Prayer later and lamentation, with the frontdesk mensch hosting a shiur of migrant kitchen workers and idle maids in the motel’s laundry downstairs, there’s a knock at His door and it’s them — His sisters, the Marys…mishpocha, what a mechaye! B holds the door wide for them dripping with the weather’s melt and that of their thick, hasty makeup, adjusting their skirts and swishy wigs, then slams the door on their noses and breasts, which have been bound if not padded, and their knees and their hands held out to embrace, only to throw it open again to ingather them all, one by one over the threshold: He drops each hard to raise dust from the floor. Marysomeones, anyones, Marywhomevers in relation to the illegitimate why, as long as it’s now and quick, over and done with like soon — a giggly gaggle of them, a nosegay in a handful of familiar scents, colors, blooms; Rubina and Simone and Liv and Hanna, too, He’d forgotten: she’s none of them, and is all, was who or what that mensch his name spit poo was Jesus meant whenever he spoke of his mother Mary as the Woman, as everything, total, as all — in that goy’s life too many Marys around, abounding, Mary his mother, also Mary his elder sister, then the whore who’d mothered him to the end…the Mary who’d laundered His diapers with a pinch of His mother’s perfume, the one who indulged the suckling fetish, and that of the wetting; the one who always had to be threatened to set the table, to quit wasting time — have you finished your homework? — then eat up but slowly, chew your fill, wash your hair, scrub your teeth; Judith, Isabella, Zeba, the same now, all one, entirely Hanna — call her a balabusta, a berrieh ballbuster, just call her this once in a while: one mother, twentyeight-limbed touchy and feely and wiping this Hanna visiting the sick, doing charity work, benevolent business, cooking, cleaning, volunteering her time; how she’d sacrificed so much she’d remind you, how she gives still of her self what she thinks it so selflessly, kind. The Marys, they’d stolen the van they’d followed Him in coast to coast (since the aborted Tour, it’d remained garaged, kept on ice offIsland), a mudspattered heap spewing rust they’d christened with a bottle of Manischewitz the Mizvah Mobile, then drunk themselves full as if to fuel their revenge. A midnight’s raid of the Garden, how they’d managed to slip into costume before slipping out. Wardrobe, they’d gotten dressed, skirted, madeup mascarad and rouged, but in their hushed rush have become mixedup, half workedover: one wears Rubina’s skirt tableclothwide, down below and pleated to match with Dina’s blouse too tight up top, shriveled as if a balloon; Natalia’s skirt blue or maybe it’s black in this light, too short with Asa’s flounced white blouse way too tight, too, Gillian’s skirt hemmed short in purple beyond any modesty, barely showing below Josephine’s blouse crying buttons in its snug to pop eyes; as for Rubina, she’s blossoming to be generous: feeling a little bloated, damply fat, in Batya’s tiny floral panties; that, with their earrings mismatched (the older ones pierced, the youngest pinched by their clipons), with one lip sticked pink, the other stuck with the red. They pick themselves up from the floor, wander throughout the room to an alluring array: on the nightstand, openlegged atop the luggagerack, retracting their foreskinlike stockings to rub at and warm their legs it’s so freezing in here, held substantial and wide atop the radiator that doesn’t work and then opposite, on the filth of the flabby recliner; one digs candles from her pockets by their wicks, she’s on her knees in grotesque attempts with matches wet to light the room dimly — flames guttering, then licking high, the wax melting to the floor in a ring around the mattress as if to holy what’s about to transpire.
