Oh, Susannah!

  Oh, Susannah!  

“Do you know the story of Susannah and the elders?” Roz asked me at breakfast.
    Because I had a doctor’s appointment and I had been determined to be an unreliable narrator and because Uncle Albert, who had been judged reliable couldn’t get out on the snow and ice, and there was snow and ice, Roz wasn’t going to work, and we were at the kitchen table, eating sailors’ eggs and drinking coffee and orange juice.
     “Of course you do,” she said. “But did you know it’s the key to the whole Bible?” She stopped. “And it isn’t even in it!” she almost yipped.
     “What are you talking about?” I said. I didn’t add that The Key to the Scriptures wasn’t in the Bible either.

     “Think about it,” she said.

She waited. Then: “It’s excitement that threatens order, always. ‘Don’t get excited’ – that’s the great commandment – because if you do chaos might break through. It’s what happens with Eve, right? God spends an entire six days – or six eons – one entire chapter putting everything in order. How dare she, excited by the possibilities the snake hiss-hints at her, risk all that? ‘Jesus! Calm down, woman.’
     “What Jesus tells his mother at the wedding at Cana: ‘Calm down, woman. Can’t we do things in order?’ And he’s right: The first of the signs leads to the second of the signs and to the third and fourth, and every one causes more trouble than the one before, and soon he’s raising Lazarus on the outskirts of Jerusalem: Real trouble is just next door.
     “‘It was the woman you gave me,’ Adam says. ‘I had to have a mother, there wasn’t another way to do it?’ Jesus asks. It’s not misogyny, I don't think. It’s just acknowledging where the excitement begins – for the learned men writing the story: it begins with women: Susana and the elders!” 

“Where did you get that?” I asked as I began clearing the table to scrape the dishes and put them into the dishwasher.

     “What do you mean?” Roz said.
     “What?” The way she said it, I must have been treading on thin ice, so I said, “What?”
     “You don’t think I could make that up? – I mean by myself?”

     “What time do we need to leave?” I asked.
     “Because I’m a woman?” Gruffly. But then she started laughing. Then, “Bwah-hah-hah,” she said. Then, “We should leave in twenty minutes or so,” Roz said.

 

02.16.21

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  * Illustration by Artemisia Gentileshi. Words and music by Stephen Foster.