On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  “I’m too fat,” she yelled. A Chassidic man, passing below on the street, looked up, shaded his eyes to see better, and then hurried on.

  “You’ll need to come into the clinic every week so we can keep an eye on you. Don’t look so horrified. It’s not a death sentence. You know I’m not scary,” the midwife had said. “Aren’t I pleasant to talk to? Together, we’ll learn a lot about these babies.” Val had awkwardly patted Surie on the shoulder as if she were a small child. Surie wanted to bite her.

  Such a stereotype! A sandal-wearing graduate of the Peace Corps, makeup-free, gangling, large-nosed Val. A confirmed spinster if only because she was, underneath everything, intensely shy. She was the only person in her cohort who’d been willing to work in the slums of Williamsburg with women who couldn’t speak English and had a baby every year. Val—lonely, idealistic, eager to love everyone and make their lives better—had wanted all the mothers to laugh at her funny T-shirts and her dyed bright orange hair, but the Chassidic women didn’t know where to rest their eyes.

  “You’re not fat!” Yidel bent over the parapet, smiling down at her, beckoning. In the marriage raffle, she had won first prize. Before the pregnancy, she’d tipped the scale at 263 pounds. “Even if you were, double my money’s worth! Come up.”

  He would not be so delighted with her if he knew he was in for two more tuitions, two more weddings, at a time when he had been preparing to retire. They’d been hoping the whispers about their family might die down. Double the financial drain, double the shame. Not double his money’s worth.

  For almost twenty years, he’d trained their two eldest sons, Usher and Eluzer, to be the same kind of meticulous calligrapher that he himself had always been. Klei kodesh, holy vessels those boys were, both ordained rabbis and scribes. He’d steadily transferred all his clients to them. These days, Yidel was a specialist. He never wrote mezuzahs, megillos, marriage contracts, divorce decrees. He only wrote new Torah scrolls, all of them special orders from the Rebbe. A single scroll took an entire year of writing from nine till noon, Monday to Friday, with a hand-cut feather. Each afternoon he sanded the stretched skins of fetal calves until they were smooth and glassy, cut them to size, ruled lines into the parchment, sewed the sheets together with dried tendons. He carved the wooden rollers, cut his quills, mixed his own jet-black ink. Their basement was always full of frames holding dried hides. It smelled of rotting meat and lime, wet oak and burned hair. The odor was the first thing guests noticed about their home. Surie could smell it three floors up, on the fire escape, in a strong wind. But in the past four years, Yidel had only written two scrolls. Now weeks went by without him bringing home fresh hides. The hides on the roof were the last he’d ever stretch. He’d told her, with glee in his voice, that he was going to retire on his birthday. Six days before her due date.

  “Rebbetzin Eckstein!” he called again, and he put his hand on the railing, his foot on the first step down toward her. Very few people called her Rebbetzin, though she was married to a rabbi. It was his little joke.

  “Don’t come down!” she said, shaking her head and backing away. “I have work to do.” She needed time to think, time to figure out how to tell him.

  Surie was no longer sure of that flash of light she’d seen in the midwife’s eyes. At the time, she’d hoped it had been admiration. The old-fashioned Jews who lived in Williamsburg, the midwife’s bread and butter, belonged to a people that had never been part of the secular world. They lived the way they had always lived. They cured skins in their basements and laid them in the sun to dry as they had done in Europe. They read books about laws and ethics and history from two thousand years ago. They dressed in styles from the forties and fifties and revered elders who had never read a word of English. The men sat and studied the word of God their entire lives, and instead of becoming wide and stodgy, they grew lean and speedy, and their eyes burned with the bright light of sharp intelligence. The women raised beautiful families, glorious families with hundreds of grandchildren, thousands of great-grandchildren. Surely the midwife, when she told Surie the news, had viewed the twins as a miracle and Surie as a holy woman? Surely that flash in Val’s eyes had been respect? She wouldn’t be able to hold herself together if that light had been pity.

