Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

Even Tal. Who, at that point, wasn’t faring much better. Over commencement weekend, he’d confessed to his parents that not only had he not been accepted at any of the law schools—Harvard, Yale, Columbia—they’d simply assumed he’d attend, but he hadn’t actually even sent in any of the applications. “But you’ve always wanted to be a lawyer,” his mother kept saying, “ever since you were a little boy.” If Dave were in Tal’s place, he would have said, “No, Mom, you wanted me to be a lawyer. I wanted to be an actor.” But Tal was Tal and he just smiled and shook his head.

Still, when the Morgenthals got back to Brookline, he and his father had it out. Tal called Dave a few days after commencement. “Things are pretty dire here,” he said, in a sharp, ironic tone that did little to mask his very real anguish. “My mother won’t come out of their bedroom. My father says I’ve broken her heart.” To add insult to injury, they’d transformed his childhood room into a blank, Formica-filled office for his mother’s kosher-style catering company—Ella’s Edibles—which had expanded tremendously in the four years since Tal left home, the Jews of Brookline (not to mention Newton) having entered into a Renaissance period and being in need of an endless supply of salmon puffs and mock sushi.

“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Dave told him. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m leaving,” he said, to Dave’s surprise. “I’m just going to come to New York. Carson said he’d put me in touch with agents.” There was a brief silence. “Do you think your parents would mind if I stayed with you for a few days?”

“Um, no,” said Dave, who was sure his parents wouldn’t mind, but suddenly, confusingly, felt that he might.

“It’ll just be a few days,” Tal said. “I’ve just got to get out of here.”

“Do you have a job?” asked Dave, feeling like an asshole.

“No,” said Tal, his voice ragged, “I don’t have a fucking job , Dave. How could I have a fucking job? Who are you, my fucking dad ?”

“It’s just, you know,” said Dave sullenly. Why was he annoyed by the idea of Tal moving to New York? Because he would be going to Rochester in two months and Tal would stay and at Christmas, when Dave came home to visit, Tal would be wanting to take Dave to his favorite Chinese place and his favorite coffee shop and it would all just be too much for Dave. Or because Tal was actually doing the thing he wanted to do, rather than hiding in some dumb graduate program where he’d learn nothing he hadn’t learned already. “It’s expensive here. It’s, you know, there are broker’s fees and stuff. Sorry. I was just, you know—” Dave heard a sharp intake of breath: Tal willing himself to be calm. Dave had heard him do it a thousand times while on the phone with his dad.

“I know ,” he told Dave. “I have bar mitzvah money. It’ll float me for a while. I just need a place to stay while I find an apartment, but I can ask Sadie if I can stay with—”

“No, man, that sounds great.” A strange sensation had overtaken Dave, which he quickly recognized as relief. Tal was coming. He loved Tal. “Come whenever. You can stay as long as you need to. My mom loves you.”

He arrived the next day, Sunday, on the Chinatown bus, his fraying army duffel slung over one shoulder. Dave met him on East Broadway, under the Manhattan Bridge overpass, and took him to the dim sum place in the mall built into the bridge’s northern buttress. “Did you tell them you were going?” Dave asked. Tal gave him an odd look.

“Of course I told them.”

“And your dad didn’t go ballistic?”

Tal shook his shaggy head and laughed. “No,” he said, “it was weird. He was completely calm.” Dave thought, but did not say, that this was not, somehow, all that weird. Tal’s father, like Tal, could be torturous in his restraint.

“What did he say?” asked Dave. Tal smirked and adopted the posture of his father—spine flat against the back of his chair, mouth turned down at the corners, glasses dangling from one hand. “‘Tal, I don’t understand why you’re being so irrational,’” he intoned. “‘If you don’t want to go to law school, fine. But renting a place in New York? It doesn’t make any sense. When you pay rent, you’re just throwing money down the toilet.’” Dave laughed.

“So what does he want you to do? Live there with them forever?”

“Yup,” said Tal.

“No,” said Dave.

“Oh, yes,” said Tal, his grin growing wild. “He has it all planned out. I’ll live with them for three years and work at his firm”—Tal’s father did something mysterious having to do with the mergers of enormous companies—“and save enough money to buy a place. In Boston, of course.”

“Not Brookline,” Dave said.

“Of course Brookline. Or Newton. Or Cambridge. Though Cambridge”—he smirked—“isn’t really cost-efficient.”

Chewing on shumai and shreds of bean-curd skin, Dave began to pick out the threads of the restaurant’s din: individual voices gabbing in Mandarin, the plates clattering against each other or the sides of rubber bussing tubs, the hiss of steam from the dumpling carts that traversed the aisles. “I don’t get it,” Dave said finally. “They turned your room into an office. He’s not even speaking to you. But he wants you to live with him? For years ?”

Tal laughed, a sad, hollow sound. He was tired. Dave should have taken him right home, let him get settled in. “It’s normal, right,” he asked Dave, who started nodding even before Tal had finished the question. “I mean, it’s normal for grown children to find their own apartments. I’m not doing something weird, right?”

“Um, yeah ,” Dave said, with a grimace. “Tal, come on . It’s totally normal. You know that.”

Tal shrugged and gulped his Tsing Tao. “I don’t know,” he said. “He said I’m breaking her heart.”

“By not going to law school? By not living with them until you’re like thirty?” Dave rolled his eyes. “Trust me,” he said. “They’ll get over it.”

“I guess,” agreed Tal. “I went to synagogue with them yesterday—”

“Wait, they go to synagogue?” asked Dave.

“Yeah,” Tal told him. “Not so much when I was growing up, but now they’ve become weirdly religious. They go every Saturday. It’s good for Mom’s business.”

“Ohhhh, right,” said Dave.

“It all comes down to the bottom line with the family Morgenthal,” he said, raising his eyebrows, which were dark and thick and extraordinarily straight. “But, yeah, it was really weird to be back there. I don’t think I’ve been since my bar mitzvah. And, you know there’s that part where they, where you, you know, stand up and recite the mourner’s kaddish, if you’ve lost someone in the last year.” Dave nodded. He and Evelyn had been forced to attend daily services at their Zionist summer camp, albeit of the stapled-together-hippie-prayer-book variety. “Well, my dad stood, because, you know, Grandpa Harry—” Dave nodded again. Tal’s grandfather, a chain-smoking garmento, had died in December, during finals week, which meant Tal had missed the funeral. “And I couldn’t remember the prayer, so I tried to read it in Hebrew, and I couldn’t—I’d forgotten everything, so I just sort of pretended, but I just felt like such a loser.” Dave looked at him, unsure of his point. “ My own grandfather and I can’t even say this little prayer for him.”

“Well, you could have—” Dave started, but Tal waved his words away. “What?” asked Dave. “What?”

“I don’t know,” said Tal. “I just, I don’t know.”