How Is This House NOT Different From All Other Houses? Across the looping from the Koenigsburg’s, then, Hanna and Israel’s: they’re both immodest houses of outwardly similar size, multiply floored and with finished or partially unfinished attics and basements, and similar shape, a central box or trunk, from which emerge their two wings each, one from either end north to south as if they’re prepared to fly away any moment, each wing with porch extensions of their own (later additions, once they’d made nice with Zoning), wings of wings, out the sides, and in the front and back, too; they have the same number of interior stairs, which is fortyfour, and the same number of rooms, which is twentyeight; they were reroofed the same month a year ago now, and the same thieves, recommended by Management, May Their Debts Grow Higher Than Sinai, did the reroofings; they’re both filled with loving, active, and involved parents of loved, acted upon, and involved with offspring, though the Koenigsburgs have only two kinder and the Israelien’s have twelve, now thirteen.
Another difference is their color, though it’s only an opposite, a reversal: the Koenigsburg’s house’s siding is the color of H and Is’ house’s shutters, and the Koenigburg’s house’s shutters are the color H and Is’ house’s siding.
Both houses have hedges front and back, both kept immaculately trimmed for uniform width and height by the exact same workforce, who work for the houses on alternating Wednesdays as last scheduled at last January’s annual meeting of the One Thousand Cedars Hass or Homeowner’s Association, hosted by the Koenigsburgs; this coming year would’ve been the Israeliens’ turn.
Though H and Is’ house has a basement partially unfinished; the repository of all difference, the sanctum of all secrets however domestic: soggy, micenibbled cardboard boxes, spiderspun hollows of cinderblock, these bulk crates of paper product (toilet tissue, towels), twin battered and chipped foldingtables — those and a host of other accoutrements reserved only for the use of guests both wanted and not: guestlinens, guesttowels, guestshoes and guestmittens and hats, provisions for every possible guestneed and guest-want, guestdesire, demand; toward the back, more boxes, these of moldering books, stacks of old photographs, paintings, and records, too, autographed Zimmerman LPs, an incomplete set of the Brandenburg Concerti, desiccated mounds of jazz sides most of them just sleeves, opera recordings probably worth something, someone should investigate, get them appraised; and even at the decaying bent bottom of the heap a trove of cantorial 35s that’d belonged to their parents, their grandparents, maybe, walled in by a dustbound encyclopedia set featuring the latest maps of the Ottoman Empire, volumes bookmarked with the corpses of worms.
Whereas the Koenigsburg’s basement had been Professionally done, as Edy Koenigsburg would relate during the course of every hosted supper come the Sabbath, the guests stabbing each other with their forks and knives in their hands and jellied eyes, slicing each other and strangling and gagging one another with napkins all to be the first to congratulate her, wish her Mazel — Edy, you say it Eatee — on her Adela’s pierogie appetizers, juicyplump just perfect, as if stuffed with the revivified testes of an assortment of ancient, powerful patriarchs…and how Edy’d always say hors d’oevres and how Adela’d mimic but one night pronounced them Whore’s Divorce, with everyone assembled thinking she was referring to Miss Glaswand nèe Kahl and that whole episode, which involved — no matter, though leading to a situation requiring serious talks undertaken Hostess to Hosted as if a peace negotiation stalled, faltering, failed down in Palestein, ultimately with Adela asked to her room and given the night off with a raise.
