JEREMY RABINOWITZ IS AVAILABLE by Carol Edelstein
Jeremy Rabinowitz speaks German-accented English with a stutter. He has black, curly hair and pale skin. Wide face, broad forehead, thick eyebrows and lips. Had acne as a teen. Sweats easily. Wears absorbent cotton tee shirts under his Oxford shirts. Still – big sweat stains grow under his arms.
Jeremy’s stutter is especially prominent when he lectures to a crowd, but it doesn’t bother him particularly.
He plays chess with a club. He’s highly ranked. He competed in high school.
His first sexual experience with a woman was with his mother. She was drunk at the time, which in itself was highly unusual. She fondled him through his pajamas before she went into her own bed. It may not have actually happened. It certainly never happened again. It may not have actually happened. It may not have happened.
When I have a son of my own . . . is a sentence he sometimes starts in his mind but he doesn’t believe he’s fit to be anyone’s father.
Jeremy’s parents survived the Second World War by escaping from Germany through France and Spain. They had connections through her mother’s family. They once told him the story in the most minimal way. The family had been rich. He sometimes imagines the beautiful furniture and silver, the fine down comforters and silk clothes they hadn’t been able to bring with them.
Jeremy skipped grades in elementary and graduated high school at age fifteen. By then his body already looked like a man’s, and he had enough facial hair to shave. His smile was beautiful and rarely seen.
He had two friends, Toby and David. They were also smart in math and science and had difficulty with conversation about most other topics. They built things that either slowly disintegrated or suddenly exploded. In the 1960s, while their classmates were out back smoking marijuana, they were in Toby’s basement, building a weather station.
When he was with Toby and David, his stutter was nearly non-existent. When he did stutter in their presence they finished his words – not to tease, just to move things along.
Toby was killed in a car accident when they were in their senior year. Jeremy and David declined going to the funeral. They stayed in David’s room and played chess all day and all evening, not even breaking for supper.
His sister Annie was born when Jeremy was six. He remembers clearly the day she was brought home from the hospital. She was an ugly, purple, wrinkled thing. He put on his snowsuit and boots and went into the backyard. He memorized everything there, and its relative position, including swing-set, hatchway, forsythia bush, clothesline. He wasn’t called in and had to decide on his own when he’d had enough. He banged on the door and was scolded for making noise – the baby was sleeping. He hated the baby.
His religion is the knight. His religion is the castle. His religion is the horse.
Sometimes still, he dreams brilliant checkmates.
His religion has always been Judaism, and since the death of his parents he has become more observant, attending services, winding the tefillin in the mornings, wearing a yarmulke not just at synagogue but out in public. He presides over the holiday table with its ritual foods and prayers, and at the prescribed moment, walks behind the children, repeating a blessing over each in turn.
He has a small scar near his eyebrow from falling onto a carpet tack as a toddler.
He speaks five languages with fluency – Yiddish, German, Russian, French and English. Only in English does he stutter.
He snores in iambic pentameter.
He finds almost nothing funny.
He has never learned to swim.
His favorite color is that shade of purplish blue the sky turns at dusk.
Once they’d both left home, his sister became his closest friend and confidante. Annie frequently gives him advice about women – good advice, since her lovers are women who tend to stick around. His women, always small and smart and beautiful – easily join up, move in, take over, but don’t stay. Their complaints are similar: Jeremy doesn’t pay attention. He doesn’t listen. He doesn’t pick up after himself.
His favorite weather is snow. He loves deep, dry, driven snow that buries the hedges, stops traffic, shuts down the school.
As an infant, he never crawled, but one day, suddenly, he pulled himself to standing and walked.
He can draw perfect circles freehand.
Alone on a Sunday night, he’ll make himself pancakes and drench them in butter and syrup. Eats them while watching the late news. Has had a longstanding crush on the goyishe anchorwoman.
When he has a son of his own . . . he starts that sentence but can’t finish it.
Beryl, the woman who has most recently left Jeremy (eleven days ago, to be exact) has a small mouth, thin lips. She always had important observations about politics and about his own subject, history-in‑the-making (Contemporary Political Thought). She looked really sexy in the dark green wool skirt she’d left in a heap on the floor of Jeremy’s closet and which he’d hung back properly on a hanger. The skirt held both the hope and the dread of her return. He was always in bewilderment in the aftermath of a romance – hadn’t everything been going along as it always had?
