“Mommy,” said Masha, laughing, “you gotta get ’em another DVD, they know it by heart.”
“We did fine without it, and we will again, if anyone else complains,” Pearl warned. “I probably shoulda never got it anyway.”
“Okay, okay, Mommy,” said Yehudis, kissing her mother on the cheek.
Six days had passed since I had gotten Masha to scratch her head. I had since convinced her to eat two pieces of chocolate cake in one sitting and use her mother’s lipstick without permission. I also tried suggesting she drink a glass of milk only five hours after eating meat, instead of the usual six, but she berated herself for even thinking such a thing. I would have to tread carefully on the religious habits, I realized.
Suri, fourteen, with a waxy complexion and fine wavy hair, walked in carrying Pearl’s eleventh and probably final baby, Leah. “Hi, sweetie,” cooed Pearl, her fists deep in the challah dough. Suri strapped the redheaded mite into her high chair and the baby started screaming, bashing the plastic apron of the high chair with her fat mitts.
“Where’s Trina?” asked Pearl.
“Vacuuming upstairs, she didn’t hear the baby,” said Suri.
“Give the milk!” said Masha, holding her ears. Yehudis dumped a measure of white powder into a baby bottle, filled it with water from the water cooler in the corner, shook the bottle, and handed it to the shrieking baby, who snatched it from her and sucked at the nipple desperately, breathing loudly through her nose as she guzzled like a nursing calf. There was, I noticed, a touch of animalism in some of the females in this household.
“Mommy, what can I do?” asked Suri.
“Help Yehudis cut the fruit,” said Pearl, working the dough. There was a moment of quiet. Then Masha, lying back on a few pillows that had been left on the bench, closed her eyes and began to sing. Her voice was eerie, raw. The song was in Hebrew. It had a winding Eastern melody, like an incantation. The other two girls joined in, creating a complex harmony. These girls could really sing. Pearl smiled, tipping the pot and rolling out the yellowish challah dough. I hovered over her, enduring the occasional swat from her flour-crusted hands, and watched, riddled with nostalgia, as she divided the moist, shiny orb into three separate balls, one for each loaf she was going to make, then cut each ball into three parts, rolling the sections into thick strands and braiding them swiftly. She cut off the ends of the three loaves to burn in the oven, just the way my mother had done, but, unlike my mother, she placed each loaf in a disposable tinfoil container, brushed them with egg, and slid them all into the electric oven. I loved Pearl. She didn’t smell of challah all week long, as my mother had, but she had a delicious concentration when she worked, the younger children weaving in and out of the room whining for chocolate ice cream (they got some), and reporting various bite marks that the wildest of all the children, Estie, had made with her little otter teeth. The serene Yehudis drew ferocious little Estie, a petulant child with badly tangled dark hair, onto her hip and rocked her while singing placidly. I remembered that my mother-in-law, Mme Mendel, had always said that matted hair was caused by demons snarling it in the night, and that one should never cut the knots out for fear of angering the demons. Eventually the little girl relaxed and rested her head on her sister’s shoulder, her eyelids fluttering. Suri sang like a good student, hands clasped, hitting all the right notes. Masha sang with abandon. Leaning back on the pillows, eyes closed, throat arched, she seemed posessed by the song.
As the women worked and sang, I clung to the ceiling with exhilarating ease, my feathery feet somehow fastening me to the plaster. My orb eyes were panoramic: I could see the white expanse of ceiling around me, the women moving around below, a blur of green out the kitchen windows. I could even glimpse a sliver of the hallway, and the unlocked front door, which opened and shut incessantly as a stream of purposeful Edelmans pumped in and out of the house all day.
The men—Masha’s bony, pallid sixteen-year-old twin brothers, Dovid and Simchee, her father, Mordecai, and various brothers-in-law, wore their black hats set back from their heads as they returned from work, went off to pray, came back for a bite to eat, went out to study Torah, popped in for a cup of coffee, dashed off to pray again. Dovid and Simchee kept to themselves, reading Torah or the commentaries every single spare moment they had, arguing fine points in twin fuzzy beards, long fingers waving emphatically. Dovid had started growing his sidelocks long, Hasidic-style, as a gesture of extra piety, and wound them around the arms of his eyeglasses. The bearlike patriarch, Mordecai, always seemed to have a baby in his arms when he was home—his own, or one of Miriam’s. Miriam, the oldest of the Edelman children, already had four children under five. She was twenty-eight. The Edelmans procreated very nearly as efficiently as the flies in the house did.
