Thirteen-year-old David Hanan is having a difficult time dealing with puberty, and with 7th grade. When a new girl, Linda, joins his class, he begins to question what it means to be a boy and how he is supposed to relate to girls. The Gift is a story about how the biological process of puberty is transformed into a rite of passage for boys into a patriarchal society.
This is a novel-in-progress. Chapters will be available in the archive to paid subscribers after they have been published. Because this is a work in progress, I might edit archived chapters to preserve continuity, chronology, and character development with later chapters.
I used to dream about Dad. Mom said that wasn’t possible because he left before I was born. But the dreams were real. I remember him holding me and rocking me in his arms, although I couldn’t see his face. I remember the smell of cigarettes and alcohol that enveloped him. Mom said the cigarettes and alcohol part was right, but that’s because lots of men like Dad smoked and drank too much, so I could have picked that up anywhere. But I don’t remember the smoking and the drinking, I remember the smell. Where could I have picked that up?
I had to pull pieces of Dad’s story out of Mom one at a time and they didn’t all fit together. I was 10 before she would even show me a picture of him. He was in a soldier’s uniform, smiling, with a big American flag in the background. He looked like me, only way older. Mom called it the “before” picture. I asked her what “after” looked like. “I’ll explain it to you when you’re old enough to understand,” she said. I hate when adults say that.
When Dad left, he really left. As hard as it was to pull pieces of him out of Mom, it was even harder to find evidence that he had ever been here. Except for me. I had a feeling Mom kept the evidence locked away where it wouldn’t cause questions. Maybe folks in the old neighborhood remembered him, but we had moved a couple of times since I was a baby. Grandma remembered him. I made the mistake once of asking her about him. She spit and said in Yiddish, “Er zol vaxn vi a tsibele mit zeyn kop in drerd.”1 I asked Grandma what she said and she said to ask Mom. But first she made me practice saying the sentence so Mom “would be sure to understand.” I repeated to Mom what Grandma said and asked her what it meant. Mom’s shoulders dropped and she sighed like she had been through this before. “That’s a really bad curse. It means Grandma doesn’t like him.” Present tense. Yeah, the spitting kind of gave that away.