This is Wanda the maid now Wanda the maydeclass="underline" in one side out the other, poof, as they say, and that’s that. Wanda Hanna’s One how she’s now Wanda-Hava, Hava as in Adam’s wife Eve in the new language olden again, as in that song they’d sung at their wedding high on babka and chairs: Hava negilah, won’t you, as in…you Wanda a little something, and don’t you deny yourself in my house, then why don’t you Hava little something — and he did, have her, still has: seven circumlocutions cracked out of Instruction, a host of prayerful songs shired after she’d learned what there was to learn, studied after she’d shaved what there was to shave, as per tradition, and so much, too, eighteen blessings after morning’s blessed the ceremony at the chintzy hall off the Turnpike, ink dripping from their ketubah witnessed by the caterer and bandleader, the wet of their names mingling and, with ten hours then at the sprawl of motel across the asphalt that gave you the deal if you went with what package spent in delicious Godentwining, in delectable Unification, he drove her in his tenyearold Taurus home, ensconced her in the kitchen: new sconces, three dishwashers, three fridges and three ranges, meat, milk, and pareve, from parents, his now made hers, who knew from machatunim’s the term, and there set her to work, stirring up the pot, preparing.
I Hava Wanda, I Hava Wanda, I Hava such a lucky mensch, a mucky match save passport and his bank balance, whispers as he palms her, shvitz upon her swell…witness the happiness of this new Affiliatedess with her appropriately Affiliated husband, who’d made a respectable woman out of her, a maid and more, a wife and a mother primigravida; in this world, there aren’t any irreligious naturalization problems: she is that she is now that the papers have gone through, a book’s worth of them, and nobody’s asking any questions, us sons we just don’t know how…hymn, maybe some aspersions thrown to glass-houses (perhaps their greenhouse just going up outside, alongside the tennis-court and the inground swimmingpool, subcontracted through his brother to a friend of his brother who’s been going through some tough times, his brother, too, their own many brethren, our sons and who isn’t, we’ll vouch), but nu — who are They to make judgments?
And still she launders and presses and folds clothes, now for herself and for her husband, too, and soon soon enough please stop shushkeh shushkeleh we’ve shtupped all genug for the baby inside her she’ll name whatever her husband wants, but whom she’ll secretly call Benjamin: oy, it’s a boy, to be a boy, congratulations…may he kill you in kinderbirth, may you die at kinderbed, upon it what death could be better, a hearty Mazel Tov all around.
Spit spit spit.
O Adela, she thinks as she irons the skirts she’s inherited, each of her blouses, too…O Adela back home, Over There back dead with her relations, their blood.
And Spit.
And so now in the quietly massive hours of Shtum, with her husband sleeping on the side he picked out as his long ago, long before he ever had a wife, it’s the side he clung to even in the belly of his mother olev hashalom toward the left kidneyward as if a worrying growth, while he sleeps undisturbed, exhausted, womanspent and that for the first time in his life he would remember if ever he were in the habit of memory, knowing nothing either of her Wanda’s past besides her foreign ancestry, her vague though desirable eastness, which is what had attracted him to begin with, she says to herself in her own language though she thinks it, too, in our own (she can’t help it, that’s why she has him, why she’s having him — to have someone to speak with, someone to correct her mistakes), then hides herself down in her mouth and down to her gut, to rummage for Instinct long fallow: still troubling, that she still can’t place that odd ancient whoever he was who’d attended dinner at her house, theirs, the old theirs that night, The Night, or had he, stolen in, could he have and how, and how Hanna’d seemed to think that Israel knew him and how Israel of course had seemed to think that Hanna knew him had known him maybe and how the two of them they seemed to think that if not them then perhaps the Tannenbaums they’d invited him, had they, and why, maybe he was poor, or that his wife she passed on, he didn’t have a meal that night that Sabbath when Shabboses still were temporal; pants, something about pants, maybe, or other, sockshoes…and Hava she knows she didn’t know him and doesn’t, did she or remember him leaving, and maybe it wasn’t dinner at all, after all perhaps it was after, nuzzling her head into the pink give of the pillow, the downy maw, the wishniak’s hairily soft and softening mouth whose stem feels topped with a feather: he didn’t give a name she placed or could or ever and he laughed when appropriate but too loudly, insistently didn’t say anything else, and ate almost nothing, like a bird, like a boyd (her husband), didn’t eat anything at all or even drink; had he forgotten or what, who he himself was, God, who was he and how did he get there, did he, and what part did he play in this spiel, which, if any at all? Then, she sleeps, snores an ocean of skin out of her mouth to soak along the round of her form…where’d you get that idea, going geist into her mind she’s woken again in a screamed shvitz hers or his by her husband (the mensch, he’d just been promoted at the slaughterhouse to Head Knife Inspector, which is a position equal in rank to the Inspector of the Finenesses of Sandgrains Used in Hourglasses, he’d joke, I’ve certainly put in the time — how much he’s proud he usually sleeps without calm, a drippy and dreamless neurotic), who shakes her and holds her and holds and shakes her at once to tell her it’s all a dream, reassure, just a dream he’s shouting and what to invoke to ameliorate, to go downstairs and nextdoor to grab the three friends husband or wife and kinder required for the prayer, what’s their names: I have seen a good dream, you have seen a good dream, it is good and may it become good, may the Merciful One transform it to the good, may it be decreed upon it seven times from heaven that it become good and always be good, it is good and may it become good blah blah…sleepinghand grabbing for the manifold amulets that hang from the scald of a knob at the door to their room, the Master Suite’s something anything to ward off: maybe that string of wolves’teeth, the cask of oil luggaged home from Safed, a missed enunciation of the O so many Names…