The Instructions (86 page)

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he said. “I went out twice for food already. This is the second meal I’ve prepared this morning. I said that already. But it’s not I don’t think I’ve won,” he said. “Probably I did—I usually do. But I don’t know for sure, and so I have to wait. I have to wait around til they call. For all I know they won’t call til next week. What do I do in the meantime? If I start working on the next thing, and it turns out I have to appeal this one, then…I don’t know.”

I said, Rambam.

“Rambam what?” he said.

I said, You don’t want to start the next thing before the first one’s finished. You’re trying to do things in the right order, like the Rambam said.

“I’m trying to do things in a certain order because I’m superstitious. You shouldn’t be like that. It’s foolish. And for future reference,” he said, “this is how you get the meat off the fish. You don’t want bones in it, okay? So you turn the guy upside-down, press lightly with the fork, right here, under his spine, and push, away from the spine. If he’s right-side up, you end up pulling—

pulling, you get more bones. You probably get a couple bones, anyway, so you have to be careful. You have to push gentle.”

He ate a forkful of fish. “It’s delicious,” he said. “Salty. Try some.” He wedged a piece between knife and fork, held it up.

It looked mushy. And it wasn’t white, but beige with shots of bruisey purple.

No, I said.

“Well I don’t want it either,” he said. “I wasn’t even hungry 799

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the first time I ate today. It’s a shame to waste a nice chub like this. I’ll leave it for you while I take a shower. Then I’ll drive you to school because I have nothing else to do. Sound good?”

You got your car back? I said.

He said, “Ema took the train.”

Can we listen to the Fugees? I said.

“We can listen to anything you want as long as it’s on NPR,”

he said. “Your mom put your lunch on the foyer table. I’ll be down in six minutes. Be ready.”

I went to the foyer, got my lunch off the table. Stapled to the fold of the bag was a note:

I SAVED YOU FOUR POPPYSEED COOKIES FOR LUNCH.

DO NOT GIVE THEM ALL AWAY TO JUNE. IF YOU GIVE

HER ALL YOUR COOKIES, THEN SHE WILL NOT BELIEVE

THAT THEY ARE AS VALUABLE A GIFT AS WE KNOW THEY

ARE. RATHER, SHE WILL WONDER, “IF THESE COOKIES

ARE SO ENJOYABLE AND DELICIOUS, WHY DOES GURION

NOT TAKE AT LEAST ONE FOR HIMSELF?” AND WHEN

SHE EATS THE COOKIES, SHE WILL NOT ENJOY THEM AS

MUCH AS SHE OTHERWISE WOULD HAVE.

SO KEEP NO FEWER THAN TWO FOR YOURSELF. MAKE

SURE TO EAT AT LEAST ONE IN FRONT OF JUNE. IF YOU

CHOOSE NOT TO EAT A SECOND ONE IN FRONT OF HER,

SHE SHOULD BE MADE AWARE THAT THERE IS A SECOND

ONE, SO SHE WILL KNOW THAT YOU DID NOT EAT THE

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FIRST ONE OUT OF MERE POLITENESS. SHE NEEDS TO

KNOW THAT ALTHOUGH YOU ARE GLAD AT THE IDEA

OF GIVING HER DELICIOUS COOKIES, PARTING WITH

THE COOKIES IS NOT IN ITSELF ANY KIND OF SPRING

PICNIC.

AND ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT ALL OF THOSE COOKIES

HAVE ALWAYS BEEN YOURS, AND THEY ALWAYS WILL BE.

LOVE, MOM THE PUPPET

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When his celly chimed, my father was merging onto the highway at 50 while lighting a cigarette and lowering the driver-side window. He dropped his lighter in the center console, kept the lit cigarette in his mouth, reached for the phone in his pocket, set his window-button hand on the steering wheel, and then thrust us off the ramp, into the slow lane, which was going fast.

“Radio,” he said.

I turned the volume knob all the way left.

“What time?” he said into the mouthpiece. Then: “Good.”

He handed me the phone while pressing the end button.

