THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 57
name was Gertrude and I liked Ger-
trude less than I had in the store.
I liked her less at McDonald’s than I
had in the car, and less at home than I
had at McDonald’s. She was boring and
smelled and required that you wash your
hands after touching her—every single
time—because she might be carrying
salmonella. She didn’t move much, ei-
ther, and was scared of everything. You’d
throw a book at the wall to the left of
her tank and she’d hide in her shell, but
it took too long to be truly funny.
When Gertrude started sneezing
a couple weeks later, though, I got
sad. I didn’t want her to be sick.
Or I wanted to be the kid with the
sick turtle who cared—same difference.
I called for my mom. “Watch,” I said.
Gertrude sneezed.
“Oh,” my mom said.
She called up a vet, not on speaker-
phone. I knew the vet must have told
her that Gertrude would die soon, but
when my mom said the vet said that
sometimes turtles aren’t made for houses,
and that you can’t tell whether a turtle
is made for a house until you’ve taken
it into a house, and if it’s not made for
a house then it should be released into
the wild where it can have a good long
life, I pretended to believe her.
We put Gertrude in the bucket from
under the sink and took her to the man-
made pond by the school. I crouched in
the cattails while my mother watched.
I removed Gertrude from the bucket,
and set her on the ground. I knew I was
supposed to say something childlike and
hopeful. I said, “Gertrude, everything’s
going to be great now. You’re not made
for houses. You’re made for this pond.
You will meet another turtle and fall in
love with that turtle and you will lay
some eggs, and turtle babies will hatch
from them. You’ll be their mommy!”
I broke off some cattails and, on the
way home, I bashed them on the side-
walk, one at a time, and watched them
explode into small clouds of fluff. I
asked my mom if we could go to Mc-
Donald’s and she said we could not—
her friend Miriam was coming over
with her sons and we would play in the
yard and maybe have ice cream. Hear-
ing “Miriam,” I remembered “Merga-
troid.” I remembered that was the tur-
tle’s real name, and suddenly I loved
her, the turtle, little Mergatroid, and
started to cry, and my mom thought
that I was crying about McDonald’s,
and she told me that crying wouldn’t
get me any fucking closer to fucking
McDonald’s, and this made me cry
more, but I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t
tell her that the turtle’s real name was
Mergatroid, or that I knew Mergatroid
was going to die of starvation if her
illness didn’t kill her, or that not being
able to tell her these things was keep-
ing us apart. I hated a liar.
“I want some chicken mcfucking
nuggets!” I shouted.- “Karate is about respect for ourselves, our
bodies, and one another, as well as the
natural world that surrounds us every-
where we go in the universe,” Sensei John-
son said, at the after-school karate demon-
stration in the gym. He made a thinking
face and adjusted his gi. “Protection is a
form of respect,” he continued. “Some
consider it the highest form of respect.”
Then he used his heel, his palm, and his
elbow to split some stacks of plywood
that were laid across cinder blocks.
My mother applauded after each
split stack. I whispered to her that I
thought I could do it. She said I’d break
my hand, and my dad said Sensei John-
son would, too, if the plywood boards
he kept striking weren’t perforated.
“What’s that?” I said. “Little punch
holes,” my dad said, “down the middle
of the boards.” “That’s cheap,” I said.
“Correcto,” my dad said.
The sensei gave us a look—we were
on the bottom bleacher, right in the
middle—then invited my father to cen-
ter court to help him. My father said,
“Sure,” and the audience clapped.
The sensei pulled a tarp off a pile of
bricks. He took a brick from the pile
and gave it to my father. “What do you
got there?” he asked my father. “Appears
to be a brick,” my father told the sen-
sei. “A regular old brick,” Sensei John-
son said. “Kind of brick,” he went on,
“you might build a house with, you were
the kind of person who built things.”
My dad was bald and weighed too much,
but the look on his face when someone
used a tone with him always seemed
to say, “You need to take a deep breath“I can do my taxes or my laundry—
it’s unreasonable to expect me to do both.”