The Mystics of Mile End (2 page)

After school, I started walking down Saint-Viateur in the direction of Mr. Katz's house. Even though I never usually prayed outside of Hebrew School, because Dad said prayer was just an example of magical thinking, I decided I'd try it as an experiment on my way over there. I'd ask God in my head to let me find Mr. Katz on his lawn so I could figure out what he was up to.

I prayed while the warm golden smell of bagels drifted through the air around me, making my stomach growl. I prayed while cool guys wearing skinny black ties with dark jeans climbed up twisting staircases, which were painted green and yellow and red, to
get to their second-floor apartments, and girls with funky jewelry and short shorts climbed down past them to unlock bicycles and pedal away. I prayed while teenagers listened to loud music at bus stops and old homeless men dug through the garbage searching for cans and small dogs barked outside Italian coffee shops and tourists snapped photos in front of bright graffitied walls.

The voices around me started to change: less French and English, more Yiddish. Now little boys were running past with curls bouncing at the sides of their faces and fringes trailing out from under their shirts. Their mothers, wearing long skirts and sleeves and wigs, rushed to keep up. I walked by the Judaica store, which was selling silver candlesticks and shiny kiddush cups, and the Hasidic yeshiva, where men studied Torah for hours on end. All along the street, tiny yards and iron balconies overflowed with kids' stuff, pink tricycles and blue toy cars. Two bearded men wearing black hats and coats stood on a stoop, arguing in Yiddish and drawing circles in the air with their thumbs. I turned the corner onto Hutchison, still praying.

When I finally got there, the first half of my prayer got answered but not the second. Mr. Katz was sitting on the grass with all the leaves he'd picked lying on the plastic bag. The funny thing was, he was painting them all green, even though they were already green. When I asked him why, he just said, “Not green enough.”

I
t was 8:15 on a Friday night and Sammy wasn't in the living room. Weird. On Friday nights we always watched the TGIF lineup, which started at exactly 8:00. I tried my best to be patient, but when she still wasn't there at 8:30 I went to her room to get her, because it was boring watching TV alone and also she was the one who always made the popcorn.

Her door was open a crack so I peeked inside. The room was dark except for two white candles burning on the windowsill.
Sammy put her hands over the flames and waved them three times, then covered her eyes and started whispering.

All of a sudden, I had a memory of Mom lighting the Shabbat candles when I was really little. I could see her pressing her fingers to her eyes and saying the Hebrew words. It made me feel weird because I almost never remembered anything about her, and remembering one thing made me wonder how many other things I'd forgotten. Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Sammy knew more about Mom than I did because she was seven when Mom died and I was only five. But she didn't like to think about Mom, it made her cry, which was why I never asked questions anymore. Except now I could tell that she
was
thinking about Mom, because she was acting like her, so maybe that meant everything was different and I was allowed to ask again?

I tried to tiptoe into the room, but one of the floorboards creaked and Sammy turned around and saw me. She looked first shocked, then embarrassed, then extremely mad. She came toward me and yelled, “Haven't you ever heard of knocking?”

Then she slammed the door.

I went back to watching TV and tried to concentrate on the show but I couldn't because one, it was kind of boring, and two, I kept wondering, why did Sammy look so embarrassed? And also how long had she been lighting Shabbat candles?

After a while, I fell asleep on the couch.

When I woke up again, it was because the noise of the TV had suddenly disappeared. The silence confused me, so I opened my eyes and there was Dad, standing over me and smiling. I could tell he'd just come back from the university because he had that tired look on his face and his briefcase in one hand. Holding the remote in his other hand, he plopped into the armchair and said, “Hello. Sorry I woke you. How come you're not in bed?”

I yawned. “Fell asleep watching TV.”

“Nothing good on, huh?”

“Not really.” I twisted my neck and saw Dad flipping channels. “What are you doing?”

“Mmm? Oh, just seeing what's on.”