  * * *

  She went inside and drained the sink, took off her damp apron, and pulled on her Shabbos ponzhelo. She transferred the green-rimmed glasses from the pocket of the apron to the new garment. The hem of her housecoat smelled of vomit from the previous evening, but it couldn’t be cleaned until after nightfall. Surie closed her nose to the smells coming from the Crock-Pot and the blech. Chulent. Kigel. Fatty soup. In the evening, she’d have to dress up again and go out for a huge sheva brochos for her daughter. She’d wear a tight smile like a girdle on her face. The big clock in the living room chimed twelve times. She poured a cup of coffee, but her stomach turned and she slid into the bathroom and closed the door.

  “Are you all right?” Yidel waited outside the bathroom door, as he had almost all the days he had been married to her. He was sixty-two, older than her by five years. A respected rabbi, he wore long white socks and a silk coat, a bekishe, that came down past his knee-length pants; his gray beard reached the third button of his shirt; his fur shtreimel, real sable, lay curled on a chair like a cat. Under his arm was the folded yellow tallis she’d given him on the day they were married, forty-one years earlier.

  His work with the holy scrolls had engraved itself on his body. His shoulders were rounded, his hips ached, he had arthritis in his ink-stained fingers. He had varicosities and a belly from so many hours of sitting. But his work had marked him in positive ways too. Yidel could concentrate on a single thing for hours. He never lost his temper. His face was as calm and innocent as an angel’s. Over time, he’d become famous. People across the world knew instantly when they saw a parchment he had written. Eckstein’s, they said. Beautiful.

  Surie flushed the toilet and spat into the water. Most of the vomit spun down the drain. She cleaned her teeth and her tongue with a dab of toothpaste on her finger and then flushed again.

  “Give me that izei?” she said. “The brown one?” He knew what thingamabob she meant from years of experience, and her favorite towel was slipped into the gap created by the partially opened bathroom door.

  “What do you want to make kiddush on?” she asked after wiping her face. She covered her mouth with her hand, afraid that he might be able to smell the twins on her breath. “When will the boys get home?”

  “What’s that?” Yidel said. He fumbled with his hearing aid, remembered it was Shabbos, jerked his hand away. “What’s that?” he asked again, cupping his good ear. His hearing was ruined from the screaming of the rotary sander he used to polish the skins.

  “I defrosted a bundt and two bilkelach,” she said softly as she passed.

  When she’d rapidly gained weight, she’d had herself checked for all those fat-lady things, reflux, diabetes, a thyroid imbalance. Her regular doctor—not suspecting—told her to cut back on sweets and eat more protein. She’d finally figured out she was pregnant a couple of weeks earlier, at the end of the sixth week, when she realized that fat couldn’t squeeze her bladder or make her nauseous. The early weeks of the pregnancy had passed in a blur. She’d been too busy with the engagement and the wedding to tell Yidel. And now it wasn’t just one baby she’d be confessing, but two. Maybe she was hoping for a miscarriage? For shame!

  “Surie,” he said, and he caught her hand and held it without any pressure. There was a very pale light like clouded crystal behind his pupils. Was that what love looked like? Was this fog the thing that caused old people to go blind? Catinkelach? Something like that? Maybe he wanted to lie down with her? Or was he upset that she hadn’t gone upstairs? So many years of this wordless communication had passed between them that he thought he could read her silences. He usually could. She, however, still struggled to understand this unspoken language of theirs.

  She’d a
lways been proud of his craftsmanship, proud that she was married to the man who wrote the Torah scrolls for the Rebbe. She would no sooner interrupt his morning hours writing than go outside without her stockings. The first year they were married, they had developed a sign language so that she might ask him if he needed something and so that he might respond without speaking and interfering with his holy work. A slightly raised eyebrow, a hand gesture, a smile, a nod. Yidel noticed everything down to the smallest movement of her lip. She’d often laughed and said that he could read her mind. Now this silence was a deeply ingrained habit.

  They both assumed that anything important would float from one to the other. With words, they were a little out of practice. She waited for him to notice the hard bowl of her stomach, to turn to her one morning and casually ask for her due date. When this didn’t happen, she was lost. She worried that there was something wrong between them, that Yidel no longer loved her in quite the same observant way. And so she waited, hoping he would see.

