Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb Page A

of our beloved A Clockwork Orange, “a little bit of the old ultravee will serve to gather cash.”
    “What about your bar mitzvah?” I asked sensibly. “Isn’t that soon?”
    “Empty rituals for empty minds,” he said in a deep stage baritone. “Besides,” he added, “if need be we can dress you like me and you can stand in for me. My parents are already half in love with you anyway. ‘He’s so quiet. He’s so well behaved.’ Yeah, just cough a lot up onstage and no one will notice you can’t speak Jew.”
    I laughed at this, and then stopped as the vaguely thrilling idea of being him in public stole into my mind.
    “So, you wanna come over for lunch?” he asked. “Belinda and Hi are still at camp.”
    I felt, suddenly, like murdering him and I didn’t know why.
    “Whatever.”
    We made our way back through the forest, and onto his back lawn. As we entered the house, I glimpsed his mother in the distance. She was wearing a clingy dress that gave what seemed to me a shockingly obvious picture of her body, and shoes that mixed puffs of fur with impalingly long heels.
    “Hi, Nicky,” she said, leaning downward and into my field of vision through a nimbus of citrus bathwater, “how’s tricks?” I looked back at her with my special fake dead smile, feeling the chill of the air-conditioning against my teeth.
    “Fine.”
    “That’s good. You guys hungry?” She looked over my head at Rob, jerked her head toward the kitchen, pirouetted on a heel, and clattered off without saying anything more.
    “Leftovers from last night’s dinner party,” Rob said to me as he opened the fridge door, “with state senator Schulman.”
    I gave a small head bob, mostly to myself, as if to indicate that dinners with state senator Schulman were a common occurrence in my life, even if, in truth, there had never, not even once, been such a thing as a “dinner party” at our house, where my father, an industrial chemist, and my mother, a registered nurse, gave always the impression of fighting a pitched war against the forces of scarcity and want. Food was for eating, or better yet, nutrition; it was attacked with profound sobriety and indifference to taste or design, and played its part in a larger ongoing object lesson taught daily by my parents and entitled The Difficulty of Life. A sense of incompletion sighed at me from the unpainted walls of my room; from the battered, dingy paint of our succession of turret-shaped cars; from the scuffed grass of our lawn, and the pinching hand-me-down clothes of my older brother. It seemed painfully obvious that to cross the street from our house to the Castor’s was to change not only economic but life-expectation zones as well. I couldn’t believe Rob didn’t see this, or if he did, refrained from saying so. I wasn’t about to be the one to tell him.
    “Try these guys,” said Rob, holding up a serving dish, “they have nuts in the center and bacon on top.”
    I picked at the food that, being cold, had a kind of congealed thick taste to it, while Rob explained in detail about his getaway plan. But I wasn’t listening especially. I remained snagged on the difference between our lives. Where did his family, for example, get such verve, while mine seemed stalled in the drab flats of existence? That couldn’t simply be a question of money. And why was there such a prickly edginess of feeling between the two moms? As regards Shirley Castor, my mother was jammed with neighborly good intention. In her eyes, Shirley was “refined.” She was “classy.” But I never understood why she cringed as she said these things, or why this otherwise depressed woman loaded such streaming, nearly hysterical emphasis into her comments.
    “Are you listening, bro?” Rob was frowning.
    “Of course I am.”
    “Really, then what was I just saying?”
    I had no idea.
    Smiling at me, shaking his head ruefully, he leaned across the table and slapped me hard across the face. Rob had always had a