Adam Levin - The Instructions

“His teachers are idiots, we can’t hide that from him, and there is little to do about it as long as he’s enrolled at that school,” said my father. “So what? Do I tell my son: ‘Obey these idiots’? Do I tell him: ‘Be docile in the mitts of fools, amid subnormals’? No. And no. I encourage him to subvert these idiots whenever possible, but without violence.”

“And how do you think he subverted the idiot, Judah? By tearing some paper? All he did was incur idiot wrath. This method is worse than ineffective — such a method undermines whoever is enacting it.”

My father grabbed her leg, and her knee hit the table-bottom. She said, “I am being very serious.”

“We can’t flirt when you’re serious?”

“You can flirt to me all that you want, but if I am being very serious, you cannot expect me to flirt back to you,” she said. And then, as if the over-immigranted English weren’t enough (my mother knew as well as anyone that people flirt with each other, not to each other; knew that the more she sounded like the earnest academic Sabra, the more endeared my father became), she flicked a blush-colored spot onto my father’s neck with her pointer.

“Are you paying attention to this, Gurion?” said my dad. “This is a useful lesson, here: when a female talks about flirting, the talk itself is flirting.”

“That is only partly correct,” my mom said. “For the smartest and the handsomest male in the world, a mention of flirting is almost sure to be a flirtation in itself, but when the male is not the smartest and handsomest, the rule fails to predict. Therefore, if a woman talks to this man about flirting, she may well not be flirting with him, for how can he be the smartest and the handsomest while also being the father of the smartest and the handsomest? He cannot.”

I said, Pssh = Stop looking at me that way.

My father said, “Your mother’s mostly right, Gurion, but she fails to tell you that when a female who you are flirting with is some kind of toughguy, and that female pulls your earlobe or flicks you on the neck rather than smashing your nose or belting you where it counts, both of which she, being such a hardnosed brawler, is capable, the neck-flicking or lobe-pulling is a sure sign that she is flirting with you, regardless of how smart or handsome you may be.”

My mom pretended to punch my dad in the nose and he kissed her on the knuckles.

Again I said, Pssh = Stop being such characters.

I didn’t mean it, though. I said it because I was supposed to. It was what you were supposed to say when your parents acted deeply in love. It made them feel young to hear it said.

“Seriously, Judah,” my mom said. “Stop kissing my hand and be serious.”

“Seriously,” said my father, “if we’re going to be serious, I think we should talk about Northwestern again.”

“That is not serious.”

“Maybe if he takes the class, he’ll see the kinds of things that he has to look forward to when he finishes—”

“Northwestern is moot,” said my mother.

My dad said, “Why don’t you go to your room, Gurion.”

I pretended to be confused and stayed where I was.

“He does not want to take any class at Northwestern,” my mother said, not waiting for me to go to my room, “and I do not want him to, either.”

“ He isn’t old enough to know what he wants, and I’m sure Professor Schinkl’s invitation’s still open.”

“Always with this antisemite.”

“Schinkl is a Jew.”

“He hates himself,” my mom said.

“In fact, he does not hate himself. He just disagrees with your politics.” My dad picked up his fork, then set it down.

When I was eight, this man Schinkl, an Israelite who taught at Northwestern University, read a copy of Story of Stories that his friend Mrs. Diamond, my Reading teacher at Schechter, had given him. He wanted to meet me and probably to become my teacher — he taught Literature and Jewish Studies — but my parents wanted to meet him first, and when they met, they started talking about Israel, and while they were talking about Israel, he called a suicide-bomber a “freedom fighter” and my mom called him a twerp and a nebach. She tore my scripture from his hands and told him she’d never let me study with him or anyone else at any school that would employ him.

“Why are you still here?” my father said to me.

I said, You’re talking about me.

“Fair enough,” he said.

“Fair enough?” said my mom. “He is not old enough to know what he wants, but he is old enough to listen to this? He is old enough to take classes at college? He is old enough to become an abnormal? He should be made the mascot, if not the object of derision, of eighteen-year-olds? Of twenty-year-olds? He should suffer daily heartbreak at the sight of pretty girls who are one and two feet taller than him, who want nothing more than to pinch his cheeks and make him blush and get some extra help with their homework? He should befriend boys who smoke drugs and wear the keffiyeh on their necks to impress these girls? He is old enough for that, do you think? Do you think we should let him move out and find himself? Do you think—”

“Stop yelling!” my father yelled.

“I am not yelling, you only wish I were yelling, and you will not tell me what to do,” said my mother, “you who would cancel not one, but two summer trips to Jerusalem, where your son has never been, so that you may defend Nazis in American courtrooms. You who—”

“Criticism from a mother who teaches her boy the quickest ways to kill men with his bare—”

“Please do not exercise sophistry on your wife,” my mother said.

“Sophistry!”

“To speak of your son as if he were a typical boy is sophistry, and you are not in court, you are at my dinner table. If you do not see the need for Gurion to know how to protect himself, you are blind.”

“So send him to karate,” said my father, “not backyard assassin camp, you who would teach him to use bootlaces for handcuffs and salt shakers for cudgels.” He waved a salt-shaker.

“Do not youwho me, Judah, with your ‘backyard assassin camp.’ For how long have you been waiting to deploy this clever phrase, anyway? Where did you write it down? Is it on the back of your clever hand, you clever man? Do not giggle like a girl, Sir.”

“And which end of this cudgel,” said my father, wagging the salt-shaker at me, “ would you hold, Gurion, if you wanted to win a fight with it?”

I knew he didn’t actually want an answer to the question, but I couldn’t tell what he wanted, so I looked at my mother.

She said, “I do not know what he is trying to prove, either, but he is your father.” = “Answer him.”

So I answered. I said, I wouldn’t use it as a cudgel. My knuckles are harder, pointier too. That salt-shaker’s brittle and the couple inches I would gain in range by swinging it aren’t worth the force the blow would lose to the shatter at impact. If I wanted to use that salt-shaker, I would pour salt in my hand and fling it in the eyes of my enemy — salt is an eye-irritant of the second-highest order.

“The second -highest order,” said my father. He was curious even if he didn’t want to be.

I said, It stings, and plus it’s grainy, and the enemy’s first reaction would be to get the graininess out of his eyes, which means he’d rub them, and make the sting worse.

“And what,” said my father, “would be a first-order eye-irritant?”

I said, Pulverized glass is one, which though it wouldn’t sting too bad after the impact, would actually corrode and soon lodge itself within the surface of the eyeball when it was rubbed; or a high- or low-Ph chemical in liquid or powder form that can burn holes in the eyes’ jellies, even something like Borax, or—