Miriam arrived, bossy, breathless, holding a Bundt cake in one hand and a heavy plastic bag in the other. Two identical little girls slipped past her and ran to the playroom, where Miriam’s youngest siblings, along with two of her own tiny kids, were still watching the movie.
“Didn’t you hear about the asparagus?” Miriam asked, her eyes falling on two dozen bundled spears lined up on the counter.
“What about them?” asked Pearl.
“We’re not allowed to eat them this year. Too many bugs.”
“Since when?”
“It was in the paper. It’s an infestation. You can’t get them out even by soaking,” said Miriam officiously, holding up a bunch of asparagus and waving it regretfully. Bugs, I knew, were not kosher, so we always had to check fruit and vegetables carefully, even in my less observant home long ago.
“Not even by soaking?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well,” sighed Pearl. “We’ll be one vegetable short, then. But you brought a Bundt cake!”
“I only got back from work at two so I couldn’t let it cool enough,”
said Miriam. “There are big chunks missing where it stuck to the mold.” Pearl patted her arm.
Now the door opened again. Another daughter. This one was Alyshaya, a petite twenty-two-year-old princess with a very long, thick brown wig that came down to her waist. She pushed a baby in a carriage. “Could somebody get the soup? It’s in the back of the car,” she said. Yehudis dashed out. “I forgot to season it,” said Alyshaya. “I forget everything now.” She cast a loving, baleful eye on her baby, asleep in the carriage. “Honestly, Mommy, I don’t know how you did it with all of us. I can’t begin to imagine it. I would die,” she said. Yehudis appeared with a heavy tureen of what I guessed was matzoh ball soup.
“What are you talking about?” said Pearl, laughing. “You get used to it. You expand.”
“I’ll say,” said Miriam, smoothing her curvaceous hips. Her waist, still small, was cinched with a stylish wide belt.
“I meant spiritually,” said Pearl, chuckling. “But isn’t it worth gaining a few pounds to have all these lovely babies?”
“Of course it is,” said Miriam. “But I still wish my hips weren’t so wide.”
“I can’t wait to have babies,” said Yehudis. “I don’t care what I look like.”
“Your husband will,” said petite Alyshaya, shaking salt into the soup.
“Babies happen soon enough,” said Pearl.
“I don’t really want to,” said Masha, her chin on her knees. Everyone turned in her direction, as if they had forgotten she was there.
“How could you not want to have a baby?” asked Alyshaya.
“Dunno, I just don’t,” she said, lying back on the pillows drowsily. Pearl looked at Miriam anxiously. Miriam widened her eyes at her mother.
“Okay,” Miriam said to Masha, shrugging. “You can take care of mine, then.”
I remained on the ceiling for hours, mesmerized by the workings of the clan, as the light through the windows faded. New to my celestial and corporeal powers, I was still trying to work out how to read the layers of my demon perception. Whereas Masha was transparent to me (as was Leslie), the rest of the Ede
lman family—the secondary selves—emitted a wavering frequency, confusing me with stray images, yearnings, and memories. A compulsive observer, I was gluttonous for every scrap I could glean. Stilling my thoughts, I became nothing but a pair of eyes, a recording mind. In this meditative state, I imagined God’s head as a great sac lined with millions of red fly eyes. In my vision, the earth floated within this eyeball-lined sac as if in a womb; the lidless domes stared, taking in all acts, each thought, tallying the blemishes on every soul. The Old Bastard was watching me too, I thought nervously, my fly feet shifting on the ceiling. He was watching me watch.
After sunset, we all assembled for the Shabbos feast, the men in their black hats and suits seated beside their wives, the unmarried children clustered at the end of the table. A chubby, fresh-faced young student from South Africa named Aron was staying with the family over Shabbos. He was seated between Dovid and Simchee. My beloved Masha had been placed at the head of the table opposite her father this evening, possibly because of her illness. She was wearing her long gray jersey dress, her arms covered with a long-sleeved white shirt, her black hair falling around her face a bit wildly. Her eyes were glazed and puffy. She looked ill.
