Adela’s was a small niche in the basement exactly the same size as the room she’d been born into, the room her five sisters had been born into, the room in which she’d lived with them and hid with them under the sag of the lone bed at midnight from the extra special police who took her father away that one night investigated in the middle of summer across the ocean the size of the greater basement, it was — an oceanic vista of blue carpet dusted with white snowlike puffs every halfstep, tentative, flaky. Here, beyond the rustlegged, moldtopped, or merely green table for pingpong, scuffed of white lines, without net or paddles either and its balls lying crushed, at the white of the wall with its electrical outlets, up against the nylonate red and white flag of her nation whichever and wherever it was draped over her door facing out, and depending on whether she was inside her room or not, out and at work, a pair of footwear stands, soft soled slippers for inside, hard for out, a mat that says Witamy then next to the footwear, at the baseboard and its trim offwhite, an antiquated, toenailyellowed scale handeddown from Edy to facilitate Adela’s daily weigh in. As Edy always thought, any justification for Adela’s obesity might lay in her nationality: Adela was maybe, she thought, possibly, she’d think, acceptably overweight because she was foreign, how Edy had to remind herself again and again as the scale’s indicator, an arrow as sharp as a mean word, would oscillate its tongue toward a sum Adela would always want translated to kilos, as if Edy’d know, as if it’d matter. What can you do — these people, their numerous ways.
Inside, in Adela’s wardrobe, a wooden hulk set against the wall opposite the door, behind a pile of her folded bedding, behind the linen, the mussed sheets patterned out of date and the matching pillowcases, too, worn by sets of mismatched guests, uninvited — an icon of a saint, and behind the saint, a large and roughly hewn opening into a passage widening with its descent under the brights of these sudden chandeliers set between emergency sconces leading under the Koenigsburg frontyard and the sidewalked street then the Israelien frontyard and there narrowing again on its way up through another opening into yet another wardrobe of the same size and shape as Adela’s (though plywood, this unit discontinued, discounted, found by Israel at a firesale — they’d been swearing to get her new furniture for a year, if not for her sake then theirs), past its own saint then past its unwashed bedsheets and clothes and lingerie, smokestained, vodkadamp, all domestic fabrics and sartorial separates that’d been haphazardly stuffed beyond the reach of the iron the girls would wield upon afternoon Fridays — and into a room of the same size and shape as Adela’s though a room in a basement partially unfinished, which Hanna used to say to Edy meant that it was also partially finished: defensively this, Wanda’s room in the Israelien home.
Wanda and Adela, these two sisters from the Pale, far beyond it — you two are so pale! Edy’d shriek, howabout we make an appointment, on me, don’t you worry yourself about anything, you’re more than my maid, my kinder’s sitter, my servant or Slavslave, you’re my friend; what’re you thinking, tanning salon, should we go with sprayon or lights, makeover or just nails, maybe the spa, we’ll soak and gab, make a day of it — they were inseparable these two if sisters then nationed only through river’s blood, umbilicus choice. Anyway, as it’s often said of them, a package deal, a twofer your money maximized, the familysized — when the two of them Edy and Hanna would recite ancient history to friends gathered, maybe at a meeting of the board of the dayschool, or at a synagogue event, a Hadassah function, that’s how they’d talk, the not quite valuepak, two for the price of three, Edy only joking around, and how Hanna would always set her up or even herself wherever whichever one left off: We went down to the Agency together, and wouldn’t you know it, we found the two of them,
The two of them, here Edy’d pick at a thread, a loose strand of tooth’s salad — orphans,
Hanna’d go on, No luggage,
as Edy’d add, They’d arrived with these illegible recommendations, which my greatgrandfather of blessed memory could maybe understand if he weren’t dead now, what’s it been, twenty years…
nodding, laughter — Edy-the-funnyone,
And now Hanna’d say,
And now, Edy repeating — they never rehearsed, would you believe?
And now, how Hanna’d attempt to kill it boredom and curtains, Edy and I are like two older sisters to them, like, aren’t we, Edy?
approval, enabling — Like two older sisters, Edy’d rerepeat like maybe ten times,
sisters we never had, like sisters we never had, like the two sisters we never had…nodding, and Hanna, having always to get the last word in would say, edgewise, Older sisters,
We are, Edy not to be outdone,
