Marc Kaufman: BRIDGES • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Marc Kaufman
BRIDGES

Rebekah Aronson’s bridge was next. It didn’t look like much, though several of us in class, the 7th graders that also knew her from Hebrew school, had our prints all over it. Fearing we hadn’t been of any help, but hoping otherwise, we watched her walk to the front of the class, thinking of the small nods and smiles of appreciation that could soon come our way if any of what we did kept it from withstanding Mr. M’s weights. Rebekah had it tough. Her mom grounded to the house with brain sickness, the family’s baby borscht hotel extinct-ed. Our parents said her people were holding on by a thread. We wanted to be of help. It was January. The biblical year had turned over on us and now we were all on the clock. Haftorah portions to study, tzedakah projects to get going on. Although our parents had us ticketed for various fund-raising activities, soup kitchen hours, slotted us for Storytime reading sessions at the public library, Rebekah’s bridge was our private pact.

It was a little bit of a plank walk to the front of the room, and Rebekah looked nervous and who could blame her. Moments before we watched with great joy as Lucas Green’s bridge was annihilated by the first small lead weight that Mr. M. tied to its span. The shop teacher made Mr. M. a series of them. Each had a name: Rain, Wind, Hurricane, Tornado, Earthquake, Tsunami. No one had made it to Tsunami, and only Jenna Ryan and Josh Gerstein made it as far as Earthquake. We expected as much from them. Jenna Ryan, the only other girl in class, knew things none of the rest of us knew. She knew the names of the astronauts in the posters at the front of the room. She knew the connection between the bust of the Roebling guy and the drawing of the Brooklyn Bridge. What she knew she kept to herself. Josh Gerstein, one of ours, was the genius son of Mr. Fixit, Leni Gerstein, who was the shadow hand that kept our old Catskill Mountain synagogue from falling into complete disrepair.

“Peoples, settle down,” Mr. M. hollered as Rebekah approached. His face, red and overrun by his beard, burst with an enthusiasm we couldn’t imitate. “We have to get through this before 11:48.”

“What happens at 11:48?” Marshall Lehmann demanded to know.

“You’ll see. It’s a surprise.”

“Tell us,” Edward Kaye yelled. “We don’t like surprises.” It was a lie. In spite of our institutionalized lack of patience, we loved surprises. It was the waiting for anything we hated.

“Hold your horses,” Mr. M. said, repeating one of his beloved expressions.

Rebekah was the last in class to go. We planned it that way. We were no better at this than she was, though we made her believe differently. We’ll get it started for you, we told her. We’ll get it started for you and you can finish it. At first, she resisted. She didn’t trust us which was fine because we didn’t trust ourselves. But growing among her usual seriousness was a deep strain of distraction and declining happiness. Was it her mother? The family hotel? We knew enough and didn’t need to ask. A week into her staring out from her curls and freckles at the popsicle sticks, she gave in. Okay, help me start it, and I’ll finish it. So, we slathered her base with Elmer’s, we carefully arranged the toothpicks and popsicle sticks in an order we thought would best hold. We talked to her of tension and suspension beams. Words we read off the drawing of the Brooklyn Bridge Mr. M. had in the front of the class. When any of us were working with Rebekah we listened more closely when Mr. M. spoke, even though it was hard to do and taxed our powers of concentration. He spoke too quickly with too many ideas crammed into any sentence. We told her we modeled it after the George Washington, a bridge everyone knew of, but only a few of us had seen or driven over. This impressed her. She had her perfect GPA to protect and even though we weren’t in high school yet, Rebekah dreamed out loud of Yale or Princeton or Brown, of future town-escape, and this class was new, and she fretted about it the way genius kids stressed about a low grade in shop or gym dinging them as they ascended their ladder of high achievement.

Our construction did not impress Jenna Ryan. She had been over the George Washington many times and told Rebekah it looked more like the Rhinebeck Bridge, which wasn’t much of a bridge, and that she was going to fail and said we were all crazy, silly boys, which of course we were. Our class at Hebrew school was filthy with boys, Mrs. Katzenbaum, Rabbi Burg’s secretary proclaimed, twirling the long silver hairs around her chin. Eyes shouting at us through her glasses. A plague of boys. We were not blessed with the balanced numbers of previous years, or even the mysterious strain of Jewish girl twins that appeared in odd birth years starting in the early 70s. In our class, it was just the six of us and Rebekah. And under any other circumstance, Rebekah was our leader, our advice giver, our bumps and bruises healer. She band-aided our boyhood disasters with vials of pinking mercurochrome and a spiritual puddy of empathy and scorn. So, we had to help. We had to help with town escape, with declining happiness, with whatever we could. And in this moment, it meant with Mr. M. and his bridges.

