On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  It was more words than the midwife had ever heard any of these women say and she was ashamed. It would be many months before she would again ask a laboring woman wearing a scarf and seamed taupe stockings, in the face of her stoic silence, her lack of curiosity, her denial of exhaustion, “What is it with you women?”

  It had been more words than Surie had ever said to the midwife, and a few minutes later, she would barely remember saying them. Without any warning, she grabbed Val around the neck and began to scream that she wanted to go to the hospital, and Val laughed and said, “Looks like we are having us a baby!”

  Her last son, her Chaim Tzvi, was born and placed on her chest and she thanked God and hoped that she was finally done, that there wouldn’t be any more children, and then she retreated into that place where new mothers go when all of the violence is done. And that was thirteen years ago. Yes. She’d said what was true for her then. Until that birth, she had been excited about each new pregnancy. Now, she had white hairs in places unmentionable. She no longer needed to wear a bra. Her doctor was recommending a knee replacement. The crying of her grandchildren sometimes set her teeth on edge. And she did not want to be pregnant. Not this time.

  FOUR

  On a Friday morning in December two weeks after the visit to the clinic, Surie and Yidel rose at dawn. After rushing through breakfast, they parted: he to go to the synagogue for the psalms club, she to polish the candelabra for Chanukah. The rain had stopped, the temperature dropped, and the wind swung around to the northwest. The sky, a tight crisp blue, suggested snow later in the afternoon.

  “Take a scarf,” she said to Yidel, and tucked one of the dozens of plain black scarves they owned around his neck. It was permitted to touch him. The boys had already left for their yeshivos. There was nobody to see this intimacy.

  Yidel put on his rubber overshoes and pushed the ends of the scarf into his coat. “Goodbye,” he said. He put his palm against her cheek and she cupped his hand with hers. “I’ll bring back olive oil.”

  “Enough for everyone. At least two large cans. Hurry!” she said, and he nodded, glancing at the big clock, then slipped his hand from under hers and went out.

  He was such a decent man, a better-than-good husband. He’d always loved their babies, held them in his lap, staring into their slate-blue eyes for hours. He’d been the one who painted their bodies with calamine lotion and ran oatmeal bath after oatmeal bath that year they all had chicken pox at the same time; he’d helped drag the enormous baskets of laundry downstairs, twenty or twenty-five baskets a week, and then hauled the heavy loads up to the roof for her to peg out. Before his daughters’ parent-teacher conferences, he’d prepared a list of questions, and on the night, he’d squeezed his bulk behind the little desks, one of the only fathers to come to the girls’ building. On his bedside table, under the glass sheet that protected the wood, sat his favorite item in the house, a note from Tzila Ruchel written when she was six or seven, saying that he was the best father in the world. A tiny note covered in crayon kisses. Why was she worrying? Yidel would be thrilled to be a father again. So what if he was ready to retire? When she told him, he’d leap into the air like one of the chickens. He’d squawk and flap. They’d hear his cheering in Crown Heights. It wasn’t fear of Yidel’s reaction that was holding her back. It was something else. But what?

  * * *

  While Yidel was gone, Surie worked on the old silver menorah. It had come all the way from Romania. Dead Onyu’s only living sister, who had since died, had given it to Surie for her wedding. Surie, at sixteen, had worn her hair in two long braids down her back. When she’d met Yidel a few weeks earlier, she’d worn a dark green rayon dress from the 1930s. She’d found the bias-cut dress in one of the charity bundles people had started leaving at their door when her mother was diagnosed and her father had to stop working. It had a little bow at the waist and pleats over the bust.

  Yidel had been clean and presentable. He’d worn new clothes that didn’t smell like mothballs. He hadn’t looked at her as far as she could tell. She sometimes joked about that brief meeting with him. “I took a peek at you at the b’show,” he always responded, smiling. “Ooh la la.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she replied. “You thought I had red hair. I remember. You thought I wore a pink dress.”

