On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  On Rodney Street, the butcher. Back on Lee, Wagers the grocer. Fish scales floated, glittering, on the freshets running down the side of the street. Rain spilled off the roofs and onto stacked bags of garbage and flattened boxes. Sparrows picked amongst the rubbish. At the bakery, Yidel added five fancy cookies to the decorated cake they’d ordered as a present for the host of that night’s sheva brochos. “For Tzila Ruchel’s girls,” he said. Their thirty-year-old daughter lived on the floor below them. “And one for my best girl,” he said, tossing in a sixth cookie and smiling at her. The carts grew heavier and heavier and leaned to one side, their wheels squawking. Yidel took the heaviest parcels out of Surie’s cart and put them into his. Just before lunch they returned to their apartment building. Her mother’s clock struck midday.

  “Go on up,” Yidel told her. He would pull both carts up the stairs, but he wasn’t getting any younger either. Sometimes she worried he’d have a heart attack or a stroke. What would happen if she suddenly blurted out that she was expecting twins?

  “I’ll heat the soup,” she said.

  TWO

  On the second afternoon after the ultrasound, a full forty-eight vanished hours after she found out she was carrying twins, Surie stood again at her sink, washing the small glass cups that held the Shabbos candles with ammonia and a rag. She had tears in her eyes, but she always had tears in her eyes when she used ammonia.

  “I’ve decided to go with the bikur cholim bus each week with Schwartz néni,” she told Yidel. “On Friday afternoons. I have free time.” It was a Monday. She was giving him plenty of notice.

  It wasn’t exactly lying, to say that she was going to the hospital to visit the sick. She’d bring chocolate cake. She’d stop and say some psalms at the patients’ beds. And then she’d make her way to the obstetrics clinic. If it was a lie, it was by omission.

  Yidel didn’t say anything. He sat at the table reading the Yiddish newspaper.

  “I’m bored,” she explained. Moisture pooled under her arms, at the base of her spine. It collected under the bulge of her belly. “Empty days do strange things to a person.”

  Why was she lying? She’d never lied to Yidel before. She put the rag in the glass and twisted it.

  “The other wives say they get antsy when they go through the change.”

  Yidel blushed and rustled his paper, then folded it and stood up. “So, you are normal. A normal wife. Good. Thank God.” Yidel had always been the most loving of fathers, infinitely patient. Though he’d be surprised at the situation, he would be proud of the twins. His age hadn’t slowed him down; he still ran up and down the stairs, schlepping multiple grandchildren on his back, shouting out old Hungarian counting rhymes. Every day, he would roll the twins to shil and his friends would have to tell him to shut up, they’d already heard all his stories about the babies, and no, they didn’t want to see his new photos either. At two in the morning, when she would be too exhausted to lift the babies out of their cribs to feed them, he’d help her. Afterward, when she was lying in her tousled bed, smelling of sour milk and unwashed linen, she would hear him murmuring lullabies, an infant over each arm, rocking them in the front room so as not to disturb her. Was his enthusiasm for anything baby-related the thing that held her mouth closed, his inability to see the long-term consequences? The happiness she knew he’d feel when she wasn’t yet capable of feeling anything close to joy?

  Her granddaughters, home from school because of the wedding, came bounding up the stairs, each a lovely thing, a shining golden peach, and she dried her hands and pulled them toward her. “My darlings, my little lambs, come, let Bubbie give you a nice hot cocoa to drink. And I think Zaidy has something for you too.”

  The girls went to a cheder that was one block closer to the river down Division. All day long she could hear the Ikvei bells ringing, the voices of hundreds of girls singing, their chattering as they lined up to get on the buses after school. Her granddaughters only had to cross Wythe to get home. But she didn’t know why Tzila Ruchel had to send them to such a strict school. Did her daughter want to be praised for being the most religious in the entire family? Or was this some kind of distancing, some way of signaling to the community that Tzila Ruchel’s family wasn’t really connected to poor Lipa? Surie’s four daughters had all gone to di alte cheder on Marcy and Keap and that had been good enough.

