Contrary to her mother’s fervent hopes, Sheila lost even more weight after the move. They had unwillingly given their daughter “her own space”, 21 x 21 feet, and a “chance to become independent”, as Miriam’s psychoanalyst friend had recommended. And what did she do? She took the delicacies her mother packed in cardboard out of the chest of drawers and threw them away! In a black trash sack on the side of the road, Miriam found a heap of untouched spinach pies, which she unquestionably recognized as her own handiwork. They had carefully pinched edges, the kind no one makes any more, except her. She would know her symmetric puff pastry pleats with her eyes closed. But her daughter refused to eat them. This caused a terrible row, after which a week passed before Sheila agreed to open the drawer again.
Sheila waited for the deus ex machina of her life and with increasing determination continued to leave the meals packed in cardboard uneaten. And then god appeared, but a very different god than she had imagined. Sheila had imagined herself being caught up into the next world by accident as a result of her dieting hobby. But no, she didn’t swoon and fall to the stage (soon we’ll get to why she was on stage so much during that period) and no ambulance came to fetch her. She didn’t end up being operated on by people in white coats with stethoscopes, and her disfigured oh my god!!! body didn’t stop functioning after all. Not yet anyway. (With what pleasure Sheila had looked forward to her own funeral! Her mother, her father, her siblings, her uncles, her aunts, her friends, especially a certain Penny, all blubbering because of her, finally able to understand how hard things had been for her; standing around the grave they would regret that they hadn’t known how to help, that they had just nagged and shouted and judged and forced advice on her that she really didn’t need—what do you say now?) And then, suddenly and without warning, god appeared before her in the form of a man from Poland.
Dovid had left his home, completely, eternally. (That’s also a long and complicated story, with more than enough anger and disgust and disappointment; we trust that things will become clear with time what kind of man this Dovid was and from what kind of ragged hole his determination, which ultimately quelled Sheila’s anorexia, welled.) Dovid traveled from Łódź first to London and then to the Big Apple, and there, at a certain experimental club, which novice Fluxus pioneers favored, he ran into Sheila. Sheila played drums, and for that reason she was often on stage. She played drums before The Velvet Underground’s Maureen Tucker! (Shlomith remembered to mention this in the Vanity Fair interview.) The band’s name was Entropy and in the wake of Shlomith-Shkhina’s rise it later gained cult status. Even John Cage was known to have attended one of their shows. In certain circles the band was called a “pacesetter”, and there was actually a grain of truth in that. These days the band’s only published EP (and a few muffled bootlegs) costs a tidy sum, by no means because of the lead singer, Penny, who in the mid-seventies decided she’d had her fill of messing about, became a jurist, and gave birth to three well-behaved girls, but rather because of Shlomith, crazy, genius Shlomith-Shkhina. But of course Sheila couldn’t dream of any of that at the time: everything was shit, shit, shit, shit.
It would be fun to describe Entropy’s music in more detail, but our competence is insufficient. To our ears, it was mostly buzzing and squeaking and onomatopoeic wailing. Sweating profusely, Sheila pounded a steady beat on the bass drum, adding violent drum fills that resembled landslides, but at what point these came we don’t know because the music sounded like a chaotic avalanche and the fills seemed to join the mix unexpectedly. But the music wasn’t random because, as if by a stroke of magic, with complete control, the orchestra stopped producing its croaking, beating, acid-hacking wall of sound. Silence. Shhhhh!
The spotlight falls on the singer, sunken-cheeked Penny in her tight T-shirt decorated with the letters L.H.O.O.Q., who plays a special role in Sheila’s funeral fantasies. (Penny falls to her knees on the floor of the synagogue, crushed by guilt as soon as the reading of the first psalm begins.) Then the drumming begins again, puduTum, puduTum-Tum, pudupudutratatatataTUM, and Penny starts howling through the mouthpiece of a soprano saxophone she has brought to her lips. It is the agony of a tortured small animal, and Sheila’s tom-toms torment the whimpering creature more. The saxophone creature bellows and moans louder, the bellows and moans convulsing the pit of the listener’s stomach, causing an intense nausea (at least in anyone who had eaten too little before coming to the show and had drunk a couple of pints on an empty stomach). And then. Silence. Shhhhh! Once again seemingly at random. Penny and Sheila don’t even glance at each other, apparently sensing when the right moment comes (people with the capacity for improvisation have a sixth, even a seventh or eighth sense), and so Penny gently lowers the saxophone to the floor and lies down next to it.
But the bliss doesn’t last long. Suddenly Penny wakes up and attacks the saxophone, straddling it and beginning to spread her legs. She does a graceful spiral, like a gymnast, and finally bends her upper body with surprising
