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“Heroics” was a short-listed entry in our recently concluded 69th Short Fiction Contest, and is published with the consent of the author.
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photo via RawPixel
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Heroics
by Michele Herman
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…..I’m sitting in Howard Johnson’s ordering a maple-walnut ice cream cone and it’s punishment. Not for me – I’m cleaner than pressed dress shirts; all I was doing was sitting and watching plates spin on Ed Sullivan and thinking about running away to join the circus to please Abraham the Patriarch. It’s for something my big brother David did. Punishment in our house can be a little like chemotherapy – zap the bad cells and you have to zap the good ones too.
…..I’m a fan of HoJo’s, even though you sometimes sense that they chewed the food a little for you before bringing it out of the kitchen, but not with malice, just as if they thought you might need a little help getting started. I used to think that explained why the waitresses were all so fat. I like the hot-dog water smell; eau de trayfe, David once called it. And I love the cardboard boxes with the cellophane window so that you can see the taffy as pale and pastel (I imagine) as girls’ underpants that your parents aren’t going to buy for you when they pay the bill.
…..Sunday night is the school night of all school nights, and we’re practically the only people in the place; no one ever goes out on Sunday nights except maybe early for Chinese at the Good Earth, but never in the middle of Ed Sullivan, the comfy buffer between weekend and week. This gets me back to the punishment.
…..There we are, sitting in the family room, Abe in his big chair with a salt shaker in one hand and a huge tomato in the other. His feet are up on the foot rest, but the rest of him is at attention. As I said, there’s a plate spinner on and this is just about giving Abe angina. “Look at that, will you look at that, is that the damnedest thing!”
…..The first trouble is that Mom isn’t looking. She’s knitting. There are a lot of sofas in the room, but she likes to sit in the straight-backed chair that’s halfway out the door of the family room; lucky she’s not big on symbolism. This gives a nice familiar guilty quality to my lounging on my sofa, in addition to the 20 vocabulary words on my desk upstairs that should by now be embedded in a story of my own devising.
…..“Would it kill you to look up?” he asks, and in response, she amplifies the stitch-counting she’s been doing all along, through a little metal knitting gadget that’s in her mouth. “Seventy-eight, seventy-nine.” For a silent person she can communicate pretty clearly. I make a mental note to tell Miss Illy my drama teacher my new exercise: communicate the mood of anger while sitting still in a chair counting to one hundred. For extra credit, convey this particular thought: “I need this husband like a hole in the head.” You can see her puff up a tiny bit, considering making a case for knitting sweaters over spinning plates, and then you can see her shrink back down and think, what’s the point of trying to scale this particular mountain. She puts down the knitting needles in her lap and looks up at the TV, at which point a commercial comes on.
…..I think for a minute that we’ve been saved, but then Abe is still so worked up from the plates that he’s looking around for something to lasso his workedupness to and what he finds is an empty sofa where David should be; suddenly David is noticeably upstairs.
….. “Where’s David?” he asks as if she’s given to hiding sons in the broom closet to irk him. For a smart guy – after all, he’s a man who chooses his friends according to how many dimensions they can think in – he’s an awful lot like Lonny Lametta, who for eight years has talked all through the homework assignment and then been unable to understand why he doesn’t know what the homework is. I watch him for signs of progress, but he’s as regular as the pledge over the p.a.
…..She’s picked her knitting back up and I can tell she’s taking it out on the sweater, which happens to be for me; I have crummy circulation. She’s a good knitter, but her stitches on this section of sleeve will be as tight as spaghetti left overnight in the colander. Some winter day down the line, I’ll be sitting in study hall and I’ll trace the history of my parents’ arguments on my sleeves.
….. Now Abe’s looking up toward the ceiling, where David’s room is, squinting as if he’s waiting for his x-ray vision to kick in. He calls his name. When David doesn’t answer, he stands up and calls louder, with lots of diaphragm. If David were on his sofa, I would start humming “The train is a-coming,” which used to be code for “a scene is a-coming,” but then of course if David were on his sofa there wouldn’t be a scene. Nowadays if you want to find David, a closed door is the best place to start.
…..Abe calls again, this time in his Winston Churchill voice, and a tomato seed flies out of his mouth and lands in the carpet in the middle of the room. I’ll put money on this: first thing tomorrow morning, Mom will find it, pry it out of the rug with a fingernail and throw it away without a word.
…..Now he’s pacing, as if to locate David’s exact position above him. He walks over and turns off the TV, and I watch Ed Sullivan shrink to a dot like company leaving too soon.
….. Mom finally takes the knitting gadget out of her mouth and says he should leave the boy alone, that he’s going through a difficult phase.
….. “Difficult phase?” asks Abe, revving up. “Difficult phase?” as if it were a synonym for heart transplant operation or homicide conviction.
