Uncovered

by Leah Lax

  “My father was a minister,” Bethany says.

  “Oh?” I say, not comprehending.

  “I don’t do abortions,” Bethany says.

  I can’t speak. I don’t know where else to go.

  “But I recommend one. Strongly,” she says.

  I stand up. “I’ll find where I have to go,” I say. “I’ll figure this out.”

  “But I would do this one,” she says.

  I sink back down on the chair. “You would?” I say.

  “I don’t see this as a compromise of my principles,” she says. “It’s that necessary.”

  I think, She owns her rules. And she can bend. Why, she is bending toward me, reaching out a hand. “You understand?” I say.

  “You have to do this,” Bethany says. And then, “Does your husband know you’re here?”

  “No,” I say. “No.” My eyes open round. “Could you do it here, in the office?”

  “Here? No.”

  “I don’t want Levi to know. If I go to the hospital, the bills will come to the house.” “I can’t do that,” she says slowly. She frowns, leans back, lowers her chin. “There would be a problem with disposing of the … tissue.”

  There are laws, after all. She also must comply with laws.

  Her voice drops. “Talk to your husband,” she says. “This is his baby, too.”

  “Don’t say that,” I say. “Don’t say ‘baby.’”

  Then I’m alone in her office while she does a routine exam in another room. I wonder if she’s with the woman I saw in the waiting room, young and rounded with her pregnancy. I watched her pick up Parents magazine and page through bright, uncomplicated advice for small, well-spaced families.

  Bethany wants me to tell Levi, but telling him is deferring to him and to the Law. I have to decide this for myself. I was just beginning to feel alive.

  Sitting there alone in Bethany’s office, I admit to myself that I’m not really afraid of the physical danger. That’s not what drove me to come here. Oh, it’s true what Bethany says, I’m not up to having another baby, but my secret is that I don’t really feel I would die. The truth is that I simply couldn’t cope with another baby, to such an extent that I feel certain of a different kind of death—I’ll break inside. That’s what I’m sure of, terrified of. I will break, and my children will lose their mother in a different sort of way. In the same way in which I lost my father. The Law allows an abortion to protect my body, but not to protect my soul.

  Levi and I once sought permission to use birth control because I was sure then also that I couldn’t cope with a baby. But this isn’t prevention. This baby already lives.

  I don’t know American law, don’t even think about child support—I think, I can’t possibly make it alone with the children. I think, Levi loves God and His Law more than he loves me, and every aspect of our life together is based on the Law—if I break the Law, it will break our marriage. I have to try to get a rav to agree to this abortion, because if he will, so will Levi. I’ll do it to keep our family together.

  But if the rav won’t agree … I am ready to ignore the Law if I have to, no matter the consequences.

  Bethany returns and sits back down behind the desk. I clench my hands in my lap. “If I tell Levi,” I say, “the only way that he will support this is if we ask for a ruling from a rav, a rabbinic authority in Jewish Law—he’s like a judge. We’re supposed to ask a rav’s guidance for these things.”

  Bethany looks quizzical. Waits.

  “I mean,” I say, “I’m going to have the abortion no matter what.” My heart races with fear. There. I’ve said it. Out loud.

  “I think you have to,” she says.

  “But I need to get a ruling for Levi’s sake.” The new voice rises, ragged. “I have to keep my family together.”

  “Would he leave you over this?”

  “If I break the Law that our life is based on and kill his child?”

  Silence. “Well, um, if you put it that way.”

  “I don’t think he can see it any other way. Unless a rav allows us.”

  She swallows. “What would I have to say?”

  “The rav will allow an abortion only if the pregnancy is life-threatening in a way that he understands,” I say. “He’ll believe a doctor. Can you use those words? ‘Life-threatening’? Would you tell the rav that I would die?”

  I can’t believe it. I’m trying to manipulate the Law. I may as well be hacking at the roots of my life.

  “I’m a doctor,” Bethany says. “I’ll tell him the risk, but I can’t say for certain that it’s life-threatening.”

