The Things a Brother Knows (3 page)

It’s not like Boaz was a bad brother. He never tied me to a tree in my underwear or shaved off one of my eyebrows or any of those sorts of things. He taught me how to do some stuff, like how to draw optical illusions and how to give the perfect middle finger. He bought me a book about the Beatles once and it wasn’t even my birthday. There was the day he got his driver’s license and he came home from the test with Mom and he raced right to my room and asked me, all excited, where I wanted to go.

Anywhere
, he said.
I’ll take you
.

The North End
, I answered. I picked the farthest place I could think of, an Italian neighborhood in Boston, right at the ocean’s edge. I was twelve. All I wanted was to be alone with my brother. And maybe get an ice cream.

The North End
, he said.
You got it
. And I went for my jacket. In the time it took me to grab it, the phone rang. It was a friend of his, I don’t remember who. He turned to me, and looked at the jacket in my hand, and said he was sorry but we’d have to go to the North End tomorrow. And we didn’t.

So Zim is looking at me like I’m crazy. But he doesn’t see, because he can’t. Even if we share a birthday and even if he is one of my two best friends, he can’t know what it’s been like to be Boaz’s younger brother.

Just then Sophie Olsen walks by.

“Hi, Levi,” she says. And she gives this little wave.

“Life,” Zim says under his breath, “is so totally unfair.”

When I get home from school, and I’m sitting on the floor of my room, I hear the toilet flush. Not your typical earth-shattering event, but today it comes as confirmation.

He’s alive in there.

Our rooms share a bathroom. He used to lock my door from the inside and then leave it like that, and it used to drive me crazy, because there I’d be, dying for a piss, locked out of my own bathroom. So I’d pound on his door, and he’d have that locked too. He’d say in this high-pitched voice,
Who is it?
like it was some big mystery, and then he’d make me go through this whole round of questions before he’d agree to go back and unlock my door.

When I hear the flushing it occurs to me that I could probably open my door—I’d bet he’s forgotten about the lock—and pretend I didn’t know anyone was in there. I could make some lame excuse about how all that time having the bathroom to myself, I’d forgotten how to share. That might lead somewhere, to something resembling a conversation.

But I just wait for the sound of his door closing.

I mean, it’s not like nobody’s trying. Mom knocks. Several times a day. She cheerfully calls out,
Boaz? Honey? Bo?

He shouts back,
I’m sleeping
.

Not that I’ve never wanted to shout at Mom like that. Sure I have. In the days before I had a phone with an alarm feature, Mom used to have to wake me for school. She’d pull the shades and sing a little song.

Wake-ee-up-ee-oo-my-little-Levi
 …

I wanted to grab something and hurl it at her.

But I didn’t. And Boaz does. This is just what he’s doing when he uses that voice with Mom. He’s hurling something her way, something heavy enough to hurt her.

He never used to use that voice with her. He used to be affectionate. He’d hug her or hold her hand in public long after I’d be caught dead doing either. He called her “Ma.”

I can see how it hurts now as she walks down the hall, but then she’ll perk up, because after all, he’s home. And home holed up in his room all day not talking or eating beats being thousands and thousands of miles away, in danger’s path. Not writing or calling.

Abba’s about to blow. He’s not as patient or understanding as Mom. Or maybe the operative word is
clueless
.

This morning, he slammed his fist on the breakfast table.

“Benzona!”

I love it when he swears in Hebrew. It never sounds like anything all that bad. For example, to my ear,
benzona
sounds like an Italian pastry. But then I’ll go look it up online.

What he’d just said, in the presence of my mother, was “Son of a whore.” And he said this while he was looking up at the ceiling, at Boaz’s room. So … he’d just called Mom someone who has sex for money. Which was kind of uncalled
for. I mean, the woman just made him an egg-white omelet, for Christ’s sake.

Fortunately, I don’t think she ever bothers to translate.

Abba ran his hands through his thinning hair. “When is he going to come down? He can’t stay up there forever.”

“He just needs a little rest, Reuben. That’s all.”

Sometimes I forget he’s home. I’ll be in class staring at the back of Rebecca Walsh’s silky hair, or in line at the cafeteria, or home watching TV, or in bed, or out on the roof, and I’ll forget.

Then I’ll remember. Boaz is home.

