Here I Am

  “Because of gravity,” Max said.

  “No,” Benjy said, addressing his question to Jacob. “Why isn’t falling the epitome of life?”

  “Why isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not sure I understand your question.”

  “Why?”

  “Why am I not sure that I understand your question?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “Because this conversation has become confusing, and because I’m just a human with severely limited intelligence.”

  “Jacob.”

  “I’m dying!”

  “You’re overreacting.”

  “No I amn’t!”

  “No you aren’t.”

  “I amn’t.”

  “Aren’t, Benjy.”

  Deborah: “Kiss it, Jacob.”

  Jacob kissed Benjy’s nonexistent boo-boo.

  “I can carry our refrigerator,” Benjy said, not quite sure if he was ready to be done with his crying.

  “That’s wonderful,” Deborah said.

  “Of course you can’t,” Max said.

  “Max said of course I can’t.”

  “Give the kid a break,” Jacob whispered to Max at conversational volume. “If he says he can lift the fridge, he can lift the fridge.”

  “I can carry it far away.”

  “I’ve got it from here,” Julia said.

  “I can control the microwave with my mind,” Max said.

  “No way,” Jacob said to Julia, too casually to be believable. “We’re doing great. We’ve been having a great time. You walked in at a bad moment. Unrepresentative. But everything is cool, and this is your day.”

  “Off from what?” Benjy asked his mother.

  “What?” Julia asked.

  “What do you need a day off from?”

  “Who said I needed a day off?”

  “Dad just did.”

  “I said we were giving you a day off.”

  “Off from what?” Benjy asked.

  “Exactly,” Irv said.

  “Us, obviously,” Max said.

  So much sublimation: domestic closeness had become intimate distance, intimate distance had become shame, shame had become resignation, resignation had become fear, fear had become resentment, resentment had become self-protection. Julia often thought that if they could just trace the string back to the source of their withholding, they might actually find their openness. Was it Sam’s injury? The never-asked question of how it happened? She’d always assumed they were protecting each other with that silence, but what if they were trying to injure, to transfer the wound from Sam to themselves? Or was it older? Did the withholding from each other predate meeting each other? Believing that would change everything.

  The resentment that was fear, that was resignation, that was shame, that was distance, that was closeness, was too heavy to carry all day, every day. So where to put it down? On the kids, of course. Jacob and Julia were both guilty, but Jacob was guiltier. He’d become increasingly snippy with them, because he knew they would take it. He pushed, because they wouldn’t push back. He was afraid of Julia, but he wasn’t afraid of them, so he gave them what was hers.

  “Enough!” he said to Max, his voice rising to a growl. “Enough.”

  “Enough yourself,” Max said.

  Jacob and Julia met eyes, registering that first act of talking back.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing.”

  Jacob let it rip: “I’m not discussing things with you, Max. I’m tired of discussion. We discuss too much in this family.”

  “Who’s discussing?” Max asked.

  Deborah went to her son and said, “Take a breath, Jacob.”

  “I take too many breaths.”

  “Let’s go upstairs for a second,” Julia said.

  “No. That’s what we do with them. Not what you do with me.” Then, turning back to Max: “Sometimes, in life, in a family, you have to just do the right thing without endlessly parsing and negotiating. You get with the program.”

  “Yeah, get with the pogrom,” Irv said, imitating his son.

  “Dad, just stop. OK?”

  “I can lift the whole kitchen,” Benjy said, touching his father’s arm.

  “Kitchens aren’t liftable,” Jacob said.

  “They are.”

  “No, Benjy. They are not.”

  “You’re so strong,” Julia said, her fingers wrapped around each of Benjy’s wrists.

  “Immolated,” Benjy said. And then, in a whisper: “I can lift our kitchen.”

  Max looked to his mother. She closed her eyes, unwilling or unable to protect him as she did his little brother.

  —

  A godsent dogfight on the street brought everyone to the window. It wasn’t actually a fight, just two dogs barking at a smug squirrel on a branch. Still, godsent. By the time the family reassumed positions in the kitchen, the previous ten minutes felt ten years old.

  Julia excused herself and went up to the shower. She never showered in the middle of the day, and was surprised by the force of the hand that guided her there. She could hear sound effects coming from Sam’s room—he was obviously ignoring the first commandment of his exile—but she didn’t stop.

  She closed and locked the door of the bathroom, put down her bag, undressed, and examined herself in the mirror. Reaching her arm to the sky, she could follow a vein as it traversed the underside of her right breast. Her chest had sunk, her belly had protruded. These things had happened in tiny, imperceptible increments. The wisps of pubic hair reaching to her belly had darkened—the skin itself seemed to have. None of it was news, but process. She had observed, and felt, the unwanted renovation of her body, at least since Sam was born: the expansion and ultimate shrinking of her breasts, the settling and pockmarking of her thighs, the relaxing of all that was firm. Jacob had told her, on their second visit to the inn, and on other occasions, that he loved her body exactly as it was. But despite believing him, some nights she felt a need to apologize to him.

