[100 Challenge] Ocean_09

[100 Challenge] Ocean_09

The Black Dress, Part 3

Once a week there is a Jewish night at the dance hall. There she meets Max. Max and Anna go to live above Max’s tailory, where on the bottom floor she measures customers and on the top he sews. Suits, dresses. Sometimes they go to the garment district in New York to buy bolts of fabric. Anna learns English. She can speak it, but she prefers the old tongue, and uses it wherever she can: with Max, with the deli man and the cobbler. Yiddish.
Anna and Max are soon married. And when the bride steps from the shadows of the synagogue to join her husband she is gowned in resplendent black. Black train, black veil, sewn by hand in the lamplight above the seam shop, and her man dressed to the nines to meet her. The rabbi, the womenfolk, the neighbors from the bricked alleyways all rising and coming down like a tide for these two. Only after would they ask her, “Why? Why black?” 
And she would answer, “Because life is so hard.”
What is it about the Poles? Why do so many of our women stand with their ears cocked listening to the far world? Why do ravens stop to surround them and give of their wings to the sheen of our beloved women’s hair? What obscure force turns them rabid when squeezed from all sides by the cold proddings of modern culture? Why are our sanatoriums overrepresented by our beautiful powerful storygiving lifegiving women? Who are they now, and what animals were they once? Why do my hands reach out as though grasping for a throat, as though straining after that breathing apparatus overwrought with heaps of dark ravishing hair like serpents like night like worms coiling after a life that looks so like death? For things have turned, have gone under where once they rose up in the light. Flecks of gold in that hair, in those eyes. Sequins sewn in the walls of the houses, inlaid into mud and braided in the thatch. Hardships that reach their bitter tendrils back farther than her mother’s birth or her mother’s mother’s mother’s. Coals passed from mother to daughter in the dark, like children at some sinister game. 
Anna. My great-grandmother Anna wore all black to her wedding. 
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