“The Giants won!”

The three boys settled in the car, pushing each other. Their lunchboxes smelled of stale bagels and something sweet and musky, maybe all the Halloween candies they had already unwrapped and licked looking for that special one they’d love the best. I rolled the window down and stuck out my hand to feel the drizzle on my palm.

“Go Rangers,” said Ben, the younger of the two neighbor boys, fishing a cereal flake out of a plastic cup. He tossed it toward his open mouth and missed. “I love the Rangers!”

I wiped my hand on my forehead and started the car. The digital clock blinked like a devil’s eye: orange on black. 7:05 A.M. It was my morning to drive everyone to school. My eyelids felt like sandbags.

“Everyone hates the Rangers,” said my son, Jacob. “Everyone loves the Giants.”

 “I don’t!” said Ben, crunching. “You’ll see, the Rangers’ll win the World Series.”

“World Series! No way! You’re only eight, what do you know?”

I heard Ben sniffling, and in the back mirror I saw his big frog-like mouth squaring, the lower lip quivering with a cereal crumb stuck to it.

“Aaaaaa,” he started to cry in a low baby voice. “Aaaaaa—”

My neck felt too stiff to look back. I got on the highway, a truck splashing my side mirror with water, the car swerving. Ben kept wailing.

“Look, you guys,” I said. “No screaming. No crying. Now, Ben, why don’t you tell me what you’re going to be for Halloween?”

“Disgusting monsters,” said Ben’s older brother Aaron. “Very scary. I hate the Rangers. I hate my brother.”

He spoke slowly, with a stutter. A little heavy, always pouting, he reminded me of a bear cub.

“Go Rangers! Go Rangers!” screamed Ben, squirming and jumping up and down in the seat.

“Go Giants! Go Giants!” echoed Jacob and Aaron, also starting to jump.

The car bounced up and down. In the rearview mirror I saw Aaron slapping Ben with his lunchbox, cereal flakes flying around like orange butterflies.

“Stop it this very second,” I said. “Both the Rangers and the Giants are fine. Sometimes one team wins, and sometimes another. That’s life.”
“You don’t understand anything, Mom,” said Jacob. “You’re not American, what do you know about baseball?” 

I threw a sidelong glance at him. Reclining in the front seat as if in a VIP airport lounge, he looked exactly like his father: a resolute frown, sharp grey eyes, a smirking mouth. The only thing he got from me was my father’s nose—big, Jewish, and prominent like the American flag on an immigrant’s house. The joy of every anti-Semite back home. That was the only thing I remembered about my father, I thought. That and the smoke rings from his cigarette. I was four when he fled to Israel. I felt lucky to remember that much.

Jacob crossed his arms over his chest: Nine running on forty-three. His first word was “Myself!” and ever since, no matter where he was—in an airport women’s restroom after a diaper accident, or at a flu shot clinic hiding behind me from a nurse with a syringe—he ordered people around.

“Just drive,” he said. “Faster.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Would you like to walk the rest of the way?  And if you must know, your World Series is not even a real World Series. America is the only country that is playing.”

“America is the whole world,” said Aaron, sucking on his thumb.

 “Says who?” I asked.

“Columbus,” said Ben, picking up the cereal flakes from the seat and crunching on them. “America’s the New World.”

“Columbus was wrong. He thought he discovered India,” I said, wiping sweat off my forehead. “That’s why Native Americans were called Indians. They’re not Indians. They’re Americans. Plus, there’s still an Old World.”

“Everyone knows that,” said my son. “And everyone knows it’s the World Series.”

“Listen,” I said. “Jacob, you can’t believe everything you hear. Who’s ‘everyone’?”

“Luke Ronson. Marcellus. Darren. Dad. Even the girls.”

“The girls don’t count,” said Ben. “They’re weird. And annoying.”

“I hate girls,” said Aaron.

I’d always wanted a girl. A little girl, with droplet pearl earrings. I wanted to make princess dresses for Halloween. I wanted to brush her hair before bedtime; I could imagine the way she’d smell—chamomile and muffins—if she’d been born. She was born blue and still, and I never learned how she’d smell—at twenty-four weeks, she wasn’t even a baby. She’d be Aaron’s age now.

I kept looking ahead at the truck in front of me. It was overloaded with pumpkins: brilliant scarlet, purple, orange, lemony-green, albino white with emerald green swirls and coffee-stained warts. Round, oblong, horned and beer-bellied, they bounced and danced in front of me as if an invisible highway fairy was hopping from one to another. It was raining now, not drizzling, and the pumpkins were shining, the only eruption of golden fiery warmth in the dull world.  

“Jacob. Honey,” I said. “You have to use your own head and think things through for yourself.”

I rolled the window down all the way, craving the cold wet drizzle on my burning left cheek.

“Close the window,” said Jacob. “There are things that everyone knows, and that’s it. Nothing to think about. Like one plus one is two.”

“Not necessarily.”

“It’s two!”

“No screaming,” I said. “Listen, you take a mama-rabbit and a papa-rabbit, put them together in a cage—one plus one—and it’s not two.”

I heard Ben and Aaron chuckling from the back seat.

“What is it?” asked Jacob.

“I don’t know. Can be anything. Three. Zero, sometimes. Hundreds.”

“You don’t know math. Dad knows math, and you don’t. When he’s back, he’ll tell you.”

When he’s back, I thought, but said nothing.

It’s been six months. Last night he Skyped me, “Great news, honey. I got a raise—and it’s only eight more months!  We’ll be filthy rich. Go get yourself a new purse!”

“Sometimes numbers are not important,” I said. “Sometimes it’s not math, it’s life.”

“You get an F-minus,” said Jacob, hitting his clenched fist on his thigh—just like Dad.

I slowed down in front of the school building, a Giants banner flying over the door beside a smashed witch on a broom.

“Here,” I said. “Out you go. Your lunchbox, Ben. Have a good day! I love you, Jacob!”

I sat in the car and watched the boys going up the wide stairs, through the row of plastic skeletons with empty eyes, Deaths in black robes with scythes, and witches with prominent Jewish noses and pointed hats. The boys looked younger than they were, their lunchboxes and backpacks with Giants stickers dragging on the silver asphalt, cereal in tousled hair, eyes still sleepy. I noticed a melted hard candy stuck to Jacob’s behind.

The door closed, but I stayed still, looking at a golden candy wrapper drowning in a black puddle, waiting a bit before driving back to the empty house.

 

Zarina Zabrisky is the author of the short story collections IRON (Epic Rites Press) and A CUTE TOMBSTONE (forthcoming in 2013 from Epic Press) and a novel, We, Monsters (forthcoming in 2013 from Numina Press). Her work has appeared in more than twenty literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong and Nepal. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of the 2013 Acker Award.