A wide veer into the fray again, the throng: amongst menschs dancing with menschs, this we’ve seen, but now unscreened, with the partition fallen, irreparably, a flimsy, heelholed Oriental divider, it’s also women dancing with women and with menschs, too, at first their sons, then their husbands and then their husbands’ friends and partners, dancing together to silence as if a reproach to all that’s mutual and forbidden; to effect a congaline, an enactment of an earlier reenacted hat dance and chicken dance and grind, encored by a sliding of the body electric, more chairs and most glasses raised, as the toast’s roasted, burnt, there’s smoke from the kitchen and outside the chefs stand and bum cigarettes from the dishwashers and accountants. The elderly sit still, aloof, they dab at their eyes and disapprove, check their reflections in the blades of their knives, test the sharpnesses upon their thinning wrists and throats. An obstructed view, a hollow column faux Hellenistic draped in the colors of the evening, weathered with crepe streamery, the slow snow of confetti thrown, cast banished, fallen from heaven. At the periphery of this the final shot, an ice sculpture of a swan melts slowly: people slip, trip, and fall, doctors are summoned, everyone’s a doctor, everyone’s always a doctor or is always married to one, or else knows someone who is and is a lawyer, too; the rabbi soon enters, to sermonize an argument with the help arguing with the rabbi, who rudely interrupts himself only to nod to the bride’s father who hands him an envelope the rabbi weighs for a moment then pockets, turns himself around and stoops to say a blessing over the slipped, tripped, and fallen body there, the puddled mother of the bride; the bride herself now, it has to be jilting a jolt up to her father, her lips to marry his ear and whisper pained, confide, beseech, help me, save me, I’m a little girl again…she touches his wrist, he withdraws it quickly, looks at his watch, holds it to one ear, looks at it, holds it to his other whispered then looks again, shakes his hand in a frenzy, then shakes hands all around. The film flaps through, reels out onto the floor, and the woman, the one here in this hall and dressed in the clothes Hanna would change into, maybe, tomorrow morning or upon arrival home past worried, handheld twelve, too late for her and with indigestion also, decaf dessert heartburn and its hearthlike, protective warmth for the kinder with the older sisters tonight entrusted instead of Wanda or the regular sitter, unmarried, who’d been invited to this wedding, too, along with her parents who were cousins, don’t ask her how — the matron hurls herself forward as if vomiting, to heap it all in her lap, the memory, vain tradition’s lit command: to consecrate time and space and image if only to their own furtherance, even if it’s just for purposes as obscure as hers, as this…as dark, as evil; the wall beyond is washed in white, deloused into a purity, annulled.
Too early for morning, too late for regret, the air veined in lightning, the sun a clouded clot. Thunder. Gods are being born in the sky.
This is why we left the Garden and moved out to Siburbia, as we’re always explaining, most of all to ourselves.
My boy, look around you, listen, sniff the air and taste the bread your mother bought, you’re sure to understand: this is why we lit out, bringing only the candlesticks with us — why this dispersal to plot, this diaspora of the subdivision, such limitation of the eternal Development.
Our sages say the following:
