The Instructions (57 page)

“He’s coming now from the garage!” she shouted.

Three minutes!

“Now!”

There was no way that dinner would be on the table in less than ten minutes, though, and I found my screwdriver on the windowsill.

Twenty-five minutes! I shouted.

“Gurion:
boy!
”
Boy
without a “please”
is for puppies and three-year-olds who are readying to stumble into highway traffic.

Seventeen hours and twenty-three minutes! I shouted.

I heard her walk back to the kitchen.

My screwdriver was too thick for the bracket-screws’ X’s. I threw it like a dagger and it stuck in the wall, then fell a second later. I was about to punch the mailslot again when I saw my envelope-slasher in the pencilcup. I tried its corner on a screw and got movement.

“I’m home!” my father shouted.

“Tell your son to get down here,” my mother said.

“Soup’s on, boychic!”

I didn’t want him to come get me in my room and see me removing the mailslot lid; he’d ask me why was I monkeying, and I’d have tell him, and then he’d be disappointed. He wouldn’t be disappointed because I showed disrespect to a thing that he built for me, but because I’d exploded, and that was not the right reason to be disappointed, which would disappoint me, so after finishing the screw I was working on, I laid the envelope-slasher 523

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on the mailslot for later and came down the stairs shouting, Forty days and forty nights! at the two of them.

My father let go of my mother’s hand and headed to his room to change from his suit into jeans and a t-shirt. When he passed me, he poked me and pinched at my shoulder and then, like a rowing viking, he sang,

Detention, detention,

And in-school suspension!

What shall

Become of

My son?

=

I killed in court!

Oh, how I killed!

My Nazi

Shall be

Free!

I walked to the kitchen with my mom, who kissed me. “So are you hungry for a nice chicken from Selig’s?” she said.

I snatched a glass from the clean-rack and filled it with tapwa-ter. I glugged it down.

No, I told her.

“It is what we are having,” she said. “So what? You were in trouble today?”

Not trouble, I said.

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“What do you think? That you can beat me up suddenly? I can beat up all of you. I have carried up hills in one arm a carbine that weighs two Gurions. Do not lie to me.”

A carbine, I said, is smaller than a rifle.

She said, “Why was the crazyman singing on the stairs?”

I broke rules and got an ISS, I said. I said, That’s not trouble, that’s punishment. And no carbine weighs two Gurions.

“You will make fun of my language?” she said. “I am fluent in four and hold a Ph.D. and people pay me to speak, it is how I heal them. You, in junior high school, know three languages, one of which is dead, you spend the money that people pay me to speak to them, and you will make fun of me? It is not nice. I do not find it to be very charming.”

Aramaic isn’t dead, I said. Not exactly.

“And if I say a carbine when I cannot possibly mean a carbine, then you should know that I meant a cannon, smartperson. It was a cannon for making helicopters drop. Do you think no cannon could weigh two Gurions?”

You blew up helicopters with a cannon? I said.

She wasn’t paying attention anymore. She was pouring mat-zoball soup from a styrofoam cylinder into three bowls. She said, “I must carve the chicken. Kiss my cheek and bring the long knife.”

She’d never told me she used to blow up helicopters.

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If chicken is a certain level of wet, it squeaks between my teeth and my tongue gets heavy. I swallow that kind of chicken as fast as I can, trying not to picture the chewed-looking meat that dangles near the throats of roosters like earlobe. Sometimes I swallow too fast, but not usually, and when I coughed at the beginning of dinner, it was not because chicken choked me. Apple juice had entered the wrong pipe.

“You are inhaling your chicken,” my mom said.

It was juice in the airpipe, I told her.

“Yet you are inhaling your chicken,” my mom said.

It’s wet.

“Don’t talk that way at dinner,” said my father.

She asked, I said. And plus if I was actually
inhaling
the chicken—

“She didn’t ask,” my mother said. “She observed. And ‘inhaling’ was meant figuratively and you know this, you are being a wiseass today.”