  She opened the icebox and took out milk. Tzila Ruchel, at thirty, had just had her seventh baby and needed help in the afternoons, which Surie was usually only too happy to give. She peeled the metal seal off the glass bottle and poured milk into a pot. She pulled the girls’ arms from their raincoats, hung the dripping garments on the nails above the window. The children exclaimed over their cookies and pushed against her in the small kitchen, and she stroked their heads, kissed their cheeks. Such darlings.

  “Did you know,” she asked them, “that Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach captured eighty witches all at once? Are you curious how he did it?” The witches ate human beings in their caves. There must have been human skulls on the floor, covered in moss. The smell of the cooking milk made Surie gag. The girls would be ashamed that their old grandmother was pregnant. She was ashamed of herself, of her traitorous body. When she found out, Tzila Ruchel, that mefunek, wouldn’t send her daughters upstairs to Surie after school. Even if by some miracle the fusspot did let them come, their grandmother’s house would no longer be a peaceful haven. It would be filled with the screams of hungry infants.

  “Your Feter Lipa loved the story of Shimon ben Shetach and the witches.”

  The little girls had been trilling about the new dresses they’d be wearing to that night’s sheva brochos, but now they looked at Surie with frowns. They knew the names of all of their uncles. Who was this stranger, this Lipa?

  Lipa stood next to her mother’s clock, his hand on the ivory escutcheon, turning the key back and forth, the edges of his body moving like a curtain in a breeze, filling and turning and collapsing. He’d been standing there for several minutes, not speaking. It had been him outside the hospital too. She glanced at him for a moment, her heart beating faster and faster. He slowly looked up at her.

  “Your uncle…,” she said. “He was here. But now he’s not.”

  The girls smiled uncertainly and switched to being excited about the boats Yidel was making them from his newspaper. They didn’t care about Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach and the witches, and they thought maybe their grandmother was teasing them about this uncle. They hadn’t noticed that their bubbie was the size of a small car. They had no knowledge of the facts of life. The rain struck the windows as if small pebbles were hitting the glass.

  “We can go downstairs and sail them in the alley,” Yidel said. He gave Surie a look with a question mark in it. She was gripping the edge of the table. Her fingers were white, but Lipa was no longer next to the clock. “Go ask your mother. But don’t wake her up if she’s sleeping.”

  They’d all been up late the night before. The newly married girl had fallen asleep at the meal in her honor, her mouth hanging open, and Tzila Ruchel had stood hurriedly and tapped Gitty on the shoulder.

  The children threw on their wet raincoats and ran down the stairs, yelping and shrieking. Yidel’s father and mother, both blind, lived on the first floor of the building. In the fifties and sixties, the third floor had been rented out, but after Tzila Ruchel was married, it had become her new home. Surie had been living on the second floor ever since the day she’d married Yidel. She’d switched apartments with Tzila Ruchel so that her daughter wouldn’t have to pull the heavy baby carriage up three flights of stairs. But at this age, Surie wouldn’t be able to pull a carriage upstairs, and Yidel, though he’d want to, shouldn’t do it either. Would they have to switch apartments again? She didn’t want to go back to her old place. She loved the view of the river and the bridge from the third floor. She hoped that something would change. That somehow, two new babies wouldn’t join her tainted family. The midwife had said as much. Seventy-five pe
rcent of women older than forty-five miscarry. Her stomach clenched. She wasn’t excited about the twins, but she didn’t want to lose them either. A soul was a precious thing.

  But what if the babies were born with Down syndrome? Women even younger than her left sickly infants at the hospital rather than bringing them home. She couldn’t blame them. Most of those mothers were old and already had ten or twelve or fifteen children. They simply didn’t have the strength left to raise a child with special needs. But what did they tell themselves about the preciousness of souls? She had no strength either. What would she tell herself if it came to that?

