Joshua Cohen - Witz

Why is that this time of year would be family, would’ve been, the holidays and their own familiar family that once a year and every year subsume our own and lesser, ingathering the schedule: All who art offering us seats at their table, which is always longer and wider than any of ours and, too, with leaves that extend so far and almost irretrievably out as to accommodate people who yearly are strangers to us and who not only look like us but also think like us and how they even like the same foods as us and have brought the flowers and wine — all that essing and fressing from Sukkot on down to Simchat Torah, that indulgence we then work off our waists and our hippyhips with a dance, the hop hop then smack smack of our palms, their fronds, against the face of the moon waxing gluttonous, eight days fattened from its new…this they have to know, not to understand, just to know: the ritual, the life that was Tishrei or is, the first of the months begun over again, after a year spent intertestamentary — sit down, have a seat, I’ll tell you what, you can even keep it, it’s yours, we have many more like it, and who knows if there’ll ever be other guests; a cycle ending with the month known as Elul only to begin again with I think Nisan, not sure, it’s been too long this forever; this year every year, this life every life, for immemorial made of lists and threats, impulsive shopping; the months made moons to wane away the time, the set then rise of coming sun whenever least convenient…Hanna lowering herself exhausted deeply and demonstrative into a chair, mundane, there at the kitchentable, profane, on the first regular old nonholiday, nonsacred autumn afternoon that’s fallen after everything, after the New Year with its ten days tonguing away at Yom Kipper’s privation, Yom-Keep-Poor then Sukkot the holiday of festive gathering outside in the sukkah under the harvest of stars, the dancing again and the singing observed what with the Torah then all over again and then, weekday, no day at all, at least nothing special, and, if just for a moment — there’s nothing…nothing to prepare, nothing to do, nothing expected of her and, too, nothing to observe for herself or her others save this immaculately slow slow lowering of her spine into that everyday chair in that brunchdrunk, salt-shaky kitchen over which she sweeps back the hair and the wig, a breath, mops brow, a moment only of exasperated existence then, what do you know, it’s the Sabbath again, Shabbos again, who has a choice, is what she’s thinking, who can choose or would want to: ticked time to prepare again, tocked to slave, to suckle; there’s so much to do, and so much less time is what the clockface questions: to bake or not to bake, chicken; Simone needs you to sign a form allowing her to attend a trip to a museum; Liv wants you to sign a test an A in history why not an A plus, she’s asking; no time for scolding pride though as Judith, hymn, she has this little seepy weepy problem that she’s locked herself alone with in the bathroom; blood, I’m scared, what is it, Ima, what’s happening to me…it’s a boy.

An emptiness, the Shabbos of a school not just off or out of session for the day or holiday but abandoned…B busts the locks then barges through the chill, seeking only shelter: an empty class. It’s just down West 90th, a girl’s school without girls or anyone; poshish, tony, the first school Rubina had ever attended, though through kindergarten only: she’d been an only daughter for a year before Simone was born, she’d been a citygirl, for six snobbed years before Liv ever joined them and made them sisters more than just to one another — then they moved down to Joysey together, way before the days of the house and the lawn and the basement and the twocar commute. Simone and Liv and the rest unborn had been too young for anything, though, and had stayed at home and unmade, but Rubina — this had been her world five days a week, fullday. Too huge to fit behind a student’s desk He destroys to splinters, He sits atop the teacher’s for a rest.

To think: this is what it would’ve been like to live in a city, to be native to this shtus, at home here, a life lived quick and quickly wise…how this is where He would’ve gone to school, too, to yeshiva, though in the boy’s wing, which is just next door, life’s always just next door, He’s thinking — had what happened never happened, that is, had we never moved out and then, died. A mind denied Him — this school the repository of yet another inheritance deferred. The shelves are empty of books, bookended loss; it’s dark in here, better not to tempt the fluorescents — the sweep of the floor, its pencil shavings, chalk remains from the happy clap of appreciative erasers smeared into the spirals of shoes out on permanent recess, their tag you’re it, and skip and jump. Dust gathered thickly on the scarred faces of desks, chewing gum’s wadded on the plastic panels of the ceiling gnawed with wet, snapped pointers heaped at the radiator as kindling, an old flag hanging in flags, a globe’s smashed in, world flattened; calendars fade into maps, so tired, the round white eye of the clock’s shut stopped; there are charts here and there are graphs and there are trees here, a mess of corkboard herald, pushpin fame, gold stars spangle the wall, they fall from their walls from up high near the waterlogged ceiling, below the paper trim that scrolls out the math and the alphabets: A a, B b, C c …B turns His head to follow the tongue of paper around and around, tongueless trying to sound its letters out now, right to left, Aleph, Bet, the latter the letter that begins His own name, ending in a grunt — call me that…in His turn facing front again, to take in the tablet before Him.

A chalkboard, effaced in clouds to bear heavy weather over the metal of its lower lip, hosting in the beveled curl its scowl, a single wisp of chalk — but no eraser. A blackboard scarred in white, balmed with the puff of gray clouds at its margins, wiped into winter at its center by a palm licked slick, dispersed with the tail of a coat, dispelled with a flick of the cuff: its surface entire a great whirlwind of days, of weeks, or moons, their record scribbled, rescribbled, worn, scrawled into palimpsest then rubbed thin to a unity, dappled pure, this sky streaked light over dark. He jumps from the teacher’s desk to stand, to grab at the chink of chalk. Then, with a fierce stub thrust, He rips the board from the wall; flaking plaster, screws stripped from wood on brick, it comes off in His hands. He ties it around His neck with a ripped stripe of the flag He halves, tying with the more modest fray the wisp of chalk to a boardtop eyelet: leaving the classroom, then the school itself, heading out into the interpreting world, stilled in Shabbos silence. B spits on a finger to erase, a clean slate, saliva daubed with blood. A thumbprint’s trace. Upsidedown, it doesn’t matter…I will write myself.

The sightings taper off to a worm. People have other appetites now…and even the most recent pilgrims, thanatopsical tourists with serious possibly illegitimate income to dispose of packagedin from Hotzeplotz to here, to Miami, their reservations made moons ago, nonrefundable deposits put down, to pay admission as much as their homage at the refurbished sites — nu, even they’re reluctant to make the trip and, if they do, just think of the money they’d lose, then they never purchase souvenirs for anyone of any relation more distant than that of a mother or wife, even splurge on dessert at the still swanky yet woefully understaffed Restaurant Under the Sign of the Imperfectly Toned Pectorals, at which establishment an Oriental tourist of the name Jacob-san, after having waited for over an hour for his order to be taken, then forgotten, then taken again, excuses himself in advance of any question to the paunch of mensch dining at a neighboring table, then asks him in a perfectly unaccented phrasebook grunt what the guidebook has thought fit to omit…ach, what in hell does the name Miami actually mean?