Joshua Cohen - Witz

A clattering that’s the clearing of plates from beyond and he’s thinking dinner’s over already, or begun the following week just now ended — but it’s only the next course, he’s missing…

Understand, we have it on good authority, the existence of a first course, and are able to identify, too, a last course: a spoondeep, knifelong affair of talking over coffee with creamer nondairy, dessert then the giving of thanks, which is benching. Blessed art Thou for a spread such as this. But is a middle course not inconceivable, a culinary lull? This, then, is that middle course — the middle of the middle course. Fish, soup, and salad. Then the maincourse with sides then dessert, coffee, decaf or tea.

A matter of course — we are now after the salad but before the main, which is chicken. Fishplates have been cleared from the table, Wanda. Soup in the soupbowls has been brought steaming in from the kitchen, first linedup at the range, ladled, garnished, then served, thank you Wanda.

Soupbowls were then cleared from atop the saladplates — appreciative, Wanda, we all are.

Under the saladplates are the plates for the main — the largest, widest, and deepest plates, able to handle generous helpings of poultry and sides, circumferential enough to handle even the most reckless soppings of sauce, or gravy, and the most unimaginable of allowed forkful combinations.

Now they’re in the nowhere, the untime, of no saladplate, that’s been cleared, Wanda, and an empty mainplate: chicken and its attendant sides have yet to be brought to the table, along with their respective serving utensils…O God and the kugel. This is a moment-of-silence, momentless, without even talk…there’s no ease here — a silence the thinnest sheet of glass, the salival bubble bursting of night, a plate so empty it might not even be a plate, only a smashable absence, a shatterable null…how it would take the right cough from the right person, the right sneeze, the right set of allergies subjected to just the right set of allergens, exactly, to break it all, broken. Windows far away to where they mightn’t be windows anymore, only a clearing, the sky. When the daughters get restless, begin throwing stuffed toys at each other, Hanukah presents some hauled to tableside — they don’t know yet to wait, have to develop their timing.

Ding, ding. Dong.

Not an oven this time, it’s a bell, with someone at the clapper, some tongue.

As it’s rung, the hollow unhallowing dissonance…tinnabulation, as if rippling upon a depth’s faceless surface, it expands, Developmentally extends itself, too far, too deep, rings out to distort whatever’s beneath — a mouthvoid, a pothole, a ditch: drop into drops, as sound into sound, the slightnesses of distance, assimilation, its violation of the still and holying Sabbath…its reverberations illuminating the entryway, in waves that would wear away, after many nights, much night, the door, its frame. The light flicking on, fizzling out. Then, a knock, then three more times, quick, cold and dead cedar. Unconscionable if not unforgivable to interrupt a family and its guests sitting down to their dinner, and at Shabbos dinner of all dinners, but it rings nonetheless, then a knock, and then three knocks again, firmly, no gloved knuckles here; as glasses fall from faces — designer frames all, with one schmuck’s pincenez — fall to the floor under the table, fall silent on the rug, and all of them step on them staring blind one another. A blurring. Those who’ve lost glasses repair to their hands and knees to feel around on the floor, under the table, getting kicked, socked and toed as Hanna’s thinking what guest could it be, counting seats while thinking, too, how as always she’s on her own in all this, gets herself up as risen as any martyr and, her shroudy dress held aside in one hand, hurries for the door — as much as pregnancy might allow. But she’s too late. A daughter’s already opened, the eldest, Rubina, ever her mother’s helper, of late. Growing up.

And at the door is a mensch.

Nu, so you know this joke, too.

As for him, he’s old, at the age when you can’t tell if it’s a woman or not, but it’s a mensch, rest assured, especially if he’s selling pants, door-to-door. How did he get into this privileged neighborhood, you ask? how’d he get past the Gatekeeper then deep into the heart of One Thousand Cedars, especially dressed like that? He did how he did. His mother, obviously long dead, didn’t send him out looking the way he does, don’t blame her — he’s on his own. And standing drenched, a kosher undernourished fivetwo, fivethree at the most, I’d say a 32 short in a puddle of his own making. It dawns apparent, slowly, with the dripping on the mat that, in the diffusion of inside light and, too, his unintended washing, reads Israelien (sh: underneath’s where they keep a spare key)…that and the smell, the heat, the whiteness of the kneecaps as if an oceanic phenomenon — how it’s soon understood, it’s not just any pants he’s selling, he’s selling his own. Also helps that he’s standing there in his shorts. And a dented cap, a sportsjacket, illfitting (38 long), tweed, with elbowpads pleather, once white dress shirt boiled cleanish, argyle socks I’m not sure whether black or blue and scuffed loafers, brown — which is the stain, too, of his shorts, skidded and zipper’s ripped, tornup with holes ostensibly engineered by the Manufacturer of Manufacturers to bare all but his most sensitive parts.

Rubina stares as Hanna stands, removed, at the distance of an arm, her hand to the knob, next to a grandfather clock that’s only halftimed, neglected.

Now, to sell something you have to someone who wants it, that’s not selling. While to sell something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it, now that’s selling. But to sell something you don’t have to someone who wants it? There’s a predicament. And then to sell something you have to someone who doesn’t want it? Hymn, that was his stripped existence, the worst of all the worsts day in, day out, and so perhaps the most universal. Funny and not. Working nights.

With a widening smile, which reveals his nine or so gold and silver amalgam or are they mercury fillings, crowded around the tenth, his patinate tongue: loose, frayed threads of bronze, sickly blue, white and yellow, he holds out a pair of gray gabardines, draped over his forearm, pleated with tiny pools across its ribs, here, here, and here around the cuffs, too, onuses, dried into an off crusty residue. That, and the pockets have been long ago cut out. As the mensch’s licking his fingers, trying to rub these blots out and away, he’s shuffling forward, hunching his head into the doorway, foot firmly against the lowermost hinge…his face rising into a squint to gradually assemble, through the middling fallow field of his trifocals, a girl, a woman, perhaps the mothering wife of the house, he thinks, Rubina, hanging onto the handle of the door, her face locked with a frown.

Batya toddles toward them, past Hanna’s hands and between Rubina’s legs to smile beatitude at this latest of guests.

If they keep showing up like this, she’s thinking, maybe there’ll be no bedtime — or, mightn’t his presence sentinel yet another course, she’s hoping a dessert after dessert, perhaps, an eternally refillable treat?

Undeterred, he’s known worse, he asks her is maybe your father home?

You give me…Batya’s holding out a hand sticky with honey and lint, change spared out from under the sofa’s cushions, the couches’ waxwork stems and nesting twigs, she’s insistent — this girl, asking of him again and again a demand, her voice whining from within her tiny fist, shaking out her words of schmutz: You. Give. Me? You! Give! Me!

A hug, love, such dessert — and an endless bedtime story to tell, keep the lights in the hall on all night…