  “But those are the words he would have to hear.”

  “You have asthma, not a heart condition.”

  “I know.”

  “True, what happened before could happen again and could be worse next time. It could be dangerous for you, but every pregnancy is different. You might be fine. I don’t know. I’m not God.”

  “No,” I say.

  “The problem is that I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” I whisper. “That will have to do.”

  LONG AFTER THE CHILDREN GO TO SLEEP, I ask Levi to come talk with me. He’s curious, a little wary, and follows me to the backyard. We sit down on our old lawn chairs, a canopy of stars enclosing our private room. There’s the scratch of katydids, the whine of a mosquito. We’ve been married over fifteen years. “I have to tell you something,” I say.

  “Well?”

  “I’m pregnant again.”

  Levi sighs, then manages a smile. “We’ve still got the bills from Shalom,” he says. “But … baruch hashem.”

  “No,” I say.

  “What?”

  “No baruch hashem. No ‘thank God.’”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I feel like this baby is a cancer, or a bomb.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “A bomb inside me.”

  His voice goes gentle, wheedling. “You’ve always come through fine,” he says.

  “I’ve been afraid from the first moment I knew.”

  Levi’s lined face is shadowed in moonlight. He lifts a hand, as if to wave away the fear like a mosquito, but then stops, drops his hand. “Those doctors,” he says in a careful tone. “You know how they can exaggerate.”

  “But she’s right. I know she’s right.”

  “About what?”

  “An abortion.”

  When he hears that word, it is as if he has just been stung. He yells, “No!” and jumps out of his chair. “Are you out of your mind?”

  But I don’t feel like a monster anymore. I’m simply resigned. Dying physically and dying spiritually are the same to me. “I have to do this for the children,” I say. “You don’t have to do this,” I add. “I do.”

  He stands and points a finger at me. “That’s murder!” he says.

  “Levi,” I say. “The doctor said—”

  “This time you’ve gone too far,” he says. He stomps away.

  It’s happening, I think. I’m losing him.

  I follow, past the fishpond, the redwood deck, the children’s swings already wet with dew. The grass is overgrown, the night sky a clear, unblinking witness. But something is shattering in both of us. I’m angry. “You’d let me die,” I say.

  His back to me, Levi’s shoulders begin to shake without sound. He’s crying. I put my hand on his arm, and we stand like that in the night.

  Then he’s walking away and I am too afraid to let him go. I yell, “Please!” and won’t let myself cry. I follow my husband through the back door, past the kitchen table, where I sit with tea in morning light, past the playroom, wooden blocks left out on the floor. “No!” he says, and puts his arms up as he walks. Still I follow. Still I beg, but my resolve is weakening. Could he keep the children and send me away? If losing him means losing them, then losing him is a more certain form of dying.

  We pass the den, where the children pretend to swim the sea-blue carpet. We pass the bookca
ses of stately books of the Law, where the old, bass voice of God murmurs on. We pass the Sabbath dining room with its out-of-tune echoes of Levi singing with the children, and the bedrooms where Leibl, Libby, Mendel, Avrami, Sarah, Itzik, and now Shalom are sleeping. I keep pace with him. But Levi stops, turns. He curls his lip. There is disgust in his voice. “Who are you?” he snarls.

  That’s when I break. “Okay,” I sob. “Okay okay okay okay. I’ll have the baby.”

  But then Levi looks hunched, beaten. “No,” he says, shaking his head and looking at his feet, and, “I don’t know.” And then, “We’ll ask a rav.”

  WE DON’T ASK A RAV. I DO. I call the rabbi myself the next day after the kids leave for school and tell him everything while Levi listens on the extension. I give the rav Bethany’s telephone number. He says he’ll call back after speaking with her. Then I pray, for the first time in a very long time.

  The rav calls back within the hour. I answer in the bedroom. He says he has spoken with the doctor. “I need to speak with both of you,” the rav says. I gesture to Levi, who goes to the kitchen. I hear him pick up the extension. “I’m here,” Levi says.

