Jacob's Folly (11 page)

“I need a drink after all the emotion,” said Libby, one bitten-down hand already strangling a bottle of vermouth.

Deirdre sighed, blinking slowly. In a langorous show of defeat, she tossed off her shoes and fell onto the couch. Stevie ran over, nuzzled up to her. She held the frail boy tight, her eyes shut. Leslie watched them lying there. Every day with Stevie was a struggle for her, Leslie knew. He wished it were otherwise. He wasn't proud of her, in that way. He wished he could be proud.

That night Leslie kissed naked Deirdre in the dark. A crack of light from the bathroom they shared with Stevie, eternally illuminated for his sake, limned the outlines of her cheek, her arm, the rounded pitch of her hip, with silvery strokes of light. He swept the hair back from her face with his rough palm. She lay on her side, slid her hand over his massive shoulder, down his back. “You're the only man in the world who can make me feel small,” she whispered.

“You are small,” he said. “You're my tiny little wife.” As she smiled, a glistening thread ran along her temple. Leslie wiped the tear away with his thumb.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just … I don't want anything to happen to you.”

“What's going to happen to me?” he asked.

“Sometimes I get scared,” she whispered.

“Of what?”

“How much I need you.” He took her in his arms, her full, warm flesh relaxed against his taut belly. He nestled his face into her neck, felt her heart beating at the base of her throat, the skin vibrating against his lips.

I
sat basking on a warm windowsill recently scrubbed by one of Masha's many sisters, or possibly the housekeeper, in preparation for the coming Shabbat. I had realized some time ago that I didn't need to go anywhere in order to keep up with Leslie or Masha. I couldn't escape them. Their two stories were switched back and forth in my mind ruthlessly. The only thing that prevented me from going mad during this period was the sensual delight of sublunary existence. I had, in the past days, become fat from the nano-scraps unwittingly left around by the scores of children, cousins, friends, and neighbors bouncing around in that house on any given day. It was a fly's Eden. Not that it was dirty—Pearl spent much of her time sucking up dust with her vacuum, wiping up or sweeping crumbs, spraying sterilizing sprays all over every ceramic or glass surface—and yet still the specks fell from the food. For me, one iota was a feast. And I was not the only fly attracted by this bonanza. Other samples of my species—largely female, I am happy to announce—were born in the Edelman house every day of the year. I had achieved a bit of a reputation among the girls by now, and the virgins tended to congregate coquettishly around me, gathering like, well, flies, hoping I would inseminate them.

I never realized it before, but there is a charming little mating ritual for houseflies: the male, having spotted the female (there were, I admit, occasional encounters with male flies, but these were flirtations, I assure you), begins to follow her, occasionally beating his wings very quickly and making a distinct buzzing noise. The female, if a virgin, might slow down at this (female flies only like to mate once). The male continues to follow. The female pretends she doesn't know what's going on and walks along, nonchalantly licking up stray drops of food or excrement. Then—this is my favorite part, and I have to say I take my hat off to the Creator for being so generous to even the lowly fly—the male sneaks up behind the female and gives her vagina a little lick. He didn't have to give us that, but he did. The female is then often somewhat more interested, opens her wings, and the male strikes, leaping onto her while curving his abdomen forward and entering her, stroking her face. We could remain in this happy position for up to two hours. Though I am not one hundred percent sure I was fertile, being a demon, I did fuck a lot of flies that spring, and, whatever their paternity, a generation of them bashed their way out of maggots—so many that mother Pearl was forced to buy a selection of fly swatters, and I nearly lost my life on a number of occasions. Pearl Edelman had a vicious swat and surprisingly good coordination. I did not give much thought as to whether these new flies—very possibly my own children—were incarnated souls, or just flies. To be honest, I was so incapacitated by the stories of my two humans as they flashed through my poor brain that I was barely able to think at all. My only recreational activity was lust. Its satisfaction brought me a blissful, fleeting respite from the stories of Leslie and Masha.

I did, however, try to remain in Masha's presence as much as possible. Her animal beauty soothed me; her pain saddened me. I had accepted the fact that I could not have her and that my love for her was an absurdity. All I wanted now was to change her destiny.

Masha woke from a nap but kept her eyes shut, alert for the pain. She took in a breath that swept through her chest, searching for a catch, a dig, an impediment. She sat up carefully. Nothing hurt! She swiftly said her morning prayer of thanks for being returned to her body, reached under the bed to draw out the water-filled red plastic bowl and pitcher, performed her ablutions, dried her hands on a towel that was crumpled near the bed. She stood up, tentatively at first, then, pain-free, she bounded past the tidily made beds of her two younger sisters, Suri and Yehudis. She passed the desk the three of them shared, covered with Suri's earnest homework, out the door, along the hall, passing the petite Sri Lankan housekeeper, Trina, who was vacuuming, and clattered down the stairs. Pearl, who was in the kitchen making challah, looked up at Masha, worried.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“It doesn't hurt anymore,” Masha announced, automatically touching the mezuzah screwed into the wall by the door, then kissing her hand.

