by Ladies
Rebekah talked about Jacob all the time and Esau let her. He even made an effort to keep the conversation going. If he had anything Jacob-related to say, he was guaranteed his mother’s full attention.
“I will concede that he had an above average singing voice,” said Esau, “but he did not have blond hair. Light brown at best. Blond it was not.”
And the whole time, Esau knew that Jacob was out there.
“Gamboling, sashaying, waving the parchment— bathed in the ever-blondening halo of our father’s sweet deathbed blessing.”
Then came the pain. It started in the balls and twisted its way into his stomach. On some days it was so bad that he’d get afraid he’d have to spend the rest of his life walking around doubled over, holding on to his groin. God forbid he should become one of those guys! He was not even sure if there were such guys. He would be the first.
Not only had Jacob destroyed his life but his memory continued to destroy it a little more every day—breaking off a new piece of his soul here and there. That was the true miracle of life: whenever you thought you’d been completely crushed, there was always a little something left to get creamed.
It was one day while sitting on a log, indulging his new hobby of twisting his beard until the pain became unbearable, that Esau met a girl from Canaan named Linda. She was into the dark, brooding type and soon she and Esau began dating. Linda was a good companion and she took Esau’s mind off his troubles.
After seeing Linda for some time, Esau finally presented his mother with the burning question.
“Do you like her?” he asked.
“I like her if you like her,” she said, never looking up from her chicken plucking.
Linda came from a family of idol worshippers. Rebekah referred to her as “the Little Idol Worshipper Girl.”
“There’s more to her than idol worship,” Esau said. He tried to come up with one or two things—how she was really nice to him, how she loved him—but he knew his mother would find all of that stuff corny.
* * *
Meanwhile in Haran, Jacob’s life was no bed of roses either. His uncle Laban worked him like a red-maned pack mule. And after he fell in love with Laban’s youngest daughter, Rachel—that was when his troubles really began. It was then that he stupidly, drunkenly— blue-balledly—agreed to work for seven years in Laban’s service in exchange for her hand in marriage.
The next day, waking up flaccid, he tried to renegotiate the deal.
“Seven years?” he asked incredulously. “It doesn’t strike you as excessive?”
“Afraid of the smell of your own work sweat?” asked Laban. “Rebekah always said you were a pussy.”
Jacob had never loved anyone like he loved Rachel. Sometimes it was a nice feeling, but often it terrified him. She felt more real than anything in the world, even himself. Sometimes he would get so insecure, he’d ask her ten times in a day, “You still love me, right?”
“No, I hate you,” she’d say, smiling. She was so young and didn’t know her strength. It scared Jacob to death. He felt like his life was not his own. His life felt like it was being batted around by a baby. At night he dreamed she was a kitten that he chased through holes and under the ground, crying. It was like there was always the risk of her wandering off, his heart in her teeth. In this way, Jacob was made humble by coming to know what pain really was. He wanted to marry Rachel even if it meant nothing but pain. He would sit on a chair made of cactus needles for the rest of his life if only to have her with him, seated upon his lap.
So for seven years, Jacob tended flocks and raised cattle and finally, at the end of the term, his bride was presented to him. But after the marriage ceremony, when Jacob lifted the bridal veil, he discovered not Rachel, but her older sister, Leah.
Jacob was furious. When he asked Laban what was going on, all he got was a shit-eating grin.
“Let’s not get hung up with details on such a day of rejoicing.” Then, closing the book on the whole thing, he scrunched up his face.
Jacob didn’t push it. In a weird way he felt he had it coming, having been a proponent of the old switcheroo himself. There were Leah’s feelings to consider, too. She felt so low.
“My father,” she had wept in explanation.
So Jacob just married Rachel as well. Then he had two wives. Just thinking about the cousins that would be brothers and the daughters who would be nieces was enough to give him a headache. But at least he had Rachel.
It was around this time that Jacob heard the voice of God. He heard it in a dream and, oddly, the voice took the form of Rebekah’s imitation of the voice of God.
