by Rhoda Lerman
Sirius climbed up the bathroom door. Ishtar rubbed a nub of Kleenex between thumb and forefinger and jammed it into the eye of Mars on the Bakelite globe. Without Mars, December and January, February and March passed and it was spring. Preparing herself for the pain and ignominy with a fingernail measure of spruce bark and mandrake root, Ishtar dialed the dentist.
The dentist, one nylon sole loafer on the stool, stands above Ishtar reprimanding her for her lateness, genitals pressing insistently into her funny bone as he sucks his own teeth clean from the inside and examines her mouth. He pronounces her plagues: silver birch bark, mandrake root, pastrami, pumpernickel seeds. His belly rests against her cheek meat. He levitates the labiodental throne. Ishtar watches his lips, brisket pink, slime quivering on the ends of the cilia in his nose as she rises in his seat to meet the needle.
And the worm, she reminds him in silent incantation against toothache, went weeping to Shamash, the sungod, for food and Shamash offered him a fig and an apricot. No, lift me up and among the teeth and in the gums cause me to dwell. The blood of the tooth I will suck and of the gum I will gnaw its roots and I will grow wise. Oh, DK, Ishtar offered her help, fix the pin and seize its foot. Because thou hast said this, O worm, may you be smitten with the might of his hands.
The dentist heard her not. “Now lie back and relax and turn your head toward me.
“YOU WILL FEEL ONE SMALL PRICK.”
He is the Tooth Pharaoh, this latent Jewish dentist, wearing his catpaw soles and cockaleekie Arnold Palmer golf pants under his clean butcher apron, out of Egypt into the desert, weighing her heart and shoving a needle of novocaine into the sanctity of her gums. A small prick, she condemns him silently, and you are such a good golfer but then I measured your soul from the sound of your caterpillar tread sucking on the urethane floor beneath us. I understand that you need no organ of regeneration in this business for your offices are death, your poison is in my mouth and your name is decay, DK. Suck, she whispers as the novocaine seeps into her sinuses toward her brain erasing the boundaries of time and memory.
“You won’t feel a thing in a minute.”
And when Tiamat opened her mouth to consume Marduk, he drove in the evil wind that she close not her lips and tightened the screws until her mouth was open wide. The moon he caused to shine, this Marduk, the night to him entrusting. My moon, Ishtar whispered, my night, and he vanquished me, unbridled in his arrogance, he constructed stations for the gods, fixing their astral likenesses as constellations and took the Tablets of Fate and hung them from his breast and split Tiamat, the Mother, in two.
“A little wider, honey.”
Suck.
“That’s better.” He tightens the clamps. He raises a silver claw to her cavity. “I’m really disappointed when you are late. I could have arranged to have another patient before you, honey.”
Suck. There is no one before me. I am one and my name is one. But forgive me, DK, be gentle with me and forgive me for being late and charge me not double as you so often do, for Robert Moses will then know my fear.
“Just a little more, honey. I have to scrape away the excesses before I begin. I’ll have to charge you, you know, for being late. I lose money waiting while I could fill in with other patients.”
Reckon not my fear on your monthly statement. Her head swims, a rock, heavy, cascading wildly through rapids of thought and dream while he scrapes. She opens her eyes, ringed now with tears and strangely glazed. Forgive me, DK, and don’t tell, oh Tooth Pharaoh. Let my funny bone go and I’ll go down to Egypt on your diamond-tipped tool and touch with sin your sterility as you faradize me and I will watch your soul dancing its farandole sextuple on the single pedal of this Muzak chair, tiptoeing to the two lips of the speaker in the ceiling and I’ll sigh deeply from my depths because I want not your pink hands furrowing and plowing in my gardens, I want my love’s hands, lettuce/letos farmer hands, rock garden hands, thick and libidinal and raw. Hands that stretch and pound and pump his polyphonic organ with flue stops, labial and polypedals and tinkling harpychords and drumming passion flower pedals, the sweet hammering in of many sons, and hair that falls to his shoulders and you, all you have, Pharaoh of another age, is one tread pedal that sucks, this sad but brave sterile flute at my funny bone and I, even I, Mother, shall take an oral fixation on you while you excoriate my teeth if you will not reckon my fear on my monthly statement. Besides I have nothing else to do, having left my macramé at home.
“Do you feel anything yet?” Who said that, I or you?