  The legs were attached with screws that had been stripped, and the menorah stood shakily. Like me, she thought as she rubbed the rouge cloth in circles. Her feet were swollen, dark purple at the ankles, the skin dimpled and coarse. Thick blue veins snaked down her legs. It was way too late for the special pantyhose of pregnancy. Yidel, had he known, would have made her wear support from the first day, not because he wanted his wife to have beautiful legs but because he wanted to lessen her pain.

  She polished the window with vinegar and a sheet of newspaper. When it was sparkling clean, she covered the windowsill with aluminum foil to protect against drips and fire and then lined up a row of tin candelabras on the ledge. There was no more beautiful sight than all of the windows in Williamsburg lit with menorahs, snow spiraling softly down just outside. There was no worse sight than the flashing of the red and blue lights of the fire trucks outside a burning apartment.

  She set a twenty-pound gogosha dough to rise on a shelf behind the stove. She brought a third load of laundry to the basement and folded the second. She peeled potatoes for latkes and left them soaking in a pot of cold water in the sink. She polished the brass menorah from Hungary that had been her own father’s, and then she polished the menorah she had bought for her son Lipa at his bar mitzvah. It was silver-plated but had an embossed design of lions holding a shield. She put that one back in the breakfront. Afterward, she took a yahrzeit candle from the drawer and put it on the windowsill together with the menorahs. And then it was lunchtime.

  Her six married children climbed the stairs, laughing and calling out, with their wives and their husbands and all of their children. Surie had thirty-two grandchildren, and every Friday night, she lit a candle for each one of them and said their names in a long, prayerful chant. Her oldest son, Eluzer, was forty, not a child but still a child to her despite his height, his age, his seriousness, his long beard just beginning to go gray. Her son’s daughter, the first of his ten children, was already married. Within a few months, Surie would be a great-grandmother.

  Dead Onyu and Dead Opa groaned as they were lifted, one at a time, into the motorized chair that climbed the stairs to her apartment on a toothed track. Surie’s children and grandchildren all looked alike, with their long, narrow faces and their navy-black eyes and their dark clothing.

  She had many names. Surie. Onyu. Mamme, Mommy, Shviger, Tantie, Bubbie. Soon Surie would be called Dead Onyu, Great-Grandmother, and Dead Onyu would be called Ook Onyu, Great-Great-Grandmother. They all spoke together in their Hungarian-inflected Yiddish, and her children and her children’s children hugged her and kissed her hand and told her what they’d brought for the family meal. This one day in the year, for the past four years, her family cooked and she didn’t. Her daughters took over the tiny galley kitchen and began grating the potatoes, and her second son, who liked to cook, began frying the doughnuts. The house filled with the smell of hot oil and onions and children’s diapers. The table was covered in delicacies, each of her daughters and daughters-in-law trying to outdo the others with delkelach or dobos torte or aranygaluska, krumplileves or cheesy papanaşi or walnut-apple-poppy-seed flódni.

  It was a small apartment, narrow and lightless. The children set up a bowling alley in the long hallway and took turns rolling balls, knocking over plastic seltzer bottles filled with sand. The girls’ group took a turn, then the boys’ group.

  As the oily smoke drifted through the apartment, the smell began to overcome Surie, and she felt sick despite her efforts to close her nose. In a moment, her stomach would turn upside down. In this apartment, there was only a small bathroom with two doors, one leading to her bedroom and the other into the hall where the children wer
e playing. They would hear everything. They would worry about her and run to their parents for reassurance, and one of her pregnant daughters-in-law would make a whispered joke to another daughter-in-law about morning sickness. She could picture their horror if she told them she was expecting twins. The silence, the flaming faces, the shocked eyes. Nobody would say, “In a gite sha’a.” Nobody would ask her when she was due. They would glance from her to Yidel and back again and everyone would be thinking that some crime had been committed, to make a great-grandmother pregnant.

  She had to get away from the smells! Surie turned to Dead Onyu and said, “You look cold.” The room was insanely overheated. Perspiration was running down her face.

