My parents will buy a twenty-seven-inch salmon-colored Sony Trinitron, with a sleek remote control that would decimate the Zenith Space Command, just in time for Peter Jennings to tell us that the space shuttle Challenger has fallen into the ocean, but when The Day After comes out we have just a little nine-incher from a local dump, which we unveil for special occasions. So I start a subscription to TV Guide magazine to get a better grip on the important shows. I am not allowed to watch TV, but I am allowed the TV Guide, which we take to be America’s version of literature. The Day After, of course, is accompanied by many articles in the Guide, and I save that copy for many years to come, sometimes looking at the picture on the cover: a man shielding a boy from a mushroom cloud, the Lightman in my closet peering over my shoulder, so caught up in the horror he’s actually stroking my wounded ear. The boy will suffer flash blindness from the blast, and the thought of being alive in the post-nuclear-holocaust world without eyesight is devastating to me. The first order of business for when the Soviets attack — and I know those lying bastards, they will attack — is to get a good pair of sunglasses from the Stern’s department store in the Douglaston Mall.
“When the bombs fall, I will take my children outside so that we can die together instantly.” This is Mrs. A, a teacher of social studies and affiliated subjects. When she says that, I feel the true horror of nuclear war because Mrs. A is terribly attractive with her slim figure and bushel of kinky Ashkenazi hair, and her daughters, who attend SSSQ’s lower grades, are both similarly situated. All the cool kids and their mothers at SSSQ seem to know Mrs. A intimately, and she will often interrupt a monologue on the Suez Canal Crisis to say to her all-time favorite student, “Chava, remember when …”
Also, she is very keen to tell us that her daughter is an amazing ballerina and how she played Lincoln Center when she was eight months old or something of the sort. This love of child makes me tear up. My father once showed up to a parent-teacher conference where one of the teachers informed him that “Gary is very smart. We hear he reads Dostoyevsky in the original.”
“Phh,” Papa said. “Only Chekhov.”
So, after The Day After I keep replaying the bit about Mrs. A taking her kids out to meet the mushroom cloud. How could the Soviets possibly kill Mrs. A and her ballerina daughter? What would Jewish television personality Abba Eban have to say about this? Before she made that announcement, I had not been entirely anti — nuclear war. My research indicated that two of the Soviet missiles would target JFK and LaGuardia airports in Queens. SSSQ is geographically equidistant from the two airports, and the school’s glass-heavy modernist structure would probably buckle and split into shards from the initial blasts, burning up the siddur prayer books like so many blue pancakes, and certainly the subsequent radiation exposure would kill everyone with the exception of the rotund, self-insulated Rabbi Sofer.
So far so good.
Meanwhile, Little Neck does not lie next to any obvious targets, the nearest one would be the Brookhaven National Laboratory in faraway Suffolk County, where my father will soon be toiling on a component of Ronald Reagan’s new “Star Wars” missile defense program, and the Deepdale Gardens cooperative is made out of millennial bricks that can withstand a heat blast up to 1,125 degrees Fahrenheit, by my sober calculations. All I need is to have my sunglasses handy and to shelter from the radiation for a few weeks. Then I will emerge into a world without Hebrew school. In this world, with my Russian accent scrubbed away, and with the superior mathematical skills I have picked up from my father’s Soviet textbooks, I will help start a new Republican civilization along with my new American best friend, Jonathan.
That is right. I have a best friend.
Mrs. A runs something called “Pilot Program,” which is for the smartest kids in SSSQ, a number that can fit around a small dining table. For an entire school period, we geniuses are separated from the usual debility of the rest of the school and are sent to a teachers’ lounge, where there is a refrigerator stocked with sad teacher sandwiches and a pall of cigarette smoke to make us feel quite adult. It is very hard to figure out what Mrs. A’s “Pilot Program” is about. It is safe to say that my father’s dream for a heavy workload in theoretical physics and higher mathematics will not come true. Activities include making caramel candies in the mold of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and discussing the TV special Something About Amelia, in which Ted Danson has sex with his own daughter. Mrs. A is a born conversationalist, and Pilot Program gives her a chance to free-associate while making baked goods. When someone mentions the Steven Spielberg movie Jaws, Mrs. A tells a fascinating story about an Israeli soldier caught in an explosion during the Yom Kippur War, who was left with nothing but three holes where his face should have been. We cautiously eat our E.T. caramels.
There are five boys who are marginalized at SSSQ. There is Jerry Himmelstein, whose victimization deserves its own after-school special and who will transfer out of our moronic inferno by grade 6. There’s Sammy (not his real name), a slim, sad, hyperactive boy who likes to jump on us while screaming “URSH! UUUUURSH!”—some deep-seated primal scream that can be translated into neither Hebrew nor English. There’s David the Mighty Khan Caesar, ruler of the Imperial Lands of David, the main enemy and sometimes ally of my mythical Holy Gnuish Empire. David’s a smart son of a rabbi who takes out a little spaceship in the middle of class and floats it before his freckled face while humming, “Noooooo … Mmm … Woooo …,” rather similar to the aviation pursuits I enjoy with my pen. There is me. And then there is Jonathan.
Jonathan’s personality has not been reduced to the level where he has to call himself Gary Gnu III or the Mighty Khan Caesar, but he is clearly not cut out for SSSQ either. He has kind and attractive parents, an adorable sister, the collie of my dreams; and this perfect-to-my-eyes family lives in a spacious, castle-like Tudor in Jamaica Estates, the kind of Tudor Dr. Jason Robards and his beautiful elderly wife enjoyed before it was vaporized in The Day After. Jonathan is short like me, and his good looks are partially hidden by a layer of baby fat. When an Israeli throws a dodgeball at him with all of his compressed Canaanite fury, Jonathan will get hit and fall to the ground clutching his elbow, just like me. Another strike against him is that his mom and dad are too shy to participate in the shtetl network of SSSQ parents, a network that’s mirrored in the friendships of the kids themselves. My own parents (“Ver is man toilet?”), of course, are completely unclubbable.
Finally, Jonathan is smart. Brilliant. And, as the old stereotype of Jews as the People of the Book dies a quiet daily death around us, Jonathan and I are also so very fucking bored. And now that my accent has faded and my English is strong and I can converse at a kilometer a minute, we become friends to the exclusion of everything else.