On Division
Page 8
“You’re a good looker,” Surie said in English, smiling at him, “but not a good finder.” They both laughed. Her body tingled all over and she began humming a wedding tune. He always had that effect on her. Such a lovely man. She knew she was lucky, luckier than many of her friends. She held out the broom and said, “Ready for the mizinkel dance?” At the wedding of the youngest child the parents dance with a broom to sweep out the house after the last of their children leave. For them, there never would be a broom dance, a home without young children. They would likely die before the twins left home. She wished she could spare her children the loss of their parents at a young age. Her parents’ deaths had devastated Surie. Her only sister became moody and remote. And her brothers had up and moved to Belgium as a group, to “get away from this depressing place,” they’d said.
So Yidel and his family were really the only family she had. He smiled at her slyly, then glanced over at Tzila Ruchel. He took one end of the broom she was holding and began to sway and hum along. “Don’t tell your siblings about the shameful mixed dancing you are witnessing in your own home, eh, Tzila Ruchel?” he said. “Family secrets.”
“Remember that Purim with Lipa?” Tzila Ruchel said, giggling. Lipa had dressed in Surie’s ponzhelo and turban and come out and danced with Tzila Ruchel in full view of all the guests and then quickly scurried back down the hall. The cousins hadn’t known it was him, but the family had whooped and chased after Lipa, banging on his bedroom door, begging to take another peek.
“Nobody remembers Lipa,” Surie said.
“Stop,” said Yidel, holding out a hand as if he could literally stop the flood of memories the way a policeman stops cars. “I don’t want to have this conversation.”
Surie dropped her end of the broom and went into the bedroom. She opened her purse and looked inside, at the bundle of pregnancy pamphlets. One for each month, detailing the growth of the baby, the new abilities, when the fingernails grew, the hair, the irises of the eyes. Now, the baby was the size of a lemon. Now, a butternut squash. Now, a watermelon. All this from a single seed carelessly tossed into her fallow field.
EIGHT
The next morning at five, down by the river, Surie watched the gulls rising and falling on guts spilled from a tuna cannery. They plunged their heads below the waves and then rose in the air, their backs arched, screaming. Two fire trucks raced by, their sirens blaring. It was probably the matzo bakery. The ovens, on the second floor, were always catching on fire. The gulls plunged underwater again.
Surie couldn’t swim. She couldn’t fly. She didn’t even have the skill of a New York cockroach, which could flatten itself to the thickness of a blade of grass and crawl between two slabs of drywall, exist for months by nibbling the paste that held the wallpaper to the wall, lay a thousand eggs even as it was crushed under a boot. The simplest, coarsest natural thing mindlessly performed its role in life better than she could. If she could end the pregnancy somehow, in a way that wasn’t too dreadful, in a way that was rabbinically sanctioned, she would. Would jumping up and down help? Or lying facedown on the floor? Praying? She didn’t know. She was afraid to try. She didn’t want to do anything forbidden. And the thought of harming a child, any child, turned her stomach.
The gull did not try to change its destiny. It knew only the river, the fish, the stale crust of bread. The cockroach did not fight what it was given. It knew only the wall, the paste, the boot. What did it matter if she was afraid about the birth, the strength she had left to raise the babies, the length of her own life? Why should she keep anything from Yidel, who had only ever been kind? She should be a seagull, brave and determined. She should be a cockroach.
* * *
When she returned to her apartment, she watered the leggy geranium that grew in a plastic pot in the window and she threw out some of the containers of food that had been too long in the icebox. She made her youngest son’s bed and slipped a love note under the seventeen-year-old’s pillow, then she took a chocolate cake out of the freezer and went to stand in line for the 8:00 a.m. bikur cholim bus that would take her into Manhattan. Lipa had taken a different bus, or maybe a train, when he traveled to Manhattan. The city scared her. Had he also been afraid?
On her way to be weighed and measured, she paused with her hand on the granite receptionist counter and gave a large slice of the chocolate cake to the secretary, who the previous week had seemed tired and melancholy. “It’s probably not the most healthy thing to eat in the morning, but it does taste good,” she said. “Chocolate lifts the spirits.”
