This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (15 page)

Later that week, I played with Sammy. Sammy was a dog.

Sammy the dog belonged to Diana, a gentile lady who lived two blocks down.

Sammy and Diana had been walking past my block every day at three o’clock, but for a long time, I didn’t know them, just as I didn’t know most of my neighbors. As I’ve said, we did not befriend such kinds. But then one day, two things happened: Diana walked Sammy at four o’clock instead of three, and I came off the school van just as they passed by. So I nearly stepped on Sammy’s paw before I noticed him, and that he was a dog.

A dog.

Dropping my schoolbag, I ran, screaming, down the block, never once looking back. I ran until I could not breathe and stumbled behind a neighbor’s bush. I crouched there, cowering in a tangle of bristly branches, begging God for mercy. There was a dog out there. A dirty dog—one of those ferocious creatures with teeth like knives that hunted down Jews in the forests of Germany and Poland, ripping their flesh off their bones. Good Jews didn’t like dogs. We stayed far away.

I knelt, trembling, listening for any sound. There were only the distant sounds of speeding cars. I peered carefully through the bush. The neighbor and her dog were gone. Stumbling out, I ran back home.

But the next day they were there again, the old lady and her terrifying dog. This time, I saw them before they reached our house. I fled up the steps and I stared down at them from the porch. Good heavens, dear Lord of the universe, those things were everywhere.

I eyed the dog, my heart beating hard. I took in its panting, hanging-out tongue, its dark fur and wagging tail. I could see the old lady smile hesitantly.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Sammy is a gentle dog. He won’t hurt you.” And she petted the creature, stroking its back as it looked at me with its demonic eyes.

Well, I thought from my great distance, she’s safe because she’s a goy. Dogs don’t bite goyim.

The old lady smiled softly now, her eyes creasing under the floral scarf she wore on her head.

“Do you want to pet him?” she asked.

Pet him? Whyever would I want to do
that?

I shook my head quickly and half smiled back. The old lady nodded. Then she and the dog slowly walked away.

The next day, I sat on the grass inside our gate, so when the old lady came I was still safe, a full two yards away. I watched her and the dog walk slowly toward our corner house.

She was an old lady like any other, her beige trench coat pulled tightly around her thin frame, the colorful floral scarf tied loosely over her head. Why, if not for the dog on the long leather leash, one could barely tell she was a gentile.

She stopped when she saw me. I stared at her curiously.

“Sit, Sammy,” she said, and the dog did.

I looked at Sammy warily. He stared patiently back at me.

“What’s your name?” the old lady asked.

I didn’t answer.

“My name is Diana,” she said. “I live there.” She pointed toward East Second Street. “And Sammy’s my old dog. I bought him when he was just a wee pup. Now look how big he’s got.”

I stood up and stepped toward the fence. The dog shifted his weight. I stepped back twice.

“Does it bite?” I asked. Because all dogs bite. My friends even said so.

Diana chuckled. “Oh, no,” she said. “Sammy’s an old dog and very gentle. Even cats aren’t afraid of him.”

And suddenly, like that, I was curious. I wanted to know what a dog felt like. So I stuck a hand through a hole in the fence and touched him with one finger. Then two. I was surprised. His fur wasn’t rough. It was warm and smooth and had a silky feel. All the while, he didn’t move, just sat on the sidewalk like an oversize stuffed animal, staring ahead, comfortable and calm. I pulled my hand back in. Then I looked at Diana. She looked back at me. Suddenly, I felt silly for having been so nervous. I laughed out loud.

I played with Sammy almost every day after that. I played with him until I wasn’t scared at all. I liked Diana because if she weren’t a goy, she would definitely have been a Jew. She looked like any old aunt, with her large gentle eyes, wrinkly skin, and orthopedic old-lady shoes. The dog gave her away, of course, but still, she was a nice gentile to have around. In fact, her late husband’s father’s mother, she told me one day, had been a Jew, and when she was a young girl somewhere down in Tennessee, she had had a good friend named Ruth whose father was a rabbi.

I told this to Rivky when she said that there were too many goyim in my life, and that no decent Jewish girl was friends with a dog. I told her that Sammy was a different kind of dog, one who did not bite Jews, and that maybe Diana’s great-great-grandmother had been a secret Jew, but never told anyone. Kathy, I reassured her, was a good goy too. The proof was the kosher candy she always kept in her closet just for me. But Rivky said that candy was no proof. The goyim only showed their true colors in times of pogroms and wars.

I told her that it couldn’t be. Kathy was one of the righteous gentiles, as was Diana, and they were definitely not like evil goyim. Rivky said that there was no way I could know that, and that just because I liked them, it didn’t make them righteous. Their
nice
was fake, she said, and I was sinning by trusting them.

