Kosher
by Gregory Cowles
Kosher was new in our school; his father had just died and his mother moved to Brewster because it was more affordable. My mother learned this over tea with his mother; their house was just across the cul-de-sac from ours and at dinner my mother told us the details as she set out a plate of rice and tomatoes. The husband had died of lung cancer, she said darkly, and she looked at my father, who was smoking over at his side of the table. My father shrugged. The wife--Kosher's mother, Mrs. Frank--was a children's book illustrator, so she could live where she wanted and still get her work done. And there was something else, my mother said, something interesting: Kosher had an older sister who was retarded.
"Really?" my father said, pushing out his cigarette in an ashtray at his elbow. "How severely?"
"I couldn't tell," my mother said. "I mean, she could talk. And she was affectionate. Physical, really. She hugged me when she came into the kitchen. Actually, it was kind of sweet."
"I've seen her," said Donna, my older sister. She put her glass down and made a face by sticking her tongue into her lower lip and pulling at the corners of her eyes with her thumbs. Then she laughed, her features settling into their normal soft glaze. "She's a freak."
"Donna!" my mother said, but she was trying not to smile, I could tell. "That's quite enough of that."
Donna smirked and picked up her glass of milk again. Now that she was in high school she had started wearing makeup, and she looked across the table at me with serious, startled looking eyes, a trick she'd figured out with mascara. Then she smiled. "You should invite the boy over," she said. "Kosher? You should try to be his friend."
It was inevitable, really. Not only did Kosher live right across the street, but his birthday was in the same week as mine, and in the elementary school way of things, those two facts bound us together. We had to be friends.
Kosher was short and dark and almost fat, with a scared, pained look on his face whenever he was with a group of people, as at that first day of school.
In groups, he had an extraordinary range of nervous tics--blinking his eyes rapidly, clenching his teeth until a blue vein stood out on his temple, gnawing and gnawing at his lips and the inside of his cheeks. But relaxed and away from others, his expression became more beatific, and he approached his surroundings with a good-natured curiosity. One day he greeted me at the bus stop holding a robin's nest, and pointed out with a certain awe the places where the bird had woven telephone wires in among the twigs and grass.
Another day he showed up with a harmonica and, grinning broadly, played the opening blues riff from "Like a Rolling Stone." This was Kosher, alone. But no sooner would the other kids show up at the bus stop, bending to lock their bikes' rear tires and laughing about sports, than Kosher would shut down.
His whole body sagged and he retreated into this sullen place inside himself, clicking his teeth together in a little rhythm.
Every Wednesday Kosher had permission to leave school early. That was the day Mrs. Frank met her coping-with-grief group ("Weeping Widows," Kosher whispered to me), and he had to take care of his sister until she returned.
On these days he would call me after school got out and ask for the math assignment, then stay on the line talking about his friends in Wilton. He told me he used to go horseback riding when his father was alive, and described brushing down his favorite mare after a hard trot. Or he talked about his old best friend, Alex, who did magic tricks and could make an egg disappear just by closing his hands around it. Mostly I didn't believe these stories, but I let Kosher tell them anyway. Now I'm not so sure--the stories may have been true, even--but at the time I felt a smug and determined satisfaction at seeing through Kosher's lies, and letting him go on telling them.
Once his sister picked up the other line while we were talking. There was a click and a humming silence while Kosher paused in his story, then a clumsy voice filled the receiver. "Hi Josher," it said.
"Hi, Laurie," said Kosher. Another pause; I heard ghost voices from other conversations on the line. I didn't know what to do, so I waited.
"Hi Josher," she repeated. I walked with the phone to our kitchen window and looked out at their house, trying to guess where they both were. It was starting to snow lightly and small snowflakes swirled in the wind, nothing that would stick to the ground. At this point Kosher and I had been friends for more than a month, but I still hadn't seen Laurie; every time I went over there she was somewhere else. Donna, who left for school earlier than I did, saw her every morning waiting for the minibus to her special school, and said that she sometimes turned cartwheels in the driveway while she waited. Once she had waved to Donna and my sister had shyly waved back, then turned away.
"I'm on the phone, Laurie," said Kosher. "Hang up now, okay?"
"I love you Josher. I called you up on the telephone to tell you I love you."
"Jesus," said Kosher. "I'm on the phone, okay? I love you too. Now could you hang up?"
There was the sound of someone breathing thickly for a second, then a fumbling loud click as she replaced the handset in its cradle.
"Nathan?" Kosher said.
