Lot’s Daughters

Kay and I drifted on the swings, half-blinded by sunlight when Danny came into the park on his skateboard the summer I turned thirteen. Kay and I spent everyday there, sharing cans of Coke and smoking Tareytons filched out of our Aunt CiCi’s Pink Ladies bowling bag. Kay was my sister but she lived with Aunt CiCi in a small rental a block away. She moved in with her in the spring after her fifteenth birthday celebration went bust because someone spiked the cola with Seagrams and because Daddy found her without her shirt on in the hall closet, playing seven minutes in heaven with a boy whose hair was so black it looked like fresh tar. Daddy ordered everyone to leave and said Kay wasn’t allowed out anymore. After the screams died and the air stopped hissing, Kay left with Aunt CiCi. Mama stayed behind in the kitchen, muttering the prayer for the dead, gazing at her like she was on fire, untouchable, afraid Kay would now be lost to her.

“Sorry kiddo,” Kay kissed my cheek.

I tried to run after her but Daddy swept me up in his arms. The smell of fresh laundry warring with the tang of his sweat. “Kapara, my atonement,” he said and stroked my hair. I saw the shattered veins in his eyes. Beads of moisture collected in the deep cleft I used to poke my finger into in his chin when I was a baby. “Don’t you break my heart,” he cried.

Aunt CiCi lived alone. She had star quality. She played on a bowling league and had a special glass cabinet in her living room where she stored her trophies. She once pinned a blue ribbon to my chest so I could feel what it was like to be a winner.

Kay and I were practically twins, only twenty months apart. We crooned to Laura Nyro’s Eli’s Comin’ in the bath. We believed love was imminent. Our voices like bells and cymbals reverberated against the tiles. We dressed in Hanes ribbed tanks and homemade cutoffs with a fringe soft as baby fingers. We liked that our bra straps showed. We used the same razor. Our hair was long and streaked with lemon-juice highlights. We worked hard on our tans. Everyday in the sun was an opportunity.

Kay could crush a can of cola in one hand. She grew her fingernails long and painted them bazooka pink. Blowing on her wet nails she said, “I’m gonna be a winner like Aunt CiCi.”

I envied her certainty, her newfound autonomy. I envied her winner status.

“Look.” I pointed to the dandelion and fleabane erupting out of the cracks in the sidewalk. I didn’t want to hear about winners anymore. “Aren’t they beautiful,” I said.

“Weeds ought to be ripped out by the root,” Kay said.

But I didn’t agree. I thought if something managed to grow in a slit of darkness it was worth holding onto. Sometimes love grew like that, unexpected and surprising in its goodness.

The park was pinned between our Hebrew Day School and an overgrown plot of land a half a block long. Anything tossed in was swallowed up in the vegetation. Small animals lived there: opossums in their nests, feral cats in the ground-cover, raccoons in their dens. All through the months of May and June raccoons screeched in heat. Their eerie cries tore through our dreams. Mama told me to watch out for ticks but never said a word about the yellowjackets burrowed underground. My ankles were swollen for weeks. The lot was covered in dandelion, mugwort, and lambs quarters. The hogweed stood taller than our father. He was only a few inches taller than me but everyone said he was a giant in our city, a tzadik, a righteous man, a man of God. People traveled long distances to seek his advice and judgement on family matters and neighborhood disputes, potential marriages, business deals gone wrong, deadbeat tenants, and unreasonable landlords. Mama would serve the petitioners tea and dates. After they sipped and snacked he listened to their troubles, soothed their confusion, and allayed their fears. They said his house was as honorable as a Beit Din. Out of respect they called him Rabbi and to honor him they called him Judge.

Our small community consisted of an elementary school and junior high, a Shell station, and a strip mall with a Chinese restaurant, a kosher butcher, McNeal’s a bar that opened at noon, and a storefront Weight Watchers. There were twenty blocks of two-family townhouses that all looked alike. The local synagogue was in the paneled basement of a Chabad rabbi. Water gushing through sewer pipes accompanied all nineteen benedictions of the Amidah prayer. Towering above us was the Church of the Immaculate Conception. The shadow of its cross stretched long over our rooftops.

