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And so on, Aaron cycling through their standard orders at their favourite North Shore joints, Moe responding with which body parts, if any, he would be willing to exchange for a regular order there. It was comforting remembering that sort of thing together over the phone, as if occupying the same mental space was a reasonable proxy for sharing a physical one.
Aaron once asked his brother if many Americans served. Moe told him there weren’t many but that there were plenty of first-generation Israelis whose parents hailed from Brooklyn or Boston or Chicago and refused to talk about it, who wanted to learn all about their birth right culture from a bona fide American.
‘It’s a cultural exchange,’ he said. ‘They teach me Hebrew and I teach them about Babe Ruth and Big Papi. Making Sox fans outta sand and stone over here.’
When he was seventeen, Aaron went on a fully paid trip to Israel. They went to Jerusalem and Eilat and Tzfat, all around the country, really. They slept in tents with Bedouins and sunbathed on the beaches of the Mediterranean. On the second to last night of the trip, the adults did a spot check and found two bottles of rum in Aaron’s suitcase. They didn’t even have to look that hard, they just flipped open the lid and there were the bottles, perched on top of his clothes. He’d been attracted to that particular type of liquor because it had little flakes of gold in it which some kid from Marblehead named Ethan had promised would get them extremely drunk.
‘It makes all these tiny cuts down your throat so the alcohol can get into your blood quicker,’ he told them at the supermarket. ‘My cousin said so.’
A few years later, Moe went on the same trip. When he came home, he started wearing a yarmulke and keeping kosher. He opted for the Orthodox Chabad synagogue over the Conservative one they’d always gone to, even though it was further away. Their parents were proud of their son’s sudden piety. Then came Passover, when Rebbe Moe forced their mother to bin about fifty dollars’ worth of chametz. Aaron watched her toss away the boxes of cereal, the plastic tub of pretzels, the breadcrumbs.
‘When octopuses give birth…’ she started to say.
‘Mom,’ Moe said. ‘Let’s focus.’
After a few months, he did stop wearing the yarmulke and going to Chabad but he kept going to the weekly minyan at their local synagogue. Then one weekend, when Aaron was home from college, Moe announced over dinner that his application to volunteer for the Israel Defense Forces had been accepted. He hadn’t even told anyone he was applying.
There’s a cough from the kitchen table.
‘My son,’ his father says. ‘There you are.’
Aaron sets his bag down beside him on the hardwood floor and waits for his father to say something sharp, some criticism dressed as a compliment. It’ll be a reference to how many years it’s been since he’s been home, surely. To his bag. His clothes. His job. But his father doesn’t speak at all. The answering machine beeps. There’s a message waiting to be heard.
‘I didn’t think I’d find you here,’ Aaron says finally. It’s too dark to see his face. He can only see the two frames of his father’s glasses flash as he adjusts them on his face. His father turns slightly away and coughs into his fist.
‘Is your mother out there?’ he asks softly.
There’s a window above the sink. The front lawn is empty.
‘She must be coming around the back now.’
‘Your mother is…’ He trails off until he settles on the word. ‘Perturbed.’
‘By me?’
His father shakes his head. ‘For once, no.’
Sweat rolls down Aaron’s neck and soaks into his shirt collar. He wants to remove his heavy outer coat but feels somewhat self-conscious performing that action in front of his father. Removing his coat feels like the first concrete step in realising his plan to stay the night, even though that plan has already been communicated and agreed upon by all of the requisite parties. The room is hot and stuffy and all of its wood has Aaron thinking about coffins.
‘Your mother told me not to bring it up to you.’
‘What, the neighbour’s flag?’
He cocks his eyebrow. ‘So, you know what we’re up against.’
‘Because the first thing they’ll do after getting themselves running water in Gaza is root out the Jews in Greater Boston, right?’
His father’s hand comes down on the kitchen table in a whipcrack of lightning and Aaron stands in the stillness of its thunder. ‘Don’t do that,’ his father says calmly. ‘Don’t minimise it.’
