A Brilliant Novel in the Works by Yuvi Zalkow Page B

try too
hard.
    “Does North Carolina have a beach?” she says.
    “Better you should tell me more about you and Jeffrey,” I
say, scared of what I might tell her next.
    As I’m sitting there enjoying her breathlessly told stories,
she asks me if Aunt Julia is still mad at me.
    “Mad about what?” And then I realize I’m using a seven-year-old
to get to the crux of my relationship issues.
    “You know,” she says. “About your problems.”
    “Which ones?”
#
    I take a few wrong turns, which suits Maddy just fine. I could
take a 2,500-mile wrong turn and she’d have plenty to talk
about.
    “Tell me about when you and Joelly were kids,” she says.
    I think about explaining to her how I didn’t grow up with
Joel. That we’re not related. I think about explaining the
difference between blood relatives and in-laws.
    And then I say, “You know Hawaii is actually made up of
seven different islands.”
#
    When I finally drop Maddy off at her mother’s barn, Ally gives
me a big hug. It’s a more adult version of Maddy’s hug but
just as comforting. We agree that the four of us should go out
again. And then Ally says something else: “You should come
back here soon. Just you. When you have time. I want to show
you my horses.”
    Ally isn’t a tall woman. She is probably five feet tall in
regular life. But standing beside her barn, as she points to it,
as she wears those big boots, as she gives me a half smile, she
seems a foot taller than me. Her hair is messy from whatever
it is she does in her barn.
    It feels like she’s coming on to me. A secret. In a barn. Just
me, her, and the horses. How can that not be wrong? But I
know that I’m misunderstanding something. Sometimes I just
feel too dumb to understand this world.
    When I was a kid, my dad kept a jar sitting on the bookshelf
that said “Great Truths” on it. When I asked him what that
meant, he said it was a joke, because no truth is greater than
another. For years, I walked around our house wondering
what was so funny about that.
    “Yes, I’d like that,” I say to Ally, “but right now I’ve got to
meet Julia.”
    Which is a “Great Lie.”
    My dad kept nothing but paperclips inside that jar of truths. I wonder what
    Ally keeps inside that barn of hers. But I still leave. I leave faster than
    you can say
Oy veyshmir
.
    But as I’m running away from Ally and her barn, I still
manage to hear a nice goodbye from Maddy. She says, “See
you later, Shmuvi!” And she says it like Shmuvi has always
been my name.
    THE GORILLA DID IT
    My brother Joelly was five years old when he realized
    you could use a black permanent marker to draw all over every piece of furniture
    in your parents’ house. I was eight at the time, old enough to know that when
    my dad got home, my brother would be in sincerely deep shit.
    I tend to think the world is a dangerous place to be. Even when things
    are going well, I’m trying to anticipate how soon I will get screwed. This
    holds true for my jobs, my relationships, my friendships, my finances, my
    family. I feel helpless against the world and am always expecting that meteor
    to crash onto my house. When an ex-girlfriend told me she had been lying to
    me for months and sleeping with another man—a bigger, stronger, richer, more
    handsome man—I wasn’t angry or offended. I accepted this fact gracefully.
    Because that is how the world works. In that same conversation, I even thanked
    her for not being more cruel.
    But my brother saw things differently. He saw the world as something
    amusing, something that could be played with. Even when dealing with my father—a
    man who could get so angry you’d have to steer clear of him for days at a
    time—my brother looked for ways to make the relationship interesting. He could
    be in control of a situation, even at five.
    Earlier that day, my mother had read to us. After reading this book,
    my mother began cooking dinner, I began playing with my Legos, and my