An Uncommon Education (11 page)

I looked for the final sentence in the chapter, the one my father told me was like the last passage in a symphony, all that the author had been working toward:
Truth is what stands the test of experience.
She’d like that, I assured myself, growing more confident; it sounded rabbinical. I backed up one, then two, then three paragraphs, finally settling on the middle of the previous page: long enough to make an impression, not so long (I hoped) that I’d lose her attention.

I could see that Teddy was disappointed when I returned the book to the shelf—he must have also been thinking that his mother would have loved it if I brought home Einstein—but he didn’t question me. I pulled a volume of Bohr from the next shelf and marched to the entrance, checking it out unceremoniously, my pace increasing as I made my way down the front steps and onto the sidewalk. Teddy was half running behind me, but I didn’t say a word to him. I couldn’t. What I was planning had to be done quickly, or I’d lose my nerve.

M
rs. Rosenthal was at the stove, as usual, stirring something in a pot. The red-skinned cheese was on the wooden block that served as their table, two pieces of it this time. My heart leapt. The timing was good. Beside them, a hard peach had been cut into quarters, then eighths, so that the entire offering included four pieces of fruit and an entire miniature wheel of cheese. Perhaps I had misjudged her. Perhaps she was warming to me. Perhaps this wasn’t a moment of desperation. But I had to keep going. I was too afraid to stop.

I sat down, picking up my napkin and unfolding it slowly before putting it on my lap. Teddy was looking at me so intently I felt like kicking him under the table. And Mrs. Rosenthal was humming. Humming! Why was she humming? I looked at Teddy and he only shook his head, bewildered. He could make no sense of either one of us. He looked terribly lost.

His mother turned around to face us. She was even smiling a little that day, which gave me courage.

“Did you know, Theodore,” I said, just as he took his first bite, “that Albert Einstein was not the first Jew to win a Nobel Prize?” My plate was still in her hand, the white of it almost glaring against her dark, creviced fingers. She put it down in front of me and turned her back to us.

A moment later she had resumed her stirring. “It was Albert A. Michelson, in 1907,” I went on. Teddy didn’t move. His mother stirred. The only sounds were the
tuck tuck tuck, tuck tuck tuck
of the wooden spoon hitting the sides of the pot, the bubbling of the soup. I knew she was listening. “But Einstein was the most famous Jew to win it. And as we all know”—I coughed out a little conspiratorial laugh—“it was for his theory of relativity.”

I made a show of shaking out my napkin and replacing it on my lap. My hands needed something to do or they’d tremble. “But the theory was still new. It matured and deepened throughout his lifetime.” I reached for a piece of cheese as I’d once seen my mother reach for a bottle of wine, casually, elegantly. “As late as 1950 he posited”—I had learned that word from my father last Thursday during vocabulary night in the Feinstein household—“that
science searches for relations which are thought to exist independently of the searching individual
.” Teddy stopped eating. His mother didn’t move.

I took a deep breath.
“This includes the case where man himself is the subject, or the subject of scientific statements may be concepts created by ourselves, as in mathematics. Such concepts are not necessarily supposed to correspond to any objects in the outside world. However, all scientific statements and laws have one characteristic in common: they are ‘true or false’ (adequate or inadequate). Roughly speaking, our reaction to them is ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ ”
I took a sip of water, pretending not to notice that she had turned around, the wooden spoon still in her hand and dripping now on her floor.

I clasped my hands together before me, a move I felt sure was inspired:
“The scientific way of thinking has further characteristics
.
”
I was sweating between my palms and they had begun to shake: there were no more false movements to be made.
“The concepts which it uses to build up its coherent systems are not expressing emotions. For the scientist, there is only ‘being,’ but no wishing, no valuing, no good, no evil; no goal. As long as we remain within the realm of science proper
. . .” Had their clock always ticked so loud?
“We can never meet with a sentence of the type: ‘Thou shalt not lie.’ There is something like a Puritan’s restraint in the scientist who seeks truth: he keeps away from everything voluntaristic”
—I had had to practice this word several times on the T ride home—vol-un-tar-
is
-tic—while Teddy had wanted to chat—
“or emotional. Incidentally, this trait is the result of a slow development
. . .”

