Apart From Love

by Uvi Poznansky

  Of one thing I’m sure: if they could wave a magic wand, or a needle or something, to undo whatever binds us, Lenny and me, to each other—this marriage and above all, this pregnancy—they would do so without thinking twice.

  What’s more, they seem to keep a secret among them, when it comes to this question: where’s Natasha? She hasn’t shown up here for the last, say, five years; which is cool with me—but still, strange.

  If I ask them about it, which I did at one time, the sisters would find a way to skirt the question. And if I ask Lenny, he would hide the truth, somehow, with a kiss, and anyway, he won’t give me no real answer, either.

  All of a sudden aunt Hadassa clears her throat and says, “Nu? Why are you staring at my eyebrows?”

  To which I say, “Who, me?”

  “Oy, dear! When you’re older, you’ll understand,” she says; which serves only one purpose: to inflame me.

  And so I ask, “Understand what?”

  Aunt Hadassa wraps the yarn onto the left needle, and loops it around. “Understand this, Anita,” she says. “The thing about eyebrows: it is the first thing to go, when you get older.”

  Me, I don’t have nothing to add to this piece of wisdom, to which she adds, “They hang down, I mean, heavily, over your eyes, and show your age, being so droopy and white, and so slick, to the point of resisting any fix, any type of makeup.”

  “I’m never gonna grow old,” I state.

  Which makes her curl her lips, like she knows something I don’t. “Give it time, dear, give it time! My, my, Anita, you’ll end up just like me, having to pluck them! Pluck-pluck-pluck! And then, just so you can look halfway presentable, paint them right back in, dear—as best you can.”

  “Really,” I insist. “It isn’t your eyebrows. It’s that nose on you. That’s the thing that fascinates me.”

  Naturally she seems surprised to hear that; which forces me to clarify, “I really, really hate it.”

  “So do I,” she admits, for no other reason than to try to appease me.

  Now aunt Hadassa slides the knot onto the other needle, and so does aunt Frida, and aunt Fruma too, in her turn. Their arms seem pretty wrinkled, like yesterday’s newspaper.

  I lift my pinkie finger and tilt it ever so slightly, as if holding a teacup.

  “Hey, aunt Hadassa,” I call. “See here, my hand?”

  “What about it?” says she.

  Now waving my fist in the air, I say, “I just want you to know that if you ever stick your nose, like, anywhere close to me, or to any of my private affairs, you’re gonna leave me no choice, see, but to punch it. Seriously, that’s one thing I learned from my ma, and I warn you now: I learned it real good.”

  “Ha,” she puffs. “Your affairs, they seem to stick out like a sore thumb, and right in our noses, too. It is you who, by fainting at the most ill-advised time, forced this stink on us, on our delicate sensibilities.”

  “Why, how d’you mean?” I ask, totally confused.

  “Who do you think has been taking care of you all day,” she says, “Ha, princess?” And aunt Frida joins in, “Who has been wiping the dribble from the corner of your mouth?” This, while aunt Fruma chimes in, “And who, do you suppose, has been changing that pad, down in your cute little panties?”

  “What?” I ask, in great outrage.

  “Yes, dear,” says aunt Hadassa. “Lenny, he found you right there, right outside the kitchen door. He said he’d called you, and called you again, then again, because the omelette, it was almost ready, and you never answered. So he figured you must have left.”

  “And the omelette,” she continues, before I have time to catch my breath. “Oy, it was getting cold, and of course it is no good cold, so finally he figured, of course, that he was hungry, because all he had for breakfast was coffee. You know he is sick of your egg salad, right? He never eats it, dear, now does he. Why you keep making it is beyond me!”

  By now I’ve opened my mouth to answer, which at once makes her raise her voice. “So,” she says, “he transferred the omelette to a plate, and added some butter on top, and waited a bit, just to let it melt, and to make sure you, dear, were not coming back. Nu, then he just ate it, after which he came out and realized, all of a sudden, that quite sadly, he had been mistaken; that in fact, you were there all along, in the corridor, lying flat on your back, and barely breathing, too. Which is when he picked up the phone and, finally, called us.”

  In disbelief I say, “Help? I don’t need none of your help! And where, where is he now?”

  To which she says, “My, my! He is so exhausted now, after all that excitement, I mean the wedding first of all, and then his stay at the hospital. Too weak, I am afraid, to be of any use! And his son, Ben, nu! What can I say? Men! They managed to lift you, somehow, and carry you to bed. So now, consider yourself lucky, dear, to be in one piece. As soon as we came, they went out.”

  “Out? Out where?” I ask.

  But in place of an answer she just waves her hand, saying, “I do not wish to lump them all in one heap, but somehow, you see, men can never take care of themselves, let alone take care of us women. They are never there for us when we need them—now are they!”

  For a minute I hesitate to ask, “What did you say, just now, about changing my pad? What pad?”

  Which makes her lay down her square of wool and say, this time real slow and careful, “You know you are bleeding, right?”

