Not Me (6 page)

He sloshed through the waves onto the shore in utter darkness, led only by the sound of the man in front of him. Many fell on their faces and kissed the earth, their mouths filling with wet sand; he could not see them exactly, but the beach was crawling with creatures, and he did not suppose they were sea lions. He fell on his face and ate sand too.

He heard someone cry, “We are free! We are free!” And then someone tugged at his shirt, and hurried him on toward the waiting lorries.

Most of his group was taken to Kibbutz Afikim, but he was sent to Naor, a kibbutz above Ashdod on the Mediterranean Sea, on the road to Tel Aviv. The caravan split up, but he was happy to see, as a match was struck and cigarettes were lit, the woman Moskovitz seated across from him. He smiled perhaps for the first time since that day he had seen the prisoners die from overeating.

In Naor they grew oranges. Because of his age and health he was also quickly recruited into the Haganah.

“None of you know how to be soldiers,” they told them, “but in this land we only have ourselves.”

When they gave him a rifle, he behaved as if he did not know how to handle it, which was made easier by the fact that it was such an old weapon he was genuinely unfamiliar with its use. But he could not as easily hide the fact that his SS training had turned him into an excellent shot
—
mainly because he could not resist the pleasure of hitting the target. So they gave him a better rifle and placed him in the watchtower, and he sat there many afternoons, and many evenings, smoking cigarettes and watching the blue-and-white Jewish flag play and flutter in the wind just above his head.

When they handed him his new weapon, the major said, “Whatever you were, you are no more. You are now a Jewish soldier.”

Sometimes when he sat in the tower he imagined himself picking off the kibbutzniks one by one. Other times, Moskovitz might climb up and join him, bringing along pieces of dark bread spread with halvah and chocolate. They didn’t talk very much, but he could see she was happy. The others meant nothing to him, but he liked Moskovitz. At least for now, however, he did not touch her.

But what irked him more than anything was that these Jews were so horribly disorganized. The army unit was without discipline, everyone was called by his first name, including the commander, and no one saluted anyone. As for the kibbutz, it might as well have been run by children.

If they go on this way, he thought, they’ll be overrun by the Arabs as soon as the British leave. The thought gave him a certain amount of satisfaction, but it also frightened him. Before that happens, he decided, I must go over to the other side, resume my true identity, and quietly slip into a comfortable exile. Silently he plotted his escape.

In the meantime, though, their sloppiness just got the better of him. Finally he went before the kibbutz council, and begged them to change their ways.

“Well then,” said this fellow, Avigdor, who was a sabra, and hence one of the worst offenders, “organize us!”

So the first thing he did was take over the books. He was appalled. Cross-outs, erasures, pages that didn’t balance, money going out with no signatures, produce being sold for who knows how much? It was impossible! From now on, everything would be catalogued
—
every item, every penny, every nail that came into the kibbutz would be noted, indexed, accounted for
—
and the same for everything that went out. Only in this way could they ever hope to make a profit and turn this makeshift farm into a serious enterprise.

Pretty soon no one would purchase so much as a dish towel without first getting Heshel Rosenheim’s okay. And if you wanted to know where something was
—
who had what where
—
it was again to Heshel you had to come. It was Heshel who knew how much the kibbutz spent on furnishing Ben-Eliezar’s room and how much on Rifka and Dudi’s
—
so when it came to making allotments, the council always deferred to Heshel. And when the disputes arose
—
why should Shuli get a radio, and not Hannah?
—
it was Heshel who mediated, and, to tell the truth, arbitrated. In a matter of months, his word was law.

“Jews!” he muttered to himself.

And he would write something else down in one of his books.

I shoved the journal back into my pocket and got the hell out of Starbucks. My father was insane. None of this could have happened. Nazis don’t end up running kibbutzim, and they don’t join the Haganah. And even if they did, the thought of my father in the Haganah was ludicrous. He couldn’t even ride a bike.

