The Mystics of Mile End (10 page)

We placed our orders and sat down at a tiny round table to eat. While I attacked my one scoop of cookies and cream and one scoop of mint chocolate chip with marshmallows and Reese's Pieces and rainbow sprinkles and maraschino cherries, Alex did an impression of Gabe's face when he realized that his tin can telephone had lost, and me and Lesley laughed. But Alex got so excited that he accidentally smeared hot fudge all over his face, which made me and Lesley laugh even harder, until finally he went to the bathroom to wash up.

“I'm so glad you and Alex are friends,” Lesley told me, smiling. “He talks about you all the time, you know. Says you're the best friend he's ever had.”

I didn't want to say the wrong thing, so I didn't say anything.

“I don't know if you've noticed, but he doesn't make friends very easily. Big reader, that one. Are you a big reader, too?”

“Sort of. Not like Alex, though.”

She laughed. “No, nobody reads quite like Alex, do they? He's the brains of the family, I've always told him that. The budding scientist.”

“He must get that from your dad, right? Liking science and astronomy and all that?”

She laughed again. “What in the world gave you that idea?”

“Well, he was a scientist, wasn't he?”

“My father? He was a plumber.”

“A plumber?”

“Yep. Fixed toilets for a living.”

“You mean he wasn't the one who came up with the whole idea for SETI?”

“SETI? What's that?”

“Um. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence?”

“Sorry.” She smiled. “You'll have to talk to Alex about that kind of thing. He's the astronomer. I buy him books on the subject when I can, but I really don't know much about it.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but just then Alex came back from the bathroom. His face was clean and a little pink from where he'd rubbed it too hard with paper towels. I finished my ice cream and Alex finished his and a few minutes later Lesley drove me home.

That night I went to bed early but I couldn't sleep. I went to my bookshelf and picked up the book that Alex had given me weeks ago and that so far I hadn't opened even once. It was
Important Names in Astronomy Today
. I took it under the covers with me and turned on my flashlight. I flipped to the back of the book and brought my finger down the list of names in the index, and there, hiding near the very end, I found it.

Zaitsev, Aleksandr Leonidovich. 1945–.

A dash and a dot. Like a coded message. I was only eleven and a half, but it didn't take a genius. What the symbols meant was one, Zaitsev was still alive, and two, he was only in his fifties, which meant that three, he was not Lesley's father, which meant that four, Alex had been lying to me when he said that he was named after somebody famous.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think of why Alex would lie to me but I couldn't. Then I thought of how, for months and months, I'd seen him walking around at recess with his eyes glued to the pages of a book. All that time, I'd thought he did it because he was really into whatever he was reading. But now I thought,
what if he did it because he liked the way it made the world go blurry at the edges of his vision? I knew it was possible, if you got the angle just right, to peek out of the corners of your eyes in a way that made everything around you go bright. You squinted. You had patience. You tilted your head to the left and waited.

I put the book on my desk, but I didn't turn off the flashlight. Instead I pointed it at my door so that Sammy could see the light from her room and come say, using her grown-up voice, “Lights out!” or “It's past your bedtime!” But even though I counted off two hundred seconds inside my head, she didn't come. I was about to give up when all of a sudden I had an idea.

I took my journal out from under my pillow and flipped back until I came to “Things That Make My Sister Sad.” Under number nine, which was
Jenny (?),
I added a tenth reason for my sister's sadness. It was the kind of thing that, once you saw it, seemed so obvious you couldn't believe you hadn't seen it before.
She doesn't have a bedtime,
I wrote. Then I fell asleep.

T
he night of the bat mitzvah was hot and humid. When we got to the synagogue, one hundred guests were squishing their one hundred bums into the one hundred seats of the congregation. The bat mitzvah girls were already sitting up onstage, in red velvet chairs arranged in a half-moon shape. Only the chair at the left end of the red half-moon was empty.