  And then she remembered it. Of course she did: it was put there for her to remember at this moment. She didn’t know it at the time. She didn’t know why she, who had never stolen anything in her life, was stealing. This was why.

  She raised one foot onto the sink and held the doorknob to her mouth, warming and wetting it with her breathing. She parted the lips of her pussy and pressed it there, gentle at first, then less so, starting to spin the knob. She felt the first wave of something good go through her, and her legs weakened. She squatted, pulled down the neck of her shirt, and exposed one breast. Then she re-wet the knob with her tongue and found its place between her lips again, pressing tiny circles against her clit, then just tapping it there, liking how the warm metal began to stick to her skin, to pull at it a little each time.

  She was on her hands and knees. No. She was standing. Where was she? Outside. Yes. Leaning against her car. In a parking lot. In a field. No, bent, the top half of her body across the car’s backseat, her feet on the earth. Her pants and underwear were pulled down only far enough to expose her ass. She pressed her face into the seat and pushed her ass out. She spread her legs as wide as the pants would allow. She wanted them held together. She wanted it to be difficult. They could be discovered at any moment. You have to be fast, she told him. Him? Just fuck me hard. It was Jacob. Just make me come. Just fuck me how you want, Jacob, and walk away. Just leave me here with your cum dripping down my thighs. Fuck me and go. No. It shifted. Now she was in the bespoke hardware showroom. No men. Only doorknobs. She ground the knob into her clit, licked three fingers, and slid them inside to feel the contractions as she came.

  She felt a sudden thud, like the violent landing that would sometimes jerk her from near-sleep. But it wasn’t that—she wasn’t crashing onto the floor; something was crashing onto her. What the hell was going on? Had too much blood rushed to her waist too quickly, causing some kind of neurological event? Masturbation was about mental exertion, bu
t she was suddenly at the mercy of her mind.

  Through the ceiling of her pine coffin she could see Sam standing above her, so handsome in his suit, a shovel in hand. She didn’t choose this. It didn’t bring her pleasure. What a beautiful boy. What a beautiful man. It’s OK, love. OK, OK, OK. She moaned, and he wailed, both of them animals. He scooped another shovelful of dirt and tipped it onto her. So this is what it’s like. Now I know, and nothing will be different.

  And then Sam left.

  And Jacob and Max and Benjy left.

  All her men left.

  And then more dirt, this time from the shovels of strangers, four at a time.

  And then they left.

  And she was alone, in the tiniest house of her life.

  She was brought back to the world, back to life, by a buzzing—it shook her free from her unchosen fantasy, and she was hit by the full absurdity of what she was doing. Who did she think she was? Her in-laws downstairs, her son down the hall, her IRA bigger than her savings account. She didn’t feel ashamed; she felt stupid.

  Another buzz.

  She couldn’t place its source.

  It was a phone, but not a buzz she’d ever heard before.

  Did Jacob get Sam a smartphone to replace the hand-me-down flip phone on which he’d been texting at Joseph Mitchell speed for the last year? They’d discussed the possibility of doing so for his bar mitzvah, but that was still weeks off, and before Sam had gotten into trouble, and anyway, they’d rejected the idea. Too much already pulling everyone too far into the noisy elsewhere. The experiment with Other Life had all but kidnapped Sam’s consciousness.

  She heard the buzz.

  She searched the wicker basket full of toiletry odds and ends, the medicine cabinet: small and huge bottles of Advil, nail polish remover, organic tampons, Aquaphor, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, Benadryl, Neosporin, Polysporin, children’s ibuprofen, Sudafed, Purell, Imodium, Colace, amoxicillin, aspirin, triamcinolone acetonide cream, lidocaine cream, Dermoplast spray, Debrox drops, saline solution, Bactroban cream, floss, vitamin E lotion…all the things bodies might have a need for. When did bodies develop so many needs? For so many years she needed nothing.

  She heard the buzz.

  Where was it? She might have been able to convince herself that it was coming from the neighbors’, on the other side of the wall, or even that she’d imagined it, but it buzzed again, and this time she could place the sound in the corner, by the floor.

  She got on her hands and knees. In the basket of magazines? Behind the toilet? She reached her hand around the bowl, and no sooner had she touched it than it buzzed again, as if touching her back. Whose phone was this? One final buzz: a missed call from JULIA.

  Julia?

  But she was Julia.

  what happened to you?

  T-H-I-S-2-S-H-A-L-L-N-’-T-P-A-S-S

  Sam knew that everything would collapse, he just didn’t know exactly how or when. His parents were going to get divorced and ultimately hate each other and spread destruction like that Japanese reactor. That much was clear, if not to them. He tried not to notice their lives, but it was impossible to ignore how often his dad fell asleep in front of the absence of news, how often his mom retreated into pruning the trees of her architectural models, how his dad started serving dessert every night, how his mom told Argus she “needed space” whenever he licked her, how devoted his mom had become to the Travel section, how his dad’s search history was all real estate sites, how his mom would put Benjy on her lap whenever his dad was in the room, the violence with which his dad began to hate spoiled athletes who don’t even try, how his mom gave three thousand dollars to the fall NPR drive, how his dad bought a Vespa in retaliation, the end of appetizers in restaurants, the end of the third bedtime story for Benjy, the end of eye contact.

