Joshua Cohen - Witz

Safeguard and Remember . In a single utterance.

And soon, she’s talking with the mirror.

Queen or Bride? she asks, she hasn’t yet chosen, it’s the source of such confusion: who was I last week? her left brow rising, littling slightly her pose, impatience in its patient oncoming.

As silent as a mirror is, and is judging — I think the queen, and so this week the bride.

It’s so simple to forget, isn’t it? like receipts, recipes…tonight, though, the mirror’s agreeable.

To forget like I forget hair things in my purse with the tiny round mirror — to reflect with it my reflection: the Bride, it must be the Bride — how could I forget. Write it down or you’ll forget, I always say. A gumstick, a sucker. It must be, another list…check the Bride, strike through the Queen with a line. Her mouth talks back to her and her eyes, she’s crying — you want an argument? He wouldn’t know, or is it a she, the mirror? her husband would’ve forgotten. Should I wait for him? she asks as she polishes, lowing her shoulder as if trying to palm herself flatter, so less light’s scattered into incoherence, less muddle more flattened slim, dark: licking a fingertip, then rubbing at the mirror as if trying to wipe away its blemish, betrayal.

One day, one Sabbath night, she’ll be the Queen-Bride, she of compromise, the Bride-Queen — she’s tucking her hairs, those of the wigs, some gray naturally, some unnaturally even, if only for the sake of appearance, authenticity, modest verisimilitude, behind the nubby, knobby earlike exudations of the eyeless, mouthless, but kinkily with noses, the brittle, chipped foam, plastic, and plaster busts that are the stands for her wigs, their holders, the heads she has spare, with all of even them thinking the better of waiting for him, Hanna nodding them shook with her hands almost strangling their bases under their chins in the permissive affirmative; and so Bride she’ll be, they’re in agreement, though their noses still snobby, held in the air.

She bumps a leg on the endtable next to her bed at her side as she goes to the phone, dials with half a nail lost to one of Israel’s work numbers — ext. 13, that’s the private, but there’s no answer and so she tries another, 1 through 12…maybe Loreta’s still there.

Hello, your Majesty …she begins to talk before she realizes it’s his answering service, the hiss, that strain of falsity laid over the voice he had even back then, when he’d call from the city out to her on the island, (212) to (516) to here and now Joysey she leaves him a message, telling him he’s the Groom like you’re it.

He’ll want to be King though, that’s the trouble, hangs up with a halfhour in which to try again, and then Shabbos.

What it is, is revelation: the hairs in the drain, clogging, the bald white tub and the showerhead above still adjusted to the morning height of her husband. An opening — it’s the type of translucent slidingdoor that Israel in his early haste hauls off it tracks every now and again, doesn’t quite pay to have someone schlep out here and take a look at it, it’s his temper that requires that service; but now as always for her in her caution at the tangling hair, which is both his and hers, and her beware of slips and falls it slides with efficiency, and Hanna steps over the edge of the metal. Tile surrounding, walling, is patterned in hexagonal agglomerations the same as the pattern of the tile in the kitchen, blue, white, highlighting similar flecks in the carpeting of the den. Or, you know how it is, she’s the only one in the family to call the Livingroom such, a source — seemingly a fourwalled, lowceilinged cell — of major domestic misunderstanding when Israel says Livingroom and she thinks he means what she calls the Familyroom when what he really means is what she calls the Den, take a breather. There to what, replace a lightbulb, water the plants, not too often, not enough. Just as Upstairs to Hanna is the floor closest to the frontdoor, at the level of the grounding earth, and below what Israel calls Upstairs that’s known to Hanna as Upstairs-Upstairs, just as the Basement below them both is called by Israel the Basement and by Hanna Downstairs, usually, to herself, her daughters and Wanda, or else to Israel she occasionally defers, resigns to calling it Downstairs-Downstairs, as the last Israel was down there was when, she can’t remember, for what.

In the shower, on its only low shelf she could sit on to wash her feet in her lap if it wasn’t so cluttered, so full and so pregnant — arranged by height if not by psychosis, tens of bottles, fifty or more tubes and cylindrical cans: shampoos, conditioners, oils, ointments once poured over the head becoming anointments, butters, balms, washes and exfoliant scrubs, all with their motley labels, rainbowing from her squeezing, her crumpling clutching, in their manifold phases of peel, anonymizing, secondshed skins, Now with extra aseptia , and scented with myrrh, with cassia, stacte, onycha, and galbanum with the 10 % added bonus of frankincense thrown in for free, alongside numerous plastic dishes below the marble dish that’s part of the wall hosting soapbars, cakes, variously watered away, some merely small lumps suspended within themselves, amid their froth, their expectant saliva greedy for the taste of her skin, others freshnew, and hard, as if ready right from their packaging the valuepak to have their names rubbed from them, their imprintings and inscriptions effaced by the water, her wash, the rash of dish-panning hands on her skin — all the names in the name of her daily ablutions. She runs her hands through her True Hair — Friday being one of three hairwashing days of the week, the last hairwashing day (one Sunday a month, we wash and style the wigs, or rather we drop them off, the salon does) — rotates the ring of the showerhead to her setting favored over that of her husband, then immerses her head in its pressure, not Israel’s pissy sprinkle but a heavy, thickly dropped flow, while bent, head hung, examining the veins running down her legs as if trickles, the slowing of flood, their lapping freezing as nerves numbed to the tips of her toes, then leans back, her hair lashing her shoulders and nipples like the handles H is for Hanna and C for who cares though she’s always thinking about it, so cold; the drain down which the impurities wash, their whirling pool, that spiral navel, picks lint from hers popped, absentmindedly. Stuff grows from the grout, all manner of mosses, lichens, and mold, epiphytic, parasitic, have to ask Wanda, remind her she’s reminding herself. There’s a hardness in her hands, not a stomach or another lump God forbid, but a straight sharp becoming softer by the moment, the spill, variformed. It’s the Rag from downstairs, taken upstairs-upstairs, she lathers with a finger of soap. What sop, the draining of stains. Hanna washes herself with it — outside the spray, its steamy source. A cell in here, so confined, she’s thinking cloistered, what could go wrong. Her hand wrapped in the Rag finding its way into her, wet: bubbles, surfaces popping the light — in from the bathroom’s sconces set unattractively, unflatteringly high over the sinks and that mirror — slip over her thighs, purse through her hairs; she blushes then steps back into the spray to rinse herself thin again, thinned, all this flesh and only a little that’s hers — if only to be rid of this hugeness, the heaviest pregnancy yet, hers or any’s, it weighs…a sea of skin, an ocean lathered as if a storming of soap, a cleansing if dangerously choppy, a purifying surge at hightide. Unbridgeable, uncrossable — this fear, though she’s been professionally told, technologically reassured: it’s not triplets or twins; Israel’s water never divided into the waters of her bags back from shopping, the paper, the plastic, her sack, the rubbernippled breakables stacked above the cannedgoods, she’s thinking, dented herself; the mixed multitudinous salad, undressed, the two loaves of challah I told him to buy, left uncovered…the boiling pot of the sun to burst itself into three stars by which we’ll divine — as many babies as the stove blechs its burners, which I’ll leave on over Shabbos, I’ll forget to turn off, that’s how many it feels, that’s how frazzled…she’s afraid, of this secret she’s keeping, that’s keeping her, how long can this go on, how far can I take it: it’s only one, though that’s not it — it’s that He’s only one: congrats, finally, it’s a boy!