At the start of the summer, Kay and I found a brand new loveseat in the center of the lot, surrounded by a fortress of weeds. Kay thought it might have fallen out of the sky.

“Like a gift from an angel,” I said.

“No, like it fell out of a cargo plane.”

To make it more homey, we placed a coffee table beside it. We arranged the old jaw bones and opossum teeth we found in a circle to mark our territory. Once, we discovered a severed thumb that looked like the end of a hot dog someone had choked on. Kay thought the thumb looked like an ordinary thumb.

“A thing’s a thing,” she said. “Don’t make it into something it’s not.”

Before Kay left home, Mama told me her pragmatism was admirable and that I ought to learn from her. My problem, she now said, was that I couldn’t see things for what they were. I got angry and said, “I learned willful blindness from you,” then felt bad about it when her face lost color and she needed to lie down. I told myself permanency was an illusion. I told Kay that I lived in a slit of darkness, planted where I didn’t belong like that loveseat, like the dandelion and fleabane that should’ve sprouted in the dirt but instead crept out of a crack in the sidewalk.

She shrugged. “Weeds’ll grow anywhere. Gimme another cigarette.”

I stood on the swing with Kay squeezed between my feet. My body heaving upward, chains shuddering. The air smelled of burnt paper. The heat made our eyeballs throb. Danny came in on his skateboard, shirt damp with sweat. The park shrank to a stump. He leaned against the fence and watched us take flight. The star of David he wore around his neck captured the sun. I felt his eyes peel me down till I was wound-wet and swollen. He never let on that I wasn’t beautiful. He called me “baby” and said in the kind of whisper my father used for benedictions, “you’ve really got something,” but never told me what it was.

He was a stranger in our city. Sixteen and already working a job stocking meat in a supermarket. He lived alone with his mother and never knew his father. His mother said his dad died in a war, but didn’t tell him which one. She said he left when Danny was two or maybe three. She said he was missing in action. His portrait hung on the living room wall as a reference point, a place for Danny to cast his eye whenever he felt lost.

“He could have been anybody,” Danny said.

When he invited us home, my hands shook.

“You go,” Kay said. “I’ve got better things to do.” Then she pulled me aside, “Sister, you ask yourself if Daddy’s gonna like him before you do anything stupid,” then sauntered off, knowing Danny was watching her leave, hips twitching from side to side.

Danny’s house, like mine, was new, built on landfill that shifted with the phases of the moon. The sidewalk buckled and in the middle of the street was a pothole large enough for cars to careen into, a black hole, a centrifugal force ready to suck us into the magma.

After a quick tour, we kissed in his mother’s bedroom. The sheets smelled of cats. I daubed her patchouli on the backs of my knees. His hands traced the places my father wanted to go. And when the sun began to set, he mapped my body with his tongue. I was turned earth, fertile and fresh for him.

We ate the casserole his mother left. I wore his underwear under my jeans like a holy garment and imagined my father seeing me strut in them, peering through the crack in my bedroom door, watching me with grim desire.

Twilight was a procession of sacred blues pressing against the windowpanes. I sat in Danny’s lap while he brushed my hair. We listened to Give Me Love. Over cigarettes and ice cream he asked about my family. When I talked about my mother I sounded muffled. Her place was on the sofa. In her hand was an embroidery needle. In her lap, a tapestry of a fox hunt. She tried her best to keep me stitched up but embroidery thread isn’t like catgut. Her face was a foreign painting. Her body was a painting of a woman sitting on a sofa. She played the recorder and the phonograph. Every afternoon at four she played the 1812 Overture while my father was at work. She loved how it opened with heartbreak and ended with canons. War on the taiga, a symphony for the dead. Music that sealed her in frost. Her memories an ice floe she floated past me on.

She hated when I came home late tracking in Danny’s scent.

“Snow begins pure until it reaches ground,” she said. “You’re gonna get us in trouble.” Her face was stark with fear. Mama looked wounded. Sometimes she doubled over in pain.

“It’s only phantom hunger,” she said.

I told her we were in love, like Bonny and Clyde.

