One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (54 page)

An overdose of Today's and I's—the exercise was growing tiresome. For more than three months into spring Tema had filled in the lines dedicated to each day conscientiously with what she was now abashed to recognize as little more than childish, banal trifles. It was time to change course. She continued to write, but now freely, at any length she desired,
straight through the arbitrary stopping point of the inane greeting to this absurd imaginary best friend she now thought of as Dear Diarrhea, and instead of giving an account of the dull events of her girl's life she would focus on a theme, a subject. The subject she selected was self-improvement; she would keep a record of her struggle to work on herself to become a better person, to achieve a higher level of perfection. Her most serious character flaw, she concluded, was Pride. Accordingly she reported on her battle against this enemy Pride to Dear Diarrhea, which she attacked on three fronts until her ultimate downfall and defeat. First, there was her pride in her personal appearance, her pathetic vanity, since everywhere she knew herself to be perceived as a beauty though oddly haughty and imperious for one so young. She confronted this weakness through a campaign of extreme modesty in dress and demeanor—loose blouses with sleeves down to her wrists, dark skirts brushing her ankles, thick stockings, walking silently in padded shoes stooped over with eyes cast down to the ground. Second was her offensive against speaking ill of others, the evil tongue, or even speaking well of others that could provoke a difference of opinion in the form of a pejorative rejoinder—
lashon ha'rah
, a predisposition she acknowledged within herself that implicitly contained a deeply rooted sense of her own superiority. Third was her strategy to obliterate herself figuratively by eliminating the personal pronoun from her vocabulary—I, me, my, myself, mine, and so on into the plural—rendering necessary elaborate circumlocutions to conduct a conversation thereby producing the secondary benefit of constricting all speech drastically. On each of these fronts, all three launched simultaneously, her mother fought her furiously, to the point that Tema reflected it was worth persevering if only to bring forth this desperate gasp of energy from a mother who otherwise passed her days stretched out on the couch in a stupor of medicine and disappointment. All of her mother's counterattacks Tema reported faithfully to Dear Diarrhea not sparing herself the ways in which they broke her spirit and eroded her resolve. “Stand up straight, Tema, don't be ashamed of your body! Give up talking
lashon ha'rah
, Tema, and you take all the fun out of life! Erase yourself, Tema, and you erase me!”

Erase me please from the book You have written, Moses Our Teacher said to the Lord. Tema was felled by the realization that her quest for ultimate humility was the height of Pride—an effort to outdo the man Moshe
himself, reputedly more modest than any other human being ever to walk upon the face of the earth. She would continue her program of confiding in Dear Diarrhea, she decided, but she would change the subject, she would seek refuge in the impersonal, in lists. She undertook the project of going through the Five Books of Moses in search of instances when God in whose image He created man allows His human side to show in acts of gentle lovingkindness instead of His usual omnipotent divine wrath decimating everything in sight. She listed the two main instances, the one in the beginning when God fashions garments of leather for Adam and Eve in their exposed guilty nakedness and amazingly dresses them Himself (she could see Him sitting there cross-legged like an old Jewish tailor squinting nearsighted as He pokes the moistened tip of the thread through the eye of the needle, then rising like a designer and contemplating His latest creation from every angle with His head cocked to the side, His forefinger pressed against His lips and thumb under His chin), and the one at the end when He buries Moses on Mount Nebo in the land of Moab (there He is, the undertaker, the gravedigger, leaning on His shovel, wiping His brow). But even those two occasions when God is “nice,” as Tema put it to Dear Diarrhea, come after He had administered the cruelest of punishments—expulsion from Paradise, exclusion from the Promised Land, the Torah's beginning and end—like a father who gives a present to his child to make up for a merciless beating that will leave its devastating mark forever, ruin the child for life.

In between those two there was almost nothing to add to this list.

So Tema decided to keep another list—a list of instances when her mother seemed happy. This list was also very short. She noted the times she could hear from up in her bedroom her mother playing the piano downstairs, “Ode to Joy,” “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” the click of her mother's gold wedding band striking the keys of the notes in the bass clef. Was her mother happy at those moments? Tema asked herself. At least she was at peace, there was some relief from whatever roiled her spirit, the item belonged on the list in Tema's judgment. Then there were the times her mother would reminisce about how she would push Tema in her baby carriage and strangers would comment on how beautiful the child was—“People would stop me in the street,” her mother would always say when she recounted this memory, pure pleasure uncoiling her face. There was even an occasion when her mother laughed, Tema
recalled, uncontrollably, alarmingly, insanely, which after some agonizing reflection Tema decided qualified for the list since technically it was laughter after all and should therefore be deposited for safekeeping with Dear Diarrhea.

It happened on a Friday night, at the Sabbath table. Her father was spinning a tale about the past week in the slaughterhouse. So I'm standing there with my knife sticking out all ready to go and this cow comes along and suddenly she opens her mouth and starts talking to me and she says, Don't kill me today, I have female troubles. I'm so surprised, you can imagine, my mouth drops open, one cow is more or less the same like another cow so it's not every day you meet a talking cow, so I say, Okay cow, come back tomorrow, I'll kill you tomorrow. So tomorrow comes and I have my knife out smooth and sharp and along comes this same cow and again she starts talking and she says, Please, not today, I'm not in the mood. I'm telling you my knife almost fell right out of my hands like a wet noodle and dropped on the floor, on top of all the blood and kishkes, I just couldn't get over it, and before I know it again I'm saying, Okay cow, tomorrow, we have a date. Then it's tomorrow and here comes this same cow again and my knife is pointed right at the spot ready to go in and do the job, and what do you know? Again she opens her mouth and she says, Please, if you don't mind, another time, I have a headache. As the story unfolded, convulsive laughter spurted out of the mouth of Tema's mother, she was practically shrieking with laughter, her chest was heaving so that she clutched herself over the heart with both hands as if the breath were about to be squeezed out of her by savage palpitations, tears flooded her eyes and came gushing down her cheeks streaking her makeup until hoarse sobs erupted from some feverish depths within her and she pushed back her chair with a dreadful scraping sound and ran from the table up the stairs to her bedroom and slammed the door.

