Esther sang as she walked through the house. Her voice was toneless, from the throat, in a frequency high in warding power. A voice with a significant half-life, a noxious mineral content, that is, if it could be frozen and crystallized, something then beyond our means or imagination. If her voice could have been made into a smoke, we would have known. If you heard it you were thoroughly repelled. She muttered in her sleep and awake. She spoke to us and to others, into the phone, out the window, into a bag. It didn’t matter. Nice things, mean things, dumb things, just a teenager’s chatter, like a tour guide to nothing, stalking us from room to room. Blame and self-congratulation and a constant narration of this, that, and the other thing, in low-functioning if common rhetorical modes, in occasions of speech designed not particularly to communicate but to alter the domestic acoustics, because she seemed to go dull if she wasn’t speaking or reading or serving somehow as a great filter of words.
She did it without thinking, and she did it to herself, and it was we alone who were sickened.
But of course we’d find out it was others, too. Others and others and others.
What she said was bitter, and we sipped at it and sipped at it, her mother and I, just ever so politely sipped at it until we were sick, because this was the going air inside our house, our daughter talking and singing and shouting and writing.
Whatever we thought we wanted, to hug or kiss our daughter, to sit near her, it was our bodies that recoiled first. We cowered and leaned away from her words, we kept our distance, but Esther was a gap closer, bringing it all right up to our faces. Some sort of magnet was in effect. A father magnet. A mother magnet. As we fled, Esther gave chase. We covered our ears and she talked louder. Our daughter seemed not to care who was listening, and we were ready at hand, ready to service her needs. We stood up to it and took it like parents, because doesn’t the famous phrase say: shit on me, oh my children, and I will never fail to love you?
We’d heard this at the forest synagogue from Thompson during an intermission, when Rabbi Burke allowed his staff access to the radio transmission, and we’d sat in the hut nodding our abstract consent to such a promise. Yes, of course we would love our daughter no matter what. How ridiculous to think otherwise. Ridiculous. It was so easy to agree to what did not test us.
The sickness rode in on my name. Loaded and weaponized. Samuel, which Esther was old enough, her mother and I thought, to call me. A little grace note of parenting, which seemed to work for other people, and which we proudly took up as though we had invented it. But Esther wasn’t impressed by this privilege. She barked my name until it became an insult, said it louder, softer, coughed it up and spat it at me.
We had missed the warnings on this one, phrases transmitted to our synagogue, the rabbi’s droning cautions. And they were killed with their own names. From the Psalms. Beware your name, for it is the first venom. Revelations. These warnings had always seemed like metaphors, the wishful equations of some ancient person’s mind. Little comfort, in the end, and it wasn’t my name alone that was toxic, but all of them.
It came in hello and good-bye and any little thing she said. Except Esther didn’t much say hello. When she didn’t use my name she said Hey and Daddy. She said Ciao and Okeydokey on her way out, language she shared with some of the gender-neutral underlings, incapable of eye contact, she prowled around with, and with fingers I dragged my mouth to smile, even though it fell slack again when I dropped my hand.
The reasoning, when reasoning seemed possible, was simple. Better to stand up to those happy moments, if that’s what they were, and give Esther a father who wasn’t such a spoiler, who didn’t turn pale on the occasion of even the most basic speech. But my face leaked force each time. A daughter was someone to pretend to be healthy for. A daughter shouldn’t see such sickness. Your child will be the end of you, Rabbi Burke had not yet said. I could speak back to her, and I could hear, technically I could. I could ask about school, or the feuds that consumed her, the massive injustices, often by omission, perpetrated by her friends, but the words felt foreign, like they were built of wood. A punishment to my mouth just to extract them, like pulling bones from my head.
That this poison flowed from Jewish children alone, at least at first, we had no reason to think. That suffering would find us in ever more novel ways, we had probably always suspected.
4
At first we thought we were bitten. Something had landed on our backs and sucked on us. Now we would perish. It was September, and the air was still soaked in heat, a nasty fried smell in the yard. Claire and I traced our lethargy, the buzzing limbs and bodies that we dragged around like sacks, to a trip to the ocean, where we succumbed to ill-considered napping atop a crispy lattice of seaweed and sand gnats that left us helplessly scratching ourselves for days.
If we looked closely, a spatter of red marks spread across our backs. Map fragments, like an unfinished tattoo. Not freckles or moles. Possibly the welters from a bite, some rodent eating us while we slept.
Claire spread out on her belly and I straddled her for the examination, but this was the wrong, sad view of her. Her bottom flattened beneath me, as if relieved of its bones, and the generous skin of her back pooled onto the bed.
Esther walked in, looked at us with disappointment. I waved her away, mouthing some scold, hoping Claire wouldn’t notice that she’d been exposed in this position.
“Really?” Esther said, louder than necessary. “I mean you couldn’t even close the door?”
One should not look too closely at a spouse’s back, should not pin her this way to a bed. This was ill-advised scrutiny. I didn’t know what I was looking for anyway. Claire squirmed under me, tried to hide from Esther’s sight.
“Mom’s not feeling well,” I said, climbing down.
“Then maybe you should leave her alone, Dad.”
“I’m trying to help.”
“Hm,” said Esther, using her face to freely show what she thought of that.
Hadn’t Esther, her skin unspoiled, still tauntingly clear, napped on the same tangled nest? We’d set up camp on burnt sand, waiting our turn in line to splash in the fenced-in patch of ocean. The three of us ripped through a bag of salted candies, then fell into one of those blissful afternoon beach comas, sleeping in the sun, our limbs fat with heat.
Claire had an explanation. The old, the tired, the ruined, got done in by bites. Turned into leaking sacks of mush. Whereas the young, they swigged venom to the lees and it supercharged their bodies. They could not be stopped.
Conversations from the museum of the uninformed. It troubled us that our common sense had so little medical traction. There were doctors, and there were armchair doctors, and then there were people like us, crawling in the mud, deploying childish diagnostics, hoping that through sheer tone of voice, through the posturing of authority, we would exact some definitive change of reality. Perhaps we thought the world we lived in could be hacked into pleasing shapes simply by what we said. Maybe we still believed that.
The medical tests, when we sought counsel, came back clear, the numbers low and dull. The doctors shooed us out. We had not been bitten. We would shake it off when the weather broke and the cold air came in. When the understaffed apparatus of our immune systems decided to take notice and erect a defense.