  “Okay,” the rav says. “You have to do this.”

  The rabbi didn’t say the a-word. So I do. “Have the abortion?” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. Then he sounds accusing. “You were using birth control?” he says.

  Levi clears his throat and says, “Yes. The doctor said it was necessary, at least for now, for Leah’s health.” We should have asked permission.

  “So,” the rav asks, and then his voice suddenly becomes a plaintive demand, almost a cry. “How did you let this happen?”

  Shocked silence. I hear his shout as the cry of a parent. We are the children, and we have failed—failed him.

  “And now,” he says, “because of your terrible mistake, I have to be the one to give you permission to kill a child?”

  No one can speak. This is when I realize that I just gave away the greatest and most terrible responsibility of my life that should have been mine as an adult: the decision to end the life of our baby. We should not have placed that responsibility on anyone else. I think, a grown woman should make her own decisions. Instead, we stand here as guilty children before a parent who is deciding our punishment, our consequence, for failing him. My mouth falls open.

  I think, We Hasidim, morally, we’re children who never grow up. We never become old enough to parse right from wrong on our own. The Law always stands over us like a parent over a child. The only choice left us now is to accept the rav’s edict, do what he tells us to do. Or not.

  For the first time, depending on a rav seems wrong. Of course Levi will succumb, obedient to his order. I try to tell myself, But this is what I wanted!

  A time will come when I will look back and wish that I’d had the strength to act on my own and tell Levi to his face what I was going to do, instead of trying to get a rav to decree my decision for me. I will wish that I had had the courage to retain that terrible responsibility that I was finally ready to take on, instead of handing it over to the rav, because living with the consequences of that choice, and with the clear understanding that I brought them about, is part of being an adult. But at the moment, moral adulthood, which thrusts us without a light into murky terrifying choices, is new to me. I don’t yet know how very much I will regret this.

  “There is one more thing,” I say to the rav. “I have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

  “Yes, you do,” the rav says.

  “So I want to have a tubal ligation. At the same time. While I’m in surgery.”

  “This is unusual,” the rav says. “You know the Law. Our bodies belong to God. It is forbidden to make unnecessary changes to them.”

  “Is that a no?” I say.

  “But, given the circumstances, I say do it, the abortion and the … other. That way, you won’t be calling me again about tragic mistakes.”

  Suddenly it’s about him. He wants to make sure we don’t put him through this again.

  “Thank you,” Levi says, his voice full of respect and humility.

  “And, Mr. and Mrs. Lax? I want you to make sure of one more thing,” the rav says.

  We speak together now, in one voice, Levi and I. “Yes?”

  “Do not speak of this. No one must know.”

  HOME NOW IN BED after the brief surgery. I have an inch-long incision covered with a dab of white tape, and that is all. During the procedure, Levi whispered psalms in the waiting room and then drove us home with a long, sad face. The rav has silenced him. Levi made no reference to the baby, his lost child, and I know he never will.

  At home, he told the children that I’m not feeling well and to let me rest. But Leibl comes in. “Mommy,” he says, “someone’s on the phone.” At my bedside, he twiddles with the sheet, reluctant to leave. I put my hand on his, then pick up the phone on the nightstand, and he leaves.

  “It’s Bethany,” the voice on the line says.

  “Did you call to check on me?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “I’m okay,” I say.

  For the first time, I imagine Bethany performing the abortion as I slept my chemical sleep, her green mask, the sound of the horrid vacuum. I told Bethany I wanted to be asleep so as not to hear the suck of the machine, or to see anything. But she had to see it all. “Listen,” she says. “I don’t know if you would even accept this from someone who’s not Jewish, but I want you to know that I said a prayer for your baby.”

  At first, this falls flat, Christian faith being, to us, one step shy of idolatry, foreign and illegitimate, in some ways abhorrent. But then I think, I hadn’t thought to pray for something I couldn’t feel—for the baby—and she did. I prayed only for my own comfort. Suddenly, it seems it was Bethany’s prayer that was legitimate, Bethany’s that offered, in that moment of infant death, real faith. If she were standing next to me right now, I would look at her more closely, perhaps for the first time—short, taut body in green scrubs, hair in reddish-blond waves, clipped and clean, green eyes intelligent and aware. “I have to thank you,” I say in a husky voice.