I said, Your observation was wiseass—it was a question, disguised. It was, ‘Why are you inhaling your chicken?’ That’s a question.

She said, “Not a question, Gurion, a request: Stop inhaling chicken.”

That’s a command, I said.

“When the request was not met, it became a command, but never was it a question,” she said. “There is never good reason to inhale chicken, and so there is no purpose in asking you why you 526

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have inhaled chicken.”

Whenever my mom was upset with me at dinner, we’d have a conversation about our conversation. I thought it was because she’d spend all day practicing FAP, which is a kind of psychotherapy where talking is called
verbal behavior
. If you were my mom’s client and you told her, “I want to kill myself,” she would not tell you, “You should not kill yourself,” or “If you kill yourself, you will never be able to decide to kill yourself again,” and she’d never ask, “When do you plan to kill yourself?” or “How do you plan to kill yourself?” or even “Why do you want to kill yourself?” This is what she’d ask: “Why are you telling me that you want to kill yourself? What do you get out of it? What is it that you are trying to elicit from me by telling me you want to kill yourself?” Since I’d been old enough to remember conversations at dinner, no fewer than thirty people had told my mom they wanted to kill themselves, and this is how many of those people killed themselves: zero.

I said to her, Eyelids.

It was a little bit cheap of me, but I didn’t feel like having a conversation about a conversation.

My dad said, “That is
very
impolite.” He cracked a chicken-wing in half.

I rubbed my eyes with my thumbknuckles and my eyes made squishing sounds.

My mother told me, “It does not affect me, Gurion. And it would be cruel of you if it did.” She said that flatly, but her upper-527

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lip kept trying to smile itself because she liked it when I teased her. She didn’t want to have a conversation about a conversation, either. “Did you hear what I said to you?” she said.

I did simultaneous eyelid flips and she spit chicken into her napkin and pushed her plate away, laughing.

“You are so
mean
,” she said. “How can you be so mean? Your father, he is not mean.”

My father, his mouth full of chicken, jabbed air with his pointer in the direction of my mother.

“
I
am mean?” she said. “I am
not
mean!” she said. “Gurion, do you think I am mean? Is that why you told your principal to call your father instead of me?”

Yes, I said.

“Because you thought I would be mean to you? I am not mean to you. I am your mother and I love you.”

My father touched a sideburn and lifted one eyebrow = “How ironic that my wife is upset with my son over this tiny aspect of a larger phenomenon about which I am upset with her,” and said, “Your son’s winding you up for kicks, so relax a little. This Brodsky called of his own volition. When he called I told him that he was to call
you
, that
you
were the one who handled such calls, and Brodsky said he knew of the arrangement, but that he was hoping for a different approach, which, as you would likely expect, led me to wonder aloud: ‘Different from what?’ He then explained that by different, he meant different from the approach my wife takes when he calls to tell her that our son has been in a 528

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fight. And then I wondered: What fights has my son been in? Of course, that latter wondering was performed silently.”

“If you are angry at me,” my mother said to my father, “please do not be coy about it.”

He slid his knife beneath the skin of a breast and sawed and pried til the skin came off in one piece, and then he set it on my plate. I liked the skin when it crackled. This skin flapped. I poked it. My dad said, “That was not coyness, Tamar. That was a question: Why is it I’m not told my own son is getting into fights at his new school?”

My mom pulled her plate back onto the placemat to fork meat, but dropped the fork and said “Uch,” and touched her eyes to make sure they were still there, and put her hands in her lap to stop checking on her eyes. Then she said, “If there was something for you to be concerned about, I would have told you. The fighting is normal.”

“It is not normal,” my father said to her. “Do not tell him it is normal. It is not normal to fight,” he said to me. “You are surrounded by delinquents and idiots.
They’re
the ones for whom it’s normal, and what’s normal for delinquents and idiots is what? Is delinquent. Idiotic.”

