Joshua Cohen - Witz

Workers are finishing up around them, coiling the cords to drills, folding up their stepladders. A last team’s accomplishing the filling of the final high kitchen cabinets aside those of the finery, the flutes and sacral cups, the pitchers fancy and plain, silver polished only to dull, in the reflection of the vases Sabbath and weekly still awaiting their flowers, always, those for the hallways’s plinths and tables and those of pink plastic for use on the porch, above the webworked, gluehandled mugs for Hanna’s afternoon tea, Israel’s crapulous coffee dawn, rows of them with their handles arranged out displaying wonderful logo to the sides: I Heart My Aba, Wakawaka Securities —His father had gotten that one for free, as a special gift to our valued investors— First International Plenary Session on Lead Insult , which’d been held down in Atlanta, or maybe that was Texas, too, Dallas/Fort Worth, who remembers with Israel dead and nothing remaining save the giveaway junk, ask Steinstein. Two workers left, they’re removing what’s still to be removed from its swaddling, stocking future Kiddush into the cabinets beneath: the bottles, his father’s blood glassed in glass and boxed in wood, his Shabbos wine; Rothschilds, Carmels without bouquet, Herzogs and many Schewitz’s, too many of them red and white and blushing both, watered down, which was Hanna, who didn’t like gouty Israel to indulge, wouldn’t much encourage. Steinstein and Ben try their best to ignore them as they finish up and leave, disappear, some upstairs-upstairs, others to partially unfinish the basement below. All this help and still no brunch, no morning food and drink, it’s unexpected. A perplex. What’s the meaning, the purpose, how we’re both too young for that. Whatever happened to the life that a house like this would’ve promised, should’ve, we were sure. Negligible, perhaps, but it’s no small thing to feel secure. Here this Steinstein sits unknowingly in the seat of His father, Israel if he’d ever make it home from work in time for sitting, Ben in what sister’s He’d never know, them both just waiting to be served, they’ve never served themselves: everything’s always come to them, kept coming, was given, handedover; the placesettings, the where and who ate first and talked and daydescribed, in order, the culinary cosmology of courses and the breakages of silence, of bread and bad news, the table on the floor flooring the basement sunk deep to ballast a house on an Island, now uprooted, dispossessed; how they’re islands themselves, made victims again of splitting water and historical weather — and yet with such knowledge stolen from their brothers dead for sharing amongst they who would survive so chosen all Steinstein can give Him is this I’m lonely shtick, saccharined tea I miss my mother spieling, the coffee creamed and sugary snivelfather…him gesturing with his hands as if this isn’t his native language (this tongue and, too, his giddy innocence within it), asking Him what kind of name’s Israelien, Ben that’s short for what — saying, I’m just so excited about my upcoming barmitzvah…

I’m excellent at math, and once played a solid outfield.

Then Steinstein springs up — he can’t sit still and won’t stand for it, what his mother used to say — to make his way through the kitchen finished since and emptied of workers to pace in place opposite the mirroring fridge at the edge of the hall to the stairs: to open it on his ownsome, the fridge then the freezer adjoining and then the fridge again, there ransacking around for a moment then shutting the door so helpless. You know how it goes…the fridge’s full, and there’s nothing left to eat. He turns to Ben and smiles, blushing, I have to meet the rabbi soon, I’m supposed to be studying. He pauses, thinking: I’m supposed to stop by, supposed to say hello…I’m supposed to do so much of everything that you’d think my parents didn’t die, like everybody else’s. It’s all the rules without inducement, like what’s the benefit of being good anymore, what’s in it for me. I mean, look at the check. Eighteen dollars, can you believe. Cheap schmucks. I’m not a kid anymore, thirteen soon enough though I’ve lost track of days. I was once a Pisces. He turns to the display digitally greened on the panel of the microwave. Is that right? They even set the time? On the wall in the hall above a countertop with the telephone, the pads and pens, the calendar’s still tacked on to December, the twentyfifth is circled Bris; next week’s the dentist for Liv, then the optometrist, or maybe the opthalmolgist what’s the difference they always ask and their parents have to explain even though they’re not quite sure what besides more money and more schooling, with Rubina to head to Florida with friends for the New Year, a friend’s grandmother out in Boca or South Beach, they forget but maybe trust her. Rabbi Schneer, Steinstein’s talking as he flips through the weeks, their ribboned Monday to Sunday days still in their boxes, wrapped in blank for the mourning — you know him, he’s short, like about my height and always with the hat. And fat. Bad teeth. Insists on his ordination, swears he had a mega pulpit, though word is he was only a chaplain; you know, like he prayed for the Army. He has me going over the letters, the words…my speech, he calls them prepared remarks: Welcome one & all, I’m supposed to say, strangers & survivors…he’s quick with the praise, knows to keep it interesting with chocolate candy. Steinstein, a wonder — they gave him God and he goes and finds his own belief, a faith to keep Him going. His mother always said he was a good boy. He’d been the king of the eighth grade.

He stares Ben in the face, searching out His eyes, the watery, venous empathetic.

What do you think’s next — for us, I mean, a future?

We studied this the other day, and he’s twitchy, scratching himself a rash on his neck: that we’re the last of our kind, and that we don’t have any women, not anymore, they didn’t have to tell me that — that our women were what made more of our kind of our kind; they made us, they made us us. Steintstein leans back against the counter. Affiliated, what’s that supposed to mean? What do they expect from me, Affiliation? He turns to wander, not back toward the brunchnook, the lox and capering cranny, but out into the hall and around the house. Forcing himself to perk, don’t forget to smile. Show me your room, he says, your parent’s, everything — him even venturing down into the basement as Ben waits His shame at the stairhead to be told what’s to be found down there, then taunted because He’s afraid though gently. Upstairs again, talked out. Bored already in his mandate, his curiosity thoroughly discharged. Steinstein peeks into the familyroom, pokes into the livingroom, take the given-room, the den, grabbing from its mantel and tables framed photographs of His sisters, feeling them up in his hands and so getting his smudging prints on their glasses as he fills them out, too, in his mind, with his hands, tilting to light up skirts, then facing down as if to pocket waists and shadowed cleavage, to steal their images and so, immortal souls, making rude insinuations with his lips he apologizes for with the flirty lashes of his eyes. His eyes black, with theirs a flashy red. At Ben’s approach, he replaces them disordered but turned to the wall, then settles on a sofa alongside a scatter of last month’s unopened mail to tap a foot and wait.

In time, a telephone rings in the house, all extensions, and Steinstein’s startled, flushes…there’s a far voice — who is it…is it for me, and Ben would answer but the receiver gives only tone.

Steinstein rises to meet Him in the hall hanging up, then the two of them head together toward the door.