Witz

Over There, Then

IN THE BEGINNING, THEY ARE LATE.

Now it stands empty, a void.

Darkness about to deepen the far fire outside.

A synagogue, not yet destroyed. A survivor. Who isn’t?

Now, it’s empty. A stomach, a shell, a last train station after the last train left to the last border of the last country on the last night of the last world; a hull, a husk — a synagogue, a shul.

Mincha to be prayed at sundown, Ma’ariv at dark.

Why this lateness?

He says reasons and she says excuses.

And so let there be reasons and excuses.

And there were.

A last boat out, why didn’t they catch it? They didn’t have their papers? their papers weren’t in order?

He says excuses and she says reasons.

And so let there be excuses and reasons.

And there were, if belated.

Misses Singer strokes her husband’s scar as if to calm him. But what she calls a scar he knows is his mouth.

Late because they’re stuck in one exilic fantasy or another; late because the adventure of ingathering doesn’t seem all on the up and up; late because they’re owed payments, and you’re goddamned right they’re going to collect…what’s yours? I’m just waiting for this one deal of a lifetime to come through, and, when it does, God! the moment it does, you’d better believe I’m out of here…

Singer stops, stoops to pick up a shoe, sized wide, fallen from his withered foot last step.

Nu, it’s been like this ever since he was born, and those long, hard years have all been as yesterday’s toll: the bridge crossing, the bottomless price of a boat full with holes, an aeroplane cast down from heaven, betrayed of its wings. And it’s not as if he hasn’t crawled his end of the bargain: wriggling ever forward from garden to grave, he’s trying, just ask him; if he hadn’t married so well, he’d have to gnaw down a branch for a cane. And then what: you pray for a splinter, you get a tree in return, from whose flesh is made paper and from whose fruit is sucked ink, both of which collaborate in God’s writing of Laws whose words and even the letters of which bless you beholden to meaning; and so we receive knowledge, such as the following, and the preceding, and this: in seeking only to stay upright, you fall, are banished then cursed and reviled, condemned to wander a continent you don’t even know where you’re going, only when you’re expected, which is every Friday at sundown though your calendars were never coordinated and what you always thought had been west was really only a left turn taken with your back to the north, in haste and with little sleep, then upon your forehead, the development of a worrying mark.

A meal after Shacharit, which is the prayer of the morning, praising God Who made the light only by saying it illuminating, also, our own saying of thanks to Him for not making us unto them — the animals, women, or sick; for not yet giving us over to the darkness of death — shadows that have no souls for which to pray if even they could, as they lack both voices and hearts, shuffle their bloated, crapulous ways into shul: Unaffiliated, jingjangling keys — there couldn’t be! that many doors…goyim nameless faceless nearly formless, quiet massing hulks emerged out of dim wet here to make a living that’s more a dying. It’s strange, no one understands: they’re here to help, not destroy. Be calm. One sweeps up; another sweeps the seats for articles and personal effects left behind, by night. Yet another stacks books on the almemar, shoves them, balled up crumpled wet, into pew pockets, lays them out on seats swept toward the rear, nosebleed territory from which the Shammes groans in with an enormous what hath God wrought iron key, looped on a rope around his waist, hanging low under his gut, swinging with his stride — which is as long and wide as the last night he’ll spend here, free, unconcerned.

Hours later when hours were still hours as restful and lit as all Sabbath’s day, not the binding celestials of numeral and ordinal, the narrow gauge of comet trains, stardeadline, failing, falling, the tickers of arrival and departure and arrival, diurnal again — the clock centerpieces upon our timetables that not only remind us when to partake but are, simultaneously, the only sustenance left — the Affiliated muster, assemble outside…soon, there’s a congregation beyond: nondenominational, because what does observance mean anyway, irreligious maybe even, or all of them heaped together, thrown atop the burning pile, who knows, with the languages who can tell? Their bloods are their tickets, purchased at a steep price or a long song much in advance. Presence by the pint. They lineup two-by-two, two of each kind, husband and wife. They’ve restedup, washedup, dressedup; they’ve reported for showers and were shorn. There’s last summer’s rose attar, perfume stagnant in air — or it’s smoke, strangely sweet…

Menschs bow down by the curb, bow at the knees and cast fingers, fish around in last regime’s grates and late afternoon’s puddles for anything that’s not yet blown away: loose pages, blots of blatt, daf stains, yellowed newspapers the print of which’s run off to tomorrow with yesterday’s wife, scraps of rag, parchment or is it just skin, God, it’s skin. As a handful of the oldest menschs bow, they fall, are then helped back to their feet by menschs only slightly younger, each of them by another younger by just a wink or a wrinkle, they’re righted, and so now they’re ten altogether, which makes us a minyan. Runoff is wrung out from these yarmulkes, mud knuckled away with spit. The menschs gather these scraps, spread them on glassy bald skulls with thumb’s knife, against the gusts at the doorway, as if they didn’t have these frags and parches, corking it All down, their heads would spill out to the sky. And its vault. Never forget the vault. Windily, they kiss at the jamb, which is marked. An Unaffiliated at the door hands out books, programs inside, both also pressed into yarmulkes.

Yellow over red to brown over black if I’m squinting it right, I don’t have my glasses on me just now, comes to west through the windows. Then, Let there be light, and there is light and if not good, then so-so — eh, though you might prefer feh. It’s not theirs, though: insight is forbidden to the assembled, at least here, and what they seek in their own homes, hosting ruin just past the horizon, and on their own time, which is almost up, is absolutely none of our business. Two lights becoming one becoming two: the Shammes has lit candles, flame, but the fire’s outside. The stainedglass remains dark. The floor’s a mess: remnants of flowing tracery, shards of leaded panes from the windows lancet and rose, long replaced or walled up due to heating costs; pews’ rubble heaped to the side, seating’s splinters, scrapped immature limbs — for use in stoking the furnace.

They’re still late — it’s a long walk and in these shoes…

Those who aren’t late yet they go some to the left some to the right and up the stairs, to the balcony there: the cheap seats, the women, forgive; some have forgotten though they’re forgiven, reminded again. Entering, the audience is shaking hands; they hug, kiss, and make inquiries with the hands they’re not shaking. Shoes echo off stone. Sweeping suits up in their hands, gathering skirts and slacks they sit, Phfoy. Elders should sit first, but the kinder these days threw respect to the dogs, a distant barking the night through. Cushions, where there are cushions, in the first few rows, wheeze out a measure of dust. Coughs and sneezes ensue, allergies. Some sit on benches, others on seats along the wall, at shtenders, a nod to the old traditionalists: a grip on the hat’s brim, a little bow, the upright stooping to become the fallen in greeting, left wordless while the dialect’s still being decided. Everyone’s pooped, the day’s pooped…I yi yi and all that kitsch, it once was. A few sit in pews, they appear ashamed, remote; there are foldingchairs way in the back. The room’s filling up; there aren’t enough seats, never are, no room, no space, no air: some stand rocking for warmth as if they’re their own mothers; others sit on headstones hauled desecrated from the cemetery beyond; there’re a few pieces of remaindered furniture outside, too, holy borax that’s rental on special, on remnants of sample carpeting they sit anywhere they can, on frayed cushions over loose currencies, sagging under weight, on a sofa with corneal slipcover making piecework flatulence when you go to give up your seat to someone with more hope, or is it less luck, I don’t know — to make way for others, people standing on people pouring in through the smashed in shattered out windows slicing their guts open on jagged edges of glass then falling their ways in, intestinal ladders and no, no angels registered, not tonight…though if not now, if you’re such a Hillel, then when — then never: widows and orphans emerging from drafts of pure nothingness and of the absence of pure nothingness, which is just the proof of pure nothingness, yadda; they lean against the walls, crouch in neighboring alleys — with the door left open a crack.

Womenfolk above, the menschs below — the women can’t complain: it’s all ritual, no one’s fault, merely a gesture to what, who remembers; the women disappearing behind the mechitza, then peeking out, disappearing again. Curtains, bodying presences — is that the one I’m in love with? her sister? maybe her mother?

How can the room hold so many, their light — so fresh, so clean, such blushing about the face? Virginal, their apples intact, if desperately ripe. For the purposes of swallowing them the shul seems to expand, a snake’s mouth, releasing an inky venom decreeing the digestion of a millennium, slower. The Fire Marshal Who art in Heaven has bestowedeth upon them His blessings of numinous capacities and maximal occupancies, illimitably, which means nevermore up for renewal…a great oven, heating.

Authorities up on High have dictated All.

A group huddling past the river of three names and of no name, done feeding the waters, done watering them, and so just in time to make the first seating’s lights: they’re rushing in, they’re dripping, taking the steps down to humble, supplication doesn’t matter if meant as it’s imposed from above — this ducking through the portal so that their prayers might rise up from the depths; and, too, so that they don’t smack their heads that’s how low.

Psalm 130, if you know it. An arch.

They’re entering their Father’s House — but is their Father home? Anyone, anyone?

You were expecting what besides miserly decoration, impoverished, no humanity, just faceless lions and onewinged birds, frozen midroar and half tweeting. Above the ark, where the scrolls are kept, where no scrolls will be kept anymore — a tympanum, a woodwork canopy peeling paint and blue mold; deepplanted vaunt, hardened bounty amidst carved drapery, earthen vines strangling eternity, then above, only ribbing. Menschs on the lowest level, their wives and daughters higher, upon the balcony then on balconies decorated in rock flowers and jewels, who knows how many of them on up to the stone seat of the moon, as if one half of the Decalogue, the cleaved five commandments, and who can sneak a look? or else they’re kept to the side, or toward the rear, the women, nearest the western wall, the separating grillwork a veil of metal, an armor of plaits…the menschs keep turning, keep coming up with prayerless occasions to turn their eyes upward, behind. We’re inattentive, weekly; resentful, daily; at all times our souls unprepared — beginning there at the ceiling, its crown, an ornamental rib intended to forsake the vault of a cross. An extra, whether left from Creation or a predating build. An almemar parts the room, though later in the show the staging will remove itself to the eastern wall, the pulpit: another migration, yet another orientation, and so which way to face, though the movements are known, felt instinctually — are up and down and back and forth, in and out and this and that and what where, only now.

Everything known better days. The worn steps up to the proscenium’s ark, arching at the height of the street once again: their cups covered over in dissolute pillows, stuffed with who wants to think. Just inside the vestibule, a lavabo for the washing of hands before prayer’s suffered drought. Those without prayerbooks are to read the prayers that have been written on the walls in a hand unwashed. A hand impure, in that it’s withheld.

At that proscenium, arkways, the House Manager, resident schlockmeister extraordinaire, an obese mensch shvitzing nerves in this freeze, smokes a frond rolled in loose page, fitted into a holder hollowed out from his humerus; he taps ash to the floor, lines of ash indicating staging. All has been blocked since eternity. The pit’s just below; the baldspot on the Conductor’s head blinding the balcony: he’s bent over his score, baton in one nostril out the other, scribbling his cues in fanatical charcoal, circling rests and only the rests. Tacit. His tuxedo’s motheaten, his cummerbund an enormous expropriated armband. A clarinet running scales up from the chalumeau, embouchure cracked, his reed a sliver of skull; a fiddler, a tallskinny mensch to the clarinet’s shortfat, fiddling with the tuner on his tailpiece: if he’s sharp he’s sharp, if he’s flat he’s flat, it’s the thought that counts, condemns; an organist, pulling out all the stops, warming up the webbed pipes; the Copyist rushes in, vaults over the rail, trips over stands, slipslides in spitvalve discharge, hands out parts barely dry, just finished as all work — not just that of Creation but of copying, too — must be barred from the sunset: dusk’s red ink smeared, ink that actually ran out yesterday and is now only blood worried with spit; the Prompter wiping his forehead with the House Manager’s noserag, then numbering cue cards with a quill so sharp his cousin could perform morally impossible ocular surgery with it — a procedure ensuring prophetic hindsight, would help. The House Manager, lapels at his ears, flicking the switch to the Applause sign, ON and OFF then ON again, as onstage, the Emcee the rabbi pops Polyn’s P’s into the microphone smuggled in tonight only.

Testing…

Testing…

One — Two — Three…

Is this thing on?

…

Good evening, ladies & gentlemen…and feedback attends

Try the veal!

…

the fivethirty show’s exactly the same as the threethirty show — and thanks folks, I’ll be here all week…

Nu, that’s what he thinks.

As feedback echoes, feeds back on itself the sound cud, swells in the mouth to air raid proportions, but it’s maybe a drill, let’s hope, or a close relative screaming Name somewhere near — as the crowd alarmed, is made fidgety, restless…a buzz that is its own sting, inspiring of shock, the instinctive Amen that surprises: people whispering to each other, jawing that it’s finally, about time — unannounced, from the leftwing stageright, the cantor comes forward, arrayed in an illfitting white kittel.

Houselights of the world to dim, out; the candles guttering brighter.

They don’t know to sit or stand: there’s a great creaking, an opening of books, a mass cracking of covers, a slitting of page with the forefingernail, honey on the pagetips to encourage as the rabbi intones off the script, introduces himself, yet again; it’s a foreign language, yet another tongue’s trouble: it’s a responsorial without a response, or actually anything to respond to…how’s everybody doing tonight? we’d like to thank you all so much for coming.

Blessed Art.

A buzz at its height, as if a hive dangled down from the roof of the night: people whispering, shouting, screaming final warnings, advice; addresses overseas to be memorized, 36,000 12-Millionth Street, Apartment 3B and ring twice; times and dates…the corner of Broadway & Innocence, 1952, 6 pm; lashon hara…it seems here, the pages are different: some have books with oddnumbered pages, others just even; some of the books only have numbers: digits — and dashes; other books have photographs in them, are only photos, images black & white, and uncaptioned, or the pages, whatever they have or say or show, don’t correspond to whatever it is the rabbi or is he the cantor, the chazzan, I forget, he does, too, announces twotongued, in every translation known to this side of the ocean: page 296, two-nine-six, page number twohundred-and-ninetysix, in the white book, you can do your own conversion for the blue.

Old menschs up front flip through their books, shaking heads, muttering Substance at all the blank pages: what should be, what should’ve been, they fill it in with the lip’s drip, the tongue’s ink. Nearest the ark, the oldest menschs standing and swaying throughout as if letters themselves, though letters still in flux, still being developed, not yet bound to fixed form. O the aleph reach, the bet bend, the gimel footforward, as if symbols with bad joints, with stiff cuffs, one leg shorter than fractured heels down below; while up top, roofing: their necks twisted to cripple, though as beautiful then still ruled permissible, kosher. Their books held out as if their own ornaments, as if crowns, tags, and kotz, they’re just black covers, no pages at all. And as for how they’re pronounced, they’re stilted, not inept but unpracticed, hinged klutzy with rust, as if requiring miracle oil, rededication to the task of innermost knowledge…as if asking themselves, who knows their own name? how to say the self ’s secret, pronounceable only if known? Argumentative, they give way to grumbling, learned grumbling, studiously insistent nodding as if their very own lettered bodies in their movements and shapes would, too, give movement and shape to their sounds: arms flowing out into fingery vowels. In the back, where voices still carry, kinder play in the aisles, odd games of lots; the sacred idiot drools into the mouth of the drunk.

Late, they arrive, finally do us the honor of showing up, about time. Survivors, us all — you’re cordially invited to join together with the congregation in this staring at them down the aisle a murmur, through the mess of mismatched to their seats. Reserved. They arrive, can you blame them, as if they didn’t show up the show wouldn’t have started without them; we wait, as they fill in the last remaining seats, except one. Reserved still. One seat’s always left empty, always reserved, still remains: the empty seat and door open a draft are not quite contingencies, but gestures.

And so we might wait for an apology, but who’s listening, no one: everyone catching up, breath, asking after, brides, cousins, do you know whatever happened to her; ordnance outside, or is it just in my head; explosions, shaking the shul deeper into its foundations: every house is built upon its own grave, as if a pit for a brother, at home in a hole pitched seven years’ deep: at least it’s the earth, and as such, livable, knowable — as who can sleep in the sky, who can lie down in the air and be comfortable there? The clarinetist bends a note, and Heaven bends, brass, night’s rainbow of one widened band: darkness, the void, O the Covenant Who forgot.

Air’s typhus, from the Hellenist typhos, an impure word we’ve been infected with, fatal: meaning smoky, a blemishing haze. All around, puddles of lands-men wait to take their place, their places, ours, as brainfog, impenetrable cloud whose controlling deities are also charged with scalping and illegal recording. The first one inside and the last one inside sit next to each other, atop one another, share between them a book, but there aren’t enough books, never are. Ben Someone or Other’s summoned up to the almemar, the bima an island at middle he bridges across on the backs of his fathers; he throws up his tallis, is hugged, kissed, returned, hugged, kissed, then seated again, bound to his chair with tefillin. Outside faces press up against glass, crucified by the mullions, they’re stretched across shards, eventually shattering, each other, themselves; window glass that’s been silvered over, why not, the better to straighten yourself for what’s to come — and so, mirrors in which the waiting arrange hairs, under collars tuck ties, breathe against the panes to know they’re alive.

A sphere makes its way around a sphere, is made.

There’ll be no east one of these tomorrows, there’ll be no rising — an unleavened morning for the wrong New Year.

And the assembled, settle.

Night. Of what colors were left, half were bleached into the moon and stars, deloused into white, an assimilation to air, high and rare above smoke; the other half, though…the afternoon’s sky: only a sleeve salvaged of a coat of many colors come bleeding through the wash outside; hues ripped from rays of the sun, snapped harpstrings the strands of a rainbow — forgotten. Now dark, which nights everything passing through it, none left untainted: a black beyond black, benighting, not so much the color of death as already an aftermath, a survival, what survives dream; black, the last color: the hair of sleeping girls, sent away to work off their breasts and hips, indentured abroad only to exhaust their own fate; the effects of an infinite yellowing: passport pictures curling at corners from fires never extinguished, Never Forget! — a night of the ninth plague, not yet; a night like whole hunks of blackbread in the mouth, soon…a night by the night: its blackness bound by stars without number and nameless, a wall then the river around it of their drained radiations: greater dawn’s strain to make it through its own pricks and dings that, in truth, are the stars, dimmed.

As our rabbi, a firstborn though he doesn’t like to brag much, beadles the floorboards by the pulpit — the tenth plague readies, is kept readied in the wings: the ninth plague sets the stage for the tenth, the arch for its entrance; though the ninth plague’s also the tenth plague’s commandment, then the eleventh’s, the twelfth; how the ninth plague is, ultimately, no plague in itself but rather the condition of all plague: its blackness appropriate, the colluding, concealing dark without morning to bear witness, clear air. And, as this is the very beginning of this last night to plague and be plagued without end, this, too, is the beginning of the very last Sabbath of all time, if not just of their lives; tell me, though, how those aren’t the same, two-of-a-kind? A Shabbos eternal we’re welcoming eternally — as any sun that should ever set again would only ensure a day of rest whose holiness must blush in comparison with the sacrifice of this one, of ours, and so desecrating in retrospect, a defilement made all the graver thanks to its very posthumity. And so, a time for rest now, this day of rest now, such rationed rest that’ll last as long as light will be remembered. An idle worship, given to graven imaginings. Because, with regard to that memory, there’s not much of it left — but still, there’s hope…to be hoped for.

Above the sill of the world, a pair of diamonds suspended. The moon and its stars, and the diamonds, too, are the impurities in the night, of the night, impurifying as those diamonds they’re only poetry, art; casements flecked with white paint, rubbled with plaster chips, remains of parget…these lights — no candles or candlesticks, which have been sacrificed to the rubble, melted down with their wicks wicked away, wisped into smoke with the upward ambition of flame — hover; what’s left is only their purpose: a question…does the light float in darkness? or the darkness around light?

No weather and the roof is maybe, hymn, missing, skullcaps blow off, blown around; there’s no refuge. Whether the roof was bombed through or, perhaps, has been landed on one too many times by messenger storks resting on which season’s way out…or, in another interpretation: there is, indeed, a roof, and from there’s where it’s raining, then snow.

Skypages blow from books that have pages, loose pages blown, wet paper mushed, pulped, wildly flung about and grasped at, stolen and promise to tell no one, they’re killed for; rain to snow, clumps of snow as if stillborn moons, this sleet and hail, this fiery hail, retributive fallings, a weather testamentary, Creation first testing its power: what can my sky do? is what God should be asking…though ignoring that voice, they jump out of their own voices and stoop to grab at skin now, piecing through the pages, this vellum taken in vain, binding themselves back together without a sense for order, with spit dripped from the seams of a beast remade, with weather into the shape of a cloud dispelled: to stoop and shirk from any mumble, that would avail a response to the mumbling of the rabbi who’d begun his own not in prayer but dismay — at their willingness to follow fate, but not his called command. From what illiterate womb is such disorder born? This reading of prayers they’ve read or should’ve read or had read to them lifetimes before, and yet prayers they’ve never, not even once, understood; the ignorance of a tongue redeemed…as they’ve never listened, heard, attended with still and silence. If reading for us is only memory — daily repetition as a guide to the pilpul perplexing, undertaken with any acronym’s help, enlisting all manner of mnemonic wonder and signs — then the following mysticism might preempt, be permitted: In the beginning was the Word, that word was all words, the book, any book, in which each letter falling into the arms of its mother is in itself the word whole — the Shibboleth, the Passwoyd, the Name of God, no one knows. The recitation of a spare set of teeth. While praying, no one knows what they’re saying not because no one knows the language of prayer, but because no one knows themselves, and so they pray: they dress themselves and shave and stoop and bow only in order to hope anew — only to ask for a tomorrow for which they might be dressed, be shorn, stooped and bowed, in which to pray again.

For an end to all this, to all time.

Tonight, though, they’ll be gone, with only their refuse, their lost and never to be found again articles to acknowledge existence, forgetting’s relics already enshrined, cataloged as just so much charity within a book glassed on display, not for use (a ledger, the list) — only to be replaced next week, same moon’s time, by a new shipment, a congregation bound in a box. The shul’s an enormous phylactery; the shul’s swollen like a stomach full and starved. No oneg shall follow, no Kiddush luncheon will save with its sponsor.

Slowly, with the pressures of privation, the weather, they remember, a response or else the responded to, same difference, especially if delivered in the hooked nosespeak of their father’s father’s father; respecting the variations, there are so many on so few — how many letters can an alphabet finally hold before it becomes a language unto itself, and so mysticism, tamei is the code, which is forbidden as bilbul, nonsense not proscribed but worthless, a waste save in how it preserves the minds and lives of those whom we’d otherwise lose to a God Who can be imaged as us — amid the shadow, embarrassment, failure; such intimacies, become parables and are foreseen to have become parables; everything’s known in advance, subsequently incorporated into the liturgy, written into the script in a fire that then destroys the script, ashes to ashes, prophecy received by the dead. All of this happened, and only then was cued — in this house, under the sky, this outstretched armband arching our world, as if a banner shaming the scroll unrolled in representation of the afterlife we’d once been promised, or so we claim in our beseeching of the only power who might grant us such succor: our kinder, who by now have all emigrated, or burnt. At the almemar, the gabbai oldtimers, the altes, the priests and the pillars, they’re still fingering what, cantillation, their arms flapping in approval disapproval all the same this way then that, the dim forms of the nusach for morning — then the roll sign, hands tumbling down a hill; business ensues; many blessings!

As the show ends, the service is what they say now, Ma’ariv it’s usually transliterated as, the rabbi exits stageright, the cantor the chazzan stageleft, Amen, they return along with the entire supporting cast to receive flowers under the proscenium arch, holding aside the petals and those of the ark’s curtain and gushing red, davening still duchening even and everything intensely meant and from the waist and kissing air then waving; the velveteen falls and rises, another round of applause, the velveteen falling, then rising again, a third and final round its applause scattered, Diasporated how they’re just standing around now they’re waving goodbye, then the velveteen falling again this time the last, the house lights go up for a finale as exit music swells from their mouths, zmirot: the players exit stage everywhere, wash, dress, and shave to shuckle through the stagedoor to the street, its grabbing hordes and their faithful hounds…down Prinz, sit.

The Rosenkrantzes and the Singer family rise and Misses Rosenkrantz searches around her seat if she’s dropped or left anything behind, and she hasn’t so she waddles out the row to the aisle to meet her husband who’s halfway already to the arch shining exit, quickly, her fat wobbles; as she reaches Rosenkrantz, there’s lightning, thunder, the house lights go out. A son, the ben Anybody to be made barmitzvah tomorrow if only, he emerges holding a long, thick, threewicked taper, thricebraided then those braids braided, its unified flame illuminating a knot that can only be undone through its melting; wax dribbles, scorches the hand. All stumble toward the arch out, step on each other, essentially trample one another, but politely, exceedingly viciously kind — a friendship’s tumult, unreal, as if faked; how the shul’s shrunk, it’s behind them now, and now the arch seems further, seems larger — as the shul backdrop’s withdrawn into the greater wings; an earthen set, perhaps, or a stage deserted, without fictive ornament or division, barren as if brokendown for the kindling — the deepest pit to be found through a hidden trapdoor…and the group, they find themselves in a field, empty — a nowhere. A sudden abandonment, but with the arch still ahead, and them standing facing.

A lone arch, standing free, with nothing on either side or above them; an arch, which enters and exits onto nothing, Niemandsland never fulfilled. Though it only appears to them far and large, huge from here, it’s a low arch, its opening’s small: to enter, they’ll have to suck and stoop, must become humbled, be made modest again; they usher themselves still in seating order, roughly, elbowing, pushing, it’s madness, keep forward. It’s suddenly hot (it’d been winter): hell if they believe in it should be this hot, that’s how, though they don’t believe, they’re living it here and now, shanking, shouldering, angrily pleasant — and not hot exactly but fevered, a delirium through which they’re wandering, exhausted, heads shvitzing, and pits…sucking under their tongues: a bottle’s cloth teat; a railway ticket used once but unpunched; an edge of ex libris marked with a temperature number.

An arch, pushed up, it stands atop a mound, a hill, a high mountain — the pressure of the arch, the pull and push the very source of its support, and how a force is pulling and pushing them, too: Singer struggling up against his attacking heart, what’s called a preexisting condition; the Feigenbaums, the Rosenkrantzs, Singers, and Tannenbaums, stepping intrados to extrados and all that pagan parsing, the watchwords of idols: the archivolt with its inscription we’re too distant from, too far to read, the soffit, it’s unreadable, also…the vaulted above with its ogive, as sharp as a knife, murderous, then toward the middle of the arch, the hole, the drop, machicolation’s the term, from where the oil or boilingwater would be poured upon any enemy advancing, invading; progress in its deathmarch, slowed as their feet are made shoes themselves through procedures of callus, brass tacks, and metal — and how that wound opens: widens to the dip of the moon that’s only the sweep of a spotlight’s escape, and everything wanders: they grovel before the steps that lead toward it, up, the winding aisles and pillowed stones; stepping high over these hazards, as some are path slates, while others are as snares and barbs, bombs and mines, and how you never know which unless you step, or until. Know this, though: that upon passage through the arch, there’s no mezuzah to forget without kiss — if ever we arrive, and with our mouths survived.

An arch: stones go up then stones go down. Without mortar, it’s pressure alone that holds this thing up.

Once upon a morning, someone would’ve pulled up the sun: an old hand long unionized amid the rigging and tugging, would’ve risen it to shine through the arch with a frayed pole that’d serve as a rope — the sun to be framed in the arch, its face revealed, appearing as if only to receive the glory of the horizon’s siegheiling; then, risen under its own momentum and higher, up to the middle of the sky without middle, millions if not more of an archaic measurement above — it’d fix, be held, sun of Joshua, without shadow, day waiting…

An arch, skysized, though they still must stoop to pass through, to pass over unto — an arch, the entrance to and exit from, with nothingness on either side…

And then, that same Someone would’ve pulled the sun down, lowered it toward the horizon just opposite; hauling in all the properties for dimwatted storage. Even the sun falls, and in now’s inner light, the dinnerguests — because they are dinnerguests, and late, hungry, starving — throw shadows, as they gather themselves toward the set; they approach from the east, advancing, invading, a swarm, freshly showered locusts, shorn with their wives…hauling what they’re hauling you’d be slow, too, but they’re trying.

As they were late for the show, and as the show ended late, now they’re late for their dinner, expected: with a candle still burning held by a boy not so young anymore, melted old in his lasting, then a couple even with flowers, which have been snipped from the wilts of the wayside — essentially stolen, then wrapped up in skin, which is theirs though it be borrowed or bargained or dripping, and wine, which is red, dribbling behind them suspiciously thin; emptyhanded’s no way to arrive, no way to treat a host treating you. As they gather over the land, last explosions are heard, creationary clumps not a warning — smoke to the east they’re fleeing, if east: suns other and younger. They’re fired toward the arch, is the feeling: it’s oy the heat, which is worse though also welcomed as it means they still feel, then the smell, too, the burning, the singe of the sauce: baked chicken, and is that soup cooling on the stovetop above — tell me, I’m that lucky?

