by Lily Pond
There is nothing I have done, that I can think of, for which I can be punished, but one is not always the final authority about these things, I have found out. I am sure there is a final authority somewhere, but I’m not exactly sure who that might be.
I realize that the shadows of late afternoon have begun to fall. This is not how it’s supposed to go at all. For the first time I feel actual fear, sadness, loneliness, great hunger, all at once. I feel very confused. And at that very moment, the scowling man comes up to me.
“May I help you?”
It is the kindest voice I have ever heard.
“I think I must have taken the turn incorrectly. At some time in the day. Now I know nothing and am very hungry.” I see that in fact he is not scowling. It’s just the way his eyebrows grow, that’s all, that give him that appearance. How unfortunate for him.
“Perhaps some noodles? Will you follow me, miss?”
I supposed turnabout was fair play. He walked on ahead of me and I followed, maybe three, maybe four feet along behind him. At least he seemed to know where he was going.
As we walked along, I had the opportunity to observe him very closely. He was not very tall, in fact, he was rather small. I liked to watch the way he walked because he looked like a young dog away from his brood. I laughed to myself at this picture of him, but I do not think he heard me because he didn’t slow his pace. I wonder what kind of animal I am, I thought. I think if I knew it would answer a lot of questions. Suddenly the man came to a stop.
“Here they have some very fine noodles,” he said.
I don’t know how we came to this place. I guess I must have been thinking only about animals because I never even saw it. I was so tired. Was it proper to enter a restaurant with a man I did not know?
He must have understood my hesitation because he said, “My name is Chen. My brother owns this place. I would like to invite you to be my personal guest.”
I guess that if he is only inviting me to his family restaurant, it is not the same thing as going into a strange place with him, is it? Maybe I will meet his brother, maybe even his mother and father and sisters too. Then it will really be like a family restaurant. Maybe they will all talk to me and tell me how to get to where I am going. Without looking up, I went through the door and into the restaurant.
One very thin voice called hello to him as we entered, but no one else looked up from their bowl. I would have expected that it would be very noisy, but it was very quiet. Sometimes you could hear someone slurp their soup or turn the page of a newspaper. I felt frightened and sad. He sat down into a booth and motioned that I should sit across from him. A man brought each of us a bowl of noodles in hot steaming liquid.
Suddenly I felt so very lonely. How could it almost be nightfall? How could I go through a night away from my family? How could I go so far from my village? Why had they sent me here? Why had they sent me away? I rested my head on my arm with great weariness.
“Eat your noodles.”
“Why did you follow me today?”
“Your brother asked me to follow you.”
I was astonished. I sat straight up again. “My brother? How do you know my brother?”
“If you will eat your noodles, I will tell you the whole story. I met your brother on a trip to your collective explaining the government’s new milk-planning strategy. Out in the yard I saw the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was more warm than a fresh-laid egg, more shining than a pony’s mane, more rosy than a prize pig and more graceful than a crane. Of course your brother saw my eyes following this girl, and he shook his head. He said, ‘That is a wild girl. She is more like a wild mustang than any man’s wife. She will never make you happy. She will only give you strife.’ This only made her appear more lovely.
I have lived in the big city for a long time. People in the city are different from the people in the country. How is a man to choose? How much I loved the two—the old ways of the country, where still there is fresh air singing in the hair, where the wings on people’s backs are not yet clipped. And equally, how I love the keen determination and the jovial humor of those in the city. How will a man take a bride who satisfies both?”
He stopped talking, and looked at me. His eyes appeared to me to be more gentle than the sun’s first grey rays in the sweet morning. I looked into his eyes for quite a long time. He looked back into mine. And then we both began to eat our noodles.
The Day of Sin
Ikeno Yuri
Resting. Waiting for no one
in full agitation. What
will release me?
This field of morning
glory turning,
following light.
Every metaphor is
pointless and means
everything.
Take these arms.
Think of them as arms.