Why did women choose the worst times to fight with him? Not that there were ever good times for fighting. But Jeremy thought it should be against some law to initiate discussion on any serious matter as one person (himself) is drifting into much-needed sleep. He knows (from having been dragged to counseling by Beryl’s predecessor) that their problem topics were drawn from the same Big Four as every couple’s: Sex, Money, Housework and Family, and in the case with Beryl, it was sort of all of them. Beryl was ready to have a child. Their child. She wasn’t getting any younger. And she isn’t going to bring a child into this world alone, which means a wedding. If his parents were alive, he probably wouldn’t even tell them he was seriously dating her (and it must be serious, they are practically living together, they spend most every night together and they mix their dirty laundry). Beryl’s father, thank God, was long gone for this part and her mother was under the impression they were already engaged, and even so, thinks it’s a shanda – a shame – the way they live.
They had just made love, and it had gone well, and he’d pulled out at the last minute as he thought they’d agreed was best for now, and suddenly, just as he was floating on his back down a grassy estuary to a warm sea, watching quick blackbirds dart overhead, next to him Beryl is crying. “What’s wrong, honey?” He asks, but he sort of knows, and sure enough, does he think she has forever, and will he ever ask her, and she’s pretty sure he won’t, because he would have by now, which makes her a fool, doesn’t it? He can’t think straight. He supposes it does . . . make her a fool. But he knows enough not to say so, and to try to hold her close, though she’s turned away from him and isn’t soft. Isn’t giving. It’s the Nile or maybe the Mediterranean he’s drifting down. He’s seen neither and may never. His life isn’t going to have everything. But it has the blackbirds. “Can we talk about it in the morning?” The silence from Beryl he takes for ‘yes,’ but the next morning she’s left for work before he’s up and when he gets back from campus her stuff is gone. Except the one skirt which he found later.
When Jeremy was eleven, he’d read an article in a magazine about psychokinesis. Intermittently since then, he tries moving small objects with his mind. His first try was a light coin, a dime, on a tabletop. No go. He tried other coins, too without success. Once, though – on a vacation with Samantha, an early relationship mistake who hadn’t seemed that way at first – in a crappy little trailer near an unswimable rocky beach which she’d blamed him for since he’d made the arrangements, he did move a yellow sponge by the kitchen sink completely with mental power. He moved it a full ¾ of an inch. It was a triumphant moment, but one he couldn’t replicate, and thus he kept the news to himself.
Sometimes Jeremy remembered the camps as if he had been there along with his uncles, and details of his parents’ privations came to him in tandem with the receipt of luxuries that his academic career provided him as a matter of course. Once, relaxing on a hotel balcony after delivering a paper which had been exceptionally well-received, he heard below him German soldiers interrogating an old man who kept whimpering and apologizing. He listened in, knowing it was a hallucination and would pass, and it did. And another time, when he dined in a posh restaurant, as he often did on university business, he saw a battered tin plate hover about three feet above the table like a halo without an angel. He knew no one else saw it, and he did not let it disturb him. He ate heartily, always a little more than he wanted, as he’d learned early that to eat was the sure way to please his mother.
Jeremy was named for his mother’s younger brother, who’d died as a child of a heart defect. He’d been sickly from the start, and the doctor had predicted he wouldn’t last even to his first birthday, but the boy stayed on several years beyond that, a sunny fellow who became a family legend.
“You must have said something to her.” His sister wanted to know what Jeremy and Beryl had fought about. “What did you say? A woman doesn’t just pack up in the middle of the night for no reason.” Annie stood at Jeremy’s sink, filling the basin with hot soapy water.
“I think you’ve managed to use every dish in the house,” she said gently.
“You don’t have to do those – I’ll get to them. Eventually. No, I didn’t say anything. I mean, I said things, but nothing that would make her leave. It was the . . . same old fight. Getting married. Having children. All that.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Well, isn’t it about time? Isn’t Beryl the right one? She seems to me like the right one. But what do I know. She’s smart. She’s a little bossy. But you need a little bossy. She’s got a good mind and a gorgeous body. She’ll be great with kids.”
