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!
A big one, Uncle Samuel had said, and he’s the doctor, the biggest I’ve ever dealt with. Though how she’d known it all better than him and before, having had the experience; but to confirm — wisdom is your own voice and prophecy, that of another — a brother, the eldest brother of her father had said, her stepfather, an observation a second doctor had seconded, this also an uncle of hers, Doctor Solomon, her mother’s brother, her youngest, concurring: ginormous!
After twelve, though, you should be able to handle it, which one had said, handle Him — Mazel Tov to your husband, a son!
She tells Israel everything, she hadn’t told Israel that — she’s thinking, why ruin it?
Hanna washes her heels and she washes her ears and she washes her One True Hair, the twitchy tip of her nose.
In the shower, she hears: the memory of the doctors’ voices, her own voice, and, within the whirlwindy muffle, gathered in the shower, risen to its tiled peak and lost in the steaming, the voices of her kinder; heard indistinct as to speaker or even age, as impossible to differentiate as to enumerate and yet how she tries, to respond, crying for her girls, and — through the halfdim of a hallway below her daughters slowly assemble, dazedly, pulling each other and pushing, teasing at one another, Rubina then Simone trying to act like Rubina detached, removed, behind the rest and mothering, selfconsciously not engaged in this messing around.
One’s holding candlesticks, the other with candles.
As to involve the others in preparations adult and mature and so, also, to calm them, Rubina hands the candlesticks one to Asa the other to Isa, has them place them on the designate sill, then struggles their candles in, melts, waxy dribble, rolls the wicks in her fingers, wicking them as stretched as their wait, longer, just a moment more’s yelled despite there being no yelling, disallowed as it’s almost time: Hanna comes downstairs in a maternity dress, blue for a boy, she thinks, betraying, whitesashed, not the white dress or shift, the mirror and the heads arranged around it in conference had decided against it, shook no then brushed hair, her white kerchief, her scarf the shade of the window opposite her descent with her heels pecking the tile from the last step to the floor, through the kitchen to leave the Rag wrung out in its drawer, shut, then a tug at the handle of the oven’s door to check, that the timer’s been set for tonight and tomorrow, the Shabbos mode back through the hallway toward the diningroom, her daughters.
From the windows looking in with the eye of the moon above, the sun below — who else is looking in in this neighborhood — she’s only a round taken of darkness, they all are, their shadows merging to mother the night.
Hanna smoothes the tablecloth, white, prepared for the taint of tonight — anything to put off the fire.
But Rubina strikes the match, and holds it there, the other sisters holding that hand.
The lights float in darkness, which interpretively is either something in nothing, or its reverse — and then, after the slightest, when no one knows if they’ll make it, the flickers go to life, in blue, in yellowing white; Hanna’s hands in their sweep, and her daughters, they follow: their words, which are hers, coming lower and hushed — though it’s not as if they’re afraid anyone’d hear — their vowels are stretched, wicked, lit on the tips of their tongues; some of the daughters knowing the words only through sound alone, others through the way their tongue feels in a particular mouthspot, the youngest ones just moving their lips in a manner that seems to them serious.