She spreads her hands in emptiness. I am depressed, Tooth Pharaoh, down in the mouth, because my love loves a candle-eyed, splay-fingered child and can not yet love me. My love, he sings also, as the head of Osiris, while his manhood is in the mouths of the letos fish. But it will be found. It will be found. She twists a Kleenex into knots, sealing the strands of fate. And verily, someday, she speaks to his astonished and grateful eyes as she fumbles under the butcher apron for his tongue depressor, you will die at the fourth hole of your cunt tree club under the sycamore rolling agonized in the mud trying to pass through a sclerodermatic urethra one large pumpernickel seed from a pastrami sandwich. Which I loved so well. You are, DK, because my hair stands on end and I sit here among your gasses in the bellybutton of the world surrounded by Lily cups and I myself am pythic, phythogenic, pyorrheic and pythenic and I say unto you they will carry you away in a fold up golf cart and all the members, black stripes on their Arny Palmy pants, will wail against the wall of the pro shop and bury you then in your two-toned Bonneville on the green for removing the excesses of the Mother … I who am still known, absurdly, as the Mother of God.
The tears slip over her cheeks to her mouth. How am I to tell you? I can say neither Lilith nor Lollipop as I blow you. Why all this pain, why crosses and nails and double axes and diamond drills and Bolivian bullets and childhood diseases? Why must I die for them? Let them die for me. I know. Let them learn by dying. I should die for their sins? Let them die for my sins.
Aah, Osiris, for all your sweet singing, for all your pain, they know you only as Humpty Dumpty. And Jesus, did you teach them anything … even to fold their clothes in neat sanctimonious piles as you did in the crypt? And Moses, you were brilliant to insist they all come with you into the desert, if you had to be a sufferer for them, they’d suffer too. Smart. But you weren’t gentle with me, were you? And I zigzagged that cloud for forty years, Moses, that was my price for the roll by the riverbank. And I led you not to oil and when you returned, did anyone but your desert band honor you? And Quetzalcoatl, burning on your fiery raft at sea, who remembers you? A lone dirt picker finds the Star of David in Tikal or some ended place and thinks perhaps Moses had been there. And Bar Kochba, son of the Star, leaves coins in Georgia and no one understands. They don’t know any of you; they don’t know my Star. They find it in Mexico, in Auschwitz, in Anatolia, in Brittany and they don’t know it is my Star. So then, how am I to do it, this resurrection of my own? Is there a safe crypt somewhere, a pyramid still perfect after the magnetic reversals, where my body will stay whole? Shall I die to return in pedal pushers on a Little League diamond? Even if I could cross the Arab-Israeli border as a gentile, Cheops is no longer a perfect pyramid. And the Czechs, the Czechs who know the secret of Cheops with their cardboard pyramids to keep liverwurst fresh and resharpen razor blades, could I ask them to fit me out in a cardboard crypt? It is unseemly to resurrect from cardboard. And is there myrrh and frankincense from Ethiopia to sprinkle on my form to preserve me while my Great Soul travels in the spheres? Is there even a trade agreement between the Czechs and the Ethiopians? The diamond digs deeper into her roots.
“Just a little deeper here, honey.”
You were fools to die. They just went on sinning, your people. They weren’t your people. You were their god. Big difference. Oh! Her jaws shiver with pain, blinding her. Oh, farther, farther. Go down, she cries, go down to the fourth hole, your promised land, for this execration is upon you and
you shall return my Tablets of Fate and my Snake Banner and all which is rightfully mine. Melt no more the golden calf, throw no longer your mother’s bones behind you. It is I who sow and I who reap. Raise that pedal, roll those balls, open that petcock, pet. Tote that barge with your nile on souls and we’ll sail down my Pharaohnyx to the Eerie Canal because I am also Lilith the Witch who roams in desolate letos fields attacking children and golfers and you are going to die on the fourth hole, DK, with your wattles turning as red as your waterpicked gums. You’ll die for me as it used to be; I’ll stick around. To be mortal and have bad teeth and unhappy loves is enough. To hell with resurrection.
He offers her a fresh Kleenex. She refuses, preferring Robert’s. He drills with a diamond. His knees shake. She works to bring him to abundance. He isn’t abundant. He rolls scarab beetle balls of silver and mercury between his Norman Vivisection Peeled Fingers. With clay he fills his fingers, with goodly clay, his fingers creating life for my decay and he’s going to fill my mohole. Oh, Mack, if you could be here to help with the pain, to ease me while this Ra does his Ra Bit in Ra Dio land with Muzak filling his head, with the red eyes and pale nostrils and hairs waving wildly in his Moses nose under his putt putt breath and his toes curling in the catpaw treadmill of his dental floss soul as his blood rushes to its appointment.
