Dreidels on the Brain (19 page)

“Well, well,” said Mr. DeGuerre. “This is a first.”

On the chalkboard was a long equation filled with fractions and symbols and
x
's and
y
's. I could have figured it out. But, really, I thought,
Who cares?

“The computer isn't even going to hazard a guess? What does it all add up to?”

“A perfect strike,” I said.

Tough as it was to stay focused in math class, I had no problem staying wide-awake at Hebrew school.

For one thing, my heart was pounding because I was—yet again—late. It's not like anything important or interesting ever happens in Hebrew school, but the problem is Cantor Grubnitz, who stands out in front of the temple, smoking and looking at his watch until it's exactly 4:15. Then he
snubs out his cigarette, goes into class, and closes the door, screaming at anyone who comes in even a minute later.

And you know why I was late? You got it: the bus. On Thursdays there's no carpool, so I have to run from school to catch the bus a couple blocks down in front of the 7-Eleven store. If I run fast enough, I can get there in plenty of time—the number 257 is supposed to come at 3:42.
Supposed to.
Usually, though, it doesn't. Sometimes it comes much later.

Today, I got there right on time and the bus arrived just a minute later, which was perfect. There was no traffic, and hardly anyone got on or off, so we even went through some green lights. Then, about a half mile from the temple, the driver pulled over to the side of the road and waited.

I thought another passenger was coming, but I didn't see anyone.

The light turned from green to red and back again. And again. And again.

“Why are we stopped?” I finally asked.

“We have to. I'm running ahead of schedule.”

“What?” I said. “But you came to my stop right on time.”

“Nope,” said the driver, shaking his head. “I got there early. There was another 257 that was supposed to come but didn't.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “I don't know. All I know is that my orders are to wait here until we catch up to the schedule.” He looked at his watch. “Shouldn't be long—just another ten minutes.”

Great. That would get me there just after 4:15. The temple was about ten blocks down the road, and I figured that if I ran, I might just make it. But my foot was still sore from this morning, so I ended up jog-limping all the way to the temple. When I got there I pulled out my watch: 4:18—three minutes late. Just then I heard the honk of a horn and looked up to see the stupid bus zipping past, the driver waving at me. My whole Quasimodo run had been pointless.

I peeked through the window of the classroom, where I could see that Cantor Grubnitz had already begun. He had written the four Hebrew letters of the dreidel on the board, and when he turned around to write more, I saw my chance. Opening the door quietly, I snuck into an empty desk. Just as I did, he turned back.

“So, you see,” he said, “an Israeli dreidel has one letter that is different.” He pointed to the board, where he had written another four letters below. “The dreidels you play with have Nun, Gimel, Hey, and Shin, for
Nes Gadol Haya Sham
—Hebrew for ‘A Great Miracle Happened
There
.' The lower four letters are what you would find on a dreidel
in Israel: Nun, Gimel, Hey, and the letter Pey instead of Shin, for
Nes Gadol Haya Po
—‘A Great Miracle Happened
Here.
'

“ ‘Here' means Jerusalem, which is where the Kchkanukkah story took place. But maybe you're wondering what kind of miracles happen here, where
we
live? For example, maybe you're thinking—like I am—that it would be a miracle if once, just once, Joel got to class on time.” Everyone turned back to look at me and laugh. Cantor Grubnitz picked up a pen and opened his roll book to mark me tardy. But then he stopped, put down the pen, and smiled.

“No. I've changed my mind. Today, Joel, I am not going to mark you tardy. And you know why? Because Hannuukkaahh is a joyous time, a time to celebrate. You can think of this, Joel, as my gift to you.” He paused, waiting for me to say something, but I just stared at him.

“What's the matter, Joel? You don't look very happy.” His smile turned to a frown. “You should be happy. And yet, you're not. Maybe you want a bigger gift? Is that it? That's the problem with you kids. You're all greedy. When I was young, we were happy to get a few pennies, maybe a handful of almonds and raisins. Then we would sing and dance and celebrate a great miracle—the victory of the Maccabees! The rededication of the temple! We have a God who works miracles! And we get to study them! So you should be happy.”

I could see his gorgle starting to swell.

“You kids nowadays think it's all about the presents you get, like race cars and transistor radios.”

I heard Sidney Applebaum whisper “Yes!” Since the beginning of the year the class has been playing Transistor Radio Bingo, based on guessing how many times Cantor Grubnitz will say the words
transistor radio
on any given day. Everybody puts in five cents, and the one who guesses the total wins it all. I usually like it, and once I even won, but today I couldn't have cared less.

“Or even worse than transistor radios, one student came to my office wanting me to pray for gold!” The class laughed, but no one seemed to know it was me. “Can you imagine? Praying for gold! So enough of your greed and selfishness!” he said, now looking right at me. “Be happy! It's a mitzvah!”

