Following Ezra (26 page)

“Anything for me?” he asks, flipping through the day’s mail and tossing to the floor clothing catalogs, credit card offers, and the gas bill.

“Over there,” I say, pointing to a couple of pastel envelopes with handwritten addresses.

“For
me
! Ezra!” he cries, grabbing them and tearing open the first envelope—literally ripping it, with such force and speed that in the process he severs a corner of the card.

“Slow down!” I say. “Let’s see who it’s from!”

He ignores me, intent on reaching the guts of the package, but I seize the shredded envelope from his hands and hold it at arm’s length, out of his reach, while I snatch the second envelope with my other hand.

“Give it back! Give it
baaaack
!” Ezra shouts, lunging toward me.

“Slow
down
, Ez!” I say. “Let’s sit down with these.”

He protests with a groan, but I point to the brown living room couch nearby, and he plunks his body next to mine, reaching and clawing for the envelope.

“
Give
it to me!”

I grab his wrist. “Stop!” He is slipping into tantrum mode. “Take a deep breath, Ezzy.”

He does—not slowly, but grabbing two rushed gasps, like he is hyperventilating.

“Give it to me!” he repeats, and I wonder what the point is of trying to slow him down when it seems such torture to him, like waving a chocolate-chip cookie in front of him and telling him he needs to wait. I want him to take in each gift, each sweet note written in longhand by some generous loved one—an aunt or uncle, a teacher or family friend. I want him to comprehend and absorb who sent the gift, to understand that it came with affection and care. I want Ezra to grasp that he is surrounded by love.

He wants the loot.

“All right, Abba! Let me
open
it!”

“Will you slow down?”

“Yes!”

I hand him the torn card. He reads the note, not the handwritten message, but the Hallmark inscription—“‘On this special day in your life . . .’”—in a singsong voice, skipping words here and there in his rush.

“Who’s it from?” I ask.

Struggling to make out the handwriting, he reads the name, then grabs the check.

“Fifty-four dollars!” Ezra says with exuberance. “Am I rich yet?” The checks always come in multiples of eighteen.
Chai
, the Hebrew word for “life,” has a numerical value of eighteen. When I celebrated my own bar mitzvah in 1975, the checks were for eighteen dollars. One family sent a card with a sketch of the Western Wall in Jerusalem and, inside, eighteen crisp one-dollar bills. Nobody sends Ezra eighteen dollars. The cards still have the same picture of the Western Wall, but the givers have adjusted for inflation: The checks are for thirty-six or fifty-four or even a hundred and eighty dollars. Is he rich yet?

“You’re getting there,” I say. He has already fled to play on the computer, leaving me with shredded pieces of the envelope, the card, and fifty-four dollars from the Shapiros.

The checks seem hardly to enter his consciousness, but after a few weeks of this, Ezra has discovered the magical power of asking. When relatives and friends began inquiring months before about what might be an appropriate bar mitzvah gift for Ezra, Shawn and I conferred with him and began compiling a list. Ami at that age favored an iPod, baseball memorabilia, and contributions toward a laptop. Ezra has specific and unique requests: a new three-volume
Star Wars
encyclopedia he read about on the Internet; a thick, pricey illustrated Disney treasury he spotted at a bookstore years earlier. Mostly, though, he is fixated on gift cards from some of his favorite stores, places like Borders and Target and Barnes & Noble. He doesn’t have plans for spending them; he simply likes the idea of the shiny plastic cards.

I should have known that giving Ezra free rein to request gifts might prove hazardous. Shawn and I have learned over the years to cope with his unusual fixations at birthday time by limiting his wish lists to a few requests, and then making sure that every item ends up in one of the wrapped packages when the day comes. What Ezra doesn’t like is surprises. He possesses a deep need to know what gifts will be arriving, as if he’s a bingo player waiting for the announcer to call out his numbers. As excited as he is each day anticipating the mail, it makes him more and more nervous and agitated when the exact gifts he has requested don’t arrive.

