NORA EISENBEKG
87
scared sips of air. Then I'd feel myself melt into a perfect peace, joyously
united with my peers in common fears and purpose. But then I'd get all
afraid all over again - of violence - not from the Russians now but
from my "commie-loving" family, or at least Nick.
Nick, of course, followed the Party and family line. Naturally braver
than I and finding his friends among the hooligans in Bronx Park, my
brother did not care what the "deadbeats in the class" thought about
him and would not participate in the take-cover drills, which "distorted
the reality of the Soviet Union and diminished the dangers of the A
bomb and radiation," as he liked to put it in speeches before the bath–
room mirror. That I participated, and so eagerly at that, won me his
contempt and wrath. I was a sell-out, who left him alone in a one-boy
campaign. In high school, organizing his juvenile delinquent friends in
the neighborhood and his intellectual friends in our special high school,
my brother led a city-wide boycott that stopped the drills once and for
all. But at Public School 56, the Bronx, the lone rebel, he was sent
regularly
to
detention - an oak chair outside of the principal's office,
which he would squirm his antsy body around on, extending his legs
into the hallway to trip the well-behaved monitors streaming between
classroom and office with records and notes. 1 was a devoted and re–
sponsible school monitor too, but it was torture for me to perform my
duties after a drill, aware as I was of the kicks and curses that awaited me
from Nick, and the ridicule of my classmates for being the sister of the
school ou tcast.
"Did you hide, you goody-goody collaborating shithead?" he'd call
to me as I passed, pretending I didn't know him.
One day, I walked too close to Nick, allowing him to grab my
arm. As I tried to pull myself free, he said, "You know, eventually you're
going to realize what a friend we all have in the Soviet Union and what
a little moron you arc."
1 wanted to say, You're the moron, getting yourself into trouble.
But, of course, 1 didn't want to be seen speaking with him. And besides
only half of me believed he was wrong
to
do what he had done. Half of
me was proud of his rebellion. So 1 said nothing.
"You're a pathetic little people-pleasing moron," he said. "A cow–
ard to cowards."
The principal must have been listening on the other side of her office
door. For suddenly the door flew open and she was standing over Nick,
bearing down at him with a wooden pointer in her hand.
"Apologize," she said. "At once."
"Absolutely not," Nick snickered.
"I said apologize. At once. Or you'll see who's a coward."
"And I said absolutely not. I say it to you and I say it to your
