The Instructions

  There were a lot of reasons why I was crying: my father was angry at me; he was disappointed in me; he was worried about me; he used a Yiddish endearment; he believed he was a murderer; he kept trying to protect me from things I could protect myself from; and by calling me an apologist, he was calling me a bad scholar. Despite his perfect intentions, despite his saying everything that he was saying out of love for me, he was wrong and I was right. I was crying because he was not God and I was not Avraham. I was crying because I saw that to honor him, I would have to disobey him—that to honor him would be to disobey him—and it is sad to learn you have to disobey your favorite man.

  I let him squeeze and play-punch my arms and my shoulders while he delivered a light, singsong monologue about tears and the grass atop the grave of poor Michael Weinberg; whether the water of the tears would grow the grass more than the salt of them would kill the grass or the salt would be the victor; whether the two would cancel each other out; whether the salt content of the tears was negligible, and what, if anything, that might say about the power of the tears; whether the tears themselves might be negligible and what asking that question might say about the fitness of the father asking it; whether or not the monologue was intentionally symbolic and whether or not one could be unintentionally symbolic while delivering a monologue; and if one could not be unintentionally symbolic, could one be intentionally but unknowingly symbolic; can a man have intentions he doesn’t know he has?

  And so on til I stopped crying.

  On the walk back to the Forems’, I gave my uneaten bagel to a homeless black guy on Western. The black guy was standing a couple feet away from two homeless white guys. I didn’t give the bagel to the white guys because I worried they were Jews, which meant, I reasoned, that the bagel would harm them. Then I felt dumb about it because the black guy might have been a Jew like me, even though it was statistically less likely. And then I felt even dumber because statistics were irrelevant because even if the black guy was a Jew, he was starving, and Hashem should not have had a problem with me feeding a starving Jew chometz. He should, if anything, prefer that among three starving men, I would choose to feed the Jew, regardless of what I was feeding him. And if I was wrong, and that was not what He preferred, then He and I would already have had so many more other problems I didn’t even know about that to spend time worrying about a bagel and whether or not some guy I gave it to was Jewish seemed pretty wasteful. In the big scheme of things. So I stopped worrying. I held my dad’s hand and let myself be tired.

  Although she favored a far less modest look—t-shirts and jeans or fatigue pants, if not tank-tops and shorts or cotton dresses that quit above the knee—my mother, who never paid attention to weather forecasts, had, on the day before she was to meet my father’s parents, bought for the occasion an ankle-length skirt of unbreathing fabric and a blouse that buttoned up to her chin and down to her wrists. This was springtime, and Chicago, and despite it having been wintery on the day she’d purchased the clothing, the temperature climbed forty-five degrees over the ensuing twenty-four hours. My mom did own other slightly less formal, far less constricting items that she wore to the hospital, but those clothes were at her apartment in Hyde Park, whereas she was at my father’s apartment on the other side of the city, in Uptown. She had Fridays off and had spent Thursday night there, as had become her habit, and by the time it occurred to her that she would suffocate in the clothing she’d bought, she and my father had only half an hour to get to my grandparents’ house; even if she’d had enough money to buy a new outfit at a local thrift store—the only kind of store there was back then in Uptown that didn’t sell liquor, candybars, or used saxophones—there was just no time to do it.

  So she frummed up as originally planned, and over the course of the two-mile walk to his parents’ house, my dad, nervous himself, attempted to lighten the situation with one-liners that failed to hit til he came upon, “At least the material’s too thick to shvitz through,” at which point my mother, bent at the knees with gallows laughter, turned her head and saw that she had, in fact, shvitzed through the fabric that covered her left underarm, and began to cry.

  They got to my grandparents’ a few minutes early, only to find my grandmother behind schedule. In order to finish the cooking before sundown, she needed help in the kitchen.

  “We’re going to have to use the pressure cooker because we are under pressure. Do you know how to use a pressure cooker, honey?”

  “Yes,” my mother said, dabbing a damp handkerchief behind her ears.

  “And how are you with a chicken?” my grandma said.

  “I fix a nice chick-chicken,” said my mother, the stutter the only evidence of the gasp she’d otherwise stifled upon realizing, mid-sentence, that the chicken she was committing to would be a kosher one.

  My grandma said, “You don’t sound so sure,” and my father, who did not yet know about the Six-Day War chicken trauma, and who was still in the kitchen at the time, believed his mother had said so lightheartedly.

  My mother, on the other hand, was confident that “You don’t sound so sure” = “Are you telling me that you expect my son to spend his life with a woman who balks at the thought of cooking a nice kosher chicken in a pressure cooker on Shabbos?” = “Do you expect me to believe that you are presenting yourself honestly in that high-collared get-up when already a rash is forming on that delicate neck of yours?” = “With your skin so dark, and my son’s so light, how can you even consider bringing my grandchildren into the world?”

  “I’m sure,” my mom said.

  She was shown the vegetables and the knives, the spicerack and the pressure cooker, and then she was shown the chicken. “Will you poke it just to double-check it’s thawed?” said my grandmother.