“Mom?” asked Jacob, “is that you?” His mother had been dead several years.
“It is God!” spoke Rebekah’s voice. “If thou heard my actual voice even for half a second thou would instantly go mad and then be of no use to anyone. Maybe some day thou might be ready for it, but not now.”
The voice commanded him to go back to Canaan. But Esau was in Canaan. What would going back home accomplish?
“My brother will only kill me there,” said Jacob. “Thou knowest how he gets.”
“Go and I shall watch over you.”
So Jacob packed up the family and went back to Canaan.
When he got to the outskirts of town, Jacob sent a messenger to seek out his brother.
“Wha’d he say?” asked Jacob when the messenger returned.
“He shall come with an army of four hundred.”
“Did he actually say army? He didn’t say welcoming committee, or coterie? Chefs? Musicians? Tell me exactly what he said—to the word.”
“ ‘I shall come with an army of four hundred.’ ”
“Where does he get a figure like that? Doesn’t that seem a little excessive?”
Later that night, unable to sleep, Jacob tried to do the arithmetic: Five men to torture each finger and nail. Five per toe. One to rip open each nostril and one to stick fire in. Three to pull head hair and three to do beard hair. Two to eye-gouge, two to ear-stab, ten to backpound. Fourteen for charley horses. And ten of the more eloquent men to admonish him for being such a bad brother. That still left over two hundred men with nothing to do but stand around drawing a salary. His brother had always been prone to high-rolling and flash.
Still sleepless, he went over his calculations again. This time, including torture of the joints and flaying of the skin, he accounted for three hundred and nine men. When he opened his eyes Jacob saw he was not alone, for squatting beside him was an angel.
The angel smiled beatifically. Then, drawing his wings back like the ears of an angry cat, he dropped his elbow onto Jacob’s groin. After that it was all nonstop pile drivers and headlocks.
All of Esau’s murderous rage and hatred had come to life in the form of a heavenly wrestling angel! Or maybe he’d decided to just hire the angel instead of the army. Either way, Jacob was getting his ass handed to him. Hiding beside a rock in the darkness, he caught his breath. Once it was caught, he ran toward the angel, screaming and crying, his arms doing a Dutch windmill. The angel caught him by the throat and bear-hugged him. His flesh was cool and Jacob noted his breath smelled of daffodils. He wondered: In Heaven, do they eat flowers? Breaking free of the angel’s hold, he reared back his fist and punched him in the nose. Maybe his dad was the one who saved my dad’s life. The angel flew into the sky and immediately Jacob felt ashamed. What kind of a person punches an angel in the face? He had never even heard of anyone touching an angel. He looked at the angel blood on his fist—red, almost purple—and felt like a sleazebag, but not for long, as the angel flew back down, stomping his foot onto the top of Jacob’s skull.
And so it went. Throughout the night, they wrestled like a couple of schoolyard kids. As the hours went by, Jacob tried anything to get the angel to leave him be— tickling him, screaming in his face, biting his wings— but there was no stopping him. Sometimes Jacob would start to laugh, thinking, This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life
, but then he was right back to inverted face-locking, camel-clutching, and mandible-clawing.
When the morning came, the angel had to get back to Heaven, but Jacob wouldn’t let him leave. He felt that he had gone too far to just back off. He gripped on to the angel’s foot.
“Bless me,” demanded Jacob.
Still smiling, the angel punched him on the Adam’s apple.
“How many blessings does one person need?” asked the angel. “Do not be a blessing hog at the Lord’s trough.”
Still, Jacob would not let go of his foot. He wanted to at least get one normal thing out of the whole experience, something that wasn’t embarrassing to tell people about.
The angel flapped his wings and kicked his legs but Jacob’s grip held firm.
“All right. I bless thee. Thy new blessed name is Israel.”
Jacob released the angel’s foot and watched him flap away into the sky. He wanted nothing more than to get some sleep, but there was no time. Israel had to meet his brother.