The writer lady looked up at me. Longingly, I thought. I wanted to scream at her. Her hair was long and undyed, a terrible, terrible mistake. It was obvious. Husband had left her for a younger woman. But what I hated most of all was that I could see she was making the assumption that we were from the same place—the township of dumped spouses. Wrong! I was telling her. I’m from the City of the Damned.

But as I got in the car I found myself staring at her through the big plate-glass windows of the coffee shop. She had immediately gone back to her furious typing. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I hated her. I hated her for writing. For telling her stupid story. Nobody wants to hear it! I silently screamed at her. I hadn’t thought of drugs in a long time, but I thought of them then. I put the car in reverse and peeled out of the lot like a high school dropout at Shoney’s Big Boy.

It was afternoon, the heat of the day. I was sitting by the pool, the very pool by which my mother had died. When I laid myself down upon the chaise longue, I half expected to see her hat floating on the mouthwash-blue water, drifting toward the deep end where the diving board sat rusting and unused.

No one was about. The golf courses had emptied an hour or two ago, and the sunbathers and swimmers had moved inside the clubhouse to finish their games of bridge or work out on the stationary bicycles. Televisions were on. Naps were being taken. I sat alone under an umbrella, sweating.

That woman at Starbucks had had a strong effect on me—more than I had realized at the time, because I just couldn’t stop thinking about her. I wasn’t thinking about her sexually. It was more about the fact that somehow I was in the same club as she was, even though I was at least ten years younger than she. She must have been over fifty. And when she looked at me—well—I got the feeling that I looked
tasty
to her. I didn’t want to be tasty to her. I wanted to be quite
impossible
for her.

I held Journal #2 in my burning palm. I laughed—maybe I needed to do what Dad did. Start my own set of journals. Ceremoniously hand them over to Josh at the point I become a semi-vegetable.

But hadn’t I done more than my share to mess him up already?

I remembered we were driving down I-80 because I decided to take him up to the Mr. Fun Arcade, where they had all kinds of video games, go-kart racing, miniature golf. He really had wanted his friend Sam to come along. “We could have Sam and Evan and Ross,” he begged. But I told him I wanted it to be just the two of us—father and son—something special. Reluctantly he acceded, but even as we walked to the car he was suggesting we could stop by Sam’s—Just Sam, Dad! No one else!—and see if he was, as he put it, “available.” Josh was eight years old. He spoke about Sam as if he were King Solomon. Sam says I don’t have to worry about the reading tests—they don’t really count. Sam eats his hamburger this way, with relish and avocado, and not with ketchup and tomato. Sam buys his clothes at Banana Republic, not at Penney’s. He didn’t quit begging me to stop at Sam’s until we actually got over the Bay Bridge and even Josh had to concede it was too far to go back. Longingly he looked at the retreating San Francisco skyline as if he were being carted off to prison.

“It’ll be fun,” I said.

“No it won’t,” he replied.

I looked over at him. One part of me wanted to throw him out of the window, and the other part of me wanted to weep. I began to sense how foolish this junket was. I wanted to say something light and engaging, but I was gripped with the idea that anything I might come up with would sound hopelessly stupid to him. He took out his Game Boy and started playing his millionth game of Tetris DX. I flipped on the radio. I put it on classical. He immediately changed it to rap.

But it was a beautiful, warm day once we got out of the city, with its malignant fog and depressing, gray air. Here the sun was shining brightly and the temperature jumped twenty degrees all the way to eighty, and we drove along merrily, at least I did. I loved leaving the fog and hitting the hot air. Each time it startled me, woke me to the wideness and strangeness of the world. I rolled down all the windows and let my hand play in the wind. And pretty soon even Josh couldn’t resist the glorious sunshine and wide brown hills, the warm summer air and cloudless sky, and just like that he gave up being glum and started talking about baseball. On good days we did that. I actually knew almost nothing about baseball, but I was ever so clever at bouncing his questions back at him so he’d think I had the same statistics at my fingertips as he did. Do you think Barry Bonds is going to get out of his slump? he asked. I assured him he would, because hadn’t he always in the past? And then I’d say, what’s he batting anyway? Oh, yeah, right, but last year he was…what? Right. So there’s no reason to suppose—and he’s a switch hitter, isn’t he? Oh duh, that’s…uh…who? Santiago! Right! When he got tired of that, we’d do the same thing with rap music and Saturday morning cartoons. Even though he was still sitting with his feet up on the dashboard and his nose in his Game Boy, it seemed he had scooted closer to me, and I reached over and ruffled his hair.

