The Instructions by Adam Levin
“They start up with him, Judah,” my mother said. “He should be picked on?”
“Are you picked on?” my father said.
I said, Not exactly. I said, People start up with me, though.
“They started up with you today?” he said.
I said, Kind of. I said, I towel-snapped the neck of this one boy the Janitor and he called me a name.
“Why did you towel-snap his neck?”
There wasn’t exactly a reason, I said, but he wasn’t a nice kid. Him and his brother used to make fun of Scott Mookus. I don’t think he’ll do that anymore, though. We’re friends now. But after I towel-snapped his neck, he said I smelled and was a B.D., so I towel-snapped his eyes and spit on his foot. That’s when his friend Ronrico charleyhorsed me from behind and kicked me in the ribs.
“You see?” my mother said. “It was just some snaps of towel, and then the second boy came.”
“The second boy,” said my father, “came to protect his friend from our son.”
I said, That’s not true. I said, He came to avenge his friend. It wasn’t protection. I wasn’t fighting the Janitor anymore—he wasn’t getting up.
“The second boy came from behind, Judah,” said my mother.
Yes he did, I said.
My mom said, “And what did you do?”
I loved my mom. She was always so interested.
I said, “I landed a glancing blow on his face.”
“This ended it?” she said.
My father exhaled loudly, made a fist around his chin = “I will wait this out, and you will both be aware that I am waiting.”
The blow pushed him back, I said, but he wasn’t out, and this crowd that was watching kept growing, so I grabbed the padlock off my locker.
“You did not,” said my mom.
I did, I said. I said, And I hooked the ring around a knuckle and blasted that kid’s lungs out with a blow to the solarplexus just before he would’ve knocked me over.
“Gurion!” my mother said.
He bent like he was praying, and I swept his legs, I said. When he went down, he hit all these metal baskets and it was so noisy everyone backed off, Ema. They were gonna crowd me up more, I knew it, but they backed off because of the noise and how the padlock gleamed.
“You are very smart,” she said.
“What the fuck are you telling him?” my father said.
In almost all of the books I have ever read, and many of the movies I’ve seen, when a husband curses at a wife, or a wife at a husband, it signals that they are fighting. That was not true about my parents, though. My parents were often a little bit explosive, always very loud, and when they’d curse it was usually with joy. When it seemed like they were fighting, they were usually playing. The loudness was fun for them. The back-and-forth way they’d become outraged with each other was a contest like the name-calling game that I’d play with Jelly during Group; neither one cared to win, they only tried to make the contest last. It is true, though, that when the subject of the outrage contest was Gurion, it would become a fight as often as not.
You could tell a fight from a contest by what they’d do with their bodies. During contests, they would touch each other, usually with pinches and gentle thumb-stabs, and they’d always look at each other’s faces when they were talking, like to say, “What then! What!” When they’d fight, though, they didn’t look at each other much, and instead of touching, they’d use a prop—usually a cigarette, sometimes an eating utensil—to occupy their hands, and their voices would become quieter. The problem was that most of their fights would start out as outrage contests, and even though the body-indicators made it pretty easy to tell the difference between a fight and an outrage contest, I had never been able to figure out what caused an outrage contest to become a fight. I knew it wasn’t cursing, though, so I didn’t get upset when my father said, “What the fuck are you telling him?” and then my mom said, “And why the fuck do you yell?”
“He hits a boy with a padlock and you call it smart!” said my father.
“That boy hurt our son, and there is no boy who saw it happen that will ever fuck with our son again, Foulmouth.”
“Unless our son fucks with another boy, himself, Toughguy, in which case that boy will have long since known to carry a weapon to defend himself against Gurion Maccabee because Gurion Maccabee is a crazed lunatic.” He said to me, “You’re not a crazed lunatic, but you are acting like one, and eventually you’ll be treated like one, and even if you were one, I would love you because you’re my son, and I would never want you to get beat up either, but this is not the way to act, the way you have acted, you are smarter than this, and you will act like a mensch, not a Philistine, you will use your gifts to avoid fights, not to start them—there are other ways to win.”
I said, That’s why I do Harpo Progressions. I said, I did one just today. To Mr. Botha.
That was excellent timing, for me to mention the progression right then. My father made his bottom lip fat and leaned at me. “Nu?” he said, faking impatience.
I said, Remember I told you about the protocol for getting in the Cage? With the passes and the clipboard?
“The gate, and the locks, yes yes go on.”
I was coming back from Brodsky’s office, I said, and Botha told me to hand him my pass like I didn’t know that I was supposed to hand it to him, like I hadn’t done that a hundred times already, and so I folded it before I handed it to him.
“He gave it back?” said my father.
He wouldn’t even take it, I said. I said, He told me to unfold it.
My father slapped the table and said, “Ha! Bureaucratic robot mamzer. So what? So you unfolded it, you refolded it…”
Yes, I said, and then I dropped it and he told me pick it up, and I picked it up and crumpled it, and—
“Get to the point,” my mother said. “This story does not entertain me.”