The synagogue was so packed that Dad started to worry out loud that maybe it would be hard to find three seats together, but then he saw a bunch of empty spots in the second row, right behind Mr. Glassman. While we walked toward them, I looked at Sammy and saw that her face was white. Dad squeezed into the row and sat down, so I squeezed in after him and sat down, too. Then Dad told Sammy to sit, but she just stood there, looking down at her fancy blue dress.

Mr. Glassman turned around in his seat and beamed at her. Dad frowned and told her again to sit down, but she didn't move. He stared at her. She stared at Mr. Glassman. Then, very suddenly, she turned around and climbed onto the stage and walked to the chair at the left end of the half-moon and sat and stared at her knees.

Mr. Glassman gave Dad a slow, careful smile, like a test. “She is quite something, your daughter, yes, Mr. Meyer?” he said. “She is the best student in her class. Best student I have ever had! You must be . . . you should be . . . very proud of your daughter . . . yes?”

Dad said nothing. I was afraid to turn right and look at him, so instead I turned left just as a very fat lady squeezed herself into the seat beside me. She was out of breath and I wondered if it was because she was very fat or because she had rushed to get to synagogue. I thought about what might have happened to make her need to rush so much, and then I thought about what might have happened to make her need to eat so much, and then the bat mitzvah started.

First Mr. Glassman got up and made a speech. Then the first of the girls, the one at the right end of the half-moon, stood up in front of the microphone and read from the Torah. Then the next girl in the half-moon stood up and the whole thing happened all over again, except this time the reading felt about five times longer. I started to pick my nose, but then I realized what I was doing and stopped. I took a deep breath and looked out at the crowd and felt how the air was heavy with all the people and all the words they wished they could say but couldn't say because girl after girl was crossing the
bima
and chanting from a very ancient scroll.

I couldn't really see, because Mr. Glassman's gray hair was standing up right in front of me, but one thing I noticed was that all the girls read either too fast or too quiet. Sometimes they stumbled over their words and lost their place and had to go back and everyone in the audience sank a little lower in their seats. Another
thing I noticed was that the fat lady sitting to my left kept fanning herself with the program and yawning. She had on a purple silk suit and a gigantic pearl necklace, and she looked unbelievably bored. I thought, who could blame her?

After about four billion years and three gazillion songs, the last girl got up on the
bima
and I made my neck long to see over the hair in front of me and it was my sister. My sister, who was not most people. Her hands shook when she took the scroll, but then she started chanting.

And there it was, the weird something in her voice. It was not too fast or too quiet but slow and steady, as if she had all the time in the world, as if it was just for her, just for this moment, that the whole world had been created. I closed my eyes. Inside her voice I could hear each letter, and each silence between each letter, and I felt happy and sad and lonely, because in each perfect silence was a smaller, hidden silence, like dolls inside dolls that go on and on forever, and inside the smallest doll I could suddenly see the list curled up, the list of all the reasons, the reasons for my sister's sadness.

The answering machine on the kitchen counter. The sticky seeds on the floor. The red bicycle in the garage. The closed door. Two small palms smeared with strawberry jam. A store full of musical instruments. A woman's fingers braiding ropes of dough. Voices singing. Feet dancing. Two boys, laughing, pointing. Hundreds and hundreds of old books. A dead bird. A familiar freckled face with a streak of paint across it, the mouth twisting down. A group of girls standing on a playground, seen from up above, their thin backs turning. And underneath all these pictures, down below the deepest one, a single question burning. It was coming closer, growing bigger and bigger like a shadow on the wall, and I turned away because the question was too big and too cold and too much and because it wasn't meant for me, it was not my question to answer, and then the voice fell away and it was all over—I opened my eyes.

I blinked once and the synagogue reappeared. It reappeared so suddenly, it almost hurt. It was like the feeling you get coming out of a dark movie theater into a bright sunny day. For a second, I felt almost dizzy. Then I blinked again and everything was normal.

Everything was so normal that now I wondered, maybe it was just me? Maybe it all just happened in my head? What if I'd fallen asleep from boredom and missed the whole entire thing? I was still afraid to turn right and look at Dad, so instead I turned to my left.