  * * *

  During the appointment two days earlier, Val had forgotten that Surie lived in the same building as her daughter’s family and her in-laws. “What’s the difference between in-laws and outlaws?” she’d asked, and when Surie shrugged, she’d finished the joke: “Outlaws are wanted.” The midwife, who was not a womanly person, laughed in a hoarse bark and then covered her mouth with her giant hand. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m embarrassing myself!” Surie knew what an outhouse was, but she wasn’t familiar with the word outlaw. Did it mean cousins?

  “My cousins came for the holidays,” she said carefully. She hated when people thought she wasn’t intelligent or couldn’t follow a conversation in English, even though she often couldn’t. Some of her guests had stayed on after Sukkos for the wedding. “They slept in the sukkah on the roof.” There was a tiny air well between the buildings, protected by a sloping tin roof that was only accessible from the kitchen window. Despite the difficulty and his age, Yidel had climbed out the window before the holidays and slowly nailed up boards to make a room. He’d covered the bamboo rafters with evergreen boughs. The cousins all brought sleeping bags and said they were going camping. It was easier than going down three flights of stairs to Tzila Ruchel’s sukkah each time they wanted a glass of water.

  “Uh-huh,” said the midwife, wrinkling her nose. “With that many people in the house, I hope you left the windows open every morning for at least half an hour. It’s…” She left the sentence hanging.

  On the wall of the office, a baby floated head down in a narrow frame of white scaffolding.

  The midwife followed Surie’s eyes. “That’s at nine months,” she said about the poster. “Don’t you remember? When the baby’s head is well down in the pelvis.” Her gestures were large and immodest. She was hard to look at. Surie felt a little sad for Val, whom she imagined might have been the butt of unkind jokes her whole life.

  Surie had never seen an image of the inside of her body. Her bones. Her parts. Prior to this pregnancy, the midwife had always come to her and she hadn’t brought along pamphlets, photographs, diagrams, and maps. Surie would have burned such obscene literature. If one of her sons saw it!

  Imagery of any kind was forbidden in her house. Photographs. Paintings. Sculptures. There were a couple of needlepoints of flowers in the dining room, a piece of black velvet painted with the Western Wall and sewn with spangles. She’d barely convinced Yidel to allow their wedding portrait to be hung in the privacy of their bedroom. Now, flustered, she mistook the word pelvis for peltz, a fur, and thought Val was talking about the way goyim liked to pose their naked babies on bear rugs.

  “It’s not our way,” she said. “We take a photograph of the firstborn child on the thirtieth day. We cover it in gold necklaces and dress it in white clothes, a nice knitted outfit.”

  “Isn’t that interesting,” said the midwife, who vaguely remembered such events from other births. Covering a newborn in jewelry couldn’t be sanitary. It puzzled her that even very old Jewish women like Surie looked young. Was it their wigs and their quaint hats and scarves or because of some strange innocence they all possessed? Maybe it was the lack of makeup? Maybe she should allow her orange hair to revert to gray? “You’ll probably have to borrow extra necklaces since you’ll have two babies instead of one.”

  “It’s only the first baby that gets redeemed. The cohen doesn’t want the others.”

  Val snorted, picked up a chart, and penciled in a few words. “That’s nice,” she said. She could never get this stuff right. Every time she thought she had it down, every time she thought some woman would appreciate her cultural understanding, poof, another kink.

  The button on the front of Surie’s blouse came off and fell to the floor. Surie fished around in her handbag and took out a needle and thread. She pulled off a little of the thread, put it between her teeth, and began to chew. She bit down on the thread as if it were the threat of Down syndrome. She bit hard. She wanted to chew right through it. Then she picked up the needle, threaded it, and with a few stabbing stitches reattached the button to her shirt.

  “That’s a quick job,” Val said. “Maybe I should hire you instead of one of the surgical nurses in the clinic. They have five thumbs, both of them.”

