The pad’s folded into three parts, the kitchen chairs are returned to the kitchen with Hanna herself bringing the rest down to the basement…the sink’s overflowed and the counters alongside the sink, the refrigerator’s made room in for leftovers and in the freezer, too, and those down in the basement, Wanda’s come up again for air and with Rubina the diningroom chairs are now straightened.
One remembers, returns with the sponge. She cleans the table a bissele, uncomfortable with such despite every week, how she’s going at it lazily and a little distant, distracted, not really meaning it, who me, this kind of work, who do you think I am, and what exactly does being a family, a daughter membered thereof, make me responsible for — suddenly, fearful, she hurls the sponge at another, hits her smack between the eyes, the sponge slides down the nose leaving a wet, wormy trail. As if to say, you’re turning me into my mother…and then, another laughs and throws her sponge at yet another, angrily if not meant that way, and yadda, me three — and soon, they’re soaked in a roil of laughter, a wriggly giggle foamy and wild, with them hiding under the table and behind the chairs hidden and sought, but letting themselves be hit all the while, still tossing. Unparented, who could believe. Each daughter now has her own sponge: specially, and in differently coded colors, each seemingly aged and sized accordingly, sopping weighted, thick with the idle drip of the tap, waterswollen. Wanda moans, retires. As one gets hold of another, her head in her armpit, her head in her mouth, in the skirt’s stretch over the womb of the widely held knees as if in a gynecological lie — and sponges her hair, her feet thrashing her arms and hands along with them and then which are her hands and which are her feet in a whirl as if she’s being drowned upon the floor, warping its wood, they’re laughing still and louder than ever with the spit of saliva, food and drink heavied drool…
When at the Israelien’s, do as the Israeliens. Each family has its own customs, traditions: who does what first, who sits where, says what when, the meaning of certain words as spoken to certain people, what’s allowed and what’s not, prescribed vs. proscribed, and the deepest meanings of their eyes, too, colored in the same blood, they’re so wrecked; these are all given over, wait for it, there…in those looks, the anticipatory glances they give each other when guests arrive, the expectation of the always, the every week, the holy returned. But will things always remain the same, what about change — that’s asked as well: will these customs, these ways of being, of doing, as given over, handeddown to the youngest kinder as good as the Law, still remain? Slowly, gradually, over centuries even and beyond, millennial, hardening. Becoming writ in a script, old enough be believable. These habits, ritualistic obsessions, because the Law is the oldest obsession, with the hardest death, suffering — these are as sponges: how the skeleton remains, the spongin it’s called, after the sponge dies and its cells are scraped away; or else, all becomes synthesized in the spirit. And only then can it absorb, heavily, grow weighty with runoff; become malleable, bendable, stretchy. Wrungout. The sponge fight continues, its natural force unabated. But what is it, exactly, that seeps through the pores of the sponge, soaked in many times its own weight — lenses of soap, facets filling the eye. An unblemishing, a cleansing — each pore is a wound, pouring. Their father, Israel, the only one left at the table, seated sound at the head. His feet are stretched out and his toes are wriggling idly. His hands are on his stomach. Fingers at rest. He parts his lips, about to speak as if in reprimand — but instead, he halfburps, halfhiccoughs, as a sponge flies by an ear, barely missing. And he doesn’t even. Flinch or scold.