When we got to Mr. Fun, which, for all its immeasurable appeal to grammar school boys, was a rather lackluster affair stuck just off the freeway in the middle of cow pastures and sheep farms, I presented him with a bagful of quarters, and he disappeared into the blaring labyrinth of the video arcade. It was a colossal waste of money, but I loved watching him. He swelled with the pleasure of being in control, and I with him. He knew exactly which machine to go to first, and how to behave with the other video-crazed kids, so that in seconds he was part of a group and was even invited to join in a round of air hockey. I hung back and watched from a safe distance. When the other kids finally wandered off, he challenged me to a game of Missile Command and fully and gleefully humiliated me. But I was proud that he could beat me fair and square. Unfortunately, he, too, was humiliated a few minutes later, because he was deemed too short to race the go-karts on his own. They said I had to drive for him. But when no one was looking we switched places. He just burst with joy. We’re so happy together, I said to myself, so maybe it will all work out.

And later we had fun in the bumper cars and we took turns in the batting cages, where I stood close behind him and guided his swing and felt his sense of accomplishment as the ball went soaring out into the field—not very far, in the scheme of hit balls, but for me they were all home runs. We ate hot dogs and hamburgers with pickle relish (they didn’t have avocado), and we drank orange sodas and munched on fries, and ate ice cream right after that, and at some point we even had cotton candy, and for the first time in his entire life I let him go into a public restroom by himself.

By the end of the day, his hands sticky with cotton candy and his mouth stuffed with Jelly Bellies, flushed and tired and a little sunburned, Josh didn’t argue when it was time to go home. My arm around his shoulder, we strolled to the car.

“It was fun, Dad,” he said.

A few minutes into our ride home, I thought it was time.

“Listen,” I said, “I have something important to tell you.”

And then I explained about his mother and me.

I watched his happy face freeze, then melt. His cheeks quivered and his little hands were pressed into tight balls.

“But what am I supposed to do now?” he cried.

“You don’t have to do anything,” I explained.

“Am I supposed to go back and forth between your houses?”

“Something like that. We’ll work it out. It won’t be so bad. It’ll be kind of fun. We’ll be bachelors.”

“I’m not going to live with Mom?”

“No, no, you’ll live with Mom. I meant when you’re with me.”

“And how often will that be?”

“I don’t know yet. How often do you want to be with me?”

He looked at me hard. “How am I supposed to know that?” he said.

We rode on a little longer. The sun was sinking in the sky, bringing down on us a blinding, desperate brightness.

“I’m really, really mad at you!” he suddenly exploded. “I’m really, really mad at you.” And then he started crying, not like when he scraped himself, or when he was made to go to his room, or when he didn’t get to stay up, or even when he was afraid to tell us his grade, or the time he got stuck climbing those rocks and couldn’t go forward and couldn’t go back and was just hanging on for dear life. It was some other cry I had never heard before, a cry so deep it was almost silent, so sharp it took all his breath away, and mine too.

The tears just poured out of his eyes.

“I know you’re mad at me,” I said. “You have every right to be mad at me. But we’re friends, Josh. And we need each other. We’re best friends. You’re my best friend.”

He looked up at me and shook his head.

“You’re not my friend,” he said. “You’re my father.”

I had to pull over a few miles down because he had to throw up. I held his head and felt his small body contracting and heaving under my hands. I gently rubbed his back as he seemed to go limp and almost sleepy. I took off my shirt and wiped his face. I hugged him and eased him back into the car. The little puddle of vomit stared up at me from the asphalt, and I tossed my shirt into the bushes.

When I came round and slid in behind the wheel, he was already asleep. I thought of the intimacy that had just passed between us, and I shuddered with dread.

