Free Following Ezra by Tom Fields-Meyer Page A

away.
    “Are you mad ?” he says, a smile on his face. I recognize his involuntary response to being reprimanded. He always smiles, sometimes giggles. It’s how he reacts to this kind of confrontation. It makes it more difficult to confront him—his smile makes me feel like laughing myself—but I have to do it.
    “I’m very angry,” I tell him. “Ezra, you don’t talk to people like that. That’s not okay . You shouldn’t talk about people’s bodies.”
    He looks down, still grinning slightly. I’m having difficulty judging whether he is actually amused, or just doesn’t know how to react.
    “Do you understand why?”
    “Why?”
    I tell him: it makes people feel uncomfortable. It hurts their feelings. It’s not polite. People just don’t do it.
    He looks at me. Silence.
    “Ezra,” I say, “listen to me. If we’re walking, and you see somebody, you don’t tell them they’re fat.”
    “Okay! All right!”
    “Do you know what you should say to them?”
    “What?”
    “Just say, ‘Shabbat shalom,’” I say, suggesting the traditional Sabbath greeting—the way Jewish people encountering one another in synagogue or on the streets of our neighborhood greet one another. “That’s all. ‘Hi, Charlie. Shabbat shalom.’ You shake hands, like this”—I grab his limp right hand in mine, offering a firm shake to demonstrate how to do—“and that’s it. ‘Hi, Charlie, Shabbat shalom!’”
    “Okay!”
    I seem to be getting through. I have learned that sometimes it requires raising my voice just to get his attention.
    “Let’s practice.”
    “No.”
    “Pretend I’m Charlie and you see me. ‘Hi, Ezra!’ What do you say?”
    He is silent.
    I wait. “What do you say to Charlie?”
    “Shabbat shalom,” he says.
    “And what about your hand?”
    He takes my hand and shakes, looking downward.
    “Will you remember that?”
    “Yes, can we go now?”
    On our twenty-minute walk to synagogue, I pause every few minutes to repeat that question, each time forcefully making my point: That’s not how we talk to people. It hurts their feelings. I figure that if I repeat it enough, and forcefully enough, I can jar his brain and maybe help Ezra to interrupt his impulse to say the first thing that comes to mind—particularly when he sees anyone who looks a little bit unusual. I don’t know whether I am making myself understood, but soon I have an opportunity to find out.
    Late that same afternoon, Shawn and I are strolling in the neighborhood with the boys when we cross paths with some friends who are chatting with another couple we have never met. As it happens, the man—sixty or so, in a white shirt and glasses, hands in his trouser pockets—is a bit on the heavy side.
    Without warning, Ezra slips away from us and approaches the husband. I feel rising anxiety as he zeroes in.
    “Ezra . . .” I start to say. Too late.
    “What’s your name?” Ezra asks him.
    “My name’s Jerry,” he says, smiling warily.
    “Can you take your hands out of your pockets?” Ezra asks.
    Jerry, raising an eyebrow, does. Ezra shakes his hand.
    “Shabbat shalom,” Ezra says.
    “Shabbat shalom,” Jerry answers.
    I’m flushed with a surge of delight—in my son and in my own ability to get through to him, to teach him. I feel a profound sense that anything can be accomplished. Then Ezra, still inches from Jerry, quickly turns around, grins, and looks directly at me.
    “See?” he says excitedly, almost shouting with pride. “I didn’t say he was fat !”
    What happens after that is a blur. I do recall a nauseous feeling, a quiet walk home, and the dismal sense that we might never get this right—that raising a child with no intuitive social instinct will be endlessly treacherous, a minefield with unseen disasters lurking everywhere. I have spent the entire morning trying to teach my son a lesson he has completely missed. How, I wonder, will we ever get through?
     
     
    That night I call a friend who is the