That’s where he is stuck. The whole process has triggered an entirely new set of anxieties. A psychologist might surmise that he has channeled his angst about something else—the bar mitzvah service, say, or facing adolescence—into his fixation on the presents. But I know Ezra well enough to understand his priorities. It’s about the gifts.

“Will I get the
Star Wars Encyclopedia
?” he keeps asking.

“I don’t know.”

“But will I get it?”

“If you don’t, you can use one of your gift cards to buy it yourself.”

“I might not
get
it?”

“I’m not sure.”

Panicked: “I might not
get
it?”

“I hope so. I don’t know.”

Those three words—
I don’t know
—are so painful to a boy who thrives on the predictable and fixed that they send him into endless cycles of panicked questioning. In the weeks leading up to his bar mitzvah, while Shawn and I are preoccupied with catering menus, centerpieces, and errands to make sure all three boys have the outfits they need, we live with an endless litany of Ezra’s repeated questions about gift cards and books and what the next day’s mail might bring.

And now he is stuck. I’m not sure what has triggered his reaction. Perhaps it was the generous family friend who, with the best of intentions, ordered the single-volume
Star Wars
book Ezra already owned instead of the 1,190-page, three-volume encyclopedia he was dreaming about. She might as well have sent a box of Brillo pads.

“That’s not what I
wanted
!” he cries. “I already
have Star Wars: The Ultimate Visual Guide
!”

“Don’t worry. We can exchange it,” I assure him. Trying to explain the intricacies of Amazon’s return policy at that moment is like attempting to educate a toddler whose balloon has flown away about the chemical properties of helium.

“But I will get
The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
.”

“Yes.”

“I
will
.”

“Yes.”

“Of course I will get that book.”

The verbal looping continues for hours. He is thirteen years old, a lanky teenager with early acne and an unkempt head of brown hair, but he can back himself into the same kind of dead end as when he was a toddler, endlessly reciting lines from
Winnie the Pooh
or, a few years later, incessantly asking people if they were Jewish or Christian.

Something about that bothers me deeply. We are expending much thought, energy, and money to mark his passage toward adulthood, but in significant ways, my middle son is no different from the little boy who seemed so remote and difficult to reach.

 

 

That painful truth also strikes me the evening I take Ezra shopping for some dress clothes for the bar mitzvah weekend. Fully into puberty, he has entered that adolescent shopping territory: too big for the children’s department, too small for the men’s section. The two of us make our way up a pair of escalators to the third floor of the Nordstrom store, where a perky young woman in Baby and Kids introduces herself as Jessica.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” she says. I smile and ask where the blazers are.

“For him?” she says, sizing up Ezra, whose last twelve months have been one continual growth spurt. A full head taller than Jessica, Ezra stares away into the distance, twitching slightly and bouncing on the balls of his feet. The boy never stands still.

Certainly not here on the third floor of Nordstrom. Jessica—cute, energetic, her hair pulled back neatly to achieve the tidy, polished look that all Nordstrom clerks have—surveys a rack of blue jackets. She grabs one, then turns back toward us to hold it up to his body. “He looks like a twenty long. . . .”

Ezra is gone. Jessica smiles. She has been in Baby and Kids long enough to be unfazed by peripatetic children. I glance through the department, past toddler-size shoes and frilly dresses and the glass cases of miniature neckties, trying to spot my son.

“Hang on a sec,” I say, dashing to catch him.

Near the cashier station, I find Ezra. He is lying on his belly on the carpeted floor, examining a low shelf of stuffed bears.

“Ezra! Come on! We’re trying on jackets!”

“I want to see the bears,” he says.

“Later. Come
on
.”

Grasping both his hands with mine, I pull him to his feet and back over toward the blazers, helping him awkwardly struggle into the one Jessica has picked out. Close enough.

“Do you want to look at some shirts?” she asks.