But really and truly I wasn’t a bad father. We were always laughing, all three of us. Always having fun. Lots of times we did skits together. I would set up the video camera on the tripod, and then think of a premise and give Ella and Josh characters and we’d do improv. It was great. I had dozens of those tapes. After the divorce, I used to look at them all the time. She didn’t want them. She gave them all to me. I must admit, that hurt my feelings.

I thought of these things while I stretched out on the chaise. My mind had a tendency to wander like that. I tried to remember what had started that train of thought—something about the woman with the long undyed hair. Something about the longing in her eyes and the angry way she typed.

I thought: there were lots of good things about me as a husband! And Ella liked a lot of things about me, too—because she told me so. Maybe I should make a catalog of all these things. I should list every single thing she liked about me, and present it to her. A kind of ledger of the good me.

I started mentally jotting them down:

Excellent pancakes

Good foot massage

Fun at parties

Professional-sounding telephone voice

Able to fix electrical things

Ambidextrous tongue

This was good, I thought, a good start! I could quantify my worth as her husband. I could help her see the logic of getting back together. I could present an irrefutable case.

Loyal to a fault (did NOT fool around even after you stopped having sex with me) Flosses

Oddly, I soon began to fall asleep again, even though I had just gotten up from a nap. My mind wandered along this pathway until it grew dull and stupid, but for a while I had been really taken with this idea of quantification, with the idea that the universe was actually made up of little pluses and minuses that you could sum up and write down in a ledger. Sure, we like to think of everything as a mystery, from human relationships to ecology to cosmic forces; it’s comforting to believe all experience is indecipherable, ineluctable—whatever word you want to call it—but we’re wrong. Yes, we’re wrong, and for a few seconds there I got it. I knew my little epiphany would get fuzzy and then wear off completely in just a few minutes—but to feel that there really is this checklist of good and bad, right and wrong, existence and nonexistence, fact and error, life and death—what joy! It was so heartening to think I could actually understand something. Right there, poolside, where my mother had fallen onto the mahjongg tiles and knocked the iced tea off the table, a spirit of love pervaded, not sorrow. The hat floating across the water did in fact mean something. It meant straw hats float! It meant that if I got into the water and lay on my back and allowed the water to own me, why, I’d float right across to the other side too. I loved this list thing! I loved saying,
See! Ella! This is who I am!
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a pencil or paper with me, and I knew I’d forget most of my best attributes if I didn’t hurry back to my father’s apartment to write them down, but I just couldn’t muster the energy to get up. It was too hot. The sweet, calm water lapping against the side of the pool had lulled me into a lazy state of mind. Maybe it was the sun beating down on my head, or the fact that I hadn’t eaten all afternoon, but for the first time in a long while I felt hope. And that was striking. So striking. Because until that moment I had not realized how hopeless I had become.

I looked around. It was a nice pool house. I felt good about it. Palm trees. Tropical flowers. The lovely sound of a lone Lincoln Town Car puckapucking down the soft, newly paved asphalt drive. I had a list now. I had a case. There was love in the world after all. Everything grew dim and pleasant as I drifted toward sleep.

But I felt something in my hand and looked down. It was, of course, Journal #2, and I woke, just like that.

I should have tossed that goddamned diary into the pool and flown back to San Francisco that very day. But I didn’t. It was Dad’s…whatever it was. And I couldn’t abandon him. I just couldn’t.

They called him the “Yekkeh,” the German. By which, by the way, they meant a German Jew, and not a German at all. It was a term of affectionate opprobrium deriving from his anal retentiveness, as the Jewish Doktor Freud would have called it, his compulsion to put everything in order, his need for cleanliness, and his fear that the slightest disarray opened the door to the ravages of chaos. As far as Heshel was concerned, he found this nickname an amusing irony. As long as they thought of him as German, he could be German. It was as if he had drawn a disguise over himself by drawing himself as he really was. “Yekkeh.” The kibbutzniks seemed like children to him. Pets. He found that he somehow wished to protect them against themselves, as one protects sheep from wandering blindly into quicksand, or horses from running frantically into the burning barn.