Free of all that - and of daily recitations of the Mourner’s Kaddish, which I found, even for its subject matter, excessively depressing - Macdonald Hall sounded great to me.īruno and Boots occupied a world wholly unlike mine, one of flagpoles, panty raids, practical jokes, dish duty. Before you know anything about class, before you encounter the circles in which examining one’s privilege is the highest form of recreation, boarding school above all represents a world without parents and who wouldn’t want, for at least a little while, to reside in one of those? With the every-other-Wednesday and every-other-weekend custody schedule we were on, my brothers and I spent more time with parents on the brain than our single-home friends, whose parents were mere figures in the background, not acting in careful accordance with a legal mandate.
For years, the book I carted with me from one side of the river to the other was Gordon Korman’s This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, the first in a series set, in the way I like my books, somewhere thrillingly just beyond the world I lived in:
Children of divorce learn to manufacture their own forms of certainty, and for me that lay in the books I put in the black back-and-forth bag, the alternate universes to which I could depart upon demand. We had a library card for each side of the divide, separate Blockbuster memberships, different breakfast cereals. This all took place in the not overwhelmingly Jewish state of Wisconsin, although where precisely we lived was hard to say, since we commuted between our parents’ two houses, duplexes located on opposite sides of the Milwaukee River. On Fridays we had an assembly called Shabbat Sing, where we sang the Israeli national anthem before adjourning to our classrooms to bless Dixie cups of Manischewitz grape juice. The flavor was a loose mix of denominations, prayer preceded graham cracker snack time, and the basketball team, called Judah and the Maccabees, always beat our Orthodox school rivals, who had to pause and bless their yarmulkes when they fell off during the course of a game. As children my brothers and I attended a Jewish day school.
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