You think it’s hilarious, I said. I said, You’re looking down at the placemat’s dandelions to hide your face, but the corners of your mouth are crosshatching the rays off the corners of your eyes is how big you’re smiling.
My dad jabbed his pointer at my mom.
I said, I had to do something to the pass that couldn’t be undone because that was the only way to win, was to do something permanent. So I tore it in four places, and that’s how I won.
“Now that is smart,” my father said. “You used your head.”
“To what end was his head used?” my mother said. “What do you think you encourage?”
“His teachers are idiots, we can’t hide that from him, and there is little to do about it as long as he’s enrolled at that school,” said my father. “So what? Do I tell my son: ‘Obey these idiots’? Do I tell him: ‘Be docile in the mitts of fools, amid subnormals’? No. And no. I encourage him to subvert these idiots whenever possible, but without violence.”
“And how do you think he subverted the idiot, Judah? By tearing some paper? All he did was incur idiot wrath. This method is worse than ineffective—such a method undermines whoever is enacting it.”
My father grabbed her leg, and her knee hit the table-bottom. She said, “I am being very serious.”
“We can’t flirt when you’re serious?”
“You can flirt to me all that you want, but if I am being very serious, you cannot expect me to flirt back to you,” she said. And then, as if the over-immigranted English weren’t enough (my mother knew as well as anyone that people flirt with each other, not to each other; knew that the more she sounded like the earnest academic Sabra, the more endeared my father became), she flicked a blush-colored spot onto my father’s neck with her pointer.
“Are you paying attention to this, Gurion?” said my dad. “This is a useful lesson, here: when a female talks about flirting, the talk itself is flirting.”
“That is only partly correct,” my mom said. “For the smartest and the handsomest male in the world, a mention of flirting is almost sure to be a f
I said, Pssh = Stop looking at me that way.
My father said, “Your mother’s mostly right, Gurion, but she fails to tell you that when a female who you are flirting with is some kind of toughguy, and that female pulls your earlobe or flicks you on the neck rather than smashing your nose or belting you where it counts, both of which she, being such a hardnosed brawler, is capable, the neck-flicking or lobe-pulling is a sure sign that she is flirting with you, regardless of how smart or handsome you may be.”
My mom pretended to punch my dad in the nose and he kissed her on the knuckles.
Again I said, Pssh = Stop being such characters.
I didn’t mean it, though. I said it because I was supposed to. It was what you were supposed to say when your parents acted deeply in love. It made them feel young to hear it said.
“Seriously, Judah,” my mom said. “Stop kissing my hand and be serious.”
“Seriously,” said my father, “if we’re going to be serious, I think we should talk about Northwestern again.”
“That is not serious.”
“Maybe if he takes the class, he’ll see the kinds of things that he has to look forward to when he finishes—”
“Northwestern is moot,” said my mother.
My dad said, “Why don’t you go to your room, Gurion.”
I pretended to be confused and stayed where I was.
“He does not want to take any class at Northwestern,” my mother said, not waiting for me to go to my room, “and I do not want him to, either.”
“He isn’t old enough to know what he wants, and I’m sure Professor Schinkl’s invitation’s still open.”
“Always with this antisemite.”
“Schinkl is a Jew.”
“He hates himself,” my mom said.
“In fact, he does not hate himself. He just disagrees with your politics.” My dad picked up his fork, then set it down.
When I was eight, this man Schinkl, an Israelite who taught at Northwestern University, read a copy of Story of Stories that his friend Mrs. Diamond, my Reading teacher at Schechter, had given him. He wanted to meet me and probably to become my teacher—he taught Literature and Jewish Studies—but my parents wanted to meet him first, and when they met, they started talking about Israel, and while they were talking about Israel, he called a suicide-bomber a “freedom fighter” and my mom called him a twerp and a nebach. She tore my scripture from his hands and told him she’d never let me study with him or anyone else at any school that would employ him.
“Why are you still here?” my father said to me.
I said, You’re talking about me.
“Fair enough,” he said.
“Fair enough?” said my mom. “He is not old enough to know what he wants, but he is old enough to listen to this? He is old enough to take classes at college? He is old enough to become an abnormal? He should be made the mascot, if not the object of derision, of eighteen-year-olds? Of twenty-year-olds? He should suffer daily heartbreak at the sight of pretty girls who are one and two feet taller than him, who want nothing more than to pinch his cheeks and make him blush and get some extra help with their homework? He should befriend boys who smoke drugs and wear the keffiyeh on their necks to impress these girls? He is old enough for that, do you think? Do you think we should let him move out and find himself? Do you think—”
“Stop yelling!” my father yelled.
“I am not yelling, you only wish I were yelling, and you will not tell me what to do,” said my mother, “you who would cancel not one, but two summer trips to Jerusalem, where your son has never been, so that you may defend Nazis in American courtrooms. You who—”
“Criticism from a mother who teaches her boy the quickest ways to kill men with his bare—”
“Please do not exercise sophistry on your wife,” my mother said.
“Sophistry!”
