Authors: Mark Goldblatt
“Why would he do that?”
“I just told you. She kept coming back—”
“No, why would he dig up her dead baby?”
“Because it was deformed,” she said. “He wanted to prove that she was working with the devil, so he dug up the baby and showed it to the people of Massachusetts, and it had a face but no head. Also, it had two mouths, and four horns, and it had claws and scales.”
“C’mon, you’re making that up.”
“I swear it’s true, Julian. Cross my heart. It’s in the encyclopedia.”
“What encyclopedia?”
“The
World Book
,” she said. “I can show you if you don’t trust me.”
“No, I trust you.”
Which was the truth. I did trust her. She knew I trusted her too, because her smile got bigger. Then she started to rewrap the painting in the brown paper. As I watched her doing it, kneeling on the sidewalk and wrapping the painting, I had a weird feeling that started in the pit of my stomach and rose into my chest. It was like a gust of wind, except it was warm instead of cold.
I was still trying to figure out what it was when I heard myself say, “It’s a great painting, Beverly. You should be an artist.”
“Do you want it?”
“The painting?”
“You can have it,” she said. She looked up at me when she said that, but then she looked back down. Then, a second later, she looked back up. She looked straight at me. “I
want
you to have it.”
“But it’s
your
painting,” I said. “Why would you give it away?”
“I’ve got lots of paintings. I don’t have room to hang them all.”
“But—”
“It’s not a big deal, Julian. You like it, so I want you to have it.”
“I
do
like it.…”
She stood up and handed it to me. “You have to carry it home.”
We started to walk again, except now I had the pizza box under my arm. Neither of us spoke, but I kept peeking over at Beverly. She looked real pleased with herself—I didn’t know if it was because I’d liked her painting or because I’d agreed to race her. But I couldn’t peek at her for more than a split second, because she kept peeking over at me. After the third time our eyes met, I stopped doing it.
I stared straight ahead and tried to think of a conversation starter. But nothing came to mind, which makes no sense, since she’s real easy to talk to. What I noticed, though, was that we weren’t walking as fast as before.
Then, at last, she said, “I know you’re probably going to win.”
“But you still want to race?”
“Yeah.”
When Rabbi Salzberg suggested putting
off my bar mitzvah until the end of May, he kind of left it up to me how often I’d come in for haftarah lessons. You’re supposed to go once a week, which I was doing every Thursday up until January, but when the date got moved back, there didn’t seem much point. He and I both knew I had the thing down cold. It wasn’t like there was a big decision. What happened was one week the lesson came to an end, and he didn’t say, “I’ll see you next Thursday, Mr. Twerski,” so I took that to mean we were done, and that was that. Except I know the guy. If I stopped going altogether, he’d think I was taking stuff for granted … and make it a regular thing again. That’s the
way he operates. So I stopped by his office every so often just to show him that I wasn’t taking stuff for granted.
That was the reason I headed over to Gates of Prayer this afternoon. Mrs. Klein, as usual, waved me right through without giving Rabbi Salzberg a heads-up. I pushed open the door to his office real slow. Except as soon as the door started to move, he called out, “Come in, Mr. Haft.”
I poked my head around the door. “It’s me, Rabbi.”
“Mr. Twerski?”
“Yes.”
“To what do I owe this honor?”
“I just wanted to tell you I’m working on my haftarah.”
“Maybe you should be helping your friend Mr. Haft.”
“Eric will do fine,” I said. “He’s studying like crazy.”
“He has very little time left.”
“That’s why he’s not slacking off one bit. I mean, you should see how he’s going at it. I’ve never seen him hit the books like that in regular school.” I almost slipped and said
real school
, which would’ve made Rabbi Salzberg blow a gasket. “Trust me, Rabbi. Eric’s going to come through with flying colors.”
Rabbi Salzberg slid his glasses down his nose and peered over them. “Things come easily to you, Mr. Twerski. That’s a blessing you shouldn’t take for granted. Not everyone is as fortunate.”
“Do you want me to tutor Eric?”
“No,” he said. “We don’t want to put more pressure on him at this point.”
“I’m really sure he’ll be all right, Rabbi.”