‘I wasn’t, I was joking.’
‘How could you possibly still be this naïve after all this time? Do you really think everyone is rooting for one side instead of against the other? And where will they go, these people you’re so keen on removing from their homes for the benefit of yet another Arab state?’
‘I don’t want to get into this,’ Aaron says. ‘Let’s have a nice visit. I have something I wanted to–’
‘You need to educate yourself, Aaron. I have quite a few books you can borrow on the topic. It’s the least you could do. In the meantime, consider this. The UK gives a parcel of land to people who couldn’t go back home. They won’t tell you about the Kielce pogrom, about what happened to the Jews who went back.’
‘Who’s they? This was over seventy years ago, Dad. Let’s drop it. I don’t want to get into it.’
‘And immediately those people were attacked on all sides,’ his father continues. ‘They defended themselves in ’48, and again in ’67, and on and on. We took the Golan Heights, it’s ours!’
‘We?’
‘We, dammit!’ he shouts, and his hand comes down onto the table again.
Aaron squints into the darkness to try and make out his father’s face but he can only find the rough outline of his glasses, his white lenses shining. ‘Dad…’ he starts.
The door creaks open behind them. His mother shuffles into the room. She picks up a watering can on the counter and peers into the darkness, first at Aaron and then at the kitchen table. ‘The bulbs are planted,’ she says. The words go stale in the silence.
His father clears his throat. ‘I was just telling Aaron to bring his things upstairs and get settled. What a wonderful surprise after all this time.’
‘Yes, wonderful,’ his mother says. She looks him over for the first time. ‘Maybe a shower. There are fresh towels in the upstairs closet.’
‘I know where they are,’ Aaron says.
His mother considers him blankly. ‘Of course you do.’
‘Well,’ his father says. He nods towards the duffel bag. This is Aaron’s invitation to leave.
He lifts his bag and climbs the wooden staircase to his childhood bedroom. His mother whispers something to his father, who hisses something decisive back which ends the conversation. The back door opens and shuts and his mother returns outside to her garden. The answering machine beeps again. The message remains unheard.
The bedroom has been preserved like a living museum. There are headshots of the 2007 Boston Red Sox still pinned to the wall. That was the summer the Boston Globe included a new headshot each week and, every morning, Aaron and Moe would wake up early to try to get the newspaper before their father, in case he threw it out. Aaron didn’t care much about baseball. He was always more interested in the completion of a collection than its contents. And, of course, Moe was happy enough being included in whatever Aaron did. Aaron sets his duffel on the bed and takes a deep breath in through his nose and lets it out through his mouth. He looks at the faces of Pedroia, Youkilis, Ramirez and finds that his hands are trembling. Even though nothing has changed, this feels like someone else’s room. No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man. It’s something his father used to tell them growing up.
The bathroom is an ensuite. Moe’s bedroom is next door but growing up they both shared this one bathroom. He looks at it now and can’t quite imagine how two people fit side by side at the sink every night, brushing their teeth. A few weeks before he died, Moe confessed to Aaron that he had started sleeping in bathtubs. There was something about a rocket blast, an entire family wiped out except the four-year-old who had curled up in the tub. When Moe got to talking like this, Aaron listened. The trick to their closeness was that he never once asked what his brother was hoping to accomplish over there.
‘Me, I like to sleep with a pillow against my back,’ Aaron said. ‘So I totally get it.’
That made Moe laugh. When Moe laughed, he laughed with his whole body. It was impossible to hear it and not at least crack a smile. Aaron had forgotten that sound until just now, being in this room after five years. There are many things that Aaron purposely does not think about and it is reassuring, in a way, to know that these memories are only lying dormant and not forgotten. There are so many it is impossible to keep them all shut away all of the time. Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards. Aaron tries and fails to steady his hand. He unzips his backpack and removes the cell phone from its front pocket. There’s a notification from Róisín. He taps a few buttons on the screen and pulls up their conversation. He bites his nail and types out a message.
i hate it here.
