Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(157)
Jacob imagined every street in Tehran packed with people throwing fists in the air, beating their chests. He imagined every park and gathering space overflowing like Azadi Square. The camera closed on a woman slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other, over and over; a boy screaming from his father’s shoulders, four arms in the air. There were people on balconies, on rooftops, on the branches of trees. People atop cars and corrugated metal awnings too hot to be touched with bare skin.
The Ayatollah’s words had dripped into more than a billion open ears, and there had been two hundred thousand pairs of fixed eyes in the square, and 0.2 percent of the world was Jewish, but watching the replays of the speech—the Ayatollah’s gesticulating fists, the crowd’s undulations—Jacob thought only of his family.
Before they were allowed to take Sam home from the hospital when he was born, Jacob had to sit through a fifteen-minute course covering the Ten Commandments of Caring for a Newborn—the absolute rudiments of new parenting: YOU SHALL NOT SHAKE YOUR BABY; YOU SHALL CARE FOR THE UMBILICAL STUMP WITH A COTTON SWAB SOAKED IN WARM WATER AND SOAP, AT LEAST ONCE A DAY; YOU SHALL BE AWARE OF THE FONTANEL; YOU SHALL FEED YOUR BABY ONLY BREAST MILK OR FORMULA, BETWEEN ONE AND THREE OUNCES, EVERY TWO TO THREE HOURS, AND YOU SHALL NOT BE OBLIGATED TO BURP YOUR BABY IF HE FALLS ASLEEP AFTER A FEEDING; and so on. All things that anyone who had gone to a parenting class, or had ever spent time in the presence of a baby, or had simply been born Jewish, would already know. But the Tenth Commandment rattled Jacob. YOU SHALL REMEMBER: IT WILL NOT LAST.
COME HOME
After the guests went home, after Uber came for the Torah, after Tamir took all the kids to the Nats game (where, thanks to Max’s thoughtful ingenuity, Sam’s bar mitzvah was announced on the scoreboard during the seventh-inning stretch), after a bit of unnecessary e-mailing, after a walk to the corner with Argus, Jacob and Julia were left to clean up. Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like “Reading in bed,” and “Giving a bath,” and “Running while holding the seat of a bicycle.” Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn’t them. It’s cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you.
Julia couldn’t bring herself to accept paper plates in the end, so there were a few loads of dishes to do. Jacob filled the machine to the brim and then hand-washed the rest, he and Julia taking turns with the soaping-up and the drying-off.
“You were right not to believe him,” Jacob said.
“Apparently. But you were right that we should have believed him.”
“Did we mishandle it?”
“I don’t know,” Julia said. “Is that even the question? Everything with kids is some kind of mishandling. So we try to learn, and mishandle it less badly in the future. But in the meantime, they’ve changed, so the lesson doesn’t apply.”
“It’s a lose-lose.”
They both laughed.
“A love-love.”
The sponge was already well on its way to mush, the only clean dish towel was damp, and the dish soap had to be diluted with water for there to be enough, but they made it work.
“Listen,” Jacob said. “Not fatalistically, but responsibly, I arranged a whole bunch of things with the accountant and lawyer, and—”
“Thank you,” Julia said.
“Anyway, it’s all pretty clearly spelled out in a document that I put on your bedside table—in a sealed envelope, in case one of the kids came upon it.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“Of course not.”
“You’re not even going to go.”
“I am.”
She turned on the disposal, and Jacob had the thought that if he were a Foley artist tasked with creating the sound of Satan screaming out from hell, he might just hold a mic to what he was now hearing.
“Another thing,” he said.
“What?”
“I’ll wait till it’s done.”
She switched it off.
“Remember I mentioned that I’ve been working on a show for a long time?”
“Your secret masterpiece.”
“I never described it like that.”
“About us.”
“Very loosely.”
“Yes, I know what you’re referring to.”
“There’s a copy of it in the bottom-right drawer of my desk.”
“The whole thing?”
“Yes. And on top is the bible.”
“The Bible?”
“For the show. It’s a kind of guide for how to read it. For future actors, a future director.”
“Shouldn’t the work speak for itself?”
“Nothing speaks for itself.”
“Sam sure does.”
“If the show were Sam, it wouldn’t need a bible.”
“And if you were Sam, you wouldn’t need a show.”
“Correct.”
“OK. So your show and its bible are in the bottom-right drawer of your desk. And in the event that you actually go to Israel and, what, perish in battle? I’m supposed to send it to your agent?”