….. “Maybe he’s just trying to get some homework done in peace,” she counters. This is touching; sometimes I think Mom has more imagination than the rest of us put together.
….. He starts sputtering; when he gets really mad, his mouth makes more saliva than it knows how to use. This lubricates the swearing. “You, you…” he says, shifting his target back to Mom, as if she had been creating the disturbance all along. I sink deeper into my sofa, wishing I’d done my homework. When he finally finds the word he’s looking for, I have to hand it to him; aside from being accurate, it sounds like the nastiest curse I can imagine.
….. “Pacifist,” he spits, with the accent on the “fist.”
….. Then he delivers the sentence to us all: “Get your shoes on. We’re going out for ice cream.” He says it so loudly I half expect the neighbors to get up and march to our garage. Mom sighs softly and folds her knitting into the bag, while he goes upstairs and works some kind of dark magic on David, although I can’t imagine what — grounding him would be beside the point, and last month Abe already tore the upstairs phone extension out of the wall (David, I happen to know, gathered up all the bits of plaster and rolled them like a joint). In a minute David’s getting in the car with the rest of us. But every time I try to look at him his face bounces away in some other direction, as if his eyes have switched their magnetic pole and have to repel mine.
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….. At HoJo’s, we slide silently into the booth the way we just finished sliding out of the car. I imagine us as soldiers in some kind of domestic army drill, being forced to slide across vinyl over and over for no apparent reason. David sits up against the window and stares right past Mom and Abe. Meanwhile his hand begins picking at a pinhole in the turquoise seat with the abandon of an outlaw on a spree. It looks irresistible.
….. As I said, it’s very quiet, and while we’re waiting for a waitress, I automatically try to compose a news item for the Purple Pro’s, which is a secret newsletter David and I used to publish. It had big screaming headlines like “International Incident Ensues When Patriarch Loses Gloves” and “Aftermath of B’nai B’rith Wild West Night Melee: Unanswered Questions Remain.” We printed it on Abe’s old ditto machine in the attic, and the pages came out all limp and dewy and we got half-high from sniffing ditto fluid. By the time we were done with an issue, the pages were purple and we were purple up to our forearms. It was David who had the idea to rub the excess ink onto Abe’s old white dinner jacket, which he couldn’t fit into anymore anyway, and so that was purple too. One day, we knew, Abe would discover the purple jacket, and there was a certain pleasure in waiting together for that particular boom to be lowered.
….. Here’s my news item for tonight: “HoJo’s Heroics: Youngest Son Orders ‘Deluxe Fried Clams Dinner’ For Dessert and Cracks up Rest of Family, Thus Ending Impasse and Restoring Peace and Good Will.”
….. But when the waitress takes our orders, I chicken out and get safe old maple walnut. To look busy, I pull the ketchup bottle over and start reading it. It’s one of those served-only-in-fine-restaurant bottles, which means the ketchup is runnier than the kind from the supermarket. Then I notice there’s a little bug crawling up the neck, with feelers going a mile a minute, and I realize with fascination that it’s a cockroach; in a house as clean as ours, we never get to see them.
….. The rest of us have ordered; Abe has saved David for last. “David, don’t keep the young lady waiting,” he says. Abe loves waitresses; this is the second time he’s made her blush right through her powder, and she’s wearing a lot of powder. David, still picking at the vinyl, refuses to speak, refuses even to look at her, and she’s hard not to look at – she’s a big one, and every time she moves she’s like a glee club of slippery female nylon sounds.
….. Abe stops mincing words. “David. Order.” I don’t know why, but I think that if I can just get David to focus on the cockroach it may help. I nudge him with my foot, but he just does the bouncing eyes again. Without looking at anything, David pulls out a big hunk of foam rubber from the inside of the seat. I try to deflect him by gesturing to the bottle.
….. “He’ll have a dish of chocolate ice cream,” says Mom, trying to keep the ship afloat a little while longer.
….. Abe has antennae too, and he senses that there’s something up he’s not in on. “Howie,” he says. “What’s so interesting over there?”
….. “Nothing,” I answer, aiming for a tone not quite so nonchalant as to sound guilty. I push the ketchup away, but the roach is circumnavigating the bottle. It’s too late. Abe sees the roach. Out comes the lasso. It’s not going to be a quiet Sunday evening at HoJo’s for much longer.
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….. He marches over to the front of the restaurant, knocking a fork off the table on the way. I bend down to pick it up. The carpet muffles his footfalls, but I can hear his pants legs slapping against each other with every step.
….. The cashier doesn’t have any customers, but she’s very busy with her receipts. Dad stands in front of her and clears his throat loudly.