“
Baruch Hashem
,” said her mother. “You still need to take it easy.” Masha took an apple from a basket and bit into it with gusto.

“Wash the apple,” said Pearl.

“Can I help?” asked Masha, holding the apple under the tap.

“You sit down,” said Pearl, using her wrist to wipe a stray hair from her flushed face, then retying her headscarf good and tight with dough-covered fingers. Eighteen-year-old Yehudis, who looked much like Masha, only rounder, with smaller eyes, her prettiness lacking the haunted fierceness of her sister's, smiled sympathetically.

“You want some tea?” she asked.

“I'm okay,” answered Masha, yawning luxuriously and sitting on a bench beside the long Formica table, drawing her knees up to her chest, pulling her long dress down to her ankles. “Where is everybody?”

“The baby's sleeping, and I let the little ones take out the portable DVD thing because it's Friday,” said Pearl.

“They're watching
The Lion King
again,” said Yehudis in a teasing tone.

“Mommy,” said Masha, laughing, “you gotta get 'em another DVD, they know it by heart.”

“We did fine without it, and we will again, if anyone else complains,” Pearl warned. “I probably shoulda never got it anyway.”

“Okay, okay, Mommy,” said Yehudis, kissing her mother on the cheek.

Six days had passed since I had gotten Masha to scratch her head. I had since convinced her to eat two pieces of chocolate cake in one sitting and use her mother's lipstick without permission. I also tried suggesting she drink a glass of milk only five hours after eating meat, instead of the usual six, but she berated herself for even thinking such a thing. I would have to tread carefully on the religious habits, I realized.

Suri, fourteen, with a waxy complexion and fine wavy hair, walked in carrying Pearl's eleventh and probably final baby, Leah. “Hi, sweetie,” cooed Pearl, her fists deep in the challah dough. Suri strapped the redheaded mite into her high chair and the baby started screaming, bashing the plastic apron of the high chair with her fat mitts.

“Where's Trina?” asked Pearl.

“Vacuuming upstairs, she didn't hear the baby,” said Suri.

“Give the milk!” said Masha, holding her ears. Yehudis dumped a measure of white powder into a baby bottle, filled it with water from the water cooler in the corner, shook the bottle, and handed it to the shrieking baby, who snatched it from her and sucked at the nipple desperately, breathing loudly through her nose as she guzzled like a nursing calf. There was, I noticed, a touch of animalism in some of the females in this household.

“Mommy, what can I do?” asked Suri.

“Help Yehudis cut the fruit,” said Pearl, working the dough. There was a moment of quiet. Then Masha, lying back on a few pillows that had been left on the bench, closed her eyes and began to sing. Her
voice was eerie, raw. The song was in Hebrew. It had a winding Eastern melody, like an incantation. The other two girls joined in, creating a complex harmony. These girls could really sing. Pearl smiled, tipping the pot and rolling out the yellowish challah dough. I hovered over her, enduring the occasional swat from her flour-crusted hands, and watched, riddled with nostalgia, as she divided the moist, shiny orb into three separate balls, one for each loaf she was going to make, then cut each ball into three parts, rolling the sections into thick strands and braiding them swiftly. She cut off the ends of the three loaves to burn in the oven, just the way my mother had done, but, unlike my mother, she placed each loaf in a disposable tinfoil container, brushed them with egg, and slid them all into the electric oven. I loved Pearl. She didn't smell of challah all week long, as my mother had, but she had a delicious concentration when she worked, the younger children weaving in and out of the room whining for chocolate ice cream (they got some), and reporting various bite marks that the wildest of all the children, Estie, had made with her little otter teeth. The serene Yehudis drew ferocious little Estie, a petulant child with badly tangled dark hair, onto her hip and rocked her while singing placidly. I remembered that my mother-in-law, Mme Mendel, had always said that matted hair was caused by demons snarling it in the night, and that one should never cut the knots out for fear of angering the demons. Eventually the little girl relaxed and rested her head on her sister's shoulder, her eyelids fluttering. Suri sang like a good student, hands clasped, hitting all the right notes. Masha sang with abandon. Leaning back on the pillows, eyes closed, throat arched, she seemed posessed by the song.