I threw a marker at Rivky, exasperated.

“But I do not trust gentiles,” I shouted. “I know all gentiles are evil, stupidhead!
Except
for Diana and Kathy. Only the two of them!”

All gentiles were bad, our teachers had taught us, but there were some exceptions—it says so in the midrash. In every generation, it is written, there are thirty-six righteous gentiles who are not like the others. Those are the gentiles who save Jews during a holocaust, who help Jewish children escape a pogrom. Those are the goyim who do not carry hate inside, because they have real souls.

Kathy and Diana were not only not evil; they were not even regular gentiles. I could be friends with them as much as I pleased, because they were the kind that were good inside, and one day when a holocaust would finally come, my stupid sister would see. Our sages had foretold.

So I played with Sammy every day after school. Then I’d go up to Kathy’s and we’d talk. But I never repented for it again. I didn’t need to. Because it really was a wonder how lucky I was: God had planned it so that two out of the thirty-six righteous gentiles on earth lived right next to me.

A few weeks after the family meeting, my mother left for Israel. Packed inside her luggage were toys and sweets enough to last a boy for a year.

This was how things would be now. With my brother in Israel for good, my mother would be going away more often, flying to Jerusalem every few months—at least three or four times a year. She was going to see my brother, she had explained to us, to stay with him for a while, and to meet with psychologists and experts trying to find a cure.

I didn’t mind my mother’s going to Israel, because for the two weeks she’d be gone, I’d stay at Blimi’s house. Blimi said that we’d have more fun than in the bungalow colony, and that she’d show me how to turn a blanket into a tent. All my siblings were to be sent away, scattered among family and friends. We could not stay at home with my mother overseas and my father working from early morning until night.

In the days before she left, toys in boxes of every shape and size had begun piling up in the corner of my parents’ bedroom, as well as shopping bags filled with sweaters and robes—gifts for my brother and aunt. In my mother’s carry-on were sweets: Peanut Chews, fruit leather, Chew Chews, and other treats that my brother loved but that could not be found in Jerusalem. Then, the evening before the flight, she packed everything—her own belongings last—into her suitcases.

I bounced on these suitcases, pushing down on them so she could pull the zippers shut. Then, as my father dragged them down the steps and into the cab, I kissed my mother good-bye. She hugged me tightly and said I should behave.

“I will, I will,” I said. “You’re choking me.”

After my mother left, I sat next to my father on the couch. It was quiet in the house, my siblings already with friends and family, and the empty rooms all around me echoed in strange silence.

“You von’t see me dis whole week,” my father said. “You going to mees me?”

I laid my head on the arm of the couch, my feet on my father’s lap. I thought some.

“A little,” I said.

My father laughed. He pulled off my shoe and tickled me. I yelped and kicked his hands away. Then he sighed. He leaned back, his arms behind his head, and sighed again. Then he looked up at the ceiling, lost in thought.

“Are you happy Nachum is not here?” I asked, because suddenly I needed to know.

My father sat up straight, like a soldier. His hands fell silently onto his lap, and his eyes went very still. He did not answer my question. Then, with his right hand, he stroked the end of his beard, wrapping the thick curls around his forefinger over and around again. As if I had never asked the question, he leaned back once more, staring up at the chandelier.

“I’m happy,” I said, reassuringly. “I don’t like Nachum either.”

My father did not move this time, but kept his eyes on the hanging crystals, his face unreadable as a sphinx. I sat up quietly and said I was going to my room. I did not ask again.

I put my fairy-tale book in the back of my schoolbag. Then, after a few minutes, my father said that it was time to leave. He picked up my little suitcase, the one my mother had packed the night before, and I carried my schoolbag. Then my father drove me to Blimi’s house in Borough Park.

We drove under the bridge, past the train tracks that separated Borough Park from Flatbush. We stopped at Goldberg’s grocery on Eighteenth Avenue and bought two chocolate bars, one for me and one for Blimi. Also a pack of gum, in case I was homesick.

It would start to snow soon, the man on the radio said. The cold was rushing toward the city. Outside the car window, the wind blew at the trees, and the bare branches swung playfully. Soon it would be Chanukah again, and my father had promised me a gold bracelet. In two weeks, my mother would return from Jerusalem with chocolates and colorful dreidels.

At last, out my window I saw Blimi waving excitedly, running down her block toward our car. Mrs. Krieger, standing on the steps of the house, called her back, but then she saw us and smiled. She walked quickly down the path, pulling the kerchief down over her forehead, tucking in the hairs straying out along her neckline. She stood at the edge of the driveway as my father parked the car.