Mother Pearl had changed into a flowered top and black skirt, and tugged her faded auburn wig over her auburn hair, checking her reflection in the mirror in her room as I danced on her powder compact. With her peaches-and-cream complexion and her generous figure, she looked quite fetching. The other girls had tidied up as well. The little children had all been masterfully put to bed by Pearl, Yehudis, and the now-on-the-bus-to-Brooklyn housekeeper—all but the sour-tempered Ezra, seven, who was allowed to stay up, and the anarchic Estie, who had wandered back downstairs in her pajamas and hung from the back of her mother’s chair like a little monkey. The long table—actually several folding tables put together—was covered in a white-and-gray paper tablecloth, bunches of hydrangeas nestled into four squat vases set along its center line, disposable yet elegant square plastic plates and cutlery for twenty-two arranged by Miriam with characteristic perfection. The table had been set up in the Edelman living room, a bare space normally furnished with a couch and two chairs that were permanently pushed to the edges of the room, the bare floor wide open, as if the place were a public hall. There were few ornaments on the light green walls, no paintings. Photos of the many children were placed on shelves and hung on one wall. The books were all religious, leather-bound volumes, exegeses of the Torah and the Talmud.
The shaggy, fur-hatted Mordecai stood up at the tip of his beautifully set table, twenty-one heads turned in his direction, and chanted the Kiddush, a brimming silver cup of wine in his hand. Once he had finished, he took a careful sip of wine, then poured a few drops, sadly cut with apple juice, into everyone’s glass. I realized grimly that I had landed in a family of teetotalers. They all took a gulp of the pathetic concoction, then Pearl and the girls got up briskly to set out the feast: French roast beef, pistachio-stuffed chicken breasts, salmon roulade, gefilte fish with horseradish, quinoa salad, fruit and lettuce salad, potatoes in mustard sauce, roasted garlic, hummus, baba ghanoush, blueberry cobbler. Two of Pearl’s sweet loaves of challah were nestled beneath their embroidered crimson velvet coverlet like dew-covered manna. It was paradise. With a shudder of pleasure and surprise, I stepped into a droplet of gravy and tasted the rich, salty fat through the pads in my feet! In a trance of sensory overload, I strolled from one luscious crumb to another, sometimes even flying to a serving dish to drink from the rim, knowing full well that my hosts were forbidden to kill anything—even flies—on the Sabbath. These people were not even allowed to wash lettuce after Friday sundown, lest they kill the bugs hidden in the leaves. I was completely safe. They shooed me away several times, of course, but nobody dared swat me. Alyshaya’s husband, Yitzak, a humorist, even quipped, “He’s a Jewish fly; he knows we can’t kill him today.” I laughed at that joke along with the rest of the party.
The men sang a hymn with strong voices, rocking their heads, tapping the table with their fingers. While the men sang, the women, forbidden to sing in front of men they were not related to, lowered their eyes and mouthed the words silently. The singing of a woman is akin to nakedness. I remembered that from the old days.
Eventually the ladies let the men keep singing and engaged in conversation.
“Mommy, have you ever tried rice kugel?” Miriam asked.
“No, but I heard about it.”
“Dr. Cohen told me about it while she was sewing me up from my last cesarean.”
“What are you talking about?” Pearl said with a laugh.
“You know how I always manage to have my babies on a Friday, right? So she’s delivered the baby and she’s sewing me up and she’s telling me about this great new recipe for rice kugel she’s trying and she had to leave it half done because I went into labor. I’m lying there trying to act interested, with my belly open like somebody’s purse.”
“Miriam!” said Pearl. “We’re eating.”
“How many cesareans you had?” asked Suri, “Two, right?”
“The last three. I told Dr. Cohen she should just put in a zipper.”
“You shouldn’t do more than three, I thought,” said Alyshaya.
“We’ll see,” said Miriam. The men finished their hymn, unfazed by the women’s lack of attention.
Masha, meanwhile, was silent. Her stare was inward, intense. Pearl looked over at her several times, but she didn’t want to fuss over her too much. The girl worried her so. I decided to try a little something. Flying behind her shoulder, I noticed she was working the paper napkin in her lap, twisting it with her fingers.
Tear it, I said. I knew she wasn’t allowed to tear on the Sabbath. Not even toilet paper. They had to use Kleenex. Her fingers kept working the paper, but she wouldn’t rip it.