Think of them.
Seventeen, excerpts
Kenzaburo Oe, translation by Luk Van Haute
TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. Seventeen years of age I am today: a Seventeen. * But nobody in my family realizes it’s my birthday. Not my father, not my mother or my brother. Or at least they act like they don’t. So I keep quiet about it too.
Toward evening, my older sister comes home from the Self-Defense Forces hospital, where she works as a nurse. I’m in the bathroom, lathering myself with soap. “Seventeen years old,” she calls out to me. “Doesn’t it just make you want to grab yourself?”
My sister is horribly nearsighted, and so ashamed of her glasses she’s made up her mind never to get married. That’s why she went to work for the SDF. In desperation, she does nothing but read. She’s ruining her eyes all the more, but she doesn’t care.
What she said to me now was probably stolen from a book. Still, at least one person in the family remembered my birthday. As I scrub myself down, I recover just a little from my loneliness. I repeat what my sister said. As I think about her words, my sex stands up out of the soap in a sudden erection. I go and lock the bathroom door.
It seems like I’m always having erections. I like erections. I like them because of the sensation of energy boiling up through my body. And I like to look at my sex in the state of erection. I sit down again and cover myself with soap from head to foot. Then I masturbate. My first masturbation since I turned seventeen.
At first I wondered if masturbation wasn’t bad for me but I looked through some sexology books in the bookstore and made the liberating discovery that the only bad thing about masturbation is feeling guilty about it.
I don’t like the reddish-black adult sex, looking completely naked with the skin peeled back, and I don’t like kids’ sex, which looks like some kind of unripe plant. The sex I like is my own, when it’s ready for masturbation. My very own sex. I can pull back the foreskin if I want to, but when I have an erection, it covers the rose-colored head like a soft sweater. I can use it to warm the stuff under the skin and melt it into a lubricating oil.
During health class, the school doctor told us how to get rid of that stuff, but everybody laughed. That’s because we all masturbate, so there’s never any stuff to get rid of. I’ve gotten to be quite a “hand” at masturbation. I’ve even discovered how to grab the tip of my foreskin as I come, like I’m squeezing the neck of a bag, and catch the semen in it. As a further advance, I’ve also made a side door in the pocket of a pair of pants. When I wear those, I can masturbate even in class.
As I masturbate now, I recall a story I saw in the color feature of a women’s magazine, the confessions of a husband who gave his wife peritonitis by ramming his penis through the wall of her vagina on their wedding night. My erect sex is wrapped in its soft white foreskin, cloaked in a blue haze. It strains upward with the powerful beauty of a rocket. As I caress it, I realize for the very first time that the muscles of my arms are beginning to grow.
For a moment I stare in amazement at my muscles. They’re like new rubber straps. My muscles. I grab my own muscular flesh, like my sister said.
Joy wells up inside me. I smile. I’m a Seventeen, with no love for anybody but myself. My triceps, my biceps, my thigh muscles, they’re all still young and immature, but with training they’ll grow unfettered into thick sinewy muscle.
I think about asking my father to buy me an expander or a barbell set for my birthday. The old man is a tightwad, and he’s not about to spend money on things like training equipment, but the warm steam and the soft soap bubbles have put me into the kind of rapture where it seems like I could talk him into it. By next summer my body will be solid, developed everywhere it ought to be. It’ll catch the eyes of the girls at the beach, and plant fervent roots of respect in the hearts of the boys in my class. The salt taste of the sea breeze, the hot sand, the itching powder dusted over sunburned skin, the smell of me and my friends, and amid the cries of the naked crowd of swimmers, an abyss of blissful dizziness into which I suddenly plunge, in silence and solitude. I cry out and close my eyes. The hard hot sex in my grip stiffens for an instant, and in that instant I feel the sperm that erupts from inside me flowing out to fill my hand. All the while, I know that the lucky crowd of naked bathers is peacefully swimming, sunken into silence in the clear summer afternoon sea within me.