  He’d guessed she was pregnant all of the previous times, bought her pregnancy tests before she knew to ask. They’d hugged each other, laughed, started suggesting names. They both loved being parents. He always remembered the mystical words he’d been thinking when each child was conceived, and he’d written each phrase in a tiny book he’d given her on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. For a man, he was intuitive. But not now. What was wrong with them? Why didn’t he guess? Why didn’t she say?

  She gently pulled away from him and took a few steps down the hallway.

  “The boys will be home any minute,” she said, looking pointedly at his hand. She could somehow feel what he wanted through the light touch of his skin on hers, the way the dark place at the center of his eyes widened. “It’s not right.”

  “Surie,” Yidel said, but when she turned away from him, he just sighed and shrugged.

  How could she tell him she was pregnant when he had so happily refinished the old baby furniture for Tzila Ruchel’s sixth child? Four years earlier, right after they’d returned from their trip to California, he’d hauled out their battered crib and the changing table and the high chair and painted them with rural scenes from Romania. How could she take that away from him, his relish at being a zaidy after all the dry and terrible years of being a disciplinarian, something not in his nature? He’d know she’d known and kept it from him. He’d always adored her, announced to their children that their mother was a saint, a love, his favorite, the best of all women. What would he think of her?

  “I am a lucky man,” he said, walking after her. He took her hand again, pulled her toward him, and raised her fingers clumsily toward his mouth. He made the same gesture to his mother on Friday nights. Surie had an idea that he was supposed to kiss her fingers, that it was the proper conclusion of the gesture, but he simply held her hand aloft for a moment and let it go. They went into the kitchen together, and she laid out the challah rolls and the cake and poured him a glass of wine, and when her three youngest sons came home, she sat and watched them all eat, her lips pressed together, barely breathing for fear she would vomit.

  * * *

  The next morning, she dressed in her good black cardigan and houndstooth blouse. She smoothed her bangs to one side of her scarf. The nylon hair was stiff and coarse and refused to be swept. Yidel had given her a gold choker at their engagement and she wore it whenever she left the house, even though it was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. Every Sunday morning, when the big clock—her mother’s clock—chimed ten, they went out into the crowded Williamsburg streets. Yidel went in front, both of them towing a shopping cart with one hand and holding an umbrella over their heads with the other. It was like him, to go shopping with her, something he had begun the first week after they were married. “Wait,” he’d said then, when she’d put on her coat to go out for the groceries. Even though no other husband she knew helped his wife in that way, the brave young man he’d been, twenty-one years old, had put on his coat and carried the grocery cart down the stairs. He’d waited outside on the sidewalk until he saw her paying the merchant for her purchases. They had an endless string of stories about shopping together, episodes they laughed over at night when they were already tucked into their beds and the lights were off and the children were asleep.

  “Remember the lady who bought the lawn flamingo and wanted to name it after you?”

  “Remember when you won the lucky thousandth customer and you could get everything in your cart free, and you only had a bar of soap?”

  “Remember when that man brought his parrot to help him pick out cheese?”

  * * *

  Surie wound the clock every Sunday morning, the heavy lead weights rising up inside the mahogany case, and then she set the time. Her mother’s clock was over two hundred years old and had been left in Surie’s parents’ home by the previous tenant, who probably couldn’t figure out how to move the massive thing—taller than a person, mounted with golden onions, and a silver face engraved with the name of some New York clockmaker. When her mother died, Surie had walked around the apartment, touching the photographs, the knickknacks, the hairbrush, the scarred cutting board. Eventually, she’d picked up the Shabbos candlesticks. Hesitating at the door, she’d asked Yidel to bring the clock. All through her childhood, she’d lain in her bed, loving the reliability of the ticking, the high-pitched chime, the gleam of the mahogany, the strangeness of something so old when everyone she knew came to the United States with nothing.