Tear it, I said, forcing my voice into her head, looping through the air. Tear, tear, tear. And then, with a calm, intent face, my beloved tore a single layer of the paper napkin under the table, her heart whomping against its boundary like a carpet beater. The thin layer of paper seemed to take a fortnight to rip asunder. Just one steady tear, on and on, as the men started in on another hymn.
Masha, whom I was now watching from the back of mother Pearl’s chair, raised her eyes and watched them sing, all the while secretly tearing the napkin. I tried to listen to her thoughts, but all I got was her voice, singing the same haunting song as the men. They were singing K’vakoras, a prayer generally reserved for Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, only occasionally dusted off for more ordinary occasions due to its extreme beauty and holiness. Masha was singing very loud inside her head, watching them, eyebrows raised, her lips mouthing the words. And then, to my astonishment, she began to actually sing. At first she didn’t realize what she was doing. She had forgotten herself. But then, she knew. Her voice became clear, strong, defiant. It drowned out the men’s voices. One by one, the men stopped singing and stared at her. She sang with all her heart, her pure eyelids shut. The party looked at her, stunned. Dovid, Simchee, and the young visitor Aron looked down at their plates, rigid with embarrassment, as though she were performing a striptease. Even I was shocked. When the song ended at last, blood came to Masha’s cheeks. She opened her eyes and smiled, embarrassed.
Mordecai spoke softly, with disappointment and astonishment. “Masha,” he said.
Masha shook her head, looking at her hands. Pearl stood and walked over to Masha’s place, gently held her by the elbow. Masha stood. Tears glistened in her great black eyes. The two women walked out of the room, Pearl’s arm around her daughter’s narrow shoulders. Weakened with joy and pride, I was unable to move at all.
Once they had gone, Miriam exhaled. “What’s wrong with her? Is she going crazy or something?”
“Don’t say that,” said Mordecai. “She’s had a shock. She was in a lot of pain.” Then, turning to the guest, Aron, he said, “I apologize for my daughter’s behavior. She has been very sick.”
“She hasn’t been the same since she got back from the hospital,” said Suri, wide-eyed, her cheeks flushed and shiny as a fall apple. “Like, remember, she said she never wanted to have kids?”
“But that’s Masha,” said Alyshaya. “She likes to say things to get a reaction.”
“Anything for attention.” Miriam sighed.
“Shah! Don’t talk like that,” said Mordecai.
“She’ll be the one with ten babies,” said Yehudis brightly.
“No way,” said Alyshaya, “you will.”
“Daddy,” said Yehudis, turning her face to her father expectantly. “If I had a boyfriend, what would you say?”
“Get married,” Mordecai said, shrugging.
“I wanna get married so bad …”
“You have someone specific in mind?” asked Mordecai.
“No …”
“She’s always getting crushes,” said Suri.
Yehudis smiled. “No one will set me up on a date ’cause I’m not nineteen yet.”
“And that’s the way it should be,” said Mordecai.
“You need to go to college for a couple years, get some kind of an education,” said Miriam.
“That’s what I want to do, I want to study graphic design, I told you, but I want to do everything together, with my husband! By the Sephardic, they get married at sixteen, seventeen.”
“You’re not Sephardic,” said Mordecai. “You’ll wait till you’re nineteen to start dating, like everybody else. It’s only, what, three months?” His gaze drifted in the direction of the doorway where his wife and daughter had disappeared.
“I just feel like I’m wasting so much time,” whispered Yehudis.
Upstairs, Pearl was sitting at the edge of Masha’s bed. Masha was sitting under the covers, staring at her hands, which rested, palms up, in her lap. “I just did it,” said Masha. “I don’t know why.”
“But you have to know why,” Pearl said. “You know you can’t do that, all your life you haven’t sung in front of the men, suddenly you do it?” She stood now, trying to hide her anger. “I think you should rest a little. You got up too soon, maybe.” She tucked Masha in and walked out of the room, flashing her an encouraging smile as she shut the door. But, once in the hallway, she slumped against the wall. Masha’s transgression was a major affront, deep disobedience, demonstrating a total lack of respect. Pearl was so thankful that, up until now, all her children had grown up innocent, protected, and observant.
Jacob's Folly Page 11
