Questions. All of you know the boychick I’m speaking of, Ben, one of our Garden’s more famous charges — or have heard of Him? and their heads nod in a row out in the hall dimly far from the projected light. Needless to say, everything I say in this meeting is to be kept strictly confidential. You’ve signed your sisterhoods away. We’ll hold you to your word. Exercise caution and your abs. Your lats and glutei. Marys, daughters — you are to be sisters to one another, and to Him: to keep Him company, to gain His confidence, how should I say this — to keep Him occupied…meaning, to seduce Him — to entertain His body, to distract His brain. In this assignment, Hanna, His mother, is to be your instructor, your mentor; maternal guidance in all its trusting worry — her here the one now dancing, or this evening she thinks it’s dancing, why not, let’s indulge her, that’s what daughters do. Or should be doing, if they’re behaved and well brought up; and you are — try to remember how well you’re provided for, how you’re kept always fed and warm. And thankful as much as ungrateful, too, it’s difficult, it’s tough. I want you to study her, to learn me, to become her daughters, mine…I want you to know her as cold as she is now. Observe her every moment and physical movement, her every overmothered eccentricity, the way she holds herself and others, the tic of the eye, the teethe of the lip, the scratch at the elbow, too; any and all idiosyncrasies you’re able to glean from stock and inspection firsthand, which will occur tomorrow at a time mutually convenient: daughters to bundleup in hooded down, with school announced cancelled, and so gathering instead for the true examination around the frozen slab upon which His Hanna lies, Morgue-stripped, bluegummed and crazyeyed. Anatomized. Dissect her, it. This, the womb from whence you came. Scalpels out. No copying.
Learn to walk her, to talk her, live her, breathe her mouth in yours, to give you life, I mean…eat her and sleep her — because He will; her when you rise up and her when you lie down, her when you go and her when you come, especially when you come…and then this business again with the pointer, her hysterical tapping; what am I forgetting?
Some of you will have your hair dyed, others will be given wigs in various shades and styles; many of your noses will require lengthening by pros-thesis; we’ve already gone ahead and rounded up their six pairs of glasses, frames we’ve refitted with new lenses, nonprescription…and then — and this is why you have to stay in shape and not get pregnant, or menstrually bloated, bellyfat and soft — if all else fails as His sisters, we’ll revert to your normal shiksa states, you Marys blond and blue, allAmerican, you’ll forgive me…I’m getting ahead of myself.
You’ll follow my instructions, and Hanna’s example’s what I’m saying, are we understood?
Lips lilt sibilance in the suspiciously affirmative, then giggle…that’s your first mistake, she says, your last — in this family, no one ever answers when spoken to for the first time, not even for the second, or third; they ignore. Then they yell themselves again even louder.
Now quiet down and pay attention, watch; what you’re seeing is upper-upper-upper-middlemeans, it’s said, classwise not too bad though taste is often the reversal of fortune — we’re talking six figures just a promotion away from partnering seven, with smart investment…late period Assimilation is it, and this despite the ostensibly religious nature of the event, the occasion Hanna’d call it, less a celebration than an observance, a catered cultic rite: the Israelien parents attending a function, was what Israel would’ve said, an hour after the synagogue, and so not a mitzvah bar or bat, but a wedding kashered with the ketubah, the contract writ upon the chuppah, which is the marriage canopy, then the heel that signs the break in glass: a wedding of whom it isn’t known. Whether family, most likely that of friends.
Allegedly, the videographer had a problem with the sound — I’m sure the lawsuit would still be alive, if they were.