They smell; their nostrils open into their faces, eating up their heads into just more empty space to furnish then water with feed; there’s a distant door, opening…gusts: the smells of cedar and pine, lemonlime, which could as much be from the wood polish as the outdoors, from the forest as dark as it’s deep that’ll hide like a mouth as well as it swallows, keeps down; the smells, too, of fat, onion, paprika; they’re desperate for a snort, a schmeck to renew. Their mouths plump; saliva drips from the lip still ahead, trails from them for others to follow: a wandering path of goldening noodles, the more boiled the less hard the less straight and as yellow as yolks, with maybe a little cinnamon dusting, or sugar, that imitation cherry topping, too, not too much to ask; with each false wishniak sac soft in the redness of the #40 dye, how you bite into one and it just seeps into your tongue, you know, as your tongue itself and the pareve of it all’s as a sin: these noodles rise toward them, to greet, as if to wave, curl into their nostrils, then as if the shed skin of serpents, harden again, fossilize fixed, pulling them in, further and near and held tightly. Fumigations, as of the Temple days, but they’re themselves the sacrifices, and yet still how this offering’s intended for them, which means martyrdom. Such expectation, this sense without taste: wafting through their hooks caked in the mucuses of over six million infections; they inhale deeply, a reflex once guilty: enhancing the medicinal effect, as intended: them coming back to life, now that they’ve been called to account…deep in the diaphragm, a lineup at gut, as if reporting; they sneeze themselves into coughs, their lungs milk out a yellow, a responsive pure gold; their forms are wracked, they’re sent into involuntary fits, seizures, or it’s only now that they’re rushing, scrambling, no time to waste.

It’s not only the allergies or infections, though; it’s the promise of food more than the food itself, then the drink, the zissen l’chaim, the mashke, the schnapps, not even that — it’s the old appetite for the as-yet-unfulfilled. Their handkerchiefs, in their pockets, have been in their respective families for who knows how many generations ever since Adam first dressed Eve only in order that she should have a pocket for that apple of hers and so keeping her hands free for tree’s cleaning, the cooking of Eden: napkins stolen from the tables of every diningroom ever liquidated to stain more than could be sopped with a badge or by a country absorbed, clumped into tight balls, into furrowed globes, wadded with snot and liquids in a respiratory ersatz of rainbows. Approaching the summit, this Sinai’s high arch — they clear their throats, an invocation of phlegm, only in order to greet, to meet, say Shalom; only in order to tell their future generations of Adams and Eves about their own passage here — how they came to be at this dinner, how they came to sit and be served only after their crawl through the desert like snakes…the wasteland infertile no good racked an ocean away for the torture, the work details, the lineups, the musters, the no food or drink hunger and thirst, O the ovens!

Everything slows, when, to the kinder, the daughters Israelien all twelve of them Rubina through Batya, their guests, The guests as ours, are even only a few, fifteen minutes late, it’s forever. Rubbed wasted time, what to do. Sing a song, say a story. Tell me about your day, I’ll care as long as they’re coming. Upstairs. Our late wander on on intentions, always, please, and so it’s enough that they want to keep no one waiting, should be. Have patience, and enough with that shuffling. I’ll be up to tuck you in in an hour at 360º. Though this sound can’t be exorcised in that way, as it’s made in no image, has no source in the body that might seek to cool down or drown it: that of blood flowing’s too soft, a heartbeat too familiar, perhaps, makes you think of death’s love and not life, as it’s mechanically measured, pursed out by a Schedule, the pinch of a hand; it’s the tick, the timer’s tock, each tooth as its ancestor was, at the discretion of eternity, to the second, the minute; the sound, it comes from the oven, the oven at the end of the arch, the arch into the oven, then out the other side.

Here is their passing, from the world of the father to that of the mother, her power, again a reparenting: the menschs reduced, exampled less in their shrinking, their squeeze, while the womenfolk only gain, increase, go from strength to strength and further — over the ocean, perhaps the flow, the wetness, made it maternal. Over there, it’d been the Father, the overbearing idol, the loved one hated who’d reigned upon his high clerkdom chair, invested deeply in his dark office raiment, his threepiece, worsted wool suits, tie and hat, his habits of chess, coffee, tobacco, his ledgers kept in scrupulous scripture: sons mulling idle thoughts of patricide, while daughters were ignored, then the mother, too, she was kept marginal if not flipped past forgotten. Here and now, though, it’s the Mother, chesty in her coming, asserted — demonstratively disapproving, her questions as to how late they are proceeding without an apology, in mounting degrees of scrutiny with each tongued flick of the timer, which is the soul of her face tipped with the wag of a finger, accusative, the settling of blame on all but herself — and as for the father, he’s fallen, demoted, let go as the weaker, submissive, stripped bare of his birthright, mortified as made mortal; less meat and more soup: watery broth with its lentils cut up so that Aba won’t gag, it’s too sad. Admit how it’s sexualized, psychology, that science we’ve made to explain our suffering as an internal affair, if only to forgive those truly responsible and so, we hope, to avoid future wrath; the redoubled vengeance of those who do us the one, true, and inexplicable harm, as if nothing’s more natural save how well they keep themselves free from guilt…as if the sons surviving, they’ve agreed to dispense with the middle, the mediating paternal — and to head instead straight for the issue; to dive down headfirst, back into the black from whence they’d issued in warnings better kept private for centuries, generations of gross sublimation, denial: the Mother, the womb…them going into the oven, then out the other side — as another, reborn: not matricide, but an erotic fight — against death.

Her, she’s the head of the household now, around here wears the skirts.

And her tick, it sets even the kinder salivating — Josephine’s hiding under the covers, suckling knees that’re maybe her own. Her mother, our hostess, her timer’s swept through its circle, has timed the rich round of her face in a licking of crumbs from her chins…and yet still — despite the overwhelmingly regular, even attractive, features, the sweet eyes and mouth and the long lashes and small ears behind which the short hair hides as if it fears her, too, her snap judgments, her nosy impatience — and yet still, despite everything made in the mirror, it’s a roundness lamentably random, without relative order, not as much a mistake that can be rectified as it is an object that must be reckoned with in its every imperfection, you have my apologies: her moles and wrinkles, the marks of such an expressioned though meaningless spanse…her flesh morning moisturized and madeup in a false cycle imposed on the raw, is what rankles, puts off, the excess blotchy and loose without cream—ding, ding, Ding. And into all this, with its own history, its own pledges and perils if lesser than any they’d left then no less dire within their own context: counters, a dishwasher, a sink like a pit without bottom, its wastes drained entire counties away — into this, our guests emerge: they come through the arch, the homehearth, the stove he says oven she says and how she’s always right, it’s her kitchen — they enter it, into a world tiled and stainless an ocean away, across, on the wind, on the smoke; with the round white detector making a noise, frightening, an alarm misinterpreted and so, for a moment, until a window’s opened to air, everyone’s frozen, stilled with a bad heart ticked between times…this process not so much a transubstantiation as a forgetting; an experience maybe better controlled with medication, prescription: two pills — one for the heart and one for the head — and they’re Out, then In again…in this kitchen, where their hostess has been cooking away since forever: rushing to the sidedoor in heels matching her mitts, to wave their smoke out into night.

Tonight’s guests, they’ve endured the oppression of that most cultivated, civilizing of structures: an arch, which humbles, makes modest, weathering the threat of its stones to fall, the rocktumbled warning, the tomb’s guard, the sepulcher’s sentry, that that’s served from night immemorial as a gateway through the electrified fence to their keeping, ensuring a bow through the barbs, giving mouth to the fire that would destroy their design even as it feeds its own flames — O the deepthroated, humiliate way, this passage of exile that’s wordless yet punctuated with stark vowels of grief: the songlessness of the conquered, stooped under the arching shade of the willows by the banks of the Babylon rivers; the Roman shuffle as shy as a caretaker, pressed through the cracks between the stones of the Temple, to be remade into either oil or Europe: how they’ve survived if with head hung the terror underlying the form — the arch’s essential destruction, debasement: in its greatest manifestations forcing submission, almost negating of presence; in its least variations standing so tiny and tight that the quills along with the parchment are flayed from any soul processed through — how through this, again, they’ve survived, and miraculously with their appetite still intact…only to emerge from an oven, across the ocean and its lip they’re stepping high and slowly as if poultry themselves, so as not to break or catch anything over the door, opened for their hostess to check on the baking, theirs or that of a surrogate sacrifice — the chicken they’re coming out like, about to be served; still, singeing what hair they have left, snagging their limp, raggedy dresses, worn and torn skirts, their loose, thousandmark suits on wire racks whose grilling appears to mark stripes across their ripped uniforms, too, shreds them into ties, strips into bands to bind tight their hats in their hands. Their glasses go fogged, and so they remove them; they’re all wearing glasses: one schmuck in a pincenez, regular specs the rest; remove them by their bridges, by their noses, their ears, then go groping for the hems of their garments, to wipe. Upon emergence, their stars lose their luster and fall from their breasts, cool to the ground as if cookies or cakes of six pointed flavors, which are as treats for the kinder: holdovers, of sorts, to tide them for bed if they’re asleep come the dawn of dessert. Singer helps his wife out; the Rosenkrantzs, even the wife of them winnowed to bones by now and so dry they’re not even fit for the pot that clouds up above, its soup stirred around with a pinch too much pity — both try to cram through at the same time, but orderly, in step, holding hands. They’ve been conditioned so thoroughly by now, trained, made to follow orders as if a recipe for themselves: a perfect selfpoison, its only and secret ingredient, fear (they all bow their heads save the last of them, Feigenbaum, who hits his); some of them young, some old, some healthy, some sick, some, relatively — they might be related. As a homemaker, a homemacher, as her husband would kid, who she prides herself on knowing her way around every substitute, how to deal with each lack of ingredient, keeps herself knifesharp, spoon-willing, tines tastes herself to ensure: makes piles, takes lists, sneaks groupings and tests; and with no attempt to make separate, between who’s been expected, already counted into the sum of the chairs, assigned placesetting and portion, and who’s been lucky enough to have managed her charity with a spontaneous tip, or on an invitation palmed off secondhand — there won’t be a problem, I’m sure…as she comes back from her guard at the door, how she’s cold to the nose as she greets them whether by name or with respect for their ruses: some meriting hugs with the mittens all thumbs, and with kisses for others, one cheek each or one for each cheek, it depends.

They the arrived late ask altogether, Are we early? or only one or two of them do, of the women, that is, and how it just sounds that they speak for their husbands, as well — and foreheads are slapped…even that of the moon, a gestural smack at the glass, into night. When we don’t know what to do or say or even if, we ask, instead — if you’re uncomfortable in that, why don’t you take it off, change the subject — after the opinion of weather: It was warm today, unseasonally, but we’re in for a coldspell, I’m told…as some assemble as if into fronts themselves around the islands of kitchen, the counterings, a mass of grays and black, already arguing and with lightnings of vein in the eyes that say not that they’re angry, just tired; others begin noshing on what food’s left out, sip water cupped directly from the tap; as some remain in the kitchen and offer to help prepare if just to get away from their husbands, their wives; as others go to hang their Homburgs or their husbands’ in the hall where is the rack: mine’s the third from the left, don’t get any ideas; there are those who take their seats already in the diningroom, which is presumptuous enough though it’s not like they’d sit well with denial: seating themselves down in order of increasing age and infirmity, that would make sense, though not in terms of the actual arrangement of chairs to the right and left of their host at the head, but merely in relation to who’s able to sit first as none of them are much help to those for whom it’s a challenge: their napkins already tucked into their collars loose of a button, or up if weakly atop their irritable laps; their knives and forks held erect, at the ready.

Theirs has been an aliyah, though of a weaker species, a pilgrimage if oppositely directioned: in a distancing turned around at a deadend, before becoming stuck in a loop — a strangers’ sojourn, made to a strange kitchen in a strange house set amid a Development that has been designed so that nothing within it seems strange, which intention feels as if inspired by the divine chance of convenient location, amid a township that — if estranging to many too confused with the materiality of this world that confines them in its tile and grout to ever live freely themselves — was created complete with an excellent school system, too; how we live for our kinder: with its property values nothing to fault save the taxes, how ten cents of every dollar’s been allocated to educating our youngest in the various historical manners by which guests like ours have arrived here alive, if burnt badly; an emergence accounted for, approved, and even financed by the reparate banks of rivers never forgotten through even the unquenchable fire.

Theirs is a life remade, as if a recipe critically revised, secondchances for the not yet overseasoned; a spoil saved what with the mold scraped off with the challahknife of the woman at whose pleasure they’re hosted, these survivors, surviving — only at the indulgence of her slaving, that is, though she’s not letting on how exhausted, especially this week, despite the fact that with that kind of kvetch you run the risk and in slippers of misunderstanding, they all do, and even she herself every once in a while: she’s happy to oblige, though, that she doesn’t have to tell them about slavery.

And so the smile, all pep and pantry rearrangement, it says: we’re so pleased you’re alive, it’s a miracle you finally made it!

Call me Hanna, she asks when Feigenbaum calls her Misses Israelien to ask her whether it’s fine with her for him to sit where he’s already sitting and that without demonstrating any real intention to get up and move, and how she asks it of him sweetly…Hanna’s enough; not like she’d just been made to feel old, even worse: one of them. No problem, please — just stay where you are.

And then how Feigenbaum says, I had a grandmother named Hanna, I think — I think I remember.

I don’t know, it’s my head. You have any aspirin?

O, the queen of this kitchen, the bride who’s married this house into home, the Development’s mother, matriarch of Joysey just an hour’s commute from New York — she’s flushed, hot; worry about yourself, though, it’s only this, which she’s used to by now as if the condition’s become a daughter itself: a moon always full whose light’s to be doted upon, cradled as if a basket she’s hoping to lose to a distant river that runs dark and thick monthly…

Feigenbaum asks, Since it’s bad luck to ask, sometime when we’re not expecting it can you just say him or her so we’ll know. I hope I live long enough to meet, which is it again…I forget.

Nu, grant thee according to thine own heart, if you’re familiar, and, nu, she is and she’s isn’t: familiar because she’s pregnant again, swollen and snippy and thinning of hair, though her other daughters had never overstayed and by so much their welcome, what’s it a week well past due, any night now into day how she’ll spring open a door, the smoke that attends though it’s the doctor who’ll be wearing the mitts…high on the hospital wall, the deliveryroom as if a vacation house that’s how much time she’s spent there, she remembers: her as round as its clock and as pale, that and upon its thirteenth cycle its last how she’s slowing, how quickly she’s stilling, the tick of a timer winding down not just on a tray or dish warming but on the mechanism itself, the entire body she came with, the oven of her womb without warranty as installed too near the soul and too private — and then, at the same time, as she finds herself answering Feigenbaum’s psalm with her silence (behold, she recalls: she that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep), not so much familiar…which sensation she feels moved to explain is almost pregnant itself, as if by itself, selfgenerating in how it’s constantly, circumlunarly estranging me from myself, I’m so lost, but she doesn’t; in the end, timelessly unfamiliar, because — and this she withholds by fingering a knob, a drawer’s navel — not only is it a boy, Mazel Tov, but why does it feel like He’s early?

Their table, like the sun, almost set. In the kitchen, the shades are down anyway. Four are the legs of their table, a table with three legs is suspect, two are impure, and a table with one leg is an abomination in the eyes of God, which are infinite and are less eyes than they are legs upon which we might flee from the gaze of His judgment come the close of the Sabbath, our day of rest. The table sits on its legs, its legs sit on the floor. All is grouted — stayed, put — not moving, nothing rushing anywhere is what, just now no; all is grounded. Upon the ground, we know what is expected of us, and what to expect of others — to grovel for air. Tile tiles — molding molds — laminate void — formica without form — linoleum turf parquet that’s wood real wood, carpet carpets wall to wall to wall to sky; rugged, shagged, we’re just floored. Breathe easy, brotherfriend. We’re here to stay again. House to heavens stilled. Beyond, who knows. And who wants to. Cloud. All’s darkening, slowly — a scurry. Tonight is a night for stray dogs. As the dark is immovable, its shadows may roam as they please. It hurries into their yard up from the sidewalks. Without traffic, however, there can be no streets, there can only be sidewalks, and so every way of the earth is made safe. Finally, we are home. Weather’s wet, dripping ugly, though it hasn’t yet begun raining, or snow. The waters below and the waters above have not yet become separate. We will tell each a lie about the other and they will come to hate one another and they will never come together again except in a storm. That lie will be the oceans are more beautiful than the sky and the sky is more beautiful than the oceans, and though both are lies they are equally true. From a cloud, the threat of clouds. Collarless, tiny. Nameless and without sound. It paws the stoop, then raises its head. Mensch speaks. Woman speaks. None listen. This barks. It barks stray. Bowoof. Arfgr. And at its sound the lights give it a new name, the lights name it dog — flicking on.

A neighbor’s, hopefully — and inside, Hanna, like these lights alert to every motion of the house, those outside it, goes to see who or sends Wanda, thinking can’t be a guest, it’s too early.

Never to suspect her husband, who’s late, always last.

Thinking which door.

As Hanna believed: frontdoors exist only to provide for the existence of other doors, the sidedoors, the reardoors, and, too, to mark for her the meaning of those who might enter her house — for dinner or which meeting home-hosted, whether invited or just dropping in: who her intimate and who not, who’s to be trusted with her keys and her friendship, her family and hospitable heart. Some would enter through the frontdoor, only to exit — meaning Hanna would exit them, holding their hands, or her arm around their waist — through the side, the rear, and so they have gained in trust and love. Others would enter through the side, the rear, even the porch, only to exit through the front — and so losing the goodwill of her soul.

As Israel’s understood it, despite doubting his wife’s belief, always leaving his own home from the side.

Her husband, who even at this late hour sits atop Midtown when and where there’s still light.

The Sabbath to the left of him, Sabbath to the right, but there’s no Sabbath where he’s sitting — the sun stayed above him, just waiting, as he waits, he’s working, he works, is a lawyer, too much.

Of him, the following’s told:

One Sabbath the Sabbath arrived already and he was stuck, going from work to home he was stuck in the tunnel out of town, under the river, the Hudson — the tunnels Lincoln or Holland, depending. And so he arrived home from work only after the sun had set, after the start of the Sabbath. When asked by the kinder how their father could travel on the Sabbath, Hanna answered that a miracle had occurred: that night, behind their father was the Sabbath, before their father was the Sabbath, above him Sabbath, below him Sabbath, too, but wherever their father was, when, stuck in rushhour, in traffic upon the Turnpike or Parkway, there it was not the Sabbath, not yet.

Aha, Shabbos. Father ordains, mother explains. Also, she cleanscooks, sews, comes & goes, pays the cleanerhousekeeper, the tailor, the sitternanny. Wanda.

Today again, it’s Friday, a week until Xmas…the year winding down as if a ribbon unwrapping what present, a question, how many shopping days left — and which is it, anyway, questions: day the fifth or seventh, depending upon which calendar you might believe, which Sabbath’s yours; or else, nu, it might still be the sixth day, as the sun hasn’t yet set to begin the seventh with night and its moon.

Almost the Sabbath, then, Shabbos they say, Shabbos is what we say and have always said every week — Hanna preparing herself and her kinder, the house, too; all must be always prepared.

Hands unwashed crowned by tiny miraculous thumbs part the kissing tips of the tablecloth. Still in schoolclothes, kinder stand facing each other across arborvitæ, place of placesettings, polished to a diamond. One remembers, and so they kiss again the tablecloth, leave it lie. A heap of white to sweep. Another daughter returns, sponge in hand. The floor is dripped upon, there are drips upon the floor, Flood upon the face of the hallway — its mouth a drop, dip your shoe.

A mess, the two of them stare at each other.

One tries to embrace the other and the other runs away squealing, returns as yet another, bearing no gifts and yes grudges, and a rag, too, and so they sponge and rag, they wring and squeeze — they flap the tablecloth once, twice, three times to catch air, bounce angels and archangels into the heavens to bump their heads if heads they have or halos upon the ceiling or chandelier. Glass in tinkling strands. One leaves, returns with a pad for protection: the pad goes under the tablecloth, over the table on its legs on the floor. Order, these daughters are always reminded. And so the tablecloth is swept to the floor, the pad placed, arranged, straightened, rearranged, again the tablecloth flapped, begins the bounce again. The angels of archangels are crumbs, they’re granules of salt, they’re the apologies for spilled wine.

Next is that chairs are counted, check, one to threed on gnawed fingers, the ten seats of the limited hand.

Might not be enough.

They yell to their mother, to their mother in the kitchen as they seem to have a different mother for each room of the house: happy and sad and cooky and cleany but constantly busy, depending.

How many we having tonight?

There’s no answer, they haven’t heard before, what, they yell again, they’re always — we didn’t hear you!

A woman enters the diningroom; what Ima she’ll be they’re waiting to daughter accordingly.

Two Tannenbaums, she answers the last time I’m telling you, plus two Rosenkrantzes, two Singers makes six, then the fourteen of us and the Cohens, the Dunkelspiels, the Kestenbaums, the Lembergs, the Friedmans, the family Weiss and the Feigenbaums make, you tell me — thirtyfour…and then, maybe your father invited his new partner, he never tells me.

Make it, what’s that? Thirtysix.

We need more chairs, they yell once she’s left and they’ve counted again, we’re too short.

There’s no answer, they haven’t heard her, what, they yell, what’d you say!

A voice from the kitchen mouths slowly and tightjawed, enunciating as if each sound a loosed tooth.

And my feet.

Stop. Shout. Ing. Come in here if you have something to say, comes the voice.

Issuance of the drain, a ram’s horn stuck in the garbage disposal.

They stick tongues though they’re warned they might stick there, in the air, at each other and her they roll eyes, toopeopled planets that might be stilled, too.

Chairs are brought in from the kitchen. Four from there to six in the diningroom makes ten. All fingers, sucked. We need more! they shout, then bring them up from the basement — foldingchairs, contingencies of plenty, storaged for the makeshift of joy. They reach for one another, pass the chairs up the stairs from the basement, of which they’re afraid, it’s unknown. And rusty and flaking, smelling by old mold and the noise, they seat themselves out in creaks, blown joints, bad knees. As it is written: Chairs from the kitchen may be mixed with chairs from the diningroom, if the number of kitchen chairs does not exceed the number of diningroom chairs. As it is said: Verily it is permissible to place a chair within one to three cubits from a chair to its left and, it follows, one to three cubits from a chair to its right, no less than one cubit, nor greater than three cubits, which violations are impure. That is, if anyone knows what a cubit is anymore. A forearm’s span, from the finger’s tip to the joint of the elbow. Aha.

What’re we having tonight? Josephine yells through the hallway.

There are only two possible answers, one really for Shabbos.

Hanna finds herself screaming meat through the hall, through which Josephine runs, her mother’s shout spattering a blood blush on her face, anger and fear, vases of dead flowers shake upon low fluted pedestals, Old Master reproductions, prints, posters, and family photographs swing to unevenness on hooks on the wall. Fleischig! Flatware, plates, utensils. The cabinet to your left, a cupboard further. There are no such things as meat chairs or dairy, not yet. And then stemware, the glasses for water and pitchers and jugs, and then the cups, for the Kiddush, which is the blessing over the wine, breathing atop the counter opposite the sink, gleaming thirsty.

What? Josephine shrieks as she arrives at the kitchen, trips over the threshold, falls into the pit of her mouth.

Her sisters gather at the rim to throw at her matzahballs plucked from the burbling soup.

Hanna sighs tongue over lips to keep herself from a reprimand, turns from the face of her daughter sobbing, hulks her bulk into a drawer, opened, bumps it hard and high — the challahknife flies up and falls, twirls across the floor, its handle hits a leg of their brunch table, their daily, and stops, its sharp pointing west; bending over her belly she retrieves it, holds it in the sink, under the water that’s running, soap webbing her hands, over the knife, she rinses then runs a new handtowel across, drying fiercely as if to separate the serrations. Tap remains on, drawer remains opened, a meat drawer. Other drawers, the dairy, are closed, marked in white to benefit Wanda.

Staring at the opened meat drawer, at the assortment of utensils relatived with their difficult, always changing names for their callings, as improved spoons, modified forks winnowed of tines then sharpened to knives for the harvest — Josephine teardried, saved from her mouth having shimmied to safety up the rope of her voice, she’s getting breath, considering thanks. She’s trying to do right, remember the order: the knife for the butterless bread against the fork for the salad, next to the soupspoon (which is table for grownups, a tea for the kinder — for herself, she steals a tablespoon extra, hides it under her napkin), dinnerfork, knife (which is sharp for the grownups, less so for the kinder, sharpest of all for herself), dessertfork then the littlest spoon to stir sugar at the tea or the coffee to be served with the cake — everything Israel’s hair silver, Hannapolished last holiday to the shine of three moons, the New Year.

They’re featheredged, Hanna would explain, vermeil is ordained; the set was a wedding gift, an aunt and her second husband, on her side of course, she’d never thought of him as an uncle — or was it, though we’d registered with…

Josephine heaps the table with silver.

Still, the drawers aren’t all shut, the cabinet, the cupboard, Hanna stops reminding herself, to remind at her daughters — whatever you open you — place the breadplates, breadknives, the huge knife for the challah, handled in arm. Again, there’s an order: the plate for the fish atop the plate for the salad, atop the dinnerplate, then, with the soupbowl, dessertplate and saucer and cups for the coffee or tea to be brought in from the kitchen. Patience, is urged. The plates are set out, aired in a stack. Kinder scrape away sauce that’d dried along a rim, had hardened, though all the plates and the bowls had already been through the dishwasher once, twice, three times or more, cycles of cycles — it’s old, Hanna’d say, about the dishwasher rumbling, rabidly slobbing its soap — almost time for a new one, an upgrade for their anniversary, only if she asks first, then orders herself. And, nu, there’s an order to the dishwashing, too: handwash first, then dishwasher, and then a drying, in threes. Freshly washed then washed again and dried servingplates line the range, atop the stove he says atop the oven she says through which their guests’ll enter tonight. Hanna’s incredulous; you’d be, too. These hands, their wrinkles, this ring — maybe it’s the solution I’m using, you think?

An order, a door is opened, glasses are removed, the door is shut and is glass. Everyone gets waterglasses, only the grownups get wineglasses, all get cups for the blessing of wine later to be poured into glasses then drunk. A glass door’s opened, glasses removed, Hanna shuts it — to the right, to the right’s the reminder. For Kiddush, said to bless the fruit of the vine, sanctifies our crushing of bunches and clusters, makes holy our stompstompstomping. Annoyance. Insistence. Josephine returns to the kitchen, to another cabinet, from it removes the cups, hers and her sisters’ all from a tray, extras for the guests from the shelf above, then from that below the rest — to the left, remember, your other left…Hanna, tired of reminding, with a last reprimand — peace — exiles her daughters upstairs.

Daughters rush to their rooms, the rooms of their own and those rooms shared together depending on age, want, need, habit, lay out their just ironed, folded blouses and skirts, which is Wanda, upon their dressers and beds, pull pleats straight, air out the give inside pressed, wrinkleless pleats, wash their faces at sinks, other faces of hands are washed as they wash their faces with them then swab gargle mint pimple potion, they throw water at each other, scream at one another until Hanna shouts loudly to stop it up there, stomps a foot twice on the tile, rings the kitchen sink with a ladle dried now dirtied, they stop, step into their dresses and skirts, zip each other up and thumb buttons, then stand in line according to an age that corresponds to their heights in the hall and arrange hair in the mirror, littlest ones aren’t able to even reflect themselves, though they pretend to. Hanna’d put the flowers brought by last week’s guests into vases and into the vases she’d poured water from the vases of the week before last and the flowers, they’d wilted and died under the shadow of the kinder’s schoolwork, redletter tests and popquizzes aced, fingerpaint smudge, cutouts and crayon portraits of Ima, Aba, & Me that flap from the wall when doors or that of the oven are opened and shut — there’ll be new flowers tonight, reassures. She notices a photograph of herself that she hates hanging lopsided off at the far sun of the wall, makes her think to stomp another foot, straighten the floor. Or else, to accept disarray. Embrace mess. Exalt imperfection. Too much, every week. Hanna can barely remember her tired. Exhausted, more like pregnant again.

Rubina, upstairs and annoyed, frustrated, goddamn it. She’s in her room that’s hers alone trying to make up the bed she hasn’t yet shared with anyone else. This is what she was told once, never told again, it’s a rule, an order unspoken, old enough she should know better by now: Make your bed!

But the sheets always come off. Rather, the bed is always coming off, up from under the sheets.