“They start up with him, Judah,” my mother said. “He should be picked on?”

“Are you picked on?” my father said.

I said, Not exactly. I said, People start up with me, though.

“They started up with you today?” he said.

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I said, Kind of. I said, I towel-snapped the neck of this one boy the Janitor and he called me a name.

“Why did you
towel-snap his neck
?”

There wasn’t exactly a reason, I said, but he wasn’t a nice kid.

Him and his brother used to make fun of Scott Mookus. I don’t think he’ll do that anymore, though. We’re friends now. But after I towel-snapped his neck, he said I smelled and was a B.D., so I towel-snapped his eyes and spit on his foot. That’s when his friend Ronrico charleyhorsed me from behind and kicked me in the ribs.

“You see?” my mother said. “It was just some snaps of towel, and then the second boy came.”

“The second boy,” said my father, “came to protect his friend from our son.”

I said, That’s not true. I said, He came to
avenge
his friend.

It wasn’t protection. I wasn’t fighting the Janitor anymore—he wasn’t getting up.

“The second boy came from
behind
, Judah,” said my mother.

Yes he did, I said.

My mom said, “And what did you do?”

I loved my mom. She was always so interested.

I said, “I landed a glancing blow on his face.”

“This ended it?” she said.

My father exhaled loudly, made a fist around his chin = “I will wait this out, and you will both be aware that I am waiting.”

The blow pushed him back, I said, but he wasn’t out, and this 530

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crowd that was watching kept growing, so I grabbed the padlock off my locker.

“You did not,” said my mom.

I did, I said. I said, And I hooked the ring around a knuckle and blasted that kid’s lungs out with a blow to the solarplexus just before he would’ve knocked me over.

“Gurion!” my mother said.

He bent like he was praying, and I swept his legs, I said.

When he went down, he hit all these metal baskets and it was so noisy everyone backed off, Ema. They were gonna crowd me up more, I knew it, but they backed off because of the noise and how the padlock gleamed.

“You are very smart,” she said.

“What the
fuck
are you telling him?” my father said.

In almost all of the books I have ever read, and many of the movies I’ve seen, when a husband curses at a wife, or a wife at a husband, it signals that they are fighting. That was not true about my parents, though. My parents were often a little bit explosive, always very loud, and when they’d curse it was usually with joy.

When it seemed like they were fighting, they were usually playing.

The loudness was fun for them. The back-and-forth way they’d become outraged with each other was a contest like the name-calling game that I’d play with Jelly during Group; neither one cared to win, they only tried to make the contest last. It is true, though, that when the subject of the outrage contest was Gurion, it would
become
a fight as often as not.

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You could tell a fight from a contest by what they’d do with their bodies. During contests, they would touch each other, usually with pinches and gentle thumb-stabs, and they’d always look at each other’s faces when they were talking, like to say, “What then! What!” When they’d fight, though, they didn’t look at each other much, and instead of touching, they’d use a prop—usually a cigarette, sometimes an eating utensil—to occupy their hands, and their voices would become quieter. The problem was that most of their fights would start out as outrage contests, and even though the body-indicators made it pretty easy to tell the difference between a fight and an outrage contest, I had never been able to figure out what caused an outrage contest to
become
a fight.

I knew it wasn’t cursing, though, so I didn’t get upset when my father said, “What the
fuck
are you telling him?” and then my mom said, “And why the
fuck
do you yell?”

“He hits a boy with a padlock and you call it smart!” said my father.

“That boy hurt our son, and there is no boy who saw it happen that will ever
fuck
with our son again, Foulmouth.”

“Unless our son
fucks
with another boy, himself, Toughguy, in which case
that
boy will have long since known to carry a weapon to defend himself against Gurion Maccabee because Gurion Maccabee is a crazed lunatic.” He said to me, “You’re not a crazed lunatic, but you are acting like one, and eventually you’ll be treated like one, and even if you were one, I would love you because you’re my son, and I would never want you to get beat 532