by Joshua Cohen
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; h
im 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 say
s 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.