Her mother's laughter was harrowing, Tema was racked by it even as she recorded it. Nevertheless, she resolved to continue her relationship with Dear Diarrhea, she was not yet ready to give up writing, she set herself the goal of filling in all of those empty spaces, the void was terrifying. She took refuge in fiction, page after page unfurling the details of the plot of the lost princess story with which she had numbed herself over the three years when her father would come into her room, a meticulous narration of all of the trials ending in failure and defeat endured by the
lost princess in her struggle to free herself from banishment and exile and return to the paradise of her father's kingdom—ordeals by water and by fire, by sword and wild beasts, by hunger and thirst, earthquake and plague, strangulation and stoning, sleeplessness and agitation, madness, poverty, degradation. What had she done to anger him so grievously to lead to such punishment, how had she disobeyed? She wrote and wrote into the early days of summer but the answer refused to rise from the abyss, and then, in a sphere beyond her awareness, her story merged into a retelling of those nights, night after night, when her father would open her door and enter her room. Fire and brimstone, the world had come to an end. Lot's daughters, the same two virgins their father had offered to hand over to the doomed Sodomites instead of the two male guests under the protection of the house these sons of Belial were clamoring for, believed there were no men left on earth for them to procreate with. So they got their father drunk with wine in a cave in the hills near Zoar where they had fled from the conflagration. First the eldest lay with their father and became pregnant by him, the next night it was her sister's turn. The eldest gave birth to a son she called Moab, father of the Moabites, and the younger gave birth to a son she called Ben-Ami, father of the Ammonites. The abomination of the Moabites was the god Hemosh to whom King Solomon built a shrine for wanton, lustful worship on a mountain east of Jerusalem. He also built there a shrine to the abomination of the Ammonites, the god Molekh, upon whose fiery altars the children were sacrificed.

The days grew longer, the school year was over. It was evening but not yet dark, and Tema was sitting in her room reading for the first time her mother's copy of
Anna Karenina
. She was up to Book Two, groping her way back to this world, looking up at the twilight after having lost herself in the story of how Anna's lover, Vronsky, blundered and broke the back of his horse in the steeplechase race. Poor Frou-Frou, there was no choice but to shoot her. Tema was eleven years old and she wanted to howl for this mare who had tried so hard to please her master. She was thinking to herself, this man Tolstoy, here was a rebbe at whose feet she could sit, she would do everything to please him, she would bend her will never to do anything he would disapprove of when she heard her father's
heavy tread shuffling toward her down the hallway. He opened her door without knocking but did not come into her room. Still in his work clothes, with sawdust on his shoes, he planted himself at the entrance and said, “I just want you should know that your mama read your diary, all of that dreck you made up about me. You left it where anyone could see. You did it on purpose to hurt me. Now your mama is saying she's going to leave me.” Manifesting no interest at all in any response she might offer up, he turned and left. She felt so sorry for him, it left her almost dizzy with hatred.

The next day she waited for her mother to come downstairs, but when by five o'clock in the afternoon she had not yet appeared Tema went up and knocked on the bedroom door. “Yes, come in, Tema,” her mother called to her in a muffled voice. When Tema entered the room her mother gazed at her for a long time with her eloquent eyes, then folded back a corner of the quilt and patted the bedsheet, an invitation to Tema to come lie down beside her under the covers. Her mother was still in her nightgown, her hair spread over the pillow like a dark crest.

Tema lay down at her mother's side, nestling close to her body, burying her face in the familiar musty smell tinged with perfume, lily of the valley. “I'm sorry, Mama,” Tema said in a choked whisper. Her mother inhaled the sweet young fragrance of her hair and kissed her on the pale exposed whiteness of the part on top of her head.

“It's all right, Tema. It's not your fault. It's my fault. I was a bad wife.”

“Why did you read my diary? You promised you'd never look.”

“It doesn't matter,” her mother said wearily. “I always knew anyway somewhere in my heart. I didn't protect you the way a mother should—forgive me. I put my own interests ahead of yours. Besides, it was just too hard to get out of bed.”

Tema shook her head ardently. “It's only a story, Mama. I made it all up, it's not real, nothing ever happened. Tateh says you're going to leave him.”

Her mother laughed to herself, a skeptic's laugh, but nevertheless Tema heard it through everything that separated them. “Why did you laugh?”

“I laughed? That was a laugh? Don't worry,
maidel'e
, I'm not going anywhere. Where would I go anyway? Besides, I'm much too tired.”

Three weeks later her mother overcame her mortal exhaustion and rose from her bed. She dressed herself in her finest clothing including shoes and
stockings. She carefully applied black kohl liner and mascara to her eyes, lipstick, powder and rouge. She polished her nails. She adorned herself in her gold necklace and bracelets and single pearl earring. She dabbed perfume on the pulse of each wrist, in the cleft of her split earlobe, in the scoop at the base of her throat. She coiffed herself in her best wig, a long blonde pageboy all of a piece that she wore only to weddings and other special occasions. She uncapped all of her bottles and emptied all of the pills into her mouth and swallowed them without water. She returned to the bed, drew the covers up to her chin, and lay there with eyes wide open looking back at her life until all the vital moisture within was lapped up by tongues of flame and she was turned into a pillar of salt.