"I'm here."
"Sorry about that," he said. "That was just, you know. My sister."
"It's okay," I said.
"She can be a real pain in the ass."
"Hey," I said. "No skin off my back." This was an expression my father used.
"Anyway," Kosher said. "I guess I should probably go make sure everything's all right. Catch you later?"
"Catch me later," I said. After I'd hung up I stood at the window for a while longer, looking out across the street at their house until the streetlights all came on in the early winter twilight and the snow, which was falling more heavily now, finally made it impossible for me to see anymore.
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That was the winter I learned to play ice hockey. Every Saturday morning I grabbed my skates from a hook in our basement and warmed up the car in our driveway so my mother in her nightgown could drive me to the frozen lake. One Friday, a couple of nights after Kosher's sister had interrupted our phone conversation, my father rapped his knuckles against my doorframe and walked into the room. "Hey, Trooper," he said, ruffling my hair. I smelled cigarettes on his clothes.
"Hey Dad."
He walked over to my desk and picked up a hockey puck I kept there as a paperweight; he turned it over and over in his hands without really looking at it. Finally he said, "I think it's nice of you to spend so much time with Josher Frank."
I watched him and nodded; I didn't say anything.
"It must be tough to lose your father at that age, and then moving to a new town and all that."
"I guess," I said.
He put the puck back down on my desk and smiled at me.
"How's hockey going?"
I nodded again. "I scored twice last week."
"Good!" he said. "That's great. Hey, tell me something. Does Josher play any sports?"
"Kosher," I said. "We call him Kosher."
My father frowned. "I know. I'm not sure that's the wisest thing, actually, but. . . ." He picked the puck up again and spun it idly between his thumbs. "I guess it doesn't really matter, if he hasn't complained about it." It seemed like he was talking to himself, so I kept shading in the sailboat I was drawing. My father went over to stand in the doorway again, looking out into the hall. "I think sports are important for developing a boy's character," he said.
A few months earlier, while I was working on my bike in the garage, my father had come up to me in this same manner and stood looking at me, rubbing his beard. "I want you to remember something, Nathan," he'd said, then fell silent again while I squeezed some oil onto the gears and spun the back tire. He took a long draw on his cigarette and exhaled. "All that you are," he finally said, "and all that you can ever become, is a sum of your past experiences. Do you understand? You should do what you can while you're young, because you don't want to turn forty and realize you don't like who you've become, or feel like you've missed all your opportunities in life. Okay, sport? Am I making sense?" A few days later he'd handed me the Brewster Islanders brochure and schedule and told me he'd signed me up to play.
Now, in my bedroom, he was using the same serious voice while he looked out into the hallway and talked about Kosher Frank and the importance of sports in a young man's life.
"Kosher plays soccer," I lied; actually, I'd never heard him talk about any sports except riding horses. I added some more whitecaps to the waves in my picture. "He's a fullback."
My father beamed and tossed the hockey puck so it landed in front of me on the bed with a small thwack. "Well," he said. "Good, good for him." He turned his back and faced into the hallway again, stretching his hands above his head and resting them against the top of my door frame. "A fullback," he said. "Good for him."
I don't know if I ever fully believed what my father had to say about people, that we are no more than a culmination of our past experience. People move past their mistakes all the time, it seems to me; and we are different things at different times.
Just before Christmas, Kosher invited me to spend the night. This was on a Saturday, after I got back from hockey, and I packed a bag with pajamas, shampoo, a toothbrush, toothpaste. Although I was only going across the street, I also included my walkman and--after a moment's hesitation--a stuffed brown bear I'd had since I was a baby. Then I walked into Donna's room and stole a joint from the carved stone box she kept on her bookcase, and put that in my pocket.
After I rang Kosher's doorbell I turned and looked across the cul-de-sac at our house. It was the purple part of the evening, with a few early stars visible, and the carriage lamps on either side of our front door were turned on. Upstairs in the family room the blue light of our television flickered against the window and I saw Donna sitting on the couch. Even from the outside you could see that our house wasn't as nice as Kosher's--there was a hole in the garage door where Donna had backed the station wagon too far, and our trim needed a new coat of peach paint--but for me that night, standing there looking back, it didn't matter. I was filled with a longing I couldn't name, a strange blend of homesickness and nostalgia, and I felt my throat tighten in the cold. Then the feeling passed and I turned around again to face Kosher's door.