He holds the delete key until the message disappears and types a new one.
it’s going well.
They had had a conversation about what to do next. Róisín told him she was moving back home. There were other things said, surely, but that’s the only thing Aaron can remember about it now. This was no way to live, she was telling him.
‘Do you want to go?’ he asked.
‘I can’t stay.’
‘But do you want to go?’
‘I have nowhere to live,’ she said. They were in his bedroom, sitting on the edge of his bed. She gestured at the walls. ‘What am I going to do, move in here?’
‘Why not?’ Aaron asked.
‘It’s time,’ she said. She picked at her nail. ‘I don’t want it to be, but maybe it is.’
‘What if there was somewhere we could go?’ he asked her.
Aaron locks his cell phone and returns it to the front pocket of his backpack. There was a way through this. He knew that if Róisín went home it would be difficult for her to get a visa back or something; the details weren’t clear. And she had admitted that there was a version of him, Aaron at his best, who she could imagine being with. In theory. Meaning, of course, that, in reality, he was too fucked to consider. Aaron does not know if this theoretical version of himself exists, or if it ever existed outside of Róisín’s hopes. And if it did, he is unsure whether or not it is possible for him to embody it again. He lies on the stiff bed and stares at the ceiling. It feels like someone else’s room.
When Aaron comes downstairs, he finds on the kitchen counter two candles, a loaf of challah and a bottle of red wine. Standing around it, his parents recite the Shabbat prayers and he stumbles through the words with them, five years out of practice. Neither his mother nor his father ask why, after all this time, he’s decided to come home. They would have discussed this, maybe even just before Aaron arrived: which tack to take to avoid driving him away. The candles are lit. His mother hands him a chunk of bread. Aaron takes a tepid bite and nods. The goblet of wine passes from his mother to his father to him. There is undoubtedly a jug of Kedem grape juice in the fridge, a constant of his father’s breakfast routine. But to ask for it would be to call attention to the substitution, to invite questions about how bad his drinking must be that he wants to avoid it altogether. Aaron drains his half-glass in the name of HaShem. Róisín would understand. He told her he would cut back, but surely this is some kind of permissible exception.
They sit down to the dinner table and listen to the radio pump out grainy jazz. The lights in the kitchen are off. There are two candles on the table. Aaron only catches glimpses of his father’s face in the flickers of the light. He arranges and rearranges the order of the words in his head. Can Róisín and I move in with you? No. Wouldn’t it be great if Róisín and I moved in with you?
‘Will you come to services tomorrow?’ his mother asks.
The distance between thought and speech is infinite. They don’t even know who Róisín is, so he’d have to begin with that bit of news.
‘There’s a new rabbi, you know,’ she says. ‘He’s really quite good.’
‘Is he?’ Aaron asks between bites.
‘He is,’ his father says. ‘He’s traditional.’
‘Yes,’ his mother nods. ‘We had one rabbi for a while, Rabbi Baruch, who was all about inclusivity. Towards the end, he had a full band playing services. We only did about half of the prayers in Hebrew.’
‘We might as well have been at church.’ His father shakes his head in disgust.
‘Why do you say that?’ Aaron asks, unable to help himself.
‘Let’s just have a nice dinner,’ his mother says.
‘There is a difference between inclusion and dilution,’ he says. ‘If that man had had his way, we’d have lost ours.’
‘And where do you draw the line, Dad?’
‘At church bands.’
‘Please,’ his mother says, setting down her fork. ‘Let’s change the topic.’
‘No, I’d like to understand this. What are the core components you feel are essential to Judaism, Dad? Matrilineal descent?’
‘In the Conservative practice, yes.’
‘And what would you call a child raised with Jewish values to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother? Would you turn him away?’