  My mom, a soldier, a killer, poked the hairy chicken with the knuckles of her clenched fists and got to work. She prepped the chicken with the spices, pressure-cooked the chicken with the vegetables, and set the chicken on the chicken-dish when the chicken was finished cooking. By the time they all sat down to eat, she had performed so many compulsive eyelid-checks that the small bit of mascara she’d applied that afternoon was smudged like warpaint.

  “I looked like a harlot,” she always tells me. “Tell him, Judah. I looked like a cheap harlot.”

  And “Of harlots I know only what I’ve read in books and seen through the windshield on North Avenue,” responds my father. “So a harlot if she says so, boychic; but if a harlot, the most expensive harlot in the history of man, and of that I can be sure, for the one thing about which all the books agree is that the less a harlot looks a harlot, the more that harlot costs.”

  “You are such a sweet man,” my mother says to him, “but so superstitious. He is so sweet and superstitious, Gurion, that in the cause of protecting me from the evil eye his mother was casting upon the shvitzing black harlot her son had brought to her sabbath dinner table, he actually convinced himself I looked as nice as I wished I did. I did not.”

  “You looked gorgeous!”

  “He is crazy.”

  However my mother looked, and whatever my paternal grand-mother thought of her, this is where the story of that Shabbos bends its knees for the leap into slapstick that it must make to remain true. It is at this point in their telling of the story that my father lights a cigarette to share with my mother, to pass back and forth with her like soldiers in a forest, the filter pinched between thumb and pointerfinger, the cherry pointed down, their cupped hands turned to shield the orange light from the eyes of snipers who hide behind anterior trees; it is at this point that my parents lean toward me and fictionalize unabashedly and I lean toward them and listen without questioning and we get so involved that I sometimes take the cigarette from one of them and put it to my own lips before any of us becomes aware of what I’m doing; this is the point at which we three conspire. We agree to act as if what’s about to get said actually took place. Hardly any of it did, but the meaning of what my parents describe is truer than the
meaning that would come across if they attempted to describe what actually happened—what actually happened was, I am led to believe, mostly unlistenable, if not untellable: a series of uncomfortable glances cast in near-silence, a few cutting remarks that echoed off the soup tureen, the damage of these remarks magnifying even as the decibels diminished. What actually happened, I am led to believe, was not funny at all, was painful and dull. Yet so would have been the life of the tramp in Chaplin’s City Lights, if the tramp were not fictional; so would have been the life of the blind girl the tramp loved, if the girl were not fictional; so would have been the operation the tramp struggled to pay for and the struggle to pay for it, were the operation and the struggle not fictional. And that operation never would have worked if it weren’t fictional, and even if by some miracle it had worked, the tramp would never have been able to get the money for it. But in City Lights, the tramp does get the money, the operation does succeed, and everything eventually works out for the lovers. And all of it should be true. And so in a way it is true. And they are worth crying for, a non-fictional tramp and the non-fictional blind girl he loves—in real-life such a doomed couple would deserve our tears. Yet had Chaplin presented them as they would have been had they not been fictional, we would turn away after five minutes instead of staying til the end and weeping as we should. I once asked my father: Why do we go to the symphony hall once a year to see City Lights with orchestral accompaniment at seventy-five dollars a head? “Because it is the greatest movie ever made,” he said. And what makes it the greatest? “It is the truest,” he told me. And why do we only weep at the end of the movie? Why do we weep once we know that everything will be alright? “We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we’ve seen can’t be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.” And so to go challenging the facts in this portion of the story—like some lawyer, some headshrinker—would be to act against faith, to act against truth, to dishonor my mother and father. To monkey with the slapstick would be to lie, and I will not lie.

  However my mother’s mascara might have made her appear at the dinner table, no one has ever argued over whether or not some dried chili peppers had been cooked into the nice kosher chicken. They had been. As for why they had been, there were two opposing claims.

  My parents’: My mother had cooked chili peppers into the chicken in good faith, for the sake of better flavor.

  My grandparents’: My mother had cooked chili peppers into the chicken in bad faith, for the sake of worse flavor.

  And why would my grandparents make such a claim? Why would they believe that my mother would want to make the chicken taste bad? Opinions vary.

  “Because she wasn’t Lebuvitcher,” my father says.

  “Because they knew I was taking their son away,” says my mother, “and they thought I was out to destroy them.”

  “If she didn’t ruin the chicken on purpose,” my grandmother said to my father from across the Shabbos table, “then why won’t she eat any?”

  “She told you, already,” my father replied. “She doesn’t like to eat chicken.”

  “What does that mean?” said my grandfather. “She’s a vegetarian? Are you a vegetarian, Tamar? And if you’re a vegetarian, are you the kind of vegetarian who eats fish?”

  “I am not a vegetarian,” my mother said. “And I do eat chicken—you misunderstood. I don’t eat kosher chicken.”

  “You’re sitting at our dinner table and telling us that not only do you eat traif, but you eat traif exclusively?” said my grandmother. “You’re saying you refuse to eat that which isn’t traif? I have a hard time understanding.”