It was Laurie who let me in. Through the narrow rectangle of glass in the door, I caught my first-ever glimpse of her: Kosher's retarded sister, padding carefully down the stairs, holding onto the banister, placing first one foot and then the other on each step. For some reason she was wearing a bathing suit, a lycra one-piece with red and white stripes. Her face was broad and flat, and I remembered in a flash Donna's dinner-table impression. My sister, I saw, had done a decent job. Laurie looked something like an Eskimo, with a squat body and round, fleshy arms; she had the tilted almond eyes Donna had suggested. She also had a real chest, I noticed, bigger than Donna's, filling out the front of her bathing suit, and I remembered that she had hugged my mother the first time they met.
She opened the door and stood grinning like a Labrador retriever for a second, framed by light and the house's warm interior. Then she spread her arms in a casual welcoming gesture, a shrug or a hug, and she blinked at me. "Hi," she said. "I'm Laurie."
I stepped inside without looking at her and stood blowing on my hands. Laurie swung the door shut and I snuck a quick peek at her, then looked away again. The Franks' entry hall was familiar to me by now, with its long rug and its watercolor paintings of hippos in hair salons and cats with tutus, evidence of Kosher's mother at work. A side table stood against the wall, and I leaned back on this. I looked at my feet. "Um, is Kosher. . . ?"
"Um, is Kosher?" she repeated, and giggled. She took a step closer to me and I felt myself blush. The snow on my shoes was melting into puddles on the floor.
I swallowed. "Is Josher home?" I asked.
"Is Josher home?" she mimicked again in her slow careful voice, her tongue against her lower lip. She laughed. "You're Josher's friend," she said. "I can do a somersault. Wanna see?"
I shrugged and nodded, mumbled "okay," and Laurie took another step towards me. I watched her come; I couldn't move. She was still grinning that open-mouth grin, and her left hand picked nervously at a seam along the edge of her bathing suit.
She's a monster, I thought.
But then, at the very last moment before she reached me, something strange happened; I couldn't have explained it then and I still can't now. Whatever it was, and however subtle, something real shifted within me. I smiled; I took the final step forward myself; and I let Laurie hug me.
She felt sticky, the way a plastic placemat feels five minutes after you wipe it with a sponge. Her face nuzzled my shoulder, and her hair was soft and light against my neck. I felt her breasts moving as she breathed; my hands, splayed against her bathing suit, felt her back move in and out. Now that I had committed to this hug, I wasn't sure what to do; I felt awkward and overly aware of both of our bodies. And Laurie smelled bad--not nasty, but sickeningly sweet, like babies smell.
Yet I made no move to leave. Just the opposite; I gave myself in to it instead. I relaxed my body against hers and listened to her raspy panting; I stood and swayed with her, the two of us solid as something in nature, rocking lightly back and forth on our feet for what seemed like forever but was really just until I looked up and saw Kosher sitting on the steps watching us, with a dark, troubled look on his face.
"Hey, come on," he said--gently wheedling, annoyed at me. "Here I am." He stood up and put his hands on his hips, and his face twitched as he nibbled his lower lip. He shrugged, almost imperceptibly. "Anyway," he said, "I'm right here."
The cold rough wood of the porch felt alien under my hands, which I moved in slow circles behind me. My mouth was dry and my thoughts seemed to be moving randomly. My brain is a train without tracks, I thought, and I giggled.
Later on that night, after dinner, Kosher and I stood outside on his porch. The moon was full and his back yard was striped with the glitter of snow and the dark shadows of pine trees. Vaguely I could make out the bows of the big yellow ribbons Kosher and his mother had tied to each tree for the hostages in Iran. In his room earlier, I had taken the joint from my pocket and cupped it in my hand to show Kosher, and his eyes had grown wide. "Crap," he'd whispered, and he'd let out a long low whistle. Now I produced it again with a flourish and we giggled nervously, our breath collecting in the air around us.
"Look, watch this," I said. I raised the unlit joint to my lips and sucked hard, exaggerating the casual draw of breath my father used to start a cigarette. I closed my eyes and imitated my father's peaceful, dreamy expression, then rounded my lips and blew a puff of breath into the air, where it materialized as white vapor.
Kosher laughed and the pom pom on his hat shook. "Let me try," he said, and I passed the joint to him. "Rock and roll," he said, crossing his arms. He hummed something under his breath, a snatch of song I recognized from one of the albums in his collection, and we sang together out into the backyard: "All in all, you're just another brick in the wall." He grinned and faked a drag on the joint, then exhaled to create the magic cloud of breath. "Hey, teacher," he said.