  It is then that I try to jump from the bed, because not only do I feel ashamed, even violated, which of course isn’t the first time in my life—but all of a sudden I sense a cramp, just like a stab, down in my stomach, in the same place where so far, the pain’s been dull.

  So she hurries over, and places the palm of her hand, like, real heavy, on top of my shoulder. “You can’t do that, dear,” she says, pushing me back, and propping up my pillow—even as I rise up to ask, “Why? Why the hell not?”

  “Nu,” she says. “Just be a good girl for me and lie down, nice and easy now, and for God’s sake, be still. Take up knitting if you like. I can bring you instructions,” she adds, “for anything. Baby blanket? Baby socks? Just tell me, dear, tell me what you like.”

  Despite her offer, I’m sick of the way she keeps saying dear.

  There’s no way for me to know what she means by that, because her tone is like, bitter, and it don’t hardly agree with the sweet taste of this word, and because she keeps repeating it all too often; all of which tell me one thing: aunt Hadassa is torn. She can’t decide between wishing me ill—and helping me back to my feet.

  “I won’t lie down,” I say, defiantly. “And I really, really don’t like knitting.”

  Her painted eyebrows arch even higher, and I begin to get an uneasy feeling, because at this point, she’s much too close to me, and the light bounces off her needle much too sharply, and now the tip is right here, against my skin, and it scratches.

  I point a finger at her, like, right in her face, to make her take note of my nails. “Shove off! Away from me,” I tell her. “I mean it, don’t you dare come any closer to me with them fine needles.”

  “I see,” says aunt Hadassa.

  She wraps the yarn around her index finger and plucks it, as if to transmit a message by wire. “A feisty little kitten,” she says, “are you now!” At which time aunt Frida asks, “She’s a kitten?” and aunt Fruma confirms, “Yes: a feisty little one!”

  By now Aunt Hadassa has stepped back, and with a tightlipped expression she sits there and starts sawing the three squares of wool together, using some fancy sort of a stitch, and clicking her tongue, and sighing, like, “My, my.”

  After doing this for a while, she pushes them glasses up her nose, and raises her eyes to me and says, “I’m trying to talk to you, dear, like I was your ma, you know.”

  To which I say, “And what makes you think I need another ma? One’s more than enough! And you, you don’t know nothing about my ma.”

  “I guess I don’t,” she has to admit.
“But being pregnant is not for sissies, dear. You must make sure you are strong, like me.”

  At hearing this, I can’t hide my disgust. “If this is what strength looks like, I swear, I’m gonna take disease.”

  “I see,” says she. “In that case, it’s not too late, you know.”

  And before I can ask, “What is?” she goes on to drive the point home.

  “I have done it before, and it can make things so much easier for you, because really, you like to run around and have your fun, don’t you. And here you are, poor dear, lying in bed, confined, probably, for weeks, if not months. Now with all this bleeding going on, my, my, who knows what has happened there.”

  She points her needle at me, stressing, “Maybe it’s no good anyway, I mean, not viable, if you know what I am saying—”

  “Don’t—don’t you dare say it,” I flash a warning at her. “For God’s sake, bite your tongue!”

  At that minute, aunt Hadassa picks up the scissors; which is when I suddenly remember that piece of music which I heard with Lenny.

  He took me to some opera, Wagner I think, which was long and kinda difficult to get, but he told me to listen, and he explained it all to me, and from there I remember them, the three Norns: They spun the thread of fate, and they sang, like, the song of the future.

  Beware, they sang.

  Beware, I tell myself now, as aunt Hadassa holds up the yarn, and snips it.

  And with a sigh she leans into her feet and gets up. So do her sisters, and all their images in that oval, standalone mirror, right there in the opposite corner.

  “Nu, we are going to leave now,” she says. “We are going to hurry out, dear, because we do not want you to tell us we should go. Just think about it, will you? I was just saying... It is not too late, really... You are in pain, dear, I can see it quite plainly. And there is still time to end this.”

  The three sisters file out with a quick, matching step, and go out to the corridor, followed closely by a whirl in the air, in which you can spot three bounces—high, higher, highest—of three balls of yarn.

  And as they make their final exit, I shout at them as loud as I can, despite that sharp pain right here, in my guts, “Aunt Hadassa!”

  I hear them stopping in their tracks out there, behind that door.

  “What is it,” whispers one. “What does she want,” whispers another. And the last one answers, probably with a wave of a hand, “Who knows... Maybe, just to meow a little.”

  Which in turn, makes me roar, “Who needs you! You, who think you can tell me what to do, and what not to do, and whether or not my pregnancy is like, viable, and should it come to full term, or not! I just wish that you leave me alone! Get the hell out! Get out of my womb, where it is not your business to be! And if I don’t see none of you never again, it’s gonna be too soon!”

