto the ground.

My mother likes to say that there is absolutely no crime in Edina—“except of course for Josh.” He has actually been arrested, for real. It happened after a traffic accident, when Josh was a junior in high school. Some guy, a college student—“some big stupid frat guy,” says Josh—rear-ended him and smashed up his brake lights. As Josh tells it, “The two of us then exchanged some words.”

They also exchanged some punches. “He came out on the worse end of the deal,” Josh likes to say in a matter-of-fact manner, which from someone else would be a pretending-to-be-modest manner. To be fair, witnesses later testified that the frat boy had attacked Josh first, and the frat boy turned out to be drunk. But when the police arrived, the frat boy was the one lying on his back, moaning and bleeding, and Josh was the guy standing over him with bloody knuckles, swearing at him and telling him to get up. So it was Josh who got cuffed and hauled in. My dad had to bail him out. He was grounded for about a month after that and lost his car privileges.