The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green (21 page)

May 22, 1983

Dearest Friends,

Please join me on June 12 of this year to again hear my fifteen-year-old son Jacob read from the Torah at temple Beth Tikvah at 9
A.M
. sharp.

I feel that this reading is quite a significant one.
It marks yet another pinnacle in Moses and Aaron’s plight to bring the slaves of Egypt to a better understanding of God’s intentions for them in the wilderness of Zin. What makes this day even more special is that I have just been reinstated as president of the shul and will again be on the beema with my “blond boy” for his fifth reading this year.

Rabbi Shapiro has said that “Jacob’s Torah readings have a very natural cadence and that you [I] should be very proud of him.” So with that said,
I look forward to seeing you. Please also join us for brunch afterward at our home.

Bring nothing but your beautiful selves.

Love,
Abram

“I’m gonna
shoooooot!
” Asher screams from my mom’s tiny front lawn. Brigitte sits up on the hood of Nicky’s Camaro in her bra and cut-offs while Beth stays vertical, rewinding a cassette with her pinkie. It’s graduation time at Piedmont High and never have I seen my brother’s smile this deep. I watch from the upstairs bathroom of my mom and Nate’s rental on Bickley Street. Asher’s got a bottle of Korbel between his knees and feigns a mounting orgasm with fluttering eyes. His best friend Nicky loves it and laughs with his head back, awaiting this bullet-to-be. “She’s gonna blooooow,” my brother says next, and pumps the bottle a few more times. I lean my chin against the window. I find a smirk of my own.

“Three . . . two . . .
one!
”

RISD said yes on the first of this month. A “full ride” as he puts it, a scholarship to paint. I stood behind him when he opened the letter in my mother’s front hall. I watched him, the back of his head, and waited quietly to hear the news. “We’re gone!” I thought I might hear. Get packed, it’s time, let’s roll—any of those would have worked just fine. But it was his time, which he earned, and he chose to say all of nothing. Since then he’s been booked solid with drinking and giggling and performing wobbly cartwheels in the halls of this house. The specifics of leaving have yet to cross his mind.

The cork rockets into the air with a
fump,
landing seconds later on Dr. Nate’s Buick in the driveway. Asher laps at the foam that covers his hands and wrists. He takes a long sip and hands it to Nicky who swigs it and gives it to Beth. I watch her tip the bottle high with both hands and place it carefully between her lips.

“Jaaacob?” my mother calls from the stairs.

I leap to my feet and collect the tatters of my report card off the tiled floor. I cram them in my suitcase but some drop and float like ash around the room.

“You up there, Jacob?”

I flushed history and science but then cut my palm on the dull knife I was using, which was awkward on the tile, but I couldn’t find a scissor. I had to tear the rest into confetti shreds and some of them stuck to the side of the bowl. “I’m in the bathroom,” I yell softly. Now I’m collecting bits of paper and trying to clean the dots of blood off the floor and toilet seat—fucking ridiculous.

Beth screams something after she drinks and I look up from my knees. She’s easily the sexiest metal-chick in my high school. An “aluminum-siding diva” from the north side of Roswell Avenue.

“Answer me if you’re up there, please?”

“In the bathroom!”

Nicky’s been dating her for two weeks now, says he found her in the deep end at the Piedmont pool. Her long peroxide hair hangs to her navel and today she wears a vinyl miniskirt with fish nets and a “Blizzard of Oz” T-shirt. She also has these airbrushed breasts that move when she walks, a Barbie-sized tush and a very approachable, just-took-a-bong-hit smile that tilts her head just so. Whenever I see her in the halls at school she’s surrounded by a gaggle of Lita Ford look-alikes with tasseled white-leather jackets and big Aqua Net hair. But when masturbating I give her silky red panties, a see-through bra, and always have her arrive unexpectedly. Occasionally she wears a wig or some type of sharp and curvy shoe but I always smell Marlboros and record vinyl on her skin, and a splash of something boozy on her lips. We laugh when her
Houses of the Holy
necklace bonks me in the chin and I run my fingertips down the smooth of her silky long back. And after an hour or two of intercourse, she begins her ladder climb down, down, down my chest and soon with eyes closed I feel this tickle of warm breath against my wang.

