The Things a Brother Knows

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Author

I
USED TO LOVE MY BROTHER
.

Now I’m not so sure.

That’s a terrible thing to say. Believe me, I know it. I wouldn’t ever say it out loud to anybody, not even Pearl. Especially since everyone else loves him. Even the people who’ve never met him. They can’t get enough of him. They worship him.

I used to worship him too. All little brothers worship their big brothers, I guess. It sort of goes with the job description. Think about it. Your brother’s face is one of the first you ever see. His hands are among the first to touch you. You crawl only to catch him. You want nothing but to walk like he does, talk like he does, draw a picture, throw a ball, tell a joke like he does, let loose one of those crazy whistles with four fingers jammed in your mouth or burp the ABCs just like he does. To your little mind, he’s got the whole of the world all figured out.

But then you grow up. You start thinking for yourself. You make your own decisions and those decisions change you, and they can even change the people around you, and my
brother made one big whopper of a decision, and in the end, it’s made it really hard for me to love him anymore.

And I feel like shit about it. Really, I do. But what can I say? It’s how I feel.

He’s coming home. Sometime tonight.

Everyone knows it.

For one thing, they made an announcement at morning assembly. So that’s how my day started.

Even though Mr. Bowers never said my name, and even if there were people there who didn’t know about Boaz, how many dudes have the last name Katznelson? Our Boston suburb isn’t exactly packed with relocated Israelis.

So when Bowers said, “We all, each and every one of us, owe a personal debt of gratitude to Boaz Katznelson, a graduate of this very school, who returns tonight from three years as a marine, and who has served this country at great personal sacrifice.” I was pretty sure people were staring at me.

I pulled the brim of my Red Sox cap down low over my face. A smattering of applause echoed off the gym walls.

“He could have chosen any sort of future he wanted. I know this is hard for some of you seniors to imagine, but any college would have taken him. He was, in every way, a superlative student. But he chose duty. He chose to serve our great nation in this very difficult and very challenging time of war.”

At this point there were a few hisses and muffled boos. I felt random hands slap my shoulders and back.

I typically start my mornings in the courtyard with Zim, comparing notes on the homework we blew off, sipping coffee
from 7-Eleven and eating mini doughnuts. The kind we eat are so fake they’re not doughnuts—they’re “do-nuts”—which makes you wonder what’s really in them. But anyway, this morning was a weird one. Like the day didn’t already promise to be weird enough.

Zim caught up with me after the assembly.

“You okay?”

Zim and I share a birthday. He moved in across the street when we were both seven years, eight months and eleven days old. I’d say he was my best friend if there weren’t a Pearl in my life.

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“Cool, man. I’ll catch you later. I’m pretty sure my mom’s cooking something inedible to bring by your place tonight. Seriously, whatever it is, it reeks. Proceed with caution.”

“Will do.”

“And Levi?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad he’s coming home.”

“Yeah. Me too,” I said, because of course I’m glad he’s coming home. I’m glad he’s okay.
Glad
doesn’t really do it. I’m thrilled, relieved, ecstatic, whatever. I’d say a prayer of thanks, if I were that sort of person, that my brother is returning from this war I don’t believe in. This war I can’t understand. This war for which nobody should have given up so much, and hurt so many people, and worried his mother down to a sack of bones.

But this was his choice. And we’ve all lived with it ever since.

Look, I know how this makes me sound. Like a whiner. Some sort of self-pitying wuss. And yes, on some level, that’s who I am. But I’m not only talking about me here. I’m talking about my family, about how we used to be before he left and who we all are now. And I’m talking about what he’s been like those few times he’s made it back home: how he shuts himself in his room and doesn’t say a word. I’m talking about the letters he failed to send.

Maybe I sound even worse than self-pitying: un-American or anti-American. That’s a tight spot to be in for a guy with a weird Israeli last name and a father with a thick accent who makes me call him Abba instead of Dad like we all still live in Israel, but I’m neither of those things. I’m not un or anti. I just don’t know what to think about this whole big mess we’re in.

And who knows. Maybe that’s even worse than being un or anti, because at least then you know where you stand.

When I get home from school it’s an afternoon like any other since he’s been gone. Nothing elaborate cooking on the stove. No streamers, banners or hand-painted signs. No champagne in the fridge. Not even a cake.

I go up to my room. Lie down on the floor. Pull out my iPod and put
Abbey Road
on shuffle. I stare at my feet. I heard someplace I can’t remember, but probably from Zim because he’s a wealth of totally useless knowledge, that if your second toe is longer than your first, you’re twice as likely to reach a position of power in your life.

Abba asked me to empty the rain gutters after school. He
didn’t ask, he barked. That’s Abba’s way. But I’m sitting on the floor, staring at my long first toe, and how it dwarfs my second.

