White Walls

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White Walls Page 2

by Judy Batalion


  “Well, you won’t need that progesterone flush today!” the doctor said, patting me—gently, this time—on the back. “Mazel tov! Aren’t you thrilled? You are thrilled. YOU ARE THRILLED. Text your husband!”

  He left the room, which was now spinning. A whirlwind of scales and swabs taunted me. I felt nauseous, and knew it wasn’t the estrogen. I managed to fumble for my iPhone, my fingers trembling as they glazed over numbers. Jon answered right away.

  “I’m pregnant,” I said, the words like squares in my hole of a mouth. My insides felt like white noise. Alive and cackling but inaudible at the same time.

  “Hold on,” Jon said.

  “You’re putting me on hold?!”

  “I meant, to my colleague on the other line,” Jon said. “Sheesh, hormones already . . .”

  “Aren’t you shocked?”

  “No. You went off the pill three weeks ago.”

  My damn reasonable husband.

  “It’s early days, we shouldn’t get too excited,” I blurted out.

  “I’m not too excited,” Jon replied defensively, but I could hear the shimmer in his voice, his British accent hitting unusual crescendos. “Come home right away,” he almost sang, tenor tingling.

  Doctor Crazy pranced back into the room, his lips stretching across his tanned visage. “We’ll need a whole new set of blood tests now!”

  “I’m shocked,” I declared, to him, to myself. A hard bolus, like a freshly blown metallic balloon, appeared at the center of my throat. What have I done?

  “Life happens,” he said.

  Quite literally, I thought.

  My sweaty thumb and pointer finger gripped the edges of the white square, trying to squeeze the two lines into one—a no, a negative, a singular slit of nothingness.

  They didn’t budge.

  • • •

  OUTSIDE, TRAFFIC WENT on as usual. The noon sun still shone. The February wind thumped my cheeks. I stopped to buy a frozen feta cheese bureka. I needed a moment to stall the rest of my life, a calm before the seismic, entropic storm like Wile E. Coyote running in midair before noticing that his feet touched no ground. How could the most incredible news I would ever receive have come to me at the bacteria-infested local clinic that Jon and I referred to as “the petri dish”? I meandered on the wide sidewalks, weaving from building to street, taking swaying steps, feeling my feet slip within my ballet flats and sensed a new state set in, a mood crystallizing in my cells: not despair, but not thrill. More of a weight, a heavy, unsettling blankness. Fear.

  My mind flitted to the legend about the foundation of Chelm, the folkloric town of Jewish fools. An angel had been passing over Ukraine with a slew of half-baked babies destined for mothers across the globe, when it tripped and dropped them all in this random spot. Rootless, homeless, these were the lost baby spirits that set up the Slavic city of the idiots. I gulped hard. This could not be a mistake.

  But why couldn’t I find the feeling of wanting this that I knew must have been somewhere inside me?

  I stepped more quickly, zigzagging along the pavement, cutting off workmen on lunch breaks, women carrying matcha lattes. I was having a baby. I was having a baby. Nebbishy, infertile me. A baby had taken up tenancy in my uterus. My arid uterus.

  Minutes later I walked into our new apartment, my perfect space, my decorative and emotional pièce-de-résistance. This abode, our Chelsea loft with enormous windows and open plans, marked the culmination of years of work; it was the manifestation that I had solved my life. I insisted we get all white counters, white sofas, white carpets. Who really needed coffee tables? “Less is too much” was my mantra when it came to space. I would live in a gallery if I could. I’d spent a decade working as a design curator, becoming a Doctor of Domesticity, for just that reason. Finally, I’d met a partner who uncannily understood, who’d helped me to make my own clean rooms. We had moved into our pale palace just four weeks earlier. Now I realized that was the same week that my egg was cooked.

  Jon was waiting in the kitchen, smiling with his eyes.

  “I’m pregnant,” I repeated. “Two years took three days.”

  “Super sperm.” He came over and gave me a firm hug, squeezing my sides.

  “Better not cuddle too hard,” I joked, breaking free of his grasp. I needed air. “Let me warm up this bureka.”

  “I’ll do it,” Jon offered. I sat down at the kitchen table as he flitted around the pallid counters, unwrapping, turning knobs, cutting, his moves graceful like a Romanian gymnast. I was trying to count months in my head, but kept messing up the numbers.

