Esau

Joshua Malbin307 12

th

St. Apt 8Brooklyn NY 11215

1EsauMy brother Jacob and I went to work in my family’s restaurant the moment myfather, Big Ike, decided it was safe. He had a two-part test. First each of us had to carry asaucepan full of water from one end of the dining room to the other, using only one hand,without rushing and without spilling. Then we each had to cut an onion precisely in half with one stroke of a heavy knife. Once our wrists had grown strong enough for thosethings, he judged we could handle the rest.It was a New American place, part of what adherents then called the “slow food”movement. The menu changed with the seasons, relied on small, local farms, and madediners feel virtuous. I was a prodigy at it. By the age of ten I could match almost anykind of meat with a sauce that made an artistic statement without overwhelming theingredient. And like any cocky prodigy, I most liked performing with the mostchallenging material, game fowl and venison. When I was eleven my roasted venisonwith shallots and chestnut cream convinced Big Ike to let me cook and serve one dish of my own in the restaurant once a week.Jacob had different talents, not culinary ones. He liked doing the salads, but wasalways either too offbeat (experimenting with grilled mackerel in place of tuna) orclichéd (putting goat cheese on the beets every single time we had them). He couldn’tmanage to be creative and crowd-pleasing at the same time. In any case salads were alesser art. No one was ever moved by a salad.

Joshua Malbin307 12

th

St. Apt 8Brooklyn NY 11215

2No, Jacob’s talents were with people. All the immigrant men in the kitchen, forexample, treated him like a little nephew or cousin. They yelled at him sometimes inSpanish, but it was clear they all loved him. I was around just as often, but unlike Jacob Inever learned Spanish from them and they never yelled at me like a family member.They were kind to me and thought fondly of me, but always as the boss’s kid, not one of their own.It was the same at school. I had friends; Jacob had followers. Kids believed it madethem cooler just to be around him.Partly it was because Jacob moved more easily in his body than I did. I hit pubertyearly and grew into a muscular, oafish, red-haired kid with red body hair sproutingeverywhere. I looked and felt as graceful as a Jersey cow. Jacob was dark, lithe, andrelaxed.Partly it was my discovery, either just before puberty or during its very first stages,that I liked boys and not girls. We lived in an affluent, liberal part of Brooklyn, certainlynot a homophobic part of the country in relative terms, but it was one more big thingabout myself to present to the world at an age when I had to struggle to present any of me.And before I could figure it out, Jacob discovered it too. He got into my laptop andfound the porn sites in the browser history.I don’t even know why I was looking at them, to be honest. I hadn’t yet learned tomasturbate, and the gleaming hairless bodies and massive phalli of the men in thosephotos and videos intimidated me at least as much as they turned me on.We were twelve then. Jacob cornered me in our shared bedroom, an area barely bigenough for our two beds and two dressers. The argument, like most we ever had, took

Joshua Malbin307 12

th

St. Apt 8Brooklyn NY 11215

3place nearly chest to chest because there wasn’t enough room for us to do otherwise. Weshoved and wrestled and called each other foul names—his mostly variants of “faggot”—until he to the business of blackmailing me. He said he’d tell everyone in school aboutmy faggotry if I didn’t go to our father with him and ask for a 50-50 split of the restaurantbetween us.Now, it was pretty well understood in our family that after I went to college—ideallythe Culinary Institute—I would return home and partly take over the restaurant. Whenmy father was ready to retire, he would pass the business to me. Jacob would go off anddo something else, perhaps motivational speaking or real estate sales. My father hadnever said any of this explicitly, but it was implied in the way he talked about my futureand his in the kitchen together, but not Jacob’s, and took care to explain to me but notJacob all the details of our supply orders and accounts. I’d had no idea Jacob wanted tobe included. I knew I didn’t want him. It was

my

future. He should get his own.I was scared of being a pariah at school, though, and Jacob could do that to me if hechose. At twelve, there was no contest between the two options. The future was far off and unimportant. What mattered was friends today.At this point I need to explain that my father was mildly crazy. He thought thatOprah Winfrey was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, quite literally, and prayed to Heras if She were Him.It had started in the early 1990s when Oprah ate at his previous restaurant, the onewhere he’d been head chef but not owner. Since then he’d catered for her every other orevery third time she came to New York, carrying the containers of food in a cab himself