An Uncommon Education (8 page)

I was at once thrilled to know that they had this in common, and disappointed that it did not include me. I had no religious education to speak of. Both my parents had hated their Sunday schools and felt that if I were ever to become religious, it would have to be a matter of personal choice. And so I chose my religion to be whatever my father would answer questions about: science, history, my future.

My mother broke into my thoughts. “Remember, Naomi, as you learn to fix all those hearts. Remember where they’ve been before they got to you. Medical science will tell you that a life ends when the brain has died. But the Halacha insists that as long as a person’s heart is beating, she is alive. Sometimes, the doctors aren’t always right.” She reached over and held my wrist, covering the bracelet, closing her eyes at the same time. After a while I asked her if she was awake and she didn’t answer. I slipped my hand out from under hers, got up, and walked quietly toward the door.

“Naomi,” she said to the wall, “close the door on your way out.”

I can recognize now that not only was that the most she had ever spoken about herself since I had known her, it was the most she would ever tell me. I wonder if something about my father’s illness had brought out something different in her, too, but if it did, it soon retreated. And at the time I don’t remember wondering over anything she had told me, despite the fact that in one brief conversation she had managed to mention her family, God, and medicine. I just drank her in, always optimistic there might one day be more, confident the future would have what the present couldn’t hold.

T
he next day I went back to my window. The wind picked up, but it stayed sunny, the trees light-filled and bent. I felt a huge sense of possibility about the day, and it wasn’t just the unexpected glimpse my mother had given me into what I most wanted to see. I think I already sensed how important Teddy could be to me, though we hadn’t known each other long. I dozed, on and off, waiting.

Teddy was back in the yard before dinner. I jumped off the seat at my window and ran downstairs, fearing he would disappear if I didn’t get there fast enough. The wind slammed the door hard behind me and I knew my father would have come out to yell at me if he’d heard it, that my mother wouldn’t have heard, or would let it go. We met in the middle of the yard. He looked tired and frantic.

“Listen,” he said, looking over his shoulder, “I definitely think we should get married.” He looked behind him again. The day had been scrubbed clean from his face. “But my mother doesn’t like you.”

“Why?” I asked, biting my nails. My teeth worked the fine pieces of dirt, giving them something to do. The back of his house looked back at us, a jumble of indiscernible shades of gray, the eyes of occlusion.

“You’re not Jewish,” he explained patiently.

“But I am!” I nearly hollered.

“But your mom isn’t,” he countered. The wind was lifting the hair off my head and his; it seemed we might fly away.

“She is!” I exclaimed. My mother, who never asked for a place in things, had wanted this place. It made me furious beyond all reason to think anyone would take it from her.

“But she wasn’t born that way, right?”

I glared at him. “Doesn’t matter.”

He shook his head, dismissing my objection as irrelevant. “My mom doesn’t really understand,” he admitted, or lied, leaning forward. His breath was fragrant, like peanut butter, and a little sour, like milk. When he looked at me his eyes were the liquid amber they became when he was excited or angry. When he was furious, they were flat, almost gray, like cement. He had the coloring of a redhead, with long, light-brown lashes and freckles, though his hair was a dull, ashy blond. It almost always looked dingy, and it smelled wonderful. “We need to do something to make her like you,” he said. The wind flew up my shirt, as cold as the sun was bright. I shivered. He grabbed my hand.

“I saw this a few months ago,” he began. “She likes this TV show where grown-ups fight and kiss a lot. She usually yells at them in Yiddish, but this one guy, who I think was supposed to marry someone else, kept kissing this other lady and my mom got so mad she spat and said something awful, I don’t know what, but I could tell it was horrible.” He looked hastily over his shoulder. “She was muttering and so worked up she had me worried.” He glanced over his shoulder once more. “But I heard her—
‘Ayin hora,’
she says, like it’s a done deal, like she knows something.” I looked blank. “The evil eye,” he explained, his teeth clenched. “Next week, the guy dies, and my mom’s just sitting there in front of the screen, smiling.”