Off, up, under: enough that one never stays on or off the other; the two rarely, never, commingle in perfection; she hates it. She’s always kneeling on one edge and stretching the sheet, fitted, over another edge whether opposite or diagonal it can’t, won’t, reach because she’s kneeling on that very edge that would give it enough slack, enough sheet, fitted, to fit, perfectly, the sheet, flat, also mussed, lying in a pile at her feet, whether on the bed or off, massed forgotten on the floor, along with her blanket, or comforter, whichever, what’s the diff.

She’s always adjusting and readjusting, pulling one side to push the other, pushpulling, making taut to obtain slack, slackening to taut an other edge, the bunch, the corner, half on, off half — it’s a mess, a burden…just wait until you go away to college and become an adult; and yet this should be unnecessary — but Wanda won’t be bothered, can’t be this Friday this late despite — especially when Rubina knows that in her sleep she’ll, unconsciously, subconsciously, though she forgets which, tossturn the sheets awry again, away and off, again and again as always, her dreaming all the while that her bed’s less a bed than an ocean, the ocean — her sheets are blue, as is her blanket, which matches her comforter, the pillows — that her bedding’s the ocean’s water, its waters, the surface then the surface underneath the surface, the depth, rising and writhing, the depths falling yet again into wake, and that nothing, no amount, degree, work, hope, will ever succeed in mating the two waters above and below that God created before He slept, too.

It’s difficult, just as, this having of kinder. Hanna’s realization in one mundane moment, in the kitchen, at the sink with waters falling unseparated, unseparatable at the stairs with her kinder ascending, at their bedsides as they sleep amid the lapping of dreams — in one breath borne high above the sky wet with kisses — that these daughters of hers aren’t only her daughters, that they’re themselves, too, people like her and Israel, future husbands and wives and even, eventually, parents, let’s hope. And so we name them, you have to: the names flow out from the mouth as their bearers once flowed born from the womb; the names given them perhaps giving them, too — or just a portion of what they’d become — to themselves; names maybe making the named; naming being in essence a making; the name Itself the sacrosanct secret formula of Creationdom’s breast. Though these names — in this family, so liquid, so fluid, always in motion and moved — sometimes shift, are forgotten, go remembered again, are less reinvented than rotated around, rerotated, stirred then scooped from, filled then poured out; they’re assigned, reassigned, then selected at random, by whom they’re ladled and spooned — the Israelien daughters being bartered and bribed for, erroneously threatened against by intemperate parents, the names forced upon them remaking with chores (Simone’s cleaning of vessels, Liv’s ritual tub scrub, sponging the bath); not that any of this matters to them, even bothers, this calling and changing born of convenience, confusion, as it’s only to begin again with another rotation, clockwise the names handeddown, dripping, a leak: a hole in the ceiling, a wound in the cup of the hands — until one eventide a lunation, as the names freeze over with the stars and the moon, each one of the twelve kinder’s anointed again with her own given name, never His.

And so Rubina — the eldest, the firstborn who’s fragile yet never much worried about, though still a girl, though still a daughter and without any privilege, without an exemption, upstairs folding her wardrobe, fluffing her seniority, her pillows and hair — she’s often known as Simone, the secondborn, though Simone is less Rubina than she is Livia, the thirdborn, who’s sometimes Si and at other times Judy, Hanna insists Judith, the fourthborn, and reverse that (Judy/Liv), or Batya (still the youngest, if often forgotten), and also Isa, the fifthborn, Isa from Isabella Hanna again has to insist, known mostly as Is — just like Israel her father she takes after, and so at least he should remember, though he doesn’t, not much — though to him Isa is occasionally Zeba, the sixthborn and so one of two middlekinder, as Isa or Is is usually poorly behaved — there’s never just one of them crying over a mistaken identity, the milk of her personality spilled — and Zeba’s only occasionally (poorly behaved), Zeb who’s sometimes Dina, the seventhborn and so the other of two middlekinder, who herself is sometimes Isa, and Natalia, the eigthborn, who is occasionally Dina, though Di is never Nat as she’s known who’s often also taken for Gill, the ninthborn, short for Gillian, who’s often Isa who herself ’s often Asa, the tenthborn, easy enough to make that mistake, and reverse that (As/Is), Gillian who’s often Jo, from Josephine, the eleventhborn, while Rubina, Simone, Liv, Judith, Isabella, and Zeba are all sometimes Batya, if seldomly, the last so far and the twelfth, though Batya’s never anyone else with the exception of Josephine then reverse that, and anyway Batya’s more often called Bat, but most often B or Be. As in Must you Be so annoying, so demanding, so loud and insistent why don’t you just go sit on the couch of the sofa and cry your way through a last show on teevee, a toy, play a game by yourself with yourself, any joy, count the cushions, which are islands, don’t you know, and must be kept separate from the pillowy clouds that require your enumeration as well. How many fingers, must you Be so difficult, how many toes. That is, whenever anyone decides to talk with her, to talk to her or even of her, orders and rules, which is hardly ever as she can herself barely speak. Who even knows if she knows her own name.

Daughters of Hanna — and daughters of Israel, too, who maybe wished some might’ve been sons.

He sits in judgment of himself atop his intersection when and where there’s still light. Skyscraping, Midtown. Not much longer. In a chair at his desk, one arm behind his head, the other over his mouth, stroking his beard, going gray to become white, the arch of his moustache, or yawning — tired, he’s always tired, he never sleeps, never gets to sleep, despite the pills, despite the wine and pills, despite his liver; strokes the remnants of his illadvised, inevitably late linner to the floor, the lunch of his dinner he flicks its rye’s crusts, crumbs, and seeds to the rich rug stretching out above the parquet slick, kept exceedingly mopped with what seems to be gribnes, or schmaltz — one day, his fear, he’ll slip and fall, his hip, his broken back, he’ll sue; might as well begin billing himself for the case, he thinks, sucks the seltzer from his moustache, withholds a weakling fart.

Tilting his chair, he props his wingtips up on the desk, stretches himself out, then pulls himself back in, fetally small, knees to lips.

Then pushes out again, tilts back the chair, feet up on his desk, then again.

This is work, if he has to explain it to them, his wife, his kinder, he throws up his hands and tells them, what I do. This is what I do to put a roof over your heads, food on your plates. What. I. Do. This is working as a lawyer for any plaintiff who could afford him. To think, those who do would make for better defendants. A caseload such as you wouldn’t believe. What he puts up with, what he hears, and what he says, too, every day, same old. Tell it to the judge who’s a friend.

His plaint: this waiting, this wasting of the last hour of the last day of the second to last week of the year, the last day of the last workweek he’s working this year. Winter, the sun to set upon early, foreshortened days. He’ll be late. To apologize, make up to them for his irresponsibility, the traffic, the weather. In his family, Israel’s often the defendant. His daughters the jury. With Hanna as counsel, he could do worse for representation.

The office is purging itself, up from the guts of the subterranean parkinggarage, with everyone off to their own — it’s almost Xmas, the holiday all the receptionists, secretaries, and paralegals observe…and a Merry Merry to you, too, to you and yours from me and mine and all of us here at Goldenberg, Goldenberg, & Israelien. With the support staff gone all next week, everyone else takes off — if not for their secretaries, what would get done? Cups without coffee. Briefs long blank. File the lack of an alphabet.

He searches his small office refrigerator — as empty as it’d been gifted to him, by friends of the family, after wasting an afternoon fixing a speeding ticket, assault more like an unfortunate misunderstanding for their son, a classmate of Rubina’s. At least it’s plugged in. Amid the silence, the thing cantors low.

It’s not that he’s still hungry or thirsty — after that sandwich too late, and this with Shabbos stuffed in the oven of home — it’s something else, something different: the refrigerator’s new magnet, TGIF it acronyms THANK GOD IT’S…his secretary, Hanna, no, Lorna, no — wait, he’ll find it, he’d scribbled it down once on the back of a businesscard, just in case — her name’s Loreta, yes, Loreta she’s always picking these magnets up wherever she shops, who knows, his wife’s habit, too, just as bad.

Nothing left to do, nothing expected of him until the Monday after this Monday expected, there’s no reason he’s here, no excuse, he should go home, his wife’s pregnant, expecting any breath, any any, but he won’t, if it’s expectations we’re talking, how he doesn’t, he stays, he works late; wraps a rubberband around his fingers as if in the hand of phylacteries, Shadai, holds a paperweight in the rubberband, tugs to tension, lets go, with the rubberband as a sling today’s paperweight’s hurled across desk, floor, office, through the air, misses the trash — a David he’s not. Around the trash are scattered months of paperweights, all the same model, moonily lucent and round — his secretary’s always picking these up for him whenever she goes on vacation wherever she goes, Loreta, he’ll remember it now: this specimen like the others says MIAMI across the top and he hates Miami, that he’ll never forget, that’s where his father lives, where his mother did, too, but his father; my daughters won’t grow up to marry like that, so he says, my daughters’ll never grow up. Holes in the wall where he’d overshot the trash, when the paperweights’d hit plaster, insulation, embedded.

It’s just around that time for Maintenance, the sanitation engineers due to slink in, dragging with them their pails and mops: he always avoids their eyes on his way out, reddened, sloshy, inflamed with powdered soaps, disinfectant sprays, it’s too terrible — how in their blindness, you see how you’re cleansed. A flesh hunched into woman stops at the door, smiles lone tooth, thumbs at his trash. He nods, she lifts it to dump into her trash kept on wheels.

TGIF. MIAMI. M.y I. A.ches M.y I, why these stupid diversions. Paperweights, there are none in his trash.

Wasting in his office, waiting for the Voice — amid the wilderness of petty dispute, for a test, a message garbled with grace, anything pressingly Urgent, requiring Attention whether immediate in action or reflective in referral and thought, anything to keep him in re: here, and so to keep him away from there, preemptive prophecy rescheduling Them. Home. And a goodnight to the window scheduled to his face. Merry Xmas. Nu, to you, too, take it easy…as he orders his work, shuffles paper, clips, throws all to a drawer of the stomach. Soon, his desk’s empty except for the calendrical blotter, his planner, which is showing two months and this month, the months prior and next shown smaller than this, shrunk, the past inked in with slashes. Fingers stained have marked with dark the month foretold at lower right. A moon revolves around the days of his planner, bleeds through boxes of weeks, wax to wane, fulling and renewing itself.

Too many engagements to appointment his keeping; familiar keys amid the wide, soothing hallway fluorescence: he nods to the janitorial shadow darkening the door to his office, which nods in return as it’s sunned, as it’s setting.

I rest my case, my feet and their boils.

A diploma, hung from a reverent nail, slid verticalways, then fell from the wall last week; he’d propped it on a shelf since, against a wall of family photos, which are doubles of those hung in the house. A tarnished metal nameplate upon the obverse of his door. An artifact already, scrape it with a toothbrush for six million years. If any teeth might survive. His name’s embossed on its brass. Though it’s nearly unreadable by now, quartercentury into this work, his name’s still what it was, and is good.

ISRAEL ISRAELIEN. And then a, a comma. And then it says ESQ., as if you had any doubts.

A sign out front, over Reception:

Goldenberg, Goldenberg, & Israelien

Attorneys-At-Law

The Goldenbergs? Are they brothers? Were they husband and wife, or father and son, mother and daughter, or father and daughter or mother and son? Or else just irrelative? What? May I ask who’s calling, asking who wants to know? Israel doesn’t, he never did, he’s never met them, not even sure they exist, ever existed. He’s now the firm’s senior partner, seniormost, and whoever the Goldenbergs were, if they were, he’s sure they’re long dead, they should be. Forgotten. Goldenberg? I don’t know. Goldenberg? Never heard of him, her, or them. Sorry. Wish I could help you.

I don’t know them from Adam. But his name was Goldberg…

Though perhaps, Hanna wastes thought on later nights — she’d never ask Israel, how to admit to that ignorance after a generation of marriage, she thinks — perhaps they weren’t people at all, rather those two golden mountains, the Poconos, and the silver valley between, where her mother and she’d vacation when she was young and could still swim the lake. One rumor among the secretaries was that the name was originally GOLDENBERG, GOLDENBERG, & GOLDENBERG, ATTORNEYS-IN-LAW, as one of the Goldenbergs had been a woman who’d taken her husband’s — and partner’s — last name, and that the third Goldenberg, Goldenberg Sr., had been Goldenberg’s — Goldenberg Jr.’s, the husband’s — older brother, they’d gossip: meaning they were in-laws, Goldenberg and Goldenberg the wife of Goldenberg, Goldenberg’s brother, née Silbertal as it’s said, and so — with lawyerly respect for the precise, the fineprint — they were attorneys-in-law, as well. Who knows. Though it’s also been said that Israel had started his own practice from nothing, and that the first order of business was to think up two names, to put up front, on the sign, on the stationary, to keep himself humble, in clients.

Quiet. He’s working. Don’t disturb.

In front of that sign the length of the wall, an ergonomic chair keeps the form of a woman at sit: obese, spine troubles around L-4, L-5 and lets everyone know, circulation problems in the buttocks, venous leg ulcers, ingrown toenails, bad breath. A desk keeps the chair. High and wood.

Israel loses himself to his planner: liquids, inks and shavings, rushed meals, spilled coffees and creamers, grains of sugar and sweeteners, unlettered doodles, a scribble of numbers the sum of all times.

Just how late is he? Enumerate this: it’s either the fifth or the sixth day of a week in the third, ninth, or twelfth month depending, December/Kislev whichever way you look at it, he more like squints at his watch though it’d stopped three hours ago. And his eyes. Hymn. Or maybe he’s already dead.

He looks at the hands writ on the wall, he’s alive.

Later, he looks again: the hands are two roots, growing further apart until they’ve grown near, again intertwine. Now it’s nearly a handful of hours past that twinning, their mingle. Fingers, two hands of them, scratch at his beard. He glances up from his planner, prints thumbs into face. Thinking about the time in his secretary’s office. Her clock he bought with the rest of her furniture.

And so he gets up and goes to her office and checks her clock to make sure it’s the same and it is, give or take and he’s taking, a sweet from her snack-drawer, sucks it on his way back to his chair.

Through the window, the sun passes: his fountainpen as the gnomon of the sundial that is his desk, and with it he scribbles a shopping list, oneitemed on an empty matchbook atop his planner at an angle of shadow equal to the latitude of his office, floors high at the top, how he’s risen.

Why not dictation — he’s thinking about calling up Loreta at home, having her take this down: Challah, two loaves.

And then, remind me again, what’re the names of my daughters? Loveneedy, Liv wants hugs and kisses. Judith does the best she can better. Give Simone her space. Easy does it Isabella. Zip it Zeba get a grip. Like father like mother as Asa. Be good to Batya, make nice to praise her effort. Don’t be meaner, support Rubina. How to remember, he’s asking, how could I forget.

And then those two loaves. Period, Paragraph. Loreta, his wife’s called: read it back, he’d ask.

Where’s his coat? She would know. On a hanger hanging in the closet doublebreasted. On the coatrack hobbled in the corner. No. Draped over his chair right behind him. And his glasses? Lost atop his head.

His coat, which none of his kinder’ll ever fit into; the youngest of them could be cradled in one of its pockets, in which she’d find an empty matchbook on which’s been penned a reminder.

Buy challah, it says.

Rolled in a receipt from last week.

From the city, he thinks, because he didn’t take the train today, the drive out to the Developments, what with the delay — an hour, fortyfive if I’m lucky. Which you are, Hanna’d remind, and he’d be reminded, remember, if only he’d call. To stop, run an errand. Just a minute. And then to stop in at shul, too, there’s still that. He’ll park in the lot, walk home in ten. All is actionable, that’s what’s on the agenda. He sips at the fountain on his way out the door. Always the last to leave, despite any nature, no matter what darkness: he’s thinking, O to have an office high above the sun!

Having presented the Gatekeeper with all appropriate identifications, Friday’s permit obtained a moon in advance, and having successfully passed Security, all ten tests, seven days of them and more, the pair idling down the street in a luxury sedan of the latest model — driving, nu, so not everyone’s so occupied with the Law — slowgoing and quiet as they’re trying to find whatever particular arboreally named turnoff, which is particularly difficult, and so requires particular slowness and quiet, in a planned gridded neighborhood of approximately ninety equally leafy, differently treenamed streets, and not just Streets: in a Development of one Elm Avenue, one Elm Boulevard, one Elm Street, and one Elm Terrace — not to be confused with 1 Elm Terrace, home of the Ulms — in a Development named by a committee of hundreds One Thousand Cedars, and not just because the Name rang investmentworthy, which it surely still does. Right turn there then left here where everything’s just soooooooo spread like all the way out, she’s just noticing, he’s thinking morning’s smooth, schmeared like creamed cheese over warmed pumpernickel the last he had to eat as she’s reminded before work with its ten cups of diuretic coffee — out where it’s too far to walk anywhere, ever, no matter what kind of shapely health you’re in and so they drive, three minutes down the Parkway from their neighboring Development.

His window down, hers up, then his up and hers down now his down and hers up again, they’re debating over the passing airs — the unabashed excesses of the stereo, the soundtrack that came with the car.

Gray with white shutters.

What number?

I’ll know it when we’re there.

White with gray shutters.

What tree?

Apple or Fig.

Which water?

There are waters here, too.

Apple River? Apple Lake?

Lane or street or avenue.

Or boulevard or way.

What number?

33?

Why am I thinking 33? and she straightens herself

in the seat and her skirts.

Open a window, he says, in the midst of a pianissimo mistaken for silence, tries to find something else on the radio so that they don’t have to talk. Across her lap a bouqet of irises; in the backseat, a bottle of wine.

What’re their names?

Who?

Their daughters’.

I forget, there’re so many of them, they’re

like locusts.

How many?

I think so.

What?

You don’t listen.

You’re the one who works with him.

And so?

You tell me.

Anyway, I work for him.

And us? she says, looking to the seat where the

wine’s rested itself in a seam.

What? he’s distracted, peers over the wheel into the headlights’ saving arc.

Nothing, she sighs you’re not listening, never, then sinks down in her seat, water from the flowers soaking her sweater through the paper and plastic they’re wrapped in.

He glances from his watch to the time of the stereo display.

Or the frequency, there on the dash.

He leans over once to peep at her watch and she thinks he’s trying to kiss her.

His office is empty, and Israel, who’d hired him just last week, is still sitting in traffic. Why? What do you consider your greatest strengths? Your greatest weaknesses? Where do you want to be in the practice in five years? In ten? The chair had been comfortable and the knot of his tie was of the appropriate size. What judges have you appeared before? What kind of hours have you been used to working? Have you brought sample briefs? His underwear had been new and clean, his socks, too. There’d been too many questions, and he’s expecting even more of them tonight, and more personal. You are married, is that correct? Does she work? Do you mind? Why no kids?

Still, it couldn’t have gone better, then the invitation for Friday night dinner. He’d answered a resounding yes to it all.

And he shows his gratitude through lateness, just perfect. An apology’s required, but he’s feeling more: maybe he’ll offer to wash dishes, or take out the trash.

Why the fear, he already has the job. Never sure.

Hanna, she’d hired Israel for husband already knowing the faults.

Why all this waiting when he has no workwise reason to wait, when he has a home and a meal, hot, and guests, yes, probably guests already, them waiting, too, and a wife and kinder only waiting for him who they themselves have no waitwise excuse — courtesy not having any priority over the coming of Shabbos?

He’s waiting in fear, Israel, out of fear.

His guests and new junior partner, what’s his name and the girlfriend, the wife.

Fear because of cancers, because he thinks he has cancers, because he knows he has cancers, because he has cancers.

And why does Israel have cancers?

Because his mother had had cancers and his mother’s mother had had cancers, his mother’s father, too, then their own parents as well, and then their parent’s parents had all had their own cancers and yadda and blah unto the most rarefied generation; everyone he’s ever been related to all the way back probably forever since even Adam, he’s thinking — whose death at almost one thousand years old isn’t accounted for in the detail that would seem to befit the first death, naturally caused — had had cancers, and then died of them weakened and feeble at whatever unripe young age.

And then fear for his own kinder, too. As those of his wife’s family who didn’t die of cancers, who’d died of anything else, if they’d only lived longer, lived long enough, if the Germans and Russians, among others, didn’t do what the Germans and Russians have been known to do, always, then they, too, would’ve eventually died of cancers, he’s sure of it, has to’ve been — it’s in the family, a blackbox heirloom kept in the basement, locked in an attic’s suitcase, a trunk at the foot of the stairs.

Inherited, dust to dust.

Why? Because. Cancer is a waiting matter. A working matter, only of time.

Why, because you have to wait on your cancers, patience patience patience — having cancers like having guests, expecting husband to father himself home with the challah, in time for the motzi and wine.

Why, because you have to work at your cancers, slowly, patiently, nurturing them, allowing them the room to like you know grow. Like in any relationship, like with wife and kinder.

Israel has all the cancers, and they’re all his kinder: some intelligent, others stupid, some handsome, others ugly, some tall others short, some embarrassing, others to pride. To shep nachas over and above, kvell the tears. To forget — though it doesn’t matter which in the end. Why, because they’re his.

Because he feels it, he knows it, deep down in the cells. He has cancers of the heart and the liver and kidneys and lungs all two of them then the throat and prostate and that that’s testicular, too, leftleg cancer, rightleg cancer, which he feels down to his toes that have cancers of their own to cope with. To deal, with the bladder control, the hairloss; imagining the mirrored shame, hurting as if a reflection of the pain disembodying, gotten under the skin despite the pills, despite treatments. He has eye cancers, nose cancers and ear cancers, brain cancers — and cancer. His cancers have cancer and those cancers have cancer, his tumors everywhere have tumors themselves and those tumors, tumors; tumors unto tumors unto tumors unto tumors unto the umpteenth generation, why not. In his office, Israel sits in what most would think perfect physical shape, recently evaluated, relative doctor signedoff on as maybe, nu, a dessert overweight, like most he could stand to lose say ten, twelve pounds, no more meals after snacks, though in generally satisfactory overall health, except for the — anyway thinking himself, maybe even wishing himself, dead away.

But until that wish might be fulfilled, finalizing him, naming him tensed in the past, Israel names himself, his own tumors — some he gives his kinder’s names and some names he thinks are his kinder’s, some names he would’ve like to have named them: Rubina, yes, Josephine and Batya, Evan and Jake — Jacob, to her — Josef or Joseph and Justin and Samuel, Simon and Steven or Stephen, and Benjamin, yes, Benjamin ben Israel Israelien; he’d always hoped for a boy, they all had, women crying out for a son, for Israelien cancers to come.

Why does he name them? To master them. To ignore.

Israel’s been sitting and naming his cancers, knowing them more intimately than he knows his own kinder, Hanna suspects. While he should be heading home, he reclines, swivels, tilts renal papillæ aching kidneyways to the left in his chair, hunches to count his cancers on his cancerous fingers with cancerous numbers kept orally in the black, deep into the carcinogenically latestage early evening, then thinking, maybe my cancers should have the honor themselves, their own cancers, too, and those cancers’ cancers, it’s only proper — and, soon enough, quarter after advanced, surgically halved, and with Maintenance spilling their own diagnoses in all the languages of Queens far dark down the hall, everything would seem cancer, cancerous, carcinogenic: his chair, his computer never unpacked, still in its box on the floor, and the quarky, panging computer things inside the computer still in its box on the floor, too, and his fountainpen and the dark though washable ink that it looks like cancer anyway, and the door’s a cancer door, his desk a cancer desk, he’s thinking the elemental material of the universe is cancer and that the fundamental quality of the universe is how cancerous it is: how the planets are nothing but tumors, mere carcinosarcomatic growths, verrucous hunks of whirlwinding storm, resistant to all terraformed, their surfaces ringed by heavy clouds of melanoma as malignant as hell; and how space, the orbital push and pull of everything it’s really only this cancerous tissue that’s always thickening and thinning into itself then perpetually expanding out then falling in cancerously until death and everything, it just dies. And then the cancers themselves come to death. And then death itself dies. And then what, he’s still late.

And still sitting, slumped, wasted, waistexhaled all unbuttoned notch expansion, slippers off without socks and in an even more comfortable chair at the head of the table, his, looking down the seats and settings at his kinder, his friends and guests, his new employee, the mensch’s girlfriend or wife unknown be thy name, and laughing at whatever his wife’s laughing lipstick at if only because she’s laughing at it and healthily, strong — the lipstick that says I’m still red and angry, but this is how I want to look to love you with company curious — Israel looks down at his plate and considers the chicken and he knows, don’t ask him how he just knows, that this chicken has cancer, that his chicken died of cancer and died for him from cancer, expressly, painlessly quick. He cuts his cancer with his cancerous cutlery (presents and the plates, too, and all of it from relatives who’d died how, give you one guess), then chews his cancer with his cancerous teeth, swallows his cancer, washes it all down with a glass of cancer from his cancerous glass, wipes his cancerous mouth with cancer metastasized as a napkin, its darkening starch, and then swallows again cancerously feeling the swallowed cancer, the throat cancer, mingle carcinogenically with the stomach cancer its gastric adenocarcinomatic manifesting intestinally and beyond, making for an even stronger, an even more weakening, more carcinogenic cancer cancering all and then turns more to the left, leaning, reclining as if appearing to rest but really in pain says to his Hanna: Hanna, it’s all so delicious and thank you, then across the table to his right and further down toward the kinder to the Feigenbaums there, Mister Feigenbaum now nursing with napkin and ice his head, the wound incurred through the oven, would he sue — him shifting uncomfortably in his seat with the urge to loose himself, sick — Misses Feigenbaum, whatever her name is, maybe Faye, he forgets, make sure she gives you the recipe: chicken, slaughtered and shipped, still feathered a little, frozen in the freezer, defrosted in the fridge, giblets removed for their own preparation (don’t forget to preheat), delicious offal reciped to a malignant perfection; motherchosen last day the seasons stained out of the book, made with prunes, raisins, all sorts of fruity sweetnesses — and cancerous, has to be, these secretions expressed from the bake of its carcass, whose last breast has been excised for the removal of its diseased bones from his plate to his wife’s, and how he sops the seep up with a hunk of the challah he’d bought, those two loaves as if the salted halves of the heart, the kidneys, the lungs, the gizzardy liver, how they all must be bad for you, too.

The drawer was opened and never shut and hung like her mouth.

A door hangs open on its hinges, Hanna shuts it, wipes clear its glass with a cuff.

The screenedin porch’s door’s open as well.

Everything open she needs to shut, she won’t stand for open, which makes her feel slightly ill, mistaken. It’s the pregnancy, her fat with a scapegoat. Let us grow bloated and blame.

With everything shut, everything’s perfect, as if nothing ever went soiled, gone spoiled, as it was and has been clean forever, without taint; she’s talking to herself pure from the very beginning — all that’s dull the life and the knifing made sharp upon the whetstone of her tongue, foods wrapped to keep in her skin, how she’d always served, never served herself, never been served herself, that’s if you forget Wanda and how in her high mighty she daily does. Which is terrible, makes her feel what, slighting, mistaken, and ill. But now she opens a drawer, and leaves it open to feel it, the sin.

In the drawer are the towels, and there folded responsibly, neatly, under the towels, the rags, the ripped pieces of old white dress shirts gone inked, skiddled underwear spangled with monsters. Patched together and held torn with sop. Rags once engaged as veils to hide the about to be wed, the knotted napkin she’d held with her husband for dancing at their reception, then once slit a hole with scissors it’s for knowing each other later that night, while hiding the nakedness, pleasure. And under all the rags folded below the towels at the very rooting bottom of the stack and there almost stuck to the plastic lining of the drawer is the Rag — the dirtiest rag, the unmentionable, the secret, the rag best forgotten, for mistakes made and of them.

This had been a napkin, from her wedding, their wedding, from the banquet or maybe it was a cateringhall she didn’t want it at but — a long story — from the table, from the very placesetting of the mensch she’d thought of as her father, zichron l’vracha as they say, when he was still alive and married himself to her mother: once white (the tablecloths had been offblue, as if ordered prestained, used or rented), this unwashed, neverwashed Rag’s unmentionable as much say as her underwear’s sexy or not, it’s a secret; at most she shakes it out outside, or now in winter off either the screenedin or windowed porches; how she can’t ever wash it, mustn’t, she needs it like this, needs the history, the past and its record of stains and grains — if it were to be found, she thinks it would turn her, sully reputationwise, ruin the marriage, though who would find it, Wanda, and then know what to do with it once found and, nu, why would that or they matter, why should they? The Rag’s soakedup the seas, the sevenfold oceans, encrusted with everything spilled and stained until the stains they aren’t stains, grains or seeds or the cancel of blackmail — they’re the Rag itself, its weep into form. It’s shvitzsoaked, stinks of spoiled milk and meat together — it’s scandalous, isn’t it? when they’d first moved in — after lawschool, even after loans paidoff, through ten years of their runging up the ladder — it’d hung on the oven, that was years ago, two stoves in the past; now it’s stained with everything since, thinking, it’s tough even to think about: it’s bloodcaked in seven species’, it’d wiped up muddy footprints from the tile floor, it’d sopped up overflows and drippings when a lid was unfastened; how she’d strain and shray for Israel who’d loosen and how some liquid would always spurt out, or, slicing a vegetable, like a head with so much between the ears, some seeds would leak all over the formica, to be wiped up always with this.

