Adam Levin - The Instructions

Goodnight, I said to no one.

I finished my cookie and there was night.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

6:00 a.m.–3rd Period

And there was morning, Thursday.

I woke to the smell of piping-hot fat, which meant my dad was restless. When I got to the kitchen, he was scrambling brie cheese and green peppers in a pan of frying eggs.

“You want a chub?” he said. A chub is a smoked whitefish with a head without eyeballs. “There’s chubs in the fridge,” he said, “also some sable. You want sable?”

I don’t like that stuff, I said.

“When’re you gonna learn?”

It smells fishy, I said.

“Fishy.”

I like lox, I said.

“Bully for you,” he said. “You know who likes lox? William F. Buckley likes lox. He calls it smoked salmon. He likes bagels, too. All those goy bluebloods like lox and bagels. Salmon and rolls. You know who William F. Buckley is?”

A goy? I said.

“A goy in a blazer with gold buttons,” said my father. “Men like him put lox-bagels in wicker baskets and eat them for lunch on their catamarans. You know what a catamaran is?”

No, I said.

“It’s some kind of boat,” he said.

Catamaran, I said.

I liked to say it.

“Or else a schooner,” he said. “If you’ve got a gold-buttoned blazer for the weekend and it’s blue, you might have a catamaran, but also you might have a schooner, which is what?”

Some kind of boat? I said.

“You got it. Do you have a schooner or a catamaran?”

I started laughing.

“Are you some kind of yachtsman in a special sports-jacket?”

No! I said.

“So learn to love fish that smells like fish,” he said, “or drop a syllable, become Greg, and add a prominent middle intial. An F, probably.” He turned the pan of cheese-eggs over a plate, but they wouldn’t come out. He tapped the pan with the spatula, once, twice, three times. The eggs flopped from the pan, landed on the plate as a single, crisp-edged glob. “Gregory F. McCabe,” said my dad, “of the textile and petroleum McCabes of West Texas. Not to be confused,” he said, sawing the egg-mass in half, shoving one of the portions onto a second plate, “with the shipping and armaments McCabes of East Texas.” He said, “I didn’t get you any lox, Clark Kent.” He set the plates on the table in front of me and went to the oven. “Christopher Peterson,” he said. He wrapped his hand in a towel, pulled a dish from the oven, said, “Bryce Matthew Pemberton-Exley.” He set the towel on the table and the dish on the towel, sat down next to me, then immediately got back up and took a chub from the fridge. “Lox you want a bagel for,” he said, “and I knew I was making cornbread. You can’t have bagels and cornbread in one meal. You’ll be snoozing by second period.” He cut me a piece of cornbread. He said, “Have some cornbread, Jimmy.”

We ate our cheese-eggs and cornbread.

You’ll win, I told him. I said, You probably won already.

“I know,” he said.

If you knew, I said, you wouldn’t have been up at five, mixing cornbread batter, waiting for the deli to open.

“I got up at four,” he said. “This is the second meal I’ve prepared today. Your mother — I went to the Jewel for the cornbread mix and got some plain yogurt and fresh fruit for her. I chopped the fruit, and she still wasn’t up, so I started peeling almonds. Not that she cares if they’re peeled, but it was something to do. Then I mixed it all into the yogurt. You know that when we yell, it’s not really fighting, right? Even when it sounds like it. We’re just yellers.”

I know, I said.

He said, “You come from a loud family, kiddo.” He slit the whitefish at the tail, pulled away its gold-scaled skin with his fingers, then flipped the fish over and repeated the process. “She left for work after the yogurt, and that’s when I went to the deli,” he said. “I went out twice for food already. This is the second meal I’ve prepared this morning. I said that already. But it’s not I don’t think I’ve won,” he said. “Probably I did — I usually do. But I don’t know for sure, and so I have to wait. I have to wait around til they call. For all I know they won’t call til next week. What do I do in the meantime? If I start working on the next thing, and it turns out I have to appeal this one, then…I don’t know.”

I said, Rambam.

“Rambam what?” he said.

I said, You don’t want to start the next thing before the first one’s finished. You’re trying to do things in the right order, like the Rambam said.

“I’m trying to do things in a certain order because I’m superstitious. You shouldn’t be like that. It’s foolish. And for future reference,” he said, “this is how you get the meat off the fish. You don’t want bones in it, okay? So you turn the guy upside-down, press lightly with the fork, right here, under his spine, and push, away from the spine. If he’s right-side up, you end up pulling — pulling, you get more bones. You probably get a couple bones, anyway, so you have to be careful. You have to push gentle.”

He ate a forkful of fish. “It’s delicious,” he said. “Salty. Try some.” He wedged a piece between knife and fork, held it up.

It looked mushy. And it wasn’t white, but beige with shots of bruisey purple.

No, I said.

“Well I don’t want it either,” he said. “I wasn’t even hungry the first time I ate today. It’s a shame to waste a nice chub like this. I’ll leave it for you while I take a shower. Then I’ll drive you to school because I have nothing else to do. Sound good?”

You got your car back? I said.

He said, “Ema took the train.”

Can we listen to the Fugees? I said.

“We can listen to anything you want as long as it’s on NPR,” he said. “Your mom put your lunch on the foyer table. I’ll be down in six minutes. Be ready.”

I went to the foyer, got my lunch off the table. Stapled to the fold of the bag was a note:

I SAVED YOU FOUR POPPYSEED COOKIES FOR LUNCH. DO NOT GIVE THEM ALL AWAY TO JUNE. IF YOU GIVE HER ALL YOUR COOKIES, THEN SHE WILL NOT BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE AS VALUABLE A GIFT AS WE KNOW THEY ARE. RATHER, SHE WILL WONDER, “IF THESE COOKIES ARE SO ENJOYABLE AND DELICIOUS, WHY DOES GURION NOT TAKE AT LEAST ONE FOR HIMSELF?” AND WHEN SHE EATS THE COOKIES, SHE WILL NOT ENJOY THEM AS MUCH AS SHE OTHERWISE WOULD HAVE.

SO KEEP NO FEWER THAN TWO FOR YOURSELF. MAKE SURE TO EAT AT LEAST ONE IN FRONT OF JUNE. IF YOU CHOOSE NOT TO EAT A SECOND ONE IN FRONT OF HER, SHE SHOULD BE MADE AWARE THAT THERE IS A SECOND ONE, SO SHE WILL KNOW THAT YOU DID NOT EAT THE FIRST ONE OUT OF MERE POLITENESS. SHE NEEDS TO KNOW THAT ALTHOUGH YOU ARE GLAD AT THE IDEA OF GIVING HER DELICIOUS COOKIES, PARTING WITH THE COOKIES IS NOT IN ITSELF ANY KIND OF SPRING PICNIC.

AND ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT ALL OF THOSE COOKIES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN YOURS, AND THEY ALWAYS WILL BE.

LOVE, MOM THE PUPPET

When his celly chimed, my father was merging onto the highway at 50 while lighting a cigarette and lowering the driver-side window. He dropped his lighter in the center console, kept the lit cigarette in his mouth, reached for the phone in his pocket, set his window-button hand on the steering wheel, and then thrust us off the ramp, into the slow lane, which was going fast.

“Radio,” he said.

I turned the volume knob all the way left.

“What time?” he said into the mouthpiece. Then: “Good.”

He handed me the phone while pressing the end button.

What am I supposed to do with this? I said.