  “I guess we’re due in October? November?”

  Jon didn’t reply. He was generally gregarious; I knew his silence meant elation. An extrovert par excellence, it was in moments of true happiness that he turned inward.

  “Hello, Jon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing,” I said. How can you feel so secure? I wanted to scream. So sure? It’s not like your family’s so normal. Who knows what meshuggener, messy offspring our shared acids will sprout! But I kept my cool. I couldn’t disturb his euphoria. I smiled.

  He cut open the bureka, showing the cheese filling nestled inside.

  I forced myself to swallow three enormous bites in a row, their edges smashing against my trachea, blocking me from uttering the high-pitched sound that had been brewing near my tonsils.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, I pulled even more blankets over me than my usual three.

  “Good night, mum o’ my child.” Jon gave me a head massage.

  For hours, I stared at the white ceiling above me, making sure it stayed far up. Do not collapse, I told my walls, do not.

  “Jon,” I finally said, nudging him and adjusting my voice to be louder than his snoring, which he did like a wildebeest with bronchitis. “Jon! Where will we put it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Where will the baby go?”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled from his pillow. “I guess the office.”

  Oh God. My office.

  I might have a PhD in the history and theory of physical space, but I did not know how to make room for a baby.

  I stared at the ceiling, listening to his nasal expulsions. The TV fuzz feeling set in again, tingling through my eyes, nose, spine. Then it dawned on me: pregnant women weren’t supposed to eat unpasteurized feta cheese. I was screwing up already.

  I got out of bed and sat in my white tiled shower until morning.

  How could I, who came from such a pathologically messy home, with no blueprint for normalcy, make one? How the hell was I supposed to become a mother?

  1ST TRIMESTER:

  The Basement

  • ONE •

  BERMUDA SHORTS TRIANGLE

  Montreal, 1986

  All I wanted to do was go home.

  To be picked up from school by a mom who played doubles at the Hampstead tennis club, stuffed into OshKosh winter couture, and escorted into a luxury-car-pool that would whisk me westward to the airy suburbs with shiny built-ins and lemon-lime scents. To do my homework, watch Video Hits, and eat SpaghettiOs and thinly sliced carrots before being bathed in bubbles and tucked into my pink trundle bed that hosted matching throw pillows with embroidered JUDYS.

  Instead, I clutched my red-and-blue coat, procured from the basement of a Lubavitch woman who served as an underground wholesale importer of factory seconds. Thank God I’d found one that looked vaguely Esprit, and that my mother had not been forcing me to wear one of the fifteen fake Howard the Duck T-shirts that she’d sourced at the same time. I made my way to the back of the lobby to wait for Bubbie, my mom’s mom, to pick up me and my brother, Eli. Mondays through Wednesdays she took me to Yiddish drama, dance, or judo. (Despite my being barely four feet tall and the only girl in the class, my father’s philosophy: you must learn how to fall!) T
hursdays and Fridays we went to her and Zaidy’s house. A few years earlier they had moved with us to a duplex in the suburbs, but averse to the local quietness, quickly headed back east, in the direction they’d always run, making my father—who had bought a house just to fit them—vow he’d never talk to them again, despite their babysitting services.

  In the recesses of the foyer, I did not make eye contact with a single fourth grade classmate, but put my coat on slowly, sleeve by sleeve, conscious of directing my every movement, negotiating the position of each of my limbs, convincing myself that if I couldn’t see anyone, they couldn’t see me either. Being short helped me to shrink out of sight. Eli, playing kick the can with an empty cardboard juice box, was stuffed into a puffy snowsuit and wire-rimmed glasses with enormous lenses that made him look sixty instead of six.

  Bubbie was usually late, which was fine with me, for when she did arrive she did so palpably. I saw her approach the glass door, flinging plastic bags full of briskets and at least one of her myriad old leather purses stashed with money and mysterious papers. She cackled with glee when she spotted me. Her back was hunched; the handkerchief wrapped around her head, bright green. Even her name—Zelda—was the epitome of conspicuousness.

  I’d made my way to Eli before she even touched the knob.

  “Judaleh!” she called, her eyes lighting up.

  “We’re coming, Bubbie,” I said, pushing my brother out into the dusk. Even if my classmates had noticed Bubbie, I absolutely did not want them to notice me, leaving school by foot and eastward, toward my grandmother’s cramped house with the original gray carpets from 1957.