“To speak of your son as if he were a typical boy is sophistry, and you are not in court, you are at my dinner table. If you do not see the need for Gurion to know how to protect himself, you are blind.”
“So send him to karate,” said my father, “not backyard assassin camp, you who would teach him to use bootlaces for handcuffs and salt shakers for cudgels.” He waved a salt-shaker.
“Do not youwho me, Judah, with your ‘backyard assassin camp.’ For how long have you been waiting to deploy this clever phrase, anyway? Where did you write it down? Is it on the back of your clever hand, you clever man? Do not giggle like a girl, Sir.”
“And which end of this cudgel,” said my father, wagging the salt-shaker at me, “would you hold, Gurion, if you wanted to win a fight with it?”
I knew he didn’t actually want an answer to the question, but I couldn’t tell what he wanted, so I looked at my mother.
She said, “I do not know what he is trying to prove, either, but he is your father.” = “Answer him.”
So I answered. I said, I wouldn’t use it as a cudgel. My knuckles are harder, pointier too. That salt-shaker’s brittle and the couple inches I would gain in range by swinging it aren’t worth the force the blow would lose to the shatter at impact. If I wanted to use that salt-shaker, I would pour salt in my hand and fling it in the eyes of my enemy—salt is an eye-irritant of the second-highest order.
“The second-highest order,” said my father. He was curious even if he didn’t want to be.
I said, It stings, and plus it’s grainy, and the enemy’s first reaction would be to get the graininess out of his eyes, which means he’d rub them, and make the sting worse.
“And what,” said my father, “would be a first-order eye-irritant?”
I said, Pulverized glass is one, which though it wouldn’t sting too bad after the impact, would actually corrode and soon lodge itself within the surface of the eyeball when it was rubbed; or a high- or low-Ph chemical in liquid or powder form that can burn holes in the eyes’ jellies, even something like Borax, or—
“To protect himself he needs to know these things?” my father said.
“I did not teach him to throw salt in eyes,” my mother said.
“Just the first-order ones you taught him? The Borax and pulverized glass?”
“No, Judah. He has figured it out for himself.”
“Based on principles you’ve taught him, Tamar!” To me he said, “What is it she tells you? ‘The world of objects should be divided into two categories. The good weapons and the better weapons’?”
Again, I didn’t know how he wanted me to answer that question. I didn’t know if he was misquoting my grandfather’s ‘Relevant Tenets of Ninjitsu’ chapter on purpose or by accident, so I corrected him.
I said, ‘If an object is not, on its own, a weapon, then it is a part of a weapon.’
My mom laughed.
“So you think it’s entertaining,” my father said to her.
“Lighten up, Judah. You react as if this isn’t your son telling you how he would defeat an enemy, but the enemy revealing how he will defeat your son; as if your son were his own enemy.”
Neither of them were holding a utensil or looking away from each other, but their voices had lowered and I didn’t know if they were fighting or still having a contest, and I didn’t know if they knew, either, but I really wanted to change whatever was happening. I couldn’t think of how, though.
“Enemies,” said my father. “How can you talk of children having enemies? They compete. They have rivalries. Children do not have enemies.”
“Children are the only ones who recognize their enemies,” my mother said. “Men fail at that. Enemies are too simple for men. Enemies are too forthright. Some men so needfully require complication, they find themselves defending t
That was a cruel thing for my mother to say to him, even if it was true. He lit a cigarette and I knew they were fighting for sure.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to fight with June, and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t imagine it, but thinking of June right then was lucky.
I said, I fell in love today, Aba.
“What?” he said. He heard me, though. The “What?” was to maintain form. If it were a fistfight that I was breaking up, and I had just gotten my arms around some guy to keep him from punching some other guy who I knew the guy in my arms didn’t really want to punch, then my father’s “What?” was like the half-strength lunge forward that the guy in my arms would make before finally giving in to my hold and agreeing to back out of the fight. As long as the “What?” was taken seriously—as long as we all pretended it was more than just form, as long as we all pretended the content mattered, that the “What?” was actually a question, “What did you say?” or “What did you mean by what you said?”—everyone would get to save face.
So I said, I fell in love with a beautiful girl today, and she is an artist.
“And what happened to Esther Salt?” said my mother. To my father, she said, “You get him this caller ID he begs you for, he gets a new girlfriend.”
“Casanova,” said my father. “Is she in the Cage with you?”
I said, She’s in normal school, in seventh grade.
His relief lit him up. He really thought the Cage was bad. “An older woman,” he said. “An older woman!” He winked at me, clicked his tongue.
“What is her name?” my mom said.
Eliza June Watermark, I said. She’s red-haired.
“That is a very interesting name,” my mother said.
“Who cares, Tamar?” said my father. “He says he’s in love with her. That’s all that matters. It’s all that matters, Gurion.”
“It is not all that matters, Gurion.”
“He’s ten years old,” my father said.
“Ten years old so what? Ask him what he plans to do with her. What do you plan to do, Gurion?”
I’ll marry her, I said.
I didn’t understand what they were arguing about yet.