by Ladies
“It’ll be okay,” Isaac said. There were tears in his eyes.
Rebekah and Jacob turned away. Rebekah started to laugh, just a little, and then so did Jacob. It was just too ridiculous.
Afterward, Esau spent the day breathing really loudly through his nose, like breathing through wide-open nostrils was a treat—a gift from God. The sound drove Jacob crazy.
“Let me tell you a secret,” his mother would say. Jacob would go over and sit in her lap. She would whisper in his ear: “It is you I love best.”
He would look at his mother and it was like looking into the void. It was from where he sprang and sometimes it felt unnatural to be so close to the source of his own existence. Sometimes he couldn’t understand why he didn’t run as far away as he could—just leap from the dinner table in midbite and run. To stick around and chat with the person that encircles the hole from which you crept out of the infinite was just sort of— awkward.
But his mother loved him so much. She told him that Esau had come out first for no reason and that she didn’t want the big dumb universe making important decisions for her and him.
“But maybe it was God’s decision for Esau to come out first,” Jacob said.
Rebekah scrunched up her face.
“Please,” she said.
When they were kids, Esau liked pretending. He talked in high-pitched voices and walked all over on his all-fours like a cat.
There is no sadder word than “family,” thought Jacob.
For Esau, Jacob’s heart was always just about to break. He imagined little cracks in it, the guilt leaking out like gray egg yolk flowing through the pristine white tubes inside him.
“You did this to me,” he imagined screaming at Rebekah. “Everything.”
Jacob had this memory of every single child in the neighborhood chasing Esau down the street. They threw rocks and brandished sticks. How is such a thing even possible? They were only four. How could they organize themselves into an angry mob, and why would they?
But Jacob remembered being with them, telling them all the things that only a brother could know. “Esau cries like a baby when I sing certain songs. Esau smells his own toes. Esau lies on his stomach and pulls his ass cheeks apart and laughs.”
“Esau. Esau,” the crowd chanted and Jacob was among them. Esau ran through the streets weeping, a mustache of mucus. It was like he was being chased back into nonexistence.
* * *
“You’re the Cain,” Jacob said when they were playing alone. It just popped into his head—a genius thought.
“You’re the Cain,” Esau answered uncertainly. No one had taught Esau how to believe in himself, how to fight.
“No. You’re the Cain.” Jacob said it with so much calm certainty that Esau just gave up. Every mother has one Cain and one Abel. That’s just how it goes. Jacob knew this.
During his adolescence, Esau went through this period where he decided that Rebekah would love him more if he wasn’t so hairy. So he cut and pulled the hair from his body.
Jacob walked in on him. Esau stood naked and shaking, fistfuls of hair clutched in his hands.
“The air feels so weird on my skin,” he said. There were patches of white flesh polka-dotting his body.
It got so bad that Isaac had to talk to him.
“Look at me,” Isaac said. “Being hairy hasn’t kept me from achieving any of my goals.”
Esau had no idea what any of his father’s goals were. Wandering the forest? Lying in bed? Still, he appreciated his father’s effort.
“Look,” said Isaac, putting his hairy forearm against Esau’s hairy forearm. “The same.”
As Esau got older, he grew into his hairiness. He became large and outdoorsy. He even began to like the way he looked a little. He said body hair was practical, that he could feel bugs crawling on him and swat them before they could bite. He made jokes about Jacob’s smoothness and Jacob defended himself by saying he was more streamlined—that it helped him run faster.
“If you oiled yourself up, sanded your nipples down, and tucked your serpent between your legs, I could shoot you into the sky like an arrow!” laughed Esau. When Esau laughed his face just froze, his eyes half open.
He was having fun and wanted to keep the good times rolling.
“You know how Mom gets that weird thing when you’re out with her at the market where she insists on having you call her by her name? ‘Stop calling me Mom,’ she says. ‘My name is Rebekah.’ What’s that all about? She trying to pick up men?”
Esau’s laughter started in his loins and blasted out through his nostrils. His mouth, open wide. His head tilted to the side. His eyes not laughing.
“Lighten up and have a good time,” Esau said when he saw Jacob silently studying him.
“By your telling me to have a good time—it doesn’t make me have a good time. In fact, it only makes me have less of a good time.”
Esau was always trying to be a party animal. It was painful to watch. He would put his arm around a stranger’s neck and bob his head up and down to some song only he could hear, one of his hands holding on to a chicken leg and the other a beer. This was not joie de vivre. This was something else, something that made Jacob’s stomach ache.
“Whoo,” Esau would say. “Ha ha.”
Jacob looked at him, his brother’s sadness sweating out of his pores, stinking up the night.
* * *
“You were so easy,” she said. “Never a problem. Never a day of heartache. I could have had a hundred of you.”
He tried to imagine it. A hundred Jacobs, all trying to fit into the bathtub at the same time. All smiling painfully, his mother scrambling from Jacob to Jacob, whispering in each of their ears.
“I love you more than any other Jacob,” she’d say to each one as she made her rounds.