I opened the door, feeling small and shy, as my father took my little suitcase and put it down by the entrance door. Blimi’s mother, still smiling, told me to run inside now; Blimi would show me the room we’d sleep in. But I didn’t want to go in yet. I wanted to watch my father go.

I waited for my father to finish speaking with Mrs. Krieger, and then waited as he settled back into the driver’s seat. He turned the key in the ignition and put his hands on the wheel. Then my father turned to me, waved, and smiled.

I watched him drive away. I waved at the blue minivan until it grew smaller and smaller, until it turned a corner and was gone. Then I went inside the plain redbrick house, Blimi’s mother behind me. I heard Blimi shouting my name from the back of the house. She said that I should come already—quick. My suitcase was already there, in her room, and she was now jumping on her bed.

My suitcase lay open, my clothes all over the floor. Blimi had found the chocolate bar. She threw me a piece, shouting “Catch!,” and said I should come and jump with her. I did, and we giggled and laughed, jumping higher and higher on the creaking springs until her mother told us to stop.

I didn’t mind staying so far from home—I really didn’t. Because we’d have fun at Blimi’s. She’d teach me how to turn a blanket into a tent. At night, we’d have ice cream and read my fairy-tale book, while her parents and siblings slept. We’d read about the beauty and the beast, the princess and the frog, and I’d explain to Blimi how they were just like the Tales of Tzaddikim, in which the prince, I meant the saint, was always disguised as a beast, I meant a pauper, or sometimes as a madman, as he wandered the kingdoms and forests of distant lands. And how miracles were like magic, and magic just like miracles.

That night, Blimi and I read our favorite stories. We read until we fell asleep, way past midnight. In the morning, Blimi’s mother came into the room to wake us, and that’s when, of course, she saw my book, the one we’d fallen asleep on.

Mrs. Krieger made me put the book back into my suitcase, and my suitcase deep under the bed. She said that she wanted both Blimi and me to promise that we would not take the book out again to read, not in her house. Blimi and I promised because, really, we had no choice. But behind our backs, we crossed our fingers.

Four years later
July 1, 1993
El Al airlines, thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean

The plane shook like a rattling toy in the great, angry sky. The captain’s gravelly voice crackled over the speakers:

“Attention all passengers. Attention all passengers. This is your captain speaking. We are currently experiencing minor turbulence. Please remain seated until further notice.”

This was it. I knew it. My first time in five years on a plane, and already I was dying. I clutched my travel-size book of psalms and gripped the armrest. My last moments on earth. A flight attendant walked briskly up the aisle, her crisp smile pasted across her face. Her head turned left, then right, left, then right, robotically checking each passenger’s seat.

“Please fasten your seat belts,” she said. “Sir, your seat belt…” She stopped to help the man seated across the aisle from me.

But there was no fooling me. It was over; I knew.

Turbulence? That’s what all captains said when things went wrong, the instant before the plane crashed right out of the heavens. What else could he say? “Attention all passengers. Don’t bother with the seat belts. We are all going to die.”

We were definitely going to die.

I eyed the elderly woman next to me. Oblivious to the doom that awaited, she never moved her eyes off the big center screen. Her face remained steady under her short, blond wig, a string of pearls peeking out from beneath her double chin. Death was all around us, and she was watching the news.

I had never wanted to go to Israel. I should have been on my way to summer camp like every normal thirteen-year-old. But my mother had said absolutely not.

“There will be no camp this year. Not this time. Not after four years.” Four years since I’d last seen my brother. I wished I was on my way to camp.

Six summers had passed since I had boarded the El Al airlines flight clutching Yitzy’s hand and Nachum’s pinky finger. I had been nearly seven years old, and for ten hours, legs dangling off the passenger seat, I’d imagined that I was on the wings of an eagle.

But this was no eagle, this flying machine, with its narrow seats, crowded aisles, and pumped-in oxygen, which left a nasty, sterile taste in my mouth. There were too many people here: snoring men, crying infants, and impatient stewardesses, their glued-on smiles wilting away in the stormy sky.

It was too late to go back. Once on the plane, there was no walking off, not before we had reached my mother’s planned destination. And when I reached it, whether I liked it or not, I was going to meet my brother.

“Nachum is different now,” my mother had said proudly. “He’s almost a man. And he wants to meet his sister.”

“You won’t recognize him,” Aunt Tziporah had added. “He’s not the child he used to be.”