Mr. M. had built an elaborate model as staging ground for testing, it was a small section of a city divided by a river. He said it was modeled after a section of Budapest near the Danube River where he grew up. We knew nothing about the Danube or Budapest and asked our parents where it was. They told us Hungary, part of the Soviet Union, behind the Iron Curtain, where communists still lived. When we asked how big the Iron Curtain was, they told us to look at a map. When we asked what communists were, they told us people who didn’t like money or America.

“Is that true?” we asked him.

“Does that sound true?” he tossed back at us. “I think your parents are describing more their image of Russia. I’m from Hungary, it’s more socialist.”

“What’s the difference?” We cited Red Dawn as evidence of how we could be unsure of his motives and reminded him of what happened to Drago in Rocky IV.

“Propaganda and ethnocentrism,” he said.

“We don’t know what that means,” we said.

“That’s the problem.”

What we did know was that Mr. M. was dramatic. He placed cars and small plastic people on the edges of our bridges and made howling sounds when the bridges began to crack and things fell into the shallow pool of water below and told us worse would happen if we weren’t more careful.

Still more or less we weren’t ever careful. On the subject of caution, we listened to Rabbi Burg, “A basic rule of caution: Don’t be overly cautious.” Imprisoned in his smoke-filled office, he would yell the Hebrew proverb at us as we mucked our way through practicing our haftorah portions for those upcoming bar mitzvahs.

Then we would become men, all of us.

It was Rabbi Burg’s doing that had us in this class anyway. Mr. M. was a friend of the Rabbi, a special classification of non-Jewish human being that elevated their standing and status in our community. When Mr. M. moved to town and needed work, the Rabbi talked the principal into hiring him for this new class. Back in Hungary, Mr. M. had been some sort of engineer the Rabbi said, but here his options were limited, so he decided to get his teaching certification. As part of the deal the Rabbi pressured our parents to pressure us to choose this as our one and only 7th grade elective. The school needed at least fifteen students for the class to be viable. We did, all of us, and a few others followed, like Jenna Ryan and Toni Murata and Douglas Palucci, and something about it in the beginning felt good, our choices suddenly of consequence.

When Rebekah got near the front of the room, she stopped next to Douglas Palucci. With more talent than we could imagine she balanced the bridge in her right hand, pushed back her brown hair with her left hand, and smiled at him. Rebekah had a common knowledge crush on Douglas. Common knowledge to everyone except Douglas, who took a pull on the grape side of his box of Nerds and looked away. Mr. M. walked towards his giant silver boombox. The first time he brought it in we thought he was going to break dance for us, which would have been strange but welcomed. Instead, he started to play Carry That Weight by the Beatles. He called it our theme song. We made other suggestions, Billy Idol, Van Halen, Duran Duran. Wally Silver, who mostly wore t-shirts, even in the winter and never seemed cold, suggested Everybody Wants to Rule the World, by Tears for Fears. He said the song was about Mr. M’s authoritarian tendencies.

“Do you know what that means?” Mr. M. asked.

“I know you wish I didn’t,” Wally said.

Carry That Weight was a short song and to compensate Mr. M. recorded it several times on the same tape. By the third day of bridge trials, we were sick of it and told him so. He was someone you could do that with. Nothing threatened him. We amused him. We made him laugh. When he laughed the stress lines around his eyes bunched into crowds of skin, as though the tension wires that held is face together suddenly went slack.

“You’re in America now and we believe in democracy,” Wally Silver told him. “We should have a say in our theme song.”

“Democracy, glad to hear it. Me too. But in this instance, I’m the executive branch and you’re the legislative, and occasionally the executive branch indulges in certain harmless privileges. If two thirds of the class can agree on an alternative, you could override me.”

“How many are two thirds?” Wally asked.

“With a question like that my power over you will be infinite and unstoppable,” he said laughing.

At the front of the class Rebekah handed the bridge to Mr. M. She held herself stiff with anxiety, filled with twelve long years of never having been south of an A in any class, of never having failed. We can’t say we didn’t want to call it off. The whole thing. Some part of us. But it was already in motion.

We tried to stall.

“Tell us what the surprise is. We want to know. We can’t concentrate on anything else until you tell us.”

Mr. M. had spent enough time with us to know we were telling some version of the truth. Rebekah tapped her foot and tugged on her Jordache jeans. It was torture and we were prolonging it. Mr. M. measured our opposition and then dropped his shoulders down in defeat. He walked over to the giant TV that jutted out from the wall. We had never seen it on and assumed it didn’t work. The TV had no buttons, only dials. “Last chance not to ruin the surprise.” He sounded sad.