  That Sunday, she stood in front of the clock as it struck ten. She was eighteen, holding her mother’s candlesticks. She was fifty-seven. How was it possible to be both at the same time? Surie followed Yidel downstairs and pushed aside two white chickens with her foot before darting through the opening behind her husband. The Ecksteins raised their own chickens. They didn’t eat red meat. The poultry lived in the backyard in a large coop Dead Opa, Yidel’s father, had built in 1951. He’d had chickens in the displaced persons camp in Austria too. The birds picked worms and rusty screws out of the dry, pale gray dust. The Ecksteins owned twenty-five chickens at a time, thirty before Rosh Hashanah, but never a rooster. On Sukkos, when Tzila Ruchel, Surie’s oldest daughter, had a sukkah that stretched across the entire front of their house and the doors opened and shut constantly, the chickens wandered out into the road and caused collisions.

  They were silly animals. They bounced into the air like rubber balls. They clucked and purked and squawked. Surie had not thought, when she married, that she would be raising chickens. None of her friends in the neighborhood had a yard full of white feathers and manure. Sometimes Yidel called faraway hatcheries and ordered dual-purpose chicks, birds that laid eggs in every corner of the henhouse but were also good for soups and stews when their laying tapered off. As her own fertility should have.

  * * *

  When she was growing up, her family hadn’t kept chickens. They hadn’t tanned skins in the basement, or pressed grapes to make wine, or squeezed olives for oil. They’d been perfectly normal until her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at fifty. Surie was the youngest of eight children, the only unmarried one left at home. Her father, panicking, had rushed to marry her off so her mother could take her under the chuppah. The irony was that her father had died of a heart attack shortly after the wedding, but her mother had lived for another two years.

  Surie was sixteen when she’d been introduced to Yidel in the matchmaker’s dining room. They’d spoken for half an hour. Once. Yes or no? she’d been asked. She couldn’t remember his name. Yuda Leib? They hadn’t discussed raising poultry. He’d had a gentle smile and a laugh that filled the room. Later, she realized he smelled faintly of chickens and skins, but back then, in the matchmaker’s house, the smell coming off his clothes had seemed exotic and unfamiliar and exciting. His beard had been a gingery orange.

  “Like King David,” he’d said, touching it when he saw her noticing. Despite being older than her, he was still just a boy, his beard barely an
inch long. He’d been blushing the entire time, excited and ashamed of his excitement, eager and shy. The same Yidel, really. “Mazal tov!” her father had shouted when she’d mumbled yes. Her married siblings and her mother and father had rushed in to celebrate, as if they’d been waiting just outside the door, listening. Her mother had cried and cried, wishing that her four older children who were murdered in the Holocaust could be there, but Surie hadn’t wanted to be sucked into that old sadness. She was making a new life, a new home, beyond the shadow of Europe.

  The Rebbetzin’s first question after the engagement had been, “When was your last period?” Was she supposed to keep track? Apparently she was. Luckily, she remembered. The wedding was set two months later, perfectly timed for peak fertility.

  The morning after the wedding, a newly married friend came over to show her how to tie a scarf over her shaven head. Surie looked at herself in the mirror. Every married person knew what had happened to her the previous night. The women would wince with her when she sat. The men would pat Yidel on the back, smirk at his smiles. But on the outside, besides the scarf, she looked the same. It had been hard to believe that there weren’t words stamped on her forehead, announcing what she had done in that dark room. And more: She was not sure if she was supposed to have enjoyed herself, but she had, and she kept on grinning at Yidel and then covering her teeth with her knuckles. And even more: She hadn’t known it, but she was already pregnant.

  * * *

  She was pregnant now too, pregnant at sixteen and pregnant at fifty-seven, two ages that one might hope to be pregnancy-free. The rain came down and made wide puddles on the sidewalk. The water came inside her shoes. Yidel and Surie made their Sunday walk up Division and onto Lee. They stopped to pick up pickles and herring at Flaum’s. There was a fish shop two doors up from their house, but they’d shopped at Flaum’s for forty years. Yidel dropped some coins into the withered hand of the man who was parked outside in his wheelchair and who constantly muttered. “Tshebiner yeshiva,” the man said. “Tshebiner yeshiva.”