  Dead Onyu gripped her arm and sniffed the air. “What is wrong, Surie? Will you tell me?”

  Surie shook off her mother-in-law and announced that she was running downstairs for her sweater.

  No one would let her. “Today is your day off, Mamme,” said Eluzer, leading her to a chair and drawing up a footstool. “I’ll catch the cardigan.” Tzila Ruchel brought her a glass of hot cocoa with marshmallows floating in the cream. A granddaughter climbed into her lap. Was it terrible that she couldn’t always attach each child’s name to the correct face? Small droplets of sweat stood out on Surie’s forehead. She licked her lips. The salt tasted good. But she was afraid she might vomit on the head of the child. At last, the feeling passed and she was able to lean back against the upholstery and breathe again.

  Someone had opened a window and the cold wind blew over her, bringing the deep green scent of the river. Through the window, she could see clouds piling up above the tops of the tallest plane trees. Hundreds of Canada geese flew past in a V, honking, heading someplace warmer. In the nearest tree, crows shuffled on the branches, hunched against the wind. The big clock’s gears ground, a click, a moment of suspense, and then the tolling. It was three, only an hour before Shabbos. A single white flake passed the window and then another.

  “It’s snowing,” one of the girls called, and everyone cheered and crowded around the windows. “Der Oibershter is emptying out the feathers from His feather bed!”

  Surie walked into her bedroom and looked up at the map of Europe on the ceiling. Coats covered her bed, a mountain of black woolen cloth lined with black silk. She wanted to lie down. She felt very tired. Her legs hurt. She scratched the nape of her neck, the inside of her wrist, her jaw. If she wasn’t careful, she would draw blood. She took off her nice scarf and her short wig and covered her head with a cotton turban. She looked at herself in the mirror. Some bubbie. Then she took off the turban and replaced it with the scarf and the stiffened piece of false hair again. This might be the last year her children came for Chanukah. Next year they would know what she kept secret this year. She should try to enjoy. Who knew what next year would be like? Who knew if she’d even be alive? To be pregnant at fifty-seven … She should go and sit with the family.

  “You look beautiful, Bubbie.”

  Surie jumped. Seated behind the mirror, just inside the old-fashioned wardrobe, was her oldest granddaughter, Tzila Ruchel’s daughter, who had been born at the same time as Surie’s Chaim Tzvi, thirteen years earlier. The girl sat on a folded coat with a book on her knees. This child had thick blond hair parted into two braids. She was known to be very smart. She was much smarter than Chaim Tzvi, who’d been affected by his long birth. Everyone worried about her. Being too smart was not good. Instead of the girl’s face, Surie saw her sixth child’s face, her son Lipa with his dark eyes and his sad expression and the strange green glasses he had come home wearing once. As a young child, he had also liked to sit inside the wardrobe and read. Sometimes he’d fallen asleep in there, and she’d had to lift him and carry him to his room, his dear little head bobbing on her shoulder, his soft payos cushioning her cheek. This, the first night of Chanukah, was Lipa’s fourth anniversary. If only he were here. She wouldn’t say anything about the strangeness of his glasses.

  Lipa faded slowly. Surie touched the green-rimmed glasses in the pocket of her apron. She was alone with the girl again. She walked to her granddaughter and put out her hand. “Miryam Chiena,” she said, “shall we go and join the others?”

  They walked hand in hand out to the dining room and everyone was eating the special foods prepared in honor of Chanukah, though it wouldn’t be Chanukah until the sun set. Yidel leaned back in his chair, his hands crossed over his belly, humming an old wordless song. This was their custom, to eat early and light the candles and then walk down the streets, looking at the menorahs in the windows and calling to their friends, many of whom would also be walking in the streets.

  One of the little boys sat crying under the table because he hadn’t received the last lick of the cheese crowns.

  “Come,” Surie said, and she bent over her belly, gasping, to lift him out and get him one of the chocolates that were supposed to be only for the grown-ups. “Aren’t you special, my lamb?” And he gloated and licked the chocolate slowly in front of the other children, taking his time, tormenting them.