“Ssssshhhhh,” she had begun to hiss, quietly at first, the sound increasing until she stopped herself short once she realized she’d silenced me.

She dropped the spoon on the table and walked out the front door, Teddy and I falling out of our chairs to trail her. She was in my kitchen a moment later. “Vat is wrong with this girl, your daughter?” she demanded of my mother, who had been sitting with a book, babysitting dinner. She stood up. “Is she possessed?” Mrs. Rosenthal demanded, her voice getting higher, her accent thick with emotion.

My father came in from the living room in response to the intrusion, though he stood at the door. “Mrs. Rosenthal!” he said, surprised, affecting the false joviality that suited him. “What a pleasant surprise. Have a seat! May we offer your something?”

“Pshhhh,” she exhaled, incensed. “Keep her!” she cried, as if ridding herself of me completely.

“I’m sorry,” my mother said, standing. “I don’t understand.” She locked eyes with Mrs. Rosenthal. “Has Naomi done something wrong?” It wasn’t so much a question as a challenge.

Mrs. Rosenthal turned on me, the query in her eyes answered on my face. “They do not know.” It wasn’t a question. “Show them,” she demanded.

“Show us what?” my father asked. He looked nervous, vulnerable.

“She is possessed! Show them!”

“I am not!” I hollered back. “And I
am
Jewish.” I stuck my tongue out at her, then began to recite the speech again, quickly now, rushing through it, making it to the third paragraph before my mother stopped me.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said softly. “You can stop.” No one said a word. “Einstein, yes?” She spoke so softly I’m not sure anyone else could hear. I nodded.

Mrs. Rosenthal eyed her as she might a rat that had just walked into the kitchen.
“Meshugenah,”
she muttered, “the whole lot of you.
Meshugas
.” She gripped Teddy’s hand as if by doing so she could save him from drowning.

“It seems Naomi has, unknowingly, offended you,” my mother began conversationally, though she had paused for a monumental beat before she spoke. “I can assure you, however, that she is not possessed.” She spoke in clipped, articulate tones. My mother had never finished college, but she had the ability to speak with an intelligence so sharp it could cut through a room of commentaries. Even her posture was lightly intimidating. Mrs. Rosenthal stared at her open mouthed. She pulled Teddy closer to her. My mother was getting angrier, color blossoming in her cheeks.

“Naomi,” my father said, crouching down to me.
“Ketzi.”
He got my attention. “How did you know all that?” He had his hands on my shoulders, as though I might fly up to the ceiling. My mother closed her mouth.

“I read it,” I said, looking at Teddy’s mother. “Where?” my father said, his excitement almost as great as his confusion. “The library,” I answered. He looked puzzled. “Physics, section 112.65 Ba to 112.65 Dr.” It felt, very briefly, wonderful to let it all out. He frowned.

“She memorized it,” my mother explained so only he could hear.

His eyes opened wide, searching mine. “Can you tell us what the other sections are?” he asked cautiously.

I put both of my hands gently on his arms: “112.65 Ds to 112.65 Ga and 112.65 Ga to 112.65 Fl . . .” He stopped me after a few more, then hugged me, tightly, wanting to press something away—doubt, the quickening vertigo of disbelief. When he released me it was to speak to Teddy’s mother. “If you recall, the great Talmudic scholars,” he said from the floor, “more than one of them had just such a gift. Naomi, as you may know”—he puffed out his chest; Mrs. Rosenthal would almost certainly not know the zinger coming—“is descended from more than one great Eastern European rabbi.”

She shook her head. “It is not good,” she contradicted him. “A little girl with the mind of an old man.” She spat on the floor, then began muttering again. It sounded like an incantation. She looked up and at my father, both eyes locking on his. “A girl is not meant to become a great Talmudic scholar,” she pronounced. “A girl is meant to become a woman. With a woman’s duties.”

My father bristled visibly. “No. A girl becomes a woman who, if she wants, becomes a doctor.” He put a hand on my shoulder.

Mrs. Rosenthal glared at me, disapproval on every corner of her face. “She should become a mother. Then she would learn something.”