“Just a wee bit longer and I’ll have this all cleaned out.” We agree. Tears catapult from her eyelashes.
“Tell me if it hurts.”
Oh, Mack, be here with me. Hold me against this pain. All I have is my anger and this poor man who sincerely wishes me no harm is to suffer for the sins of his forefathers and his foreskin. Oh, farther. Farther. Let this be done. And you too, DK, shall come to pass, so consider your cockaleekie pants and my fine raiment and my flesh. My flesh, she warns him with a basilisk stare, as the shoulder of the drill pinches her lip.
“Filled.” He places carbon impression paper between her teeth. “That’s better. Just a little more and we’ll be finished.” Muzak plays don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me and Ishtar agrees with the Ra Dio and the Ra Bit and mouths the gentle percussion of ten trombones and two guitars as she brings him to abundance and curses him in an ancient manner as his eyes rise to the ceiling.
And I write your name on clean parchment or blue carbon and I place it in my mouth and I spit on you four times in the course of each day and I wipe you out with my left foot and throw you in the flames and I will be triumphant over you.
Ishtar presses her sandal on his loafer, suggesting a rhythm for his soul.
“Very good. Bite down and gnash your teeth.”
Bite down? she inquires with her periwinkle blue dazed eyes and bites down sharply on the little league diamond depressor and the carbon impression paper and releases him and there is a hot molten trill on the organ as an untold multitude of homunculi candystore owners, unregistered pharmacists and vivisectionists die foaming in the flaming pink of the Lavoris rinse. And your children’s children after that. Your egg shall be lost. Your seed shall not knit. I am triumphant over you and you didn’t get any on me.
His eggshell fingernails quiver as he offers her the Tablets encased in silver foil. A pale stain spreads across his butcher apron. “Take these for pain. There isn’t any charge.”
Ishtar agrees.
She nods, wiping her eyes with the knotted Kleenex, clutching the Tablets in her hand. I’ll be down to meat you, fourth hole, DK. DK waterpicks behind her and she weaves into the office and wraps herself in a trench mouth coat, smiling at the jackass-eared receptionist. “There is no charge,” they reassure each other.
Ishtar speeds along the glissando back of a sea serpent along Hiawatha Boulevard, around Lake Gitche Gumee, to Mack, to ease her pain. The novocaine slips out slowly from a fracture in the rock of her head, hissing. The boulevard arches and dips in her coming and Gitche Gumee rises with her tears. To be mortal is enough.
14
AHASUERUS WAS A BOOR.
I, as Vashti, had extended his reign from India to Ethiopia. I was a good queen with goodly limbs and justice in my heart. I had chosen Ahasuerus. I make errors often because I am tempted by juicy and aggressive bull-like men. But although their inconsummate appetites for rapacious love-making are appealing to me, I find their beer swilling and machismo prancing utterly intolerable. You know some of this story. It is recorded, although by prejudiced patriarchs, as the Book of Esther. Although it is not allowed into the Bible since it gives away the story of the overthrow of the matriarchy and doesn’t mention God, who really wasn’t terribly on the scene then, it is quite important. The holiday, Purim, is still celebrated for the children each year. It is a gay holiday. The Megillah is unrolled and Esther, once again for the children’s ears, saves the Jews and has Haman killed and everyone lives happily ever after and punch and hamantashen are served in the social hall after the announcements of the next bas and bar mitzvahs. I grind my teeth. Esther was a decoy of the Hebrews: a false queen. Actually Ahasuerus deserved her with all her cute fainting tricks and deceits.