“But I mean, why are you watching it on mute? You could turn the volume back on, since I'm up anyways?”

A funny smile came over his face. “It's something I picked up from your mom, I guess,” he said. “You know, she used to like to find the stupidest shows on TV, I mean the most truly awful soap operas in the world, and then turn the volume all the way down so she could make up what the characters were saying. God, she loved to do that. I would find her sitting here sometimes, making up dialogue and laughing her head off.”

I froze. Dad was like Sammy, he almost never talked about Mom. Once in a while something would remind him of her and he would tell me some random fact, like the name of her favorite chocolate bar (Milky Way) or her favorite Beatle (George). But that was it.

Then I had a genius idea. Maybe if I did the voices for the characters on TV, it would make Dad so happy that he would want to tell me stuff about Mom all the time!

I concentrated hard on the episode of
Star Trek
playing on the screen. A Klingon guy was talking to a woman while their ship crashed through space, lights flashing like crazy all around them. I put on a woman's voice: “Excuse me, sir, but your skin is breaking out. Your forehead looks like it's got a mountain growing out of it! You should really try that new face wash I got you for your birthday.” Then I switched to the man's voice: “Um, can we talk about this later? Our ship's about to crash!” Then I did the woman's voice again: “Stop trying to change the subject. You're always so sensitive!” Then the ship tilted over and the characters fell down, so I said, “Your turn, Dad!” But when the man's mouth started moving
again, Dad didn't say anything. I looked over my shoulder and he was just sitting there, staring at me.

His eyes flashed with anger. The muscles in his face were all twisted up for a second, then they went flat again. He turned off the TV and got up. “It's late,” he said. “Time for me to turn in. Good night.”

As his back disappeared down the dark hall, I caught a whiff of perfume coming off him. That's when I understood why he'd gotten so mad. If he was still sniffing Mom's old perfume bottle, sometimes even spritzing it on himself, that meant he still really missed her. It probably hurt him to be reminded of her, just like it hurt Sammy.

“Good night,” I whispered, but I don't think he heard me. The door to his room was already closed.

T
he next day was hot and quiet. Most Saturdays, me and Sammy played Snakes and Ladders or Monopoly or Scrabble, but today she had her best friend over. Actually, Jenny was her only friend. Even though Sammy was one grade above her, they'd known each other forever because our dad and her dad taught at the same university and our families were friends. When Mom died, Jenny's parents said they could watch me and Sammy after school every day so that Dad could work late and wouldn't have to hire a housekeeper. He told them sure, thanks, why not.

Now Sammy was playing with Jenny in her room, and the door was closed, and I didn't want to knock in case Sammy was still mad at me.

So instead I turned around to face the door to Dad's study. It was closed, too. But I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened the night before: how he'd told me something cool about Mom completely out of the blue, and how maybe, if I was lucky, he might do the same today. I went ahead and did something I hadn't done in ages. I knocked.

“What?” He didn't like being interrupted when he was working.

I opened the door a few inches and said, “Hi.”

Without taking his eyes off the book in front of him, he said, “Do you need something?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Sick?”

“No.”

“Well then? What is it?”

I didn't know what to say. Finally, I said, “I'm bored.”

He sighed. Then he put a finger on the page to mark his place and looked up from his book. I couldn't tell what it was but the letters on the cover were in Hebrew. There were a dozen other books stacked up all over the desk, and a million more on the messy shelves behind him. One of them, I knew, even had his name on it:
The Unorthodox Kabbalah,
by David Meyer. Near his elbow were a slice of toast and a half-finished cup of coffee, but I could tell he'd forgotten all about them. “Where's your sister?” he asked.

“In her room.”

“What's she up to?”

“Hanging out with Jenny. Painting or drawing or something.”

“Well, why don't you ask them to play a game with you?”

“They won't want to play with me.”

“You don't know until you ask.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll ask.”

“Great.” He shot me a smile and looked down at his book. “Would you close the door?”

I closed the door.

