This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (3 page)

My best friend, Blimi, said that it was my parents’ fault my brother was crazy, because they had fallen in love.

I chased Blimi down the school hallway when she said this. I stuck out my tongue at her. I told her that she was a liar and had no right to say such things about my family.

“It’s true,” Blimi said. “I even heard my father talking about it on the phone.” She stood across from me, her chin jutting out, her ponytail bouncing up and down. “Everybody knows!” she exclaimed. “Your parents fell in love before they were married! I’m not making up lies!”

I glowered at Blimi. I stuck out my tongue again.

She stuck out hers at me. Then she ran away.

I wasn’t friends with her all that week.

That day, after school, Kathy told me not to feel bad about what Blimi had said. There was nothing wrong with falling in love.

Kathy was our neighbor. She lived in the third-floor attic apartment of my house and we were good friends. This was a problem because Kathy was many years older than me—my sister Rivky said she was fifty at least—and married. Also, because she had had a nervous breakdown some years back and had been childish and strange ever since. But more important, Kathy was a goy. And we did not play with goyim.

In the neighborhood of Borough Park, in the borough of Brooklyn, where everyone I knew lived, there were few gentiles. Mostly, there were Jews, ultraorthodox Jews, all of the holy nation picked by God in the Sinai desert three thousand years ago. But in Flatbush, where my family lived, there were mostly goyim, people who were unchosen, like Kathy.

Kathy was a real goy, of the Christian type. She went to church every Sunday. So I should not have been friends with her at all. My sister had told me that it was just plain wrong, prancing around with a goy like that. She said my teacher would never approve. And Mrs. Friedman really did not approve. Kathy might be a sweet lady, she said, but I should find other friends to talk with. It was wrong. God would not allow for it.

God, truly, did not allow for it. He said so Himself, clearly, somewhere in the Torah: that His people should not play with the goyim, even if they are the neighbors. Because Kathy had not been in the desert two thousand years before. She did not keep Shabbos or kosher. She did not know how to pray to God in Hebrew. She did not observe the rules of modesty. She wore pants.

But I liked Kathy anyway. I went to her often after school and she gave me kosher candies. I told her all about the new art notebook I had gotten, and she showed me pictures of herself when she was a girl.

I asked Kathy several times not to go to church. I explained that if she’d only be gentile without being quite so gentile, God wouldn’t mind so much that I was her friend. But she just laughed.

Kathy had a very good memory. She remembered when I was born, eight years earlier, on the fifteenth of August.

“You were a beautiful baby,” she said. “Always giggling and laughing, with eyes like pretty green stars.”

She said the same about my little sister, Miri, and my brother Avrumi, but she almost never spoke about Nachum, although she remembered the day he was born, before anyone knew he was crazy. As a baby, Nachum hadn’t giggled and laughed. He had screamed for hours on end, even when my mother held him, even when she cradled him on the soft grass in the garden outside.

The day Blimi said that awful thing about love, I ran upstairs to Kathy’s. She smiled a little. Then she said, “It’s nice, falling in love.”

I didn’t answer. It was hard for her to understand, I knew. Goyim fall in love and back out of it all the time. But Chassidish Jews, we know better. Marriage is a sacred business, decided by God, and the bride and groom have nothing to do with it.

Kathy told me about when she was twenty-two and became engaged to her husband, Mark. “He brought me flowers, and took me on trips, and we had a wedding in a garden.” She looked happy, remembering.

Kathy loved speaking of Mark and how she had married him—and was still married to him after over thirty years—but I didn’t like Mark very much. He was silent and gruff, a scary kind of goy, barely answering me when I passed him by as he smoked cigarettes right outside our house.

I sang Kathy a song I had learned in school, but I couldn’t remember the motions that went with it. Then I hurried back down to the first floor, before anyone could ask where I’d been.

After supper, I told Rivky what Blimi had said.

“That Blimi is a blabbermouth,” Rivky said. “She’s slandering others, which is an evil sin. Don’t be friends with her anymore.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. I’m not being best friends with her this whole week.”

My brother was crazy for other reasons. God did not make crazy like that for nothing. It was all part of His Grand Master Plan, the one Mrs. Friedman always said explained the tragedies and mysteries of the earth, and showed that everything was all for the best. The problem with God’s Grand Master Plan was that it was a hidden one, an eternal secret known only to saints, angels, and souls on high. This meant that I had to die if I wanted to find out why Nachum was really crazy, and I wasn’t going to die anytime soon.

Upon realizing this, I had asked my mother if I could get to Heaven sooner, say by noon tomorrow, so I wouldn’t have to wait so many more years just to understand one heavenly secret.