Now, the Rag’s as hard as a plate and its corners, its edges like blades, as sharp as a shard — as if a piece of the glass it’d wrapped that Israel had broken underfoot at their wedding (whose wine had been cleanedup with whatever’s around).

Hanna replaces the other towels atop, takes the top placed to do the dishes, with which to dry them, Israel’s undershirt shmatte — with it draping each object as if magic or fragile, to decide: which is a bowl and which is a plate, deep and with a stiffly high lip she’s not sure; only to scrape whatever’s been missed by the dishwasher, the machine and not Wanda, her neither — sauce stuck, a crumb caught. Holding a serving of silver, a platter, up to the light; the last to be replaced before darkness, the darkness of its appropriate drawer: she looks at her face looking at her, as if asking whose fault, misdirection; the platter’s edge a rose garland, she likes how it frames her face, which in turn frames the eyes: for a lighter brow, she tilts from; for fuller lips, she tilts toward. That stain, the remains of the afternoon, the morning’s meal ingrained: reflected at forehead, this mole made from a freckle, a kinder’s pox or the swelling of hives, must scrub it away — steelwool as if it’s been shorn from her thighs, grown between them…

Hanna replaces the knife from the floor to the sink to the towel to dry at the edge of the sink and now to its own drawer again, which she shuts; she takes a new towel from the other, adjoining, runs an edge around each tine of a servingfork, finished with the drying; until, she’ll begin a new meal, which begs a new wash.

Batya, still the lastborn though soon, soon enough, to be usurped in that position, standing awkwardly intoed, flexkneed, pudgy, and whiningly shy with her head held down to rest on a shoulder, her hands holding each other, behind her, her hands in her hands, or maybe they’re just stuck together, they’re bound — her hands are always shvitzing, they’re sticky, like stuffedup spinnerets with the webbing, the silkgum, all tangled. She’s tight in a onepiece pajama outfitted with feet, which zippers down her front as if a metallic mark for incision, her gutting — the spill of her feelings.

Her little rodent eyes say she’s left out of preparations, how that makes her feel: excluded and Hanna, never not a mother, notices, hands her a glass to put away on her own. Batya makes it three, four steps, drops, eternity, floor and the glass shatters into they’re millions of shards, not enough hands to finger them falling: a tint to drink, a prism to sweep, under the baseboard, the pantry, the refrigerator, the islands topped in formica, shored in with grout; under the profane weekday table, under the oven the stove, the dishwasher, hard by the trash’s full bag waiting to be taken outside — flung, the glass throws the light, the outside’s last light streamed in and, too, the overhead light, all over the kitchen, glistening upon the tile, which once was white, illuminating shades she’s never previously known.

Her mother goes not forgetting today’s towels in hand to the laundryroom, for a broom, for a mop, remembering, too — not only drawers — to shut that door behind her, as Batya trips into hiding, upstairs. In the laundryroom, Hanna tosses the towels to the washingmachine. And then, begins the cycle again, to be made new again — saving the dryer for later.

Hanna sweeps the light into a pile, mops as she yells upstairs, put on your shoes! steadying the dustpan with a slipper, then the bucket coldwatered from the laundryroom’s sink, rooting around under the refridge Israel says then the freezer nextdoor to the fridge for what’s stray; she slices her hand, holds it, opens a drawer, roots for the Rag, holds the Rag to the seethe then walks upstairs to her youngest daughter calling her name, so concerned she leaves the drawer open.

And then, wending her way to her own bedroom from the room Batya shares with a sister, soon to be made that of the newborn — they’re in the process of moving Batya and Josephine out, down the hall. This is called, Acting out. This is called, Pregnant; what’s that the doctor told me again — I’ve been through this before. Despite any comfort, the tickle of a feather the tear of a pillow, the stroke of her hair a whispery word — an upheaval. Weekly, the lingering suspicion: this house is a mess. A certifiable wreck.

Though the upstairs is left in pitch — the air a modest enough gown over her skin — she knows her way, the touch of space off the walls, each give in every bum floorboard, the yield of the blue wall-to-wall. Hanna touches the door-post, the jamb, the mezuzah affixed thereupon, then kisses at the fingertip that touched and the kiss becomes a sigh as her hand’s wiped on the hem of her skirt. Her pregnancy weighs heavily; she feels with both hands at her puff, bruised with bloat, her filled wineskin of incredible ephahs and kavs, drunk with fat it feels, like she’s thirsty, hungry, too, the yen always for — breathing enormously, long and deep gulps of air’s inhouse twin.

In her room in its bathroom connecting, she runs the sink’s tap, splashes her sliced hand underneath.

Remember to shut all the drawers and the doors, to turn off the taps — her instructions.

This she must remember, too: which door is her closet — some lead into nowhere, gape into void, a walkin with no out.

She takes a white maternity dress from the drycleaner’s hanger, more offwhite she thinks as she holds it up to the just repainted wall, and, softly, with a sweep, lays it all out on her side of the bed, huge and lonely as empty — always been her side of the bed though she can’t remember when or if they’d ever decided. She’d slept on this side, it feels, even as a girl with her mother, and then alone in her twin. This side, closest to the sun’s rise and its brightening of the bathroom adjoining.

Come my beloved to greet the bride—

the Sabbath presence let us welcome

their mother in the Master Bedroom would be an attempt at a prayer impossible to translate, which she sings to herself in a language she only half-knows, hums, then mouths without sound, kicks her slippers under the bed to sleep there with their innumerable sisters and shoes, as she sits on the bed to unburden her blouse and then again rises to step from her skirt.

Her hand she stretches out to the distaff, her palms support the spindle

She still has to make the salad, too, she remembers: artichoke hearts are what she’d forgotten, they’d be on the middle shelf of the fridge. What else, listing mundane. Standing naked in front of the mirror, which is nude itself, motherwide and as tall as all fathers, it’s hard, she thinks, even in this shadow, to feel, what’s the word? resplendent, to even ape resplendence, what’s that; she exhales her belly cheek, tracing the elastic waves made by the panty waistband, those raggedtoothed, scarry wavelets breaking cuts into a flurry of small widening rivers, stretchmark tributaries veined swirly and tidal from her thirteen pregnancies now, is it that many, has it been; cutting a fingernail through the watery grain of her vanity, cedar topped by tile, its dust if you can believe despite Wanda (where’s the nail broken, she looks but can’t find it, not really, forget it, that’s not what I do). Is it still there, though, and if so will it fit? and, then, what is It? all, the marriagebedclothes, the one or two items of clothing she owns for a life lived between the swellings of kinder, the workout apparel she’d bought for that one month fitness jag back a year ago now, the lingerie he’d once bought her, a year or so before their first, so long ago she thinks at the mirror, at herself in the mirror, thinking of resilvering, too; the intrusion on intimacy of practical life, the practicable, dusts: on this great expanse of wood taking up an entire wall — if there’s light enough naturally and not that of those bulbs above kept glareless and silent from hum, upon whose turns she doesn’t want to break her eyes in her forgetting of them over the Sabbath — a few hairbrushes, combs toothsome, tangled up with the week’s losses, mostly grays from her true hair, some six variously styled wigs beneath, shaytels you say, she says sheytels, one for each day and then the Shabbos’ kept under the kerchief of sky, snooded with a tichel, worn tight: straight, wavy, curly corkscrewy, crowned and banged, nipped in the nape, tapered and layered, the Asiatic silky and the synthetics, hitech faux, the Maxi, the Micros and Euros, the Rachel Gold, Leah Plus; these wigs over wigs under wigs she wears, auburning over a chocolate base over her own unadulterated hair, that natural brilliance, all lightening shades of the One True Shade: the naturally lightened if still a little dyed henna of aged dusk, of the olden night dawning in strands, to pluckout if too light to gray or white or to tuck behind the ears, the fall of horizon; then, an odd handful of pins: bobbies, safeties, and straights to prick her with the impractibility of it all, the girlishness; what a fool to fumble among the drawers open and quickly shut again upon another nail, finger, slit hand, for her old tiara, a souvenir from an occasion forgotten, a kitschy wedding or barmitzvah, given away as a favor to another’s celebration — she’d saved it for home, plastic and glittery littering why in its own plasticbag in its own bottom drawer. She rises from her knees to the mirror to try the thing on, sits it askew on her head then turns to look vain over a shoulder, profiling its shadow, holds herself steady at the lip of the vanity while feeling shakes from her belly, from the floor’s carpet a rattle and without her slippers or shoes, fingers for a hold the holes for her earrings removed — hears life coming up from the diningroom below, holds a smile.

Safeguard and Remember. In a single utterance.

And soon, she’s talking with the mirror.

Queen or Bride? she asks, she hasn’t yet chosen, it’s the source of such confusion: who was I last week? her left brow rising, littling slightly her pose, impatience in its patient oncoming.

As silent as a mirror is, and is judging — I think the queen, and so this week the bride.

It’s so simple to forget, isn’t it? like receipts, recipes…tonight, though, the mirror’s agreeable.

To forget like I forget hair things in my purse with the tiny round mirror — to reflect with it my reflection: the Bride, it must be the Bride — how could I forget. Write it down or you’ll forget, I always say. A gumstick, a sucker. It must be, another list…check the Bride, strike through the Queen with a line. Her mouth talks back to her and her eyes, she’s crying — you want an argument? He wouldn’t know, or is it a she, the mirror? her husband would’ve forgotten. Should I wait for him? she asks as she polishes, lowing her shoulder as if trying to palm herself flatter, so less light’s scattered into incoherence, less muddle more flattened slim, dark: licking a fingertip, then rubbing at the mirror as if trying to wipe away its blemish, betrayal.

One day, one Sabbath night, she’ll be the Queen-Bride, she of compromise, the Bride-Queen — she’s tucking her hairs, those of the wigs, some gray naturally, some unnaturally even, if only for the sake of appearance, authenticity, modest verisimilitude, behind the nubby, knobby earlike exudations of the eyeless, mouthless, but kinkily with noses, the brittle, chipped foam, plastic, and plaster busts that are the stands for her wigs, their holders, the heads she has spare, with all of even them thinking the better of waiting for him, Hanna nodding them shook with her hands almost strangling their bases under their chins in the permissive affirmative; and so Bride she’ll be, they’re in agreement, though their noses still snobby, held in the air.

She bumps a leg on the endtable next to her bed at her side as she goes to the phone, dials with half a nail lost to one of Israel’s work numbers — ext. 13, that’s the private, but there’s no answer and so she tries another, 1 through 12…maybe Loreta’s still there.

Hello, your Majesty…she begins to talk before she realizes it’s his answering service, the hiss, that strain of falsity laid over the voice he had even back then, when he’d call from the city out to her on the island, (212) to (516) to here and now Joysey she leaves him a message, telling him he’s the Groom like you’re it.

He’ll want to be King though, that’s the trouble, hangs up with a halfhour in which to try again, and then Shabbos.

What it is, is revelation: the hairs in the drain, clogging, the bald white tub and the showerhead above still adjusted to the morning height of her husband. An opening — it’s the type of translucent slidingdoor that Israel in his early haste hauls off it tracks every now and again, doesn’t quite pay to have someone schlep out here and take a look at it, it’s his temper that requires that service; but now as always for her in her caution at the tangling hair, which is both his and hers, and her beware of slips and falls it slides with efficiency, and Hanna steps over the edge of the metal. Tile surrounding, walling, is patterned in hexagonal agglomerations the same as the pattern of the tile in the kitchen, blue, white, highlighting similar flecks in the carpeting of the den. Or, you know how it is, she’s the only one in the family to call the Livingroom such, a source — seemingly a fourwalled, lowceilinged cell — of major domestic misunderstanding when Israel says Livingroom and she thinks he means what she calls the Familyroom when what he really means is what she calls the Den, take a breather. There to what, replace a lightbulb, water the plants, not too often, not enough. Just as Upstairs to Hanna is the floor closest to the frontdoor, at the level of the grounding earth, and below what Israel calls Upstairs that’s known to Hanna as Upstairs-Upstairs, just as the Basement below them both is called by Israel the Basement and by Hanna Downstairs, usually, to herself, her daughters and Wanda, or else to Israel she occasionally defers, resigns to calling it Downstairs-Downstairs, as the last Israel was down there was when, she can’t remember, for what.

In the shower, on its only low shelf she could sit on to wash her feet in her lap if it wasn’t so cluttered, so full and so pregnant — arranged by height if not by psychosis, tens of bottles, fifty or more tubes and cylindrical cans: shampoos, conditioners, oils, ointments once poured over the head becoming anointments, butters, balms, washes and exfoliant scrubs, all with their motley labels, rainbowing from her squeezing, her crumpling clutching, in their manifold phases of peel, anonymizing, secondshed skins, Now with extra aseptia, and scented with myrrh, with cassia, stacte, onycha, and galbanum with the 10 % added bonus of frankincense thrown in for free, alongside numerous plastic dishes below the marble dish that’s part of the wall hosting soapbars, cakes, variously watered away, some merely small lumps suspended within themselves, amid their froth, their expectant saliva greedy for the taste of her skin, others freshnew, and hard, as if ready right from their packaging the valuepak to have their names rubbed from them, their imprintings and inscriptions effaced by the water, her wash, the rash of dish-panning hands on her skin — all the names in the name of her daily ablutions. She runs her hands through her True Hair — Friday being one of three hairwashing days of the week, the last hairwashing day (one Sunday a month, we wash and style the wigs, or rather we drop them off, the salon does) — rotates the ring of the showerhead to her setting favored over that of her husband, then immerses her head in its pressure, not Israel’s pissy sprinkle but a heavy, thickly dropped flow, while bent, head hung, examining the veins running down her legs as if trickles, the slowing of flood, their lapping freezing as nerves numbed to the tips of her toes, then leans back, her hair lashing her shoulders and nipples like the handles H is for Hanna and C for who cares though she’s always thinking about it, so cold; the drain down which the impurities wash, their whirling pool, that spiral navel, picks lint from hers popped, absentmindedly. Stuff grows from the grout, all manner of mosses, lichens, and mold, epiphytic, parasitic, have to ask Wanda, remind her she’s reminding herself. There’s a hardness in her hands, not a stomach or another lump God forbid, but a straight sharp becoming softer by the moment, the spill, variformed. It’s the Rag from downstairs, taken upstairs-upstairs, she lathers with a finger of soap. What sop, the draining of stains. Hanna washes herself with it — outside the spray, its steamy source. A cell in here, so confined, she’s thinking cloistered, what could go wrong. Her hand wrapped in the Rag finding its way into her, wet: bubbles, surfaces popping the light — in from the bathroom’s sconces set unattractively, unflatteringly high over the sinks and that mirror — slip over her thighs, purse through her hairs; she blushes then steps back into the spray to rinse herself thin again, thinned, all this flesh and only a little that’s hers — if only to be rid of this hugeness, the heaviest pregnancy yet, hers or any’s, it weighs…a sea of skin, an ocean lathered as if a storming of soap, a cleansing if dangerously choppy, a purifying surge at hightide. Unbridgeable, uncrossable — this fear, though she’s been professionally told, technologically reassured: it’s not triplets or twins; Israel’s water never divided into the waters of her bags back from shopping, the paper, the plastic, her sack, the rubbernippled breakables stacked above the cannedgoods, she’s thinking, dented herself; the mixed multitudinous salad, undressed, the two loaves of challah I told him to buy, left uncovered…the boiling pot of the sun to burst itself into three stars by which we’ll divine — as many babies as the stove blechs its burners, which I’ll leave on over Shabbos, I’ll forget to turn off, that’s how many it feels, that’s how frazzled…she’s afraid, of this secret she’s keeping, that’s keeping her, how long can this go on, how far can I take it: it’s only one, though that’s not it — it’s that He’s only one: congrats, finally, it’s a boy!

A big one, Uncle Samuel had said, and he’s the doctor, the biggest I’ve ever dealt with. Though how she’d known it all better than him and before, having had the experience; but to confirm — wisdom is your own voice and prophecy, that of another — a brother, the eldest brother of her father had said, her stepfather, an observation a second doctor had seconded, this also an uncle of hers, Doctor Solomon, her mother’s brother, her youngest, concurring: ginormous!

After twelve, though, you should be able to handle it, which one had said, handle Him — Mazel Tov to your husband, a son!

She tells Israel everything, she hadn’t told Israel that — she’s thinking, why ruin it?

Hanna washes her heels and she washes her ears and she washes her One True Hair, the twitchy tip of her nose.

In the shower, she hears: the memory of the doctors’ voices, her own voice, and, within the whirlwindy muffle, gathered in the shower, risen to its tiled peak and lost in the steaming, the voices of her kinder; heard indistinct as to speaker or even age, as impossible to differentiate as to enumerate and yet how she tries, to respond, crying for her girls, and — through the halfdim of a hallway below her daughters slowly assemble, dazedly, pulling each other and pushing, teasing at one another, Rubina then Simone trying to act like Rubina detached, removed, behind the rest and mothering, selfconsciously not engaged in this messing around.

One’s holding candlesticks, the other with candles.

As to involve the others in preparations adult and mature and so, also, to calm them, Rubina hands the candlesticks one to Asa the other to Isa, has them place them on the designate sill, then struggles their candles in, melts, waxy dribble, rolls the wicks in her fingers, wicking them as stretched as their wait, longer, just a moment more’s yelled despite there being no yelling, disallowed as it’s almost time: Hanna comes downstairs in a maternity dress, blue for a boy, she thinks, betraying, whitesashed, not the white dress or shift, the mirror and the heads arranged around it in conference had decided against it, shook no then brushed hair, her white kerchief, her scarf the shade of the window opposite her descent with her heels pecking the tile from the last step to the floor, through the kitchen to leave the Rag wrung out in its drawer, shut, then a tug at the handle of the oven’s door to check, that the timer’s been set for tonight and tomorrow, the Shabbos mode back through the hallway toward the diningroom, her daughters.

From the windows looking in with the eye of the moon above, the sun below — who else is looking in in this neighborhood — she’s only a round taken of darkness, they all are, their shadows merging to mother the night.

Hanna smoothes the tablecloth, white, prepared for the taint of tonight — anything to put off the fire.

But Rubina strikes the match, and holds it there, the other sisters holding that hand.

The lights float in darkness, which interpretively is either something in nothing, or its reverse — and then, after the slightest, when no one knows if they’ll make it, the flickers go to life, in blue, in yellowing white; Hanna’s hands in their sweep, and her daughters, they follow: their words, which are hers, coming lower and hushed — though it’s not as if they’re afraid anyone’d hear — their vowels are stretched, wicked, lit on the tips of their tongues; some of the daughters knowing the words only through sound alone, others through the way their tongue feels in a particular mouthspot, the youngest ones just moving their lips in a manner that seems to them serious.

A blessing not of the candles, but of daughters standing at window without fear of fire, warm, and about to be watered and fed: what riches, what wealth of comfort and beauty surrounding; a pair of diamonds without jewelry, unset, these culets blessing them as if worth all the world, saved for their flee only every Friday examined and polished — valuables struck out of sulfur, dug from their holdings in trunks, dispersions like the spreading of flame…how strange, how foreign it feels to be thinking of how to survive, how to exist, to prepare for a future unknown and yet, inevitable — as the candlelights burning are the impurities in the night, it’s impossible not to admit, though the necessary impurities, they have to insist, that that reminds them of that that remains still unfinished, unlit, in need of repairs.

And then the moon, too, an impurity, and the stars — they’ve all come in pairs. Their house, so lit, the world entire. And everything around it, surrounding, forget it. Banished, unto the basement, unfinished. They disperse, the sisters one by one, each of them ten, a hundred almost, or so it appears to Batya, to her own hallway, or room — except hers, soon not to be — heading upstairs, to sit, upstairs-upstairs, lying in wait, peering out over the yard and the drive through their windows that won’t open, God forbid they should fall from; they’re brushing each other’s hair with their mother’s brushes, combs, they’ve had to wait until she’d finished with them. All except Batya, her tears dried to the quality of the glass she’d shattered, these shards from her eyes: our grief burdens, as it’s converted unto the nature of the responsible sin. She’s itchy, she’s scratched up her face and it’s red and hurts awfully. Now she attempts to sit in the livingroom, the familyroom, the den of her father and his animal life: struggling, shvitzy and angry, barely able to get herself up on a sofa, which Israel calls a couch or else Hanna does and Israel a sofa — the fireplace ledge. The candles are shining from just down the hall, and Batya’s thinking if only to herself why this happens every Friday with the sticks and the wicks and her sisters, it’s so together and pleasant and, she doesn’t have the word, the ideas, but why not every night, every day three times with meals and a cookie, a cupcake. Warming, though confused, babied with hope despite the burn of her cheeks. Atop a table of stacked bills, clipped receipts, President Resident, addressees: Mister Hanna, Misses Israel. A book she can’t read that holds prayers her head knows, a siddur. And a bowl of what’s to her fruit. Batya consoling, fists an apple that’s wax, bites, then replaces it, teethmarks first.

Simple enough, he thought: the instructions had been to buy bread, those were the rules, his engagement, the vows.

She asked, buy some challah — ceremonial bread.

For motzi, the cerement of our hunger — the burial in the mouth of the loaves, two of them, one for each language — and how he repeats this to himself, the request’s order, silently but still in the voice of his wife: on your way home, if it’s no trouble, she’d said, no trouble, she’d added, but not a conditional.

Not too much.

Still, it’ll make him later, this stopping here, twenty minutes out of his way and then shul, don’t forget.

She hadn’t baked. She hadn’t baked? There are fish in the sea and chickens in the air, and she hadn’t baked — it’s unnatural, not normal, it’s not like her, what’s wrong. There’s a kid in the womb, flyingthings in flight and things that swim swimmingly, and then what, nothing at all in the oven, the stove, cooling atop the counter, what gives. And so the order, the request as if for his complicity in a shirking that’s only hers if companioned: buy challah, she’d said, don’t forget as I don’t forgive as thoroughly or as quickly as you; after his shower, while he was dressing, suiting, tying his tie, before he left for work in the morning, before work, at work she’d left with Loreta a message she’d left him before she left for home for the day, the week, the year, before early evening, approaching the dark that’s only as constant as him, he’s flattering, as sure as the sun in its nightly crash to the pavement — stopping outside the storefront, the window display, arranging in its reflection his hairs left, wilted weeds like at the trunks rooting the sidewalk landscaped. He browses past the baskets empty of bread so late in the coming — through to his image, thinking an olderyoungish middleaged: hope, there’s still a little crust left for me yet.

Inside, behind the counter, an aproned mensch about to untie, fold, sweep crumbs, close up, and head home — just a moment, though, wait up, a mitzvah Israel’s asking, lawyerly arguing the Closed for Business he’s earned it, telling and tsking his merit, all these long years a loyal customer fast with exact change and his wife, how he should know him by now and this late, he’s just saying, Mister Baker with the apron and hat and three doughy chins, the floury cheeks, it would pay to know him here every week, and so why not a dozen egg kichel thrown in for free, every once in a while, just asking just asking, two loaves, if you have them, I’m in too much of a rush.

I’m sorry, the baker’s saying, I don’t remember you, Mister…

Israelien, he says, I’m just saying is all, having my fun — and now as if in apology: my wife, she usually bakes.

My wife, he says, doesn’t even know how to cook. I should tell you — feel lucky; except that I’m sorry, all I have left are two loaves.

I’ll take them, how much?

But they’re for me, my wife and my — tell you what, I’ll break with you bread.

Here’s a loaf, one of mine. You can always cut it in two.

Israel blushes the blessing, can’t find the thanks this harried and sanctified in surprise, and so he cleans out his wallet, hands to the counter too many bills.

The baker nods as he takes one of the pair out of their bag to bag it separately now, paper in plastic, the braided better and larger and wider and more goldeny done one, a single loaf challah, honeyglazed fresh, hands it over.

Have a wonderful Shabbos! he smiles Shalom, and he waves, while with his other hand scooping up the money then shoving it all down into the full box for charity positioned alongside the register, which is empty and anyway broken.

Give my regards to our God!

Israel leaves the store to the shrill disapproval of bells, a jingling that reminds him of the phonecall he never made to tell his wife, sorry.

To console: at least I’ll get home before Shabbos the next, but he’d used that the Shabbos before. And so to blame: whether Loreta, which client or car trouble, my shadow’s always making me late; him to tell Hanna later: I only wish it’d come along Monday mornings, there’s barely a minyan at shul.

In the synagogue’s lot, he parks himself over the three spaces of the Rabbi, the Cantor, the Building Supervisor, and leaves it there, the car, to be pickedup come motzei, that Sunday or Monday with Hanna dropping him off or Wanda, more plans, ever more preparations, who knows, maybe he’ll walk, even run, please God and his doctors at once — in a rush, just a duck for a daven, putting in an appearance; after all, he’s the president, too. Arriving only for the last lines of the night, the chazzanut cluck, the salty warble, he speeds his prayers silent then shakes all around hands, fins and wings, distributes free legal advice. Problems solved. Call me later this week, that shouldn’t be difficult. Consulting with the drumsticks and scales: the poultry knobby, the slippery fish, gathered to pray for the grace of a soul. They slither and stomp, they flop and squawk. It’s a commotion, a crowd, how he feels much the same way with his kinder: removed, held high above their messes and fits; the bestial consuming the oneg — he’s tired, so tried. And desirous of quiet.

The street: eternally lamped, but an unholy emptiness, not so much superiority as the need for its silence, him wanting to be left, if only for a moment, by himself, alone…Godless though wellmarked, turns reft and light familiar, then a detour Israel knows isn’t any shorter through the huddling woods, scrubby shrubs and hedgerows, through yards of happinesses (and sadnesses, also, he tries not to think of) he can’t claim, hopes rickety swung see to saw, junglegym to sandbox, to garden and herbplot, steps over scattered toys, the dispersal by wind of deflated balls, the dashed heads of dolls, then up the slate path toward the broad cedar door that guards them inside — suddenly, skirting around, past the enclosure for trash then to the door at the side, he knocks at it softly, as if testing, then opens.

Aba’s home. Bramblebound from the walk. There are steps over the threshold. He shuts the door behind him and locks.

A daughter descends, Isa he thinks, Asa she is, Israel drapes his coat over her head: the coat gray and old and wet a little and hot with him to be hung in the closet and not draped on the pillows of the bed, the foldout, the couchbed, the sofa convertible, in any spareroom whose hospitality has been furnished exclusively for the coats of the guests. He takes off his suitjacket, drapes it on a kitchencounter, then loosens his tie from underneath his collar unbuttoned, leaves it in its knot to remind: the day no longer strangling, not yet forgotten, never freeing; still complex, still coiled, prepared for the tightening come what may the next week.

How was your day? Hanna not waiting for an answer to the both of them asking; her nudging a trunk with a heel then examining, resentment, the damage done to her manicure while he greets his guests, whoever’s arrived. Though with not all of them yet and her not telling him that, letting him search and find only the regulars, the usuals and not his new partner already with his wife or the girlfriend, what’re their names, he comes back down the hall to embrace her — though her hands, without hug, are only held out to take the challah from him, and her mouth, which refuses his kiss, only tells him, instead, in a whisper: go upstairs, get thyself changed.

Hanna sits on this trunk as a handful of the oven’s guests gather, the wives just standing around, loafing, examining Israel’s purchase, passing it around for inspection — the single loaf he’s halved while at shul she hefts in her hands again then puts back in its bag to hand to Rubina who takes it to table.

How it’s unspoken, all of it — obvious to every guest that these trunks have been sitting here forever, for months, for years, incurring feminine disapproval, raised brows, the forcing of coughs; that there’s about as much possibility of them moving them as them moving themselves, though Hanna would explain, smoothing her dress folded around her as if she’s a package, merely wrapping, a box or container herself, short and breasty — her legs dangling, calves white above the veins, their skein’s twine:

We’ve been meaning to move them, but you know how things are…telling them they know, and, as if mystics or prophecy, they know: what with my philanthropic activities, thanks for reminding, how much I volunteer, the tzedakah, the charity with which I chair the meetings of schoolboard and then with the kinder: two of them aren’t in school yet and one, she goes only halfday. Nat.

I’ve got to drop them off then pick them up then drop them, the activities afterschool, extracurriculars, the clubs and the sports, tennis and swimming, enrichment, the study groups and all the projects, the labs and ballet, painting, piano lessons in violin and voice, tutoring, college applications and visitation, the cancer hospice and the old peoples’ home, the youthgroup and shul and, our Wednesday schedule’s the worst…as she leans to pick at the trunk, at a wig’s hairs from a wrinkled length of tape, gray duct that’s lost much of its stick.