I laughed and sat down. "Leave those kids alone," I said.
Kosher walked over to a portable heater on one side of the porch and switched it on. In a few minutes, the coils were glowing bright red and I felt a pocket of warm air against my neck and the side of my face. I liked the warmth; it felt good, like having a campfire in the snow.
Kosher lit the joint by resting it against the hot coils and inhaling. His face became skinny for a second as his cheeks caved in and his eyes bulged out, then he started a short spasm of sputtering coughs and released a cloud of white smoke. He held a hand up; his eyes watered. "Damn," he said. "That hurt like hell." He smiled weakly and passed me the joint.
I glanced behind us into the house, where the living room was dark and empty. Mrs. Frank was probably standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes, or upstairs reading to Laurie. Anyway, Kosher had said earlier, she couldn't say anything even if she did catch us, because he had found a stash of marijuana and rolling papers in her bed table just before they moved. This fact amazed me; I was still at an age when adult transgressions and plain blind desires could surprise me just by the fact that they existed at all.
We stayed on the porch for ten minutes smoking. When our joint had burned down to half an inch and the end was soggy from our saliva, Kosher stood up and cracked his knuckles. "Do you feel anything?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. "Yeah, I guess." And I did feel different: The cold rough wood of the porch felt alien under my hands, which I moved in slow circles behind me. My mouth was dry and my thoughts seemed to be moving randomly. My brain is a train without tracks, I thought, and I giggled.
"I know what to do," Kosher said. "Come on." He walked down the steps and into the yard, then turned to look at me. "Come on," he said, and I remembered vaguely--from a distance, like he had told me years ago--that he wanted me to follow him.
"I feel weird," I said, feeling my tongue move in my mouth. My thoughts spun dangerously, giddily, on a precipice. But what could I do? I got up and walked towards Kosher in the snow.
It really was a beautiful night, clear and cold and a million million stars stippling the sky. No one had been in the Franks' backyard since the surprise snowfall a week ago, and the trail of our footsteps from the porch to where we stood now looked like vandalism, a rock through a stained glass window. "We ruined it," I said, a little mournfully, and Kosher tilted his head at me, considering. Then he lay down in the snow and shut his eyes.
"No," he said. "See there?" With his eyes still closed he extended one arm to point at some hatch marks scratched across the snow's surface. He nodded. "Bird tracks," he said. "The blue jays ruined it before we did."
"Oh." I sat down next to him and leaned back with my hands in the snow behind me. Above us a satellite crossed the sky, twinkling, flashing like a bottle cap in the sun. "That's a relief," I said, but I couldn't remember for sure just what it was we were talking about anymore, just that I felt this mild and comforting sense of reprieve. I thought about Laurie, her hair tickling my neck, the surprising weight of her breasts against my body. Her closeness, her warm breath. I slid my hands backwards until I also was lying in the snow, feeling the ground cold and hard beneath my back and watching the fat moon beaming down on me. The pine trees stirred in the breeze. A burst of TV laughter carried from one of the neighbors' houses, and a door slammed. My hands felt frozen. Next to me Kosher was moving his arms and legs slowly back and forth, apart and together, his eyes still shut so he seemed to be swimming a slow backstroke in his own universe without moving anywhere. I propped myself up on an elbow, flexing my fingers against the cold, and watched him for a moment. "Kosher?" I said, but he didn't answer, didn't even pause in his swimming, so I lay back again and shut my own eyes. I shivered.
Some time later--maybe ten seconds, maybe ten minutes; I couldn't tell how long--the sound of Kosher's arms against the ground finally stopped and I heard him sit up. His jacket rustled, his boots crunched on snow, and without opening my eyes I knew that he had moved a few steps closer to me. He felt for my hand on the ground, and pulled it so my knuckles just rested against his face and I could tell in the dark that he was crying.
"I miss my dad," he whispered, and sat down. "Nathan?"
I felt some loose snow at my shoulders slide towards him, a mini avalanche. "Nathan?" he whispered.
I thought of him sitting on the steps earlier that night, watching me with Laurie, not saying anything until I noticed him there. I didn't answer.
"Nathan." Softly insistent now. He took my hand away from his wet eyelashes and lowered it to the ground again without letting go. He sat like that for a moment, no more than twenty seconds, then he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth.
We are the sum of our past experiences.
No. We are different things at different times.
