March, 2001

Sunday, March 4, Marwa set aside homework, fine-tuning preparation for the Intel Science Fair in Brooklyn in two weeks, to accompany Judy and her father out to a cemetery on Long Island for their annual rite of visit to Judy’s mother’s grave where visit stones had to be placed. A monster snowstorm was predicted for Sunday night through Tuesday; TV meteorologists were ecstatic with frenzy, storm-tracking this and Doppler-4ing that. Dr. Yamaguchi, Judy’s father, was irritated with TV meteorologists but less depressed than Marwa thought he would be because he was “getting a chance,” he said, “to drive his midlife-crisis-red car out of the City.” Marwa had stayed over at Judy’s on Saturday night so they could get an early start. Marwa didn’t understand the Yamaguchi family mood, especially since eight year old Jody was coming along to the cemetery for the first time, but she had felt honored when Judy had asked her to come along.

Dr. Yamaguchi was about the same age as Marwa’s father, in his 50’s, but that was about the only similarity she could see. Dr. Y (Why?), as he liked to be called, was mid-height. While he was not fat, he had a distinct belly that this Sunday tested his unbelted corduroy slacks. Usually, he wore jeans and a colorless sweater over some equally colorless shirt and tie-up leather ‘shoeboxes,’ Judy called them.

“If he’s gonna wear jeans, why not just sneakers?” Judy complained.

“I am not a fashion-plotz,” Dr. Why once apologized in Marwa’s presence.

Marwa could not think of an occasion that could compel her father ever to apologize. He was tall and proud of his trim weight (“A banker is not a shopkeeper,” he said), and Marwa’s father always dressed modestly, even at home. She had never seen her father without a bathrobe on, or in slippers without socks. Marwa realized she shared his pride in how he looked. But Dr. Why was so there, so obviously interested in Judy and Jody as people, not just as his daughters. It did not seem to matter to him that they were not sons. She had asked Judy, and Judy had assured her it was so.

“My father thinks misogynism, prejudice of any kind, is not just stupid, it’s ‘counter-productive. We need all the help we can get,’ is what he says.”

Dr. Why was a Japanese-American who had married a Jewish woman.

Judy explained in the car that because of the impending monster blizzard, they wouldn’t be going after the ceremony to her “Lensky grandparents’” assisted living condo on Long Island, but they were expected at the cemetery along with Judy’s “uncle on that side and his wife.” Her “Lensky-Yamaguchi mini-geneology” included Dr. Why’s parents, both deceased, who had been put in “the concentration camps for Japanese-American citizens during WWII,” but he had a sister and her family living in California where he had been born and raised.

“Northern California where the mud slides,” Dr. Why said from the front of the car where Jody was occupied with changing a cd.

The red car had just crossed over the Williamsburg Bridge and was moving toward the low hills of a tremendous cemetery. Marwa remembered when she was very little, going into the City from Far Rockaway and passing this garden of black-grey stones, she had asked How do stones grow? and had been soteased by Sharif that she had (1) thought her stupidity embarrassed them; (2) they expected her to be stupid because she was a girl; (3) there was a significant difference between stones and living things that was very interesting.

Now Marwa wondered how young, she must have been. She had language, she had visual memory. She could still see the grave markers like living things pushing up out of the earth, so many of them, green all around them so it was summer? — but she had no tactile memory of heat or confinement. Had she been in a carseat?

Marwa’s thoughts were interrupted by Jody and Dr. Why’s awareness of his younger daughter.

“What you got there, Sprinkle?” he said.

“A cd’s got a hole so it’s a donut thing, not a se-vere, right?”

“Sphere,” Dr. Why said.

And the donut’s name is Ferdinand,” Jody joked.

With the imperial fatigue of an older sibling, Judy explained, “Ferdinand the Bull, ergo Taurus, ergo torus.Don’t get her started on Mary Poppins or worse, Tinkerbell.”

“Air-GO, Air-GO,” Jody chanted to the backseat, “I’ll tell YOU where to GO!”

Dr. Why started singing, “‘Life is just a bowl of cherries…’” Jody joined him as she put the cd in and pressed play.

“Watch this,” Judy said.