“Jacob?” she says through the door.

I check the floor and toilet for more blood and confetti. There’s a piece of Spanish pinned to the shower curtain. “Be right out.” She knocks. I open the door just a slit, and hide my hand.

“I’ve been calling your name for five minutes. Why don’t you answer me?”

“I’m in here.”

“I see that,” she says, trying to look behind me. “Ya got Hebrew school, babe. Chop, chop, Dad’s on his way to take you.”

Blow jobs have been on my mind a lot these days. I think
about how glorious the concept really is and how fortunate we are that someone’s willing to do it. Jonny wins the race to fellatio. I’d been ahead on hand jobs 1 to 0, but who cares about that now. He gets one from this thirty-year-old lady in Mendocino, some wacky, hippy, California friend of his dad’s. He says they were drinking margaritas straight from the blender and before he knew it she was shimmying toward him and picking at the knot in his sweatpants. I asked him if he came too quick, but not because I always do or worry that I forever will or struggle with that helpless, can’t-stop-it-now rising that occurs when female fingers get so close to my pubic hair, but more just to know the details. He says he was doing fine until she put her pinkie on his butthole and “shoved a little.”

“Are you even packed?” my mother says.

I keep the door nearly closed and point at my suitcase on the toilet. “You mean
that?
”

“Don’t be flip, Jacob. You know I don’t like that. If you’re angry with me just say it.”

“Flip?”

“Flippant. Don’t be flippant.”

“Flippant?”

She looks at her watch and sighs. “Will you wait outside for him today, please? I really just . . . don’t have the energy.”

I nod and gently shut the door. I check the toilet and glance out the window once again. Asher’s holding his plastic-wrapped cap and gown. He takes two quick steps and punts it into the hedges.

“Come on, babe,” my mother says from the hall. “He should be here already.”

I splash water on my face and widen my eyes in the mirror. “What about Gabe and Dara?”

“What?”

“Where are Gabe and Dara?”

“They’re at your father’s already . . . with Janice.” The new boarder. A Haitian nurse from Irvington who can already bless bread and wine in Hebrew and make grenade-sized matzo balls. My father’s in heaven.

I grab my suitcase, open the door, and head for the stairs. My mother follows me down.

“We’ll be in Atlanta until Sunday,” she says, “and then Boca for the night.”

“Boca?”

“Just a little R&R. You’re back with me as soon as we land. All three of you. I’ll come to Dad’s from the airport. Now, Asher’s gonna stay here and I want you to call him if there are any problems, all right?”

“What’s in Atlanta?”

“Same. An adoption consortium. Nathaniel’s the keynote.”

After serving as a professional witness for a nationally publicized egg-donor case, Dr. Nate is in very high demand. It leaves them traveling a few times a month now. Asher gets to live here with his girlfriend when they’re gone, while the three of us get my father, a very recent graduate of some group called est. Last month he allowed a new woman friend, Rona, to shave his beard off while he wept in the woods during an Outward Boundish self-help retreat. “At least he’s trying” is the way my mother puts it.

“I’ll call you when we get settled,” she says. “All right? And here, put this twenty-dollar bill in your room for emergencies.”

I open the front door and toss my suitcase on the porch. It rolls a few times and settles upside down.

“All right, Jacob?”

“All right.” I take the money from her hand and squeeze it in my palm.

“Can I have a kiss?”

Beth sees me before the others do. She smiles and exhales a stream of smoke through her nose. We’ve hung out twice before and she’s been sort of flirty both times. I’ve come to think she knows she’s the queen of my skanky dreams. My mother kisses the back of my head. “Good luck in temple on Saturday. I know you’ll do wonderfully.”

I ignore this and await what comes next.

“When I get back I’ll . . . talk to your father again. No more of these after this one, okay? Last Torah reading. Promise.”

I want to laugh but I don’t. Asher sees me and starts to walk over.

