At six, I didn’t know more than riding a Schwinn
and climbing banyan trees. “Do you believe in God?”
the two blonde girls from four doors down asked
as our bikes circled endlessly in figure eights
around each other. Well, I suppose one girl asked
while the other simply rode, silently and blonde.
They weren’t twins, but a monolith of dress and act,
like the perfection of someone’s philosophy.
In my imagination now, they ride a tandem bike.
“No,” I said, unfamiliar with the question, echoing
what I understood from the electric wires passing overhead
our house. “So,” the girl declared, “you’re Jewish.”
*
“What is Jewish?” I ask my mom in the next moment
the daily night washings and monthly purges have preserved
and spliced in some axiomatic stitch of neurochemistry.
We are standing on our front deck beside the red brick steps,
as she carries groceries in. “Why?” she clutches,
“Where . . .?” as if something in her blood alarmed,
knowing how swift a black tide could turn to grab your things.
Then, in the next moment, six months have passed
(or maybe it’s the year before), my grandfather’s kitchen:
*
my great-grandmother, Bubbie Bella—a small hunched
slivered shadow in one of her last scenes—hands my
two-year-old sister a Ritz cracker with a dollop of liver,
and as my sister begins to eat, my mom enters the room
and shrieks, lunging over a live wire to scoop the meat out
of my sister’s mouth with her fingers. We were vegetarians,
it is true, but from here her revulsion seems a cusp
of Old World contagion, as if a pogrom or a yellow star
had been affixed to her daughter’s tongue. The scene ends
with the shocked looks on two girls’ faces.
One the look of a girl who crossed the Atlantic alone
at twelve years old, whose sisters one day stopped
writing back. The other the look of the girl who had only
crossed the kitchen and opened her mouth.
They each gaze up at my mother, shaking
from the opposite sides of the century,
one unable to imagine any harm in a child being fed,
the other unable to imagine any harm at all.
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