In the Land of the Living Read Free Page A

vinyl behind them.
    Their father called out to them from the top of the brick steps that had no railing: “You must come back to visit to me!” And he waved slowly from under the dark porch, with eyes sadder than ever, as if the boys were abandoning him, when in fact he had sent them away.
    The foster parents were old, and they lived not so far away from Hildana, in University Heights in a house that smelled like dogs, but it felt like another country. The old lady had her own kids, one who still lived there and seemed quite old himself, and two dogs, and she didn’t hear well, but that first day she did give them some cranberry bread and it seemed to be edible. There was evidence that the old man’s ears were fine, but he seemed disinclined to use them. He liked to play with the dogs in the backyard and had a bunch of weird magazines next to his bed that had pictures of women in their underwear. They said MAN on them in big letters. The boys went to the foster home in University Heights in the winter, and Isidore changed schools.
    They shared a room and a dresser and even socks and underwear, and Isidore opened the drawers for Dennis and showed Burt that you had to lift as you pulled or they wouldn’t open at all. It seemed important that the top drawer should be for those sacred articles worn against the privates, and that was where he’d put their underwear, even though that drawer was slightly too high to reach into comfortably and hurt the elbow and the armpit to reach into the back of it, where he kept his mother’s lilac blouse. After their first dinner he came back to the bedroom and scraped his elbow while pulling out the blouse.  He went into the closet with it and brushed a sticky spiderweb off it, and there he unrolled the blouse and tried to smell her on it, but all he could smell was the unfamiliar chest of drawers and the musty closet. In the hot stuffy air underneath his winter coat, with his elbow burning, he cried till his nose ran and his brothers heard and came to him and, for their sakes, he made himself stop.
    Ezer did visit them after all, and especially in the winter they dreaded news of his arrival. In the winter, when other carpenters picked up side jobs, Ezer collected unemployment. He would bring the boys back to Hildana Road and sit around in their old house reading Morgen Freiheit, the Yiddish communist newspaper, and bitch at the air in Yiddish. Isidore figured that he sent them to Yiddish school three days a week at Der Arbeter Ring instead of Hebrew school just so he’d have someone around who could understand his bitching. In the summers, when he was working, he came to see them less and sometimes he took them to the picnics that the Jewish communists threw on Sundays, and those were best—not because the picnics were any fun (they weren’t, though there were generally hot dogs), but because Ezer could complain to sympathetic ears about the plight of the workingman, or talk about the Yiddish theater, and the boys usually got through the picnics without any shouting matches between Ezer and Burt.
    At the end of three years at the foster home, Ezer got married to a woman whom the boys called the Bitch. Her son was a drug dealer, and one time he threatened Burt with a gun. Ezer bought a new house, on Meadowbrook Boulevard. A few months later and, as far as they could tell, having nothing whatsoever to do with the loaded gun in Burt’s face, Ezer and the Bitch were divorced. But the Meadowbrook house was big enough and the boys were old enough to move into it with or without a Bitch.
      
    By the time Ezer took the boys back, Isidore didn’t think of himself as a boy anymore. He could ride a bike and do his own laundry. He could make scrambled eggs. He had seen weird pictures of women in their underwear, and could throw a baseball and a football, could tell time both by hour and minute (you had to consider them separately, then add them back together), he could multiply, and he could