As the cd played a song from Disney’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, Dr. Why kept right on singing, “‘..Don’t take it serious, life’s too mysterious…’” while Jody shifted into a melody and lyrics sung by a motherly teapot.

“My father prides himself on this,” Judy said. “He can stay singing a song when another one plays.”

Dr. Why interrupted himself, “Try it, it’s not so easy.” He tapped his head. “You should see what lights up in your brain… ‘You work, you slave, you worry so–”

“–But you can’t take your dough when you go, go, go,” Jody rejoined her father.

“Nice, Dad,” Judy grumbled.

Marwa patted Judy’s hand. “Can you imagine the kids of those shark guys last night?”

“What shark guys?” Dr. Why turned down the cd’s volume.

“We saw on the Discovery Channel this show about early sharks, Daddy. They were 100 feet long with teeth shaped like triangles the size of my hand,” Judy said.

“I don’t want to imagine their kids,” Dr. Why teased.

“Not the shark guys, Daddy, the sharks had the teeth,” Jody said.

“These were toothless scientists studying giant ancient sharks?”

“Yes, Daddy, the scientists were utterly toothless,” Judy said.

“They were not. They sat inside the shark’s open jaw,” Jody demonstrated opening her mouth as wide as she could. “They could both fit inside it!”

The shark teeth, Marwa thought, looked like artichoke leaves in their smooth, tight overlap, as raspberries resembled igloo formation, snowflakes were all hexagons, as arachnids and lobsters had eight appendages, oxygen’s atomic # was 8, and — aloud to Judy, Marwa said, “The Chinese consider the number 8 good luck. They exchange eight tangerines for the Chinese New Year.”

“Something to consider,” Judy nodded, accustomed to Marwa’s rambling.

“Ijtihad,” Dr. Why said from the front seat.

“What?” Marwa asked.

“A colleague gave me the word. It means the ancient Islamic tradition of questioning. Ijtihad.”

Marwa silently corrected his pronunciation, but she liked the word and Dr.Why’s complimentary tone. The car had moved past the stunning ocean views from the Belt Parkway rimming Brooklyn’s sandy Atlantic shore which curved north at Far Rockaway (where Marwa had been born and lived until three years before, the same year Judy’s mother died); there, the artery linked up with the Southern State Parkway to eastern Long Island. She had not returned to visit childhood friends. She looked out at the reddish trees along the Southern State — they all blurred a reddish color before they greened, except for shy willows haloed in pale yellow, and neon-yellow budding forsythia, and the evergreen scrub pines. They were traveling too quickly to see crocus budding out of the few patches of leftover dirty snow, but Marwa was sure they were there, purple and yellow and white. She was back in her mother’s garden in front of her childhood home.

Marwa felt guilty toward her forgotten friends and toward her best friend Judy whose mother slept in her stone garden. But as the car continued to speed east under a greywhite sky, Marwa’s mind moved as quickly to the photographs Judy had shown her for the first time the night before, after Jody had gone to bed. Judy’s mother had been a photographer for The New York Times. When Judy was twelve and Jody four years old, over the year before she died while she was strong enough, their mother had taken a volume’s worth of timed photos so both daughters would have lots of pictures of them together. Then, she had selected just a few of the best portraits and worked with a forensic-computer photographer friend of hers to create images of herself with her daughters as they would age.

What had given Marwa chills when she looked at the image dated ahead to the present, where Judy was sixteen, was how exactly it did look like Judy now and Jody at eight years old. Marwa had read about this photographic method, used to project what a six year old kidnapping victim would look like in the present, twenty-two years later; it had appeared in a Times story recently when the child’s murderer was reported found. Marwa had managed last night to maneuver Judy away from these morbid topics to other objects in the living room and bedroom. One was the ‘star tetrahedron’ sculpture on the windowsill next to a large geranium plant. It looked like Judy’s tiny 2-dimensional Jewish star (“Solomon’s Seal,” Judy insisted) on a chain around her neck, expressed in 3-dimensional bronze wire 9” outlines stuck into a wooden base. They put the sculpture between them on the coffee table and sat on the floor on either side, facing each other as over a ouija board.

Judy intoned, “Mer –”

“Light,” Marwa echoed.