“Gangsters,” she muttered, resigned to my fate.

I never talked about my father, not even when Danny asked. I was his youngest daughter, an afterthought. My two older sisters fled to a city near the sea. I never asked them why. I knew. I think I’ve always known. Even before Kay left to live with Aunt CiCi, Daddy called me his yafeifiyah, his beauty. He called me ayouni, his eyes, and kapara, his atonement. That summer he must have sensed that I loved Danny because his hands became ravenous. He buried longing in the ground where it grew like strangling weeds. Without Kay there as a buffer, I was his terra firma. I was where he planted his heels.

Kay wasn’t serious about the boy with the black-as-tar hair but she let him take her out; she let him touch her in the places she’d been told were shameful and exquisite. We were in her bedroom at Aunt CiCi’s, an alcove with a blackout curtain, drinking Kahlua and cream. I was dizzy staring at the ceiling. The nubs on the white bedspread were like thumbs in my back.

“Can I tell you something?” She said, her breath heavy across my face.

“Sure,” I said.

“That boy wants to marry me. He says that’s the kind of love I inspire.”

“Do you believe him?”

“No,” she said.

I could feel our heartbeats traveling in tandem through our bodies. The pounding worried me. I wanted it to end.

“You don’t have to marry him,” I said. “Not if you don’t want to.”

“Don’t be an idiot. He was Daddy’s choice. Why do you think he was at my party? Why do you think I took him into the closet?”

“To ruin his chances,” I said. “To punish Daddy.” The room spun and I held onto the mattress.

“Oh God, shut up, just shut up,” Kay said.

I loved the days when it was just me and Danny. We stole Marlboros and red hots from John’s Deli while the counterman sliced a quarter pound of bologna. We scored nickel bags from a redheaded guy named Glen. On rainy afternoons we sat in Danny’s kitchen. Blind Faith’s, Can’t Find My Way Home on the stereo. The fridge packed with beer and a lasagna for dinner. He said our days were like beads on a string of lost promise. I called him a poet. He called me a fucking princess. We drank cola with aspirin, hoping it would get us high. Every ashtray in his house was a pyre of stubs.

That summer the air quality was low. Mama couldn’t catch her breath. Shit for lungs, the tattered remnants of war. Her hands opened and floss unspooled. Daddy dropped her off at the emergency room, then rushed to the temple to form a minyan. He was a public griever, a keener, a man who turned worry into prayer. He davened with ferocious intent. His body jerked as if possessed, like a man speaking in tongues. He prayed to God. He prayed to the angels as sewer water churned through the pipes.

On his way home he saw me and Danny in the park, refracted in the light, a kaleidoscope of parts. His mouth on mine, his hands cradling my face like I was something precious. Daddy kept me home for a week. Someone had to cook and clean. Someone had to take my mother’s place. I scrubbed the floors on my knees. I stuffed peppers with beef and rice. I threaded a needle and filled in the blank spaces of the hunt. No one in that tapestry escaped.

My father was a secret agent. He spoke to me in code. Every gesture a signal for what was to come. He was a prophet who planted minefields. I didn’t know where to step. If I could, I’d have sent him back to the ghetto he came from where they’d hang him in Martyr’s Square and bury his body outside the gates of Damascus in the desert where the jackals would ravage him.

I tried to barricade the door. It worked for a night, maybe two but he found his way in, or I let him. I’m not sure.

The doctor hand-fed my mother pills that made her face swell. She stared at her reflection and wept. When she came home I was crouched like an animal on the cushion.

“What happened?” she said

“He thinks I’m you.”

“Look at me. What can I do?” Her face slack as a sheet, powerless in this house, in this city. Her eyes disappeared into folds of flesh as she watched me go.

I ran to the park in my cutoffs and tank. Kay was on the swing in a miniskirt I’d never seen. Danny stood over her like a wish bone. His hands gripped the chains, his feet hugged the sides of her hips.

“Hey,” I said and sat down beside them. My hands and lips numb.

“Hey.” She wouldn’t look me in the eye. I gazed up at Danny and said, “What did you do to her?”