Jacob had his people send forth to his brother a gift.
“Make it munificent,” said Jacob, and his people sent out camels, cattle, and sheep. Esau, as it turned out, was very warmed by the gesture and when the brothers met, Esau bowed and Jacob bowed back. There followed a great deal of bowing. It started off sheepishly and slowly but became more and more heartfelt. In the end the two brothers were practically belly flopping at each other’s feet. All the while, Esau’s army stood around them in a huge circle. Jacob could not help thinking of the money their just standing there and not painfully killing him was wasting.
Finally, Esau spoke.
“I received your gifts,” he said. “They were really munificent.”
Esau introduced his brother to each of the four hundred men in his army. Jacob gave up trying to remember their names after the fourth one.
“Everything I told you about this guy,” said Esau, his hand on his brother’s shoulder, “forget it.”
“There’s one more thing I have for you.”
Jacob handed Esau the flattened-out piece of parchment.
“It’s really yours,” he said.
Esau protested but Jacob, who was still all wrestly from his match with the angel, started to get physical about it—awkwardly shoving it down his brother’s toga.
Later in the evening, once they had begun to loosen up, a spread of food was prepared. As they ate, and Esau got into the warmth and spirit, without thinking, and under Jacob’s stunned gaze, he pulled out the rumpled parchment and used it to wipe a spot of gravy from off his chin.
“Dad would be so happy to see us like this,” said Jacob.
“For a long time, all I wanted to do was murder you,” said Esau. “On some days it was the only thing that kept me going.” He motioned a chicken leg toward the army. They were playing dice and drinking merrily.
“I wanted to kill you well—everything just so. Now I have four hundred men to feed. For what?”
Jacob smiled.
“You’ve changed,” he said. “Your shoulder hair is practically white.” He stopped, not wanting to disrespect him. “Like snowcapped mountains, I mean.”
Esau laughed.
“You seem different, too.”
The angel’s thigh punches had given Jacob a slight limp. It helped him to come off as less of a hotshot.
Jacob told him about how he had fallen in love and how it made him see life differently. From love he quickly wound his way toward the subject of his father-in-law. Once he got going, Rachel joined in with extra details about her father’s douchery—just to keep the party vibe going.
Esau listened with a serious look on his face. He liked the way life was now able to get his brother worked up.
“I wrestled an angel last night,” said Jacob, happily jumping from subject to subject. They were learning to converse. It was like learning to walk—together, bound to one another under one toga.
“You know,” said Rachel, “it’s crazy how much you look alike.”
The twins looked at each other silently, their faces relaxed. It was like gazing into a clear pond on a summer day.
“Sometimes I wake up screaming at her,” Esau said. “My wife tells me I’m crazy.”
But then their conversation turned to other things, cattle and the weather, and they did not talk of Rebekah. They did not speak of the hand that had wiped away their tears, how now it was bereft of flesh, how now it wore a bracelet made of worms. It would have done no good to have spoken of any of it.
The Golden Calf
After forty intense days with God, Moses descended Mount Sinai, his nerves shot. No sooner had he reached the base of the mountain than he heard music coming from a nearby clearing. Looking through the trees, he saw the children of Israel praying to what appeared to be a crudely sculpted golden calf. They danced and pranced—flounced, frisked, strutted, and swaggered. All hopped up on idol worship.
Cranky by disposition but made even more irritable by lack of sleep, Moses began to weep tears of anger. Even the people he’d trusted—the wise, loyal ones—tapping their feet and snapping their fingers like it was a hootenanny!
Golden calves were all the rage, but Moses had warned them before he left. “I’ll be down in a jiff,” he had said, “so don’t start praying until I get back.”
