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A Tortoise Can Only Ever Be A Tortoise

My brother's pet tortoise Ferdinand wasn't what he was supposed to be. Neither was I.

By Lacey DoddrowPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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A Tortoise Can Only Ever Be A Tortoise
Photo by Luca Ambrosi on Unsplash

A tortoise placed in water will float. It can’t swim, but it will float. There is enough air up inside its shell to keep its head above water, but beyond that, it will be at a loss. Tortoises are very good at being tortoises but they cannot do anything else.

My brother Aaron got a tortoise as a bar mitzvah present. He’d wanted one for years, but by the time he turned thirteen he’d outgrown the desire for a pet tortoise and what he really wanted was a weight set. Instead, my parents bought him a tortoise. It was a little African Spurred that was as big as Aaron’s palm, and he called it Ferdinand, after the bull from the children’s story.

In the book, Ferdinand is supposed to be a tough fighting bull, but instead he just wants to live a peaceful life hanging out in the shade of a tree.

Ferdinand the tortoise wasn’t what he was supposed to be, either. He wasn’t a weight set. He wasn’t a cool new car.

He was a tortoise, and he mostly liked to nap under his heat lamp.

By Marcus Dietachmair on Unsplash

I was fifteen when Aaron became a bar mitzvah. I didn’t have a bat mitzvah party. My father’s family doesn’t have them for girls, and he said he saw no reason to start now, especially the way they had all gotten so out of hand. All the girls my age had big blowouts that only proved his point. They had all been themed, too: horse themed, sparkle fairy themed, Justin Bieber themed, You’d-Think-Money-Grows-On-Trees themed. Aaron’s bar mitzvah didn’t have a theme, there was no glitter on the kippot, and the DJ played the electric slide. Tradition is important to my dad.

I wasn’t too jealous of Aaron’s bar mitzvah. At fifteen, I didn’t get along much with the other kids in Temple Youth, and I was starting to fall out with what everyone else called “G-d.” In services, I got bored and wondered whether Moses would have approved of our Rabbi’s decision to replace the ner tamid with a green eco-friendly lightbulb. I forgot the Kaddish on purpose. I stole kippot out of the basket at the entryway and used them to sew little dice bags that sold for three bucks at school.

Ferdinand ended up living in my room after Aaron used his bar mitzvah money to buy a weight set. I put hiss glass tank on top of my dresser and could hear him digging in the gravel at night. He had a few fake plants and a half-log to entertain him, but he preferred to claw down through the gravel and scrape at the glass in the corners of his tank. I wondered if he knew he was going nowhere or whether he thought he was in a mile-long tunnel he’d been working on for weeks. Once while he was digging I set the log over him, hoping to trick him into thinking he’d finally dug through.

On the other side of my bedroom wall, Aaron’s secondhand weights made a heavy clanging noise whenever he lifted. If I paid close attention I could smell the sweaty boy-stink coming from his room. After his bar mitzvah he quit going to Temple with us, which I hadn’t realized was an option until then. But after years of quiet acquiescence, my mother’s dramatic heartbreak over Aaron’s refusal to join us, and so many Friday-night sleepovers turned down that I didn’t get invited to anything on weekends anymore besides Temple Youth events, I had no choice.

By Victor Freitas on Unsplash

One Saturday morning I snuck Ferdinand into Temple in my purse, and after services a couple of Temple Youth kids went down to the pond with me and we put him in to see if he could swim. We chased the ducks off, left our shoes under the big cedar tree and waded in to watch Ferdinand try to swim. He just bobbed around a little and I thought maybe he would drown if his little nose tipped under, so I picked him back up and dried him off with my unfashionable shul dress. I took him inside and fed him strawberries from the snack table.

When we got back home I held Ferdinand on my lap and wondered whether he was scared when I put him in the pond. Can a tortoise feel scared? Does a tortoise realize it can’t swim? I thought about Adam naming the animals in the garden. Did he do experiments too, to see if the tortoise could swim, if the mouse could fly, if the snake could talk? I think it’s just a thing that people do, experiments like that. One of the boys who suggested I put Ferdinand in the pond was Caleb, a boy who had a video game themed bar mitzvah. He wears a “Legend of Zelda” kippah. He’s cute, but I think he likes one of the seven Rachels, the one with the star-shaped braces.

When I went to put Ferdinand back in his tank I moved too fast and he pulled himself into his shell with a hissing noise. It always startles me even though I know he doesn’t mean it. It’s just the air pushing out of his shell, the same air that lets him float without swimming. That’s the only way he knows how to fight back, how to defend himself. He really is a Ferdinand.

By Mitsuo Komoriya on Unsplash

In the next room over, I heard Aaron drop a weight on the floor. No one could ever accuse my brother of being too peaceful. Next to my desk, on the wall, in tiny pencil marks, where no one else could see, I was keeping track of how many days it had been since he talked to me. Nine, by that Saturday. So I talked to Ferdinand. Sometimes I said the Kaddish if I thought he wanted to hear my voice but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I hadn’t really forgotten it.

When I put Ferdinand in the water I really did hope that he would swim. I hoped maybe he would be the only tortoise in the world who could do something besides regular tortoise things. Not to impress anyone, just to know that it was possible. But when I saw him floating in the duck pond, his legs moving like he thought he was still on land, his little beak nose dipping into the water, I knew, like Adam did, that a tortoise could only ever be a tortoise.

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About the Creator

Lacey Doddrow

hedonist, storyteller, solicited advice giver, desert dweller

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