  Chapter 6 A Promise, Aborted

  As Told by Anita

  For a while I leaf through this book, which Lenny’s bought me. I bet he’s real excited. He so looks forward to becoming a father, the second time around. I can just see him in my head, like, holding the baby’s hand, guiding him already in his first steps. Then, letting go, he’s gonna take a step or two back, and hold his breath, waiting there for the little one to walk into his open arms.

  Lenny’s gonna buy him a brand new tricycle, and teach him how to set his little feet on top of them pedals, and push, push harder, even harder—yeah! Just so! And again: Go on, push, until—oh boy! With great joy, he’s gonna clap his hands, because here—for the first time—you could detect a move, a slight move ahead.

  And then, a few years down the road, he’s gonna surprise our child with a large, shining bicycle, and adjust the training wheels as time goes by, until they wasn’t needed no more; at which point, Lenny would remove them, and hold them in his hands, like, to weigh them for a moment, and try to wipe the rust, and wish that time would like, slow down, just a little, because it’s hard, so hard for the old heart to let go.

  Yes, Lenny needs a son: someone to need him, trust him, and make him trust himself again.

  I turn the page over, only to find some of them words much too long—but I read them anyway and like, I enunciate them, as slowly and as clearly as I can, ‘cause it’s gonna make him proud of me, and make me worthy of him.

  The book says that just four weeks after conception, basic facial features will begin to appear, including passageways, I repeat, passageways that will make up the inner ear, and arches that will contribute, contribute, I say aloud, to the jaw. And it says that the baby may now be a quarter of an inch long, which sounds like they’re talking about some lizard, or maybe a fish.

  But the book don’t say nothing about what I’m really worried about, which is: how to be become a ma—and at the same time, how to be totally different from my ma.

  Me, I often wonder about that, ‘cause it’s kinda hard to know the right thing to do, even with the best of intentions, when all you have before you is nothing, nothing but a life cursed by violence, and by misery, and by a long list of mistakes.

  Like the time when I was fourteen, and ma called me Bitch, for no better reason than me telling her that, like, I’d missed my period. I wasn’t sure if she called me that because I was pregnant—or because she didn’t want to hear it.

  At any rate, ma pondered the situation. This was what she called it back then, a situation. And she gave me a smack across my face when she figured it was Johnny's baby, which was real bad, not only because he was already married—but because he was also dating her at the time. And if there was one thing she hated, it was the idea of sharing.

  After the blow I could taste blood in my mouth. And when I touched it with my tongue, one of my teeth felt kinda loose, and after a while it started to rock back and forth.

  Once she simmered down, ma said, “There’s still time. It’s not too late.”

  And she took me to that clinic, where she’d just joined the cleaning staff. And they did her a personal favor, so that instead of paying a full charge, she could put in some extra hours, like, for a few months. And there, they took care of the situation, but not of the tooth.

  And so, I ended up losing it.

  Me, I’m awful lucky, ‘cause you can’t tell it’s missing—unless I’m having real good fun and busting out laughing, which sometimes makes me forget to keep my mouth shut.

  But right now I have to bite my lips.

  Either that, or dig my nails, like, deep into the flesh of my hand, so that them cramps, they’re gonna stop, or at least fade away. So I close the book, reach over to the bedside lamp, and click its knob.

  And at once, the place has changed. All these fancy pieces of furniture, and this entire bedroom, in which I don’t really belong, with its walls—those here around me and those over there, beyond the threshold, out in a corridor—all of these things ain’t solid no more. In a blink, they’ve lost their bright, yellow sides as well as their opposite, dark sides.

  There ain’t no contrasts anymore, so that now, you can’t define no objects as, say, a four poster bed, or a coat hanger in a corner, or a wooden headboard, part of which is reflected there, in that mirror.

  And instead, the whole space has become kinda fluid, like a gray, smoky swamp, given to the wild storm in my head, in which a shard here, a shard there start floating, in a total muddle.

  And I ain’t even sure if them shards are, like, in the shape of things that have already taken place, or the shape of things yet to come—but somehow I know that from now on, no matter what happens, I ain’t alone: There’s new life in me.

  I touch myself under the blanket, brushing my fingers real slow, from the navel up to the crease right here, under my chest, which is where I can feel the change: My breasts, they’ve grown so much firmer than before, and my nipples, they’ve gotten so much larger, like a drop turning into a ripple.

  I let my hand hover over the place where I imagine my baby, and picture in my head how them things, them passageways start to fo
rm, connecting like, by magic, from here to there, forging little nerves in all the right places inside this tiny creature, all quarter inch of him.

  The two of us feel this bond, this warmth right here, coming across the thin gap between the skin of my belly and the skin of the palm of my hand. And so, we’re happy. And then, then I stop to breathe—I gasp—I breathe deeper, deeper, so I can take it, take the pain.

  Which in a flash, brings back to me that which I want to forget. It’s the memory of that clinic, where they took care of the situation, and of how I came to, in that horrible place, and found myself lying there, flat on my back, feeling wounded.