My mother just looked at me. “Do your homework,” she said.

Over the years, I had heard other reasons why Nachum was plain crazy. My cousin Shaindel told me that her cousin’s aunt from her father’s side told her that it was because my mother didn’t nurse Nachum when he was a baby. If only she had nursed him, God would’ve changed his Grand Master Plan, and Nachum would have never turned out this way. Mrs. Olephsky, from the summer colony, said the nurse in the hospital must have dropped him on his head but was scared to tell anyone, leaving him damaged and forcing God to immediately make a new plan: make Nachum crazy. My ten-year-old neighbor, Motti, said that if we would only repent, my brother would become uncrazy. God would remember his original plan and see to it that Nachum was as whole as anyone, and it did not matter who had dropped him on his head.

I knew that what they said probably wasn’t true, though I was never completely certain. But then Rebbitzen Goldknup, the
rav’
s wife and my mother’s good friend, told me the story of the angel who struck Nachum’s lip just a tad too hard before he was ever born.

It is true, it says so in the Talmud, that before a child is born, an angel from on high studies with him the words and secrets of the Torah, so that his soul is suffused with holiness. Then, at the moment before birth, the angel reaches out with his right hand and strikes the upper lip of the unborn child, erasing all memory from its mind. This way, the child must start again. This way, he must put in his own effort to regain the lost knowledge.

But sometimes the angel strikes the upper lip too hard. In this case, not only is the memory of the Torah erased, but so is the ability of the child to remember anything, even how to speak, how to say simple words. Such a child is born mad, like my brother.

When I told this to my brother Yitzy, he frowned. “Not true,” he said. “Everyone makes up stories.” He knew exactly when it had happened, though he could not really say how it was part of any grand plan. It was, he explained to me, because of the boiling milk that had spilled on Nachum’s brain when he was only two. My mother had put a pot of milk on the stove to cook, and then, just as it was bubbling, Nachum had reached up and grabbed the handle. The pan toppled over. The boiling milk spilled right over my brother’s head, and for weeks he was wrapped in bandages like a mummy. When they took the bandages off, Nachum was broken.

I thought this was a good reason, so a few days later, when I was playing at Blimi’s house, I explained it all to her. But Blimi rolled her eyes.

“It’s the love thing,” she said again, “and anyway, there’s no such thing as turning crazy from milk.”

I chased Blimi angrily across the yard. I pulled her hair. I called her a liar and other things, until she ran up the stairs and inside, locking the door of her house.

I sat in Blimi’s yard and crossed my arms. Just because Blimi was two months older than me, she thought she knew better. She did not.

Later, I told Kathy that Blimi was a hateful liar. She was just jealous because I had a bigger collection of Hello Kitty stickers, and because my family was much more important than hers.

I asked my father if it was true that he had fallen in love with my mother. My father, pouring milk into his coffee, burst out laughing.

I scowled.

He leaned against the dairy counter, laughing harder. The coffee sloshed over the rim of his cup, dripping onto the beige tiles of the kitchen floor. A small stain grew on the sleeve of his white shirt.

I hid my face behind the cereal box. My mother walked in, a pile of newspapers in the crook of her arm, sheets of paper covered with her writing in her hands.

My father turned to her. “Menuchah wants to know if it’s true that we fell in love,” he said, and my mother smiled, amused. She put down her papers, sat down across from me at the kitchen table, and chuckled. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Nothing,” my mother said. “Nothing is funny.” But I could see the smile hidden in her eyes. She reassured me that they had not fallen in love. They had gotten married because Hashem had wanted them to. Then she turned to her papers and began marking her students’ work.

Aha. I knew it. Pious mothers and fathers like mine did not love before, or after, marriage. They did not kiss, or hug, or touch each other in any way. Such things were repulsive to God, and forbidden in a Jewish home. Only liking was allowed—a modest kind of love.

Liking was when my father brought my mother flowers on Tuesday for no reason at all. Liking was when he smacked his lips, declaring her fried eggplant the best he’d ever tasted, even when it was certainly not. Liking was when my father bought my mother a gold necklace when she already had three, when he stuck up for her even when it was plain that I was the one who was right. Liking was when my mother said that my father was the most honest, hardworking man in the world, and she said it proudly, as if it was something special.

Once, my father called my mother a brilliant and “bee-yoo-tiful lady,” which was okay, I thought, but somewhat tricky, right where like becomes almost love, and better to stay away from. Besides, mothers aren’t “bee-yoo-tiful” ladies. They are mothers. With kerchiefs; long, dark house robes; and purposeful frowns.