I thought the wind might be filling my head, making the skin on my forehead stretch out and thin. I shivered again. “She killed him?” I croaked.

Teddy didn’t answer me right away, but his eyes were watching me closely. “I’m worried,” he whispered back.

My hand flew up to my chest. “What should we do?” I asked.

He leaned forward and whispered into my ear, his cheek on mine, “We need a plan.” Then he squeezed my hand, turned around, and ran back inside. “Tomorrow,” he mouthed at the door.

I
hid myself in my room, staring at the walls in a desperate attempt at inspiration. I would need to do something definitive, something that would indebt his mother to me for life. Somehow it had become about her as much as it had become about Teddy; somehow I knew they were, on some level, one and the same, that I couldn’t love one without having the love of the other. She would not let me take him away from her. I understood this, already, about his mother.

I thought about my own mother and her clean beauty, wondered if a child could be readopted, if we could steal Teddy and keep him. I thought about what she’d said about Grandmother Carol, wondering if, on her rare visits, she brought me candy as a way to try to quickly fix something that was broken. Adults assumed it was kids who loved candy, but they were the ones always presenting it to us like a cure-all.

I dug the plastic, jellybean-filled Easter bunny she’d brought with her that spring out from the bottom of my closet where I had buried it after my father had pitched a fit. I stared at it after retrieving it, everything about it perfectly intact, the pastel colors looking back at me opaquely. There was something both unsettling and miraculous about the fact that even though it had been buried for three months, it still looked as untouched as the day my grandmother gave it to me. Perhaps this was not just a miracle of plastic and corn syrup; perhaps there was more to this mythical creature than met the eye. The fact that some of the candies were the exact same color as my father’s antacids gave me further courage. I clutched the rabbit in my hand and snuck down the hall to my parents’ bathroom.

His father’s heart. That was where the miracle needed to happen. What does a heart need? I tried to think. I thought of that night in the hospital, of the ugly mold of the heart and the meticulously drawn one with all its lettering. I thought of the orange bottles they’d sent my father home with, how he took them so carefully, each pill its own distinctive and mysterious color.

My parents’ medicine cabinet was full of its usual mysteries. Cough syrup I recognized. My mother’s hairbrush. Shaving cream. Many other bottles, the titles of which I could read but did not understand. There were three of the type I was searching for: the orange with the white safety cap, a device my father had already shown me how to unlock. I was hoping for one that didn’t have many pills left. The second one I tried had only two, and my heart leapt when I opened it. I dumped them into the toilet, worrying that it was too loud, that the sound would wake my mother, praying as I flushed that the two pills wouldn’t be missed. Then I replaced the contents with half the jellybeans, saving the other half just in case Mr. Rosenthal needed more.

Back in my room I tried to scrape the paper off the front but it wouldn’t budge. I was sweating. I pulled off my sweatshirt and draped it on my bed, setting the bottle beside me to study it. I could make my own label, tell Teddy how to get it to his dad without either one of his parents’ seeing where it had come from. But how? How to make sure that these oddly beautiful gems would work as I needed them to?

I screwed my eyes shut and stuck the bottle under my shirt, pushing it up first to the left side of my chest, then farther up to the spot on my neck where I could feel my pulse beat against it. I said the Shema, the only prayer I had ever said on my own, the one my father had told me to say when someone died, the one I now whispered to myself whenever we passed roadkill:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One.
Da Vinci and his pigs’ hearts swam before my eyes.

I studied the effect on the bottle. It was impressively unchanged, but warm. I went to my desk and cut a rectangle from a piece of white paper, wrote “Heart Medicine” in bold print across it, then “
vena cava, atrium, aorta, ventricle, septum
,” in small, careful letters underneath before taping it over the printed pharmaceutical label. At that point it looked completely different; the only thing it had in common with what it had been was orange and white plastic.