“How is your sick friend, Mr. Twerski?”
“Quentin? He’s doing much better. It’s like night and day from when he first came home. He ran a race last week. You should’ve seen him, Rabbi. He was ahead until he stopped—”
“You’re not worried he’s going to die anymore?”
“No!” I said. “The doctors said he’s going to be fine!”
“Do the doctors consult with you on a regular basis?”
“No, but—”
“You’re a man now, Mr. Twerski. You must be prepared.”
“Prepared for what?”
“Do I have to answer that question?” he said.
“But I just told you. The doctors said—”
“God has the final word. Not the doctors.”
“I’m telling you, Rabbi, he’s getting better.”
“You should be like Jacob, Mr. Twerski.”
“All right …”
“Do you remember what happens to Jacob? Do you remember what happens when he wrestles the stranger?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“
Do
you remember it, Mr. Twerski?”
“No.”
“Do you know who Jacob is?”
“Jacob is Isaac’s son,” I answered. “Abraham, then Isaac, and then Jacob.”
“When Jacob wrestles the stranger, he loses. But he doesn’t let go. That’s the key, Mr. Twerski. You need to be like Jacob. You need to hold on, even when it’s difficult.”
“Do you mean Quentin? I’m not going to let go of him, Rabbi.”
“I don’t
just
mean Quentin.”
“Then I don’t get it,” I said.
“You should thank God for the time you’ve had with your friend.”
“Why are you talking like that, Rabbi? If you’d seen the guy run—”
He shook his head. “Go and study your haftarah, Mr. Twerski.”
I shut my eyes. I shut them real tight and felt like I was going to bawl, but I fought it off. I wasn’t going to let him make me bawl. I opened my eyes and said, “You’re wrong, Rabbi Salzberg.”
“Am I?”
“You’re wrong about Quentin, and you’re wrong to talk like that.”
“You may be right, Mr. Twerski. But only in one of your opinions.”
* * *
The conversation with Rabbi Salzberg would’ve ruined my day by itself, but when I got home, Howie was pacing back and forth in front of my house. I noticed him as I turned the corner at Parsons, and I slowed down. It wasn’t something he’d do for no reason—hang around in front of my house. Don’t get me wrong. Howie’s a great guy, but he and I have always been kind of at the opposite ends of our group. We’re friends because of the group, not because we’d be friends no matter what. Plus, things between us have never gotten back to normal since I told him Beverly didn’t want to be his girlfriend. I knew he might be sore because I’d walked her home on Monday. And if he knew she’d given me that Bowne House painting, he might be more than just sore.
I wanted to figure out what kind of mood he was in while there was still distance between us, so I called out, “Hey, Howie!”
He looked up and said, “Hi, Jules!”
I knew right away, from the sound of his voice, he wasn’t sore. The look in his eyes proved it even more. He still had the same killed look from when Beverly outran him in Ponzini.
I walked over and leaned against the iron rail in front of the driveway. “I just got back from temple.”
“Yeah, your mom told me,” he said. “I didn’t think you still had to do that.”
“I show my face every so often. It keeps Magoo happy.”
The name Magoo made Howie smile. As hard as Rabbi Salzberg rides me, he rides Howie even harder. Back in our third year of Hebrew school, he once knocked on Howie’s forehead with his knuckle for half a minute, yelling, “Hello? Is anybody home?” just because Howie screwed up a vowel sound. That’s half a minute of the class pointing at you and cracking up. You don’t forget something like that.
“The old guy’s always telling me I should study like how you do,” Howie said. “But the joke’s on him ’cause you don’t even study.”
“Well, at least you’ve got until September,” I said. “Eric’s the one on the hot seat.”
“Yeah, that’s going to be painful to watch.”
“You think so?” I asked.
“He’s going to crash and burn for sure.”
“I think he’ll come through all right. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“You know Eric,” Howie said. “He could piss his pants.”
“C’mon, even if he’s a little shaky, I’m sure Magoo will help him out. He’s not going let the guy stand on the stage and choke. Eric’s family is shelling out a lot of money for the thing.”
“I hope you’re right, Jules.”