Is’ schedule is packed, too, you understand: always running from one thing to the next, like a headless dinner; he knows this jeremiad well, rolls eyes from upstairs, news travels fast: that’s where the kinder get it from, my girls…they’re scared of the basement, and Wanda has today mostly off — explaining the arcane processes of packing and unpacking, of storage and steps, stairwells and ways, of narrow closetless hallways not enough space for all this, yardsale, rummagesale, waspnests in attics, of sumppump problems in the basement still partially unfinished as if to say, so shoot me and sue my corpse, this overworked, overtired body of mine and, nu, we’ve gotten sort of used to them here, patting, petting, the slow fall of dust moonlit through the windows.

We like the whole impermanence of the thing, like if we had to pick up and, you know, leave…like in the middle of the night.

By day, the house entire’s littered with trunks, suitcases and briefcases, boxes and cases, and the lawn, littered with life: a tricycle with leaves rustling through its spokes, a pair of discarded trainingwheels; rakes, some trashbags ripped through with branches, overflowing with clippings, some trashcans tipped to one side with neighborhood opossums and raccoons liningup amid the fleas and gnats gathering for their own feasts at the mouths; milk, how do they drink so much milk, and one of those big cylindrical waterdrums that goy in the black truck he delivers each week that he picks up the empty ones and so what’s this one doing out here with the trash. The mailbox hangs open, but there’s no mail inside and all of it’s bills. From the sidewalk, the house is white with gray shutters or maybe the reverse, three stories at least, too dim.

He stands in the street across from the path, the walkway up from the sidewalk’s street while she stands on the sidewalk itself, curbed at the lowest bend of the Circle she says, Looparound he says the Turnaround or About, taking the whole house in, its round plot. They’ve parked a length from the driveway of across the street neighbors, so as not to be found pulling up front and parking on the Shabbos he says, Sabbath she says, if she has to; there’re only three other vehicles, two so big they can’t be called cars, more like monsters these foreignmade mutations of steel and wheel in the we’ll go with loopabout or arounding (one, the Brooks’ new van, which’ll necessitate yet another garage reexpansion), and he hopes God how he hopes they’re not the last to arrive. Picking up the coat of his second new suit in a week (will Israel notice it’s the same he wore last Friday), draped over the driver’s seat, hunching it on, he shuts his door, stoops peering into the third car, that of a founding partner in another top firm he’d interviewed with that didn’t make him an offer, lives opposite with his wife the nonpracticing doctor and this, their midlife crisis convertible with its top up in winter, and, bareheaded and without scarf or gloves, he’s doing a little light accounting as she picks a stray thread from his pocket, unslit.

I think this is it.

You think?

Me.

Thirtythree?

Three three three…pointing to the numbers nailed once to the mailbox hanging open, then once to the siding its shingles hung off, one three in the latter display slung downsideup and so 3 3.

I’m looking good?

That a question?

She’s drying her sweater off, holding the dripping flowers away from her far while she wipes, like their smell’s sickening, like she can’t bear being near them.

All daughters, yes — how many they have at the least?

At the least, he says, I wouldn’t remember, realizing he’s never seen or met the same kinder twice.

How many times: there’d been that once at the office when the older attractive and the second he thinks were around, don’t think about it how old she is with the breasts and the breath and he’d been here once before her, without her, dropping Israel off because he had a car and Israel didn’t, had left his but where, he couldn’t remember; and there they were, playing in the yard, in the front. Who knows what games. All had the same look around the mouth and how they appeared to swap clothes. He remembers to her one in particular: one outfit not red or yellow, the other fired halfway to blue if blue was like a grandfather’s, what do you call it, he means techeles, that purplish on one or twoish of them. Running around, a dash, don’t get your clothes dirty, your suit you just bought it new. Here, now, in the frontyard, he’s mimicking them at their fun, trying to reenact for her enjoyment: she’s unhappy being here with him and thinks him weak and fearful, acting differently around others, how he’s rushing for props to cheer her, clown around smiles; grabbing them up, balls for baskets and bases and for soccer, mitts, a ripped pinwheel, a fractured kite tailed with a jumprope, a holed pail, rusted spade, making her even more impatient and angry, I can’t believe, a tossing of hair, what I’m doing for you, her walking up the path then the six steps of the stoop toward the doormat — a message there, obscured, dirt laced into itself, Shalom’s script interwoven — then the automatic lights light on and she jumps, stares at him, startled.

Sorry, he says, throws down a weatherworn, handling splintery slugger, rushes up the steps, next to her on the stoop, to behold the light suspended, the candles framed in the window.

They knock, ring repeatedly as if to get in sooner, almost to make as if they’ve been waiting a while. A single unlock, and a stranger opens the door, a woman with real presence, which means impolitely fat as not pregnant, Hanna, can’t be: her hair colored too brightly and the makeup reddening errant over lids and lips, Wanda sloppy in a shiftlike kimono and hurried along. They kiss her anyway and hug her surprised at how forward they are, how intense and excited to please; not stopping to kiss the mezuzah, they step inside by stepping around her, each to a flank and further to what has to be Hanna now next to Israel, his boss and bread changed into casual slippers but into new pants and a shirt, too, just as formal as the suit he’d been wearing; they’re holding each other, these guests, her head on his shoulder as if she’s suddenly tired, and how he tries to shake her hand off to shake Israel’s then say sorry to Hanna; apologies — that’s what I’m good for.

Wanda had Shabbos off, ostensibly, their Sabbaths and not hers, if and only if during the week she’d somehow or other satisfied Hanna, which satisfaction was often as difficult as proving to the most redoubtable of doubters the existence of an omnipotent God: though this can be done, God’s history tells us, there’s nothing impossible; Hanna’s particular brand of cacoethes carpendi, otherwise known as obsessive/compulsive not a disorder, an order, and that’s the idea, a mania known Developmentwide — tempered by only her optimism, her famous can do, oftabused.

On Friday nights, Wanda had to serve, that was it: upon Shabbos eves rare in Hanna’s happiness, her having plucked no fruited fault from the tree whose boughs, pruned daily, would overnight, over eves, branch into all species of tasks, errands, resentment. It was Hanna’s elected responsibility to prepare their family dinner — duty, the Schedule, just doing her part, hauling her own pregnant weight — and then, how she’d sit in the shade of accomplishment, accepting compliments heaped into her cups, bowls and plates, blushing the rose of an apple and eating all the courses from the challah on down to dessert even and drinking her wine, too, and Israel’s as well, though not while with kinder while Wanda would serve. As for those cups, those bowls of fruit and plates — though it was always the responsibility of these kinder, rotating, to set the table, each week, they would groan to their mother, shouldn’t Wanda do this?

I mean, every Friday, what do you pay her for anyway?

As if, to decrease your inheritance.

In any defense, though, Israel offering his with professional husbandry to Hanna’s constant complaint — I might want to fire her but I can’t (I have my reasons), I’m not strong enough and how that calls everything else into question, I might not even want to at all — Wanda did offer to help do this setting as regularly as such offers would be refused, and so today, as every Friday in its late afternoon with the female half of her employment situation upstairs and clattering at cooking, Wanda would lie on her understuffed futon and smoke a filtered menthol or vanilla into her wardrobe, adjacent, her head pillowed listening to the dull slipper and sneakerfalls from the kitchen directly above her room underground, one floor up. Until called for — her smoking complained about despite how much she’d spray even sunscreen and insect repellent and scent with candles and burn incense for hours. After she served, which was a responsibility mostly for show, she would return to her room and sit listening to the kinder haul everything into the kitchen: three steps to a thud, four to a shatter. After Shabbos, a sink full of dirty pots, pans, dishes, and silverware would be waiting, plates and bowls, a pile of shards to be superglued. And leftovers, to scrape to the trash, the disposal, or else refrigerated or frozen for Sunday’s reheating.

Dinner! Hanna shouts, Wanda echoing her way upstairs-upstairs, in that accent of hers fearsome, and yet so endearing her to the kinder flooding their ways down the stairs screaming:

Dinner.

Dinner.

Dinner.

Dinner.

Dinner.

Dinner…

one flight from rooms the floors of which angels and archangels bump their halos and heads upon if heads or halos they have. The stairs take their feet, as if the bent backs of older guests — the Singers hunching their ways to the table, each being the other’s crutch. Batya, the last one though nearest the diningroom, stumbles in from the room living, family, den, her eyes smiling through sniffle, her mouth shaped as if the last teardrop, toothless. Israel blesses her nose wiped with a tablecloth corner, kisses her head; Hanna sighs. Tonight is one of the last dinners — one of the last linners or dunches, not many more of them left, combinations, recipes of the blend, before meals vomit themselves into omnipresence, that voraciously forever cyclical course; into our eating and drinking through not just an appetizer or entrée to late time — as if the arrivals, the youngest the latest among them, were afraid they’d missed everything with even dessert already served until Hanna had said and loudly what would sound like the name of a God and then in that accent of Wanda’s that renders everything foreign and so authoritative, such sense of importance mitigated only in its echo of echoes amid the high giddy swoops of the girls: they’re so excited, forgive them, it’s almost as if they, the guests, had been early or punctual after all; though it’s not them that’s been so long expected, their company, conversationally muktzah their dwelling on business and workaday cares, it’s what their presence finally, ultimately, means to them, to the daughters: the dinner, the dinner, THE dinner…

Hanna turns to straighten Israel’s tie he’s still in, the same tie from the day’s suit retained — to tuck it under a collar again, button it in again, tighten; he holds her hands in his to resist.

How thoughtful, she thinks, he’s wearing it for his partner: set an example, if you love him so much…

There’s a great gathering at table, each to a place and its set — every meal’s mishegas at their settling.

Cork, who has the cork? they ask.

I want to smell the cork, I want to taste it, to suck.

Israel raises his cup and remembers: first to wash ’n’ dry, to bless the bread he’d bought not an hour previously, half that, broken into two loaves and covered over then uncovered and blessed — kneaded asunder, they’ve risen to the occasion, so high. She didn’t bake? rise newly arrived eyes around the table, again, mouthy whispers falling silent, assuring: she didn’t bake. Salt then dinner ensues now with talk, the stir of the soup, conversation never indexed under any number Oxyrhynchus, as it’s all too well known. Why? Save your questions to sweeten the coffee, the weakening steep of the tea. Because everything can’t be forgotten, that’s why we remember, and anyway, guests, they shouldn’t ask too many questions, am I right…be pleasant, host polite, elbows off the table, shoulders straight, no fulling while your mouths talk to rumor, to gossip, or talking to answer while your mouth’s full, I mean — you come from a good family, they can tell…the Who’s? maybe…O any relation to the who’s on the Mainline, of one of the Five Towns, figuring that’s a twenty percent shot, odds are you’re favored? what street, what number, asking, just asking, a daughter’s at, hymn, and a son who’s her husband, the Muttershtups, the Ladlefarts him the surgical judge how he does operations on minorities at risk and for nothing, takes requests, no, on second thought maybe you wouldn’t, but at least you brought a bottle, how thoughtful, how kind, a few flowers for her, a bouquet of bees, an arrangement: isn’t it about time you got married, and so maybe you’d bring your kinder, too, if you have them the two of you you’re so cute together or if not, next time, then what’re you waiting for?

Tonight, and all the Fridays are the same, and how that’s the idea, one of the guests, Feigenbaum his name, head tenderized, rendered as soft as his heart’s always been from his entrance through the oven, shifts uncomfortably in his chair, scoots, scooches, moves himself bald with his seat, shoots glances left, right, then across the table, excuses himself in a voice too soft and unsure to hear or truly know if he excuses himself or not with even him still unsure and so maybe he didn’t, rising, wending his way around his own chair then past those of the others, nimbly, squeezing himself as if greased with the essence of the fish and the chicken to follow through the small occasional apertures appearing between chairs and wall, knocking the hands of dim clocks to chaos and photographs and art, too reluctant and ashamed, too, to ask the seated to pull or push their chairs in a bit, a bissel and so generally upsetting all their eating and drinking and talking even more than if he would’ve asked to be disregarded politely to begin with.

This is his third trip to the bathroom this meal, though this one, and though he’s thought this every time, is no False Alarm. A ringing in the crotch, this bowelward tingle. The trouble is twofold, as it always is, if not morefold, brokenloaved, turning cheeked: one, his bladder, the second, his memory. Or. Though he’s been there twice already tonight, or has it been thrice, he has no idea, for the life of him, no memory whatsoever, of where exactly which bathroom is. Maybe it’s the medication is the easy way out — which leads I don’t know, wish I did. He’s not even sure he went to the same one the two times previous. It’s quite possible he’ll spend time in three different bathrooms tonight — if he doesn’t have to go again, the odds of which aren’t in anyone’s favor: the plumbing and paper supply. Even given the number, not to mention the aesthetic variety, of bathrooms in this house, those options of memory wellventilated, overlit, he still has no idea where the gehenna any of them are. And how to ask for help, for direction. At least, he had his dignity earlier. He’ll find it himself, don’t you mind.

He wanders, quickly now, holding it in, cupping his cheeks, bunching his pants up. A left here and right there, the way the light fell anywhere, and the darkness. That particular wallhanging, print, or mirror. The carpet giving way to tile, or was it a woodfloor, or rug pulled out from below, and if rug then a rug patterned how, over what — wandering into a part of the house he probably hasn’t or doesn’t think he’s ever been in before, maybe a portion that didn’t even exist prior to his wandering it, an annex, extension. Inscrutable. Obscure. He’s feeling for walls, his hands held out to ascertain distances, depths, pushing against the leaning, the pitching hallway, feeling for openness and passages, cavities, cancerous abcesses, pressing turns and doors and deadends. Respiratory difficulties. Senility. Alzheim, I forget. He fumbles with handles, knobs, trips over thresholds, his feet snag on rugs, snare on throw-rugs, nearly toppling honorary plaques and trophies from pedestals, then pausing to right them, pushing against and finally — his third bathroom of the night, a mistake; a door he didn’t mean to open but does, falls against it and there it, or only one of them, is.

He runs the tap to weather the sounds, shpritzes his wife’s, his Felice’s (there’s the name Israel’d forgotten, left in his other suit), less expensive perfume, stolen from home’s vanity and kept leaking in his jacket pocket, to create a cloud for the odor anticipated, then undoes himself, piles pants on the floor. He sits and waits, strains, tries; locked in with the running tap, the noxious atmospherics of imitation scent. Has he gone yet, hasn’t he — who wants to look, to hear, to smell. Not yet. Too pitiful, too embarrassed, to ask for help he sits and waits, taps shoes under his pants as if a stray calf ’s hidden down there and breathing. And he’s there next week, maybe, as if gestating, hibernative unasked after, never searched for or what, at least it seems that it’s his wife again his Felice eating her dinner, and drinking too much all over again, she’ll feel it in the morning in bed with a headache with me still bathroomed, locked in — her talking and always too huge with the wife of the household, not thinking to ask whether she, Hanna he’s searching for the name, knows where he, Feigenbaum, is; him hearing Hanna talking, talking, the woman’s always talking, to his wife just down the hall, the halls, the other guests, about the guests and his wife, about them to them, too, the preparation of food according to special diets, neighborhood tragedy weighed upon the Grecian scale — the walls shaking intestinally, the windows giving gaseous drafts; hearing what must be next week’s preparations in the hallways already, drawers opening, closing, and closets, he sits and waits, wetting wads of tissue, sucking them to formlessness, gumming the soap for his sustenance — they’ll forget about him, always do.

A clattering that’s the clearing of plates from beyond and he’s thinking dinner’s over already, or begun the following week just now ended — but it’s only the next course, he’s missing…

Understand, we have it on good authority, the existence of a first course, and are able to identify, too, a last course: a spoondeep, knifelong affair of talking over coffee with creamer nondairy, dessert then the giving of thanks, which is benching. Blessed art Thou for a spread such as this. But is a middle course not inconceivable, a culinary lull? This, then, is that middle course — the middle of the middle course. Fish, soup, and salad. Then the maincourse with sides then dessert, coffee, decaf or tea.

A matter of course — we are now after the salad but before the main, which is chicken. Fishplates have been cleared from the table, Wanda. Soup in the soupbowls has been brought steaming in from the kitchen, first linedup at the range, ladled, garnished, then served, thank you Wanda.

Soupbowls were then cleared from atop the saladplates — appreciative, Wanda, we all are.

Under the saladplates are the plates for the main — the largest, widest, and deepest plates, able to handle generous helpings of poultry and sides, circumferential enough to handle even the most reckless soppings of sauce, or gravy, and the most unimaginable of allowed forkful combinations.

Now they’re in the nowhere, the untime, of no saladplate, that’s been cleared, Wanda, and an empty mainplate: chicken and its attendant sides have yet to be brought to the table, along with their respective serving utensils…O God and the kugel. This is a moment-of-silence, momentless, without even talk…there’s no ease here — a silence the thinnest sheet of glass, the salival bubble bursting of night, a plate so empty it might not even be a plate, only a smashable absence, a shatterable null…how it would take the right cough from the right person, the right sneeze, the right set of allergies subjected to just the right set of allergens, exactly, to break it all, broken. Windows far away to where they mightn’t be windows anymore, only a clearing, the sky. When the daughters get restless, begin throwing stuffed toys at each other, Hanukah presents some hauled to tableside — they don’t know yet to wait, have to develop their timing.

Ding, ding. Dong.

Not an oven this time, it’s a bell, with someone at the clapper, some tongue.

As it’s rung, the hollow unhallowing dissonance…tinnabulation, as if rippling upon a depth’s faceless surface, it expands, Developmentally extends itself, too far, too deep, rings out to distort whatever’s beneath — a mouthvoid, a pothole, a ditch: drop into drops, as sound into sound, the slightnesses of distance, assimilation, its violation of the still and holying Sabbath…its reverberations illuminating the entryway, in waves that would wear away, after many nights, much night, the door, its frame. The light flicking on, fizzling out. Then, a knock, then three more times, quick, cold and dead cedar. Unconscionable if not unforgivable to interrupt a family and its guests sitting down to their dinner, and at Shabbos dinner of all dinners, but it rings nonetheless, then a knock, and then three knocks again, firmly, no gloved knuckles here; as glasses fall from faces — designer frames all, with one schmuck’s pincenez — fall to the floor under the table, fall silent on the rug, and all of them step on them staring blind one another. A blurring. Those who’ve lost glasses repair to their hands and knees to feel around on the floor, under the table, getting kicked, socked and toed as Hanna’s thinking what guest could it be, counting seats while thinking, too, how as always she’s on her own in all this, gets herself up as risen as any martyr and, her shroudy dress held aside in one hand, hurries for the door — as much as pregnancy might allow. But she’s too late. A daughter’s already opened, the eldest, Rubina, ever her mother’s helper, of late. Growing up.

And at the door is a mensch.

Nu, so you know this joke, too.

As for him, he’s old, at the age when you can’t tell if it’s a woman or not, but it’s a mensch, rest assured, especially if he’s selling pants, door-to-door. How did he get into this privileged neighborhood, you ask? how’d he get past the Gatekeeper then deep into the heart of One Thousand Cedars, especially dressed like that? He did how he did. His mother, obviously long dead, didn’t send him out looking the way he does, don’t blame her — he’s on his own. And standing drenched, a kosher undernourished fivetwo, fivethree at the most, I’d say a 32 short in a puddle of his own making. It dawns apparent, slowly, with the dripping on the mat that, in the diffusion of inside light and, too, his unintended washing, reads Israelien (sh: underneath’s where they keep a spare key)…that and the smell, the heat, the whiteness of the kneecaps as if an oceanic phenomenon — how it’s soon understood, it’s not just any pants he’s selling, he’s selling his own. Also helps that he’s standing there in his shorts. And a dented cap, a sportsjacket, illfitting (38 long), tweed, with elbowpads pleather, once white dress shirt boiled cleanish, argyle socks I’m not sure whether black or blue and scuffed loafers, brown — which is the stain, too, of his shorts, skidded and zipper’s ripped, tornup with holes ostensibly engineered by the Manufacturer of Manufacturers to bare all but his most sensitive parts.

Rubina stares as Hanna stands, removed, at the distance of an arm, her hand to the knob, next to a grandfather clock that’s only halftimed, neglected.

Now, to sell something you have to someone who wants it, that’s not selling. While to sell something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it, now that’s selling. But to sell something you don’t have to someone who wants it? There’s a predicament. And then to sell something you have to someone who doesn’t want it? Hymn, that was his stripped existence, the worst of all the worsts day in, day out, and so perhaps the most universal. Funny and not. Working nights.

With a widening smile, which reveals his nine or so gold and silver amalgam or are they mercury fillings, crowded around the tenth, his patinate tongue: loose, frayed threads of bronze, sickly blue, white and yellow, he holds out a pair of gray gabardines, draped over his forearm, pleated with tiny pools across its ribs, here, here, and here around the cuffs, too, onuses, dried into an off crusty residue. That, and the pockets have been long ago cut out. As the mensch’s licking his fingers, trying to rub these blots out and away, he’s shuffling forward, hunching his head into the doorway, foot firmly against the lowermost hinge…his face rising into a squint to gradually assemble, through the middling fallow field of his trifocals, a girl, a woman, perhaps the mothering wife of the house, he thinks, Rubina, hanging onto the handle of the door, her face locked with a frown.

Batya toddles toward them, past Hanna’s hands and between Rubina’s legs to smile beatitude at this latest of guests.

If they keep showing up like this, she’s thinking, maybe there’ll be no bedtime — or, mightn’t his presence sentinel yet another course, she’s hoping a dessert after dessert, perhaps, an eternally refillable treat?

Undeterred, he’s known worse, he asks her is maybe your father home?

You give me…Batya’s holding out a hand sticky with honey and lint, change spared out from under the sofa’s cushions, the couches’ waxwork stems and nesting twigs, she’s insistent — this girl, asking of him again and again a demand, her voice whining from within her tiny fist, shaking out her words of schmutz: You. Give. Me? You! Give! Me!

A hug, love, such dessert — and an endless bedtime story to tell, keep the lights in the hall on all night…

That you can get from your mother…he says in a disappointed whisper, a sigh, hanging his head and chazzaning to the pitch a little prayer of repentance even the Hasids out in Lakewald don’t know, as Batya and Rubina, two daughters the youngest and eldest, just then and whether in his voice or his eyes find in the mensch maybe something, hymn — an incarnation of a forefather known only from the unsmiling frames hung on the staircase’s landings; and possibly Batya only then remembers what her mother’s warnings are regarding talking to strangers: forget it.

Mensch’s confused, pats his breast pocket for his medication: it’s not there, which means he’d taken it, but if that’s so then why doesn’t he remember having taken it? Did it work, is it working, it took? Batya turns to her mother in tears, buries her face underneath her swell, in her crotch, shaking her head in a No to tuck in even deeper, don’t wake me. No thanks. The mensch gathers himself to peep through the doorway, the entryhall through to what he best guesses is the diningroom, leans his miniaturized weight against the jamb, shading his dark over the threshold as Hanna takes Batya’s wrist, slaps it lightly, and Batya, face removed, tots away from her in a fit, kicking at the pedestals and plinths lining the hallway away from the rooms dining and living, family, den, and into the kitchen, bringing their miscellaneously artistic idols and vases stuffed with flowers both lifelike and silklike and all of them real in their ruin down to the floor, crashes with her crying quietly again up the stairs to her room not to be seen or heard from again the whole night. Meanwhile, the other daughters have made their ways to stand behind their mother, passing through the hallway amid its trunks and boxes and packing supplies, mind the scissors, the tape sticking to the fringes of their garments, their trims tangled in twine, with Israel following as if whisked by the wind of their skirts, the guests left to themselves and to Wanda who’s serving — and soon the family entire’s assembled at the door, even her belly’s boy, and Hanna comes calmed, with more assurance, strengthened and safe in her home, frowning from under and staring impassive from over her nose, having gotten a whiff of what to expect, a scent and an eyeful, too, the inclination of an ear: attentive to the chink of mensch inhabiting the crack, and to the drafty drift of the spiel guaranteed now forthcoming.

And sure enough, the mensch mumbles what, it’s impossible to say…a For You Good Price pitch, st-stuttering now of fine material, of finer workmen-schship, a how it’s lasted him for years testimonial, rubbing now a pant leg between two fingers as if summoning a species of foreign dybbuk.

Nowhere! he oaths, because menschs like him have foresworn swearing, nowhere will you find gabardines like this, of worsted cloth the best, made of warm and wefty wool, or coddled cotton, of silk and rayon twill, he stretches out a leg — whichever you want, let them be. Much too long for myself, anyway, much too wide; wicks the leg out almost onto her pregnancy, proffering it to her as if a scarf for the winter outside, waving a cuff between two of her chins.

I’m sorry, Mister? What? A representative calling from the firm of Baggenhatz & Shirtzenpantz. Mister Farbenlint, here for a Mister Boxenbrief…Mister Lispstein, Fallenwallet, or Sloppenputz.

Matzahsock, or was it Latkerot?

Is here Nitz, he says, and what, please, is your name? reaching in to pinch Hanna’s bounty, one of infinite cheeks, oy his eyes.

I regret, Mister Witz…

Nitz, just Nitz, please and only…

I regret that my husband isn’t home, then nods at Israel standing behind her.

So another time I’ll call, he says.

Don’t, please. I can assure you my husband’s not interested in purchasing your pants.

This I can hear from him, he’s cupping his ear into a phonographs’s bloom. A cricket cacophony. Might I interest you, while we’re waiting, in the world’s smallest violin? A pity, you won’t be able to hear it, it’s Shabbos.

Israel has many pairs of pants, is how Hanna goes on, Israel shamed with his silence amid womanly worry — too many, more than he even knows himself, fine pants I can assure you, the top quality finest, though I’m sure yours are fine, too, in their own way…

As if to say, if God Himself can make one fine pair of pants, then why can’t He make many?

Israel’s wardrobe is virtually exploding with pants, we have closets both regular and walkin, I’d take you upstairs, but…of pants in every size skinny, lean, and not so much older, the widening of the thirties the age and its waist, the fall of the abdominal wall — and all of them the basement, the closets and drawers all stuffed fatter than I am, but with pants, I assure you. We’ve even given away so many pairs, charity, tzedakah, you wouldn’t be interested, would you (he’s shaking his head, not declining as much as in disbelief) — though, admittedly, Israel ends up always wearing the same two or three pairs, out of habit, you can understand, though I’m sure that…

So then you should tell me when’s maybe a good time.

Sorry, no thank you, and Hanna goes to shut the door even if it means mangling his foot then the lawsuit.

So maybe dinner’s not so great a time. A hint I can take, a hint even I can take. Shaking his head so much he’s nauseous.

Or it’s the food that’s doing it to him, asking, is that something paprikash I smell?

Please understand, Mister…

Nitz, Rubina says, her voice high and clear, it’s Nitz only.

Understand that we make these decisions, these decisions regarding pants, together, Israel and I, and so if you’d please…

Nu, I can’t see so well but I’m not also deaf. So no pants but what about dinner?

I don’t think…Hanna staring Israel down under the matching interior mat of the entry.

Or, hymn, some chicken for takeout? in a little box you could make up for me maybe? If it’s no trouble. I’ve got some string saved somewhere to tie it all up with, pats himself down.

No, no dinner, sorry, and no pants either, no maybes…Hanna turning away in sour withdrawal, nodding let’s wrap it up at Rubina, let’s not let the next course get cool.

We’re not interested, Mister Vitz or vatever, come back never, don’t let the door hit you on your, Shabbat Shalom.

Whispering to himself another prayer, underrecognized, underrated, another supernumerary blessing of curse and that while tonguing a tooth loose, Nitz steps his three steps retreat, minced, then bows at the knees before turning tush. Rubina shuts the door lightly, her hand feeling the seam, the scarred lining. All disperse, return to the table and guests, with what’s new to talk about with them, where should we begin, and who should. Josephine’s left alone at the door, her face flattened against the spectral stain of its glass. She presses herself to the cold, presses herself barelipped to kiss…the glare from the lights outside, the round belly lamps of the street, thinskinned, brilliant — the membrane of home keeping everything out, so very fragile.

Out front, mounted above the porch with three screws into shingle siding, the automatic light, equipped with a motion detecting, sensorial device type thing — Hanna says to Israel how after Shabbos he should replace it, the bulb — has burnt out. Nitz passes them as unknown as ever, I’ve never. Through the rest of his long, slow ailing walk — an attack of the heart once with the wind, his breath coming harder, was he always this old, without wings — his disappearance down the narrow, wooded slate path heading straight for the gate he forsakes for its intersection with the asphalt of the serpentine drive, from the two, maybe, difficult to tell in this light, three, four, five vehicle garage, then out into the open, just vacuumed street, the still air richly rarefied in its emptiness, and then through it, intruding, imposing and onto the next house, always the next, a mensch as much Elijah material as anyone going on to take in this entire tallhoused, widelawned hemisphere, a world itself in Development, new houses being put up by the day to the west, playgrounds and parks between them cleaved from the earth, lots amenitized with diamonds and turfs, making his way to the Koenigsburg’s, which is across the way though the daughters say always Nextdoor, their walk slated to face in on the looparound, the turnabout, Nitz faces down, shuffling his spindles through puddles of oil prismatic, in a funny, shuddering hunch. Josephine gives a laugh, as he wills himself again to the nerve of his spiel.