My sister Rivky said nothing, and my brother Yitzy shrugged. Miri, even Avrumi—they had all gone but me. I had spent my summers in the Catskills instead, all eight weeks in the colony or at sleepaway camp. After age ten or eleven, camp was where most girls spent their summers, and for a long time my mother agreed. Until she did not.

“You wouldn’t believe how he talks,” she told me, and I had pretended to believe her. “He can hold entire conversations.” But when I thought of Nachum, I saw only flailing hands.

“You wouldn’t believe how he can read,” said my aunt. “He’s a real mensch, a proud young man.” But when I looked out our backyard window, I saw Nachum, hunched over and alone, far from the playing children.

“Things have changed,” said my mother, and I had nodded as though I was listening. But inside my head I was somewhere else, anywhere but Israel.

This time, the suitcases lying open on the dining room table had been mine. I would be the one handing my brother the gifts and sweets that bulged from every corner of the bag. My mother had hugged me tightly, tears in her eyes. She had checked my carry-on, again and again.

“Your passport is here, the credit card here, the cash right here, and the airport security—remember: you answer them short and to the point. No diddling or extra answers. And don’t take a package from anyone! I don’t care if he looks like the chief rabbi of Israel…” On the right side of the carry-on were three packs of gum, and on the left side solution for my ears for landing. Because when I was a baby, I’d had a terrible ear infection that had gone on for weeks. So you never knew. It could help.

“Call me as soon as you land, Menuchah, you hear? Aunt Zahava will be waiting for you at the terminal. Remember what she looks like? Remember? Are you sure?”

Four years is a long time for a brother to be gone, always hovering in the background, just around the corner of our lives. Four years is a long time to know a brother who is gone only from the fragments my mother brought home every time she came back from Israel. There was the framed painting hanging like a memorial on the wall; the carefully preserved letter with his first, illegible written words; the Judaica candlesticks formed out of wax and the mosaics that she said he’d made. Lost bits of memories were scattered across our halls. Nachum had stopped being real the day he left home.

My mother had spoken of Nachum often, and I had listened because I had to, but as if to some faraway legend about a crazy boy. Oh, I felt for the people in the narrative, for their pain and futile struggle, but not too much. That’s just how it is with legends. The thing about this one was that it unfolded all around me, characters wandering in and out from the pages of their story and into mine, telling me things, explaining, wanting to hear my thoughts, unable to know that I had no part in their drama, that this was just some legend about a tragic boy.

The tragedy and the boy lived across the sea. His mother traveled there often, leaving her other children behind to visit him. This mother said that her boy was not crazy, that he was only lost in a labyrinth that had trapped his mind. If she could just break into the labyrinth, she would find her hostage boy and bring him home.

There was also a father in the story who was tall and very silent. He did not try to stop the mother from going. Instead, he gave large sums of money for the trips across the sea, as if, even in his silence, he really believed they might do some good.

For years the mother searched. She searched for anyone who could tell her how to find her lost boy. She traveled from city to city, from one expert to another, but to no avail. No one knew of any labyrinth. Mostly they said it didn’t exist, that there was no boy inside to find.

There was the doctor who thought it was ADHD, but it turned out it was not. There was the psychiatrist who declared it to be a psychosis, but who could not say what kind it was. A physician in Manhattan said it was a brain chemical the boy lacked, one that could be supplied by medication, but the medication left the boy nauseous and ill, and the chemical was still missing.

A holy man said it was the doings of the evil eye. Special prayers and sacred water would force it out. So he prayed and chanted and sprinkled the boy with water, but though the boy got very wet, the evil eye stayed inside. And then there was the renowned professor who told the mother to stop trying. In his wide and spacious Manhattan office, way up on the twenty-seventh floor, he held an onion in the palm of his hand.

“The boy is like an onion,” he said from across the cherrywood desk. “You peel off one layer, and another. And then, just when you think you’re done, you find another layer underneath. Layers and layers of problems…”

He put the onion down, so the mother should see.

“You are trying to find an apple in a child that’s an onion,” he said, and he told her to go back home. Put the child away. Forget about him. Such children were lost forever. They could never be found.

The mother left the office. She took the elevator back down twenty-six floors. For days she wept whenever she saw an onion. Then she continued with her search.

Time passed. The boy was now eight years old. The school he attended overseas for children with special needs and other general disabilities said he was hopeless. Their other students—Down syndrome, developmentally delayed—all progressed in the program, but not this child. This boy’s disability was a strange one, not of the general kind. They did not want him any longer, they said. The mother and silent father paid vast sums of money just so the school should keep trying.