A few minutes later, the secretary—not a small woman herself—brought Surie a hospital gown in a 5X that would actually cover her bulk. She also brought a spare sheet to act as a shawl were the garment to fail.
When Surie climbed onto the midwife’s table and leaned back, Val noticed the gown. “I didn’t know they made them so large,” she said, plucking at the aqua cotton sprinkled with mauve hippos.
“Live and learn,” said Surie, being a cockroach, being a gull. “Maybe you will have another large woman come into your clinic and you will know where to find something that doesn’t make her feel like a sardine can wearing a sardine.” The midwife laughed, partially because of the strange image and partially because there was a new note in Surie’s voice. And Surie had looked her in the eye.
“Why haven’t you told your husband about the twins?” Val asked. “You’re not worried he might … hurt you?”
Surie looked over the midwife’s shoulder. Lipa sat, watching, on a high stool in the corner, as the midwife listened to the heart tones of the babies using a long wooden ear horn. His own heart beat as fast as an unborn child’s. She felt the long silence burning the inside of her lips and she knew a little of what it had been like to be him. Lipa was there and then he was not there, though Surie did not look away from him.
“We are both very busy,” Surie said finally. “I’m waiting for the right time to tell him.” And to herself, she said, After we talk about Lipa, we will talk about the babies.
* * *
The doctor, meanwhile, had been making plans about the best way to keep Surie from the worst obstetric disasters. What if it were his grandmother who had mysteriously fallen pregnant? Naani, who couldn’t read a watch but always knew the time anyway? Or worse, his beautiful mother! What wouldn’t he do to protect them from harm! But the thought of his elegant, reserved mother having an intimate moment made him squirm and blush, and though he would, of course, be compassionate to Surie and treat her with the respect he’d been trained to give to the elderly, when he saw her in the hallway, he felt his hamstrings tighten, the muscles along his jaw contract, parts that he didn’t like to reference during work hours shrivel.
He stopped her. It was imperative, he said politely, that she undergo amniocentesis immediately, perhaps even that same day, before it was too late to make any important decisions.
“The hospital has never had such an aged mother. The oldest mother until now has been a woman who was fifty. And she wasn’t delivering twins. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it is a matter of national medical interest. I’ve been discussing your case with my colleagues.” The specialist, in fact, had almost bitten Dr. Bhatnagar’s head off. He’d been furious not to have been called in from the first day. Naturally, he didn’t tell her about the specialist, but Dr. Bhatnagar did think Surie would like to hear that rather than an embarrassment, her pregnancy was of interest to many important people.
Surie looked beyond the doctor. She glanced at the doors along the corridor, but Lipa was not there. She opened her purse. Her son’s green glasses were still resting in their Ziploc bag.
“Sometimes…” The doctor hesitated, as an unworthy image of his mother floated up in his mind. He felt like a boy again, crying in the school bathroom, traumatized by the first whispered tidbits about sex. “Not my mother!” he’d said, and the circle of boys had jeered at him. He blundered on, telling Surie what the specialist had said, all the w
hile folding and refolding his hands in front of his crotch: “We have a film crew on hand for unusual births.” Her face was frozen. “And”—he had told the specialist that no Chassidic woman would agree, but the man had shouted at him—“newspaper coverage.”
She shut her purse with a click.
“Maternal age being such a risk factor these days, and yet more and more common. New York mothers would be reassured to think this hospital could manage such high-risk pregnancies.”
She unsealed the Ziploc bag and took out the green glasses and opened their arms and slid the spectacles up onto her nose. It was a strong prescription. Her eyes began to water.
“I wonder,” Surie said, pulling the glasses down lower so that she could look at the doctor over the lenses. The huge frames in that lurid green looked incongruous on her pale face, tucked under her modest scarf. “What it might be like for you to have a film crew there while you struggle to remove some piece of surgical equipment you left inside a patient by mistake?”
The doctor’s face collapsed like a cake when the oven door is slammed. Moisture oozed from his cheeks. He writhed inside his tailored jacket. He was most sorry, but he had forgotten to mention something, he told Mrs. Eckstein. She was this close to preeclampsia. She could die. The babies could die. It happened regularly and to people in much better health than her.