“So did you want to talk?”
He started to rub the side of his face with his right hand. “I heard you’re going to race Beverly tomorrow.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t my idea.”
“I was thinking maybe you should take it easy on her.”
“She didn’t take it easy on you,” I said.
“Yeah, but that was different.”
“It’s different, but it’s not
that
different.”
“I don’t mean you should let her win. You should
definitely
win. But I don’t think you should slaughter her. It just … it just wouldn’t be right.”
He looked down right after he’d said that, like it was a relief, like he’d been saying it over and over to himself, and now that it was said, he could let it go. He didn’t have to remember it anymore.
“I’m not going to slaughter her.…”
“I know she gave you that Quaker painting. I know she’s sweet on you, Julian.”
“Howie, I don’t think—”
“No, it’s okay to admit it,” Howie said. “I talked to Lonnie. I know you didn’t plan nothing. You and her got more in common than me and her. That’s what Lonnie said, on account of you’re both such brainiacs.”
“Lonnie said that? I’m real sorry, Howie.”
“It’s just that … sometimes things don’t go how you
want them to go. They go how they’re going to go, and you wind up looking like the bad guy. But you’re not the bad guy, even if you did a bad thing. Do you know what I mean?”
“No,” I said. Which was the truth.
“I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, what you did with Beverly. It could happen to anyone. That’s all I’m saying.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. But when a guy gets killed the way he got killed, you can’t expect him to make sense right away.
I patted his shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about it, Howie.”
He turned and headed back to his house. As he was walking away, I got a low-down feeling that was hard to describe. But then, suddenly, I knew the exact word to describe it: I felt
sluppy
.
Right up until the last minute, I was
hoping Beverly would change her mind about the race. Not that I thought she would. I knew she was dead set on it, but I was still kind of thinking, in an unthinking way, she might come to her senses.
It’s like when you’re watching a baseball game on TV and your guy strikes out, and then the replay comes up and you kind of hope he’ll foul off the pitch—even though you just saw him strike out. Your brain tells you that it’s stupid to think like that, that it’s not going to happen, that it
can’t
happen. But your heart still holds out hope.
Beverly wouldn’t talk to me during morning or
afternoon homeroom. She waved me off the couple of times I tried to make conversation. Then she walked home alone while the rest of us took the bus with Quentin, who was having one of his bad-breathing days. (Lonnie called them BBDs.) It was a strange thing. He had a much easier time on miserable, overcast days when the air was thick and wet. The days when the air was crisp and cold were harder.
He wouldn’t gripe about it, but you could tell he had to focus on inhaling. He’d be standing next to you, and then, without warning, he’d get this panicky look in his eyes, like he was choking, and he’d take like ten breaths in five seconds. But afterward he’d be all right.
Quentin was sitting in the back row of the bus, next to Howie, who was keeping an eye on him. We rotated doing that, keeping an eye on Quentin—even though he didn’t know that was what we were doing. It wasn’t something we sat down and worked out. It was more like a habit we fell into. Eric and Shlomo were in the next-to-last row, right behind Lonnie and me. As the bus turned the corner at Twenty-Sixth Avenue and Parsons, Lonnie jabbed me with his elbow and said, “You’re going to teach her a lesson, right?”
“I’m just going to beat her. That’s it.”
“I think you should teach her a lesson.”
“Why would I do that?” I asked.
“Because if you don’t, she’ll want to race again. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but down the line. Then where does it end? You’ve got to nip this thing in the bud.”
“Yeah, but it’s
Beverly
.”
He shook his head. “I know you like her—”
“I don’t
like
her.”
“What I mean is, we
all
like her,” he said. “I didn’t mean, you know,
you
like her. Which would be fine if you did. I’m not saying it’s good or bad. That’s not what I meant. What I meant was, this whole girls-racing-guys thing, you’ve got to put a stop to it. You’ve got to teach her a lesson, or else you’re just going to make things worse.”
“How about this?” I said. “I’ll beat her bad for the first half of the race, and then I’ll let her catch up a little. That way she’ll know I could’ve beaten her by more, but I won’t embarrass her.”