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To my son Yuda, who came afterward and, with his music, made this book happen
And God said to Abraham, “Your wife Sarai—you shall not call her name Sarai, for Sarah is her name.
“And I will bless her, and I will give you a son from her, and I will bless her, and she will become [a mother of] nations; kings of nations will be from her.”
And Abraham fell on his face and rejoiced, and he said to himself, “Will [a child] be born to one who is a hundred years old, and will Sarah, who is ninety years old, give birth?”
The Yiddish used throughout this novel is in keeping with the pronunciation used by Hungarian and Romanian Jews, who replace the u sound with i. “Shul” (synagogue) becomes “shil,” “kugel” (potato pudding) becomes “kigel,” “rabbeinu” (our rabbi) becomes “rabbeini.”
The midwife said to the Chassidic woman, “Your due date will be the thirteenth of July. Isn’t that exciting?”
Surie hesitated. “No,” she said. “I was looking forward to having a little time to myself at last.”
“Don’t you already have grandchildren? You must be busy anyway. What’s one more child to a family like yours?”
Surie only answered gently that a single child is a whole world.
ONE
After the appointment, Surie sat at the bikur cholim bus stop, staring at the stream of people walking into and out of the Manhattan hospital, trying not to cry. It was late Friday afternoon, the day after the fiasco of her daughter’s wedding. The lab-coated professionals, the trim secretaries with their folders, the mothers in leggings and transparent tops, their ponytails sweeping their backs, all were racing toward their weekends. There was even a young Chassidic man who looked just like her son, Lipa, standing on the other side of the road, staring straight at her. So much for privacy! The hospital rose up behind him, a tower of glass and steel, smelling of germicide even from a distance.
“This is All Things Considered.” A taxi stopped next to her, blocking her view of the young man and blaring an American radio channel. She didn’t ever listen to the radio. The announcers spoke in English and were much too fast to follow. Though for some reason, her husband, Yidel, kept a broken radio from the fifties in the basement and occasionally opened it up to tinker with the tubes.
Yidel loved puns and riddles and the old jokes that came off the wrappers of the candy the children liked to eat. He loved to sing in the shower at night before he went to bed, even though Chassidic men try not to make sounds in the bathroom. It was a transgression, but a little one. He loved to build fires in their backyard and feed rotten tree branches into the flames. He loved to take control of situations, figure out solutions, do the right thing. It could be a bit annoying, but on the whole, it wasn’t the worst thing ever. He loved to sit with his whole family piled up around him on his bed and tell stories in the semidark. He’d loved all of his sons. All of them. Even though she was a deflated fifty-seven years old, he hadn’t stopped loving her either. But could he continue after the news? Or would something close in him like a mousetrap?
She put her hand in her purse to find her prayer book. For the past four years, her mouth had needed to say the words of the psalms the way other mouths need to chew gum. But there was no book. There was nothing in her bag except for a pair of green-framed glasses, a pamphlet about pregnancy, an appointment card for the hospital because apparently home birth wasn’t an option this time, a bottle of prenatal vitamins, and a free disposable diaper. Every time before this she’d been filled with bubbles of delight, a baby-scented seltzer of happiness. She’d wanted every one of her children with something close to craziness beginning from the moment she found out she was pregnant. But this was different. She was too old. It had been an invitation to the evil eye, to schedule a doctor’s appointment for the day after a wedding!
Last night Yidel, annoyingly upbeat Yidel, had been oblivious to all of the wedding’s disappointments. “It’s so good to see the whole family dressed up and in one place,” he’d said in the back of the taxi bringing them home from the wedding hall. “Such a good-looking bunch! Such nachas!”
“The groom’s mother,” Surie said, scandalized, “was wearing an uncovered wig. Why didn’t we know she was that kind of woman? That they were that kind of a family?” It was after three in the morning. Her innocent daughter was off somewhere with a boy who trimmed his side curls, a boy who wore long pants to his own wedding instead of dignified three-quarter length, black socks instead of white stockings. His cheap shtreimel—dyed squirrel tails, probably!—sat on the back of his head as if he’d never wear it again, dripping modernity. In the kabbolas ponim room, everyone had seen this spectacle walking toward her beautiful child and turned their noses. All Surie’s friends snuck glances at her, to see how the former queen of their circle felt about such a low-class match for her daughter. Even her best friend slipped out ten minutes into the dancing, mumbling something Surie hadn’t caught. Never mind. She knew the real reason.
During the usually solemn covering of the bride’s face, the boy grinned at her daughter without a shred of modesty. He hadn’t just timidly held his wife’s hand after the chuppah. He’d snatched it up with a gleeful smirk. Her daughter’s face had been crimson and so had Surie’s. And her friends’. Who knew what was going on in their hotel room? She wanted to close her eyes and not open them again for a long, long time.
Yidel patted the sleeve of her beaded black gown. “Our daughter is twenty-two,” he said. “She was already long on the shelf. We should be thankful. And they are nice people. Really. The boy has a good job selling electronics.”
