Uncovered

by Leah Lax

  Fourteen

  The questions remain, but most of the time I ignore them. Such is my static life: no distinct line of movement to plot out, no steady, gradual change. Such is my female life: moments of disappointment or dissatisfaction or joy are occasional pinpoints of growth that fade before the onslaught of mothering, details, daily needs that flatten my sense of self and make that “growth” irrelevant. By the time another such moment comes, the last is almost gone. No buildup. No gradual change. How to tell a story without a self? I act along scripted lines; I don’t react. I sense my children’s feelings; I don’t feel. More time passes. The old yearning for home is just an anxious old hum that rears up at times and robs my sleep, then fades in the day. When I do sleep, erotic dreams, and dreams of my past life, intrude. On occasion I admit my disappointment with the community or with Levi, and then I shrug. Sometimes I tell him, but he says little. Then I go back to work. Thus I move with little change, anchored yet waving in the wind.

  Then, seventeen months after the first Passover in our new home, on a summer Sunday afternoon, my sister Debbie shows up at our door holding her infant son, David, her five-year-old daughter, Katie, at her side. We haven’t seen each other in years. Her husband, Robert, just got a job at one of the petrochemical plants that ring our city, and they’re moving here.

  I assume she felt obligated to visit; as children of an immigrant family, we were always taught to stay connected no matter what. But when I open the door onto that little group, I let our shared past back into my life. The sight of my sister with her two children in shorts and sleeveless tops sends such a surge of familial feeling through me that I open the door wide. I hug her and sweep baby David into my arms. “Look at him!” I say.

  “God, it’s hot here,” Debbie says.

  “Come in. Come in!”

  The blue carpet is a sea of toys. The kids run in and out, excited. In the middle of it all is our newest and sixth, Itzik, crawling and busy and eight months old. Katie peers at the kids from behind her mother. “Look!” I say to Debbie. “David’s got that single left dimple, just like Itzik!” I gather the kids and introduce their cousins. I pronounce their Hebrew names slowly for Katie, mentioning all but the seventh growing inside me.

  Katie doesn’t try to repeat the names. We settle on our beat-up sofa. The kids gather around. A line of eyes. “Go play,” Debbie tells Katie, but Katie clings to her mother.

  I ask Debbie about their house hunting, their move, finding schools. Debbie talks and laughs, and that means so much. After years in our arid community, this easy family connection is like water in a desert. I think, surprised, I never thought we might get a second chance. But Leibl is staring at Katie. Katie leans on her mother. She points at Leibl’s skullcap. “What are you wearing?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” Leibl says. He turns and runs out of the room. Libby, Mendel, and Avrami stay. That line of eyes. “You’re not Jewish,” Mendel says.

  “Let’s get the kids together every week!” I tell Debbie.

  Katie pulls on her mother. “I don’t like it here,” she says. “Let’s go home!”

  MIRA, MY MIKVAH BUDDY, has taken a rather passionate interest in politics. She’s been quoting a new radio personality named Rush Limbaugh. It is odd to me that she thinks the world should operate according to our values in the Law, or that she thinks a Christian man could represent what we believe. I don’t know much about Limbaugh, but I listen to him one day while driving and find his voice derisive and cold. “You know,” I tell Mira one mikvah night in the dark car, “we’re good for each other. You’ve got to learn there is a gray, and as a religious woman, I have to remember black and white. We both need a little work.” But it’s ardent, vocal Mira, black-and-white-thinking Mira, whom our community respects. It’s tough, I think, to be the one who remembers gray.

  BREATHE. Four months after Debbie’s visit, I’m in Methodist Hospital in a sterile white labor room hooked to an IV dripping chemicals into my arm to try to stop labor two months early. I try to breathe, but each pull burns between my shoulder blades. Teeth clattering, I sweat and shake from whatever it is they’re dripping into my vein. My limbs and face are swollen from months of cortisone. I look to Levi. Then the placenta separates in a gush of blood.

  Dr. Haines comes in. Her patients call her Bethany. “We’re not stopping the labor anymore. We have to induce you,” she says. “We have to get the baby out.”

