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 welclass="underline" 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 reversaclass="underline" 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.