  Lipa had always been the child crying under the table. His cousins had picked on him. He had no backbone. He could never hit the plastic seltzer bottles with the ball, and he preferred to sit in her room, organizing her shoes in the wardrobe. He never wanted to wear the black clothing they all wore, and from the time he was five, he’d asked for brown shoes, navy trousers, blue-striped shirts, a maroon yarmulke stitched with a gold star. She had said no. Such small things he had wanted. Why couldn’t she have said yes? Why had she been so afraid of what others thought that she was unable to see how much these small concessions meant to her son?

  In San Francisco, four years earlier, they had been taken to see him. On a metal table in the middle of a white floor was a body covered with a piece of plastic. Yidel lifted the sheet and looked at their son’s face and said nothing. Fat tears fell from his eyes and into his beard. “This boy is not my son,” he said. She had run to the table and pulled the plastic out of his hands. It was Lipa. He did not have his payos. He had a tattoo on his chest and a metal ring through one nipple. Around his neck was a dark purple line that came to a V in the front, like the neckline of an undershirt, and in the gray flesh of his neck were dozens of small cuts.

  “My little boy,” she said. “My lamb.” She covered him with the plastic and tucked it in under him. She stroked the plastic over his head.

  “Come on, Surie. We have to go,” said Yidel.

  “No,” she said.

  “He was never like the others. He had his problems from the start. Look what he has come to. It wasn’t anything to do with us.”

  “They shouldn’t have whispered about him like they did,” she said.

  FIVE

  The community had found out about Lipa when he was arrested on nine felony counts of malicious mischief involving infected body fluids. Heads of the community had paid the quarter-million bail. Out loud, the rabbis said they didn’t believe such lies about one of their own. The details weren’t something to talk about. Sha, shtiller. No one in the community was like that; such behavior didn’t happen among their own men; the arrest was some kind of scam. The story was a filthy stinking lie made up by anti-Semites, a new kind of blood libel. But despite what was said out loud, the news had spread like wildfire. The morning after the arrest, when Yidel entered the mikva, the room fell silent. His oldest friend came over to clap him on the back and display his solidarity but swerved at the last minute, afraid to touch Yidel, afraid of contagion. A few people pretended to talk about something else, but then the silence rose up again.

  When he’d called home after his arrest, Lipa told them the accusation was true, though he hadn’t known he was sick or that there was any risk to anyone. At twenty-two, he still didn’t know the names for the things he did. The police didn’t believe him. What kind of person couldn’t know? Did the kid grow up on Mars?

  Surie felt ill, and when a social worker came on the line, describing the medical rout
ine and precautions that would be necessary, she handed the phone over to Yidel. He leaned against the wall, his face white, holding the phone away from his ear. As a result, they were both unclear about the details of infectious transmission.

  Lipa, confused, exhausted, filthy, sobbing, was released into the care of his family. Surie was afraid to let him in the house. She put a pillow and a blanket they’d planned on throwing out onto the plastic-covered couch. Yidel told his father and his sons and nephews and grandsons that they shouldn’t be alone together with Lipa. Surie told her grandchildren that if Lipa touched them or breathed on them, they’d die from a very bad kind of cancer. Lipa’s old friends didn’t visit. Their Ruv didn’t visit either.

  When Lipa went out to buy cigarettes, storekeepers stared at the hand holding out money until he put the cash down on the counter. Then they used a pen to knock the bills into the register. Men who’d known Lipa all his life jackknifed their bodies away from him and couldn’t meet his eyes. His own family jumped whenever he came into a room, and for the first time ever, the door to Tzila Ruchel’s apartment was closed and locked. His mother, Surie, took the china and the silverware she served his food on and, wearing rubber gloves and a mask, threw them into the incinerator. When he tried to return to Manhattan, he found he’d been locked out of his shared apartment. Even the gay community treated him like a pariah for not disclosing his HIV status.