In their chairs still, they bench: quickly, murmuring thanks, gratitude formulaic; one part conversation to one part actual prayer, the grace after meals, the mealy, measly gratuity Blessed art Thou King of the belch, the flatulent lounge, each of them though — meaning the guests and, too, the daughters, though never their hosts, the parents, who are immovable, like the boxes, crates, and trunks here at home — seated in a chair other than the one in which they’d eaten and drank, placed now at settings over coffee and coffeecake and tea more appropriate to their talking and dealings, more polite and refined and less of this shouting and screaming diagonally, over heads, under table, all over the room; presently directly across from, or more intimately next to, those whom in the course of these courses their interests have chosen, nearer to those with whom they share the most common worries or the interests of business, with whom they’re most compatible culturally, or if it has to come down to hobbies, pastimes, or the sharing of peeves.

Slowly, gradually amassing but then all at once risen, as if invited, requested by clap, or another bell rung, no one wanting to be the last to leave, to be a nuisance, a pest or worse: to be needed at the sink for the doing of dishes, to be called there without notice or chance for escape; a seizure to fake, a doctor’s note written, a lawyer’s exemption — the guests gather themselves, holding their stomachs full, then shuffling their chairs back under the table; and then: in wary glances and whispers the discharge of last pleasantries, fulfilling the barest, the basest, the least expectations; them offering to help with whatever needs helping: the cleaning, the sweeping or mopping, the prodigious returning of chairs; all gesture no followthrough, and, just as ritually, their offers are refused, refuted: they wouldn’t have offered if there was even the most remote hope of anything otherwise — and so they leave as they’d wanted to leave, with every excuse in the world at the ready and yet, having done the right thing, with their reputations still intact and appreciated, slowly, gradually, too, these goodbyes, and then toward the door, with their coats returned to them by the daughters from the bed of any spareroom upon which they’d been wrinkled.

We trust your girls, who wouldn’t, but they check their pockets anyway, you’d better believe. And then again, goodbye, and all over again this good-nighting, this hug and kiss, Shabbat Shalom and an entire family of finally gratuitous partings, separation leavetakings, you know the Thank You’s, I’m sure — some attractive and likable, others ugly and not. Misses Feigenbaum leaves without her husband, alone. And so maybe some silverware’s missing. Dessertplates, dessertspoons, are cleared, cups, nondairy receptacles, saucers and spoons, the tablecloth’s kissed, to be shaken out outside for the birds, curbside scavenge, washed in the washingmachine, dried in the dryer; it’s stained, Wanda’s bleached prohecy, it’ll come out, Hanna, I’ve forseen it, envisioned such from the detergent’s advertisements and packaging…who spilled, not me, says the eldest, not me, says the second eldest, not me, what about the boy in her belly, a punch or a kick, impossible, maybe, incredible — this pregnancy, it’s known stranger.

The pad’s folded into three parts, the kitchen chairs are returned to the kitchen with Hanna herself bringing the rest down to the basement…the sink’s overflowed and the counters alongside the sink, the refrigerator’s made room in for leftovers and in the freezer, too, and those down in the basement, Wanda’s come up again for air and with Rubina the diningroom chairs are now straightened.

One remembers, returns with the sponge. She cleans the table a bissele, uncomfortable with such despite every week, how she’s going at it lazily and a little distant, distracted, not really meaning it, who me, this kind of work, who do you think I am, and what exactly does being a family, a daughter membered thereof, make me responsible for — suddenly, fearful, she hurls the sponge at another, hits her smack between the eyes, the sponge slides down the nose leaving a wet, wormy trail. As if to say, you’re turning me into my mother…and then, another laughs and throws her sponge at yet another, angrily if not meant that way, and yadda, me three — and soon, they’re soaked in a roil of laughter, a wriggly giggle foamy and wild, with them hiding under the table and behind the chairs hidden and sought, but letting themselves be hit all the while, still tossing. Unparented, who could believe. Each daughter now has her own sponge: specially, and in differently coded colors, each seemingly aged and sized accordingly, sopping weighted, thick with the idle drip of the tap, waterswollen. Wanda moans, retires. As one gets hold of another, her head in her armpit, her head in her mouth, in the skirt’s stretch over the womb of the widely held knees as if in a gynecological lie — and sponges her hair, her feet thrashing her arms and hands along with them and then which are her hands and which are her feet in a whirl as if she’s being drowned upon the floor, warping its wood, they’re laughing still and louder than ever with the spit of saliva, food and drink heavied drool…

When at the Israelien’s, do as the Israeliens. Each family has its own customs, traditions: who does what first, who sits where, says what when, the meaning of certain words as spoken to certain people, what’s allowed and what’s not, prescribed vs. proscribed, and the deepest meanings of their eyes, too, colored in the same blood, they’re so wrecked; these are all given over, wait for it, there…in those looks, the anticipatory glances they give each other when guests arrive, the expectation of the always, the every week, the holy returned. But will things always remain the same, what about change — that’s asked as well: will these customs, these ways of being, of doing, as given over, handeddown to the youngest kinder as good as the Law, still remain? Slowly, gradually, over centuries even and beyond, millennial, hardening. Becoming writ in a script, old enough be believable. These habits, ritualistic obsessions, because the Law is the oldest obsession, with the hardest death, suffering — these are as sponges: how the skeleton remains, the spongin it’s called, after the sponge dies and its cells are scraped away; or else, all becomes synthesized in the spirit. And only then can it absorb, heavily, grow weighty with runoff; become malleable, bendable, stretchy. Wrungout. The sponge fight continues, its natural force unabated. But what is it, exactly, that seeps through the pores of the sponge, soaked in many times its own weight — lenses of soap, facets filling the eye. An unblemishing, a cleansing — each pore is a wound, pouring. Their father, Israel, the only one left at the table, seated sound at the head. His feet are stretched out and his toes are wriggling idly. His hands are on his stomach. Fingers at rest. He parts his lips, about to speak as if in reprimand — but instead, he halfburps, halfhiccoughs, as a sponge flies by an ear, barely missing. And he doesn’t even. Flinch or scold.

Night inhales through his nostrils, exhales in a puff, he slumps deeper, reclines: he’s stuffed, huffy about taking the pills he should, the indigestion, the heartburn, begin working out, the gout, his head…the table’s been sponged, at least wetted enough by the toss of his daughters, by the wastes of their throwing until hard as rocks then dried to stone with the air and the scuffle — and here’s one of them now with a new, laundered tablecloth to be placed upon the table again, then a vase of flowers, too, gifted tonight, irises, Hanna’s birth-flower by the secular calendar, placed atop that; how very thoughtful, and quiet. Unshatterable, a fading of steps, a pit pat, the dribble of daughtering wine to your tired. Makes you drunk with exhaustion. Dregs, disappeared. The kinder, who had showedoff and actedout throughout dinner, have now been exiled upstairs, upstairs-upstairs and are by this time, let’s hope or deny what really goes on around here, either sleeping or hiding, having been dismissed by only the silence, Israel’s refusal to yell — only the sigh of his disapproval, the slight heave of his lungs as lodged tight within the skin of his dinner. A button of his pants birthing loose, underwear thanks fat for elastic. Hanna comes in from the kitchen, and she and her husband moon around the diningroom, emptied. Relax, the drooly flow of smalltalk, lazy endearments, yawny reminders for Sunday’s household repairs…the faucets, they’re still running upstairs, and in Feigenbaum’s bathroom, the drip of the sink without sponge underneath to soak in with silence, the tappy leak it’s enough with it, and the hotwater heater — an industrial forehead, its veins pulsating madly; soup that’s been supped to cool, still frothing over the lip of a hairy pot…and suddenly, wet’s flooding everywhere, flooding from her, from her legs, between them cramped and spasmed, this is It, it might be — the Sabbath and how there’ll be no hospital visit, not because of the holy and its violation as much as because there’s no time and like Shabbos, you just have to believe: darkness eclipsing the diningroom, the candles burned down, absorbed into melt — disfigured weepers in wax, olden idolatrous forms of what she’s become, she’s becoming: a burnt huddle of the mothers before her; the rotations halted, globe’s guttered still, the revolutions snuffed out for the sniffing, their ashes…boxes bursting themselves out of their calendars, spinning emptied, negative, from their orderly orbits: it’s been these however many hundreds of days, xd out on the kitchen luach, the diary, the addressbook’s backcovered page, and some hours, minutes, seconds, prayers, shooty pains the stem of her standing, has to sit now, next to her husband, across, the swell flipflopping, huddling her weight to one side then the other, its haunch as if a cut from the butcher’s, those leanings to glean, the which aisled shelf reachings, hunching on line at the Shoprite, the Acme, ten items or less almost there, at the cashier, conveyor and then, the rush for the sink, the toilet, for the Pathmarked pathway vomiting her stoop, then her home…the shoving at the magazinerack, the candy and gum bumble and push, the elbows as knees and the toes up to tickle at the foot of her throat, the hands of the jaw straining through — the doorhinge, a head inclined in its mouth toward the dark that to Him must be light, has to be. Her shrieks and almost the smell of milk souring, not of treyf in and of itself but of mixtures forbidden, that or another burning…now waking the daughters, rousing them out of their beds, their rooms then down the halls to the stairhead, or, if not asleep — up, their eyes photoreddened already, tented, pillowcaved in their clubs — then pulling them downstairs gaggly ragged and demonstratively sleepy to lineup against the wall of the hall in any order fertility might urge and bear witness, enough room kitchen to dining. This is what you will be, what’ll happen to you. Only if.

Israel, to rip off her dress. And Hanna, she’s tatteredly naked, immaculate, tearing: her hair, her hairs down below and bushcurly, as dense as her eyes, now being emptied she’s leaking all over, deluge through the ears and nose her mucose, stuffed, but runny, and through her mouth how she’s screaming herself by the wick of her tongue it’s on fire, shouting red blessings blackened to curses flaming at once, exhortations and honks from her pits and a fart, I love you, I’m sorry, I don’t…look at me, don’t you look at me, get out of here, stay, bring me a glass water, a couple of, tensing hard, the tush clench of the bottommost jaws, a gurgle boiled of wet dreck and blood — relaxing herself now into pain’s onrush, then tensing again and again. And at midnight, a halfhour later or so, He rises up, and she bears Him right there, loafed upon the table from which he, Israel, swipesoff the tablecloth in one movement deft with his wife and the vase and its flowers above her head, undisturbed — the very table upon which He might’ve been sown nine months earlier, has it really been that many moons ever since — tense, breathe, bearing Him, all of Him enormous, fullgrown, and it is a Him, Israel with joy and the boy with a whine and a beard and, what are those, glasses already, here on the table in the diningroom, late and yet a week just in time, in no way premature for what’s to birth with the coming of Xmas, the New Year, the secular’s turn…even old, old enough, what with those wrinkles and the pruning red and the wizened blue eyes and the mouth that’s ready to say — what’s with all that hair flecked ruddy blond and with these clunky glasses on how the daughters crowd in to get a better look, their drippy frames bent from His passage the better to know His parents by and His sisters, gasping in terror their own eyes, their own mouths as He’s wipedoff, amniotic forewater pissily pooled over his hairily rimmed and pudgily lipped mouth bubbling to burst upon His glasses’ lenses, smudgy with fluid, that and His, nu, you know, too, which is hairy as well, the beard down below and apparently, can it be, already circumcised, or else, an ornamentally tiny, scaly dangle, it seems, just now wiped away with a wrist-flick, soaked up to dissolve by a sponge that Rubina brings from the kitchen her own and with Josephine close at her heels, almost tripping, holding the challahknife with which she’s been entrusted, maturing already, slow down, sharpdown, with which Israel cuts the umbilicalcord then with its handle to smack His tush into breath — a cry upon which their expectations might now impose words, meaning, a life, help me, I love you, go away swaddled…Ima; as Israel, how not to answer, to give in to such a demand, a request so prodigious and especially easy to please, hands Him to Hanna bloody and wet in the tablecloth, which barely covers the whole huge boy, Him.

A First Helping

Serveths twelve (12).

Not twelve fullgrown, nor twelve halfgrown; not twelve male, nor twelve female; neither twelve kinder; not twelve fat, nor twelve skinny; not twelve of the holy, nor twelve of the unholy; but twelve all who art hungry, whose thirst knows no bounds.

And as this recipe doth serveth twelve, she must doubleth — as twentyfour (24) are to dine here tonight.

Verily, these are the Ingredients — as they were received from Someone or Another’s hands at the very beginning of the timer’s wide circle:

2 chickens she has slaughtered, or purchasedeth preslaughtered,

2 onions, which she has peeledeth and quartered and,

4 carrots, peeledeth and slicedeth and,

They’re good for the eyes, Misses Feigenbaum says that’s what my mother Olev HaShalom always told me — I don’t know if it’s been proven or not, just know that’s what my mother

Olev HaShalom always told me…

2 leeks, slicedeth and,

2 turnips, peeledeth and quarteredeth and,

4 celerystalks and their leaves, choppedeth and,

4 sprigs of parsley, which are optional, though as Hanna said in the name of Down The Block Sarah, They are recommended…

Salt and pepper to taste

My husband doesn’t do well by salt, says Misses Feigenbaum.

He really shouldn’t.

And verily these are the Instructions that the Lord thy God hath given unto her this day, through the merit of the Sisterhood Cookbook:

Placeth the chicken in a pot of a capacity of many cubits, with the water, four (4) liters runnething over: Four, and not three, nor two, nor one, neither any other number not obtaining thereto, and bringeth slowly to a boil, removing scum as it forms, as it is written, Thou shalt removeth the scum, wheresoever thou shalt find it in the Land.

Addeth the vegetables, and the parsley, too, if thou shalt so opt, reserving a little for garnish. Seasoneth with salt and with pepper. Then cover, simmereth on low heat for two and one half hours, no less and no more, adding water as necessary to maintaineth original level.

Removeth the chicken after one hour, and take from it its meat so as to not overdo it. Moistenth it in its own broth to be served later, then returneth the chicken’s carcass to the pot for the remainder of the time allotted, again addingeth water as needed.

Straineth the broth.

Thou shalt not skimmeth the fat floating atop.

Before serving, addeth two (2) handfuls of fine farfel (See FARFEL) or lokschen (See LOKSCHEN) or mandlen (See MANDLEN) or plätzchen (See PLÄTZCHEN) or spätzlen (See SPÄTZLEN), or yadda: verily not two large handfuls nor two small handfuls of whichever, but the two handfuls of your firstborn son shalt thou let simmereth until soft.

Ladleth into fine porcelain.

Serveth hot, garnishing with any parsley reserved.

Soup — just the thing for winter.

Being begotten by the begetted begetist whose begattable begettance begatted Big Beggeters and their Big Beggeterers begotally, whose begettability was begotted by other begotterers begatally, and yet other begatterers besides, whose begottance, begettance, or begattance begetally begot he who begat he who beget the begotting of the begotist so burdened with the begatting of the begatist beburdened again with the begetting of this Benjamin, the Ur or First Benjamin, a son of his father’s old age, the oldest known ancestor of the namedafter latterday Benjamin whose first wife’s, the first wife of Benjamin the First otherwise known as Benjamin I, name was Barba, who was out back in the shade of the far mountains gathering fruit from the familytree when this Benjamin he entered his dwelling after a day long and hard herding the flock and there on the floor, which was dirt and, as they commenced with the congress of knowing each other, mud, knew Batya, who was the handmaiden and daughter of this Barba and Benjamin, too, knowing her now for only the first time and in doing so actually making her his second wife: him entering her, him wounding her, then sickening her, having her now vomit out of her mouth the flowing lacey finery of a wedding gown, also her shroud; and verily Batya before she died, or as she died, bore Benjamin Adam, her brother, as well, who he was harnessed to the land as was his father, Benjamin, who had handed over to this Adam his firstborn son as Barba was barren the flock and his land and the sun and moon, the stars and the sands and the mountains, too, and this Adam begat Seth, and this Seth beget Enosh, and this Enosh begot Kenan who lived seventy years before bearing Mahalalel, who lived for eighthundred and ninetyfive years and bore Jared, who beared Enoch who walked with God for only threehundred years, as it’s said, before he was no more, leaving behind Methusaleh whose span was to be threefold that of his father’s, and Lamech and landed Noah, who, once arrived, only to depart again in a wander through ten more deluded, deluging generations, through Shem fathered Arpachshad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah, then Avram, who as Avraham fathered a people whose first recorded ancestor, generations later, to be born out onto the landmass known to them as Europa was named Matthew, who was harnessed to the soil as was his father, Yeshu, who had handed over to this Matthew his firstborn son the management of the land of one Count Chmielnicki, say, and verily Matthew begot Mark, and Mark beget Luke, and Luke begat through a Hava who was then the most beautiful woman in the world that was their small village or town of only ten houses around a dirt and mud courtyard and its barren tree (this the fruit of a marriage for which, incredibly, neither were put to death) a John who he verily fell like an apple from favor in the eyes of the Count, though the current Count was almost blind, though the Countess then current, with whom his father Luke had also slept, oversaw all business matters, and though John held a note of credit, nothing helped, he was soon illiterate, without harvest one cold season and bankrupt, in debt to all and so sold himself over to the Other Side, here where he met a woman named Judith whose father had owned and operated the SRO establishment in which John lodged, Judith née Eisenstein who, Judy, bore him Peter who he went on to establish, own and operate an enormously successful lace factory, which would go under as lace began to be made by machine in the early years of the next century dawning, then married Ruth née Stern her name was who would love less him than his money, who bore him before leaving him after yet another bankruptcy Paul, who was raised by his father and who survived him and was himself deep in debt and so went and married another unattractive, wholly repellent though ostensibly moneyed Affiliated woman whose name has been withheld to save her the embarrassment and, too, to assure for at least this Chronicler a shaded place in the World to Come (suffice to say, she was a Lerner, of one of the foremost litigious families known to greater New York), who bore him a doctoring son he insisted on naming Jeb, who grew up then went and wed a Deborah née Jacobson and begat with her Hanna, who she was raised by this Deborah her mother and, after Jeb was hit by a bus in the Park on his way to visit his mistress so way up on the Upper East Side as to be Spanish Harlem, a mensch named Gary Hyman, some hold, though others hold Hymen, whom she, Hanna, anyway called Dad, Aba, a Hymen of the Upper West Side Hymans and not of the Downtown Hymans or Hymens, the ones, the Upper West Side ones, with all of those laser surgery franchises and that son of theirs, Gary’s brother Seymour Hymen or Hyman, a graduate of whatever school, with whatever degree MBA, anyway, very impressive, do you know them, and if you do will you say Shalom for me — though she, Hanna, was, in the matter of her paternity, until at least the night before her batmitzvah, none the wiser, not to be confused with Weiser, which was a surname of second cousins (her mother’s), Hanna whose last name she returned to being Senior after her true father, Jeb, assumed only after the breaking of the news, her subsequently tearful batmitzvah, then the exiling of Gary who’d explained it all to her out to Venice, the one they have now in California, and a new stepfather soon obtained, name of Arnold, Arnie a seller of electronic and personal computing components on commission to friends whom she and her mother loved dearly; Hanna who knew no one, Hanna didn’t know anything, until she knew one Israel Israelien, who’d become converted as much through his love of her as through his love of her people and the incredible tax breaks that came with it all, Israel who was three years her senior as she was three years his junior Senior as they’d tell their Fridaytime guests and then laugh, and so it came to pass that Hanna bore Israel over the period of eighteen years daughters, twelve of them, too many of them if not to love then to at least know by face or by name, and to any degree of difference, or intimacy: and verily they were Rubina and Simone and Liv and Judith and Dina and Natalia and Gillian and Asa and Isabella and Zeba and Josephine and Batya again known as Bat, following whose birth Hanna finally bore Israel their thirteenth, a son, this lastborn of theirs and their only male to be named Benjamin Israelien, known to us as Ben and less often as B, born to them upon the Sabbath at fullsize, at full intelligence, too, whatever there is, who’s born mature already, with glasses and hairy, another beard in the immediate family.

Blond and curly, His head full, frosty it seems sometimes, at other times golden — an inheritance, many have speculated, from a lover of a grandmother six times maybe great, willed to Him by some archduke or other minor noble who’d kept her, others hold, who this landed notable was sleeping also with the woman’s sister, Benjamin’s greataunt five times over. How else are we to explain, the scholars have asked, how else to explicate, to reconcile, call to account: how Benjamin received His own two eyes, as blue as a recessive flame, from a Cossack, even a Nazified Aryan, who’d perhaps raped a grandmother of His, though it’s said she’d liked it. How else to represent His full, Elvis kingfishy labial traits than as an inheritance from an Iberian peddler of fraudulent Scripture; His belly unmistakably that of a bearish Russian, hulking over the scrawny poultry limbs of a Pole; His nose that of a lusty Gypsy priest ordained in the Orthodox church, if only for the salary and shelter, or maybe that of the fake Father’s cow: a sinful snout, gigantically puffed; His heart, that of the most kindly Venetian whore, while others say her pimp, and as for His mind, O His mind — that of a rumpled, sleepless Viennese, who’d breathed feuilletons between aphorisms, his sperm a spurt of ink. As for the horns, though, that later horn in, those He gets from His mother…don’t look at me.

And so if the record above withstands judgment, the Tests, ten or no, and all its facts, names, and dates are for sure, verified, God’s honest, signed, sealed deliverance received with a profusion of thanks due to ineffably named offices as obliging as they might be obscure, then despite all the goyim involved, despite all the Prussians, the Russians, the pull and push of the Poles, His Affiliation is here proven, thus exiling any rumor, defamation, and libel outside the midst of our encampment: that though His father was not born Affiliated (how he’d allowed himself to become converted, out of love and, maybe, to get a job as an outwardly respectable lawyer with a decent firm of impeccable reputation), His mother was, was born Affiliated and, as the Law states more than once and simply, the bloodline lives and dies by the mother: this the opinion of one Rabbi Yosi the Galilean, who’s not to be confused with yet another Rabbi Yosi, whose Talmudic ruling permitting circumcision on the Sabbath would be invoked by both Hanna and Israel throughout the eight days following the Shabbos birth of their son, regaling their family, friends, and acquaintances and even those they’d meet on the street or at the store with the wisdom received — that circumcision, as a covenant that predates that of Sinai, in fact supersedes and defers the Sabbath Herself, and can indeed be thought of as more sacred, holier; how their rabbi had told them that, the same family rabbi who would’ve circumcised Him on that very Shabbos, had he been a firstborn himself, and survived. And what then, we might ask before we’re carried any further away from His origins, into the realm of history being written and rewritten today, what then of Ruth if you know her, Ruth a relative from way back then, toward the Root? Ruth that Moabite, that hardluck, hardliving gleaner, her bundling sheaves enough to last her the bitter cold of the winter that was also her womb, the widow of Mahlon, daughter-inlaw of Naomi and wife of Boaz, that almona aguna whose calling’s the confirmation of everything: her book ending with a genealogy of its own no less confused than that that’s been given above, which leaves her, through the seed of Obed and the water of Jesse, as the bubbe to end all bubbes — the grandmother of King David, and so, as tradition always tells us, the Matriarch of the Messiah: the King of Kings, if you will, May His Name be Perpetuated, Increased, to be from the upwardly mobile egg of a fallen, shellshattered mother; the Moshiach, the son of a convert, who would believe…Israel, are you there — what, if anything, does that explain?

Allow us, then, this walk down the blocks, these blocks or those that resemble them, as it doesn’t much matter, as it’s all the same nowhere, it’s home; the grid of the suburbs. Siburbia, as Israel often called it, if nowhere can be called, if nowhere can be known, the tundra, the wasteland, quarter century later how Hanna’d still laugh when he’d say it, even if he’s late home from the office and hasn’t called her ahead, heard her voice to humor it silent. It’s kept tranquil here, wherever. Our myth is affluent, it ensures quiet, permanency, solitude lit and with multiple zones of heat — whichever way you might turn in this northless, southless world, there’s this sense of perpetual arrival, at stasis, though traditions of ascent are still observed daily: up is always an option, and down is the grave.

Here are the streets, though they lead only to other streets — and all are sidewalks, if not in purpose then practice. Only the road leads out, and only the adults, the grownups, know the one street of the incomprehensibly infinite streets that are all of them sidewalks that leads to the one road leading out, to somewhere or other. Shalom in peace. O the sidewalks, the sectioned pathways here that lead nowhere, only to other pathways leading to nowhere, then intersecting in crosswalks, crossing streets and lanes and avenues, ways and even boulevards and courts in white lines — and that one road still, where is it, where does it go?

Here it’s safe, but Ima says to look both ways just to make sure.

The one road out is the one road in, into the sanctum, the penetralia — a lot where once the Development had planned to build a pool, but the depths were drowned in committee, rezoned.

Instead, His house had been raised thereupon.

And then out — the one road leading into the one wider world, it’s said, into the Unkempt, the Unmanaged, God knows.

Ima says to be careful, don’t talk to strangers.

And yet here, no one’s a stranger — as you might know where they live, with whom, what they do and even how much money they make at it, though you’ve never met them, they’re yours…

Everything inside is the domain of the Gatekeeper.

In this world there are always brotherhoods, clubs, orders, or organizations, nearly illimitable loyalties each with their own mottos, intricate insignia of the fingers secreted in handshakes, all to prove affirmation for meeting nights, dissolving between resolutions into allegiances of individual necessity — and so verily there are fraternities within fraternities, lodges within lodges, loyalties within loyalties, divided then subdivided again and again to a degree of confusion at which you just can’t, don’t, won’t keep up with them anymore and so go and give it up for mishegas, nonsense, cleaving instead to an overly simplistic interpretation of the world, your loss. Our Gatekeeper here is a member in good standing of the Gatekeeping Lodge, they all are, those of every Development — them sharing intelligence, methods, techniques, these guardians of the protocols of entrance, upholders of the rituals pertaining thereto, their loyalties perpetually divided between the efficient maintenance of the flow of traffic and persons in and out of their respective Developments, and a professional satisfaction to be found in proper inconvenience, the pride they must take in postponement, delay. An expert, this Gatekeeper knows every reason to counter excuse, and will countenance no exceptions, nor explanation. His domain is a heated, insulated lodge nearly the size of a house such as those his position’s foresworn to protect, situated parallel with the road at the landscaped mouth of this luxuriously prefab Joysey Development — this Gatekeeper’s last, most deluxe assignment, almost a retirement, he’s still getting paid. One Thousand Cedars its name, but who’s counting?

One Thousand, the slogan goes, bannered across the fence upon the rare Open House, then on the bunting: A Grand Place to Live.

Oy, wasn’t his idea.

With a swig of dietetic soda he gulps the last of his medications, a host of attention deficit pills (last prescribed by a Doctor Klockenmeyer at 82 Oak); he’s waiting — a lay member must not be caught lying down; unto the midnight shifts, with static up on the screen and the ominous crackling crush of the dogwalkers, insomniac, tromping puppies through snow and ice, through to the morning shifts, newspaper funnies fixed featureless to forehead — all those passes and identifications to understand and transmit, Developmentwide. Isn’t easy. Vigilance is key. There among the switches, his sustenance; he lives on snackfood, the carbohydrate bounty of the vending machine Management had installed in his Lodge for them to make return on their investment in him: pretzels low salt and no, these sugarless candy bars and saccharine sodas, now empty receptacles for the sorting of his meds. His screens show the lack of activity around the perimeter, the news, a situation comedy set in a Development much like this one, and Misses Herring’s private bathroom: this latter a measure of personal surveillance, undertaken on his own initiative; though more a hobby than an issue of security, it’s lonely, it works.

He’s the Master of Allowances, of favors granted (though only occasionally, in weaker moments) — he’s the Arbiter of Recognizance, this squat older goy with a gun at his hip for which they’ve never given him ammo, him with a twinkle in his eye and teeth plasticized in infinite, highrising floors to flash at passersby. For her, though, a smile more genuine, unforced, becoming sheer grin: he knows her, of course, this woman, the one with the light hair and dark eyes, the other half of the package — not the Koenigsburg’s, this is H and Is’ woman; knows her not in the sense of Scripture, not that he would’ve refused, not at all, you’re misunderstanding, it’s up to her; no, he knows her more intimately, knows her schedules, arrivals and departures, her weekly forages in the Greater Outside, which is where he’d like to live with her if ever she’d quit her dying Inside. And me here, he thinks, how me, too — in a sort of purgatory, between the two worlds, a barrier, at the edge of two middles. Not quite a coworker, far from the boss. He leans across his desk as she walks up and onto the sidewalk in a slink particular to the refugee or oppressed, keeping his eyes lusting on her until she takes her turn onto Apple. As for her, she never looks over her shoulder, rather faces down, like she’d never turn toward him, no matter what, even if he was barking her name and for her to stop and had his gun loaded and aimed at her head; you’re born knowing to walk like that, and under those conditions, he thinks, if you were born where she was and when, which was he doesn’t know where, neither when, but can imagine — even with the monitoring, that’s what he does.

