It’s been given over somewhere or other, I don’t know, go ask your mother, that when you die, and you will, when you leave, finally, this terrestrial kitchen, that you live again, and in some other otherworldly kitchen, and there with every object you ever broke, cracked, destroyed, ruined, or otherwise defiled in your entire life at your disposal, and only those: and so Hanna, to drink her own spoiled milk, deathmilk from Israel’s clubby bachelorhood glasses sharded together from shatter, to sit on a chair missing a leg at a table that wobbles, to gaze out over Paradise from the platesmashed window of her brunchnook, shabby in skirts without knees, frayed hems, heelless solestripped athletic shoes, not so white anymore. At ten in the Eden of morning, an hour she’d almost never wasted in such reflection, with the kinder off at school, Israel at work, she’s at table, at herself idle, not hurting anyone anymore: having destroyed, if only objects, having depossessed possessions, and she herself, dead (the cancerous sunning, the fibrotic breasts, the two lumps ignored, she’d done it to herself, we all do or our parents)…or else, in another interpretation, this is life — and only death is when everything’s fixed, where all’s mended again and made whole: with glue on the seams of mugs, raggedypatches on the elbows of sweaters, sneaky shoelaces tied together to tie once again, with no more worrying knots to finger at numbly, what with the arthritis healed, that third breast lump gone and as for her car, its door’s intact and its fender, too, she’s sure he’ll never notice. And all the promises, all the vows she’s ever made and those that’ve been made for her and to her, fulfilled. And yet she’s still waiting, and waiting.
Though he never promised, just said so: babele, I’m coming…
It’s less him than the pain, hers, though all of it hurts. Tears are her eyes, pregnant pouches. At table, Hanna’s stomach gives a growl. Who can eat…quickly, she doubles herself, folds in, rocks her gut, the loose swell of her emptiness, the bag not paper or plastic but me — cries loudly for help from her kinder, her who never needs help or wants it; this is It. As there’s no answer, and sensing the timing, the ineluctably slow ticktock of the heart, she tilts toward the laundryroom, grabs a rag on her way through the kitchen to the hall — once inside shuts the door, her hand to feel shut the seam.
It’s here that she births herself. Insideout.