  “Healthy kid, hostile environment?” I manage.

  “Something like that,” she says.

  A nurse hangs a new bag and puts a syringe of pitocin into the line. A cold flush rises up my arm.

  Faces: a man in green saying, “Here are the warnings … you have to know, possible cesarean … stroke, cardiac arrest or respiratory arrest, or …” Just get the baby out. Levi’s kind, concerned face, as if a mask has been pulled away. “The Rebbe sends his blessing,” he murmurs close to my ear, and then adds, “Kol sh’vi’im chavivim.” All sevenths are beloved. Bethany says through the haze, “This one will be different from the others. You mustn’t push hard.”

  Oh, but this artificial labor is different from the others. The pain slams through with no warning, no buildup, no natural finesse. I have no strength to push anyway, and oh God … “The head!” I yell in panic. “I can feel how small it is—I’ll break it!” I pull myself up on my elbows and move backward on the bed, as if to back away from the baby inside me. Then my own head falls back and I have no weight, no substance. My body is not mine. Has it ever been? My father, Levi, the Law, the Rebbe, the children—I am more theirs than my own. They lift me. The tiny baby parts my bones.

  The next day, I walk on rubber legs alongside Levi, step after unsteady step, to the preterm nursery ICU. The lights are low. Incubators beep and whir, infant bodies breathing and dreaming. Levi dons a green paper gown and a mask that doesn’t cover his beard. Our baby is just over three pounds, hairless, eyes squeezed shut, but he’s a thriving little thing. Levi’s eyes shine. He takes all fifteen inches of our son into his two cupped hands.

  Two weeks of weak, queasy days pass while I lie in a hospital bed. I wake, take asthma medicine, eat, pad to the nursery to hold an impossibly small, squirming package to my breast, then head back to bed and sleep. Day and night, I sleep. Sister Debbie calls every day. Even my mother calls. And my grandmother. She’s angry at me for doing this to myself, but I hear in her voice the kind of loving “anger” that is full of concern. “You have to take care of yourself,” she says. “That is how you make them a mother.” She’s quoting her mother, from the Yiddish. “Make them a mother” means becoming a good mother by taking care of myself. Do it for the children.

  One evening, Levi throws himself into the bedside chair in dramatic exhaustion and recites a litany. “Oh, the children, the house, the carpools, the fights, the mess,” he says. “When are you coming home?”

  But something has changed. I hear him really saying: When will you come do all this work, instead of me? I think about this, and don’t answer. The women in the community have been sending over casseroles and scooping up kids for playdates. Gladys has been getting the children up each day, feeding them, and getting them ready for school. She looks after little Itzik. I don’t feel sorry for Levi. “I need to be here,” I say.

  That night, hours after he leaves, Dr. Bethany comes to my bedside at the end of her rounds, just as she did the previous night and the night before that. Finished with her day, she sits and visits. I don’t know why she does this, but, unlike other non-Jews out there, Bethany is no cardboard cutout to me, not anymore. I can still hear her voice at the end of a dark tunnel during the labor, like a rope pulling me through. She moves her chair closer to my bed.

  I bumble out shy conversation strained with need and loneliness. I wish I could convey my gratitude. I wish for an easy connection like I have with my sister, but I’m out of practice speaking to a person in the world. I feel as if I’m an alien, and besides, Bethany’s life seems so much
her own. I think she can’t possibly comprehend the breadth of her freedom.

  Bethany leans forward and knits her brow. She says, “Leah, it’s time.”

  “Time?” I say. But I know.

  “Another pregnancy could be dangerous—for you or for the baby. Or both.”

  The Group voices rise up in righteous protest full-force in me then, calling for self-sacrifice for the Law, jarring me with shame. It is my duty to bring Jewish souls into the world. Mesiras nefesh, self-sacrifice, honors God. Recently, a Lubavitch woman named Rochel Leah defied her doctors and had an eleventh child, then died of heart failure. Never mind that any rabbi would have told her to listen to her doctor; Rochel Leah was determined to go beyond the letter of the Law. She has become a saint among us. A martyr. Babies have been named after her, moving sermons devoted to her. A woman of valor, who can find? If I ignore Bethany’s advice, I will have the community’s admiration. The clamor rises.

