Doc Silverman,” said Brad, “you know the six scariest words in the English language? ‘The dentist will see you now.’”
“Good one,” said Dad, though he hated dentist jokes.
What the hell was happening? I could barely catch a softball. Now they expected me to learn to chop a wooden board in half with my bare hands or kick some musclebound jerk into a pit of quicksand?
“We’ve got a class starting in T-minus five minutes,” said Brad, taking a swig of peppery Vernors ginger ale, which I hated, but which most people I knew drank proudly because it was made in Michigan. I preferred the chocolate sodas my Mom brought back from her “mental sanity” vacations in New York.
“Remember,” Brad called after us, as we headed to the locker room to change into our new uniforms, “the aim of karate is not victory or defeat, but perfection of character.”
“Sounds like a Jewish proverb,” my father whispered.
I wrinkled my nose. To hell with Jews and their useless proverbs.
The locker room also functioned as a storage space for brooms, mops, and boxes of paper. As I fumbled with my stiff white jacket and pants, I kept an eye on the other boys, who looked at least five years younger than I, flinging their karate belts at each other like whips, calling each other pussy, lady-boy, faggot, just for fun. It felt strange being in their company after staying out of school for months. My parents had worked out a plan with my principal for me to finish my freshman year of high school by working independently at home, as if I’d contracted a contagious illness.
I folded and re-folded my navy blue Michigan sweatshirt, which my older brother David bought for me when we visited his dorm last fall. If my body wasn’t the puniest in the room, it was still shameful. My arms were pale and thin, my shoulders soft and rounded. Anyone who wanted to could have snapped me in half like a twig—and someone wanted to. That’s why Dad had dragged me here.
I gave up waiting and retreated into the bathroom stall to finish the job. Maybe I could just stay here, I thought, fingers trembling as I jumped into my starchy white karate pants. Maybe I could lock myself in this stall and wait out the whole lesson.
But finally, I took several deep, hot breaths and forced myself out into the studio.
Brad had us stand in a single line on the mat, or the “dojo,” which reeked of Windex. The other boys kept breaking their ready stance to cheerfully punch each other in the ribs. Dad loomed over them. His white uniform, just a bit too tight, kept opening across his chest, showing off the hair that he kept threatening would one day sprout on my own chest. I slouched at the end of the line, my bare feet gripping the cool, waxy mat, my sweaty fingers clutching my jacket lapels closed. I felt naked.
People said I resembled my father, but I didn’t see it. Dad’s pink cheeks were dusted generously with freckles, and his hair was a tight wreath of red curls, now fading to auburn. Meanwhile, my complexion was pale, my hair brown, straight, and boring.
As MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” squealed in the background, Brad taught us to bow, and then step forward while simultaneously punching out our fists. “A punch should stay like a treasure in the sleeve,” he said. “We do not attack or defend. We reflect our enemy’s negative energy back at his unworthy face.”
Dad and the boys learned quickly Brad’s moves. I planted my feet, thrust out my fists. Step, punch. Step, and then punch. I believed that I too was getting the hang of it, that eventually I might learn how to really hurt someone. But then Brad came over to show me what I was doing wrong. He rolled back my shoulders, raised my chin, pushed on my spine. “You’re real jumpy,” he said. “Stand up tall, Ari. Like a man.”
Dad offered to help, but Brad had me practice alone for the remainder of the hour, insisting, “He’s got to figure this out for himself.” So I struggled to make my arms and legs shoot forward in stiff energetic bursts while on the stereo, “U Can’t Touch This” changed to “Blaze of Glory,” “Cradle of Love,” “Ice, Ice, Baby,” and other manly anthems, perhaps meant to inspire fighting. Usually, when it came to learning, I did well without trying. But here, the harder I worked, the less I learned.
“No, no,” Brad said, twisting my arms around. His fingers tickled like twitchy spiders. “Buddy, don’t you want to be able to take care of yourself?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” I said, feeling lightheaded from all these questions.
Now watch me. I’ll do it for you in slo-mo, so you can get it.”
He planted his feet, balled up his fists, and punched. Right, left, then right again.
“Oh, now I see,” I lied. “Thanks. That was helpful.”
Brad gave me a sorrowful look, then patted my shoulder and left me alone.
Before we left, Brad confessed to my father that he hadn’t been to the dentist in a while. “Makes me uncomfortable, sitting all helpless in that chair,” Brad said. Then he asked, “It’s not true, is it, that you can get AIDS from your dentist?”
“We wear gloves now,” said Dad, though I knew he didn’t always. He hated the slippery latex, said he couldn’t get a firm grip on his scaler, which ironically made him more likely, not less, to draw blood, and wasn’t that what they were trying to avoid?
During the drive home, Dad said in a shaky voice, “Well, that was a good start. A few more months of this, and—”
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