‘What a ridiculous question,’ his father scoffs. He pokes a slice of brisket with his fork, raises it to his mouth then sets it back down. ‘There are Reform organisations, Aaron. These people are welcome at–’
‘These people?’
‘These so-called Jewish people who–’
‘So-called?’
His hand slams onto the table. Aaron’s mother shrinks into her chair.
‘Why is it,’ Aaron asks, ‘that someone can put a cross around their neck, never go to church and still be counted as a good Christian, but we can’t even manage to accept the ones who want to be Jewish?’
‘It’s tradition,’ his father says.
‘It’s blood purity.’
His father opens his mouth to bark something but his mother sets her hand on his arm and faces Aaron. She considers each word as she says it. ‘My grandmother, your great-grandmother, immigrated to the United States when she was just a girl. That’s how recently the pogroms happened. Someone who hid in a broom cupboard with her mother for two days without food or water, listening through the walls as everyone she’d ever known was gathered and shot, told me about her experience first-hand.’
‘I know, but–’
‘To be Jewish is to be handed a very small candle which has been burning for thousands of years. Rabbi said last week that there are only fourteen million Jews in the world. Without the Shoah, we would be three times as many. We have an obligation to everyone who came before us not to let that candle go out.’ She squeezes his father’s hand and they both return to their food.
His father picks peas from his plate. The fork clicks against the ceramic with every stab. He takes a long sip from his glass.
‘My girlfriend is pregnant,’ Aaron says.
His father spits out wine across the table. There’s a moment of pause before his mother springs into action. She flips the light switch and rushes to get hand towels and cleaning fluid. Aaron sees his father’s face for the first time. The left half is expressionless, drooping like putty. His right eye goes wide in shock and then he covers himself.
‘Turn the light off, dammit!’ he yells. He leans on the table with his right hand, his left one fixed to his face, and struggles to stand up. He flips the lights off as he limps out of the kitchen. His foot thumps off the steps as he pulls himself up the stairs.
His mother sets the rag and spray bottle on the kitchen counter and sits back down at the table. After a few minutes, she speaks. Two months ago, she came in from gardening and found Aaron’s father motionless on the floor. At the hospital, the doctors told them it was a ‘transient ischaemic attack’ which can, in many cases, precede a catastrophic brain haemorrhage. During the precautionary brain scan, they found a tumour. It’s small but growing and, due to its placement, completely inoperable.
‘He doesn’t want the fuss,’ his mother says. What she means is that he’s decided to die.
‘What about you?’ Aaron asks. ‘He can’t leave you alone.’
His mother scoffs and dots her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘That’s rich.’
‘Mom–’
‘You were gone more than five years, Aaron. I get a call out of the blue saying that you’d like to come home and stay the night. Do you know how excited your father was? You show up in a taxi that you don’t have any money to pay for, expecting us to house you, which we will, because you need us. But it turns out it isn’t even us you need. All you need is a place to stay, the house we happen to be living in. I wonder why it is never the parents who are allowed to need their children.’
Aaron reaches for his mother’s hand. She pulls it away. Their faces are illuminated by candlelight.
‘Losing one son and becoming a stranger to the other,’ she says to herself, dotting her eyes. ‘I don’t know which is worse.’
16
The doorbell chime sounds out of an old movie. Róisín is in the kitchen searching for tea when she first hears it, elbow-deep in one of the many doors of what Aaron offhandedly referred to as ‘the pantry’. She keeps finding faded, expired boxes and places them onto the kitchen table in the exact arrangement she finds them in, in the hope she can reassemble the shelves as they were, leaving no evidence that she has been through them. The house is empty – the only reason she’s left the safety of Aaron’s cramped childhood bedroom and come down here on her own. The doorbell rings again, the melody turning over itself. Róisín is holding a box of expired chewable calcium supplements. The cardboard is gluey. She sets the box down on the kitchen table and decides to open the front door.
