It’s that violation all over again, older than ancient, the rendering of a sacrifice impure, marking it as illegitimate, a sanctuary defiled, Jerusalem forsaken and the Temple in ruins: her ovum being a Holy of Holies…and, inside her, tailspun moments after, she’s slumped, elbowkneed on the honeymoon suite’s tremendous toilet, he’s sprawled already halfway to the somatic Edenic, that’s when the encounter occurred, the illicit approach, solicitation repine, wormy rape: a burrowing, a burial if only of hope; when the sperm, always lazy, fat, and most probably Polish in origin, meets the smart, moral, and altogether perfect perfectionist egg. How it happens, hymn…he knocks on her door, of the house she’d lived in as a girl, this someone he’s selling something and she doesn’t know from what how would she, innocent as she is, she’s not even home, she’s away with her parents down the Shore, themepark Florida, or Jerusalem; or maybe she is home, and there locked in her room — a fantastic instance that most assuredly must remain Apocryphal — and she’s unable to move, to react, as this who does he think he is, whoever the gehenna, however he was raised — and it’s most definitely a he, she knows by how he knocks paw, then tries the bell, the key under the mat he thinks for once and for once the schmuck’s right, the knob, he lets himself in, and this putz, he makes himself mamzer at home: feet up on the furniture, drinking wholemilk, from where, not in my house, straight from the gallon, the sofatuber, he watches the screen until late, later than her parents ever let her watch, and unspeakable shows she’d never been allowed to know existed; and then what does he do, he stays, and she in her locked room can’t help it, she falls asleep, how long, 12:00blink12:00blinkclockradioalarm then the frontdoor, slam, wakes her up, someone’s leaving but it’s not the same someone expected; no, it’s someone else, someone who looks, acts, talks, and thinks, and everything else — though she has no way of knowing this — exactly halfway between the first someone and herself, and there’s this Thing, this odd weirdness between us, like what’s the weight, the word that it weighs on your tongue, guilt: she admits, confesses, begs…has done something wrong, realizes, a sin unmitigatingly mortal, she let something happen, the same as having made something happen, having remained silent, she’s responsible any way it’s minced to finish and the frontdoor, it’s locked eternally now from the outside, she’s helpless, absolutely goddamned helpless and shrieking for succor, You’re mine, you’re mine, you’remine — and the entire house’s settling in its foundations as if it’s laughing gut, for twenty, thirty, forty years until it’s all paid off, a divorce from the mortgage, a life agonizingly amortized of sin, having aged unattractively and unable to flirt anymore if ever she was she’s still sitting, here on the couch and drinking a from the mix Bloody Mary, talking her new nose to a throwpillow: I didn’t make a mistake, I loved him, that was all that mattered, wasn’t it, we’d planned it out beforehand, went to therapy diligently something like three times a week, four in the summer, isn’t that enough, that two people love one another, mature, it’s not like we ever futzed around on each other, or anything — to throw that pillow across the room set with sectionals, and resume her harangue to the pillow underneath, enumerating all her misses, her nears: I should’ve married Gary, Harry, Larry, he was always, we once, I ever tell you about the time he took me to supper and a show in New York, night he stole his parent’s…and eventually say three or so, with the light of the screen givingout the lachrymal evangel, its pledgedrive to benefit only those with love but none of her homes, clothes, without food or drink, she manages and with a swizzlestick stuck obscenely to passout, a life and even its dreaming — preempted…with storyhour over, unprayered, it’s time to go to sleep, Benjamin, will you?
Tell us another story, just one more.
You want another, sighing phlegmish pudding, an urge to smoke — don’t you know they’re all the same?
PopPop, Grandpaw Senior, whoever you are, one more…
Alright, then you sleep, just one last:
This Is The Story, says PopPop in a yuck yuck yabber, impersonating a foreign voice, as if that of Benjamin’s grandfather, His other whom neither of them knew, Hanna’s father Senior who’d died so long ago, of which war’s cancer forgotten — with MomMom’s crucifix swaying from his neck on a chain of seaweed, him the already caricature consanguine doing this goofy goy impression (perfected against the imagined model of all his late wife’s late forefathers), applauding his hands in mock frothy excitement, as he says, Of The Lumbering Dumb Sperm, & The Intelligent Petite Ovum:
Once upon a time, it begins in a land between your Mother’s legs and your Grandmother’s legs, and between the legs of her Mother and her Grandmother and her Mother and her Grandmother before that crotch, yadda, there was a Lumbering Dumb Sperm named Lud, no, let’s say for argument’s sake Mamzer who he’d wandered far from home in search of his fortune.