Painting
Jane Hirshfield
There is a painting of it: an eighteenth-century miniature from the Kangra School of India, of the lovers Krishna and Radha. In other paintings, they have sheltered together, stood under a canopy of invisibility among cows and the village girls who tend them. His hand has covered her breast. In other paintings, we have watched her prepare for him, behind the screen of a bedcloth held up by her friends. She is putting red dye on her nipples and the bottoms of her feet, while he looks down from an upstairs window, smiling. His body is blue, his flute’s notes possess a god’s effortless irresistibility. But here it is different. Though her eyes and mouth turn toward him with undeniable longing, she stops him with one raised hand. Inscribed on the page are his words, “Hear me, hear what I ask,” and hers—they are simple, immediate—“I hear, my Lord.” But still she is leaving, walking away. Though her torso turns back, her feet are already rising a little out of her slippers—the god, though not the viewer, can see the red dye as she goes. Under the silk of a sari so fine it could pass through the hoop of her earring, her nipples are standing.
III. From the West
“It was all around you, everywhere.”
The Gates Are Closing
Amy Bloom
HELP ME.
I slip my hands up the legs of Jack’s shorts to stroke the top of his thigh and he lost his grip on the paint roller. A hundred tiny drops flew through the air at me. Thoroughly speckled, squinting to keep the paint out of my eyes, I stroked higher under his boxers, right up the neat, furry juncture of his crotch.
“Jesus,” he said. “It’s not like I have any balance anyway.” Which is true. He has Parkinson’s, and if it weren’t for the fact that he’s been house painting for twenty-five years and is the synagogue president’s husband, no sensible group of people would have him painting their religious institution. I volunteered to help because I’m in love with Jack and because I like to paint. I lay down on the dropcloth and unbuttoned my shirt.
“Want to fool around?”
“Always,” he said. There has never been a sweeter, kinder man. “But not right now. I’m pretty tired already.”
“You rest. I’ll paint.”
I took off my shirt and bra and painted for Jack. I strolled up and down with the extra-long paint roller. When the cracks in the ceiling lost their brown, ropy menace, I took the regular roller and did the walls. I poured Jack tea from my thermos and touched my nipples with the windowsill brush.
He sat up against the bimah, sipping my sweet milky tea and smiling. His face so often shows only a tender, masked expressiveness, I covet the tiny rips and leaks of affect at the corner of his mouth, in the middle of his forehead. His hand shook. He shakes mostly at rest. Mostly when he is making an effort to relax. Sometimes after we’ve made love, which he does in a wonderfully unremarkable, athletic way, his whole right side trembles and his arm flutters wildly, as if we’ve set it free.
I told a friend about me and Jack painting the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, and this woman, who uses riding crops for fun with strangers and tells me fondly about her husband’s rubber fetish, got wide-eyed as a frightened child and said, “In shul? You made love in shul? You must have really wanted to shock God.” I said no, I didn’t want to shock God (what would have shocked God? two more naked people, trying to wrestle time to a halt?), it was just where we were. And if someone had offered me the trade, I would have rolled myself in paint and done dripping off-white cartwheels through the entire congregation for more time with Jack.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are my favorite holy days; you don’t have to entertain anyone or feed anyone or buy things for anyone. You can combine short, skipping waves of kindly small talk with deep isolation and no one is offended. I get a dozen invitations to eat roast chicken the night before and a dozen more invitations to break the fast, including the one to Jack and Naomi’s house. I think her name was Nancy until she went to Jerusalem in eleventh grade and came back the way they did, lean and tan and religious and Naomi. Jack thinks she’s very smart. He went to Catholic school and dropped out of Fordham to run his father’s construction business. Mouthy Jewish girls who can talk through their tears and argue straight through yours, myopic girls who read for pleasure, for Jack, this is real intelligence. And Naomi Sapirstein Malone totes him around, her big converted prize, the map of Ireland on his face and blue eyes like Donegal Bay, nothing like the brown eyes of the other men, however nice their brown eyes are, not even like our occasional blue-eyed men, Vilna blue, the Cossack-came-by eyes, my mother used to say.
