Before he could finish any more of his false promises about my body or spirit, I switched the radio on. I’d had enough trumped-up optimism for one afternoon.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “I really like Bruce Springsteen.”
YOU’RE A FUNNY ONE
I WOULDN’T HAVE NEEDED TO LEARN karate if Mark Taborsky had kept his promise last fall to teach me to fight in good old American style, with fists. He said a kid my age should know how to pound someone.
But then Mark decided that I was the one who needed the pounding.
For years, the narrow patch of pine forest across the street from our house had remained vacant, a refuge for birds, black squirrels, and kids sneaking cigarettes. The lot was too small, and my parents worried that the wrong kind of people might buy it and lower our property value. People who cut their own lawn in summer or shoveled their own driveway in winter. People who parked RVs in their driveway.
So my parents were relieved when the land went to Rabbi Taborsky and his family, poor by our standards but respectable. The Rabbi served a small congregation who’d stayed on Nine Mile Road, though most of the other Jewish families around them had fled to suburbs several miles further from Detroit. After a local news feature about how his synagogue was bucking the white flight trend, Rabbi Taborsky became a minor celebrity, called into service when a rabbi was needed to hold hands with a black minister or Iraqi imam during an “interfaith” dialogue, or to light Hanukkah candles and have his picture taken with Governor Blanchard or Mayor Young.
While the Taborskys were visiting the house during its construction, Mom dashed across the street to introduce herself. She discovered their two sons would be transferring to my school, the Lev Stern Hebrew Academy, where half the day we studied in Hebrew, and the other half we solved algebraic equations or read Catcher in the Rye like normal kids. Mark was the older son and would be in my grade, though I was a year younger than he was. I’d been promoted—my punishment for being freakishly smart.
“You two might become friends,” said Mom, who liked the idea of matched sets, coordinated colors, pairs of shoes lined up heel against heel in a closet. She ran her own business designing intricate ketubahs, or Jewish marriage contracts, carefully inscribing creamy archival paper with Hebrew calligraphy, and then embellishing the words with delicate flowers and Biblical animals in thin shades of gouache or watercolors. When she wasn’t home, I’d peek in her studio, the tubes of paint clipped to a pegboard on the wall, shelves piled with colorful patterned fabric swatches, and her pens and pencils standing stiffly at attention at the back of the broad glass table where she worked.
“I worry about you spending so much time alone,” Mom said.
“I’m fine on my own,” I said. Actually, I was so desperate to find a friend, you could smell it on me, like bad breath.
When I was younger, I used to ride tricycles in packs of boys and girls at the park and draw funny pictures that made my friends laugh at school or birthday parties. But then my voice dropped, hair sprouted under my arms and between my nipples, and the rules of fitting in became mysterious and complicated. As other kids peeled off into private twos and threes and fours, I’d watch from behind my sketchpad and draw cartoons of hairy, sharp-toothed animals chasing my classmates into a deep lake.
In late August, the Taborskys finally moved in. Their builders had demolished the pine forest, except for a thin line of trees at the edge of their backyard, preserved for privacy. All they had left to do was to finish the front lawn, a bumpy patch of plowed earth and a pile of bluegrass rolled up like a carpet.
I was sitting on our front step, trying to draw a rhododendron when I first noticed Mark Taborsky, dressed only in a pair of jeans and stretched out on a newly hung porch swing. Either sleeping or sunbathing—I couldn’t quite tell as I peeked at him through waxy rhododendron leaves. He wore dark aviator style sunglasses, and his bangs fell in soft waves over the lenses. An open book rested on his bare chest, and his rosy feet dangled off the edge of his swing, which swayed slowly in the breeze.
I liked his hair and his sunglasses; both had a sense of style. He was a rabbi’s son, so maybe he had a kind heart. He was reading a book in summer, another hopeful sign.
I tossed my sketchbook on our front steps, then wiped the sweat off my forehead, combed through my hair with my fingers, and crossed the street.
Mark barely stirred in his swinging as I walked up the Taborskys’ newly paved driveway, still tacky from the freshly laid asphalt. I could have stepped away and he probably wouldn’t have noticed, but I kept coming, the way you do in bad dreams. When I stepped onto the porch, he bolted upright, catching the book as it slid down his tanned chest. As he gave my hand a rough shake, I noticed his thick gold ring with his initials, “MT,” and a tiny diamond studded inside the “M.”
“Great book,” I said, nodding at his paperback, To Kill a Mockingbird.
“Yeah, great for putting you to sleep,” he said. “My mom’s making me read it.”
Mark gave me a tour of his house, which smelled dizzyingly of fresh paint. A large neon-colored abstract painting of floating triangles and circles hung above their cream-colored leather couch. Mom could have made them something way better than that.
His bedroom faced mine, and I thought of Anne Shirley and her bosom friend Diana in the book Anne of Green Gables, flashing each other messages using their window shades like telegraph signals.
Mark put on a T-shirt, then fed a cassette into his stereo, something called Bel Biv Devoe. His parents were transferring him to Lev Stern Hebrew because it was closer to their new house than his old school, also Jewish, but more conservative than Stern, the kind of place where boys dressed only in black and white and girls wore denim skirts down to their ankles. At Stern, only tank tops were off limits, for both sexes.
Strangely, Mark didn’t sound the least bit nervous about going to a new school. Already he was going to a party hosted by one of my classmates, a party I hadn’t heard of.
“So the girls at Stern, are they easy?” he asked, flopping down on his bed. His jeans weren’t regular old Levi’s, but Guess, an expensive brand I’d never seen displayed on the crowded racks at Boesky’s Discount Shop for Boys, where my mother bought all my clothes. Next to his bed were a pair of Reebok high tops, fastened with both Velcro and laces, a thing I had not thought possible.
I looked for somewhere to sit, then settled on the carpet, which felt rough on my palms and smelled like wool. “I guess they’re as easy as anywhere.”
Mark grabbed a blue rubber ball off his nightstand, pretended to whip it at me, then snickered when I flinched. “What base have you gotten to with girls?” he asked.
“Not to any base in particular, I don’t think,” I said above the Bel Biv Devoe music, a pack of shrill-voiced guys who kept yelling “Poison!”
“You’re a funny one,” Mark said.
He’d sized me up quickly. The few times I’d politely ask a girl to dance at a bar mitzvah party or school mixer my parents forced me to attend, she’d bite her bottom lip in sorrow and claim that her ankle hurt, or she was saving her dance for someone else. So while my classmates rocked back and forth in each other’s arms, I sipped a Coke at the edge of the dance floor and warbled along faintly to whatever syrupy pop ballad was playing, as if to say, I can be one of you, give me a chance! But the notes rang false. It was like reciting a prayer for a religion that wasn’t mine.
“You guys get in a lot of fights in your school?” Mark asked.
“Fights? Not really.”
Mark made a fist and held it up to my face, very close. “I got this ring for my bar mitzvah. It’s pure gold. See how heavy it is.”
“I see,” I said. The air in that room felt very hot and close.
“If I punched some kid in