At any rate, it was time for Haman to become my god-king and Ahasuerus was to step down. Most kings welcome Paradise and a glorious death. But impure A., even though I assured him of beer parties in the afterworld if he so wished, did not want to step down. Haman, who may also be remembered as Amen of the Egyptians, and the ends of all your prayers, reasoned with the king about cycles, rebirths and the necessity of bringing one thing to an end to begin the next. Proudly, A. laughed and invited all the princes and kings to a party for days on end. Pig. He, drunk as a beast, insisted that I come down and let him show me off. I refused. I do not like to be paraded as a possession and that is what my husband was on to. A. blew sky high that I would not obey him. Others have tried to stop the tides and fared as poorly. I would not appear. Well, he and all of his drunken male friends decided that my offense against him was an offense against all men and they issued a royal decree that not only would he transfer my position to another more deserving than I, but that from then on all wives would show proper respect to their husbands, whether of high or low birth. I laughed in my quarters when I heard and simply began the temple preparation for his death and the initiation of Haman as elect. I had not figured the bestial arrogance of Ahasuerus and the other men we had chosen from the fields and the plains for civilization. I was locked in the temple, my priests bought off.
In the streets, thousands of young beauties paraded in rich gowns and caravans, dangled by their fathers, incestrual uncles (Mordecai was such a one) and pimps. My Playboy of the Eastern World invited each to his chambers, one by one, until he found one more deserving than I. That was easy enough. I was hardly deserving of that pig in his purple gowns. Much of this is written and only bears reinterpretation. You realize, the Book of Esther marks the end of the matriarchy. A.’s decrees were that a man would forevermore be master in his house and that his native language shall be followed by all in his household. No longer does the Goddess choose the king, no longer do the queens continue the line, no longer is civilization directed by woman. It really was an ending.
And along comes Mordecai of the Jewish men, with his delicious decoy Esther, who must have been really good in bed, for A. was a dirty old man. Mordecai was a diviner of dreams, self-fancied, and an eavesdropper. Esther was from nowhere, no class, no bearing. But she was beautiful. Haman and I, realizing the momentous mischief A. was causing, plotted to get rid of A. and continue the cycle of killing the year’s king as must be. Mordecai fingered Haman. We were in trouble. The matriarchy would be overthrown by Mordecai and the Jews … who really had no one important yet as a God. And Esther was pleasing A. right and left and in between. Haman finally convinced A. to reason and A. agreed not to sleep with Esther for a month while he considered what he had done, dethroning, after all, the Queen of Heaven. I am still amazed he managed this far.
Esther was ignored in her chambers. A. understood that he had committed a monumental sin, an act of intol
erable disrespect for the workings of the world, an act of pride. He considered. He decided, for he was still aggressive and needed to be king, that he could save himself by killing all the Jews and blaming the entire scheme on them … which is nothing new. But this time the Jews were responsible. Which is why the Rabbis wanted to leave Esther from the Bible.
A month passed. Esther, covered with unguents of mare spoor, adorned in robes of white linens (mine), appeared before him. She came in fainting and carrying on and passing out. You know the tricks. A., who kills anyone entering unbidden into his rooms, was overcome by the spoor and his pent-up desires … which, believe me, were considerable … rushed from his throne to her and held her in his arms as she faked the faint and asked him, fluttering her eyelids in innocent wonderment, to save her people. “Kill Haman,” she said. It isn’t enough she has my first husband and my mare spoor and my robes. “Kill Haman. He did this to you.” A. didn’t know what Haman did to him except keep him celibate for a month, but it would get that king-elect out of the way. So A. agreed to kill Haman, save the Jews and give Mordecai a seat of importance. He dragged Esther off to the chambers. Good-by, Esther. Enjoy yourself.
Good-by, Vashti. I am not stupid. And if the times are against me, I do not stand around waiting to be hung on crosses. I pack and leave for the cliffs of Mohr, where the good O’Briens have a pleasant castle, albeit covered with guano, and I leave Persia, Medea, Israel, Ethiopia … all of it … to the masculine apes and their fainting deceitful women whom they think are obedient. And from Ireland I hear that A. had a very grand celebration. Haman was killed and the Jews were allowed to kill others and they, according to the Megillah, smote their enemies with blows of death and devastation, three hundred here, five hundred there, seventy-five thousand there and Shushan, the city of A., was glad and rejoiced and they ate Haman. Ahasuerus got the thigh meat; Esther, the cheek meat; and I, cursing the rain and the guano, traveled across this new island planting palm trees. There is a great festival in the Sunday Schools even today, this Purim. All the children eat the hamantashen, the cookies of Haman, all those little God-eaters in their Florence Eiseman and Piccolino, nosh on the hamantashen for strength, joy, fertility, fecundity, new ten-speeders and anything else one might acquire by eating divine flesh of the god-king. It is equivalent, nowadays, with my recipes, to a Twinkie, but their reasons for eating it are impure, and hamantashen will never help them. Amen.