  Surie, startled, smiled. She’d attached buttons almost every day of her adult life and not once had anyone ever said a word about her skill.

  THREE

  That night after the sheva brochos, when Surie’s granddaughters had run back downstairs to their mother, Surie washed all the extra dishes and dried them and put them away. She decided to wear a nightgown she’d been given by a friend as a joke when she had her cancer surgery. After peeking inside the scandalous box at the hospital, she’d squealed and blushed. It had been hilarious at the time, just the thing to give her a little bolt of naughty energy when she felt at her lowest ebb. She should have thrown it away, but she hadn’t. In the back of her closet, she found the box and opened it. A sleeveless white nightgown with a pink silk bow. She pulled it over her head and then covered her bare arms with a cardigan. Under the clingy sheer fabric, the bowl of her belly was visible. When she came out of the bathroom, her husband lifted his head and looked at her. “Nice dress,” he said.

  Her twin bed listed as she climbed in. She didn’t immediately cover herself with the blankets. Earlier, after her periods had stopped, they’d decided to put their two beds together at night. Each morning, she rolled the beds apart and pushed a little nightstand between them. Lying on her back, close to the crack between the joined beds, she pulled the fabric tighter over her belly and glanced at her husband out of the corner of her eye. He was staring at the ceiling.

  “Yidel,” she said, “do you really like this?”

  He didn’t look.

  “It’s not a dress, you know.”

  “It’s a good thing you are such a refined role model for the einiklach,” he said. “Their bubbie is always so elegant.” He was staring at the ceiling, biting the hairs of his mustache. The ticking of the old clock in the living room seemed abnormally loud.

  She pulled the fabric tighter and lifted her hips, willing him to notice.

  Was he blushing? He was! And she was too. The nightgown had been too much, too transparent, too immodest for him. She jerked upright and leapt off the bed with a clanging and crashing of springs and rushed to change.

  “I like this old flannel one,” he said when she returned. It had long sleeves and a high collar with rows of lace. He put his arm around her and put his lips against the back of her neck. “It smells like you.”

  “What do I smell like?”

  “Bleach. Maybe that powder you use to scrub the sink? And silver polish.”

  She sighed and pulled the blankets up over her shoulders. Once covered, she tucked her knees up inside her nightgown. Her thighs pushed into her belly and she could feel the twins fluttering deep within her.

  “How romantic,” she said. “Cleaning fluids.”

  “I love being a grandfather,” he murmured. He loved a lot of things. He would love the twins too. Sometimes it was tiring to listen to all of his enthusiasms and to trip over the clutter from the castoffs in the basement. The mosaic tiles. The sock-knitting machines. The pile of tools he used to create parchment; the rotary sander that had destroyed his hearing. The half-finished cans of paint. At least he tried. Some men could barely g
et out of bed in the morning. And there was something endearing about how childlike he was when he was in the grip of one of these enthusiasms. “Being a zaidy is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I wish it had happened when I was young enough to enjoy it more, instead of having such a hard time getting down in the gutter with the girls this afternoon.”

  “You’re ancient,” she said softly, laughing. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him about the babies. She pulled his hand down over her belly so that he could feel the twins’ movement, discover the pregnancy himself.

  “Decrepit,” he said, pulling her closer. But then he moved his hand a little lower. “And so are you, Madam Clorox.”

  “Creek, eek, creek, groan,” she said, pretending to be his joints. “Or perhaps I should say splish, splash.” She leaned back against his shoulder.

  When the twins were born she would lose this most precious of all things, the quiet love that had arrived after the children had become less needy, when she and Yidel finally had a little time to discover each other. Her mouth tasted like rust.

  On the window ledge, just beyond Lipa’s green glasses, two pigeons huddled out of the rain, making strange gurgling sounds. Their eyes were closed and their feathers seemed almost turquoise in the light from the nightstand.

  “The new Pathmark that opened up is probably cheaper than Greenstein’s,” he said.

  “I’d rather give my money to a person. Someone who knows my name.”