I had no problem not being happy for Cantor Grubnitz. He can cry in his soup, for all I care. My mom, though, is another story. This evening when I got home from Hebrew school she was as miserable as I've ever seen her. I could tell because of how cheerful she was acting.

“What's cookin,' good-lookin'?” she said when I got home. That's what she always says to me. Just from her tone, I could tell my dad hadn't woken up, and there was no point in my asking her. “How was Hebrew school?”

“It was fine,” I lied. “We celebrated Kchchanukkah.”

“That's nice,” she said, taking a carrot loaf out of the oven. That's a special recipe of hers, made with carrots and rice and eggs. It tastes better than it sounds.

“Oh, look!” I said. “You made carrot loaf! Great!”

What's even weirder than my mom pretending to be happy is that I do the exact same thing. The happier she acts, the happier I act, and it just keeps going like that, until my face hurts from smiling. I can't help myself.

Kenny, on the other hand, wears his heart on his sleeve, and as we ate dinner, there was no question how worried he was.

“Can't the doctors do something to wake him?” he asked. “Like make a loud noise? Or shake him?”

“Well, they've tried. And they're doing the best they can,” said my mother. “Hopefully he'll wake up tomorrow.”

“But what if he doesn't?” said Howard. “What if he dies?”

There was a long pause, and my mom looked like Howard had punched her in the gut.

“Well, we just have to hope for the best.”

“And pray,” said Howard. “Maybe Dad's asleep because we haven't prayed enough.” He looked at Kenny and me. “I know I've prayed a lot. Maybe you two haven't prayed enough.”

“I've prayed more than you,” said Kenny.

My mom looked like she was about to collapse. “I know!” I said. “Let's light the menorah. Then we can
all
pray.”

I found six pretty good candles, and chose the longest, a yellow one, for the shammes. My mom lit it, and the three of us took turns lighting the others. Howard read his special prayer for healing. Then, just before we started faking our way through “Maoz Tzur,” Kenny discovered something on the box of candles.

“Hey, look!” he said. “The words to ‘Maoz Tzur' are right here on the box! In English
and
Hebrew!”

He was right. Not only were they in English and Hebrew, but they were in
Hebrish,
which is Hebrew words spelled with English letters. I had never thought about the words before. Even though the song's about a rock, it's supposed to be about God, who always comes through, especially when things are looking bad.

Yeah, right
.

“This gives me an idea,” said my mom. She brought the box of candles to the den—my room—and we followed her to the corner, where we have this really old upright piano she used to play when we were kids.

“See, it even has notes!” She put the box on the music holder, opened the piano, and began to play. It took her a couple tries to get the right notes, and the piano was way out of tune. Some of the keys buzzed when she hit them, and a
few didn't make any sound at all. None of us have very good voices, and we're embarrassed if we have to sing in public, so we usually mouth the words, even when we're
not
singing about Jesus. Now, though, Kenny and Howard sang out loud with my mom. I didn't feel like singing at all—especially about rocks. My foot still hurt, and the first time through I just kind of mumbled. But then something kicked in—I don't know what—and when the Hebrew came around, I sang out loud, as my mom somehow figured out ways to avoid the keys that didn't work. The third time through, we all sang as loudly as we could, so even God could hear us.

When my mom reached the end of the song, we all stopped, listening to the fading echo of the piano. Even after they'd all gone to bed, I could still hear it.

“Is that what you want, God?” I asked. “Just the four of us down here? And my dad up there, your own personal shlimazel?” I shook my head. “Send him back. Please?”

No response.

I wonder if God's in a coma too.

For just a moment when I awoke this morning, I thought it was summer vacation. The air was hot and stuffy, and my sheets were clammy.

Then I remembered everything. No matter how hot it was, this was the dead of winter and my dad was in the hospital. I jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen to see if there was news.

“Mom?” I called.

There was no one home. Kenny and Howard were both gone, off to school already, and on the kitchen table was a note: “Joel—Went to the hospital. Cream of Wheat on the stove. I'll call if your father wakes up. Love, Mom.”

Sure enough, there was Cream of Wheat on the stove. Lumpy and cold. Outside, I could see heat lines rising from the asphalt, which gets soft on really hot days. The sky was “hazy,” as the weatherman likes to say, which is a euphemism
for “smoggy.” Amazing to think that I'd begun this Ckhanukah believing it would snow, imagining I'd be building snowmen and making snow angels. Now it was so hot that even a
thought
of snow would evaporate.

As I picked out lumps from the Cream of Wheat, I realized what I was: a sucker.

