Our sages say the following:
If you have a house, you are safe. If you have a house with a lawn, you are safer; though a house with a lawn with a fence is still safest, with neighbors all around to tell you what is yours and what is theirs and to affirm that nothing will ever be both of yours, or no one’s. But if you erect a fenced and lawned house on an Island, you have only created another Garden — and so there can only be another Fall. The familytree will be uprooted. Apples will turn to waxen wood, becoming mere ornament atop the table. A chart of the ABCs will burn. Plush dolls will lose their stuff to rage. Limbs torn from toys. And even the toys shall be allotted toys of their own to neglect. The hobbyhorse, thou wilt be lamed. LMNOPee. The crib has been moved against the window to make room for the bed, whose bedding matches the carpet, which is pink, brightened by the sun coming in past the gauzy tongue of curtain. A cedar chair cushioned in a fluff of white by the door, which even if closed is always open. A son who trusts in locks is no son of mine. A woman sits atop the chair, knitting a bootie big enough for the thumb of God; she whispers to her boy, a lullaby for the waking. Benny Cenny Denny Schlaf. If a baby lives in a room, that room is called a nursery, the knob to its door a willing nipple. Suck it in, suck it up, He’s our kaddish. Talcum breath, with hands of cream, clasped in benediction. Keep quiet. Tiptoe an inside voice, He’s sleeping.
Without bells, or their jingling toll — the sleigh that’d brought Ben back from night and forest, its horrid, haunted, enchanted, and terrible wood, it’s a flatbed knockaround workhorse that’d been too rundown to haul a century ago; its wood unvarnished and splintering, it’s parked now in the garage below; its horselike dogs impounded from the pines romping puppy in the backyard, amid the snow of the sandbox overlooking the ice and the fieldstone, the gley and the marsh, the warehouses, the fallen stockyards and trafficlights wavering slow yellow in the wind. Across the ice, dawn rises to a vantage upon Bergen and Communipaw Cove, silence rents to own; a railway terminal with its switches abandoned, the grids of the parkinglot like empty graves stood sentry over by leaning watertowers, the lowing overpass of the holy drainage ditch, baptism by the irradiating verd of sludge — the skyways arching over the fallen industrial gardens of Joysey as if they’re the rainbows of a million different covenants, each fulfilled only at the deadend of the asphalt and its prismatic stains of oil in the miracle that is the city, founded to last any Apocalypse, as secular as steel.
What a view, what a nightmare, Joysey and west, the Palisades; a mountain risen from the receding of the waters below, only to be frozen by those above, that crystalline breathless sustenance of window — glassing the gaping mouth of house and, too, the unspoken dreams of those who live within. Who lived. Understand, this is how we once spoke of dream, both as a visitation of the night and as the mark we hoped to make upon the forehead of the day. Of what did I dream now not a concern of the prophets but of the failures among us, those who would never own to a home. Above the window there’s a banner, cardboard, one end of which hangs low to the sill from a tack that’d lost its dig into wall. Mind it. In retrospect, this banner reads like crank prophecy, as if the first words mumbled after a darkened sleep.
Mazel Tov, it says—It’s A Girl!
As the sun makes her face, the woman rises slowly, failing to countenance a litany of joint ailments from the weakly kneed chair — don’t get up for her sake; no, really — she’ll be fine. His mother, with her dress taken in too tight under the breasts, the wig askew and all too black, makeup smeared as if yet another face fallen from the face she leans to light His own, to kiss Him awake upon the lips.
Come downstairs, the hallway calls in a voice, if not hers then whose — it’s brunch.