I
tucked the bottle under my pillow that night and slept with it, bringing it down to breakfast in the morning. I always ate early, with my father. I saw him glance at my creation, but he didn’t mention it until after he’d prepared my cereal and juice and set them down before me.

“What’s this?” he asked, gesturing toward the bottle as though he had just noticed it.

“Medicine,” I said, shoving food into my mouth.

He nodded. He picked it up and looked at the label, then set it back down. He studied it, trying to form another question.

“Teddy’s father is sick,” I explained, helping him out. “Mr. Rosenthal. I think it’s his heart.”

My father opened the bottle and looked in. “Are these jellybeans?” he asked.

“They were,” I said. “I made them into heart pills.”

My father nodded, swallowing, trying to take it all in. I felt vaguely sorry for him. “Heart pills,” he repeated, still nodding. He looked me in the eye. “You know, Naomi, people go to school for many years to make such things. You can’t just create such things overnight,
ketzi
.” He was looking at me like there was something very important I needed to learn, something he thought I wouldn’t want to know. His expression only made me more determined.

I stood up. “They’ll work,” I said, taking my bowl and glass to the sink and dumping the whole meal down, the milk and cereal and juice mixing in the sink and making me feel vaguely sick. I was sweating again. I turned around. “You’ll just have to trust me, Dad.” He still looked like he had something to explain to me.

I grabbed the bottle and ran out the door, though the sun was only just rising. When I reached Teddy’s back steps he was standing there in short pajamas, his knees standing out and looking at me. “Here,” I said, opening the screen and shoving the pills in his hand, “give these to your dad.” I ran back down the stairs before remembering. “Two in the morning, two at night,” I called over my shoulder. He nodded, his face a blur behind the screen.

T
hat night I dreamt of my mother’s last visit to the doctor: over two years earlier, the winter before the summer I turned seven. My father had brought her from her room and helped her into her coat after the babysitter had been called. They were trying to pretend that they were going to dinner instead of to the hospital, but I saw the number they left for the babysitter by the phone. I wish my hunger for information had known better boundaries, but I was too young to make the connection between nosing outside my business and learning things I might one day want to forget. The nightmare brought back every detail.

When they came home later that night, I pretended to be asleep in my room as I heard my father shuffle the sitter out and my mother go, too slowly, up the stairs. The quiet that came after was only more frightening, and I lay awake, listening to it. I knew something was wrong, and was all the more upset by not knowing what it was.

I lay in the dark for a while, my vigilance finally paying off when I heard a soft thump in the hallway outside my room. I opened my eyes wide, trying to make sense of the muted noises now just at the top of the stairs. I pulled the blankets off and went to the door. There was no one there, just the normal shadows of our upstairs hall at night. I studied them, wondering if one of the shadows might shift and frighten me. I remember one taller than me that might have been a coat rack or a man. I was more curious at that point than frightened, but I shivered as I stood in the doorway of my room.

I went down the hall to my parents’ room. Their door was slightly ajar, and as my eyes adjusted to the dim light from their window I could see only one shape asleep in the bed. I walked back down the hall and down the stairs and looked idly through the living rooms, working up the courage to find my mother in whatever state I found her, suddenly afraid again. Once in the kitchen, I heard the front door shut softly.

I made my way toward the sound. On tiptoe, I could look through the windowpane in the front door, a kaleidoscope of frost patterns. I put on my coat, hat, mittens, and boots as quietly as I could, afraid of waking my father. I knew he’d tell me to go back to bed, and I knew I didn’t want to. The thought didn’t occur to me that if he had known she was gone, he would have gone after her himself.

The world outside was shockingly cold and completely silent. The trees were strangely immobile, holding themselves stiff in the cold. It was a windless night, but the freezing temperature charged the air with its own invisible errands. It had snowed lightly, enough so that I could see footprints leading from our door down our front path. I had never gone beyond that by myself. I hesitated for a minute before following the tracks that turned right and disappeared down the street. As I walked I felt nervous, like I always did when I disobeyed my parents, but all bets were off when one of them had broken the rules, too.