“Okay?”

“Right.”

“I love you.”

“Okay.”

“‘Okay’? Just ‘okay’? You’re not gonna say it back?”

“Fine. I . . . do, all right?”

“Then say it.”

“I do.”

“So say it.”

“I
said
it!”

She walks in front of me and lifts my chin with her finger. “Why are you yelling at me?” she whispers.

I turn away and can feel her staring at the back of my head.

“Jacob, please look at me.”

“Throw that thing in the air,” Asher says to Nicky, and lifts a stone from the driveway. “Try underhand.”

Nicky lifts his cap and gown off the front lawn and begins to windmill it around and around.

I hear my mother sigh.

“Out over the street,” says Asher. “I don’t want to hit the house.”

“I’ll try.”

“What’s he doing?” my mother says.

“
Pull!
”

Nicky hurls the bag into the air and Asher fires the stone at it. It misses by a mile and bounces off the Kissler’s garage. They both laugh their asses off.

“Jesus,” she says. “Asher! No more of that.”

“Oh. Hi, Ma.”

“No more. You’ll break a window.”

“That’s it, Nick.”

“I’m going inside, Jacob. Take care of your brother and sister over there, okay? I’ll call you when I can.” She kisses the back of my head again.

Pause.

I hear the door shut behind me.

My brother retrieves the robe from where it lands in the street and walks toward me on the porch. “Looky here,” he says waving it. “Freedom in a bag.”

I nod and sit on the front stoop.

“It’s fuckin’ over,” he says, cradling the plastic bag in his arms.

I lay my open hand on my knee so he’ll see the blood on my palm. He doesn’t look down.

“Hey, I got somethin’ to tell you,” he says.

He found an apartment in Providence. That’s what it is. There’s a bedroom for each of us and the bigger one has a view of the river. He gets it of course. Mine has a tapestry for a door and no closets but the toilet’s closer to me and his room can get noisy on weekends. Pack your shit and load it in Nicky’s
trunk, he says. Write a note to Mom if you want but do it soon. I want to hit the highway by dusk. No, be ready to bolt by dawn. Be ready by noon tomorrow. Say your good-byes and be ready to fire up the engine by . . .

“Little Greeny!” yells Nicky, and I face his way. He looks like a cross between Sid Vicious and Dennis the Menace these days: short, blond, boy-next-door meets aggressive, whiskey-loving nutcase with immeasurable issues and a passion for arena metal. He lives in an old, ignored Victorian with his extremely elderly grandmother and a piranha named Swallow. “New speakers, ya ready?”

Brigitte and Beth put their fingers in their ears. Nick flashes devil-horn fingers with his pointer and pinkie and starts his ignition through the window. The engine roars and the bassy thump of Iron Maiden makes his windshield wipers hop. Asher takes a smiling swig from the bottle of champagne and his eyes meet mine. “Pretty fuckin rockin’,” he says, with a squinty, buzzed grin. “A Blaupunkt. Graduation gift from his dad.”

I nod and look down at Asher’s cap and gown. He sees me admiring it and sends it spinning into the air. “
Fuck yeaaaaaaah!
”

I watch it climb into the sky and dream that when it lands it’ll be mine. Like a lonely bridesmaid I scurry underneath but it hooks right and drops like a brick into the rhody bushes.

“You didn’t wait for me to get a rock,” Nicky says, and pulls one from his pocket.

Asher holds the Korbel out for me. “You want a swig of this shit? Still cold.”

“What’d you want to tell me?” I ask.

He takes a long sip and offers me the bottle again. “Have some.”

“I can’t. I got—” Beth is staring right at me—“Hebrew school,” I whisper.

“Oooooh, you poor fuck.”

“Why don’t ya come along?”

“Um . . . can I have my testicles hacked off instead?”

Asher got officially expelled from Beth Tikvah the day after he heard from RISD. Est training and all, my father still went berserk and flung a full coffee mug at his bedroom door. Luckily, Asher wasn’t home for all the fun. They’ve “talked” once since it happened.