So my mother and father liked each other just the way God allowed them to, not more and not less. I asked my father several times more, just to make sure, and he said each time that they had not fallen in love. They had gotten married because Hashem had wanted them to.

I wished Blimi was there right then so I could tell her what my parents had said and yank her ponytail until she begged for mercy. But Blimi was at home in Borough Park, where I was never going to play with her again. And anyway, telling her wouldn’t have done much. Because that evening in my father’s car, everything got ruined. It was there that Nachum broke the perfect liking between my mother and father.

I can’t say how it happened or why, because that’s how it was with a brother like Nachum. One minute he was quiet, the next he was blinking mad, as if he’d been struck by the tapping angel once to take away his knowledge of the Torah, once to take away his speech, and once for the rest of his mind.

It began when my father picked my brother and me up from my aunt’s apartment, where we had played with my cousins all afternoon. We were riding in my father’s new blue minivan, the one with doors that opened automatically. Usually Nachum was quiet in the car. He’d sit peacefully, looking at the dashboard and listening for the spurt and hum of the motor, the throb and pulse of the moving tires, the soft rumble of the road beneath. It was as though the car was his cradle, the engine his lullaby.

But then the sirens came.

My father had stopped at the red light at Seventeenth Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street. From behind us, I could see the ambulance approaching, speeding down the street. My father pulled over to the side of the road to let the ambulance by, siren blaring, and blue and red lights flashed past the windows on Nachum’s side. I wanted to tell my father to chase the ambulance down the street, to follow the flashing lights, but just then my brother made a sound like a cat on fire, as if someone had ripped the skin off his chest.

“What happened?” my father shouted, but Nachum didn’t answer. He blinked his eyes, his head shooting up like a windup toy’s. He threw himself onto the floor in the space between the front and back seats and folded up his body. Then, silently, he began to bang his head forward and back against my father’s seat.

Back. Forth.

Back. Forth.

Back. Forth.

Back—

“Stop,” my father said.
“Stop that.”
His voice was harsh and dark. He could not bear it when Nachum banged his head.

But Nachum could not stop that. Not at home against the wall, not in school against the board, and not in the new blue minivan with the doors that opened automatically.

He banged harder. Back, forth, back, forth, like a swinging ax on wood.

The car behind us beeped loudly. My father, twisted toward Nachum, quickly turned to face front and pressed the gas. Our minivan swerved around the car in front of us and sped down the street toward Flatbush.

Back, forth.

Back, forth.

Back, forth.

Back…

My father’s face was pale and grim. He drove quickly down the long block home. We came to an abrupt stop in our driveway. My father jumped out and opened the door on my side.

“Run inside,” he said sharply. “Go call Mommy. Fast.”

My mother was sitting and writing in the kitchen when I rushed in. I pointed to the backyard.

“Nachum,” I exclaimed. “He—” My mother did not wait. She dropped her pen and hurried past me and out the door.

I pulled off my jacket and dragged it down the hall to the bathroom. In the bathroom, I stood on the ledge of the tub and peered through the narrow window overlooking the yard.

It was nearly dark outside, but I could see my father standing away from the van, his legs firmly apart, his hands deep inside his coat pockets. My mother had opened the car door and was leaning in, calling my brother out.

My father was saying something to my mother. I could hear his rising voice, her soft murmuring, as she hovered half in, half out of the car over Nachum. Finally, my mother stood up and looked back at my father, shaking her head, gesturing for him to come.

My father stepped forward. He bent over and into the van. There was a short shriek, a guttural sound, and then my father was standing, carrying my brother in his arms.

But Nachum hated being touched. I could see him, scared and wild, eyes shut tightly, as he hurled himself from my father and crashed onto the asphalt. On his hands and knees, Nachum spun around like a trapped animal trying to escape from between two hunters. My mother reached out to Nachum and circled him closely. She brought her hands down gently over his head, covering his ears, as if trying to shield him from his own terrifying sounds.

Nachum pulled away. He crawled frantically from my mother, bumping into my father’s knees. My father stepped back, then forward, gesturing impatiently at my mother as she leaned over Nachum. My brother was standing up now, his hands groping at the space around her, and under the night sky, their shadows looked like two great sea creatures writhing and battling.

Then Nachum turned and ran. He ran down the driveway and out the gate. My mother ran after him. She caught him by the gate, holding him as he struggled, his head nearly crashing into the ground. I could see my mother’s shadow pulling back, but my brother’s shadow was stronger. It pulled on my mother until it had devoured her, until you could not see what was him and what was her, until it swallowed her whole.

I could hear voices through the narrow window, my mother crying because my father would not come, my father angry because she would not let go, and Nachum screaming and pulling, pulling, pulling.