We almost stopped him but didn’t.

With the slouch of someone being held at gunpoint, he turned the dial and a flash of light blinked on in the middle of the screen. The light stretched out into a horizontal line and slowly expanded into the beginnings of a picture. Mr. M. looked at the picture anxiously. It was jumbled and unclear. He banged the side of the set and it shook into focus. Our pupils dilated. At first all we could decode was the smoke building beneath a massive white shape. We focused harder. The picture shook nervously.

“What is it?” we asked.

“What is it? It’s the shuttle! Remember we’ve been talking all week about the launch, and in precisely 18 minutes it’s gonna launch.”

We were confused.

“Didn’t you say it was supposed to launch yesterday?”

“It got postponed.”

“Didn’t you say it was supposed to launch earlier this morning?”

“It got postponed.”

“Class is going to be over in eighteen minutes.”

“I’m gonna give everyone notes,” he insisted.

“Some of us have gym after this and you know how Coach is when you get to gym late?”

“But I’m gonna give you notes.”

“Notes from the new Technology teacher don’t hold much weight for Coach.”

“You said hold much weight…very clever.” Mr. M. laughed again. He was the only one. “There is no way you can miss this, and you shouldn’t want to. Have any of you seen a launch before?” We started to answer. He anticipated us. “Besides the ones in the movies…I mean have you ever seen an actual live launch? With the countdown and the smoke and the booster rockets falling to Earth?” His voice cracked. He sounded like some of us going through our changes. It was the same when he talked about bridges.

Mr. M. looked at the clock and did a little bit of math in his head. It was going to be tight. This was the absolute last day for bridge testing. Mr. M. wasn’t often strict, but when he was it was always over deadlines. If you chose to be last and time ran out, then you weren’t going to get a grade. We had already moved on to the next assignment, building elaborate paper airplanes which eventually we would take to the gym and fly for distance. Rebekah had taken a risk trusting us.

Mr. M. switched off the TV. It made a tormented sound, as though its life was being sucked slowly through a straw. “No more distractions. Let’s focus on Rebekah’s bridge and then I’ll turn the television back on, and we can turn off the lights and watch.” He placed Rebekah’s bridge on the model. One thing we had gotten right was the measurements. The span of the bridge was exactly twenty inches and fit precisely between the two banks of the model Danube. Rebekah loosened a bit. She almost allowed herself to smile.

“Good job, Rebekah,” Mr. M. said. “Now tourists can make it from Pest to Buda to bathe at Gellert.”

She nodded as though she knew what he was talking about.

Our hearts raced as Mr. M. tied Rain to the bridge. He clipped the weight slowly, as though defusing a bomb or playing Operation. He always took forever. We always told him to hurry up. He told us accuracy is speed. We told him speed is speed. He leaned back and raised his hands over the bridge as though casting a spell. The bridge held. We breathed.

Mr. M. checked the clock. 11:25AM.

Hurricane was bigger, but we were feeling confident even if Rebekah still looked nervous. We gave her thumbs up. She scowled at us. Maybe she thought we’d blow her cover, but Mr. M. had been onto us for weeks. He saw us pass her bridge around. He saw us smash it and start over ten times. He saw what we saw—that we didn’t have a choice. Probably, he didn’t have much faith in us, and in the end, she’d reap what she sowed.

When the Hurricane hit the bridge with little effect we seemed to be in business. Our posture improved. Mr. M. squinted at it like a problem he was trying to solve. Carry That Weight started over. Tornado was always where we got into trouble. The bridges would bow and crack in the middle slightly after Hurricane, and then Tornado would snap the sticks in half.

“Rebekah, the forecast is getting dim. A tornado is heading this way. A funnel cloud with winds up to two hundred miles an hour leaving a wake of devastation in its path.” He spun around in place and knocked some of the people over on the bridge and on the streets of the model. It sounded like the threats made by Hulk Hogan. We suspected Mr. M. watched wrestling, but we never said anything. “What are you gonna do, Rebekah, when the Tornado comes for you?”

“Stop it, Mr. M.”

We closed our eyes and listened for the sound. We’d know it when we heard it and we heard it. The creaking, like bones about to break, penetrated us like bad news and rejection. But it was all we heard and when we opened our eyes there was the bridge and there was Rebekah and there was Mr. M. and they both stood speechless. Jenna Ryan even took interest, craning her head away from the window.

Rebekah winked at us. “That’s what I’m gonna do, Mr. M, when the Tornado comes for me.”

We laughed.

“Hubris,” Mr. M. said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s what makes people go into space, my little Icarus.”

“Ica-what?”

