Adam Levin - The Instructions

I said, If I show up too late, I’ll have to serve it tomorrow. Don’t you have clients to see?

“It is Wednesday. I had class this morning, so I cancelled class. I had one client, and I rescheduled with him. I did this so you would not have to sit in ISS all day — I know you do not like ISS. And I will not allow your principal to put you in ISS tomorrow. You will wash up and I will make you breakfast and then I will drive you to school for the second half of the day. Why did you fall asleep on a chair by the window holding a projectile weapon?”

I said, How will you stop Brodsky from giving me another ISS?

She said, “Uch” = Tch = “That is such a stupid question that I am going to walk up the stairs without saying anything else and cook an omelette.”

She walked upstairs and cooked an omelette.

On the way to my room, I opened the front door and checked the stoop. The stoop was clear, so I went outside and did a perimeter-check. Nothing. I hadn’t missed my chance to blind him, whoever he was, and the omelette was perfect, not a foldover, and not the kind they make at diners where the ingredients go on top either, but a fully integrated cheddar and tomato one like chefs cook at brunches in hotel lobbies. It was a delicious omelette, and eleven o’clock, and a forty-minute drive — just a half day’s wait til detention, June.

In the car, we listened to National Public Radio. There was a long, sad story about a family whose house got bulldozed by the IDF in Gaza in 2003, and then a shorter one on Drucker vs Wilmette. In the second story, my father’s name got mentioned more than anyone’s, even Drucker’s. NPR loved my father. At least three times a year, he’d participate in on-air panels as their Constitutional law expert.

My mother did not love NPR. She said, “These mamzers. One story about the violent Jews of Israel, and then another about the ethical Jewish defender of Constitutional rights.” She drew fire into the end of her cigarette. “This seems like balanced press for the Jews, yes, Gurion? The balance is an illusion. In the first story, it is the bad Jew, they are telling us, who harms those who would destroy him. And in the second story, it is the good Jew who protects those who would destroy him. It is the same argument both times: the Jews should let themselves be destroyed. I could kill them for how they use your father.”

No one uses Aba, I said.

“You are right,” she said. “I spoke with too much force.”

She kissed her hand three times — loudly, rapidly — and touched the crown of my head with it, and then we were quiet.

I kept trying to fix my eyes on a single tree along the highway so it wouldn’t blur when we passed it, but all of them blurred.

My mom had lit a cigarette just before we pulled into the Aptakisic parking lot and was still smoking it on the way to the front entrance when she tried handing me a paperback. I was spaced out, looking at the school’s outer wall. A WE DAMAGE WE bomb spanned six bricks above the bushes. I still didn’t know what exactly it meant, but it had to mean something , and I liked that. I could see my mom’s hand insisting with the book in my left periphery, but my eyes were doing a nice soft-focus on the bomb and I didn’t want to break the trance.

My mom wagged the book and the pages flapped, sharpening everything. “To read in ISS,” she told me.

Thank you, I said.

I took it from her hand. It was Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man , one of his only three books that I hadn’t read yet, unless you counted the autobiographies, which I didn’t; I was determined never to read those. I didn’t want to know what was true and what wasn’t when it came to Roth, or any other writer of fiction I liked for that matter, but him especially. As long as the information I’d learned about him and what he believed did not come directly from him, I could ignore or embrace it at will, and it couldn’t then interfere with the fictions he made — at least not that much — nor with what others made of those fictions, which was also important. Sometimes at least.

I said to my mom, I thought you said Roth was an antisemite.

“I have never said that,” she said.

We stopped before the doors of the front entrance so she could finish her cigarette.

I remember, though, I said. I said, You argued with Aba about it once. You said, ‘Roth is bad for the Jews.’

“He is,” she said, “bad for the Jews. But that does not make him an antisemite. He loves the Jews.”

But you argued—

“Ask Aba what I argued. You misunderstood. That can happen when you hear conversations you were not meant to hear. In the meantime, I just gave you a book by Philip Roth that I liked when I was younger, a book I rushed to the bookstore to buy for you this morning while you were asleep so that you would have something to read in ISS, so—”

So thank you, I said.

“You are welcome,” she said.

That is when Jerry the Deaf Sentinel came outside. He said, “Ma’am, I have to let you know that there is no smoking permitted on school grounds.”

“Good morning,” my mother said, flashing teeth. She flicked ashes and took a drag.

Jerry waited til she took another drag to say, “I’m going to have to ask you to extinguish your cigarette.”

“Very shortly,” she said. “First I must finish it.”

“Then I’m going to have to ask you to leave the school grounds, Ma’am.”

“And now you have done so,” said my mother.

“Ma’am—”

“Sir,” my mother said, “I do not know who you are, or what authority that beaten felt crest on your pocket is meant to represent, but I am confident — I am certain —that I am not within the, the, the — what is the word, Gurion?”

Reach , I said.

“Not reach ,” she said. “There are more syllables.”

Jurisdiction is too fancy, I said. I said, You want to say jurisdiction but reach has more force. Reach sounds like punch .

“Pow!” she shout-whispered, mock-swinging a fist at my chin.

“Ma’am—” said Jerry.

“I am certain, sir,” said my mother, “that I am not within the reach of whatever authority it is that you represent. Stop bothering us.”

And Jerry said, “I really don’t know how to respond to that, ma’am.” His whole face was twitching, but especially this one jumpy muscle under his left eye. He didn’t seem angry, though, just confused.

“Maybe you should let it go,” my mom said. She said it in her concerned voice, the same voice in which she must have said the same thing a thousand times before to clients.

“I’d like to let it go,” Jerry said, “but I’ve gotta do some thing.” He kicked his left heel with the toe of his right boot, concentrated on the pavement.

My mom exhaled some smoke. “How would you usually respond?” she said.

“There’s no precedent,” Jerry said. He raised his head, and I saw his eyes twinkled a little. The muscle under his left eye had gone still, as if the twinkling were an outcome the earlier jumping had manufactured. It was not entirely surprising to me, the way Jerry was acting. My mom is seriously pretty, and not the way everyone else thinks his mom is pretty because she is his mom and he gets confused because she is nice to him, but truly pretty, and in an uncommon way, at least in America; to be addressed by her at all, let alone in the concerned voice, makes people weak, even me sometimes, and I see her every day. “I’m Jerry,” Jerry said.

“No precedent at all?” my mother soothed, ignoring the introduction. “Would you have me believe,” she said, “that your superiors have failed to establish a protocol for dealing with those who illicitly smoke cigarettes on school grounds?” The cherry was almost down to the letters. Probably three more drags.