And I feel like a shitty brother for the forgetting.

It’s Friday night. Shabbat.

I hear the buzz of his electric clippers and then the shower in our bathroom.

Dov’s coming for dinner and Boaz must finally be planning on coming downstairs. I think he knows if he didn’t, Dov would break down his door and seriously kick his ass.

Dinner is something we were never allowed to skip back when the normal rules applied. We always came home in time for dinner.

It’s Abba’s thing, dinner is, even if he never does the cooking. He believes in it as much as he believes in anything. He grew up on a kibbutz, and while he claims to have enjoyed the communal life—the freedom, the constant stream of barefoot children chasing after balls that belonged to the lot of them—he missed sitting down to a family dinner. Most often he ate in the dining hall with his friends, and while this
sounds like heaven to me, it left Abba with some sort of hole in him it’s our job to fix.

Tonight the house is full of the smell of Mom’s roasting chicken.

Dov never arrives empty-handed. He’s brought some food from the Armenian. That’s what he calls the little deli in his neighborhood. The owner, Mr. Kurjian, is the closest thing Dov’s got to a friend.

“Give me whatever’s good,” he says and hands Mr. Kurjian his empty basket.

Today it’s stuffed grape leaves, some pizzalike flat bread with spices, and a white cheese that’s too runny to cut with a knife.

“Try this,” Dov says as I help him lay his goods out on the table. “It’s nice and salty.”

Abba walks in and they launch into Hebrew.

I pour myself a root beer. Take my time collecting ice cubes, lingering in front of the open freezer door. I try to pick out a word, a phrase, anything familiar. All those Sundays trapped in Hebrew school. Did I really learn nothing?

Then I give up. I should just be glad they’re talking instead of pretending like Mom does. I can tell by the pitch of their voices that they know Boaz is not just catching up on sleep. That he isn’t going to open up his bedroom door, give a big stretch, rub his eyes and then snap to, like a bear in striped pajamas from an old black-and-white cartoon.

When Boaz finally does come downstairs we all stop and stare. It’s just what I told myself I wouldn’t do, but none of us can help it. Mom fills the silence.

“Bo, honey, do you want a drink? A slice of cheese? A carrot stick?”

She reaches out and rubs his shaved head like he’s a little boy.

His T-shirt hugs his chiseled chest. The tendons in his neck mean business. He hasn’t lost any touch of the desert sun on his empty face.

He walks over to Dov, sticking out his hand. They shake like buddies meeting in a bar after work.

We sit around the table.

Mom takes a sip of her wine. “We’re so blessed.”

Dov rolls his eyes. After Boaz left, Mom started going to synagogue almost every Saturday morning. It used to be she went only on the High Holidays, dragging Boaz and me along, but now Mom is Temple Beth Torah’s most reliable attendee. She’d go Friday nights too if she could, but that would get in the way of family dinners, and there’s no way Abba would stand for eating potluck style in the synagogue social hall.

Dov starts a rant about the economy. The price of chocolate bars at the Stop & Shop has gone up twice in the past six months. Not that Dov even eats chocolate, but he notices these things, and this is his proof that the economy is on the fast track to hell.

Mom used to call Boaz the Human Hoover, and he’s living up to his old name. It’s good to see him eating like that again, even if it’s only because he’s been starving himself for days. And it’s easy to explain away his silence when his mouth is full of food.

He approaches his plate with absolute concentration.
Dividing the chicken from the vegetables from the potatoes. He eats them separately, and completely. He leaves nothing behind.

“Boaz.
Nu?
” Abba says because he can’t help himself. He can’t let it be enough that Boaz is sitting at the table, that he’s eating, that he’s finally come downstairs.

Boaz looks up from his plate and meets Abba’s eyes but doesn’t say a thing.

“What’s next, son?”

Silence. Only the sound of forks clinking china.

Finally Boaz shrugs. “Back to sleep.”

He stands and takes his plate into the kitchen. Mom shoots Abba a
why can’t you lay off him
look. Like if Abba had just let Dov rattle on about his chocolate bars all night, everything would be right with the world.

He comes back into the dining room, wiping his hands on his jeans.

“Well,” he says. “Good night.”

It’s seven-thirty.

He turns to leave.