  “I am not exclusive with traif,” my mother said, “I—”

  “She’s not exclusive with traif!” said my father. “She’s eating from every other dish on the table. Every other dish on the table is as kosher as the chicken. I’m sorry, I interrupted you, Tamar—”

  “It’s okay,” my mom said, “I—”

  “Is it because she’s Ethiopian? Is it Ethiopian Jews, they don’t eat kosher chicken?” said my grandfather.

  “If she doesn’t eat it,” said my grandmother, “why would she cook it? Why would she think she would know how to cook it and now the meat is ruined?”

  “I think it’s delicious,” my father said.

  “Oh, Judah, it is not delicious,” said my grandmother.

  “I’m telling you I think it is,” my father said.

  “It is not delicious, Judah, not remotely,” said my grandfather. “It is not remotely delicious and you should stop eating it, or else your stomach will tear apart.”

  “Chili peppers!” said my grandmother. “Where did she even find them?” said my grandfather. “Why do we even have them?” he said. “They came with the spice rack,” my grandmother said, “I should throw them away? I suppose that I should now. I should throw them away. I’ll throw them away. I should have before, but that shouldn’t be so. That should not have been so. It never should have been so. Of all things, chili peppers! Peppers she puts! Peppers on chicken!” “On chicken!” said my grandfather. “On Shabbos!” “And for what?” “For what? For what he wonders. For what is: To hurt us!” “To hurt us!” “And why hurt us?” “Yes, why hurt us?” “Because we were nice enough to—” “Because we were foolish enough to—”

  “Enough!” my father said. “No one is trying to hurt you, and you are being unkind.”

  “I am not trying take your son away from you,” my mother interjected.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I am saying please do not worry,” my mother said. “I am not trying to take Judah away from you.”

  “Please do not worry? I am not trying to take Judah away from you?” said my grandfather. “If not to take him away, then what are you trying to do with him?” said my grandfather. “And why should you tell us not to worry about a thing about which we have heretorfore expressed no worry if not precisely because we should worry; if not because when you say to us ‘Don’t worry,’ you are making a threat, a veiled threat, true, but a threat nonetheless and that threat is exactly what you say it isn’t, which is to say that it is nothing other than a threat to take Judah away from us and… and… I have lost my antecedent… I have lost my own antecedent, young lady, but I have not lost my mind, I have not lost my mind, not mine, and what it is that I mean to ask you is: Why else, when we have expressed no worry about Judah being taken away by you, would you say such a thing as you have said about not trying and don’t worry, if not to suggest that we should in fact worry and that you are trying? Why say it that way when it could be much more easily expressed if you just spoke the one word over and over very quickly so it sounded like: Worry! Worry! Worry!? Why not just be forthright and honest and say to us: Worry!?”

  “And why aren’t you trying to take Judah away?” my grandmother said. “He’s not good enough to take away? You’re looking for someone smarter, maybe? Someone handsomer? As if you even could take him away! You should be so lucky. You should be so lucky, youshouldbesolucky.”

  “She should be so lucky!” “Yes, she should be so lucky!”

  “What is it you sound like?” my father said. “Robots,” my father said.

  “Yes, she should be so lucky!” “Yes, she should be so lucky!” “No, she should not be so lucky, or else she would be very lucky, which is not a thing I would want, given what so much of her luck would mean for us!” “We would be unlucky, then! You will not be so lucky with our son!”

  “A pair of shtetl robots clucking,” my father said.

  “Should she be so lucky, we should be unlucky is the thrust of the matter.” “Luck for she is no luck for we is the thrust.” “That is the thrust.”

  “I want you to be my wife,” my dad whispered to my mother.

  “When?” my mother said.

  “Her luck would be our tragedy is the real thrust.” “A tragic thrust for us, not her!” “No: not tragic for her, but lucky
!” “Lucky for her, that thrust!”

  “Next Saturday night,” my father said.

  “The worst of luck is what we should be wishing her.”

  “You are drunk with defiance,” my mother told my father.

  “The worst of luck is what we are wishing her.”

  “Then a year from next Saturday, so you know I’m sincere,” said my father. “In the meantime, live with me.”

  “…the thrust!” “…should be so lucky!”

  “I will,” my mother said. “And I will.”

  And my parents rose from their chairs.

  My father bowed and my mother curtsied.

  My father set his right hand on my mother’s waist and my mother set her left hand on my father’s shoulder.

  My father clasped her right hand with his left.

  With her left my mother clasped his right one back.

  And the dancing began.

  At first they did a mid-tempo waltz: one step for every thrust clucked, two for every three luckys. They dipped and spun away past the table.

  The musicians, insulted, launched into a furious cha-cha.

  And my parents furiously cha-cha-ed.

  They cha-cha-ed in the living room, and they cha-cha-ed in the foyer, but no matter how far away from the stage they went, the clucking grew louder and faster. Before it could deafen them, they cha-cha-ed out the door.