In the hall, my eyes landed on a couple of picture frames that had been sitting on the same table for as long as I could remember. One showed Dad the year before Mom died, back when he was still
religious and had a beard. He was sitting in his study with a book in his hand and a look on his face like he was itching to get back to it.

The other picture showed Mom around the same time. I picked it up and ran a fingertip over the glass. I traced her smiling eyes and her big, laughing mouth. I wished I could see more of her, but her long-sleeved dress hid every inch of skin, all the way up to her neck. Her hair was tucked away under a plain blue scarf. Still, she glowed.

The last time I saw Dad with a beard was ages ago, when I was five. Dad had bought a new book and he and Mom were having a big fight about it. I was in bed, so they thought I was asleep, but I could hear every word coming through their bedroom door. Then Dad stormed into the bathroom. I tiptoed into the hall and saw him shaving his beard, but he didn't see me. A few days later Mom came home with her head shaved and a wig to wear over it instead of her usual scarf. I felt sad because one, I used to like playing with her long, shiny hair, and two, after she did that Dad didn't say a word all day and then the next day it was too late to say anything because Mom got hit by a car and died.

For the millionth time, I wished she were still alive so she could play with me right now, and also so she could get Dad to come out of his study. Ever since she died, he mostly stayed cooped up in there. Somehow I thought if she was around, he would be happier and would want to spend a lot more time hanging out with me and Sammy. But she was gone, and his door was closed, and there wasn't anything I could do to fix that—at least not right then.

I put down the photo, opened a closet, and took out the Snakes and Ladders board. But instead of knocking on Sammy's door, I went into the backyard and set up the game on the grass. I rolled the dice and moved my token six spaces forward. I rolled again and landed on a ladder and shot up two rows. I rolled three more times and landed on a snake and dropped all the way down to the
bottom again. When I got tired of playing against myself, I lay back and stared at the sky until my eyes started to close. The next thing I knew my ears were full of ringing and somebody was calling my name.

Inside, I followed Sammy's voice to the front door. She was making small talk with Alex, who was glancing back and forth between her face and his shoes with a half-excited, half-terrified expression. “So, what do you like to do when you're not at school?” she asked.

He mumbled something that sounded like “Look at the stars.”

“Cool,” she said. “I love looking at the stars.”

“Really?” He beamed. “But actually, I said ‘listen,' not ‘look.'”

“You listen to the stars? How can you
listen
to stars?”

“They send us messages all the time,” he said seriously. “And I mean, if there's intelligent life up there, don't you think it would be trying to communicate with us?”

Sammy stared at him. His cheeks and the tips of his ears glowed bright pink.

“Hello,” I said.

“Oh!” Alex said, glancing at me. “Hi, Lev. Do you want to go play? Um, basketball?”

I blinked at the basketball in his hands. I couldn't believe he was here, at my house, wanting to play sports. Because I couldn't think of anything else to say, I said, “Where?”

“At my place, I have a hoop in my driveway, remember?” Then I guess he realized that I'd never actually been to his place. “Well, you don't have to, I just thought you might want to.”

I asked Sammy if it was okay. She shrugged and said she didn't see why not. Then she turned back to Alex. “What did you mean, the stars are sending us messages all the time?”

“I can show you, if you want. I've got all the equipment set up in my room. You can come with us, if you're not busy?”

“Yeah, I'd like to see—”

“Samara?”

We all turned around. Jenny was standing in the doorway of Sammy's room. None of us had noticed her, but I wasn't too surprised by that, because Jenny was the kind of person you could not notice for a long time. She pushed a strand of blond hair away from her freckled face and said, “My mom's not coming to pick me up for another half hour.”

“Oh, that's okay,” Sammy told her. “I'll stay till your mom gets here, definitely.”

“And then you'll come over to my house, right?” Alex asked.

“Sure,” Sammy said. “What's your address?”

He gave it to her. Then we waved good-bye and the two of us headed off down the block.