  Outside, icicles hung from traffic lights. It was too cold to talk, even for Bubbie. This was also fine with me and I walked silently, slightly ahead of her and Eli. I buried my face into my scarf, pretending to myself that we were walking to a doctor’s appointment, or tennis lessons, or our cream-colored Jaguar that just happened to be parked far away.

  But once I’d climbed through enough piles of snow and seas of slosh, once we were far enough in the east, deep in the area of 1960s low-rise apartment buildings, Vietnamese corner stores, and street names like “CÔte-des-Neiges” and “Lavoie” instead of the upper crusty “Westmount” and “The Boulevard,” I forced myself to look up. There were neither classmates nor their mothers here. Anyone who could see me was also in the east—we were all the same. Breathing easier, I stepped right into pace with my bubbie and simultaneously slipped into a different genre of fantasy, a historical one. Now, I was foraging through a Siberian work camp, or sneaking across bridges over the frozen Vistula, or running through the blustery Polish countryside, or something else that Bubbie might have done during the war.

  “You are Hitler!” Bubbie screamed at a grocer, waking me from my inner world and directing me into a fruit store. “And SS,” she said, gesturing to the Sri Lankan assistant schlepping wet boxes across the slushy floor. She was not the kind of Holocaust survivor who suppressed her memories or pretended it never happened. On a regular basis, I heard how she escaped Warsaw by swimming across a river. And in a truck filled with oranges. And at a convent. And thanks to a Nazi, who, of all things, turned the other way. Her best friend was a Polish woman who had helped save Jews; her other best friend had recently been accused by a livid man at the local shopping center of being in the Warsaw Judenrat. Forty years later, these were still topics of gossip here, in this Yiddish outpost of a Polish shtetl in the middle of French Quebec in an ex-Anglo colony.

  “Nazi,” she muttered. “Turned my sister into soap!” I was used to my bubbie’s public explosions, especially in this stretch of fruit stores, one of which she was convinced was owned by Hitler’s cousin who charged double for his apples.

  Eli and I waited at least an hour while she haggled with grocers. “For the best eekelech, for you,” she said, flailing a cucumber in my face. I knew she had medication to help her craziness—when she took it. As Dad always said, it was the paranoids who fled and survived, giving rise to paranoid children.

  Finally, when she was pleased that she’d selected the best roughage at the best price ever offered in the universe, she stuffed her new wares into her cocoon of bags, amazing me that she could fit more inside. I pulled up my backpack, made sure Eli’s was on tight, and we headed back out, again me pretending that it was 1939, and we’d just stocked up to save our lives.

  • • •

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, we arrived at Bubbie and Zaidy’s house on Campden Place, the bottom flat of a duplex on a pedestrianized street, its center filled with trees instead of cars. A quiet pocket of the city, unnoticed by passersby. I’d lived on the upstairs floor from ages one to six; back then, our home was cluttered but in a free-spirited, hippie sort of way. My parents hosted drinks nights where they served Breton crackers and peach schnapps on their teak tables, Mom’s raucous laughter trickling through the walls, reaching me as I dozed off in my bed. My early birthday parties, overstuffed with guests, offered buffets of bagels amid the seventies crochet. On weekends, Mom taught me to illustrate puns in little homemade booklets as we sat on shag rugs, listening to folk music and her spirited Socialist-Zionist records. Now, my bubbie’s house hosted faux French regency sofas covered in plastic, golden lamps, and a smattering of photographs and Judaica from Poland, though I was never sure how they’d carried large framed photos and crystal vases when they escaped east to Russian work camps where they ate horse meat, and then after the war when they walked back to Poland via Kirgizia, where my mother was born.

  My favorite photos were of Bubbie and Zaidy when they were in their twenties, with their dashing slicked-back Warsaw dos and Bubbie’s striking high cheekbones, like a model for Vogue (Vodjz?). My other favorite photo was my parents’ wedding portrait, which hung in a thick gold frame in the living room, showing my mom as a slender beauty with long dark hair and an innocent smile that graced her cherubic cheeks, my dad as a dashing man in fashionably gigantic 1972 eyewear. No pictures of my parents’ wedding hung in my house. Each time I was here, I took a few minutes to stare at this evidence and imagine what it must have been like when they were young, happy. I wondered what it would take for Mom to look so elegant again.