  “You’re welcome,” she says.

  “Before the surgery,” I say, “I didn’t want God to be part of it. Or I would lose myself. Again.”

  “I understand,” she says.

  But I don’t understand. And I don’t understand why I don’t feel I’ve lost a baby, why I can’t mourn. I think, It’s a sad thing to have no sadness.

  BOTH LITTLE ONES GO back to sleep midmorning after the others are off to school. The house seems to be waiting for end of day, for in-out door slams, the smell of sweaty children, games and squabbles, the bounce of a basketball on the drive, kids tearing off on bicycles, homework and dinner, baths and bedtime. What’s new is that for these few hours the house is my private space alone with this new little inner voice that, in the quiet, now I can’t help but hear. The rav said no one must know. Those who are known to have stepped out of our circle are considered a threat to the whole. Maybe that’s why all of us in the group are afraid of gossip, and probably why we deflect gossip by passing it on. No one must know—to protect the group, but also because we could lose status or friends and see our children shunned as well.

  But there are many more secrets among us besides mine. Plenty are open secrets. We all collude.

  Over the following weeks, the weight of my secret grows. I am distracted during the day, lie awake at night. Finally I decide, If I can’t speak, I’ll write. I’ll write what I’d say to a friend if I could. I won’t show it to anyone.

  I sit up late one night in a pool of light at the bedroom desk, at the computer. Levi’s papers are piled at one side of the room, his sleeping form on the bed behind me. Shalom is in the bassinet, finally sleeping five or six hours at a time. No one must know. I mustn’t write the actual story. I’ll just get the sense of it down, not the facts. But then, fingers on the keyboard, I don’t have the words.

>   So I sit and wait, but years of swallowing words, always waiting, attending, with a closed mouth, has covered me in silence. Around me lie shadow boxes and stacks of religious books and business books. A deeper shadow, from the lone tree in the yard, falls through the blinds across my hands on the keyboard. The baby snuffles. Levi shifts in his sleep. I sit in the dark. Shalom whimpers, then sinks back into sleep with faint sucking sounds.

  A ghost girl reappears in elastic-waist home-sewn shorts and a sleeveless top, long, sand-colored hair. She seems to be reaching out as if blind, creeping down a hallway trying to get to her mother.

  I wonder what I dared think I might write. Who do I think I am?

  Well, I think, struggling, I’m a flawed mother, but … I’m a mother. A mother teaches her child how to name the world—she’s the bridge to language. That’s who she is. Maybe from motherhood I’ll know what to do. At least I’ll know not to give up.

  So I write a single word. “I.” It stands bare and exposed on the page. Uncovered.

  Soon I’ll remember the ghost girl learning to climb a cottonwood tree in front of her home, how she took along a journal and a pencil tucked into her waistband. I’ll watch as she climbs sure and agile to the rooftop, where she leans back against the warm brick chimney to write and muse and wonder, chewing on her pencil.

  But a long time ago she became a dot in a vast field of roofs and treetops and sky. I think, She had her own words. I’ve lost mine. I’ve become a “we,” not an “I.” No longer her. I don’t have language of my own anymore.

  Why would I do this, when the very act of writing threatens who I am?

  And yet, desperate, I plunge down, down, beneath the long, modest dress, because I have to see more of who might still be there. So she can write. Just one word. Then another. Each word stands alone.

  I

  am

  velvet.

  Deep

  dark

  blue.

  Fifteen

  Levi takes off his glasses and folds the earpieces in, first one, then the other, lays them face up on the counter in front of the mirror in a precise and measured gesture, then moves them to a meticulous two inches farther from the edge. I think of how he keeps precious items on his dresser in an unchanging order: his comb, his wallet, his keys.