“You knew?”
“It’s not like we are a perfect family anymore, Surie. People talk.”
“What?” she asked, hot, flustered, her powdered face turning red for the twentieth time that evening. “What do they talk about?” But she knew, of course. Behind their hands, the community gossiped about Lipa, her sixth child, who had died four years earlier. And as a result, her little pearl, her seventh child, had to settle for a husband and a new family well beneath her or risk remaining unmarried.
* * *
Earlier on that awful Friday after the wedding—would she ever forgive herself for the timing?—the midwife had given her a handful of materials and said, “Take a vitamin every morning and every night. You need folate.”
“What is folate?” she’d asked, translating the midwife’s sentences slowly into Yiddish in her head. Which was still full of the wedding. “What is a neural tube?”
“Neural tube defect,” Surie muttered in English, before reopening her purse and placing the bottle on the concrete. The vitamins weren’t kosher. She’d have to buy her own at a pharmacy outside the community. They’d stare at her scarf, her clothes, giggle about her accent, but at least they wouldn’t spread gossip.
The midwife, Val, had delivered all ten of Surie’s previous babies. But Val, for all her skill, was childles
s; she couldn’t know how it felt. She couldn’t know what it was like to be tied to a small and demanding physical body for years. To feel the burden of keeping something alive. All those hard years raising them up and for what? A marriage to such a lowlife? Such shame and embarrassment?
And then, a strange look had come into the midwife’s eyes. A glancing light, like sun across the dark river, an illumination but a temporary one. What had Val expected from Surie? Tears of joy? Smiles? Surie was ancient. From the moment she had noticed the early symptoms, she had known, in her heart of hearts, what they meant. Despite her shame, she’d almost resigned herself until Val said it was twins. Twins! Since the breast cancer, the muscles of her arms were so stiff that she could barely get her cardigan on in the morning. How would she lift two babies? As Surie sobbed, the midwife looked away and said something about glucose stress tests and multiparous women. The words were unfamiliar. There were no words for neural tubes and stress tests and private places in Yiddish. There was no Yiddish word for please, so she said it in English.
“Please,” she begged no one. “Please.”
The midwife leaned forward, wanting to put out a steadying hand, but feeling some coldness, some rejection, before she even reached out, she rattled off words about Surie’s exasperating body: Condom. Withdrawal. Rhythm. IUD. The Pill. You are responsible for your own fertility. Val had made her own peace long ago with this occult knowledge. She’d grown up in a religious Catholic home but left her faith behind forty years earlier when she started working as a midwife. Faith was no excuse for ignorance. For her, this was a core belief.
Surie was no stranger to her own fertility. She still checked her menstrual chart every morning, even though she hadn’t bled in over ten years. She’d been delighted when the chemotherapy had sent her straight into menopause. Only after many cancer-free years had she thought she was in the clear and stopped taking the tamoxifen. Maybe her body, rejoicing at being free of the drug, had bounced right back to whatever was the opposite of menopause? Maybe that’s how the pregnancy had happened? But Val said tamoxifen wasn’t a form of birth control. It seemed obvious to Surie that the midwife was mistaken.
Val was older than Surie. Loose wattles wobbled under her chin, though she was rail thin. She talked until white flecks appeared at the corners of her mouth and then she removed the spittle with her blue-gloved fingertips. Surie couldn’t remember this woman speaking at all when she’d delivered the other babies. She’d had the impression that the midwife was a little afraid of her back then. But now she rattled on and on. Remember how you bled the last time? You’re at risk of hemorrhaging. I’m talking to you. Can you pay attention, please? Blow your nose. This is not the time to fall apart. Do you know what hemorrhaging means? Bleeding. To death. The midwife’s gabbing must have been sanctioned by someone somewhere.
“Your husband is going to have such a surprise when you tell him!”
Surie usually told Yidel everything. But strangely, two months in and for some reason, she still hadn’t opened her mouth to announce that they were going to be parents again. How had she allowed the time to pass? She hadn’t realized she was pregnant for the first few weeks. Then, once she had, the pregnancy seemed like a bad dream, something that just wasn’t possible. Later, there’d been the flickering at the edge of her vision, faces that couldn’t exist, the scent of freshly turned dirt, mint and apples. The madness of old age, she’d thought. It was a miracle she’d made an appointment at all. And at the wedding, she’d danced as if she were an ordinary grandmother, not a pregnant woman. Although, of course, she hadn’t known she was expecting twins.
“If necessary, take time off from work. Do you work? Don’t drink any wine.” Too late. She’d gulped several glasses to quench her horror at the wedding. Val could probably smell the alcohol on her breath. “It’s been known to cause fetal alcohol syndrome.”
Val said this as if Surie had, at some time, been familiar with fetal alcohol syndrome. As if she should have heard about it. Well, she probably had, but she didn’t remember. She wasn’t a bad woman, Val. Each time Surie didn’t remember something, the midwife went away and came back with another pamphlet to stuff into her hands. Each time, Val patted her on the shoulder as if to say it would all be all right. Expecting twin babies at Surie’s creaking age couldn’t ever be all right.
