Pass it along, Der’s almost had it. Ben sits trying to peek under His veil, over the pew and her at the shot she has, bowed by her nails manicured in rainbows. Let’s see it, Der demands again and she says, her, let’s see Her…and she hands the photo over facedown to him greedy, grousing, who holds her image bent near his eyes, then squints to crease his forehead.
Is this who I think it is?
If not, then her mother’s got some explaining.
How recently did they embrace it All? Don’t tell me they’ve gone ger! I was down to meet with him last week and…long enough ago, it’s her turn to interrupt, for it not to cast aspersions — it’s only been a day or two but kosher, real legit. He had his own people officiating. I spoke with him just this morning, he’s keeping it quiet for now, asks that you respect his wishes, knows you will…she dangles her empty frames from a ringfinger, touches her tongue to a wart on her nose understood to be her nose until her sniffly tonguing of it explains the flesh behind it, massed in its support.
Der’s expression as if to say, you were holding out.
What can I say? she asks and says, complain me no complaint, bitch me no bitch, I just wanted to make you shvitz…. what’s that they say, kvetch, whine your misered heart out.
Plus, a boy like yours needs options. Do we have a deal or no? She grabs up the photograph from his hands, flips it over to the reverse’s scrawl, smudged dark in stricken zeroes.
I’m the one laying down the dowry here, is that it? Der nods disappointment. This the price, then? resignation, and he forces a whistle that ends in a kiss, his moustache smeary, pinching.
Insistent, she nods her wig shifty atop the snowdandruffed, icehump of her head to hang over her one good ear as if she doesn’t hear a thing. And not a shekel more or less, she says then shifts her weight, with her feet asleep; finally, gives up humoring the pretense to obeisance, spits a wad to the floor, worriedover mucus.
Our schmuck sure has a pair on him, I’ll tell you, two pairs, but tell me this — why didn’t he come direct? We work together. We talk. I know his wife by name. We have what you’d call a relationship.
You know, she says, I have the impression this used to be easy.
And then saying to Him, at least your future inlaw respects his tradition.
Tradition schma — and Der gathers his uniform pants as he rises from the pew, stands over her with his epaulets raising his shoulders above his head as if altars converted to highflown burden; he’s hunched and raging with his medals clinking as if his station’s brassy tongues; they’re shrieking, he is, flapping out the threats: incarceration, outerborough deportation, worse, assaulting even with his hands her ears and their jewelry, low at the lobes, drooping to the knees…ridiculous, this is extortion, pure and simple, you know it, I know it and, as you say, nu — the President knows it; he thinks this’ll help him at the polls, is that it, but do I have news for him: there are no more polls. I mean kaput. No longer exist. Not soon. Schmuck wants his way with posterity, goes about it like he’s doing me the favor…she’s impassive, as if unimpressed at his fume, takes from a pocket of her skinned she lived with fifty always sick and dying cats housecoat an appointment diary, and tries to go through it inconspicuously, holding it upsidedown between the pleats of her skirts. Still, he’s quieting amid the reverberations of his voice, their repercussions, her flipping — distancing, harmful to the greater cause, what he’d wanted originally come knocking too early to wake him from the surety of his slumbering plans, entombed for private worship in this, his icebound Temple — if that’s how he wants to deal…
Rising to full height herself, all of her five nothing, putting the Tit in Petite as if to remind that though laughably small as if prepackaged for parody she’s also endowed, still indescribably intimidating, a woman of valor, as goes the translation, of valorous proportions, too, and experience (and this despite having had no kinder of her own)…it’s time, she says bookmarking with a cigarette, replacing the diary, I get my onceover. And so Der orders Ben to stand, too, in the pew too narrow, barely accommodating His girth and perhaps the earliest tingle of a tumescent shed. That and with the height, the stadium’s pitch and the air of its arc He feels but can’t glimpse veiled, He’s dizzied. Der straightens that out as he uncrooks all, pulling the slacks’ bunch up and over Ben’s waist almost to His pits, then tucking in His shirt to tail around it feels at toes, a happy wag.