A hundred Jacobs unable to look each other in the eye. A hundred Jacobs sighing so loudly, in unison, that it would shake the heavens like a lion’s roar.
He wanted to sway her. He thought about some of the things that made Esau likable. He couldn’t think well under pressure.
“You should just let him know you like him. Because I know you do.”
“Oh, Jacob,” she said. “You’re so compassionate. I could have had a thousand of you.”
* * *
“He’ll waste his birthright,” she said. “He’s so stupid.”
She scrunched up her face.
“You’d be doing him a favor,” she said.
Esau came in from hunting, dragging behind him carcasses, beaks, and tusks. It left a trail of greasy blood and made the house smell like sweaty back hair and death.
Jacob was by the stove mixing a small pot. He was wearing Rebekah’s apron.
“I swear to God when I walked in here and saw you in that thing I thought you were Mom,” said Esau.
“It keeps my clothes clean,” said Jacob, stirring and bristling.
“Whatever you say, m’lady. Pass me a little pottage. I’m about to drop dead from hunger.”
Jacob thought for a moment.
“I’ll give you a big heaping bowl,” said Jacob, “but there’s a little something I’d like from you in return.”
“A pair of oven mitts to go with your apron?” asked Esau, letting loose what he believed to be the good hardy laugh of a man who’d been hunting all day. “I’ll tell you what: In my pockets I’ve got a couple hedgehogs I’ve slaughtered. You can stick your pudgy little ball-handlers in each of their arses.”
Esau’s laughter filled the room. Goosing Jacob, wrapping its hairy arms around him, sticking its fingers into his heart and trying to pry stuff out.
“I want your birthright,” said Jacob.
“The parchment?” For that was what Esau called it. Jacob had seen it around—lying among Esau’s underwear.
“What do you want with that old thing?” asked Esau. “God knows where I even put it.”
“Find it and I will feed you.”
“Everything’s a
hustle with you,” said Esau. “Here I am, starving to death, and you’re working an angle.”
Esau tramped off to find the crumpled little ball. Years later, when Jacob recalled the transaction, he would see in his mind how fast Esau had tramped off. As eager as his brother was to eat that day, he was even more eager to simply be liked.
* * *
“You know,” said Esau, shoveling back the stew, “how Mom gets that look when she looks at you? How she wrinkles up her face like she’s just smelled spoiled goat milk? She was just doing it to me this morning. I was telling her about my plans for the summer, about the summer hut I want to build, and she was doing the face. Do it for me. You do the best Mom.”
When they were kids it was one of the only jokes they shared. Jacob imitating their mother.
“You throw your shekels away on nonsense,” Jacob would say, his hands on his hips. It didn’t take much to get his brother rolling around on the floor.
“Just do Mom,” Esau begged. “With the apron on it’ll be perfect.”
“You talk too much about Mom,” Jacob said.
Jacob felt sorry for Rebekah. He knew Isaac couldn’t have been an easy man to live with. He was always off to himself, removed. Ruminating. Wandering the woods. Considering climbing a tree. Deciding not to.
“You don’t come within two seconds of having your father murder you and have your life end up a big party,” said Rebekah. “That little boy was broken that day.”
Rebekah said that when she was young she was a good dancer, but Isaac never wanted to dance with her.
“He’s too heavy to dance,” she said.
At parties she would dance while Isaac sat watching from his chair. She would wave to him. He would smile and wave back.
“As he’s gotten older, all he does is wait around to hear from God all day and he’s afraid it could happen any moment so he doesn’t want to be doing something undignified when it does. He’s in and out of the bathroom in five seconds flat and he’s careful never to get food in his beard.”
Then she stopped, leaned forward, started, licked her lips, stopped, leaned back, and started again.
“Don’t ever get married,” she said, her eyes full of love.
When Jacob heard the story, it was never from Isaac. It was usually from old friends of the family, sometimes from Rebekah. He always wanted more details. He wanted to know if Grandpa Abraham had said anything to Isaac first. “No hard feelings,” or something to explain that he had no choice—that he was just following orders. He wondered if they had walked back home together afterward and what they might have talked about along the way.
He wondered if Isaac had ever said to himself, “I’m never going to do stuff like that to my kid. Me, I’m just going to lie in bed all day. Wander the woods. Keep to myself. Stay out of trouble.”
Jacob was glad God never bothered trying to get in touch with him. It was always bad news with That Guy.
As Isaac’s health got worse, he started to disappear into himself. He’d lie on his side in bed, the sheets drawn up past his chin. Rebekah said he was afraid of the angels. He saw tiny ones all over the walls. They were like moths, but with faces. His eyesight was failing him, and aside from the angels he could hardly see a thing.
“Now is the time,” Rebekah said. “He hasn’t much longer to live. I’ve sent Esau out to hunt for him. Go to your father now.”
She had been bugging Jacob with her plan for weeks. Esau was supposed to get Isaac’s Big Blessing, the one given from the deathbed that goes to the firstborn. But Rebekah had other plans. She thought that if Jacob dressed up in Esau’s clothes he could get the blessing instead of Esau.