  But there is Leibl, Libby, Mendel, Avrami, Sarah, Itzik, and now our new son. “Make them a mother.” That’s what my grandmother said. I can’t listen to the voice of the group. I won’t. I won’t die. I won’t leave my children without their mother.

  I don’t know this new, demanding voice in me speaking above the chorus. But I listen. “Tell me,” I say weakly to Bethany. “Tell me what I have to do.”

  Bethany exhales. Leans back and smiles.

  The next evening when Levi comes, I tell him what the doctor said. I tell him Bethany says if we don’t follow her advice, it can be dangerous.

  “We’ll ask a rav,” he says.

  “Why bother a rav to tell us what we know?” I say. “We know the Law: If a doctor says it is a life-or-death matter, we have to listen.”

  “True,” he says, and there is pure relief in his face.

  HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL, our nameless son now weighs

  four pounds and nurses every two hours. Sarah and Avrami and Mendel and Libby and Leibl, who is almost ten, also need attention, and little Itzik is spiking a fever once a week and we don’t know why. Weeks pass in a blur, no distinction between nights and days. When the baby is a month old and reaches five pounds, we finally hold a circumcision ceremony. We make it at home with just the minimum quorum of ten men, as I won’t allow the exposure when he’s so small. The mohel makes his quick, deft cut, the baby wails, and the mohel calls out our son’s name b’yisrael: Shalom, peace. The name is like shalem, complete. Our family is complete.

  Over the following months, I return again and again to Shalom’s birth and the sense of losing myself to family and Rebbe and God as if they carried me through. I hear Bethany saying, “You have to do this,” meaning birth control, and the surprise of Levi’s agreement, as he could finally hear my voice alone. He followed my lead. I begin to understand this as a turning point and settle into a new, stronger reality.

  I have chosen to say no. I marvel every day that I will not ever have to succumb again to the roller coaster of pregnancy. My body is my own. I have claimed it as my own. I stand a little more solidly. Is it possible my future is more mine as well? If someone from outside the community—someone I trust, like Bethany—were to show up and ask me pointed questions, I might even find a way to hint at a new self emerging. I might say, in a small voice, that I am beginning to stand apart.

  PASSOVER IS COMING AGAIN. But the children’s needs now seem far more vivid than the demands of the Law. I hire two women to help Gladys (notenough, Levi says, but he means money), and I don’t even try to check their work, don’t vacuum coat pockets or search closet corners for Cheerios, don’t stay up late at night scraping the oven, and I don’t fret at my shortfall. Our preparations might not be quite to ideal Hasidic standards, but I know the minimum the Law requires. I hear my own clear voice when I tell Levi, “Whatever the hired help gets done is enough.” Somehow he doesn’t object, although he flies into melodrama about the cost. Then I go a step further and announce that I’m not going back to work. No more teaching. Levi gives up and sighs. He’s worried how we can manage; at least my salary paid the housekeeper. “Can’t you just take a break and then go back in the fall?” he says. But I hear my grandmother, Make them a mother. “No,” I say. “I can’t anymore.”

  SHALOM’S INFANCY IS A BLINK, a breath, each day gone before it’s over. I want to burn his fleeting image into my brain; he’s changing so swiftly, every moment with him one I won’t experience again. When I hold you, little unfinished man, I am more rooted and awake because of you, maybe for the first time. You seal my motherhood. You are all of the children. You make them all more alive because you are the last. I am with you, every moment, in the days and in the nights while you sleep, even the nights after I go to the mikvah.

  Funny how a little rubber stretched over a flexible ring can change so much. It’s a paradox to me how birth control gives me the strength I need for the children, a paradox that preventing motherhood gifts me with motherhood. Every time I take the diaphragm into my hand reminds me that my well-being is a priority. Just like during the year of reprieve Rav Moshe gave us long ago, now, at thirty-two, I still like the sploosh of foam into the rubber cup, the body awareness I gain setting the thing into place. I got back from the mikvah an hour ago. It’s very late. The children are asleep. Levi is waiting. I pull the scarf off and drop it on the floor, shake out the hair I’m allowing to grow long again. I finish, step into the bedroom, and go to him.