….. “Does this unclean establishment have a manager?” he booms right past her into the kitchen. Now a party of people, very tall people, has come in, and they’re waiting patiently to be seated. One of them is an old man with a walker; you can tell that even he would be tall if he could stand up straight. Abe looks up at them and tells them they should take their business elsewhere if they are concerned about their health and hygiene. He points toward the door and the Ford dealership across the street. When they look blank, he remembers to mention the cockroach.
….. “If they can’t keep them off the ketchup bottles, think where else they must be lurking.” Now they look properly shocked, but I think it’s because, unlike us, they’re not used to men screaming in restaurants. One of them says “Oh, dear me.”
….. I feel for this family – they probably spent the whole week planning this outing. They probably picked HoJo’s because it’s so comforting and quiet. It’s no short trip from the parking lot to the front door, either, and there are steps to get up. I bet the old man had to stop in the middle and rest.
….. Now comes the part where he brings us into it, yelling about how he will not compromise the well-being of his family. Our waitress has come out of the kitchen to watch the fireworks. You can see that she, at least, is grateful; the Sunday shift must be pretty dull. She winks at me; I’m the only one in the booth who will look her in the eye.
….. “He’s a live one, ain’t he?” she says.
….. Abe motions across the restaurant to us to get up. Mom sighs under her breath, and I know that the rest of my maple walnut is going to be left to melt next to the untouched dish of chocolate. It’s time to start sliding across vinyl again. I hope the waitress doesn’t have to pay our bill. I reach over and try to shove the foam rubber back into the hole, but it’s too big.
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….. Now I’m in bed, lying absolutely still. I’m trying to will the household to stay calm the way that guy on Ed Sullivan willed a spoon to bend without touching it. For a while I hear going-to-bed sounds downstairs in the master bedroom: the Bowery Bank jingle on WINS, gurgling water, a brief outburst about toothpaste. I will harder, and finally I hear Abe snoring away, as if his evening’s activities were a good calisthenic workout. I feel triumphant.
….. I tiptoe across the hall and knock on David’s door.
….. “Can I come in?” I ask.
….. “Give it a rest, Howie,” he answers. I can tell from his muffled voice that he’s in the lower bunk bed. But at least he reaches over and unlocks the door.
….. I push the door open slowly and go in. I haven’t been invited in in a while. I expect some change, but it’s the same old kid’s bedroom – baseball posters all hung upside down, GI Joe’s glowing at the bottom of the fish tank.
….. “That was a good one, tonight,” I say, sitting down on the floor. When he doesn’t answer I add, “So what’s the tally?” We used to keep a list of the places Abe stormed out of: motels, tailor shops; car dealerships were a favorite. There was an asterisk next to the ones he stormed out of without paying.
….. But the trouble with big brothers is just when you’re ready for checkers, they learn chess, and when you finally learn chess, they’re playing a game you’ve never heard of and they won’t even tell you what it’s called.
….. “David, is something wrong?” I ask.
….. He laughs. I try to take this as a good sign, but even Mom would be able to tell it’s not that kind of laugh.
….. It suddenly comes back to me that the spoon-bending guy turned out to be a fake. I remember Abe took it very hard – he’s a big believer in willpower.
….. “No, really,” I say.
….. “You wanna know a secret, Howie? I’ll let you in on a good one.” He rolls over onto his stomach and turns his head up toward me. All of a sudden he’s getting downright excited.
….. What he tells me is that he’s flunking.
….. “Spanish?” I ask hopefully; he’s always had a bad attitude about Spanish.
….. “Modern European History, English, Chemistry, Industrial Arts, Trigonometry, Gymnasium.” He’s lying on his back, counting off each subject on his fingers. He’s enjoying the sounds of the words. “In addition to Intermediate Español.”
….. I wish there were more subjects so he could keep on naming them for me. “Don’t forget Homeroom,” I say. “And there’s garden-weeding, and snow-shoveling. And ‘acting like a civilized person at the breakfast table.’”
….. “I’m counting on you to raise my bail,” he says, as if he means it.
….. “Can I cash in your trees in the Israeli forest?”
….. “Howie, go to sleep. It’s a school night.”
….. I say goodnight and go back to my room, but I can’t sleep. I get up and do my homework. Then, for David, I do the extra credit.
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Michele Herman’s first novel, Save the Village (Regal House, 2022), was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Prize. She’s also author of two poetry chapbooks from Finishing Line: Victory Boulevard (2018) and Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes (2022). She was the 2024 recipient of the Subnivean Fiction Prize, judged by Gish Jen. Her work has appeared in recent issues of Carve, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, The Sun and many other journals. She’s a devoted teacher at The Writers Studio, a developmental editor, writing coach, award-winning translator of Jacques Brel songs, and an occasional columnist at LitHub.
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“My Vertical Landscape,” Felicia A. Rivers’ winning story in the 69th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest
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