Better, it’s that dream Ben’s been having, that’s been having Him: one eye fluttering, one two three then, poof — she’s gone like never was. Only a wisp of skirt, a flash of heel, a taste of tongue, then nothing…His sisters, too, and father, them and their promises made. Any other morning upon waking — to rise an immediate rush down the hallway to their room as if expelled from the Paradise that is sleep, banished forcibly forever from its rest and so condemned to wander an eternity down the deserted halls past the mirrors and windows draped, and the framed photographs, too, and the shoescuffed, handprinted walls whiter than ash being the death of ash, the rooms of His sisters their doors shut, locked even and the carpet between them what’s patterned in stellated hexagons of blue on white down to its other end and the humpbacked trunk that floats there, the treadle sewing machine antique and decoration only aside the top goatskinned, meeklegged table topped with a vitric but plastic vase of baby’sbreath, its icewhite blooms seasonally intermarried with an abundance of lavender hydrangea made in Asia, crowded around with the silence of unread books, a stray shoe this loafer, a pair of His father’s old glasses, wireframed round and without lens, a forgotten, shattersheathed thermometer, a bowl of shells from beaches south…then, a quick last left to the door and He’d open it into another temperature zone, the alternate universe of a thermostat no one was ever allowed to know, let alone touch. It’d be freezing in there; His breath would come like shvitz, to take the air like faces. To lie down at the edge of their bed, which is made and empty, which was always made and always empty, and there on the pillows that still smell of her hair, His mother’s skin’s comforter, too, discomforting, in that it still feels like her legs and arms, to pray for sleep again. This was a week, had been. His sisters would have been up for hours. His parents, forever.
And then to sleep there at the foot of their sleeps between their twin nightstands topped with more books, yearold magazines, and the forfeited frontpage of the newspaper, their wedding photographs and telephones their cords tangled with those of the lamps and the 06 blinking 59 clocks, it’s another dream: to lift the shroud on another night, this different from all other nights…a maid’s wifely sheet, He peeks — and there’s a woman, standing just outside the lone wide window of His parent’s room, this great green monster in the robe His mother mourned the night when she, and that other time that, the once then don’t forget…O to be born too late for memory, waterswaddled, as naked as metal. Liberty’s her name. He stands on His Island next to hers. They match. Are twins. They’re just friends. Good friends. They’ve been married by the moon. Tell the truth, they’ve been forbidden from each other. It wouldn’t work, won’t, not to say it never does.
A love, it’s this…Ben and her, they never touched, they couldn’t have, can’t: His arms are too short and hers, they’re holding stuff. A book. A torch. Commandments. In reward for their keeping, an icecream cone of ten scoops, their flavor’s bronze, and its melt, molten — who knows to ask, who would ask to lick. Anyway, she couldn’t speak, never did. She’s without tongue as if guilty, He can never look her in the eyes. His are shut, He’s sleeping. Still. To be born too late for waking. Sh. He’s pretending. All night, they’ll drift further away from one another, then far beyond the dream. And then one morning — her crown will be the sun. A gloriole. Another day.
To sleep here always, forever in your own bed — your childbed, your deathbed; to rise up and lie down day after night in His own room as if in the very house He’d been born in, on its table a floor below. And that it is. Joysey or near enough, still within its jurisdiction, the judging throw of a stone from a strong hand, of an arm outstretched to Manhattan and its water iced. To wake always and run to Ima, which is what He would’ve called Hanna, to hug at her breasts and kiss upon them nipples, never again. Forget any finding His father already left for the office, Israel in depositions early, high in Midtown, trying every courthouse from Centre Street down to Camden, a dreaded arbitration in Secaucus; out to try a client in Coney Island seeking to sue Berlin for nightmares at midcentury…then, His sisters — never again to tug their hair in a row down the halclass="underline" I’ve got your nose, a quarter from His ear. Home is where the heart is, it’s said, and there imprisoned, criminal, beaten. The doors to the outside have been locked. Ben lies in His bedroom, and even sleeping aches. In what seems His house to the final detail, the most thoughtful ornament, the voweled adornment last. Down to the lost sock strewn His room, His nursery’s what they’d called it, His parents, it should be, should’ve been, way back Turnpike to the Parkway south and exits further — a bedroom that’s His and isn’t, relocated a mile or so north of the Great Hall at the edge of the Garden, an Island ringed in ice, with a sheet of freeze paving from here to shore in reflection of the appled lights.