I didn't move right away, just sat there and played dead with Kosher leaning over me, his lips soft and light against mine. I felt his breath in my mouth, felt a tremble or shiver run through him. Water dripped onto my forehead and I wondered idly, stoned, whether it was tears or melting snow from his hat. Then I remembered Laurie again, with a sudden forceful clarity--her back moving in my hands, her smell of baby shampoo--and I rolled over onto my side, away from Kosher.
I opened my eyes to see him sitting up, a slack stunned look on his face, and his breath curling away from his nostrils. Behind him where he had been lying on the ground was a perfect snow angel, wings arched, ready to fly, with three footprints leading to where Kosher was now.
I turned away from him again, looked back at the dark porch and the house looming beyond it.
"What are you doing?" I said. My own mind raced and jumped; my heart pounded. I felt like I might start crying myself. Kosher snuffled. "I--"
I shook my head. "Get the fuck away from me," I said.
Yesterday, at the home for retarded adults where I work now, my boss handed me a state newsletter on mental retardation and said, "Isn't this where you grew up?" The article she pointed to was about a Special Olympics coach in Brewster who was 80 years old and still swam the butterfly every day with his kids. I didn't know the man, but as I looked at the picture of him at the edge of the old YMCA pool, flanked by four Downs patients with their broad flat moon faces, I found myself thinking about all of this again, remembering things I hadn't remembered in years, with an urgency like panic balling and swelling in my chest. I handed the newsletter back. "No," I said. "No, I grew up across the border in Connecticut."
In the week following that night in Kosher's backyard, the last week before we broke for winter vacation, I would look up in homeroom and see Kosher staring at me, his dark eyes swimming, his teeth working savagely at the inside of his mouth, and I would look away again quickly. On Wednesday, when he called for the math homework, I had Donna tell him I was somewhere else, over at a new friend's house. It was that easy, cutting the friendship short. My other friends congratulated me for breaking free. I didn't talk about what had happened, not at first anyway, but they saw the change and approved. They had never understood how I had endured him in the first place, they said; they had privately worried about me. But now all of that was over; my life shifted smoothly back into its old patterns; I didn't miss Kosher at all.
But of course it couldn't be that easy, not really. Nothing ever is. On the first day after school let out, exactly one week after the night in Kosher's backyard, I showed up for hockey practice with my team. It was a warm day, unseasonably warm, and we were all horsing around--sending up little sprays of shaved ice with our skates, laughing that the lake was going to melt before we could finish practicing on it. Coach Wilkins was losing patience, trying to take us through his passing drill one more time. Pass the puck through zones A,B,C; receive it through zones C,B,A. Come on, guys, he said, skating backwards while he looked us over. You can do this. One more time, then I'll let you goof off.
I had cocked my wrist and wound up for a pass across the ice to Billy Lane when I happened to glance up and see Kosher sitting on a picnic table on shore, watching us. He had on the same red jacket he had worn the week before, with a hat and scarf poking out of one pocket; it wasn't cold enough for him to actually wear them. He saw my glance, saw me recognize him, and he quickly ducked his head and stood up to leave. He hadn't meant for anyone to know he was there.
But it was too late. Waiting for my pass, Billy Lane followed my gaze and saw him there also, climbing down off the table. "Hey," he said, leaning on the end of his hockey stick. "Isn't that Kosher Frank?"
That might have been the end of it right there, and probably should have been--the rest of the team looking up, seeing his retreating back, snickering. But Lance Campbell laughed meanly and said "faggot" out loud, and I shot him a sharp look.
"No he's not," I said, feeling the heat rush to my face. Everyone looked at me.
I swallowed. "I saw him kissing his sister," I said. The lie slipped out easily, hung in the air. "I mean really making out," I said. "It's true."
They looked at me and waited.
"You can't tell anyone," I said, knowing what I was doing, knowing that the story would spread and grow and take on its own proportions. "He made me promise I wouldn't say anything," I said. I stopped talking and rocked back and forth on my skates.
Their eyes were wide; they were fascinated and repelled by the possibility of it.
And it came to me then--after I had finished talking, while I stood nodding at my friends' disbelief and watching the red of Kosher's jacket disappear back into the woods until it was no bigger than the flash of a cardinal--it came to me that my father was right after all: That what I was doing here was building a life, my life, piece by tentative piece, and for a moment I was so dazzled by the pure and absolute sureness of this knowledge that all I could do was blink, every bit as disoriented as someone who wakes up to find that it has snowed during the night so that light is moving in a million different directions over the landscape, and nothing old looks familiar, and never will again.
