silly,â my mother said.
âIâm protecting the family.â I stood on a stool, holding the candle high above me, and when the alarm began to blare, I told Jonathan that we were safe for another week, that God would protect us until the next sabbath.
âGod doesnât protect us,â my mother said. âThe smoke alarm does.â
âYou donât know anything,â I told her.
I kept my door open when I went to sleep at night, hoping to hear the smoke alarm. Iâd be like my father in World War II, guarding the battalion from death and Hitler, reciting poetry.
âI hate poetry,â Jonathan said after school one day.
âPoetry kept Dad sane during the war.â
âSo what?â
âSo itâs important.â I thought about this when I went to bed that night. Lying beneath the blanket my father had captured, I couldnât fall asleep. I didnât want to fight in a war; I lacked my fatherâs courage.
âI donât want to die,â I told Jonathan the next day. âI donât want to get flown back in a body bag.â
âTheyâve got nuclear weapons now. If you die in a war, youâll get blown to pieces. There wonât be a body to fly back.â
I imagined my parents during World War II. What was my mother thinking while my father was in combat? How could she have known the danger he faced, this girl who wasnât yet a teenager, who lay in bed at night listening to the radio for news from the battlefront, who saved her allowance to buy provisions for the soldiers? Maybe those provisions reached my father. I saw him crouched in his foxhole, eating a can of beans my mother had sent him, grateful for her kindness.
For a while I thought heâd been injured in the warâand that was why my parents couldnât have children.
âMaybe Dad got his balls blown off,â I told Jonathan.
âHe didnât get his balls blown off.â
âMaybe he has some kind of disease.â I read about diseases Iâd never heard of, and convinced myself I had them. âI have Lou Gehrigâs disease.â
âNo you donât,â Jonathan said. âOnly Lou Gehrig had that disease. Thatâs why they named it after him.â
âLots of people have Lou Gehrigâs disease. Thousands of people in the United States.â
People with Lou Gehrigâs disease had trouble swallowing, so in fifth grade I started eating my food without chewing it, in the hope that with practice I could improve my swallowing.
âYouâre a healthy boy,â my mother said. âPeople with Lou Gehrigâs disease are much older than you.â
I didnât believe her. I read about rare neurological conditions, about bacteria-carrying insects, and viruses that existed only in the jungle. And I continued to eat without chewing.
âYouâll choke,â Jonathan said. âThatâs what youâll die ofâasphyxiation.â
He wasnât worried about disease, but he was happy to pretend he wasnât well, if only so we could be a team.
âI have whooping cough,â I said. I stood before my mother and whooped as I coughed.
âI have the mumps,â said Jonathan.
We knew about the mumps from The Columbia Medical Encyclopedia . People who had the mumps sometimes lost their hearing, so Jonathan pretended he was deaf. âI have to go to special mumps school,â he said.
âI have cervical cancer,â I said. Then I felt bad, because my grandmother had died of cervical cancer; now she was in heaven, looking down at us.
âOnly girls get cervical cancer,â Jonathan said.
For months after that he pretended I was a girl. âYou have breast cancer,â he said.
âNo I donât.â
âYou need to go to a gynecologist.â
Mostly we pretended we were sick so my parents would let us stay home from school. They rarely believed us, though. As a boy, my
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