I
I wonder about the conversations between Adam and Eve. Adam didn’t exactly come home after a long day and tell Eve all about the petty little aggressions at work. Eve didn’t meet Adam at the garden’s gate with stories of how the kids got on her nerves; she conceived her first child after they left their starter home.
They had no master bedroom to remodel, no bills to pay, no shopping lists to make out, and no other neighborhoods to drive through to see what the public schools were like. Adam couldn’t try talking Eve into seeing the latest Sylvester Stallone retrospective, and Eve would have had no way to pressure Adam into seeing anything starring Meg Ryan. There were no summer vacations to plan, no holidays to dread with neurotic parents, uptight in-laws, estranged siblings, drunken uncles, floozy cousins, or even recent divorcee’s besotted with their newest stranger-date from Match.com. They had no tales of burgeoning adolescent sexuality, no dating and prior relationship favorite anecdotes. Adam most likely didn’t have a complex about his penis size, having the only human one ever measured, and I just kind of assume Eve was content with her breasts, which always look perfectly perky in the paintings.
Without anything real to talk about, they must have turned their attention to the beasts under their dominion, the flora and fauna, although I don’t think they could have seen foliage-couture in either of their futures.
An eternity of perfect union with God and nothing to talk about. By their hundredth year or so in the garden, the relentless conversational boredom must have set in. When the serpent showed up, there is no talk-starved wife who could have remained immune from this duplicitous raconteur – a talker! – even if he was only talking about fruit and trees.
II
Across the expanse of a long leather sofa, the rabbi inched to his right, closing the distance between us. He fidgeted and fought, first tossing off a throw blanket behind his head, then sliding past the plump head cushion daring to propel him off, obstacles to a smooth, suave glide that seemingly sprouted the instant his body touched that segment of the couch. He moved as if he’d never sat on his own sofa with anyone.
When he was in range, he crossed his legs, matching mine. Criss-cross-applesauce. His right leg nestled against my left, pressed against it. Unmistakably intentional. His upper body leaned into me, and in that instant, I leaned away.
I awoke with a surge of excitement, raw need playing out in a Technicolor dreamscape. This man’s torso would be sturdy, his branches graceful, his fruit new to me. He could nourish me, this man who tends his flock, this man unafraid to look a mourning daughter in the eye and laugh with her stories of the deceased.
III
The frozen ground does not yield. That which is planted in this garden won’t grow. The only thing to come up are headstones; in eleven months, one will bear my father’s name. I can no longer take from him any of his fruits, his strengths forever mixed with his weaknesses. There is no further conversation for us, the shallowness of how little had been spoken over the years shattered with a final tearful flow, showering down on me, how he loves me, how he’ll miss me, how he’s proud of me, how he’s sorry if he ever hurt me. And me, ever the Eve, offering him what he waited a lifetime for – a taste of something sweet that would cost him his life: all is forgiven, all is love.
Is it he who was expelled from the garden of my life, or me expelled from the garden of his?