“Let him have the blessing,” said Jacob, waving her off. “He needs it more than I do.”
“Believe me,” she said, “you’d be doing him a favor.”
“How would stealing our father’s final blessing be doing him a favor?”
She waved her hand dismissively.
“He’d waste it on whores.”
Jacob tried to talk her out of it. He tried to talk himself out of it.
“But if he touched me,” he said, “he’d know I’m not Esau.”
“Please,” she said. “We’ll stick some goatskin to your arms and neck and stink you up a bit. You’ll be fine.”
Jacob wondered: if you tricked a blessing out of someone, did it devalue it? Inverse it? After all, the universe’s workings have always been more than somewhat ironic.
* * *
It smelled like eucalyptus and sweat. Out of the dark all he could hear was “Esau. Esau.”
Jacob timidly walked toward his father’s bed. He feared that Isaac, so close to Heaven, could sense his fear the way animals could. He tried to relax himself. “This wasn’t your idea,” he repeated to himself. Somehow this notion soothed him. He was just doing it for her. He was being a good son. He pretended he had no will, that he was a golem—a blessing-stealing golem brought to life through the force of his mother’s will, through incantations whispered in his ear.
Still, the thoughts came: This is the worst thing anyone has ever done to anyone in the history of all creation. Even when Cain killed Abel it was probably a crime of passion. Who goes on to bigger and better things after a stunt like this? He moved closer. He stood over Isaac’s bed.
“Sit,” his father said.
They sat, not saying anything, Isaac’s heavy breathing filling the room. The goatskin was scratchy against Jacob’s skin.
His father stared at him with wild eyes that really looked like they could see.
“My son, my seed, my life, my joy,” said Isaac, and then Jacob just zoned out. He stared into his father’s eyes and blocked out the sound of the world. Maybe Isaac was blessing Esau anyhow. Maybe it didn’t matter that he was holding his hand.
When he was done, Isaac kept raising his forearm to him and smiling.
“The same,” he said.
Jacob had no idea what the gesture or the words were supposed to mean. He grabbed his father’s forearm with his hand and, making his voice as gravelly and outdoorsy as possible, told his father to rest.
When Esau got home from the hunt he saw Jacob in his shawl of goatskin. He started to laugh, but then he understood and his laughter stopped. It frightened Jacob how quickly his brother understood. He began to talk and Esau ran past him.
“Let him,” Rebekah said.
Esau went to Isaac’s room. Then Isaac understood. He still wanted Esau to have a blessing, too, but his strength was diminishing and his blessing-power was weak. After the passion of the Big Blessing with Jacob, he was burned out.
Still, he took Esau to his side and gave him what he had left.
“Bless thee. Bless thee. May thine health be passable and thine income middling. May thou find a bride of so-so looks and mediocre bust. May thine days pass with relative tolerableness.” And so it went.
Rebekah saw the look in Esau’s eyes and knew he would be out for blood. She told Jacob that he must flee.
Jacob was nauseous. He was not the fleeing kind. He told her he wanted to try to talk to Esau, but Rebekah said it was past all that.
“Now there is only running,” she said. “You know how he gets.”
Rebekah had a brother in Haran named Laban. She told Jacob to go to him.
“He’ll take care of you,” she said. “He’s just like you. You’re both my favorites.”
“What about your husband? And Esau?” Jacob asked. He didn’t know why he even bothered.
“I love them, too,” she said evenly. “I just have a very special place in my heart for you and Laban.”
Apparently Laban was the other light of his mother’s life—a demigod who could do no wrong. Jacob hardly remembered him. They had only met once, years ago, when Jacob was a small child. He had been building a tower of blocks when Laban walked in and kicked it over.
“Make no Babels,” he said.
“Laban, you’re wicked,” his mother laughed.
&nbs
p; Jacob stood at the edge of the field with Rebekah.
“Do you remember when I was a child and you told me that you liked me better than Esau? Why did you do that?”
“Because it was true.”
“But why did you think I needed to know this? Did you think it would make me happy?”
“I guess I wasn’t a very good mother,” she said, her hands twisting up.
“You were a very good mother,” he said, backing off.
“I couldn’t help it. I tried my best.”
“I know.”
“It was different back then. I see how modern mothers are now. I didn’t know any better.”
Jacob sat in silence, thinking about his brother. Before he left, his mother hugged him tightly. She looked at his face.
“I love you more than life itself,” she said.
“Ma, please. Why do you have to tell me these things?”
“I just want you to be happy,” she wept, her whole body shaking.
After Jacob moved away, Esau took care of Rebekah but still, she wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t give him her full love the way she did with Jacob. Esau knew it and she knew he knew it. It was a thing they shared. She held on to her love as though holding on to it was a mark of character, as though love was gold that you had to be thrifty with. And so every second she spent with Esau, it was like there was some part of her, deep down, that was shaking its head and saying, over and over, “Nope.”
Still, Esau couldn’t help but try. He even put her whole role in the blessing thing out of his mind. He put all of his hate on Jacob and in this way, Jacob got a double share.