He jumped off the swing. “Nothing, baby. It meant nothing.”

And though he stroked my hair, I knew she was his yafeifiyah now, his beautiful girl.

Kay said, “Sisters forever, right?” And held out her pinky, her nails ragged like she’d been digging in dirt.

“Why?” Kay shrugged.

“He wasn’t Daddy’s choice.” I imagined her fingers trapped in a bowling ball. I imagined her on a league with Aunt CiCi, wearing a Pink Ladies uniform like a waitress in a Greek diner, a winner’s ribbon round her throat, her tongue blue as the ribbon CiCi once pinned to my chest.

“It’s all right,” Danny said. “Nothing’s changed.”

We went back to his house alone and broke into his mom’s liquor cabinet. I hid in her bedroom, cradling the bottle. He followed me there, playing with the bowie knife he got for his birthday last year from his uncle Bob in Florida.

Danny pushed me to my knees. “Bitch, you’re mine” he whispered lovingly.

The rug was soaked in Dewars. Credence Clearwater belted Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog on the kitchen radio. I thought it was romantic how he held the knife to my throat.

“I’m yours.”

I wondered what Daddy would say if he knew.

Danny never told me it was over. A few weeks later, I was outside the park and saw him take Kay down the slide that curved like a machete. His arms around her waist. Her face glowed and hanging from her neck was his star of David. He taught her to skateboard and kissed her on the mouth. He kissed her mouth. The dandelion and fleabane withered under the August sun. The weeds in the lot turned to husks. I saw them together on the loveseat laughing, touching. His hands never still. The coffee table slowly covered in undergrowth. The jaw bones marking our territory overrun. Alone on the swing, my forsaken body touched the sky.

That autumn Danny left with his mother for a distant city. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Kay in months. Mama found out from Aunt CiCi that she went back to the boy with the black- as-tar hair. I missed Danny. I missed the loamy scent rising off his thighs. I missed his lips on my neck, the slickness of his teeth, the soft warmth of his tongue, the way he devoured me like meat. I whispered his name to my father in the dark. I squeezed my eyes shut and heard the swift hiss of his hand as it came down from above. He grabbed hold of my hair the way he had Kay’s all those months ago, and dragged me outside. I hit the ground hard. Porches were lit with men drinking beers, the same men who with enough liquor in them shot their guns into the air, into the lot, who used cats for target practice, who fought each other bloody, and petitioned my father for judgement and advice.

Mama pressed against the screen door.

I tugged my shirt over my thighs. A breeze cooled my shamed skin.

“Daddy?”

“Not in my house,” he said. His expression an ache of disappointment. I was his yafayfiyah, his ayouni, his kapara. The front door slammed shut behind him.

The men mumbled and shifted, tugged at their crotches. I sat on the stoop stretching the tee shirt over my knees. One of them groaned and soon they all banded in front of our house, jostled for position and jeered at me.

Mama came out then. “Go home,” she cried. “Nothing to see here.”

She took me inside, washed my face where bits of concrete glittered like jewels in my cheek.

“Love like that can kill a girl,” she said.

I snuck out after Daddy fell asleep half wild, my face swollen. A yellow moon seeped through the trees. I reached the park buttressed against the empty lot. Dry weeds rustled. I remembered Danny and me on the loveseat. I remembered him and Kay there, safe in that fortress. The wind swallowed their names as they fled my mouth. I lit a match and then another until the brush finally caught. Fire swept through the lot and engulfed the loveseat. Cats and raccoons charged as flames roared toward the park. Embers whipped into the air and landed on the rooftops of the nearby townhouses that ignited like tinder.

I could see it stretched before me like a prophecy, the city in flames as the angels watched it burn. In the distance, engines roared. I looked up and saw Mama, her breath wheezing and beside her was Kay, my sister, clutching our bags. Our faces gorgeous in the half-light.

“What are you girls waiting for,” Mama said. “Let’s go.”

Zeeva Bukai was born in Israel and raised in New York City. She lives with her family in Brooklyn. The Anatomy of Exile, published by Delphinium Books, is her first novel.

Excerpted with permission from Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible (SUNY Press).