Why is that this time of year would be family, would’ve been, the holidays and their own familiar family that once a year and every year subsume our own and lesser, ingathering the schedule: All who art offering us seats at their table, which is always longer and wider than any of ours and, too, with leaves that extend so far and almost irretrievably out as to accommodate people who yearly are strangers to us and who not only look like us but also think like us and how they even like the same foods as us and have brought the flowers and wine — all that essing and fressing from Sukkot on down to Simchat Torah, that indulgence we then work off our waists and our hippyhips with a dance, the hop hop then smack smack of our palms, their fronds, against the face of the moon waxing gluttonous, eight days fattened from its new…this they have to know, not to understand, just to know: the ritual, the life that was Tishrei or is, the first of the months begun over again, after a year spent intertestamentary — sit down, have a seat, I’ll tell you what, you can even keep it, it’s yours, we have many more like it, and who knows if there’ll ever be other guests; a cycle ending with the month known as Elul only to begin again with I think Nisan, not sure, it’s been too long this forever; this year every year, this life every life, for immemorial made of lists and threats, impulsive shopping; the months made moons to wane away the time, the set then rise of coming sun whenever least convenient…Hanna lowering herself exhausted deeply and demonstrative into a chair, mundane, there at the kitchentable, profane, on the first regular old nonholiday, nonsacred autumn afternoon that’s fallen after everything, after the New Year with its ten days tonguing away at Yom Kipper’s privation, Yom-Keep-Poor then Sukkot the holiday of festive gathering outside in the sukkah under the harvest of stars, the dancing again and the singing observed what with the Torah then all over again and then, weekday, no day at all, at least nothing special, and, if just for a moment — there’s nothing…nothing to prepare, nothing to do, nothing expected of her and, too, nothing to observe for herself or her others save this immaculately slow slow lowering of her spine into that everyday chair in that brunchdrunk, salt-shaky kitchen over which she sweeps back the hair and the wig, a breath, mops brow, a moment only of exasperated existence then, what do you know, it’s the Sabbath again, Shabbos again, who has a choice, is what she’s thinking, who can choose or would want to: ticked time to prepare again, tocked to slave, to suckle; there’s so much to do, and so much less time is what the clockface questions: to bake or not to bake, chicken; Simone needs you to sign a form allowing her to attend a trip to a museum; Liv wants you to sign a test an A in history why not an A plus, she’s asking; no time for scolding pride though as Judith, hymn, she has this little seepy weepy problem that she’s locked herself alone with in the bathroom; blood, I’m scared, what is it, Ima, what’s happening to me…it’s a boy.
An emptiness, the Shabbos of a school not just off or out of session for the day or holiday but abandoned…B busts the locks then barges through the chill, seeking only shelter: an empty class. It’s just down West 90th, a girl’s school without girls or anyone; poshish, tony, the first school Rubina had ever attended, though through kindergarten only: she’d been an only daughter for a year before Simone was born, she’d been a citygirl, for six snobbed years before Liv ever joined them and made them sisters more than just to one another — then they moved down to Joysey together, way before the days of the house and the lawn and the basement and the twocar commute. Simone and Liv and the rest unborn had been too young for anything, though, and had stayed at home and unmade, but Rubina — this had been her world five days a week, fullday. Too huge to fit behind a student’s desk He destroys to splinters, He sits atop the teacher’s for a rest.
