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Sympathy
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
63 Sympathy With great wrestlings have I wrestled with my sister. —Genesis 30:8 Rachel and Leah on a blue flannelgraph, paper limbs clinging to fiber and shadow, the edges of their arms overlapped, hand holding hand. Sisters: their photocopied faces told us so. We two sat on the church room floor, handling our cotton-ball sheep, all paste and stringy wool, my lamb’s eyes drooping. Your fingers crept out to grab at my sheep— I slapped your hand away. The Sunday school teacher plucked Rachel from the board, tucked her behind Jacob’s tent. The ball of her foot peeked beneath canvass, suggesting the turn of a dance. Jacob loved Rachel, but he hated Leah. We thought we knew the meaning, then, of the pair of sisters: one would be loved. The other would stand outside the tent, her paper arm extended, hand empty. We eyed one another, 64 each certain that we would be the heroine of our own myth, each the one to dance in the tent. The way your face went hard told me that you would leave me standing in the dust. But we didn’t know— Leah: from the Akkadian, meaning cow. Meaning the one with the swollen eyes, her body used to plow the fields, arms dragging a furrow through soil and rock to feed the sons born to her sister. Rachel: from the Hebrew, meaning ewe. Meaning the one used as sacrifice, the one filleted, chopped, stewed for a meal. The one stripped naked to clothe the sons that weren’t her own. Neither the victor, neither one loved. Both chattel to a wandering shepherd, wrestling over crusts of bread. We didn’t know that a tent’s flap folds the way the body bends to breaking. ...