“Bo, honey,” Mom pleads. “Sit awhile. I’ll get you a cup of tea. Some nice, hot tea.”

He shakes his head, then walks slowly over to her and gives her a quick kiss on the cheek before going back upstairs. She beams, electrified.

I’m pretty sure it means nothing. It’s what we always do before going to bed. It’s a reflex. It doesn’t mean Boaz is anywhere closer to acting like himself.

Nobody says anything for a long time.

Maybe I should be sitting here thinking about Boaz. But I’m not. I’m plotting how to make my exit.

I’m supposed to be going to a party at Chad Post’s house. I worry about how it looks going off to a party when my brother has just returned from the desert, but I also worry about Zim and Pearl killing me if I bail.

And anyway, if I stayed in tonight, Boaz wouldn’t come out of his room. So what’s the difference?

It’s not like we ever spent our Friday nights hanging out.

We weren’t like those brothers who confide in each other, or seek out each other’s approval, or commiserate about their parents. We weren’t even like those brothers who wrestle or shove each other or pin each other to the floor, laughing so hard they almost puke, hiding their deep affection under a layer of physicality. We were more or less strangers.

Or maybe that’s not really fair. I guess I’m talking mostly about what happened when he got to high school. Before that, before he got his driver’s license and a girlfriend, there were times I was the only game in town. On vacations we’d build elaborate sand castles or take borrowed bikes and go exploring. One regular Saturday night we watched the whole
Godfather
trilogy and we didn’t even start until ten.

As he got older he sort of gave up on me. He dove into a new world and shut me out. And then he went off to Israel for a summer and came back with the idea that he needed to join the Marines and then all hell broke loose around here.

If he talked to me more, I’d have some idea about why. But I never really understood all that much about him other than that he was stronger, faster, bigger, smarter and
way better-looking than me. He had a confidence I marveled at and a girlfriend I fantasized about. Boaz knew what he wanted and he went out and got it. I’ve never really wanted much of anything.

I’m not so sure how much has changed in the years since he’s been gone. I’ve grown taller and I’m grateful for every quarter inch, but I still don’t know what it is I’d give up everything for the way he did, or if such a thing even exists for me.

When I was younger, I used to sneak into his room. I’d run my fingers over his trophies, his collection of rocks, the spines of his books. I thought of myself as somehow stepping into my future. I was catching a glimpse of who I’d become four years down the road.

But in the end that room taught me nothing.

“Levi,” Dov turns to me. “Why do you smell so pretty?”

“Because I showered?”

“No. It’s more than that.”

Dov’s right. I put on some cologne. It’s been in the medicine cabinet since Boaz’s high school days, and I’m taking a leap it hasn’t turned toxic. Once I’m bothering with this party I might as well make an effort.

Pearl is tagging along with Zim and me, as per usual.

“It’s one of the only benefits of having you as a friend,” she says. “They don’t know how to throw a party at Convent of the Holy Child Jesus. All those stereotypes about wild Catholic girls aren’t true.”

“I’m going to a party,” I say finally. “I won’t be back too late.”

I’m not sure why I hesitated. I mean, I can pretty much do
as I please. One benefit of having a brother who chooses a life in a combat zone is that my parents never get all knotted up about where I’m going, or what I’m doing, or who I’m with, or if I’m getting good grades, or how I’ll spend my summer vacation, or where I’m applying to college.

They used to bug Boaz about those things and look where that got them.

Dov puts his hand on mine. “Have a good time, beautiful,” he says. “And whatever you do, don’t forget your handbag.”

Pearl is sporting some serious cleavage.

“Mama Goldblatt let you out of the house in
that
?”

She holds up a gray cardigan. “There’s a reason God invented sweaters.”

She climbs into the back of Zim’s car, leans forward and buries her nose in my neck. “You smell yummy.”

Zim puts his hand up like he’s shielding his eyes from the blinding blaze of a too-close sun. “Gross. Get a room.”

She breathes in deeper. “You smell like Boaz used to smell.”

I push her away. “Are you for real?”

“I’m a girl. I have a strong olfactory sense. Or maybe it’s a Chinese thing. Either way, I remember how he used to smell.” She takes one final whiff of me and then falls back into her seat. “Mmmmmmmmm. The scent of falling in love.”