Jessica points to the shelf and I pluck out a pair of white button-downs and lead Ezra toward the dressing room. Jessica unlocks a door and I follow Ezra in. He sits down on the floor. He doesn’t understand why we are here. This is part of Ezra: He experiences every new situation as a mystery. What might seem natural and ordinary to others—to select pieces of clothing and enter a changing room to test the fit—to him is like landing in a foreign country. Or on the moon. I know what he is thinking:
Why are we in this tiny room? Why does my dad have those clothes? Who was that woman? And why is she waiting outside the door and asking us if we’re all right?

I tell him to take off his shirt, so he can try on the button-down. He slips off his T-shirt as I quickly pull what seem like fifteen or twenty straight pins from the shirt’s crevices and remove the cardboard and tissue. When I look up, Ezra is staring intently into the full-length mirror, examining his image. Shirtless, he leans close to the glass, gazing into his own eyes, giggling and mumbling something I can’t hear. Mesmerized by his own reflection, he slowly begins licking the mirror.

“Ezra!” I say. “Stop!”

I hand him the shirt. He begins trying it on, backward, the way I remember wearing smocks made from my father’s discarded dress shirts in kindergarten.

Then I hear Jessica outside the dressing room.

“Everything going okay?”

 

 

That Saturday afternoon, I decide to take Ezra out for some air. Earlier in the day, he had been repeatedly inquiring about the
Star Wars
encyclopedia and the gift cards, again and again begging for assurance that his requested items would arrive soon. When his nonstop imploring spills into the afternoon, I know I need to do something to help him out of his mental jam.

“Come on,” I finally tell him. “We’re going for a walk.”

I grab Sasha’s leash, clip it onto her collar, and the two of us head out the door. Ezra and I routinely take these weekend afternoon walks. Before we acquired Sasha we called them our “dog walks,” because Ezra would seek out dogs in the neighborhood, barraging their owners with questions and kneeling to greet the animals face-to-face. Now that we have our own dog, I use it as an excuse to get Ezra out to walk around the neighborhood. Even as we walk, he continues his jabber. “Will I get the
Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia,
Abba? . . . I’ll get more Borders gift cards? . . . But I will get
The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
!”

I finally stop him: “Why do you keep asking?”

“I want to be
sure.
”

“But I have told you hundreds of times.”

“You’re
mad
at me?”

“Do I look mad?” He stops walking and examines my face earnestly to see if my expression might yield a clue.

“No . . . you’re not
mad
!” he says, as much to himself as to me.

“I’m not angry,” I say. Sasha is pulling on the leash, so we continue strolling. “I am just frustrated.”

“You’re frustrated?”

“I’m worried because you won’t stop talking about presents.”

“I’m
obsessing
?” He knows he is. It is only in the last year or so that he has come to understand terms like
obsessing
. Somehow, that doesn’t stop the obsessing.

“I feel like you’re stuck.”

Ezra looks down: guilty as charged.

“Yeah, I’m stuck,” he says quietly.

“I’m concerned,” I say, “because how many bar mitzvahs are you going to have in your life?”

He does not answer.

“How many, Ez?”

“One.”

“That’s right. You only get one. It should be one of the greatest days of your life. So many people who love you are coming to be with you. And they’re all excited to see you and talk to you.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“But Ima and I are worried that you won’t be able to enjoy it.” I put some force and volume into my voice to be sure I am getting through. “We’re worried that you will be so stuck thinking about presents that you’ll miss the day. Your bar mitzvah will come and go and all you’ll be thinking about will be the
Star Wars
encyclopedia and the Looney Tunes DVD.”

I look at him, worried that my invoking the gifts will ignite his rant all over again. Ezra is quiet a moment, seeming to give ear.

“I shouldn’t talk about those gifts?”

“No. You need to stop.”

“But I
can’t
stop,” he says, pleading. He is nearly sobbing—more from frustration with his own mind than with me. “I really
want
those presents!”

We have turned onto Beverly Drive, the tree-lined main artery of our neighborhood. We stop on the sidewalk, and Sasha sits on a grassy median strip next to the trunk of a bushy ficus tree. On the spot, I come up with a plan for Ezra.

“I want you to take all those thoughts about presents, okay? And put them all into one place in your brain.”