“Mom,” Teddy said, pulling lightly on her wrist. She looked down at him. His face was pleading. “Stop,” he said. “Please.” Her gaze didn’t waver off of him, but her face began to fall in on itself as she took in his expression. She must not have realized until that moment that he, like me, needed the care of another child more desperately than either of our parents wanted to admit. She took in a breath quickly. “Tee-o-dore,” she said softly. And they exchanged a look of such intimacy I had to look away. With one arm she pulled him to her chest and held him there. “Come here, girl,” she said after a moment.
“Aher,”
she repeated in Yiddish, gesturing to me.

I moved out from under my father’s hands and went to her, trying to feel brave. She was not very tall, but she was infinitely wider than me; her body could have performed a full eclipse of mine. She laid a hand on my forehead. Her touch was dry and papery, like the wasp’s wings Teddy and I had collected when burying the ones my father had killed along with a nest that summer. We pulled off the wings before covering the split bodies with dirt, the transparent clippings taking to the air like rice at a wedding. Mrs. Rosenthal shook her head, tsking. She lifted her other hand off Teddy and put it on the side of my face, chanting, shaking her head. I realized almost an instant too late that I had become an object of pity, and dropped my head just in time.

And then, suddenly, I can’t explain why, I threw my arms around her, giving her the hug my father had given me, the one my mother would never have wanted, pressing myself into her so she would know me, bodily, squeezing sympathy from her as though she were an overripe fruit, full of sweet juices.

She made a small, soft sound and stopped muttering. I held her for a moment longer, at peace. Then, alarmed by her silence, I stood back and looked up at her. It’s true I didn’t trust her. She hadn’t wanted me to. Her eyes were shining now, though her mouth was turned down. She put a hand on my head, then dropped it to my chest, pushing against me. I took a single step back.

She shook her head and turned her face. “My boy is lonely,” she said. She took a moment, nodding to herself, before she addressed the room: “So now you know.” Teddy’s mother took his hand and walked out the door.

The next day at snack I had my own piece of fruit. In exchange, I stopped going with Teddy to the library.

Seven

I
n the years before his father died, Teddy grew long and strong, like Paul Bunyan in the tall tales, so beautiful that even the reality of him was difficult to grasp. If he hadn’t been so thin, he would have seemed truly unreal. But his young bones stuck their way out of the sleeves of his T-shirts; his knees were doorknobs as he bent to examine something; the line of his jaw strained against the skin: it took effort for his skeleton not to burst through. I took all this in with the flush satisfaction of devotion. I had decided it was just fine that we would be a family together. We were equally eager to be in each other’s company, and neither one of us alone was really complete. There was still the problem of his mother, who hadn’t warmed to me since the Einstein incident, but I was sure she had at least grown used to me. I was a constant presence hovering just near her, and I allowed myself to hope that she was less categorically opposed to me than she had once been.

Just before his twelfth birthday, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to either one of us, Teddy’s
peyes
disappeared and his clothes loosened, both in formality and fit. Together we concluded that, as Teddy put it, “they were chilling a little,” and that, as my father put it, at least one of his parents might “be warming to the idea of greater assimilation.” And I, understanding myself to be the product of the greatest of assimilations, began to perk up, hoping that one day Mrs. Rosenthal might release her son just enough to let him drift into that undefined, soupy mess in which cultures merge and individuals emerge, forming fierce pairs to substitute for the intense connections they’d fought so hard to diminish.

He was still bar mitzvahed the following March. I was not invited, but a shaky video recording was made of the party afterward. I tried to act interested, but I wasn’t. I felt more and more confused by Judaism, more like a half-breed member of a tribe that demanded one’s full attention, and I realized that as far as I could tell, my parents’ actual faith might be either blind or nonexistent.

Still, our mutual transitions into adulthood were definitely taking place, and I was fascinated by the small, critically different ways our bodies were changing. Teddy’s Adam’s apple seemed to leap from his throat when he swallowed, and I had new breasts that hurt so much sometimes I lay awake, shirtless. We were not yet sexual, but our bodies were preparing us to be. His being close to me hinted at a new thrill, and I felt sometimes anxious in his presence, hungry and nervous.