“Ka –”

“Spirit,” Marwa translated.

“Ba,” Judy completed the spell, pronouncing it “bah!”

“Body,” Marwa played her part.

“You see much point waiting for vibrations from Thoth to balance our chakras?” Judy joked.

“Nah, but I liked solving for the volume of a set of twointersecting triangles and the percentage volume occupied by a star tetrahedron inside a cube.”

“I liked cutting and pasting and folding the paper ones we printed out. That was fun.”

“Marcus liked that better, too. But enough of Platonic solids and Pythagorean mysticism,” Marwa had stretched her long legs as she stood up and went to the white formica dining table, “hey, this is new.”

“It’s a glass Klein Bottle,” Judy said. “Hand-blown. But I think that means mouth-blown,” she added with a lewd giggle.

The transparent object was shorter than a Barbie doll and looked like a one-legged stork bent over, its beak transformed into an elephant’s trunk curled and snuffling against that one leg. Judy picked up the Klein Bottle and through the glass stuck out her tongue suggestively at Marwa. Marwa made a superior face back.

Judy said, “You’re such a prude,” but then, “Felix Klein put together two mobius surfaces, a left and a right, to form a single-surfaced three dimensional object.” Her face turned impish again. “Wanna see if it whistles like a regular bottle if you blow into it?”

Marwa carefully took the fragile object out of Judy’s hands and replaced it on the table. “We do not,” she said.

“You and Queen Victoria?”

Marwa wandered over to two large framed prints hanging above a black Scandanavian couch. Marwa recognized the Magritte, but the Escher was new.

“You know what other Magrittes I really like? The one with the train coming out of the fireplace, Time Transfixed, I think,” Marwa said, “and the one with all the men in black bowler hats falling like raindrops straight down in the same direction.”

“Which is not how rain falls,” Judy said. “The wind blows it in several directions at the same time. Which is why no snowflake has precisely the same structure because each one falls through its individual turbulence.”

“But it’s always a hexagon. People and schools of fish and birds can move like that, all together at once. Like scales on a fish, they all go in one direction. Like worshippers all in white bowing to the Kaaba. It’s beautiful.”

“Like iron filings and a magnet, you think that conformity is beautiful? You think that’s what’s happening to the iron in our hemoglobin when a hot guy walks by, all the blood rushes to engorge your — ?”

“– Engorge?” Marwa stopped her. “You are so Saturday night!”

Judy had gotten that sharp look on her face then, the one she had when checkmate was the next move. Marwa had actually taken a step back and waited. But Judy backed off, too, and said instead, “You ever wonder if there can be anything new under the sun? I mean, if there is anything to reincarnation, where’d the first souls come from when humans evolved?”

She led Marwa to the new Escher print. In it, a young man was observing a highly curved image of a ship steaming into a Venetian kind of city. Marwa could see she was looking at a repetitive series of the same, distorted image; at the center of the print was a whitened cloud in which the artist had signed the painting.

“It’s the same thing, over and over. The iterations in Stoppard’s ARCARDIA.”

“Not exactly,” Judy said, “but my father has a friend who’s done the math on this and finished the picture so you can see what should be in the blank space where Escher signed. It’s ‘conformal mapping’ which is so cool because my father does that with mapping the human brain, when you have to map the surface with all the folds flattened out.”

“So how could Escher do it? At all?”

“My father says an artist is like Nature, and a scientist is like someone who tries to model Nature.”

“An artist makes an image and then a scientist comes along and recognizes it,” Marwa said. “But an artist isn’t a plant. The image comes out of the artist’s brain, doesn’t it? And that’s a human brain just like the scientist’s. Once you have a workable model, like a formula for a specific event or maybe an artistic image, too, you see it applies at different orders of magnitude. The specific formula is also a generalization.”

“But my father’s friend’s picture with the center fully generated changes things at the edges. Are you hungry?”

“I dreamed last night that I was eating my way out of a bathtub filled with spaghetti.”

“I’m hungry, too. As hungry as a shark,” Judy said, opening her mouth hugely, baring her little human teeth, chasing Marwa into the small kitchen. “Let’s see if we can makesomething entirely new out of old ingredients. L Let’s make some soul food or food for the soul!”

