‘Get him to go to the liquor store,’ she said.
‘We have enough.’
‘Well, I need more for tomorrow.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Look, my dad’s just not used to being challenged, okay?’
‘I didn’t challenge him.’
‘Yeah, you did. That’s what you do.’
Barbra twitched. ‘All I said was no fucking pig.’
I was still angry about what she did with Joel.
‘Look, my father was just trying to tell you why he wasn’t kosher, all right? You need to stop pushing. You need to step down.’
For the first time since she entered our house, I felt hate. I thought that supplying her with wine would keep her off drugs. But how many fucking bottles did she need? How much did she have to split herself apart and put herself back together? Fuck, I’d followed everything she’d wanted for nearly eight weeks! I’d scratched her back, played her games, asked my dad for all kinds of shit. My dad got her a visa. She didn’t know how much we’d done. And what’d she do for me? She fucked my best friend.
The paramedics landed in the restaurant like troops. They put rings on my arms, a can on my neck. I heard Barbra screaming but I could not see. The plastic tablecloth wrinkles. No limit to the ceiling. What I remembered was her hand in my hair. Slow-motion scuffle under the tablecloth skirt. It was her fist, then her hand holding me up by the scruff.
‘Can you feel this?’ the paramedics asked me, pushing.
Barbra, doe-eyed model orphan, had taken the horns.
I had a can on my neck. I could only feel pressure.
‘Take it easy, kid. Breathe.’
I knew the summer would not go on forever.
‘What’s your name? Does he know his name?’
Jew-boy was my given name.
‘He’s in shock. He needs oxygen.’
Chili oil was demonic. Barbra had brought us some kind of new blade.
‘Take a breath now,’ they said. ‘Try to tell us your name.’
She’d stood up from the table underneath the tablecloth skirt. She had a left hand, a left fist. I thought she was looking for my father. All I thought was: we are taking a break. My father had been gone for too long in the bathroom. I saw the gleam for one second under her skirt. It was curved, leathersheathed. It had all these grey teeth.
‘She got kicked out of the army. Does that not concern you?’ my mother shrieked.
I felt gurgling, no air. Her left fist in my hair. Charred beef. Ice-cold smoke.
Abigail cried on the phone. She kept saying she missed me. She missed me.
The knife at my neck was when the first woman screamed.
My sounds ricocheted off the restaurant wall. Abduction by force. My neck was a puppet. Abduction was always by violent force. Where was my father? Barbra overtaken. Her head was measured and sprayed with DDT. My mother had not wanted her to come to our home in the first place. Kafka wrote that his mother in their family was like the ‘beater in the hunt.’ He meant that the mother was the one who chased the birds into violence. The mother was the one who found the violence, in fact, the one who prepped all those birds for the eager shotgun. Cheap wine covered up trauma. Beef upturned on the carpet. I heard a high-pitched, hovering, whimpering wind.
‘Those ISIS guys are evil,’ my father said. ‘They kill the Jews and Japanese.’
I thought, mothers are beaters and visionaries.
My neck, the fountain. Blood hit the plastic. Barbra jiggled the knife. My phlegm built a poultice. I begged my dad to come back. I prayed to him, Dad, rescue me.