Then one day, someone told the mother about a last-hope psychologist in Jerusalem, another expert he had heard of, and she sighed. “This one is different,” he said. “This psychologist is known as the one who tests untestable children. She diagnoses only the worst cases. Take your son to her. If anyone can diagnose him, she can. And if she can’t—well, then…”

This is how the lost boy and his mother arrived at the office of the last-hope psychologist, Dr. Cory Shulman, known for testing untestable children, boys and girls who could not be found.

The doctor sat with the crazy boy for an hour, maybe two. Outside, in the reception area, the mother waited apprehensively. She read weekly magazines and insert advertisements. She stood up and sat back down. She paced around the small office, listening to the sounds behind the wall. Finally, the doctor came out. The boy shuffled behind her. He sat down on a chair, staring straight ahead.

Dr. Shulman turned to the mother, asking her to come into her office. She asked her many questions about the boy. She wanted to know everything about him. What had he been like as an infant? As a toddler? With the siblings? In each school? The doctor filled out many papers, checking lists and scribbling things down. Then she sent them both away.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I will call you, God willing, tomorrow.”

The evening came and went. The night crept by, ever so slowly, and finally dawn came. The mother sat up in the silent apartment, unable to sleep. What if this last-hope doctor did not know either? What if this doctor could not test her untestable child? Wherever would she go then?

But early that morning, the psychologist called. She asked the mother to come to her office again. The boy stayed home with an aunt and uncle and watched through the window as the white cab drove away, his mother sitting in the backseat.

In the office, the mother sat across the crowded desk from the last-hope expert, who had a small stack of papers in front of her. Then at last Dr. Shulman told the mother that she had evaluated the boy’s tests, and that in the labyrinth she had found a diagnosis.

“Nachum is a child with autistic tendencies,” the mother heard her say. “Nachum meets the criteria of a condition known as autism spectrum disorder. This is a neurological condition that he was born with.”

She paused and looked closely at the mother.

“Your son is autistic,” she said, and then waited to see if the mother had absorbed this.

The mother stared at the doctor. She stared at the papers that Dr. Shulman held out. “Autistic,” she said. “What’s autistic?”

And that’s how the first story goes.

I kicked the seat in front of me, trying to stretch out and sleep. The man in it turned around, glaring. It was inhumane, this business of sleeping in a flying can of sardines. I sat back up, exhausted. The seat belt sign glowed red. The plane shuddered. I looked out the porthole at the dark outside, where the bullying winds pushed the aircraft to and fro.

Before I had left New York, Kathy told me that she’d switch places with me in less than a minute. Who didn’t want to go to the Holy Land? I said, “Okay, let’s do it.” Kathy had laughed. She said that she had always wanted to visit Israel, the place where Jesus walked, but it was too expensive. When I told her that I really didn’t want to go—people died in planes all the time—she said that I was safe.

“Don’t worry, Menu’hah. God loves you, and He takes good care of planes going to His land. You’re gonna love it there. You wait and see—you won’t wanna come back anytime soon.”

She also promised that Jesus was going to watch over me from her prayers, and that my God would watch over me from my prayers, so that between the two of them, my flight was foolproof.

But I hadn’t wanted Jesus to watch over me. I just wanted my own God to masterfully change my mother’s grand plan and get me off the plane. Or at least stop the turbulence.

The elderly woman next to me asked me a question, and I turned to her, startled. She had finished watching the news.

“Are you going for a family wedding?” she repeated, smiling at my startled expression.

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “I’m going…I’m going…”

Where
was
I going? To visit my crazy brother?

No. Definitely not. Not with the questions that would follow. The person I was going to visit was some other sibling, a plain just-any-kind-of-brother, who happened to live overseas.

But elderly ladies had a way, I knew. They always wanted more information.

So which school is he in? she’d inquire. How old is he? Oh, and what is the name of this just-any-kind-of-brother? And why Israel, with so many good schools in New York? And I’d have to remember every lie, and the order in which I told them, all for one impossible question.

I changed my mind. I was certainly going for a family wedding.

“It’s my mother’s youngest sister,” I explained. “But mostly a bar mitzvah. My first cousin’s. He’s the oldest so it’s a big deal.…Yes, we’re very close. He’s coming to New York for my bas mitzvah. I mean he came already—last year.”

Huh?

But the lady did not delve. She chatted mostly about herself and the married son she was visiting who had just had his seventh child. We talked some until the turbulence finally stopped and I fell asleep.

When I woke up, the plane was dropping out of the sky, along with my intestines. We were landing, the captain announced. All passengers were to be seated immediately.

I bent over quickly, burying my head between my knees. A flash of nausea passed through me. I covered my ears, forcing myself to take deep breaths. I offered God my last prayers.