My mother still couldn’t believe that I’d even joined a synagogue. Two bar mitzvahs when I was thirteen set off an aversion to Jewish boys that I have only overcome in the past ten years. And if I must go, why not go someplace nice, with proper stained glass and a hundred brass plaques and floral arrangements the size and approximate weight of totem poles? There, you might be safe. There, you must be mistaken for people of position, people whom it would be a bad idea to harm. When my brother Louis had his third nervous breakdown and they peeled him out of his apartment and put him in a ward with double sets of locking doors and two-way mirrors, the doctors tried to tell me and my mother that his paranoia and his anxious loneliness and his general relentless misery were not uncommon in children of Holocaust survivors. My mother was not impressed and closed her eyes when Lou’s psychiatrist spoke.
We went out for tuna fish sandwiches and I tried to tell her again, as if it was only that she didn’t understand their zippy American medical jargon. I counted Lou’s symptoms on my fingers. I said that many young men and women whose families had survived the Holocaust had these very symptoms. I don’t know what 1 thought. That she would feel better? Worse?
“Well, yes, of course, they suffer. Those poor wretches, she said, in her most Schoenbrunn tones.
“Like us, Meme. Like us. Daddy in Buchenwald. Grandpa Hoffmann in Ebensee. Everyone fleeing for their lives, with nothing The doctor meant us.”
My mother waved her hand and ate her sandwich.
“Please. We’re very lucky. We’re fine. Louis has your Uncle Morti’s nervous stomach, that’s all.”
Louis recovered from his nervous stomach with enough Haldol to fell an ox, and when he got obese and shaved only on Sundays and paced my mother’s halls day and night in backless bedroom slippers, this was Uncle Morti’s legacy as well.
Your might, O Lord, is boundless.
Your loving-kindness sustains the living.
Your great mercies give life to the dead.
You support the falling, heal the ailing, free the fettered.
How can you say those prayers when your heart’s not in them, Jack said. My heart is in them, I said. I don’t think belief is required. I put
my hand out to adjust his yarmulke, to feel him. I never saw anything so sweetly ridiculous as his long pink ears anchoring that blue satin kippah to his head.
You could wear a really dashing fedora, I said. You have that sexy Gary Cooper hat. Wear that. God won’t mind. God, I said, would prefer it.
Naomi’s breakfast was just what it was supposed to be: platters of bagels, three different cream cheeses in nice crystal bowls, roasted vegetables, kugels, and interesting cold salads. There was enough food so that one wouldn’t be ashamed in front of Jews, not so much that one would have to.
I helped Jack in the kitchen while Naomi circulated. Sometimes I wanted to say to her, How can you stand this? You’re not an idiot. Doesn’t it make you feel just a little ridiculous to have gone to the trouble of leaping from Hadassah president to synagogue president in one generation and find yourself still in your mother’s clothes and still in your mother’s makeup and even in her psyche, for Christ’s sake? I didn’t say anything. It was not in my interest to alarm or annoy Naomi. I admired her publicly, I defended her from the women who thought their husbands would have been better presidents and therefore better armatures for them as presidents’ wives, sitting next to the major donors, clearly above the balabostas at God’s big dinner party. We’d had forty years of men presidents, blameless souls for the most part, only the occasional embezzler or playboy or sociopath. Naomi was no worse, and she conveyed to the world that we were a forward-looking, progressive congregation. I don’t know how forward-looking Jews can actually be, wrestling with God’s messenger, dissolving Lot’s wife, wading through six hundred and thirteen rules for better living, our one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old mothers laughing at their sudden fertility and our collective father Abraham, willing to sacrifice his darling boy to appease a faceless bully’s voice in his ear.