Night inhales through his nostrils, exhales in a puff, he slumps deeper, reclines: he’s stuffed, huffy about taking the pills he should, the indigestion, the heartburn, begin working out, the gout, his head…the table’s been sponged, at least wetted enough by the toss of his daughters, by the wastes of their throwing until hard as rocks then dried to stone with the air and the scuffle — and here’s one of them now with a new, laundered tablecloth to be placed upon the table again, then a vase of flowers, too, gifted tonight, irises, Hanna’s birth-flower by the secular calendar, placed atop that; how very thoughtful, and quiet. Unshatterable, a fading of steps, a pit pat, the dribble of daughtering wine to your tired. Makes you drunk with exhaustion. Dregs, disappeared. The kinder, who had showedoff and actedout throughout dinner, have now been exiled upstairs, upstairs-upstairs and are by this time, let’s hope or deny what really goes on around here, either sleeping or hiding, having been dismissed by only the silence, Israel’s refusal to yell — only the sigh of his disapproval, the slight heave of his lungs as lodged tight within the skin of his dinner. A button of his pants birthing loose, underwear thanks fat for elastic. Hanna comes in from the kitchen, and she and her husband moon around the diningroom, emptied. Relax, the drooly flow of smalltalk, lazy endearments, yawny reminders for Sunday’s household repairs…the faucets, they’re still running upstairs, and in Feigenbaum’s bathroom, the drip of the sink without sponge underneath to soak in with silence, the tappy leak it’s enough with it, and the hotwater heater — an industrial forehead, its veins pulsating madly; soup that’s been supped to cool, still frothing over the lip of a hairy pot…and suddenly, wet’s flooding everywhere, flooding from her, from her legs, between them cramped and spasmed, this is It, it might be — the Sabbath and how there’ll be no hospital visit, not because of the holy and its violation as much as because there’s no time and like Shabbos, you just have to believe: darkness eclipsing the diningroom, the candles burned down, absorbed into melt — disfigured weepers in wax, olden idolatrous forms of what she’s become, she’s becoming: a burnt huddle of the mothers before her; the rotations halted, globe’s guttered still, the revolutions snuffed out for the sniffing, their ashes…boxes bursting themselves out of their calendars, spinning emptied, negative, from their orderly orbits: it’s been these however many hundreds of days, xd out on the kitchen luach, the diary, the addressbook’s backcovered page, and some hours, minutes, seconds, prayers, shooty pains the stem of her standing, has to sit now, next to her husband, across, the swell flipflopping, huddling her weight to one side then the other, its haunch as if a cut from the butcher’s, those leanings to glean, the which aisled shelf reachings, hunching on line at the Shoprite, the Acme, ten items or less almost there, at the cashier, conveyor and then, the rush for the sink, the toilet, for the Pathmarked pathway vomiting her stoop, then her home…the shoving at the magazinerack, the candy and gum bumble and push, the elbows as knees and the toes up to tickle at the foot of her throat, the hands of the jaw straining through — the doorhinge, a head inclined in its mouth toward the dark that to Him must be light, has to be. Her shrieks and almost the smell of milk souring, not of treyf in and of itself but of mixtures forbidden, that or another burning…now waking the daughters, rousing them out of their beds, their rooms then down the halls to the stairhead, or, if not asleep — up, their eyes photoreddened already, tented, pillowcaved in their clubs — then pulling them downstairs gaggly ragged and demonstratively sleepy to lineup against the wall of the hall in any order fertility might urge and bear witness, enough room kitchen to dining. This is what you will be, what’ll happen to you. Only if.