“We’ll see how the gods treat you now.”

Rebekah fingered the small gold Star of David that hung from her neck. “Don’t you mean God?”

“Nope. Gods. Plural. Greek. Roman. Ancient gods. God of War, God of Wisdom, God of Love.”

“What about the Goddesses?” Jenna yelled.

“Yup, them too.”

Mr. M. made siren noises. “Warning. Evacuation. The Danube is rising. I don’t think the bridge can take the punishing ground shaking and waves to follow.”

Josh Gerstein tapped his foot aggressively. He agreed with all of this in theory. See, we wanted to be of help, but we needed help and Josh was the one we turned to. We coerced his assistance with bags of his beloved peanut butter cups, which although he was cleared by skin tests and blood tests, his parents still forbade after a suspected nut allergy incident turned him blotchy and hoarse at summer camp. The Gersteins were a lovable but cautious clan that inflated a bubble of protection and anxiety around Josh, that was easy to exploit. At first, he spearheaded our efforts. We found him in the computer room typing furiously away at the Apple IIE, that hazy glow of the green screen reflected in his eyes. He waited half an hour for the printer to spit out the dot matrix blueprint. It sold Rebekah on the whole idea. How organized we were. How concentrated our desire was to support her. But Josh, unlike Jenna, was competitive. He pushed his glasses tighter onto his face and tried not to look any more pregnant with regret. Could she actually beat him? Could he actually beat himself?

Mr. M. tied Earthquake next to the other three weights. They hung like chimpanzees from the span. The bridge whined and dipped, and made sounds that threatened worse, but still withstood.

“Did you mix concrete with that glue, Rebekah?”

She said nothing. Mr. M. glanced at all of us. It was too late for blame. If he had wanted to put a stop to the whole enterprise, he had to do it long ago. It was too easy to deny now. We were excited and unified and this close to everything we promised.

Mr. M. looked at the clock and then looked at the TV. You could tell he thought the bridge would have crumbled ten minutes ago and he’d already be narrating the shuttle launch. He already told us: The shuttle’s mission is planned to last six days and part of their objective is to deploy two satellites, one of which is supposed to track Halley’s comet. Then he told us what Halley’s comet was. That sounded cool. Especially since we’d all be eighty-two the next time it came back around.

The tape ran out and there was a quiet for a moment we were unused to. Silence frightened us. It communicated our parent’s anger or our awkwardness. We heard Mrs. Lopez scold her way through her Spanish lesson next door. We heard the wind brush the snow against the window. We heard Josh’s leg bounce up and down relentlessly.

To fill the room with sound, we started to sing the song a cappella. At this point we knew it by heart.

Mr. M. picked up Tsunami and broke the spell. “Here we go…for the class championship.”

Rebekah reformed her looser angles back to her carefully held straight lines.

Back in character, Mr. M. shook the model slightly and screamed, “Hold on everyone. This is gonna be at least twenty meters high.”

We sang a little louder, Josh’s leg kept time for us. Mr. M. kept looking back at the clock, his eighteen minutes were almost over. He held the largest of the weights in the grips of his hands. “Maybe we should turn the TV on,” he said. “We can watch while we finish…There’s a teacher on the shuttle you know, someone just like me.”

We waited for the bell and said nothing.

He laid down Tsunami and went and turned the TV on. The blurred white object on the screen was tilted, already in flight. Still, the bridge, we thought of the bridge, of having come this far. Back to the screen, it was there and then it wasn’t. The picture on the TV turned confused, streaks of smoke and fire in the sky. Mr. M.’s face sank as he stared at the screen. Jenna stood next to him staring in the way that made us nervous. We didn’t know where to look or how it happened that we couldn’t predict what would happen. Josh already exploited the distraction. The bell rang and before we could stop him, he sprung from his desk and grabbed Rebekah’s bridge.

“It’s not fair,” he yelled and smashed the bridge down on the desk. “She didn’t build it.” Mr. M. tried several times to do anything, but couldn’t, no matter how much Rebekah screamed for him. Jenna put one hand on his arm, the other held back tears.

“She had help,” Josh said, breaking our pact, undoing our help. “We started it for her.”

On the screen, the sky, everything was in pieces. Everything was in pieces except for Rebekah’s bridge, which despite Josh’s rage, remained intact and trembled with life.

Born and raised in the Catskills in New York, Marc Kaufman moved to Tokyo more than ten years ago to take a teaching position. His work has most recently appeared in -Ette Review, Narrative Magazine, Silk Road Review, and F(r)iction Online. He has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently an associate professor at Tokyo’s Sophia University, where he teaches writing and serves as the faculty editor for the student writing journal, Angles.