That's someone who falls for a cheap trick. I always keep a list of “sucker bets” with my impromptu magic. They're not real magic tricks—more like a cross between an illusion and a crank phone call, like Kenny's friend Danny always makes. He'll dial a number and say, in his deepest voice, “This is the telephone company. We'll have a repairman working on your phone line for the next half hour. If anyone calls you during that time, it is very important that you do not answer the phone—or they could be electrocuted!”

Then he waits for exactly twenty-eight minutes and calls the same number. It rings. And rings. And rings. And rings. After about fifty rings, they finally pick up.

“Hello?”

And that's when Danny screams as loud as he can.

Prank calls are pretty mean, so I don't do them. Sucker bets are kind of mean too, and I only do them when I have a heckler. That's someone who thinks they know how the trick is done and shouts it out to everyone. When that happens, the only thing to do is invite them up for a sucker bet.

“Sir,” I'll say, “you seem very smart. In fact, extremely smart. I know, because I can read your mind. To prove it, I'd like you to take this pad of paper and this marker, stand way over there where I can't see you, and write any word you want in big letters. Meanwhile, I'll stand over here and write something on this pad of paper. And I will bet you one dollar that, whatever word you write, I will write the exact same word.”

The heckler will go for it—they always do. I put down my dollar, they put down theirs, and then they walk to the far side of the room and hide the page to be sure I can't see. I hide what I'm writing as well. Then, when they've finished, I put down my pen and say, “All right—you've written your word. Want to raise your bet?”

They'll usually go for that too, maybe even up to five dollars, or ten if the audience cheers them on. Then, when their money is on the table, you have them turn their pad over, and you see they've written something like “lasagna” or “gymnasium” or “Mississippi.” They stand there with a big grin.

I smile back, and say, “Believe it or not, as promised, I have written the exact same word.” That's when I turn my pad around and show them: “THE EXACT SAME WORD.” The audience will laugh, and the heckler will grumble—and lose.

I have a bunch of bets like that: Tie a Knot Holding Both Ends of the Rope, Walk Through a Playing Card, and The Shell Game, which is a classic sucker bet you've probably seen. There are three walnut shells you slide around and the sucker has to guess which one has the little pea hidden under it. They think they know—but they don't. After each sucker bet I ask the heckler if they want to go double or nothing. I always win, of course, and when we've gone four or five rounds, and they're getting really mad, I always tell them, “Keep your money.” Then I whisper, “But don't spill the beans.”

It's one thing to get stuck on the losing side of a sucker bet. But what's worse is to fall for it again. And again. And again. Like I had this whole Kchanikah, starting with the Gimels. And the snow. And the prayers, I thought as I stepped outside and into the blast of heat. You know what I was? A sucker. Not just a sucker—a shlimazel.

I suppose that's why, halfway down Kimdale Drive, I turned around, ran back home, and reached under my bed to grab the shoe box marked
IMPROMPTU
. I pulled out the list of sucker bets, which I put into my backpack. If there were going to be sucker bets, I was sick and tired of being the sucker. Then I decided to take the whole shoe box, with the rope for “The Professor's Nightmare,” a deck of marked cards, my lucky deck of unmarked cards, flash
paper, a pair of scissors and the thingamajig for The Cut and Restored Necktie, and a bag with fifty bronze coins for a trick I've been working on for Sunday's show called The Miser's Dream.

With that, I headed to school. My backpack was heavy now, especially with all the coins. A couple years ago, Shell Oil ran a contest, which they called States of the Union, but was really their own version of the shell game. Whenever you got gas from a Shell station you also got a little white plastic package with an aluminum coin. On the coin was a picture of one of the fifty United States. The idea was to collect them and if you got all fifty, you'd get five thousand dollars! The problem, of course, was that some coins were really hard to get. Nearly impossible, we found.

But it wasn't for lack of trying. Each time we stopped for gas, my brothers and I asked for a coin for each of us, maybe another for good luck, and one for our little sister, who we explained was sick at home with typhoid fever. One guy heard that and gave us a whole box. And you didn't have to fill up the tank; you'd get just as many coins for putting in a gallon of gas, which is only thirty-five cents. So we would go from one Shell station to the next, buying a gallon here, a gallon there.

Before long we had hundreds of aluminum coins. There were tons of some—“Shoot, another Nevada!”—while
others were really hard to get, especially Delaware—that single coin stood between us and five thousand dollars. So my dad, being the kind of guy he is, wondered if it was the same at Shell gas stations all over the country. Maybe, just maybe, there was somewhere with plenty of Delawares but no Nevadas. So he took out classified ads in newspapers around the country, offering to pay twenty dollars for a Delaware coin.

