I scrambled for an excuse. Did I need to learn with my father? Help with unpacking? “Well, I—”
“No protesting. Come meet people.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Great. You have your own car?”
I didn’t. We had two cars shipped from Brooklyn, an old Honda Civic and a Nissan Versa, one for my mother, one for my father. I never minded this, seeing as I rarely drove in New York—where would I possibly go, save the library?—but figured showing up on bike to this party would be absolutely socially unacceptable. “No,” I said, ashamed.
“Cool, you’ll ride with me. You do own a cellphone, don’t you?”
“I do.”
He handed me his iPhone and had me punch in my number. “Great. Eight o’clock?”
“I—what do I tell my parents?” I asked before I could help myself.
The famous Harris laugh. “Tell them you’re with me, or that you have an ice cream party or whatever you guys did in Brooklyn.” He slapped my shoulder and headed back across the street.
* * *
“I’M TELLING YOU,” MY MOTHER gushed over dinner, delighting over her first day of her new job, “these kids are just radically different.”
My father helped himself to another ladleful of meat sauce. “What does that mean?”
“Well, for starters, they’re light-years ahead of the fourth graders I’ve always taught, even though these cuties are only in the second grade. That’s not hyperbole, Yaakov. Light-years. The way they read, spell, do long division. Half of them know where they want to go to college and have political opinions. I mean, did I ever even have a fourth-grader at Torah Temimah who knew the name of the president?”
“Shlomo Mandelbaum,” I said, twirling my pasta. “He definitely knew what was flying.”
“Good point. That’s one, then.”
“Interesting,” my father said. “It’s very important to understand the secular world. But surely there are trade-offs. Probably they can’t learn Chumash as well, for example.”
“I don’t know,” my mother said. Her fork was down. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they did, especially if their parents think it counts as speaking a foreign language. They’ve had tutors from the time they were born. They’re almost too precocious. They’re angels when it comes to schoolwork, though they really dislike davening. I had one kid try punting a football during Alenu. I don’t understand what that’s all about.”
“By the way,” my father said, still chewing, “I booked reservations today.”
“Reservations for what?” I asked.
“For Meir’s bar mitzvah. Norman’s been pressuring me to book through some travel agent he knows.”
“Probably because he gets a percentage of the transaction,” my mother muttered. “That ganef.”
“Probably,” my father agreed.
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “But—what if I have something I can’t miss in school?”
My father frowned. “In school?”
“Yes.”
“We have time,” my mother said. “You can always cancel if you really need to.”
My father nearly choked on his seltzer. “Cancel on his first cousin’s bar mitzvah?”
“Let’s just play it by ear, that’s all.” My mother passed me a plate of mashed potatoes, ignoring the look on my father’s face. “Ari, fill us in on your day.”
“It was fine. Uneventful. I’m going out tonight, actually.”
“Oh?” My mother looked pleasantly surprised. “With whom?”
I took a swig of water. “The kid across the street.”
“Noah, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“He seemed really nice, didn’t he, Yaakov?”
My father ruminated over his plate. A smudge of meat sauce colored his chin. “He did,” he conceded. “But these are different sorts of people.”
My mother frowned. “And that means?”
My father shrugged innocently.
“Really,” my mother continued, raising her brows, “I’m curious what you’re implying.”
“I mean,” my father said in his monotone, “that Noah Harris is a long way from Shimon Levy.”
“Well, that’s silly. He seems perfectly mensch-like.”
“Different places encourage different values. You said it yourself—the kids here are light-years ahead.”
“I was referring, clearly, to their academic abilities.” My mother returned her silverware to her plate. “So I disagree.”
“And the davening stunts?”
My mother continued cleaning without looking up.
“Tell me, Aryeh,” my father said, resting his gaze on me, “where are you off to?”
I shrugged. “Not sure,” I said, which wasn’t altogether a lie, though it was the first time I’d ever offered my parents so much as a mistruth. “Noah wants to introduce me to classmates.”
“How downright devious,” my mother said under her breath.
“And the girls,” my father asked, “from the barbecue?”
“What about them?”
“Will they be there?”
“I don’t know,” I said, reddening.
“Of course they will,” my mother said. “And Ari should meet them. He’s going to be spending the year with them, isn’t he?”
My father revisited his spaghetti with unbroken concentration.
“Cynthia was telling us about Noah’s girlfriend,” my mother said, “a lovely girl he’s been dating for years.”
“Her name is Rebecca,” I said.
“Strange to think they can love so young.” She looked away from the table, fingered her ring. “Who knows? Perhaps they can.”
* * *
ALMOST EIGHT. I WAS SITTING anxiously in my room, door closed, flipping through Noah’s paper. Finally, my cellphone rang.
I sprang from bed, peeked in the mirror. My thick brown hair was matted and unruly, my sneakers worn and sexless, my button-down replaced with a creased white polo, making my standard black-and-white ensemble slightly more palatable. Why, after many years of neurotically maintaining a clean-shaven appearance, had I picked today to experiment with sporting scruff? Why did the corners of my eyebrows insist on undergoing a slight vertical ascent? Would it be biologically impossible to gain even one-tenth of Noah’s muscle mass? Did others suspect they, too, owned a fundamentally unrecognizable face, one people consistently failed to remember? Unsatisfied with what I saw, I took a deep breath, hid my tzitzit in my pants and emerged from my room.
“Imma?”
She was sprawled on the living room couch, reading another selection from the New York Times Best Seller list. The usual: self-help and educating children. “Abba’s at mincha.” She said this without looking up.
“Noah’s outside. I’m heading out.”
She hesitated. “Ari?”
I opened the front door. “Yes?”
I waited for a reminder to behave, to be home early, to daven ma’ariv. Instead, she gave a knowing look. “Make sure you have a good time,” she said quietly. “It’s more important than you think.”