  He saw what they either couldn’t see or couldn’t allow themselves to see, and that only made him more pissed, because being less stupid than one’s parents is repulsive, like taking a gulp from a glass of milk that you thought was orange juice. Because he was less stupid than his parents, he knew it would one day be suggested to him that he wouldn’t have to choose, even though he would. He knew he would begin to lose the desire or ability to fake it in school, and his grades would roll down an inclined plane according to some formula he was supposed to be proficient with, and the expressions of his parents’ love would inflate in response to their sadness about his sadness, and he would be rewarded for falling apart. His parents’ guilt about asking so much of him would get him off the hook for organized sports, and he’d be able to favorably renegotiate his screen time, and dinners would start to look a lot less organic, and soon enough he’d be steering toward the iceberg while his parents played dueling violins at each other.

  He loved interesting facts, but was almost always troubled by his strange recurrent thoughts. Like this one: What if he witnessed a miracle? How would he convince anyone that he wasn’t joking? If a newborn told him a secret? If a tree walked away? If he met his older self and learned about all the avoidable catastrophic mistakes he would be unable to avoid? He imagined his conversations with his mom, with his dad, with fake friends at school, with real friends in Other Life. Most of them would just laugh. Maybe one or two could be nudged to a gesture of belief. Max would at least want to believe him. Benjy would believe him, but only because he believed everything. Billie? No. Sam would be alone with a miracle.

  There was a knock on his door. Not the sanctuary door, but his bedroom door.

  “Scram, fucker.”

  “Excuse me?” his mom said, opening and entering.

  “Sorry,” Sam said, flipping the iPad facedown on his desk. “I thought you were Max.”

  “And you think that’s a good way to talk to your brother?”

  “No.”

  “Or to anybody?”

  “No.”

  “So why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe take a moment to question yourself.”

  He didn’t know if the suggestion was rhetorical, but he knew this wasn’t the time to take her anything less than literally.

  After a moment of questioning himself, the best he could muster was “I guess I’m someone who says things he knows he shouldn’t say.”

  “I guess so.”

  “But I’ll get better at that.”

  She scanned the room. God, did he hate her little stolen surveys: of his homework, his belongings, his appearance. Her constant judgment carved through him like a river, creating two shores.

  “What have you been doing up here?”

  “Not e-mailing, or texting, or playing Other Life.”

  “OK, but what have you been doing?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “I’m not sure how that could be possible.”

  “Isn’t this your day off?”

  “No, it’s not my day off. It’s my day to get some things done that I’ve been putting off. Like breathing and thinking. But then we had to make an unscheduled visit to Adas Israel this morning, as you might remember, and then I had to meet with a client—”

  “Why did you have to?”

  “Because it’s my job.”

  “But why today?”

  “I felt that I had to, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “And then in the car it occurred to me that even though you have almost certainly thwarted it, we should probably continue to act as if your bar mitzvah is going to happen. And among the many, many things that only I would remember to remember is your suit.”

  “What suit?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s true. I don’t have a suit.”

  “Obvious once stated, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I continually find it amazing how many things are like that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why are you apologizing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So, we need to get you a suit.”

&
nbsp; “Today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “The first three places we go aren’t going to have what we need, and should we find something passable, it’s not going to fit, and the tailor is going to get it wrong twice.”

  “Do I have to be there?”

  “Where?”

  “The suit place.”

  “No, no, of course you don’t have to be there. Let’s make things easy and build our own 3-D printer out of popsicle sticks and macaroni, and render a perfectly accurate anatomical model of you that I can schlep to the suit place alone on my day off.”

  “Could we teach it my haftorah?”

  “I’m not laughing at your jokes right now.”

  “That didn’t require saying.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You don’t have to say you aren’t laughing for someone to know you aren’t laughing.”

  “That didn’t require saying, either, Sam.”

  “Fine. Sorry.”

  “We’re going to have to talk when Dad comes home from his meeting, but I need to say something. It is required.”

  “Fine.”

  “Stop saying ‘fine.’ ”

  “Sorry.”

  “Stop saying ‘sorry.’ ”

  “I thought the whole point was that I was supposed to be apologizing?”

  “For what you did.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “I’m very disappointed in you.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s it? You don’t have anything else to say? Like maybe, ‘I did it and I’m sorry’?”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  She put her hands on her waist, forefingers through belt loops.

  “Clean up this mess. It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s my room.”

  “But it’s our house.”

  “I can’t move that board. We’re only halfway done with the game. Dad said we could finish after I’m not in trouble anymore.”

  “You know why you always beat him?”

  “Because he lets me win.”

  “He hasn’t let you win in years.”

  “He goes easy.”

  “He doesn’t. You beat him because it excites him to capture pieces, but you’re always thinking four moves ahead. It makes you good at chess, and it makes you good at life.”