This is Wanda the maid now Wanda the maydel: in one side out the other, poof, as they say, and that’s that. Wanda Hanna’s One how she’s now Wanda-Hava, Hava as in Adam’s wife Eve in the new language olden again, as in that song they’d sung at their wedding high on babka and chairs: Hava negilah, won’t you, as in…you Wanda a little something, and don’t you deny yourself in my house, then why don’t you Hava little something — and he did, have her, still has: seven circumlocutions cracked out of Instruction, a host of prayerful songs shired after she’d learned what there was to learn, studied after she’d shaved what there was to shave, as per tradition, and so much, too, eighteen blessings after morning’s blessed the ceremony at the chintzy hall off the Turnpike, ink dripping from their ketubah witnessed by the caterer and bandleader, the wet of their names mingling and, with ten hours then at the sprawl of motel across the asphalt that gave you the deal if you went with what package spent in delicious Godentwining, in delectable Unification, he drove her in his tenyearold Taurus home, ensconced her in the kitchen: new sconces, three dishwashers, three fridges and three ranges, meat, milk, and pareve, from parents, his now made hers, who knew from machatunim’s the term, and there set her to work, stirring up the pot, preparing.
I Hava Wanda, I Hava Wanda, I Hava such a lucky mensch, a mucky match save passport and his bank balance, whispers as he palms her, shvitz upon her swell…witness the happiness of this new Affiliatedess with her appropriately Affiliated husband, who’d made a respectable woman out of her, a maid and more, a wife and a mother primigravida; in this world, there aren’t any irreligious naturalization problems: she is that she is now that the papers have gone through, a book’s worth of them, and nobody’s asking any questions, us sons we just don’t know how…hymn, maybe some aspersions thrown to glass-houses (perhaps their greenhouse just going up outside, alongside the tennis-court and the inground swimmingpool, subcontracted through his brother to a friend of his brother who’s been going through some tough times, his brother, too, their own many brethren, our sons and who isn’t, we’ll vouch), but nu — who are They to make judgments?
And still she launders and presses and folds clothes, now for herself and for her husband, too, and soon soon enough please stop shushkeh shushkeleh we’ve shtupped all genug for the baby inside her she’ll name whatever her husband wants, but whom she’ll secretly call Benjamin: oy, it’s a boy, to be a boy, congratulations…may he kill you in kinderbirth, may you die at kinderbed, upon it what death could be better, a hearty Mazel Tov all around.
Spit spit spit.
O Adela, she thinks as she irons the skirts she’s inherited, each of her blouses, too…O Adela back home, Over There back dead with her relations, their blood.
And Spit.
