Brewster by Mark Slouka Read Free Book Online

heart could feel, could close my throat over a line in a movie, a song, anything—while the other half was as dead as a pit in a peach.
    Take my parents. I knew they’d barely made it out of Germany, that they’d escaped the worst by sheer luck and bribery, that they’d slipped sideways through the closing door with a suitcase apiece and started again. I knew my father’s brother, Klaus, had disappeared into Sachsenhausen, that my mother’s sister, late for a train, had simply vanished from the earth. But sitting in History watching Night and Fog , sick to my stomach, I didn’t connect it to them, to me, and when Moira Rivken belched and ran out of the room with her hand over her mouth, I understood but I didn’t, really. I felt for her of course—I figured it was about her parents, or relatives—but what had happened to mine didn’t have anything to do with me because that was how they wanted it.
    Whenever I asked about the war, and I did, more than once, it was as if I wasn’t even in the room. “Your father died for them at the Somme and they turned on us like dogs,” my mother would say to my father, as though he didn’t know, and my father would sit there staring at the carpet. They’d suffered—I could never understand. It was the same with Aaron. They’d lost their firstborn, an unthinkable thing. How could they explain it to me? It was like watching somebody making dinner while blood pours from their sleeve.
    We were watching a Walt Disney special about tigers one night when I was little when my mother started to cry. This happened. You weren’t supposed to do anything.
    “It’s alright,” my father said after a while. And then: “Do you want me to turn it off?”
    My mother just sat there, sobbing into her hands.
    “I know,” my father said. “I know.” He kept saying it: I know, I know. He went over to the couch and put his arm around her and she started to cough—a forced, fake-sounding cough like she was choking.
    On the TV a kid my age was running across a kitchen floor with muddy shoes.
    My father said he’d make a cup of tea, then looked at me and quietly shook his head, telling me something.
    I didn’t know what to do. On the TV a tiger was walking along a broken wall.
    When I touched her hair she flinched away like I’d stuck her with a pin.
    I remember bursting out crying, more with surprise than anything else, and my father rushing back in yelling, “What happened? What on earth?” as my mother ran past him and up the stairs. We heard the door slam. I was maybe five, six.
    My father just stood there. “She’s upset,” he said, then started wiping at my face with his handkerchief which smelled like tobacco and spit. “Do you want to finish watching the show?” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
    F OR A WHILE when I was in fourth grade I had to go talk to the school psychologist during gym class—I forget her name. She reminded me of those folding rulers you used to see—tall, straight, angles and elbows. She wore men’s glasses and very red lipstick and great square stiff dresses that looked like they belonged on a large doll, and once, when she got up from her chair, I saw a long, thin stripe of black hair going up the middle of her white calf.
    Who knows what she talked to me about? Coping skills, probably, or whatever they called them then. The importance of Communicating My Feelings. Some things don’t change. They’d sent me there because a few weeks before, watching Scotty Steinberg tease our class guinea pig with a carrot, then knock it on the snout, I’d tapped him on the shoulder, waited till he turned around, then punched him in the stomach. I’d never hit anybody before. I was surprised how easy it was. My fist just sank in like he was pudding and then he bent over and started making weird barking noises and ran into the bathroom at the back of the class and locked himself in. I wasn’t sorry.
    It wasn’t Scotty. Or the guinea pig. It was the way she