Seeing their lurid dance, Moses took the tablets he was carrying—tablets bearing commandments he had transcribed for them—commandments that, among other things, commanded there be no other god but God—God god—and he dropped them to the ground. Though Moses could get angrier than just about anyone besides God, he dropped them not in his wrath. For Moses this was odd, as he ate, spoke, slept, and snored in his wrath. He could even whistle a tune in his wrath! But when he let the tablets fall to the earth, he did it like an overburdened little kid who just didn’t care anymore. That was when Moses was at his scariest: when he was all quiet and holding back.
The children of Israel stared at him in silent terror.
“Zero commandments for you,” he repeated quietly under his breath.
* * *
You would think that that would spell the end for golden calves, but this was not the case. There was still one man holding out hope, a man who thought monotheism just another fad. This man’s name was Gomer and he was the largest golden calf dealer in the Sinai region and, much to his son Ian’s embarrassment, he had a real “never say die” attitude.
“They’ll come around,” Gomer said to his son soon after the commandment episode. “An invisible God that no one can see except Moses? Oh, and He’s also got a temper problem—likes to make threats and burn bushes. I don’t want to pray like a frightened mouse. I want to pray as one equal to another. And those laws— ‘Don’t wear this cloth with that cloth! Don’t let this cattle graze with that cattle!’ All that red tape. Not for me.”
But the god of Moses did make a splash with a great many people. When Moses got going, waving his staff around while yelling bloody murder—curing leprosy and transforming his rod into a snake—he made a pretty persuasive case. People became fired up on New God and began forming mobs of protest in front of Gomer’s showroom. But still, Gomer was undeterred.
“Business is business,” he said to his son as they watched the crowd grow, through a crack in the door. “Is there a commandment that says ‘Thou shalt regulate trade’? No way. Remember when they said candied manna was sacrilege? I rode it out and two weeks later I was selling it on a stick!”
It was true Ian’s father was an innovator. When he got into the business it was all cows, full grown, but Gomer saw that as homes got smaller there was a need for an idol that could fit more neatly into a corner— something you could drape a caftan over and prop your feet on when you weren’t worshipping. And thus the mini cow, or “calf,” was born.
“What makes the god of Moses better than my calves?” Gomer asked. “What can he do that they can’t? Speak in that sonorous voice that makes you feel like you just swallowed y
our balls? Bullshit. That’s not being a god. That’s just being pushy. The Calf is a more laid back, cud-chewing lord. He minds his own business and only steps in in a pinch. Remember when I prayed for the bastard selling silver goats next door to get dropsy? And did he not deliver? All praise the Golden Bovine, whose gold trumps silver, whose golden teats nourish us with invisible golden milk.”
Gomer stopped his pantomime of teat-squeezing and looked at his son to see if he was making an impression. He was not.
“You heard Moses talk on the mountain,” Ian said, “the deep grumbly voice—the water into blood. It gave everyone the same feeling. We all said so: The tingling in the chest. The rattling of the rib cage. You said you felt it, too.”
“You know me,” Gomer said. “I don’t want to hurt feelings. If someone gets excited I get excited, too. But someone does a few magic tricks and you renounce everything you ever stood for? I was born a Golden Calf man and I shall die a Golden Calf man. Integrity. It’s the way my daddy raised me and, if I’m not mistaken, it’s how I raised you.”
Gomer had raised him to be cheap, suspicious, and sneaky. He didn’t know where integrity fit in.
“They’ll come around,” Gomer said. But as the days went by and the angry crowd outside his showroom grew in number, Gomer saw that people weren’t coming around.
“What we need is a battle plan,” he said.
And so Gomer invited over his brothers. A bigger bunch of shysters, hoodwinkers, and chicanerous pettifoggers there never was. Ian hated when they all got together. In five minutes the whole house smelled of farts and his cheeks were pinched black and blue.
Brother number one sold discount winnowing shovels that broke the second you winnowed; brother number two was a professional angel spotter (“There’s one right behind you!” he’d cry. “You just missed him!”); and brother number three was a bookie who took bets on the weather. Every time Ian saw him he’d grab him by the sleeve and try to explain something called the “Sunny Day Trifecta.”