They made grilled cheese sandwiches with tomatoes with sour pickles Dr. Why bought on the Lower East Side. Marwa said how strange it was in dreams that you saw familiar people you’d never seen before, “how the mind naturally creates novelty.” Even though she was going to Judy’s mother’s grave the next day, Marwa couldn’t tell Judy about her dreams and Descartes’s three and the fiery sparks that flew out of men’s eyes.

Nor had Mawra told Judy about seeing Prix two weeks before during February break when the Yamaguchi sisters had been away in Florida with the maternal grandparents she was about to meet. Marwa’s parents, of course, had gone to work that week, and Joey was looked after by Mrs. al-Banna. Joey called her ‘Banana’ only out of his mother’s hearing because she’d severely scolded him for insulting, however ignorantly, a “name honored in Egypt for the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 to depose the secular regime.” Joey didn’t know the meaning of depose, secular, or regime, but the tired look on his father’s face as his mother scolded told him he didn’t have to.

Mrs. al-Banna was an elderly Egyptian widow who belonged to their mosque on West Broadway, a dozen blocks or so north of Battery Park City. Mrs. al-Banna, whose favorite afternoon TV program was a psychic who transmitted messages from the Other Side, had no children of her own, so she picked Joey up from school and stayed with him until his mother or Marwa returned. For this week that New York public schools had off, her mother took Joey to Mrs. al-Banna’s apartment over on East Broadway. “Goin’ to Banana’s,” Joey sang each morning – out of his mother’s hearing.

Marwa had been left to herself to work on the Intel Fair preparation. Which she had dutifully done until the weather changed for one day, abruptly and momentarily to Spring. On Thursday of that week, the sun rose into a cloudless, calm blue sky, and the temperature climbed as well to 50 degrees by noontime. Marwa might not have known of this rare alteration, so engrossed in spread sheets and graphs as she was, had not a pigeon perched on her windowsill and startled her by pecking at the glass. It had been months since Marwa had seen a pigeon fly this high and close to the building; all winter, there had been only seagulls over the Hudson in the distance.

Marwa stared at the blue-necked white pigeon, which quickly flew away, and then she looked down at the street where people were walking without coats on. A carnival breeze was blowing at street level, and since she had not even eaten breakfast, just had cups of coffee as she worked, Marwa decided it was a fair bargain to go out just for a quick lunch. There were still dirty mounds of snow from the last storm a week before, but you could breathe the melt in the soft air, and there were puddles everywhere. Marwa wore a thick sweater over a turtleneck and a long blue jean skirt, but she’d left her parka behind. She walked along the esplanade, looking out at the Sun glittering on the Hudson. Like warm hands cupping her face and stroking her hair, the Sun doubly approved Marwa: for taking a break from eye-straining work and for having taken off the hijab. She briefly permitted the Wind’s flirtatious fingers riffling of her long hair, then tossed her head as she walked and considered where to pick up some lunch.

Prix wasn’t sitting on his bench; it was wet. He was leaning against the black railing. He wore a dark wool cap pulled over blond curls. When Prix turned and saw Marwa, the cap was a dark outline around his face like a visual echo of his brown-rimmed green eyes. The color of his skin in the noon sunlight allowed Marwa for the first time to understand why coffee was called brown gold, and her mind smelled coffee brewing. Then so did her nose, and she said yes to lunch nearby in a small cafe decorated for Valentine’s Day, all red hearts and bow-and-arrowed cupids swagged on the windows, doorway, and cashier’s counter.

“The month of February is named for one of the aspects of the Roman goddess Juno. The whole month was sacred to Juno Februata, patroness of the fever — febris — of love.

The original Valentine’s Day was Rome’s Lupercalia. Guys handed out proto-valentines with girls’ names on them to be partners in erotic games. I take Latin.”

Prix signaled a waitress who nearly tripped when she saw him. She did spill some of the water she brought to the table.

“It’s a good thing she’s not carrying knives and oranges,” Marwa said.

“What? Why?”

“Oh, the Koran tells of Yusuf, Joseph, ‘the noble angel’ and the rich women. They cut their hands with knives intended to cut oranges for dessert when they first see him.”