The ads were in the papers for a while, and then this guy in Chicago wrote to say that he actually had three Delawares! You do the math—that's fifteen thousand dollars! Enough to pay off the medical bills for my dad's last operation
and
all the loans my parents had taken out since then. My dad called the guy, long-distance, and talked to him. He was legit! So my dad airmailed him a money order for sixty dollars, and tossed in a bunch of Nevadas we had lying around.

Then we waited. Two weeks later, we got the package. We were so excited when we opened it—and out came three coins.

Connecticuts.

Connecticut? Who needed Connecticut? We had dozens of Connecticuts.

We never did win the prize. And the guy never did send my dad's money back. In fact, all we got for our efforts was one “instant winner” prize: a set of fifty bronze coins, one
for each state. It seemed like a booby prize at the time. Neither Kenny nor Howard wanted the coins, so I got them. Now they jingled in my backpack, another sad souvenir of my dad.

Because while stories have happy endings, I thought, life doesn't—especially if you've ever done anything you shouldn't have, like utter the wrong prayer or lie about a little sister with typhoid fever. The best you can hope is that something turns out to be not quite as horrible as it could have been, and when that happens, you call it a miracle.

But even that doesn't happen very often. In fact, it's rarer than a Delaware coin. Because God, the great magician, evidently doesn't like heckling. And
loves
sucker bets.

When I got to school I saw that the sign had been changed. Someone must have found a bunch of extra
s
's and exclamation points, because now, below
WINTER HOLIDA
Y ASSEMBLY
, it said
SPECIAL S
ECRET SURPRISE!!!!!!

As I stood there puzzling it out, the bell rang, and I tried to remember which class I had first. God might not play dice with the universe, but I'm pretty sure that Mr. Newton plays dice with the schedule, because today we had classes in an order that we'd never had before, with Home Ec first. Luckily, all the girls, including Amy O'Shea, were in the music room next door, practicing Christmas carols—or, rather,
“winter holiday songs”—for Monday's assembly, which I didn't even want to think about.

That left about a half dozen of us boys in the classroom, which felt like the inside of an oven. Mrs. Hernandez opened a window, but that made it even hotter. A stick of butter she had brought out for a cooking project had completely melted.

“Boys, it's too hot to cook,” she finally said. “Do whatever you want, as long as you don't get in trouble.”

Nobody wanted to do anything but argue about how hot it was.

“It's so hot in here,” said Larry Arbuckle, “that we should turn on the oven to cool down!”

“It
is
on!” said Eddy Mazurki. “And it's not helping.”

“It's even hotter than summer,” said Billy Zamboni.

“No, it's not,” said Eddy. “It just seems that way because it's winter and it's supposed to be cold.”

“No way, Jose!” said Billy. “You just think that because the heat has baked your brain! It's so hot outside that you could actually fry an egg on the sidewalk.”

“That's just an expression,” said Eddy. “You can't really do it.”

“Yes, you can!” said Billy.

“No, you can't!”

This went back and forth for a while, driving everyone
crazy, before Mrs. Hernandez finally said, “Enough!” She went to the refrigerator, brought out an egg, and said, “Give it a try.”

Mrs. Hernandez likes experiments, especially those involving food. Earlier in the fall Jimmy Bowen came in from the cafeteria with a rock-hard grilled cheese sandwich, which everyone calls Bixby Brick-and-Rubber. Everyone was tossing it around the room like a Frisbee when Billy Zamboni said he thought we could put a stamp on it and mail it. To our surprise, Mrs. Hernandez took it from him and said, “Let's find out!”

She took a stamp from her desk drawer, made labels with the school's return address and her home address, then pasted them all on. Mary Wigglesworth agreed to put it into the mailbox near her house on the way home from school. Sure enough, a week later, Mrs. Hernandez brought it to school, the stamp postmarked and everything. Given the success of that experiment—and the fact that it was just too hot to stay in the classroom—frying an egg on the sidewalk seemed like a good idea.

“But if anyone sees you, don't say I gave you permission.”

We went outside and gathered around a burning hot spot on the cement. Larry cracked open the egg.

Nothing. Just gooey egg spreading out, running downhill.

“Try again,” said Billy Zamboni. “Look—it's even hotter on the asphalt!”

We grabbed a second egg from the classroom and went out to a spot on the asphalt by the tetherball pole that was never in the shade. Larry cracked another egg. Nothing.

“It needs oil!” he said. “You can't fry an egg without oil!”

We sent Jimmy back to class to get oil and another egg, then tried it again. Still nothing.

“Butter!” said Larry. “Everything fries better in butter!”

As they tried to fry eggs—almost a dozen of them—they switched from arguing about the heat to complaining about the dress code. An eighth-grade boy had been sent home because his hair was three and a half inches long, and another girl had been sent home for wearing something called culottes. It turns out they're a cross between pants and a skirt, but have too much pants in them for the Bixby dress code.