But where was his home, you ask?
Okay, in the far ’n’ widehanging testes of this terrible Oaf who roamed the dark dense pubic forest of a nameless kingless kingdom, it might’ve been Podunk for all we know, the wrong side of the tracks. And this Mamzer Sperm, he whistled a simple tune: tweet tweet tweet t’tweet, then said to himself in a language more like grunting that he the dumb schmuck thought meant something, it’s such a goddamned wonderful day! let’s wander into that sunny patch of the forest over there and find something to destroy! and so he did — tweet tweet tweet t’tweet! — and soon beheld through the trees an open grassy field up ahead so calm and so peaceful and so wandered there, and met an Intelligent Petite Ovum, an IPO known as Mazel, not a girl’s name, so sue me in your dreams…and then what you ask? I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow, my boy.
That, or the tale of Rumpleforeskin.
For now, get your rest, make a schlaf.
At least tell me what happens next, you say?
Alright, fine…a reversion to normally nasal lisp: the long story short’s that Mamzer, he rescues Mazel from Mazel’s wellmeaning but at times okay could be overbearing father — a King of Kings, really, and takes her away to an even more terrible third kingdom who knew even existed, it’s named Exile — in which no one invites them to lavish parties without at least a slight degree of wariness…you happy?
As habit evolved over the years, three of them of repeated instruction from Hanna reiterated again and again whenever they’d go on vacation, family or just the two of them, even away just for the weekend, which opportunity had been getting rarer as Israel’d work longer and harder for more money who’d ever spend (retirement might’ve meant death at his desk), Wanda’s locked triply and doubly checked all the doors, front, back, and basement, the two doors per porch interior, ex, the four deckdoors, too, had locked all the windows then let down the blinds, pulled curtains, timed lights set like alarms — her purpose, to preserve anything Benjamin might inherit, after her, and her own, as the Underground’s planning to repossess everything in One Thousand Cedars’ bracket, to ingather its lode to the Hall of Domestics, to house it there until its sale as a single lot to a fence as yet elusive, woody or wiry, going through the interview process, getting screened, prior to any dispersal, mass exodus into greater America, evading the authorities of Immigration, Naturalization, and the retribution of a reckoning substantially diviner: measures proposed then voted upon in a matter of emergency at the meeting of the Eve. Redemption, come up from below, and despite the locks, the alarms above, which are only the world of pretense, of appearances, surface — now, these women have their saving to do, personal scrimp, their own gleaning, its own degradation. Boxes are arrayed, breakables swaddled in newspapers outdated, This End Up. Underground, Domestics are occupied hauling chairs, chandeliers, tables, tarpulined paintings and books never again to be read, everything downstairs then down and out through wardrobes then into and through the wide floodlit tunnels they’re humming, they’re whistling, giddily insulting one another on down the line of waiting looters in every language that is, their vernacular an echoic, welcoming admixture of Slavicisms and the vulgar idiom of American pop, resounding like a party in revolt under the earth, whose face is being emptied chair by table by lamp: each Domestic responsible for her own transportation of the holdings of her home to the warehouse of the Hall (endtables with casters hoarded, lawyerhusbands’ carts used to lug home files, prized), and yet the proceeds from the sale of the lot in toto are to be split evenly amongst all members, without preference equally shared among Domestics, Grounds, and Maintenance alike, an inheritance from their old worlds and its outmoded socialist governance, though Adela and despite having received no explanation in return for a promise to honor a request this unexpected if not just untimely has agreed to keep Wanda’s absence from the others and, furthering hush, even offered to glean a portion of the Israelien household on her behalf (Wanda insisting on the Scriptural tenth, the holiness of the sum she felt sanctifies greed), while preserving the rest for what she, Adela, didn’t understand, couldn’t ask — for Benjamin, if ever He’d come of age, or for His guardian down there where Wanda said, Myhammy.