“On purpose? What for?”

“Their hands just slip.”

The shaky waitress returned with iced tea for Marwa and hot coffee for Prix. They ordered lunch.

He said, “It’s like acid.”

“The coffee?”

“The way the waitress looks at me.”

“I’m sorry.” Marwa looked down and couldn’t swallow.

“I don’t want you to think I like it. That I’m vain. Maybe I am, but I don’t –”

Marwa stared at a red cardboard heart. “The Catholic Church replaced Juno Februata with the mythical martyr St. Valentine. They said he was a Roman teenager who was executed at the exact moment his girlfriend received his invitation. The valentine, card, inviting her to –”

“People look at me as if I’m food. As if they’re starving.”

Marwa had no appetite. She forced herself to take a sip of the cold tea. “There are a lot of people worse off.” It’s what her mother would have said.

And he laughed and pulled off the dark cap.

Dizzy at the sight of his gold curls, Marwa thought of herhijab and blurted, “There wasn’t any observable differential.”

The food arrived at the same moment.

“What?” Prix asked.

The flustered waitress said, “Isn’t it what you ordered?”

Prix reassured her with a glance that made her blush even harder, then returned his attention to Marwa.

“Deferential?” he asked.

“Differential,” Marwa said. “The diamond I told you about the first time. You were right, it was too small for us to measure any heat-sapping effect. I don’t know why I exaggerated. Why I lied to you like that.”

“To impress me,” Prix said easily, taking a bite of sandwich. “It worked, but I didn’t believe you. Don’t you like your salad?”

Marwa looked down and saw the food for the first time but couldn’t really understand what it meant. She remembered how to eat and took a forkful, swallowing with the help of the iced tea, tasting nothing.

“Why didn’t you believe me?” she asked.

Prix shrugged. “I never believe anyone.”

As they were walking back to their building, he invited her to his apartment and aughed. “I think I only ask to see you narrow your eyes like that. Like a cat. Who’d guess that such big eyes could get so–?” He gestured with his left hand, pressing his fingers against his thumb.

He was left-handed and wore a gold ring on his middle finger.

Prix went on, “I mean, I’d love for you to see my view since you say it’s lousy from yours, your parents’ — now what? Stop.”

Prix put his left hand on her sweatered arm. He was unhappy and serious. “Listen. You may never talk to me again after — but I want you to know something. Something. The way I look, from the time I was half your age, there were people — of both sexes — who wanted to buy and sell me. And they did. I even thought I liked it. But it got — old and it got — ugly. And now, if anything, I’d like to outvirginyou.”

Marwa face was hot and red. She felt dizzy again. His hand was still on her arm.

“Oh, Jesus, that came out wrong,” Prix said. “I don’t mean I want — I don’t know how to talk to anyone,” and he strode away, leaving her rooted there.

Why hadn’t she said anything or run after him, caught up? She felt disgust. She hadn’t misunderstood him at all. It was just the sudden heat, the ides of February, all the others’ fevers for him and her own.

The bitter wind when they got out of the car at the cemetery quickly dropped Marwa’s temperature. Dr. Why walked ahead, taking Jody’s hand out of her coat pocket and putting it inside his big brown leather glove with his hand. Jody had gotten very quiet when they left the highway for the wide avenue that took them past several large cemeteries, including some big national one.The sign said Wellwood Avenue. They had stopped at a strip mall-like group of stores for headstones and grave buntings where Dr. Y bought three green cones to be stuck into the ground and three bouquets of daffodils. Judy turned her head away from Marwa and looked out her window. When Dr. Why took Jody’s hand to share his glove, he gave the cones and flowers to Judy and Marwa to carry.

You could taste the storm coming, a metallic flavor in the icy air. At the gravesite, Judy’s grandparents and uncle and aunt were waiting, shivering. There were embraces and small talk. Dr.Why, Judy, and Jody stuck the cones into the ground beside the four filled with already nodding tulips just placed there, and the daffodils still inside the florist paper inside the cones. Judy’s Uncle Robert took out a prayer book and read.

“‘Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash sh’may ra’bbo…v’imru Omein.’”