“Coffee brings on preterm labor, a major risk for geriatric mothers,” she added.
Geriatric. That word … did it mean old people? Did Val think Surie should be in a nursing home instead of a birthing center?
“If you don’t want to carry these babies at your age, you don’t have to.” Val lowered her voice, drew closer. “Most older mothers miscarry. If you want, I could talk to the doctor about a therapeutic abortion.”
Surie wanted to vomit. Her mouth was full of saliva. Her throat burned. She shook her head. Such hideous and forbidden words. God forbid! Chas vecholila! Abortion.
A long silver knife in the midwife’s hand, an unearthly screaming, blood everywhere. Hushed whispers behind closed doors, her three sons who still lived at home pointing their fingers, an iciness encasing the few friendships that had survived Lipa. A stone wall disconnecting her from Godly light. What hushed comments had she heard about abortions? It was all bad, that was for sure. Only other people killed babies. Only goyim thought fetuses weren’t really alive.
* * *
The next morning, Saturday, she washed all of the dishes from the fancy Friday night meal her married children had prepared for the new bride. It made Surie’s skin crawl to see how her daughter smiled at the obscene groom, as if she liked him, as if she would have chosen him herself, as if he were just like her holy brothers. How could her daughter think that Surie would choose such a man for her if she had better options? Her beautiful, innocent granddaughters took turns lying on the couch, massaging one another, complaining that they weren’t getting the full five minutes, groaning from the pressure of a hand between their scapulars, completely unaware of the tragedy that had befallen the family, that would soon befall each of them! Their matches would also be affected.
Surie’s mouth wanted coffee and a big slice of cake. Could she? Her stomach rolled over every time she saw a chocolate bar, but mysteriously, she craved chocolate cake. Only a day later and already she couldn’t remember any of the midwife’s advice. Maybe, besides being pregnant, she had early-onset Alzheimer’s? Val spoke too fast. A Yiddish translator might have helped, but Surie would have been ashamed to cry in front of someone from her own community. And not just that … she could picture the translator totting up the years—thirteen!—since Surie’s last birth and shooting her a glance of surprise and disbelief. Der Oibershter knows what he does. Der Oibershter will give you strength. No evil eye, darling! Your babies will keep you young! It’s bashert. But silently, the woman would be thinking it was time for Surie’s kids to be raising babies, not Surie. She’d be wondering who she could tell this crazy news to first.
To give birth was to announce publicly that she and Yidel still found each other desirable long past the usual age of childbearing. None of her peers had been pregnant in a decade. The girls she’d grown up with, her friends, never discussed their private lives. It was easy to assume that they never even looked at their husbands, to imagine they had returned to the virginal state of their youth. These girls who she still imagined in school uniforms and braids were now grandmothers, one even a great-grandmother. They would ponder the logistics of her pregnancy. Most mothers in the community had shut up shop as they passed their early forties, and that seemed right, appropriate, modest. No one wanted to bring home a baby—two babies!—with Down syndrome or some other disaster of getting older. Here she was, fifty-seven, grandmother to thirty-two grandchildren, still going strong. The women of the community would say mazal tov, but privately, they’d blush for her, the sex-crazed hussy. And this strange news on top of Lipa’s death and Gitty’s match … her poor granddaughters! They’d never be able to escape the fami
ly’s new status, no matter how perfectly they or their mothers behaved.
Surie leaned against the sink, cringing. Several noodles floated in the cold soapy water. It was revolting. The morning sickness rose in her throat again. It was much worse with the twins than it had been with the singletons. Because of her size, because her belly swelled out in front of her and overflowed at the sides, and because her flesh was hard, not soft, she could barely reach the taps behind the sink. Stretching, she flicked off the stream, turned, and went out on the fire escape, to the cool breeze from the river.
She was careful with her feet because she was off-balance with the extra weight. She stood on a section of rusty metal grid. The railing was loose. It wouldn’t do to fall three stories down to the street and splatter on the road like an overripe watermelon. Paper wasps had made colonies under the eaves, and though it was already early December, already cold, they fell clumsily out of their nests, stunned, one by one. They spread their wings but did not move. The empty lots behind and to one side of the apartment building were full of wilting Queen Anne’s lace and blackened golden rod. When the wind blew, the aspen leaves clapping together sounded like rain.
Yidel was just above her, on the flat part of the roof, walking among the hides stretched on frames and placed in the sun to dry. He couldn’t touch them on Shabbos morning, but he liked to look at the skins when he came back from the synagogue. He was a sofer, a scribe. He called out to her.
“Good Shabbos, little wife!”
The pregnancy, which had shown from the very first moments (she’d thought it was more change-of-life fat!), rose up from between her hips in a dense ball and pressed against her thighs as she crouched, her back against the wind. She was enormous. It was insulting, really, that her family thought all of this flesh was her own. Yidel called again, urging her to climb the last flight of rickety steps and join him on the roof.
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