Mom is downstairs cleaning, filling the house with the smell of fake spring. This is how she spends her days. Wiping, polishing, folding, straightening. She hums as she cleans. Tuneless, shapeless humming.

I know enough about Mom and her superstitions to have predicted that no celebration would be under way. Not until he walks in the front door and closes it behind him. You don’t spill salt on the table without throwing some over your shoulder. You don’t let an object come between you and someone else without saying “Bread and butter.” You don’t place a hat on the bed. And you never celebrate your good fortune until it’s real enough that you can hold it in your hands or clutch it to your chest.

I offered to go pick him up. I figured that would be a shock. Boaz has been gone since before I earned my learner’s permit. Now I’m fully licensed, with two parking tickets and a citation for a rolling stop to prove it.

I saw the whole scene playing out on this little movie screen in my head. I imagined pulling up to a curb somewhere. Boaz would be standing outside, a duffel thrown over his shoulder. I would roll down the passenger-side window and say something like “Need a lift?” It would be evening, but still, I saw myself with sunglasses, never mind that I don’t own any. I imagined a slow smile spreading across my brother’s stony face.

Maybe we’d shake hands. Or slap each other on the back. Then I’d drive him home.

But imagining is just that. And anyway, Abba said no, that Boaz had his own plans for his return and I should just go on about my business.

So that’s what I’m doing. And my business does not involve cleaning the rain gutters when there is no hint of rain.

I’m waiting. I’m always waiting. My family is always waiting. For something, some word, some news, some event to change everything. But I’m starting to think that maybe today it’s not such a crazy thing to wait. Maybe change is coming, finally. Maybe he’ll come back and it’ll be like it was before he left.

Then I think of John Lennon, the one true love of my life. It’s a hero-worship sort of love, not the gay sort of love that Pearl and Zim like to tease me about. I think of the line from “Beautiful Boy.”
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans
. Right. And change is what happens when you aren’t sitting on your bedroom floor, staring at your toes, waiting for it to come.

Change creeps in quietly. It grows like hair or fingernails. It spreads through you slowly, like the dull ache you get in your cheeks when you’ve been faking a smile too long.

I stretch out and roll onto my stomach. I close my eyes. The rumble of Mom’s vacuum is having a lulling effect on me. Lots of stuff does that. Airplanes, the backseats of cars, chemistry class.

A nap. Naps are always good. I assume the position of sleep—arms tucked under me, legs spread out, head to the left. I dig my cheek deeper into the plush carpeting.

My door flies open.

Pearl never believed much in knocking.

“Ooops. So sorry. Were you having a little private Levi time?”

I pull out my ear buds. “No.”

She throws her backpack on my bed and kicks off her shoes. “I meant the ‘little private Levi time’ thing as a euphemism. Masturbating. Get it?”

“I got it.”

“Maybe it would have been funnier if I’d said ‘some private time with Little Levi.’ ”

“Nope.”

She lies down next to me and stares up at the ceiling.

“So what are we doing on the floor?”

“I dunno.”

Pearl has arrived straight from school, still in her uniform. She goes to the Convent of the Holy Child Jesus, and as if that weren’t tough enough, try going to a Catholic girls’ school when you’re Jewish. And Chinese.

We met in Hebrew school. She used to make fun of me for being short and skinny. Nobody had ever bothered to tease me before, not even my brother, and I sort of liked it. And her. Eventually, she came around to liking me too.

She wanted us to form a band. A pop rock duo.

“We’ll be the new John and Yoko,” she said.

“But Pearl, Yoko was
Japanese
.”

“Like you know the difference.”

It might have worked out if either of us knew how to play an instrument. Or carry a tune.

Pearl picks herself up off the floor and offers me a hand.

“C’mon. I need a smoke.”

She still hasn’t forgiven me for quitting. She takes it as a personal affront.

We climb out the window and assume our usual perch on the roof. It’s late spring and the air is heavy with heat.

She holds the pack out in my direction. “Want one?”

“Are you ever going to stop asking me that?”

“Nope.”

She lights up a Marlboro.

“You know, Levi, this whole not smoking thing, it just makes you boring. I mean, without it, where’s your edge?” She blows a thick plume of smoke right into my face. “You, my friend, are currently edgeless.”

Once, during P.E., they brought in this yoga teacher, and they made us all do these weird stretches and stupid breathing exercises, but it wasn’t half bad for me because (a) I was sitting right behind Rebecca Walsh and that girl is seriously limber, and (b) when the teacher had us close our eyes, and she led us through these mental exercises involving lapping waves and calm breezes and asked us to imagine our “safe place,” and told us to go there in our minds, I wound up right here on this particular slab of roof, sitting next to Pearl.