  As Eli and I disrobed, my zaidy, now with only scattered white wisps of hair crowning his barely five-foot-tall body, emerged from his basement hideaway—his makeshift workshop where he busily fixed pipes with masking tape and smoked cigarettes. His twinkling gray eyes peeking out from under swollen eyelids, Zaidy giddily played with us as Bubbie got down to the business of cooking. Everything was done by hand. Orange juice was squeezed by hand. Bees were killed by hand. Floors were scrubbed by hand, though I’d noticed lately they were starting to smell acidic, like stale urine. Zaidy, Eli, and I played a game where we ran from wall to wall trying to catch one another—Bubbie joining for some rounds—and then I cleared us a picnic place on the floor of the dining/TV room, which hosted heaps of leather bags and clothes draped on golden chairs. There, my grandmother spread out newspapers for our five-course dinner—cut up vegetables drenched in oil; chicken soup; meatballs with no sauce and spinach latkes; apple compote and Neapolitan ice cream; a petit four of Kit Kats—which was served over the next few hours, until Dad came to pick us up.

  When Three’s Company came on, Bubbie sat on a chair, cackling loudly at her major crush, John Ritter. “They should put this on for cancer patients, for victims of war. I don’t even think about my mother dying in gas chambers when I watch Jack!” she cooed, munching on toast with cottage cheese and jam. “We used to swim in the Vistula, all my sisters,” she whispered, as if letting me in on a secret from her old world—the old world—even though I’d heard these stories a thousand times. “The Zionist groups swam. That’s how I saved myself. I swam.” I remembered a photo my mom had shown me of Bubbie walking on the banks of the river. She was wearing a long dress, her long legs taking long strides, next to a man in a suit who did not look like my zai
dy. At all. “Who’s that?” I’d asked.

  “Oh, I think her boyfriend,” Mom had answered from the couch, as if my grandmother having a boyfriend—a life before Zaidy, a life before the war—was nothing. Her having had a romantic, carefree existence felt more foreign to me than the daily stories of partisan violence on the Russian front. There was a drop of normalcy somewhere in my lineage? I hadn’t asked any more questions. I hadn’t known how. I just packaged up this bit of knowledge, storing it for later.

  After the meatball course, my grandmother slowed down her service, and as usual, came in to show me her victories of the day. “How much you think I pay for this?” she asked, holding out a mint green sweater with gold lamé weave.

  “Ten dollars,” I played along.

  “Less!” my grandmother cried in delight, our reverse bargaining session beginning.

  “Five dollars.”

  “Less!”

  “One dollar.”

  “Twenty-five cents!” She applauded herself. She had taken me with her a couple of times to the bazaars where she trawled through long tables piled high with shiny clothes, and then fought it out penny for penny with the sellers, always emerging triumphant.

  I had no idea why she kept shopping, considering that opening her closet resulted in a mudslide of dresses. Purses were piled high on the living room couches. A full room in the basement was unlivable, the pool table buried under a mound of skirts. Yet, it didn’t bother me that much. I didn’t live here, and the stuff wasn’t for me. These piles wouldn’t drown me, pull me under. Please don’t let my house become this bad, I begged inwardly, but I already sensed the slopes were slippery like the wintery ground outside.

  Finally, after all the desserts were brought out and scattered across the floor, I started to check the clock. At a commercial break during A Different World, I went back to the living room with my parents’ almost-fictional wedding photo, and practiced my moves as I sang Tina Turner and danced in front of the full-length mirror, checking every few minutes to see if Dad was out back and if he’d honked. If we made it to his car quickly, there’d be no time for him to think about how mad he was at Bubbie for moving and there was a better chance he’d put on CKMF radio so I might catch Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus.” When I noted his Pontiac station wagon outside, the headlights spotlighting the snow that sprayed in all directions, I ordered, “Eli, let’s go!” I made sure he put on all his layers and that we both had our schoolbags before hugging Bubbie and Zaidy so tightly I thought I’d break their osteoporotic bones. “I love you, Judaleh,” Bubbie said, nuzzling her smooth chin with its maze of thin wrinkles into my hair for an extra-long second. The warmth diffused across my scalp.

 

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