What am I supposed to do with this? I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “They’ve got a verdict. Came in last night. I have to wait til 3:00 to hear it. We have to listen to music now, loudly.”

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Fugees? I said.

“
Fu
gees?” he said. He said it like I was crazy. He said, “Find the Mix.”

The Mix was a CD of anthems, mostly punk rock ones he missed out on as a yeshiva boy. My dad made the Mix when I was two and he got his first burner. It was all he would listen to on days that a verdict was going to be delivered, and he would never listen to any of the songs it contained on other days. He made about twenty copies of the Mix and stashed them all over the place like a gangster does with his money. There were two copies in the car. I pulled out the one that was under the seat.

“Get the other one—that one’s scratched,” he said.

I got the other one from the glovebox.

It was also scratched. The only songs that worked were the first two: “Gotta Gettaway” by Stiff Little Fingers and “Guns of Brixton”

by the Clash. As soon as “Guns” would end, the player would skip back to track 1 and “Gotta Gettaway” would start again.

“Gotta Gettaway” wasn’t fun to sing along with, but we traded off screaming verses at each other during the third round of “Guns” and came together on the choruses.

(
Judah
)

When they kick at your front door

How you gonna come?

(
Gurion
)

With your hands on your head

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Or the trigger of your gun?

(
Judah
)

When the law break in

How you gonna go?

(
Gurion
)

Shot down on the pavement

Or waiting on death row?

(
Judah and Gurion
)

You can crush us

You can bruise us

But you’ll have to answer to

Oh, oh, the guns of Brixton

We were two-thirds through a fourth round of “Gotta Gettaway”

when we pulled into the Aptakisic parking lot. I waited in the car for the song to finish. I didn’t want it to be stuck in my head all day and get ruined. Songs I knew always stuck when I’d quit them before they were over—they’d get stuck from the point where the song left off and repeat. It would have been especially bad if “Gotta Gettaway” got stuck right then because the last third of that song was, itself, a bunch of repetition: “Gotta. Gotta.

Get away. Gotta. Gotta. Get away,” and then, “Gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta get away” over and over with another singer going, “Oh oh,” in the background.

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Unfinished songs stuck to my father the same way, so I didn’t have to explain why I wasn’t getting out of the car.

The two of us just sat there for a minute, watching students walk from the bus circle to the front entrance. The Main Hall Shovers poked each other and did secret handshakes, and I saw that some had, yes, drawn icthii on their blankspots. The Jennys and the Ashleys made exasperated faces and hugged basketballers. The basketballers acted bored and copped feels.

Bandkids leaned left or right, depending on which hand held their instrument case. The jolt of every step taken by a tiny girl I’d never seen before pushed a looseleaf binder closer to ejection from her half-unzipped backpack. Then I saw Ben-Wa Wolf and three other Cage kids—Casper Lunt, Fulton Market, and Derrick Winnetka—doing this thing that looked like some kind of game.

Ben-Wa would pratfall, and the others would surround him to help him up, but they didn’t help him immediately—they faced away from him for a few seconds first, as if they were worried others might see them. After the third pratfall, I gave up trying to deduce the game’s rules and decided I’d ask them about it later, but in the meantime “Gotta Gettaway” had ended and “Guns of Brixton” had started. I looked at my Dad and he waved a short wave with one hand = “So wait out ‘Guns of Brixton.’ I don’t have to be downtown til three.”

Soon, a yellow pickup truck driven by a girl with high bangs and blue eye-makeup pulled into the lot a couple spaces to our right and Bam Slokum got out of the passenger side. He chinned 804

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the air at me as he passed our car, and I chinned it back and felt dumb.

“What the hell does that guy teach?” my dad shouted over the music.

I said, Ha!

“Ha
what
? He’s wearing ripped jeans. That’s not a good examp— Who’s this?” he said, suddenly looking over my shoulder.

My shoulder got cold.

June had opened my door.

“Who are you?” my dad shouted at June.

She pinched my shoulder. “June!” she shouted back.

My father halved the volume of the Clash. “I’m Judah,” he said.

He’s my dad, I said.

“He’s not dark at all,” she said. “What’s this music?”

The Clash, I said.