  Late one mikvah night when Shalom is three and a half months old, I find myself pulling away from Levi in horror. I wasn’t really thinking before we climbed into bed together. I was somewhere else in my mind—with the children and the baby, who’s not gaining weight as well as he should—and now it’s too late. I forgot the gate. I forgot to use the diaphragm. I jump up and run into the bathroom and lock the door. “Oh God,” I moan.

  “Leah!” Levi says through the door. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I forgot!” I say. Oh no, oh no, oh no. Frantic, I run hot water in the tub and step into the swirl. I crouch there and try to wash him out of me again and again. Then I jump out, dripping and trembling, grab the tube of spermicide and squeeze hard, smearing thick, greasy cream along two shaking fingers, then swab myself inside. I am possessed. I take the tube and squeeze it directly into me. Kill it kill it.

  No voice of the Group rises in righteous protest. It’s just me crying, “No. No!”

  The next day, I move through the house in quiet terror, thinking, Another baby will break me. I’m no saint like Rochel Leah. I don’t want to die to bring another Jewish child into the world. Over and over, the idea plays in my mind like a leer: Toomuchtoomuchtoomuch.

  I try to reason with myself. Why am I afraid, when I don’t even know if I’m pregnant? Maybe I’m not pregnant. Maybe I’ll be fine. Maybe, probably there’s nothing to worry about. I force myself to attend to the children, the house. But I had just discovered a little freedom.

  I try to return to that place. For nine more days, I try to return to that place. On the tenth, I take a home pregnancy test and it’s positive.

  I go into the state of a body under siege. There’s a scream in my mind: This will kill me. Unlike seven times before, I can’t muster any sense of a sentient being forming in me. I can’t see this pregnancy as human. It’s not a baby, I think. It’s an alien thing, a cancer.

  The Group, the Law, the Rebbe, taunt me in their familiar chorus: Love this new child because you should!

  But there’s an inner retort I can’t suppress: It’s not a child!

  Cry for it, then!

  I can’t. I will not.

  Picture your child, her or him, in your arms. Vulnerable, trusting, soft.

  No! I am not Rochel Leah. I DON’T WANT TO DIE.

  I don’t know this rebellious woman in me. I don’t know her, standing apart from the Group, don’t recognize her strength. She claims knowledge I don’t have—there’s no proof this pregnancy is dangerous. Every pregnancy is different. I’m supposed to be a mot
her, endlessly a mother. The argument between head and heart rages. I close my eyes and flinch.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong?” eight-year-old Libby says, and puts a hand on my arm. “Nothing,” I tell her. I smooth her hair, touch her face. I go to the kitchen table and collect the used plates.

  For days I reel through the house on remote, whirling with guilt, fighting myself while every pore continues to scream, Get it out. I won’t allow the scream actual form—I keep quiet—but I don’t sleep or eat with the effort. I’m horrified at myself, afraid of this stranger who is me, who wants to kill her child. Who am I becoming? I am a monster. I could murder. I am capable of that. I become nauseated.

  I must get the baby out. Out of me.

  Days pass before I can even say the word “abortion” to myself, but when I finally do, the righteous chorus fades and I find the word doesn’t spell depravity. It spells survival. It spells cold-blooded relief. I still think I’m a monster, but I will risk anything for my children. I have to make them a mother. I call Bethany. “I’m pregnant,” I say. “I think it’s a problem.”

  Her voice is gentle. “First,” she says, “come in to the office and have a blood test. Maybe you’re not pregnant—those home kits aren’t always accurate.”

  That afternoon I’m in Bethany’s office, using my new little voice to squeak out my terrible request past the renewed, shaming judgment of the Group and God. The blood test is positive. A broad, shining desk between us gives Bethany professional distance. She looks grave. I am timid, but inside I am some kind of primitive, driven by instinct, ready for infant sacrifice.

  Framed on the shelf behind the doctor are her two smiling, squinting boys in baseball caps in the sun. One holds a catcher’s mitt. The other has freckles.