As the women worked and sang, I clung to the ceiling with exhilarating ease, my feathery feet somehow fastening me to the plaster. My orb eyes were panoramic: I could see the white expanse of ceiling around me, the women moving around below, a blur of green out the kitchen windows. I could even glimpse a sliver of the hallway, and the unlocked front door, which opened and shut incessantly as a stream of purposeful Edelmans pumped in and out of the house all day.

The men—Masha's bony, pallid sixteen-year-old twin brothers, Dovid and Simchee, her father, Mordecai, and various brothers-in-law, wore their black hats set back from their heads as they returned from work, went off to pray, came back for a bite to eat, went out to study Torah, popped in for a cup of coffee, dashed off to pray again. Dovid and Simchee kept to themselves, reading Torah or the commentaries every single spare moment they had, arguing fine points in twin fuzzy beards, long fingers waving emphatically. Dovid had started growing his sidelocks long, Hasidic-style, as a gesture of extra piety, and wound them around the arms of his eyeglasses. The bearlike patriarch, Mordecai, always seemed to have a baby in his arms when he was home—his own, or one of Miriam's. Miriam, the oldest of the Edelman children, already had four children under five. She was twenty-eight. The Edelmans procreated very nearly as efficiently as the flies in the house did.

Miriam arrived, bossy, breathless, holding a Bundt cake in one hand and a heavy plastic bag in the other. Two identical little girls slipped past her and ran to the playroom, where Miriam's youngest siblings, along with two of her own tiny kids, were still watching the movie.

“Didn't you hear about the asparagus?” Miriam asked, her eyes falling on two dozen bundled spears lined up on the counter.

“What about them?” asked Pearl.

“We're not allowed to eat them this year. Too many bugs.”

“Since when?”

“It was in the paper. It's an infestation. You can't get them out even by soaking,” said Miriam officiously, holding up a bunch of asparagus and waving it regretfully. Bugs, I knew, were not kosher, so we always had to check fruit and vegetables carefully, even in my less observant home long ago.

“Not even by soaking?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well,” sighed Pearl. “We'll be one vegetable short, then. But you brought a Bundt cake!”

“I only got back from work at two so I couldn't let it cool enough,”

said Miriam. “There are big chunks missing where it stuck to the mold.” Pearl patted her arm.

Now the door opened again. Another daughter. This one was Alyshaya, a petite twenty-two-year-old princess with a very long, thick brown wig that came down to her waist. She pushed a baby in a carriage. “Could somebody get the soup? It's in the back of the car,” she said. Yehudis dashed out. “I forgot to season it,” said Alyshaya. “I forget everything now.” She cast a loving, baleful eye on her baby, asleep in the carriage. “Honestly, Mommy, I don't know how you did it with all of us. I can't begin to imagine it. I would die,” she said. Yehudis appeared with a heavy tureen of what I guessed was matzoh ball soup.

“What are you talking about?” said Pearl, laughing. “You get used to it. You expand.”

“I'll say,” said Miriam, smoothing her curvaceous hips. Her waist, still small, was cinched with a stylish wide belt.

“I meant spiritually,” said Pearl, chuckling. “But isn't it worth gaining a few pounds to have all these lovely babies?”

“Of course it is,” said Miriam. “But I still wish my hips weren't so wide.”

“I can't wait to have babies,” said Yehudis. “I don't care what I look like.”

“Your husband will,” said petite Alyshaya, shaking salt into the soup.

“Babies happen soon enough,” said Pearl.

“I don't really want to,” said Masha, her chin on her knees. Everyone turned in her direction, as if they had forgotten she was there.

“How could you not want to have a baby?” asked Alyshaya.

“Dunno, I just don't,” she said, lying back on the pillows drowsily. Pearl looked at Miriam anxiously. Miriam widened her eyes at her mother.

“Okay,” Miriam said to Masha, shrugging. “You can take care of mine, then.”

I remained on the ceiling for hours, mesmerized by the workings of the clan, as the light through the windows faded. New to my celestial and corporeal powers, I was still trying to work out how to read the layers of my demon perception. Whereas Masha was transparent to me (as was Leslie), the rest of the Edelman family—the secondary selves—emitted a wavering frequency, confusing me with stray images, yearnings, and memories. A compulsive observer, I was gluttonous for every scrap I could glean. Stilling my thoughts, I became nothing but a pair of eyes, a recording mind. In this meditative state, I imagined God's head as a great sac lined with millions of red fly eyes. In my vision, the earth floated within this eyeball-lined sac as if in a womb; the lidless domes stared, taking in all acts, each thought, tallying the blemishes on every soul. The Old Bastard was watching me too, I thought nervously, my fly feet shifting on the ceiling. He was watching me watch.