Wanda walks quickly, her small head knotted into a kerchief to the slight rain, then snow, disappears from his eyes only to reappear up on his screen, heading west on Apple to the house at its loop; she’d gone out to reconnoiter Masses, their hours, for tonight and tomorrow, for herself and Adela.

He’d taken the wreathe out of its storage under the desk, had hung it on his door just last week.

A moment, though, slow up and shtum…he’d thought now might’ve been the time to spring the question: What are you doing tonight, and tomorrow, and with your life after that? Wanda, a Wonda, why the name, and from what?

As our rabbis explain — it’s because when they were building these houses, they cut down one thousand cedars that’d grown upon the face of this earth since the beginning of time.

And where did those cedars end up?

In the houses, on their roofs, as shingles, as siding.

Satisfied?

No.

How Is This House Different From All Other Houses? According to our sages, it’s because this house is the Koenigsburg’s house and all the other houses are not, with the exception, it’s been raised, of the Koenigsburg’s mountainhouse, or retreat, which is located in New York, Upstate, a house she’d wanted and not he, let’s not get into that just now (like every single one of their houses, it’d been too expensive, the mortgage and the upkeep, too, and the property taxes, and yadda). As Rabbi Bill has said in the name of Reb Bob of Normal, IL, the Koenigsburg mountainhouse is different from the Koenigsburg househouse in innumerable ways. And we all say, too long a story. According to the scholars, their househouse is different from all other houses, as well: inside, the arrangement of the furnishings, the disposition of important investment papers, the hides of their wills, passports, forks, knives, and twisted white metal hangers are divinely unique. It’s been said, other households might have some of the same possessions, however no other household has the exact same amalgamation and arrangement of the exact same possessions. And Rabbi Lao Zhang-Zhao goes on to explain — this house has an attic. And in the attic is a steamertrunk, which her grandmother had hauled all the way across the ocean. No other house has the trunk of her grandmother, and, anyway, not in its attic, though to be sure other houses have their own attics and their own grandmother’s trunks, and maybe even grandmothers’ trunks up in attics, though, he expounds, probably none have attics inside the trunks of their grandmothers. Though Rav Martinez does not rule it out. According to Rav Nuncio, it’s its inhabitants that make this house unique. And then there’s the Koenigsburg’s shorehouse…

How Is This House NOT Different From All Other Houses? Across the looping from the Koenigsburg’s, then, Hanna and Israel’s: they’re both immodest houses of outwardly similar size, multiply floored and with finished or partially unfinished attics and basements, and similar shape, a central box or trunk, from which emerge their two wings each, one from either end north to south as if they’re prepared to fly away any moment, each wing with porch extensions of their own (later additions, once they’d made nice with Zoning), wings of wings, out the sides, and in the front and back, too; they have the same number of interior stairs, which is fortyfour, and the same number of rooms, which is twentyeight; they were reroofed the same month a year ago now, and the same thieves, recommended by Management, May Their Debts Grow Higher Than Sinai, did the reroofings; they’re both filled with loving, active, and involved parents of loved, acted upon, and involved with offspring, though the Koenigsburgs have only two kinder and the Israelien’s have twelve, now thirteen.

Another difference is their color, though it’s only an opposite, a reversal: the Koenigsburg’s house’s siding is the color of H and Is’ house’s shutters, and the Koenigburg’s house’s shutters are the color H and Is’ house’s siding.

Both houses have hedges front and back, both kept immaculately trimmed for uniform width and height by the exact same workforce, who work for the houses on alternating Wednesdays as last scheduled at last January’s annual meeting of the One Thousand Cedars Hass or Homeowner’s Association, hosted by the Koenigsburgs; this coming year would’ve been the Israeliens’ turn.

Though H and Is’ house has a basement partially unfinished; the repository of all difference, the sanctum of all secrets however domestic: soggy, micenibbled cardboard boxes, spiderspun hollows of cinderblock, these bulk crates of paper product (toilet tissue, towels), twin battered and chipped foldingtables — those and a host of other accoutrements reserved only for the use of guests both wanted and not: guestlinens, guesttowels, guestshoes and guestmittens and hats, provisions for every possible guestneed and guest-want, guestdesire, demand; toward the back, more boxes, these of moldering books, stacks of old photographs, paintings, and records, too, autographed Zimmerman LPs, an incomplete set of the Brandenburg Concerti, desiccated mounds of jazz sides most of them just sleeves, opera recordings probably worth something, someone should investigate, get them appraised; and even at the decaying bent bottom of the heap a trove of cantorial 35s that’d belonged to their parents, their grandparents, maybe, walled in by a dustbound encyclopedia set featuring the latest maps of the Ottoman Empire, volumes bookmarked with the corpses of worms.

Whereas the Koenigsburg’s basement had been Professionally done, as Edy Koenigsburg would relate during the course of every hosted supper come the Sabbath, the guests stabbing each other with their forks and knives in their hands and jellied eyes, slicing each other and strangling and gagging one another with napkins all to be the first to congratulate her, wish her Mazel — Edy, you say it Eatee — on her Adela’s pierogie appetizers, juicyplump just perfect, as if stuffed with the revivified testes of an assortment of ancient, powerful patriarchs…and how Edy’d always say hors d’oevres and how Adela’d mimic but one night pronounced them Whore’s Divorce, with everyone assembled thinking she was referring to Miss Glaswand nèe Kahl and that whole episode, which involved — no matter, though leading to a situation requiring serious talks undertaken Hostess to Hosted as if a peace negotiation stalled, faltering, failed down in Palestein, ultimately with Adela asked to her room and given the night off with a raise.

Adela’s was a small niche in the basement exactly the same size as the room she’d been born into, the room her five sisters had been born into, the room in which she’d lived with them and hid with them under the sag of the lone bed at midnight from the extra special police who took her father away that one night investigated in the middle of summer across the ocean the size of the greater basement, it was — an oceanic vista of blue carpet dusted with white snowlike puffs every halfstep, tentative, flaky. Here, beyond the rustlegged, moldtopped, or merely green table for pingpong, scuffed of white lines, without net or paddles either and its balls lying crushed, at the white of the wall with its electrical outlets, up against the nylonate red and white flag of her nation whichever and wherever it was draped over her door facing out, and depending on whether she was inside her room or not, out and at work, a pair of footwear stands, soft soled slippers for inside, hard for out, a mat that says Witamy then next to the footwear, at the baseboard and its trim offwhite, an antiquated, toenailyellowed scale handeddown from Edy to facilitate Adela’s daily weigh in. As Edy always thought, any justification for Adela’s obesity might lay in her nationality: Adela was maybe, she thought, possibly, she’d think, acceptably overweight because she was foreign, how Edy had to remind herself again and again as the scale’s indicator, an arrow as sharp as a mean word, would oscillate its tongue toward a sum Adela would always want translated to kilos, as if Edy’d know, as if it’d matter. What can you do — these people, their numerous ways.

Inside, in Adela’s wardrobe, a wooden hulk set against the wall opposite the door, behind a pile of her folded bedding, behind the linen, the mussed sheets patterned out of date and the matching pillowcases, too, worn by sets of mismatched guests, uninvited — an icon of a saint, and behind the saint, a large and roughly hewn opening into a passage widening with its descent under the brights of these sudden chandeliers set between emergency sconces leading under the Koenigsburg frontyard and the sidewalked street then the Israelien frontyard and there narrowing again on its way up through another opening into yet another wardrobe of the same size and shape as Adela’s (though plywood, this unit discontinued, discounted, found by Israel at a firesale — they’d been swearing to get her new furniture for a year, if not for her sake then theirs), past its own saint then past its unwashed bedsheets and clothes and lingerie, smokestained, vodkadamp, all domestic fabrics and sartorial separates that’d been haphazardly stuffed beyond the reach of the iron the girls would wield upon afternoon Fridays — and into a room of the same size and shape as Adela’s though a room in a basement partially unfinished, which Hanna used to say to Edy meant that it was also partially finished: defensively this, Wanda’s room in the Israelien home.

Wanda and Adela, these two sisters from the Pale, far beyond it — you two are so pale! Edy’d shriek, howabout we make an appointment, on me, don’t you worry yourself about anything, you’re more than my maid, my kinder’s sitter, my servant or Slavslave, you’re my friend; what’re you thinking, tanning salon, should we go with sprayon or lights, makeover or just nails, maybe the spa, we’ll soak and gab, make a day of it — they were inseparable these two if sisters then nationed only through river’s blood, umbilicus choice. Anyway, as it’s often said of them, a package deal, a twofer your money maximized, the familysized — when the two of them Edy and Hanna would recite ancient history to friends gathered, maybe at a meeting of the board of the dayschool, or at a synagogue event, a Hadassah function, that’s how they’d talk, the not quite valuepak, two for the price of three, Edy only joking around, and how Hanna would always set her up or even herself wherever whichever one left off: We went down to the Agency together, and wouldn’t you know it, we found the two of them,

The two of them, here Edy’d pick at a thread, a loose strand of tooth’s salad — orphans,

Hanna’d go on, No luggage,

as Edy’d add, They’d arrived with these illegible recommendations, which my greatgrandfather of blessed memory could maybe understand if he weren’t dead now, what’s it been, twenty years…

nodding, laughter — Edy-the-funnyone,

And now Hanna’d say,

And now, Edy repeating — they never rehearsed, would you believe?

And now, how Hanna’d attempt to kill it boredom and curtains, Edy and I are like two older sisters to them, like, aren’t we, Edy?

approval, enabling — Like two older sisters, Edy’d rerepeat like maybe ten times,

sisters we never had, like sisters we never had, like the two sisters we never had…nodding, and Hanna, having always to get the last word in would say, edgewise, Older sisters,

We are, Edy not to be outdone,

nodding, We are, Hanna repeating and, to end it again this time ended once and for all — sealing her victory while unsealing another container of tupperware would add, Have a little more artichoke salad I saved the hearts just for you (I always remember — that’s what I do, I safeguard & remember),

or, And how’s your son making out at whichever school at his whatever new job is he still with that girl who, with the father who, what’s her name?

On the day they’d both arrived incountry, they’d met at the Agency, were transported to work in the same windowless van, Agencydelivered right to the same street, right to their new doors right across the street from one another, behind which locked a thousandfold then alarmed they’d work for their lives in return. This Agency that was wholly owned though operated only on the evenings of weekdays by a descendant of the founder of the very town or village or muddied well from which neither of them came but that was near enough and in the same country at least as were their own towns, which were villages, dirty burrows or caves, though that country had first to become many other countries before again becoming that country once again his and theirs; this owner and operator a descendant of their shared nation, then, who now owned, operated, and exploited his heritage that was only a Heritage in America, exploited, too, the presently disadvantaged situation of their coconspiring country in order to supply this relatively affordable and dependable workstaff to the descendants of a people who had been killed by the ancestors of those who’d arrive here five days a week and without any official sanction, eager and earnest to cook and to clean: among them, though hailing from two estranged, mutually hating and universally hated cities that had become bombed into towns that had then become bombed into villages debased amid respective cataract and cess situated at opposite ends of two nations that had survived only to fall at opposite ends of their now redistributed and so unified nation, how Wanda and Adela had each overheard the other muttering obscenities in a shared, reunified tongue (as if a breathy length of conterminous flesh, which ensured they’d never get too far away from one another), an estranging language that sounded to Hanna like SZCZSZCZSZCZ and was apparently understood only by the three of them, the Agency proprietor, Wanda and Adela, and the dead ancestors of their employers, whose eyes, even in silent stairwell photographs, often retained a moisture that sustained flies the sound of whose beating wings would resemble the buzz of their talk; the two turning each to face the dry tongue of the other, flouncing over shoulders hair washed in dishwater, each dressed in the same model formless sweater purchased at State department stores laden with identical shelves, CZÓSZCZÖSZCZSZÔCZØSZCZÒS it sounded like to Edy, fantastic in its palatework, its display of glottal virtuosity that no one else in the metal and glass lobby of the Agency would understand as the lobby was then at that early hour full only with working mothers and even housewives assembled to haggle over the imports, to handle the merchandise, to argue and to bargain and broker their deals, though only after making deep and thorough inspections according to criteria known only to conscience (firm breasts and sweet breath, good knees, healthy gums); then, it was a hug that neither of them understood, as if without thought, like already here they are being bold, brash, impetuous, fastfriends, these instantaneous Americans, immediately assimilated into this vast and multitudinously faceted citizenry of cheeks, with a kiss lipped amid the down of each, their hug cleaved out from the air between them a mass of wet concrete (the most famous material of their nation, wherever it is, if it still was) that would come to harden into a landmark in their lives, a monument abstracted into intimacy, founded upon nothing save the flimsy linoleum flooring of the landmass known to us as Memory: remember that dictator, yes, the one whose moustache pointed up or the one whose moustache pointed down, either, the one who was bald or the one whose hair was combed severely over to the right indicating the side to which we all would salute, both and his eyebrows, and that regime, sure, the one that took your father, no, the one that took my mother, you mean that one, and then the Revolution, right, where were you when, and what, I almost forgot, who could forget, I was only a baby, I was only a girl.

But not all Undergrounds are the same. There are differences, and not just of depth: the Main Tunnel here, longer than day and wider than fecund womanly hips, seemed in its enormity the work of an unholy, mythical earthworm that’d been burrowing ever since the crack of Creation, and not the hard-won product of thousands of hours of digging with the dulling spoons they’d scooped from the drawers of their Hosts’ fine silver. As far down in the world as Undergrounds go, this was domesticated, even luxury, exceptionally lit with equidistantly staggered fluorescents, its floors lavishly tiled in alternating hexagons of royal blue and the baring whites of their incredulous eyes, decadently furnished with oversized, overstuffed settees set on both sides of the Tunnel against walls slathered by Maintenance with vast murals tending toward the idyllically socialized realist, pastelly archetypal depictions of the happy domestic, overflowed with pillows fat with feather their covers kept immaculate through regular launderings conducted topside, the responsibility for which would lovingly revolve amongst all.

No Siburban legend, digging began on the Underground immediately following the passage, which has it been three years ago already, of the infamous Stay At Home Legislation (Stahl, named after its sponsor, first name Sandra, it’s said), a for your own safety ordinance applying to all aliens living and working within One Thousand limits. Apparently, in years past there had been a number of escapes, not a little scandal attendant. Lawyerhusbands advised not to mention it, lawyerwives invariably agreed. The Development only said we couldn’t go outside, Adela often remarked, after dark with a meal hot in her stomach and a drink in her hand, the smoke of a cigarette burning low, they never said nothing about not taking ourselves Underground.

Though only this past summer did Adela finally receive majority approval to commission an investigative committee tasked with exploring the possibility of an extension, for purposes of access both emergency and daily, her envisioning an eventual network of Undergrounds leading outside the planned community (to be known as OUTCOM — and even now they have a host of personal gardeners divided into Nippers and Tuckers, Landscape Engineers, Pool Scoopers, Odd Jobbers, and I’ve come to fix your cable Repairmen, as illegal here as anyone else, working hard on seven outlying passages when sober, inclined), by this past fall the entire InCommunity (INCOM) project had already been realized, all Domestics now connected, all husbands notified in writing then after thirty days duly billed. The last and largest of INCOM’s major modules was dedicated just the first of last month, in a glorious ceremony ruined only by its policy of compulsory attendance: the Underground Social Union set three floors into earth, deep amid the graves and the plumbing, an auditorium and meeting hall allpurpose, in which Domestics were free to socialize and organize, coordinate coverage, appointments and playdates for their kinder, or just relax, stress down over a tall glass of the house kvass and what would begin as a friendly game of clobyosh.

This Social Union’s situated directly under and could alternately be accessed through the first manhole upon northerly entrance to what’s now known as Synagogue Street, which had been named for the redbrick, steepsteepled church that once shadowed its southernmost terminus: impossible to believe, I know, that at one intersection of History & Joysey not all seven thousand plus residents of One Thousand Cedars had been Affiliated, weren’t almost required to be, that someone or other had once to pay full price for these units, not everyone had an uncle who had pull, or push, whatever weight how he or an aunt’d brought carried water to bear, someone who knew someone who’d execute the due diligence, and that without asking too many questions, or providing too many answers (requiring the recommendations, forms, why in triplicate my W2s?), pushing their applications through the planning tribunal, pulling their relatives, friends, and associates through both loophole and lapse…nu, maybe not an uncle in the sense of relation, though he’s a good friend of the family, now with the auntie wife asleep three floors up aboveground then three floors more up above that at the top gable of their house in its bedroom in bed dreaming of dreams without the interpretation of pills he’s taking his pride with him hard and pulsing below the arches of his immaculately maintained eyebrows on a tour, a surprise inspection of the Underground premises: wrapped in a terrycloth towel provided for patrons with any deposit of valid creditcard, his license, or passport he’s making his way out of the Social Union then through the Hall of Domestic Workers, an expanse forbidding in its sudden and darkening narrowness, lined on both sides with these uniformly small, metalframed photographs of the maids and other sundry employees of Development families who had fallen in the line of duty, become martyred to the profession, each portrait’s frame equipped with the jut of a spike on which a candle’s been impaled and kept burning at all times of Underground day and night in memory of the victim represented on the plaque below both dated and named, though with the smoke from the flames blackening over those plaques and even the portraits, too, eventually all that could be seen of most of these tragic Domestics — fallen upon a broomhandle, slipped to death on a mop — is the staring silver of their memorious eyes, which penetrate through any accretion of soot then into the souls of those like our uncle who must through design pass this way on the ways to their pleasure; the Hall then opening into an impressively spacious anteroom rowed on two of its faces with individual shower stalls walled and floored in tile and glassed, towels also blue, white, and of every fade bruised between hang from gilded hooks, soap dispensers installed on the fundament wall on both sides of its door.

Our uncle, he of the promiscuous towel he hangs on any hook vacant, enters a stall to scrub the wrinkling work of day from the coppery skin and copious hair of his limbs, in preparation for the luxurious adultery of the next scheduled rotation, ignoring in his nude a husband voluntarily repurposed down here for hard labor S & M: there’s a rag hanging from a pants pocket, a niggun on his lips; misting up an enclosure with three quick shpritzes from a pump of noxious solution: Mist Mist Mist, he’s singing, Dadadadadoo, Mist Mist Miss a Spot, Lose a Yacht, Then get mad and sue…through the showering facility now, through its further door, its threshold heaped with mats filched from the trash of houses topside, then into a more spacious expanse this walled with yawning wooden doors as cedar as anything rooted. This room, too, heaped in a decorative disassociative state, schizophrenic, half class half crass, with its variegated pillows and rugs and pelts of fur below the valanced false windows (as we’re now what’s the equivalent of six floors Underground), shaded anyway, possibly for what’s thought of as relaxing effect, with strung nautiluses and conch shells schlepped home from houses timeshared down the Shore, counties Atlantic and Cape May, that fronted the most endangered of dunes. It’s neurotic here, almost insane, as if these Domestics didn’t know what to do with their new country’s bounty, have been irremediably confused by the power of purchase lately acquired; elegance mismatched with pretension jumbled, arranged haphazardly, ungepatched in every imitation of the ideationally venerable, the misguided antique, the fauxworn, the anything-went, anythingworks: plush with loveseats, and with fleshy settees and divans, leatherette taborets, tuffets and tufted ottomans, canapés, flutelegged couches and highbacked gossipbenches, a host of instantaneous heirloom, an inheritance made new on the cheap — thanks to a participating husband, if you have to ask, who’d portfolioed a rash of warehouses stuffed with like kitsch out on the Hudson and was so far free with his inventory and love: this the room to which our uncle will come, and come again and again, the room where the Development’s female Domestic Workers — FEMDOMs, in the know — would whore themselves out at prices reasonable enough to be renegotiated every year to the lusts of their male professional employers (MALPROs), and their firstborn male kinder (FIRMA) as well, many of whom actually brought here by their fathers for their very First Time, an experience in bonding or just light bondage, the virginal both, a sacred rite of the wellventilated, dimly lit passage: sometimes they shared, doubled up, and at other times they took the same Domestic in turns, the fathers always first (respecting at least one half of the Fifth Commandment — Thou Shalt Honor thy Father whether he be timid, or Pharaoh, or God), often the two or more — and whether they’re business associates, carpool friends, synagogue acquaintances or only neighbors not necessarily social or on talking terms — all taking on the very Domestic or Domestics they employed, the maid who’d fix them brunch just an hour later aboveground, with the yolk of the sun just beginning its shine and her asking those who’d bask in it, how do you like your eggs? whether farm fresh, free range, Grade A or doubleyolked, purchased from a facility situated far on the opposite side of the Social Union’s expanse: a supermarket grounding an excellent mall in which, both of them, even the most discerning Domestic would find anything ever itemized on any list whether it be that of grocery, or To Do; special diets no problem, diabetic and sugarfree, sure, lactose, we know, with a kosher section the largest in the state; clothing and cosmetics, too, flowers and jewelry and movies and literature made in native languages for their own pleasure and more — all without the hassle of lines and unseasonal markups, the terror that is public shopping.

And so far everything had remained a secret, as if the husbands, guilty as they were, would talk, many of them being lawyers and in this state women being entitled to half. All Domestics, all with wardrobe access to the Main Tunnel, were circumspect themselves, how weren’t they cautious: protecting their entrances with a holy vengeance, enshrining an assortment of religious icons in their entryways, these idols of saints, graven images. How each Domestic had her own saint to make sacred the rear of her wardrobe, to safeguard her own entrance and exit, and how when there happened to be more Domestics than there were saints, whether due to the enormity of the Development, its increasing need for qualified Domestics, or to the wanting slightness of the eccleisiastical calendar, the slowness of the church to canonize the worthy, or else thanks to the true scarcity of the truly miraculous upon this profaningly ephemeral earth, then saints had to be invented, miracled out from thin air: new arrivals had to fake a saint, which an eager, unilluminated, and yet earnestly religious member of the Maintenance Staff would then mock up in wood, which had been mandated cedar. This despite the belief that to fake a saint was disgraceful if not sacrilegious, a symbol of the new, the foreign and its reminder of confusion, of Babel; as such, it was suspect, looked down upon, sniffed about. Though the only way in which a newcomer could obtain a true saint was for its patronized Domestic to become reassigned, which happened almost never, or to be fired, which happened if rarely, not if her favorite husband could prevent it, if he had say, his own sponsors, connections and contacts among important Hostesses aboveground — or else to quit, maybe, or die, and why not.

This was their embarrassment, the mark of an outcast estate: they’d arrived too late for the real, and so had to make do with the American fake — Wanda and Adela, they’re dealing. When they’d arrived, the assignments were deepening into all taken Decembers; their days setting, feasts starving them out: there was the saint who was first a virgin, then a nun; then there was the saint who’d been martyred by the Muslims at Eleutheropolis; the saint who was first a hermit before coming out of the wardrobe to free his own people from those very Muslims; then the saint who’d married the son of a saint whose own son and his sons then, too, were to rule all the west of Europa, and yadda. Wanda had wanted Saint Anastasia, long spoken for, imaged and installed, her mother’s favorite, too, feasted on Xmas itself, the 25th of December: Anastasia whose refusals to go to bed with both her two husbands had ended in their deaths, whose three maids were then brought before a Roman prefect on the suspicion of witchcraft, were ordered stripped and yet, as it’s been said, how their clothes clung tight to their youth; Anastasia who was banished, exiled out to the island of Palmarola to receive her requisite martyrdom, being burned at the stake under the reign of Diocletian; her mother, Wanda remembered, had always worshipped an Anastasia, though which Anastasia Wanda wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure her mother had ever been sure either, whether hers had been a saint or a Romanov, or only a dream. Adela, ardent adherent of the mirror Edy had hung on the wall opposite her wardrobe, also wanted what had already been taken, made iconic for the sake of another, the saint after whom she’d been named: St. Adela, the daughter of the King of the Franks, founder and abbess of the Benedictine Convent at Pfalzel. After a host of arguments, offered bribes, and the failure to broker chores with St. Adela’s protected, a lifer, Greta from Pomegranate Way, Adela had had to resign herself, reassign, imagined for her use a St. Schwartz, founder of the Order of Absent Fathers. As for Wanda, after the Anastasia disappointment and consultation with Adela her bestfriend and an avidly sardonic churchgoer, she’d settled on a St. Weiss, in her mind the son of a German draymensch and the daughter of eminent rabbis from Poland, a native of Los Angeles, patron saint of media, fish, and eyewear, martyred in an earthquake in an attempt at saving the neighbor’s chihuahua.

Adela arriving home from mass, the eve of Xmas, long past middle night — she’d had the day off, they’d had the day off, had nothing all today save this service, then home to prepare for her shift Underground, which was never off, canceled or closed, which all actually expected to be busy if experience serves. She enters the kitchen, folds the arms of her sunglasses into a worshipful embrace, lays them on the marble next to the sink then turns to the window, its reflection of her as if in dishsoap, wrings the part of her hair, severe, to air naked scalp, how stark her roots show…

The Development surrounding, it’s motionless, noiseless, because all she can sense is herself: it seems no one’s at home or awake. Midnights until Fridays late (Edy’s hosted cousins tonight, relations so far removed as to constellate another spacetime, and even that neighborhood changing, not for the better), Adela would help wash the dishes, sponging away whatever’d been left behind after Edy’s quick rinse, the scraps that’d feed families, the detritus of rind and fat, grease and oil pooled only a gesture above an initial superficial scrub, at this hour Edy usually at the sink herself less working than waiting, like Hanna a maker of one meal a week, and insistent on washing up after it, at least a little, one squirt from the faucet’s long nose; maternal proofwork to herself more than to her kin, washing distracted and so poorly, leaving the salvaging to Adela, once she’d arrived upstairs from the exile of the meal, and before returning Underground for the night. She’s whispering, American lipstick and Slavic dentistry, Eatee, Eatee…throughout the house, seeking order, direction, the host that is mastery: her whispers to rise up the stairwell slat by slat up to the rooms upstairs-upstairs, to sound plank into rooms that uphold the walls, voice to grain away wood. Furniture, possessions, stuff. That that is owned has no right to respond. Only echo, reflecting echo — and even when ordered to respond, it cannot, because it’s not only owned, it’s dead. Adela shrugs, smiles caps, crowns, a mouth full of fools and princes, the cityscape of a world far away, vista of castle and church. Pleased to be alone, to preserve her hands, safeguard her manicure for the favor of night, it’ll be pleased, they always are: her hand strokes up and strokes down, then a milky moon appears above the valley of palm. To leave its dish with the others for the promise of tomorrow, though what’s not done tonight is undone forever, can’t blame. Even upon the Sabbath, Adela has to sign herself into the Register, with the pen left on its table, Alan’s spare fountain: one of two received as a wedding gift a life ago, it’s never been used to sign anything but her own name; then, makes her way down the other slotted stairs to her room, downstairs-down-stairs with her heels heeled off held in her hands she passes there on the walls the albums eviscerated, their remains now framed for inspection, portraits of family, immediate, ancestors, once her fellow countryfolk, never her fellow countryfolk, who knows what they’d have to say about it, their lips held tight, one black, one white, the rest of them predeceased gray. Koenigsburgs long passed on…their eyes compel, then concess and give depth, they aren’t just frames sunk into frames — they’re photographs themselves: each pupil the home of the portrait entire held within its gaze, and within the eyes of that portrait the photograph admitted again and yadda unto infinity and eternality, perhaps, at least the unphotographable. Timeless just means whatever’s no longer. We are not buried below the earth, we are buried atop our own dead. And then, to enter over the threshold.

On the door there is a house and in the house there is a name and as one passes through the door then past the house one must kiss there at the house, whose walls kiss the name — a mezuzah, Edy’d once explained, that this is done to remind people that houses are to be reverenced as homes, and that the very idea of owning or even renting a heaven on earth, itself mortgaged, is a miracle to be recognized upon every pass. As to pass through a doorway is to experience a revelation, especially when over this threshold lies your dead. Adela never kisses, though. As this isn’t her house or home as much as she is the house’s, like a wall when she’s left alone, when working more like a floor. Door shut, there have been no bodies found yet, only basement, paneled in cedar: outside lamplight eking through windows at earth, illuminating fingers of dust, then a pinball machine they’ve never plugged in, and a screen, embarrassingly huge, an entire wall, a world in and of itself. Another passage. Images live on this screen. Images like people, like gods, some appropriate, others not so. Discretion’s advised. Images to Show the Kids to Shut Them Up on a Rainy Day, images Never to be Screened by Anyone Else Save Edy & Alan on Penalty of Grounding, the ratings. Loss of Innocence, labeled. And if screened then alone amid the dead of night, with no one home and the doors and the windows locked and the alarm armed with you know the basement’s code, when that little light thing goes red. An image imagining itself. As for the code, it’s the same used by all these houses, all in secret. Numbers breathe no word or letters even. Eighteen, thirtysix, sums or permutations of the numerals of life.