“You’re not so dark either,” said my dad to one of us.

He’s not the Ethiopian one, I said to June.

“The Clash is good,” June said.

I said, June and I are getting married.

June squeezed my hand.

My dad said, “The same taste in hooded sweatshirts
is
a solid foundation on which to build—”

She stole it from me, I said.

“I stole it,” June confirmed.

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“That strikes me as sweet for reasons I don’t quite understand.

Why don’t you get in the car. You look cold.”

“You’re a stranger,” June said.

“So are you,” said my father.

“I’m the girl Gurion loves.”

“Gurion lives at my house.”

“Fine,” June said, and I moved over and she sat on my seat with me.

“Gotta Gettaway” had started up again.

“Now what?” June said.

“Now we all listen to this song by Stiff Little Fingers, and then the two of you go to class.”

We listened to the song, then got out of the car, but I was way too happy to go to class so I didn’t.

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The spots where Ben-Wa pratfell all said WE DAMAGE WE.

The words were jagged-looking, and some of the letters were barely there—he’d used a rock to scrape them into the pavement.

I knelt and touched one, and June knelt next to me.

She said, “These things are everywhere now. I like it the best when they’re scraped like this.”

Me too, I said, but I don’t know why.

“It looks like the words have always been here, waiting to get uncovered,” she said. “They look revealed. Like old marble 806

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sculptures—like the art was hidden inside the stone and all the sculptor did was chisel away the stuff covering it.”

I said, If I hugged you right now, then your ribs would snap and cut your heart.

“I had this dream the other night I made a cage for a piglet by tying spareribs together with tendons,” she said. “When I woke up, decoding it, my thigh had this cramp, and I was sure I’d torn my hamstring, but I hadn’t—I was fine.”

We entered the school a couple minutes after the first-period tone, and Jerry sent us to the Office for a pass. We walked toward the Office until he stopped watching us, then ducked into B-Hall where I wrote one with my left hand, and on the way I saw that June was right: the bombs were everywhere—I counted thirteen without even turning my head to look for them—and all the scraped ones were better because of subtractiveness.

Deface, I thought.
De
face. To deface is to damage; to scrape DAMAGE to deface. The words were enacting what they described, and I got a rush from thinking about it.

Even the guard-booth was bombed. I showed Jerry the forged pass and he waved us on to our lockers, but then June wouldn’t ditch with me because she had Art.

I offered her a pass to give to Miss Gleem.

“I don’t want to lie to her again,” she said. She was hanging her coat and pretend-accidentally bumping me with her left shoulder and hip. “I want to hand her a ruler,” she said, “and hold out my knuckles so she can bash them like nuns do in books by 807

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angry Catholics. I want to look in her face so she’ll see my eyes blur when I wince.”

Is a forged pass really a lie? I said. I said, Because even if it is, you didn’t have any problem with me flashing one at the Deaf Sentinel.

“I don’t care about The Deaf Sentinel,” June said. “Did you bring me a cookie?”

I said, Are you dying to have one?

“You said they were the best,” she said.

I gave her all of them.

She took two from the baggie, handed one of them to me.

“These have a lot of butter in them,” she said, looking at the shine her cookie left on her fingertips. “Do you ever press really buttery cookies against the roof of your mouth til the butter starts falling down the sides of your tongue and the rest of the cookie becomes a dense ball that you store in your cheek and pull apart slowly by sucking it through the gaps of your teeth?”

It’s good to do it that way, I said. I said, But my mouth always wants to chew, so I chew.

“Me too,” she said. “I think what we should do is chew one cookie, and do the pressing thing with a second one.”

Which first? I said.

“It would be easier to do the pressing to the second one because the chewing desire will have already been fed by having chewed the first one,” she said, “but if we do the pressing first instead, then our teeth will be teased before they get satisfied by chewing 808

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the second one, and the teasing will make the chewing full of relief and that much better.”

So we should chew the second one, I said.

She said, “The only problem with that is that it might be impossible. If we try to do the pressing to the first cookie, but the cookie is so good that we can’t control ourselves and so we start chewing it, then what?”