Free This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir by Judy Brown Page A

him to a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a hypnotist too; it couldn’t hurt.
    The specialist told my mother to put Nachum in an institution. There was nothing anyone could do for a child as odd as that. The psychiatrist said that something was definitely terribly wrong with Nachum and that it was my mother’s fault: when he was an infant, she had not cuddled him enough. The doctor said that something had almost certainly happened to Nachum during the pregnancy. Or as an infant. Or as a toddler. But he couldn’t know when or what. And the psychologist said that it was tragic, just tragic.
    Finally, one day, my mother told me that my brother wasn’t crazy after all. A big doctor had said he was something else. He was ADD. The severe kind.
    I told my cousin Shaindel.
    “What’s ADD?” she asked.
    I didn’t know.
    “It’s a type of crazy,” I explained. “The severe kind.”
    Shaindel chewed loudly on her taffy. “Oh.”
    I asked my mother if medicine would make Nachum better. Or, if they couldn’t change his brain, could they replace it? The way they had put a different heart into Blimi’s grandmother.
    “No, they can’t.”
    That was all she said.
      
    My father did not like that Nachum could not be fixed. He did not like what the angel had done, tap, tap, tapping on my unborn brother’s lip until he had sucked up his mind. My father did not like the special school that could not cure him, or the teachers who had no idea what to do. One evening, he and my mother had a fight in the kitchen, about Nachum and the experts and whether there was hope.
    I wanted to tell them about the tapping angel, because they didn’t know. But I was scared of their yelling—I’d never heard them like this before—and instead hid deep inside my blanket. My father shouted, my mother screamed back; then she cried. She said hers was not a hopeless child. I put my hands over my ears.
    The next week, after another such fight, my mother took us all to a family psychologist who said we should talk about our feelings. But my father didn’t like him either.
    “So tell me how you feel,” the psychologist instructed him, after my parents had sat on the couch and my siblings and I had squished ourselves into little plastic chairs.
    “Ken you fix my son?” my father asked.
    The psychologist peered over his half-glasses.
    “I can’t fix your son,” he said. “But I can try to fix the feelings you have about your son—”
    “No, you ken’t,” said my brave father. “You ever hev such a son?”
    “No,” said the psychologist. “I have not.”
    My father tapped his fingers on the armrest.
    “Zen you ken’t fix my feel about vat you don’ even know.”
    The psychologist pushed the half-glasses up the bridge of his nose. My father stood up from the couch.
    “I don’ look for change in feeling. I look only for change in son.” The psychologist shook his head and opened his mouth to say something. But my father did not wait.
    “You don’ vaste my time,” he said, and walked out of the office, closing the door behind him.
    I wanted to run out of the office too. I wanted to march out with my father, tall, proud, and mad. I wanted to declare to the world and the stupid psychologist that I didn’t care how I felt about my brother, and that they could not keep me, squirming and squished, in a hard little plastic chair. Nachum was the one who was broken. So why was I the one stuck here?
    It was my mother who made me stay. She made me sit and say how I felt to the man and his stupid half-glasses.
     

Thirteen
    It was December, the day after Chanukah. Outside, bare trees wrapped themselves in snow, their white-covered branches flailing frantically in the wind.
    In the kitchen, the cleaning lady was polishing my father’s silver menorah, the one he had lit for eight nights. On the counter nearby stood Yitzy’s smaller menorah, the one he’d received at his birthday. My sisters and I also had menorahs, ones we had made in