“Annie, she’s gone. She picked up the rest of her things last Monday while I was over at school. She hasn’t been back. She hasn’t answered her phone.”
“Did you leave her any messages?”
“No, but what am I going to say?”
“You tell her, ‘Beryl, you are the love of my life. We have to talk. Please come see me.’”
“You do it. Since you’re so sure what to say,” Jeremy watched Annie as she methodically scrubbed, rinsed and stacked his dishes. For eleven days he’d been living on oatmeal and canned spaghetti and hot dogs and mainly, toast. Sorrow made him hungry. Toast with cinnamon and sugar, toast with jam, toast with peanut butter, toast with leftover spaghetti. He was getting bigger. Putting on sorrow.
Besides being his baby sister, Annie is a lovely grownup woman. That fact kept sneaking up on him, surprising him, that she is a mature person, holds a job with the city of New Haven, has a lover, and a stepdaughter and bills she pays, and a home she worries over, even a dog. He can still see her so clearly as a first grader, bundled in her snowsuit, with drippy nose and red cheeks, coming into the kitchen. When had she leap-frogged over him and gotten ahead?
Jeremy’s left hand rested on the tabletop. Such a copy it was of their father’s hand. Could be their father’s hand. The thought: It isn’t in me to keep the chain going. The chain of life.
Annie turned and leaned against the sink. He could see her view of him, an old man in a bathrobe, newspaper folded open to the crossword puzzle, looking ruined.
“You’re tired,” she said. “You’ll think of what to say. Send her a letter. Real handwriting. Women love real handwriting. The deliberation. The care. Use nice paper.”
Jeremy attended to the puzzle, though he’d heard what Annie suggested and thought it a good idea. He would try that – writing. He began in his mind to compose the note. Dear Beryl . . . No. Theirs was a fundamental difference. There was nothing to negotiate. She was enough for him, but he wasn’t enough for her. And what she wanted was what all reasonable persons seem to want. Therefore he was not a reasonable person. The End.
“You have nice paper,” said Annie.
Jeremy sharpened his pencil. “What’s a five letter word for ‘one-eyed enchantress’?”
“Sometimes I think your mind is like an apartment building. Politics on the ground floor, crossword puzzles and chess on the second, Chinese history on floor three, languages in some deluxe fourth floor suite. Where is Beryl?”
“I do have nice paper. That rice paper you gave me for . . .”
“For just such a purpose.”
“But I’m not going to. It’s a good idea, Annie. But I won’t.”
She shrugged, wiped her hand on the dishcloth. “Suit yourself.” She moved from the sink and stood behind him, studying the puzzle over his shoulder. “Try ‘witch.’ W-I-T-C-H.”
“Of course, WITCH.” He wrote it in. “And that gives me HAWKEYE for 63 Down.”
Annie bent to kiss him on the forehead. “You need a bath and a long sleep. And some fresh air and some light on your skin. I love you.”
“Likewise,” said Jeremy.
She put on her coat. She let herself out the front door and he heard her lock it. He moved to 64 Down: Four letters, “Shakespearean bird of prey,” begins with a “B . . .”
There is a pond near their childhood home. Of all the wild creatures, Jeremy loves frogs. Has always understood their mysterious, ugly, jewel-like patience, loved the whiteness of their bellies and their eerie, other-worldly croaks. He felt sure that whatever they were seeing through their wide-open eyes was true, more true, most true. That if life is a wheel (not likely), he had been around before as a frog, and it had been good.
Jeremy Rabinowitz is available, but he is not seeking. He’s not likely to change, but he has a big heart. A steady and decent income which he will gladly share. Children (pre-existing) okay. Carries some extra weight.
A man carries a sack of corn all the way over the mountain, intending to sell it where corn is dear. As he walks, it trickles out a small tear in the sack. The trail of corn attracts blackbirds. The blackbirds are noisy, calling in many voices – eager, anxious, angry, joyous – in turns. They love him for his corn. He does not mind. He keeps walking with the tear in the sack until all the corn is theirs.
Carol Edelstein’s short stories have appeared in Flash Fiction, Epoch, Word of Mouth, and The Fiddlehead. This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.