The fat lady's hands were trembling. Her eyes were squeezed shut and a single tear was rolling down her cheek. It slid down her skin and fell with a plop onto her purple silk skirt.

It wasn't just me.

There was a pause, and then Mr. Glassman crossed the
bima
to make the final speech. He had cue cards in his hands, but his fingers were shaking, and he could barely get the words out. He seemed confused and a little blind, like his eyes hadn't adjusted to the sunlight, either. He kept turning to look at Sammy. Finally he said good night, and then there was the sound of one hundred bums lifting out of one hundred seats, and Sammy came down from the
bima
and stood very still beside me.

She looked at Dad and for a second he didn't say anything. Then he opened his mouth, but before any words could come out, Ira came rushing up the aisle toward us. His eyes were watery and his face was red like maybe he'd been crying. He stared at Sammy as if there was so much he wanted to say but he didn't know where to start. Then he took Dad's hands in his hands and looked right into his eyes. “Miriam would have been proud,” he whispered. “So proud.”

Dad ripped his hands out of Ira's and balled them into fists. A vein in his forehead was jumping up and down, and if I had to describe the expression on his face using only one word, the word I would use to describe it is
fury
.

Then Ira's wife, Judy, came up to us, dragging Jenny by the hand. “That was wonderful, oh, just wonderful!” the woman cried. She kissed Sammy on both cheeks, making her blush.

Jenny was staring at my sister. Her eyes were so wide I thought they were going to pop out of her head. They were filled with a feeling that looked like awe and regret and sadness all mixed together. I tried to come up with one word to describe her expression but it was hard.

Five minutes later we got into the car and drove away. Almost immediately, it started raining. The windshield wipers swished back and forth, filling our ears with a loud clicking noise. Raindrops slid across the windows like comets. I traced their tails with my fingertip.

Dad's knuckles were white on the steering wheel, and he didn't say a word the whole way home. Except once at a red light I heard him mutter something about “sharper than a serpent's tooth.” I didn't understand what he thought was sharper than a serpent's tooth, unless maybe he meant the rain, but it wasn't even coming down that hard. In the backseat, I was sitting up close to Sammy, and when he said that I could feel her whole body shiver.

When we got home, Dad went straight to his room and Sammy went to hers. I heard their two doors close like echoes of each other. I got a cherry Popsicle and stood licking it in the hall. The framed photos of Dad and Mom stared up at me. He was frowning, but she was smiling. Her face had a light in it that his face didn't have, and I wondered if maybe that was
emunah
. I thought, was Mom a happier person than Dad because she had faith and he didn't? Then I bit straight down on the Popsicle, pushing my front teeth deep into it until I shivered.

I knocked on Sammy's door and then opened it. She'd changed into shorts and a T-shirt, and she was stuffing a bunch of things into her trash can. The blue dress. Her candlesticks. A box of matches.
The triangle she used to play in band class. The kiddush cup. Her prayer book. I asked, “What are you doing with all this stuff?” and she just shrugged, so I asked, “Can I have it?” and she just shrugged again. Then she pulled her backpack over her shoulder, so I said, “Where are you going?” and she said, “To the supermarket, go to bed,” and then she left.

I poked around in her trash can, took out all the things except the blue dress and the triangle, and stuffed them under the bed in my room. Then I tried to fall asleep but I couldn't. After a while, I heard the phone ring and ran to the kitchen to answer it. Even though I said hello three times, nobody answered. I hung up, but a second later the phone rang again. This time I let the machine get it. Instead of a voice, I heard a long stretch of silence, with a few taps thrown in here and there. Then the machine beeped and went quiet.

I went back to bed and crawled under the covers. I turned on my flashlight, made another list, and turned off my flashlight again. But I still couldn't fall asleep, so instead I calculated how much my name equals in
gematria
. I calculated Sammy's name and then I calculated Dad's name, too, trying to see if all our names added up together equaled something I could still recognize, something maybe not that different from family.