Little light thing goes red between the two couches, above a recliner across from the narrow hallway to the door to the laundryroom, the name of the room in which laundry’s done, though it could also be named Rachel or Leah, or Adela. Then, her door. Jambed at an odd recline. As if pasted on the wall, a stamp. As if a patch sewn onto the flag of a stranger. Imageless. Alan Koenigsburg — senior partner in Koenigsburg & McQueen, which was how he’d come to own this house, Israel’d recommended for opposing counsel, testified responsibility to the tribunal — having obtained the necessary permits, had hired the brother of a client to sledge his hammer to a wall; the room, and the washroom, too, adjoining, and through another door, to the right, Storage — all was redeemed from nothingness. Potentiality until. It would always have that, impermanence. He’d never enter the Underground through the wardrobe of his Domestic, as did the other husbands through the wardrobes of theirs, preferring instead the access of an Apple Street sewergrate, having a subterranean fear, the contracting mistakes, the problems with his foundation as Alan’d say, too close to home. To remove your hard soles, at the threshold, then to replace them with soft, with the slippers, is another way to sanctify home, a room of her own. Adela’d been here for maybe a year, and her drawers still as empty as life: no movie career or master of business degree, no husband dumbly rich with portfolio — her inexpensive imitation denim still in its suitcase, whose own home is the floor. Twinbed with bedding themed by dinosaurs, Oriental partition of ricepaper. On sale at a steal, $69.99 for a limited time only at Wiltinghills, not the Siburban location but the Upper East Side & Lex. In the bathroom adjoining, a bath slash shower and toilet, alongside a stack of magazines wetted then dried into each other into a tablet, half off the Law. Inside the room proper, atop a table, her own framed images, these limited to frontispieces of various samizdat editions smuggled autographed by their authors either in prison or exile, then those family photographs of her mother and which sister or her posing waterside, Lake Balaton, the Danube, Vltava, which is the Moldau, the Irtysh or Ob, the same; a strip of photos she’d taken with Wanda amid an airtight steel trap sunk a million miles deep, Port Authority, maybe, or below Grand Central Station; and then on that table’s only low shelf, a dictionary, which she’d memorize on the weekends when she had off if the Koenigsburgs weren’t entertaining, they had to give notice. Hall: a connecting passage, charitably the lowermost room in a house set with doors leading to other rooms, empty, forgotten, a crawlspace it’s called; from there, a door slamming shut onto Storage, a room half the space of hers in which she keeps the clothes she bought here as opposed to those she brought with (wardobed): the new underwear and stockings she never wore, three sweaters and a skirt pressed and folded, tzedakah, the skirt Alan and Edy’s and the sweaters Hanna and Israel’s presents, last Xmas; Adela’s to get another skirt this year, this one longer at Edy’s insistence, more demure than the mistake of last year, if tomorrow.

Adela had walked to the train, to the aeroport, its plane, to yet another aeroport and plane to take the train to then walk again to the agency an entire ocean away, and all in the span of two days. A fish out of water, it’s said, she’s more perfectly a carp displaced, this season’s fish, which in her hometown village would’ve already been harvested from its pond, would’ve been hauled to the ramshackle, once drearily dissident Seasonal Market, to be netted from a tub enormously filled with the melting of snow, then weighed before all on a dishonest scale for the approval of the womenfolk, liningup as old as the earth and as patient in their revolve; women at the beginning of the line the oldest and the last no more than a little girl the granddaughter of the forgetting first just sent out with coin on an errand. Each remembered to her as her mother. How their carp would be netted, then bagged and hauled home to their bathroom, there in their own iron tub to swim itself dizzy in lazying loops, awaiting only the wrath of a mother — though progress happens, traditions evolve: now, how the fish would flipflop in the hands of the monger, then the thunk down on the cyclopean head with the brute, senseless mallet, the Angel of Death; Its knife would slice from out of the sky, then the head of the fish, with which to make stock for their soup, would tumble into the wrapping of its own newspaper, they’ve only printed one copy, headlined Today Is A New Day, black on black; the body of the carp dropped into an honest bag, which is bottomed, to be carried home dripping dead, leaving its entrails in a trail, the blood of the street crucified in holiday traffic. It’s this anonymous Advent, which had been only yesterday for her mother, if she’d be unlucky enough to still live, that her daughter remembers as she reaches through the dark to retrieve an item of frill, lucrative lingerie, a satiny blue flyaway with white trimming in lace, from the thirsty lip of the sink across from the units of washer and dryer. And, as she opens the door — as doors are for nothing but opening, unless a door is already opened, in which case all we can do is stand around at the threshold and refuse ourselves entrance: a shut door is a welcome to death — the door to the laundryroom here, the laundryroom downstairs-downstairs, which is the room of white on some days, the room of colors on others…what she lets fall from her lipstuck lips is nothing but the carping silence of that decapitated bottommost feeder.

Edy leans over the sink with a jar in her hand, polish for silver, rag in the other and fumes.

Adela heads upstairs, past those portraits whose features are no longer visible because the lights have long been slept, upstairs-upstairs to the room of their son Kyle, just made a son of the commandments last month, a barmitzvah, congrats a bounty of mazel, Hanna and Israel and their twelve daughters in attendance in matching dresses you should have — dead in his room, bent at the edge of his bed, expired in the middle of, we’ll leave him at that…then to the room adjacent, a suite even, almost a house in its amenities, and nothing, then to its bathroom tiled and toweled and Kylie, the older sister dead in the shower, her hair in the drain deep in water, a curtain undisturbed…and then, to the open Master Bedroom, and there nothing either, but beyond its fluelessly artificial fireplace that cleaves the expanse, never been lit and into the study, Alan’s head a bald egg nested amid transcripts of depositions, his neck loosely noosed with the telephonecord…

A violation of the Sabbath the Koenigsburgs never kept, Adela dialing emergency the Development’s 0 how she manages don’t ask — she’d like to speak higher of herself and her sisters the other Domestics, as if forced to defense, references, experience, to justify Mass and then, how she’d sworn to an oath — just sitting there rocking herself held through it all: denial, anger, bargaining with grief despite having nothing to offer, through the entire suggested by board, vetted by committee process of Mourning, holding rocked on the rollick of waterbed pitching a heave like an ocean attempting to stay afloat atop another ocean, the floor, her in search of an air separate, alone, until an Officer, ID’s himself as Security Officer 316 (Bundy — Approved) arrives, verifying himself verbally through the intercom as per regulations, the requirement that is courtesy despite catastrophe’s garble; he takes off his coat to float in, to slog on upstairs on his passkey, with gun still holstered as already knowing, and tremulant pale save the chapped red hands and the nip at his nose, which isn’t blood only the bloodless cold and a few or five fingers of whiskified nog, his blazer dusted with waters that might be dribbling that or, better, his tears, or just melting snow, holds Adela until she’s finally drowning in weep, to fall over the tight heat of his uniform lap.

Here are the houses, their houses or those that resemble them in the darkness of day that is the darkness of night, its weather, make your myth. Sprawls of land sown with ice, designer sled, shovel, a mitten, snowmensch’s eyes made of the piss of an eagle, doubtingly browed with vanilla candy, a ruddy apple mouth, halved, below a nose blue from the cold, a handful of berries — chemical cess mixed with sump, to freeze; playthings tenting up what snow’s fallen, and what’s falling. All’s rich, wealth the sound of silence, stuffed with its tastes. Garages full of metal — and engorged insides, as well, which is where the Domestics are headed not to be late for curfew, Lights Out then Underground, after an entire payroll of smiles that’d need five ten grand put into them to be as attractive as they seem happy, giddily embarrassed, and yet secretive, too, to the Gatekeeper who, though permissive, needs this job for the love of a Herring.

Inside are rooms opening to Fate like cavities long closed, gone gunked up with stuff: a bowel loosened to allow hallway flow, a prostate pinched to accommodate a drip out the doors; their walls hung hairily with lists and signed tests — additional interior decoration courtesy of that great iconoclast I. B. Kitsch, if you know him, alongside the kinder’s own artistic scrawlings in pencil gone over in crayon, the entire forge of family photographs, the furniture and appliances new and maintained as well as the schedule allows. It’s God, this Schedule, as it tells time and is time and it is and is good, altogether. Downstairs, a grand of a piano, an upright upstairs-upstairs, the same sheet music copied on both of them from when the kinder left lessons months ago, how their teacher got pregnant, and…with their staves marked in red: dore-mi-fa-sol, do-do, fa-sol-la-ti-do, do-do, G Major, one sharp, remember, one key always left dark. Dust had laid siege to the afternoon, dust to dust, as evil as Amalek, enemy motes, to be eradicated, wiped from the face of the grain of the wood, rings both ebony and ivory.

Nitpick from sundown, late enough. Seven, eight days since, and Hanna as sudden and unexpected as a miracle recovering; through the twelve, her labor getting progressively easier, until this, He just, not quite — you should never have such, without drug. To bring a baby into this world is to live for tomorrow. There’s a sound at the door. On the roof. Prophecy just another of our many names for hope, which are infinite in number and as vague as all love. Sneezy, coughy, and croup. Farts, groan, and a snooore. To bear a son into this world is to believe in the Messiah, at least in a God Who believes…Messiah just another familiarity for the most talented, the most intelligent and attractive among us, the most only, promising, sleeping upstairs. His mother herself. Separate rooms. A whimper, in her sleep she’s crying. Or only a bedspring, unconsoled. To die with the pain of birth is unbearable, though Hanna’s memory of the pain’s been by now tempered, by the nachas shepped for its cause. Clicks on the glass. Brass, given a wrist. Hurt and hurt for Him, too — Israel cutting the cord to let his son fall, umbilicus tested by the frozen fire of steel, the knife they’d sanctified to the challah. Sanitized in wine. Then, tying it off, it had to be done, someone had to do it, and Israel happened to be in the diningroom, an adult, and the one of the couple not just then giving birth…by now, Wanda knew this by heart.

She lies on the floor in a puddle who knows what it is but it’s hers.

As if schnapps.

A room just beyond the birthroom: this, the kitchen. How she’d usually enter — the sidedoor — was in a whisper of names, with a jiggle, her keys to jingle a festive responsorial of sorts from the ring of her hand, keyring that of Israel’s lawfirm, swagschlock, hung with the housekey hung with her other, poorer keys, those to another house far across the water that she’s always known deep gut inside she’ll never walk through again, to sit with her sisters and Matka and what for the holiday, to gift each other poor presents, to toast Papa they’ve waited on dead all these years with quick shots of brandy’s fruit chased down with decis of grog…whispering names as prefaced with the perhaps sanctimonious titles she insisted on honoring, still, the Mister & Misses that made the Israeliens sick with guilt, without echo through the fall of the hall to pilled darkness, reflecting deaf off the mirrors, glossed from surfaces last polished, in her voice with its accent threatening to shatter the glasses for wine, those and the glass that glasses them in.

Now, she only moans, and no names, it’s nothing.

Usually, she’d take off her heels to make for them less click clack, not to waken.

Then, she’d sign in — the Register in the hall a mat from the frontdoor, to let her Masters know she’s been in by Curfew, lit later tonight, due to the Eve.

Stridor, a creakling as if a fire nearer. Her mouth’s open, dry, and senseless as if stuffed with a beard.

Help, her ringed toes wriggle.

A drawer gapes open.

She shrieks.

Hanna, like where art thou already?

Knocking on the frontdoor, the sound, the doors there they seem then three more, quickening…she sees: behind it, a fist, Adela’s, and she’s yelling, a whisper: Wanda’s own name now Wanda, Wanda, the language she knows, that of emergency home, that of babytalk crisis, Adela tapping her acrylic tips on the door — to tear out the eyes of the glass, which is faceless.

In her other hand, Adela’s holding a flashlight.

Wanda sits up, gets up, goes to the door.

A diffuse star skies the house.

To pass slowly throughout, through the room with the screen, the room with the piano, through the room with the books on their shelves then unread, now reading themselves, looparound through the diningroom, around and around its table unset, then into the livingroom, the vestibule beyond then up the stairs slot by trip.

Blueprints moldering in the basement say this is the Master Bedroom.

And so it was, and it’s good.

Here Wanda stands, Adela behind.

She knocks lightly, frightened, to no answer and, slowly.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe — only to be…

To lift Adela’s lamp beside the golden door — and its dead. Seven limbs braided like bread, gray bread broken, fingers of one hand intertwined into a candle lacking a burn — Israel, sitting, had been untying his tie, finally, singlehandedly trying, Hanna lying, abed, her exhaustion exhausted, already asleep.

No more dream.

Employers, they’d been surrogate parents of sorts; strange, how a eulogy recipes itself right away…Wanda goes to them to knead their flesh into life.

No longer to rise.

After one night spent under observation, made ill with the urban up at Kennedy Memorial, then the others at home, all of them recuperative, though without sleep and dreamless, then after another dinner, Shabbos again and its last, less guests this night save the newborn, whose appetite — which is that of twelve regular guests or more, always more who knew who invited whom — only approaches in grandeur His size, always huge the both of them, and demanding, and hungry still and thirsty for the teat since gone cold, a milky mold left atop a platter wobbly.

His Hanna, stilled — nothing more to cook or clean, nothing more to do.

Wanda trips to the next rooms, Rubina’s and that of Simone and the same, then the next rooms, that of Liv and Judith and then that of Isa and Zeba, and the same…then the next rooms and the next, then the next hallways, now through a left perpetually spiraling still left maliciously dark and forever, to the two shared rooms of the rest of them whose names Israel’d always forget and of whom Hanna would always remind, and the same: those aged ten and twofifths, those aged nine and onesixth, as they’d remind you, as if; dressed as they’d been told to dress not for night or for bed but for the morning that’d never be next, trying on their new dresses and skirts and blouses and sweaters purchased and tailored lastminute, fitted especially for the occasion impending, the bris tomorrow, to be, their only brother’s one and only circumcision, or so they’d hoped, or so they’d not even thought of it, to hope and the same. They hadn’t even undressed for bed, modest unto the end: brushed teeth, flossed, tucked in, Shema Israel and goodnight, Laila Tov and again, in yet another left, this off the hallway that lies furthest to the left, almost lost in the recesses of orientation, of night, its turn opening out into the one lone room just above the backdoor, the last exit, the final escape, to be used In case of fire, meetingpoint outside, let’s regroup the backyard’s the plan, between the rust of the swingset and the moldy spiderweb hammock; this the room of the newborn, shushwhispered about, tiptoed around, and also the most spacious, the one with the most light, a room to grow into, itself a posthumous birth, stilled in its fall from the house’s main bulge, a promontory pregnant, cloudcarried high above the cars and the doors for the cars, the garage and the flooring of oil and dirt. Jealous Him not such rarefied privacy: Isa and Zeba’d been moved out, though their submission’s been bribed with lobelove, the promise of piercings for ears. A thimble trash for diapers soiled, alongside a table for changing up against one wall, with a chest of drawers at the other, next to the desk, cedar, too; atop that, a bureaucratic clutch, foldered His birthcertificate, hospital paperwork, a sheaf of greeting cards and deflated balloons pressed up against dying flowers, silvered photographs saving just the last week, instant mementos, posterity developed then doubled; atop that, a passport application for Him they’re intending to fill out any day now, you know, if they’d have to get away, or only wanted to.

Wanda slivers open the door, admitting the light Adela’s shied on in violation, the hallway streaming its perfectly acceptable known into the darkness of a room at midnight past, framed in drapery that resembles anything sweet and girly pink: the taste of sunrisen marzipan, of icecream melting, cotton candy or saltwater taffy, and then set high enough on the wall that He couldn’t crawl out of it, and He could crawl, and also walk, especially when hungry like always, the window’s open and outside lights from the street mingle with the hallway light in through the doorway, in their diffusions dusting sleep across the still face of the eightdayold.

Wanda rushes up to Him, futz the tip of the toes exposed, uncovers His stomach, without navel, it’s said: in later accounts, as if the cord had been attached to His tongue instead, its own limb. Wanda soothes at His beard, smoothes down a stray hair of His moustache. And then, says His name, what His name would’ve been had He lived to be named tomorrow in the midst of His family, friends, and professional others, sanctified amongst the trays of fish, basketed loaves, and cases of liquor; held high above the assembled by hands their winish fingers and mouths reeking of herrings; what His name is still: as it’s said, Hanna and Israel had settled on Benjamin Ben Israel Israelien, or so — it’s been passed down — Hanna had told only Wanda surviving upon her return from the hospital, in the course of conversation idled in the kitchen, over a soup said they’d intended to name Him Benjamin, to be foreshortened to Ben after a paternal relative irretrievably distant, other relatives’ names apparently having been gendertwisted or otherwise incarnated by twelve daughters preceding; Benjamin the namesake one of the only relatives not represented among the portraits hung on the wall of the stairwell down to the basement, however finished it might have been claimed. Security Officer Bundy appears behind Wanda, holding Adela in the doorway, too close for the light. Wanda turns, bears Adela and the officer out on her breasts, then turns to pronounce Him again. Benjamin, attempting to lift Him up in her arms, Benjamin…as weak as raked leaves, stormshook, the floor trembling a pile a burn in that breast — it’s impossible; the strain, the weight, that and He’s soiled Himself, slippery gripped in a flow from His sex.

Benjamin, Wanda says again, that hot mouth opening up inside of her, as if speaking her life into His.

Though, something’s amiss. Whether an unpropitious disposition of furnishings despite what’s been paid in consultancy fees, or a draft of winter in through the opened window to make amid the sheets, pneumonia — or maybe the scalding knob of the door sealed shut to her palm, Adela singed.

Benjamin, He isn’t crying.

What else to do but check the diaper, not yet rag material, an old shirt of Israel’s — soiled in blood, Wanda’s thinking, dirtied in guts.

As she goes to peel the shirt from Him, she’s recalled — there’s a mush from the roof, a great tearing of hooves.

As she turns to Him again, He’s scratching at eyes, kicking His legs out, and tearing.

The Gatekeeper mandated to his hut, dumbly wondering of Misses Herring, who wouldn’t have gone to bed without her brushing and combing — if he should remind her he thinks, use the Development Line, phone her up and say only, Scrub…just then, his extension exploding.

Eight members of the Maintenance Staff, they’d been picking huge wax out of the Development Menorah, anonymously donated, about to be yearly retired, when their radios go staticky mad.

A switch flicked.

And lampposts turn searchlight — vigilance…the perimeter’s secured by a force that’d make any Third World proud, or jealous.

It’s amid these cries and officialdom’s echoes that He calls to her His first word — a word first whispered, then spoken, then shouted out from the halo of gut. He screams, Ima, which is the language for Mom, what Hanna’d preferred to be called.

To lick His own tongue…Ima, as opposed to just any ordinary Mom, Moms, normal Mother, Mommy or goyishe Mama or Mam, Hello Muddah, Shalom — and this when Israel’d left only a short while ago, after an alarmset, a prayer if abridged, then kiss kiss kiss at the cheeks and the chins; he’s gone, but still Ima, His Maker. No need to justify, a woman’s there soon enough, whomever she is — no need to care, just that He’s in her care, in the nest of the nipples.

A woman whom Ima and His father who’s Aba call Wanda as she calls them Misses & Mister, called, and how now, with His newfound ability, He wants to wish her a Merry Merry with skills, a very very special whatever it is that she observes on this day today or tomorrow, the Erev of the true holiday, whichever was important, more so, was real and was theirs — tomorrow, He understands, which is also today, to be marked by His slicing, to be sanctified at the sharp of a knife; the day to become hallowed by tipsnipping, at the earliest hours then the dribbly, latening suck of the wound to stem the flow as they did to keep safe and healthy back then in the desert flawless and flowless, way before the very discovery of disease. In the days back when people had to die so that we could ever exist, fallen in the merit of our way a hell’s future: potential, Benjamin, promise, Benjamin, already He understands His own name, and His purpose, to live with this knowledge and for it — but Covenant, appointment, deposit on the rabbi who’s the mohel or no, and despite the caterer and famished phonecalls to guests, travel agencies, car rentals, area hotels the negotiation of a spare bed, between His legs, His foreskin now sheds on its own, a reddened wrinkly rainbow arcing a day early, too late; the partihued skin of a snake grown since His birth, it flakes again to the mattress, without knife or other sharp save that of the night in its freeze, then with a hiss goes gusted out the window opened to the suck of the wind. A plastic bag, a burger’s unwrapped, it’s shameful, embarrassing; though, as the gusts gust always impermanent, this condition regrettable, brutely unfixed.

As Benjamin would grow, so would the foreskin again (you want me to give a call, leave a message beeped with the relatives and the friends, set a raindate, kept snowlate, apologize and reschedule — every week, on the day, on the hour or no), it would grow back, Him as His being born again and again, every word of His first, every skin felt like His last ever flayed, such a pain — how its hollowness, a shell, a hull or husk, would manifest and make scarce of its own accord, and on it, as well, there founded upon its most sensitive tip surrounded with soil, a brilliant bloom from a roil of waste: it would grow only to fall, would resurrect itself then shed only to be risen then, regenerating all over again — and lost: out windows, and between cracks in the sidewalk and sofa, between the den, family, or livingroom, rivenroom’s cushions of couch to be left never found — to disappear itself, though, in only its form, not to decompose but to become different, be changed, sustained into what seems to be manna.

No steady hand involved either, no putzing nothing around, nu, problems He had.

God, Wanda thinks, look how we shake.

To think that eight burning birds would perch on His windowsill, then in the middle a stork landing to swallow them up.

Or that nine graves would combust in the cemetery just down the Parkway where His people are buried.

Or else, how there’d been not just one pillar of fire descendant, but eight others, too, each the distended sharp of a star — that would be how.

It’s tough — how miracles are only miraculous if they never come to be, only if they retain promise, remain to be prayed for, their granting made eternally late, postponed forever tomorrow.

In the beginning, it’d been Hanukah that Hanna had counted by, its candles lighting the week until His birth. Hanukah that newest of holidays, as if rendered sacred only by its secular proximal, Xmas — to the cynical, not to be trusted: the Festival of Lights, rededication yadda, those pellucid, Selucid nights; the holiday upon which Jesus wrestled the King of the Greeks, nude and greased, for eight straight days in the midst of the Temple defiled. 50 % off, two for the price of your firstborn, for a limited time only — a seasonal bonus for the boychicks departmented down in the kindled inferno of Marketing.

In observance, a question, what did the daughters receive?

On the first night, it was nightlights with which to illuminate their hallways on their ways to the toilet to pee out their shimmery gold; on the second night, waterbeds all around to replace their old, uncomfortable, unsafe, bunkbedding units; then the third, ferns potted and other plants like aloe, say, and flowers like irises, symbolizing the trees Israel had purchased for them out in Palestein, a transaction made certain with the seals of certificates stating as much and printed on the paper that is their rough flesh; on the fourth, new lamps and new fixtures and sconces — the better to read by, the better to be read to by; and then, upon the fifth, stuffed birds and fish, a herd or pack only to become increased like sands and stars on the next night, the sixth, on which it’d been stuffedanimals again this time like lions and bears they beat each other with on their heads then ripped the limbs off them and tails and eyes, ears, and noses and slept with them near (except for Liv, for her it’d been the renting of a horse, a pony, really, and leased on monthly installments, to be stabled just three exits north, free to be ridden on weekends, whenever else she was free after school for Hanna to drive, Israel to pick up); upon the seventh, pillows and sheets and comforters both solid mature and youthfully cartoonily patterned, new bedding on which they would finally rest watery-eyed, swollen with appreciative lap; and lastly upon the eighth…hymn, they forget. After the litany of creation in its lights, water, leaves of grass, fish and meat, they could care less what came next, waiting all the while for what they really desired, which they knew just as well as their parents did would be posthumous: whatever it was the kinder nextdoor and at school had gotten, and so how they had eventually to get that, too, come the start of school after break and then, later — upon the longer, phantomly plagued ninth night and beyond, the wandering night soon to consume with its darkness and oil be damned — to receive into their midst a brother, their greatest gift gotten, or so Israel would say to their disappointment, or so Hanna would have them believe.

To receive is to want, it’s been said, that to give is to ask.

As for Him, what if anything did He Himself get, save parents and sisters and life itself, for this His first holiday: what booty, what bounty, what price?

In one tradition, it’s only a memory, coming early, In the beginning belated…a present, a past — even before the birth, this a life prior to the laden table, all trauma’s to be repressed, to a basement ever lower, and even less finished. It’s a memory that’s gifted into His stream, winging around Him with veiny ribbons and bows a week before birth, two weeks prior to the death of His mother He’s inside, awaiting arrival, outliving a Messiah’s gestation, nine months, nine moons, a sunstilled Biblical day, only a moment — until He falls through the gate no longer strait, through Hanna’s lips wilting. His isn’t sleep in the womb, isn’t awake, neither dreaming, that was a previous life. A thrum or sensation, what He remembers as either, or both, as blood through His now bodied soul, a movement, a rush: it’d been a knock, there was a distinct rap at the door, at first, it’s a given…might’ve been a knock on the frontdoor, or at the backdoor, whether it’s at the porchdoors exterior to the interior doors of the porches, or, improbably, at the garagedoor, the exterior door to the basement perhaps wholly unfinished, or else upon any one of the who knows how many, too many of them, interior doors, including those of the showers and the toilet stalls’ sliding partitions. Benjamin’s not about to know which, how could He, prisoner of this swell, trapped behind the fleshdoor, the stomach’s high and thick wall. As per our sages, however, it’s at the frontdoor, and it’s the knock of the elderly, the frail, a wizened mensch who’s been denied so many times that three or so wouldn’t seem so terrible, would they, a mensch named Nitz this night of nights, none too witzful, how he makes do: he knocks onto His heart — a clock caged in His rising ribs, an alarm, and Benjamin’s moaning, to suck at both His grown toes.

Though once such suckling is over and done with, only interpretation is left — the life of the lips without nipple.

We have been taught thusly: that a knock, a rap, an application of the hand, of the knuckles, the palm, is variable with intent, that a knock must spend itself in only one of two ways, depending; and so we have two interpretations, one to each fist, united in purpose; whereas some scholars say, a knock ends when the hand breaks contact with the struck surface, other scholars hold that it’s when the sound of its striking is rendered imperceptible, when it’s said to die — physics and the acoustic aside, this is philosophy, what’s meant is the appreciation of senses. But this knock is strange; it’s as if the fist or all the world’s fists at once are metamorphosing into the door, and without any breaking, any cracking, or splinter, in a knock that’s forever a knock, a massed hand of hands exploring the surface, the lifespan of entry, though others hold that the hand of God outstretched and strongarmed only strikes quickly, then removes itself, retracts into its own power and infinite mercy, and that the sound then lives, not reverberates, that the knock sounds in a single wave throughout the structure of the house, the solo stroke transmitting itself in full to the foundations on up to the roof and quaking with light, undiminished — the entire house knocked upon, this house of total door. As a force, this came to Him, felt this through Himself, it shook loose His bowels, its contents, sending the milks and meats of His juices sloshing from sucked feet to head and back again to the toe cradled inside his mouth in tides without moon, fogging His glasses to tears to hold in His beard.

A knock, not a joke’s setup: without punchline, a knock not funny at all but the opposite. Inverse. Though it wasn’t the knock that scared Him, this He remembers, that His siblings or parents expected, they might’ve expected, yet another visitor at this latest hour: had a dinnerguest left a scarf behind, maybe, or a serving platter for the dessert who bought and brought, no, He thinks, that wouldn’t justify, another thing much more important then, maybe a weddingring taken off sinkside to wash hands without prayer, or a prosthetic limb forgotten, perhaps, propped against the wall alone (how it eats and drinks little, doesn’t take up much room), or else Misses Feigenbaum, finally back for her husband; it’s that this knock’s horror, true terror…who’d it be, had his father left yet, already for work on Monday, a weekday already? It wasn’t the knock that froze Him inside, no, it’s that He felt that Someone now expected something of Him — and so there inside Hanna, He flailed out once, kicking out her navel, to a second stomach, lesser or greater. In the end, the scholars agree: a knock is a knock is a knock, make no mistake about it, there’s no disputing — it knocked the stairwell photographs downside up, to be righted by Wanda by morning, and all that was fine, understandable — it’s the thought, though, that He’d have to answer it.