Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(93)
He put his hand on top of her hand on top of his hand: “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I’m so sorry, Julia.”
He was sorry, so sorry, but for what? There was so much to apologize for.
At his wedding, Jacob’s mother told a story that he had no memory of, and didn’t believe was true, and was hurt by, because even if it wasn’t true, it could have been, and it exposed him.
“You were probably expecting my husband,” Deborah began, eliciting a good laugh. “Perhaps you’ve noticed that he usually does the talking. And talking.”
More laughter.
“But this one I wanted. The wedding of my son, whom I grew in my body, and fed from my body, and gave everything of myself so that one day he would be able to let go of my hand and take the hand of another. To his credit, my husband didn’t argue or complain. He just gave me the silent treatment for three weeks.” More laughter, especially from Irv. “They were the happiest three weeks of my life.”
More laughter.
“Don’t forget our honeymoon!” Irv called.
“Did we go on a honeymoon?” Deborah asked.
More laughter.
“You might have noticed that Jews don’t exchange wedding vows. The covenant is said to be implicit in the ritual. Isn’t that wonderfully Jewish? To stand before one’s life partner, and before one’s god, at what is probably the most significant moment of your life, and to assume it goes without saying? It’s hard to think of anything else that a Jew would assume goes without saying.”
More laughter.
“I’ll never get over what a strange and easily explained people we are. But perhaps some of you are like me, and cannot help but hear the familiar vows: ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.’ They might not be our words, but they are in our collective subconscious.
“There was a year in Jacob’s childhood—” She looked to Irv and said, “Maybe it was even more than a year? A year and a half?” Then she looked back to those gathered. “There was a period of time that felt like longer than it was”—laughter—“when Jacob would pretend he was disabled. It started with the announcement, one morning, that he was blind. ‘But you’re closing your eyes,’ I told him.”
More laughter.
“?‘That’s only because there’s nothing to look at,’ he said, ‘so I’m resting them.’ Jacob was a stubborn child. He could keep up a resistance for days, and weeks. Irv, can you imagine from where he might have gotten that?”
A laugh.
Irv called back, “Nature from me, nurture from you!”
Another laugh.
Deborah continued: “He stuck with the blindness for three or four days—a long time for a child, or anyone, to keep his eyes closed—but then came to dinner one night batting lashes and once again adept with silverware. ‘I’m happy to see you’ve recovered,’ I said. He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to his ears. ‘What is it, love?’ He went to the cabinet, got a pen and paper, and wrote, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. I’m deaf.’ Irv said, ‘You aren’t deaf.’ Jacob mouthed the words ‘I am deaf.’
“Maybe a month later, he limped into the living room with a pillow under the back of his shirt. He didn’t say anything, just limped to the shelf, took down a book, and limped back out. Irv called out, ‘Ciao, Quasimodo,’ and went back to his reading. He thought it was a phase among phases. I followed Jacob to his room, sat beside him on his bed, and asked, ‘Did you break your back?’ He nodded yes. ‘That must be incredibly painful.’ He nodded. I suggested we reset his spine by taping a broom to his back. He walked around like that for two days. He recovered.
“I was reading to him in bed a couple of weeks later—his head propped on the pillow that had been the hump on his back—and he pulled up the sleeve of his pajama top and said, ‘Look what happened.’ I didn’t know what I was supposed to be seeing, only that I was supposed to be seeing it, so I said, ‘That’s looks horrible.’ He nodded. ‘I got a very bad burn,’ he said. ‘So I see,’ I said, very gently touching it. ‘Hold on, I have some ointment in the medicine cabinet.’ I came back with moisturizer. ‘For use on extreme burns,’ I said, pretending to read the directions on the back. ‘Apply liberally across burn. Rub into skin as if massaging. Full recovery expected by morning.’ I rubbed his arm for half an hour, a massage that went through seasons of being pleasurable, and meditative, and intimate, and, apparently, sedating. When he came into our bed the next morning, he showed me his arm and said, ‘It worked.’ I said, ‘A miracle.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘just medicine.’?”
More laughter.
“Just medicine. I still think about that all the time. No miracle, just medicine.
“The disabilities and injuries continued to come—a cracked rib, loss of feeling in his left leg, broken fingers—but with less and less frequency. Then, one morning, maybe a year after he’d gone blind, Jacob didn’t come down for breakfast. He often overslept, especially after nights when he and his father stayed up to watch the Orioles. I tapped on his door. No answer. I opened it, and he was perfectly still on his bed, arms and legs straight, with a note balanced in the well of his sternum: ‘I am feeling extremely sick, and think I might die tonight. If you are now looking at me, and I’m not moving, it is because I am dead.’ If it were a game, he’d have won it. But it wasn’t a game. I could rub cream into a burn, I could set a broken back, but there is nothing to be done for the dead. I had loved the intimacy of our secret understanding, but I no longer understood. I looked at him lying there, my stoic child, so still. I started crying. Just as I’m about to do now. I got on my knees beside Jacob’s body, and I cried and cried and cried.”