Judy’s relatives all repeated, “Omein,” and Judy and Jody joined in, a second behind as their father did. The prayer went on for a short time, but Marwa knew it was over when a final-sounding “Omein” was echoed.

he grandfather cried, but Judy’s grandmother just pressed her lips together tightly and held her husband’s hand. Uncle Robert’s wife unfolded a piece of paper and read a poem. It was very short.

“’Once out of nature I shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing,/ But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make/ Of hammered gold and gold enameling/ To keep a drowsy emperor awake;/ Or set upon a golden bough to sing/ To lords and ladies of Byzantium/ Of what is past, or passing, or to come.’”

Then each family member picked up a pebble from the ground and ceremoniously placed it on the top of the headstone ELEANOR LENSKY YAMAGUCHI * July 9, 1948-March 5, 1997 * Beloved daughter, wife, mother * (a carved camera was centered below)

Marwa wondered where all the pebbles came from. Did cemetery workers make a point of salting the earth around the graves so visiting mourners could find them? Once out of nature, why would all the questions nature forces us to ask even matter? They wouldn’t matter without matter. But they were the most important questions we asked here. Then a huge black crow flew to a tall yew hedge and folded its wings. It waited, flapped, cawed loudly, waited again, and then flew away. Was that an answer or superstition, and how could you know and what could it mean? The tulips and daffodils didn’t know; they looked miserable. Already limp and freezing, they would be buried in tonight’s cold snow. Jody huddled between her father and her sister, but she didn’t cry until Judy did, and Marwa felt the sadness fill and overflow in herself. Uncle Robert’s wife had tissues. There were embraces again and tearful farewells. Back in the car, Jody made no move to put in a cd. Judy asked Marwa if Muslims observed annual mourning.

“In the twelfth lunar month, Dhul-Hijah, at the end of thehajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, for Id al-Adha, in late January or February usually, we visit the graves of our relatives. The Feast of the Sacrifice. But all my family’s graves are in Egypt.”

Although no one asked, Marwa filled the silence by adding, “The Id marks Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at Allah’s command, according to the Koran.”

“Did he kill him?” Jody said.

“No, it’s the same in Judaism,” Judy quickly explained. “Abraham’s son Isaac. There’s an angel or a scapegoat instead. A goat appears. Abraham kills the goat. That’s where the word ‘scapegoat’ comes from.”

“That makes no sense,” Jody said. “An escape goat? It didn’t escape. It should be an instead-goat. A ‘steadgoat.’” Jody paused. “Why’d God want to kill his son or a goat?”

“Abraham wanted to show Allah that nothing was more important to him than Allah. For us, it is a sheep, not a goat.” Marwa said.

“It was Abraham’s idea? But Marwa said at Allah’s command,” Jody frowned.

“Who knows?” Judy said. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

Marwa knew the tone of that voice, but there were still tears in it.

“I don’t think he should’ve killed a goat or a sheep, either,” Jody said. “I’m going to be a vegetablarian.”

“A vegetarian,” Judy corrected, but she also laughed. “A vegan. Tell Marwa where babies come from.”

“Doesn’t Marwa know?” Jody said.

“She’ll admire your theory,” Judy encouraged.

“Well, I don’t believe it any more, of course,” Jody began, “but when I was little, when I saw fat pregnant women, I knew the baby was inside, but I couldn’t figure out how it would get out. Then I decided it was the buttons.”

“Buttons?” Marwa was game.

“Well, we have belly buttons, so these were baby buttons, and they grew during pregnancy with the baby. When it was time for the baby to come out, the mother had to go to a hospital where the special baby button doctor knew how to unbutton the buttons. Like those trapdoor pajamas they put on kids.”

“Did you have any trapdoor p.j.’s?” Marwa asked.

“No. I must’ve seen them someplace,” Jody said thoughtfully. “I had feet-ins. They make your feet sweat.”

Marwa laughed. Then Marwa realized that Dr. Why had been silent since he’d started driving. He didn’t utter a word until they were nearly at the Williamsburg Bridge and then he asked Marwa about her Intel Fair project. He expressed surprise when she told him it was his research that had inspired her, but Marwa saw the gray color in his voice and knew he was hardly there.