Surie nodded and thanked him for the information. She smiled at the doctor and then handed him the neatly folded gown. She did not wish him a good day, because one does not wish doctors good days. A good day for a doctor means a day with many seriously ill patients.
When she was seated on the bikur cholim bus at 2:00 p.m. to return to Williamsburg, she opened her plastic Harrods bag, broke off a large piece of the leftover chocolate cake, and ate it with relish. Then she offered a piece to the woman sitting next to her. The woman seemed petrified. Her eyes looked at Surie’s face and looked away, over and over.
“Are you sure this is the right bus for you?” the woman said. This, though Surie was meticulously dressed in the fashion of the community and spoke the familiar dialect of Yiddish with her companion. It wasn’t the glasses. She’d taken them off and put them back inside her handbag.
They didn’t know each other—the community had close to a hundred thousand members, and many of the mothers stayed at home. But it seemed that the other woman could not believe that Surie was part of the community at all.
“What is wrong?” Surie asked her. She had taken this bus many times before, and no one had ever challenged her right to be there.
“Where are you from?” the woman asked. “You don’t look like anyone I know.”
Surie glanced at her reflection in the dark window. There was something unfamiliar about her posture, the way she was holding her head, the set of her lips. And there was some loosening that she felt in her lungs, her chest, that had begun the moment she opened her mouth to the doctor.
“You are quite right,” Surie said. “I must have made a mistake. I don’t think this is my bus.” Before the bus could leave, she gathered up her package of cake and her handbag and stood up. She did not feel like the same Surie who had come into Manhattan earlier in the day. She did not feel the same as the woman who had cooked five omelets and brewed a huge urn of coffee that morning. But she could not say in which way she felt different. She thought only that she would walk across the bridge rather than ride in the bus and that the fresh air would do her body some good.
At the center of the Williamsburg Bridge, fifteen minutes into what had turned out to be a steep walk, she turned and peered through the faded red girders. She didn’t know much about New York, despite having lived in the city her entire life. Far below, the river moved like a scarf rippling in the wind, rolling over and over itself. It did not look like the familiar tame water at the end of her street.
A lone tourist pointed her camera at a distant building and said, “The Empire State Building!”
Surie pointed her finger down at the water and said, “The East River.”
The tourist asked her twice to repeat herself and then, still frowning, walked away. I love you, East River, Surie thought. She broke off a piece of cake and fed it to the river. “I am trying to love you, babies,” she whispered, and she sank her teeth into the cake.
* * *
The next week, when she went into the clinic, she asked the secretary how to correctly pronounce the East River in English and she listened to the young girl carefully, and then tried to say it. When Surie spoke, it sounded like di est drivver. “The East River,” said the secretary over and over. She had an accent too, maybe from Jamaica, a little singsong patois from her part of Brooklyn, the t’s strong and clean. “The Eeeeeeeastt. Rivuh.”
For the next couple of weeks, after her checkup, Surie decided to walk back over the bridge instead of riding in the stuffy bus, whether it was snowing or a cold wind blew from the north, with her hands inside the pockets of her good wool coat and her knitted scarf up near her mouth, humming a little lullaby for the twins, “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen,” and each time she stood next to a tourist or a hipster or a cyclist and pointed down at the river and said, “The Eeeeeeast River.” If she looked out from one side of the bridge, she could see the Empire State Building. And she could see the roof of her own building, where, in the sixties, Dead Opa had installed washing lines for the diapers and racks on which to stretch the hides and a low iron fence painted red so that no Ecksteins would accidentally fall down to the sidewalk.
One Shabbos afternoon in the beginning of her second trimester, Surie invited her family to walk with her over the Williamsburg Bridge. Her children knew that sometimes she walked home over the bridge after visiting sick people in Manhattan.
“But is it permitted?” Yidel asked. “To pass from one island to another on the holy Shabbos?”
Tzila Ruchel’s husband, a rabbi who taught in the kollel, said that it was allowed. He was much stricter than Yidel in such matters and so they deferred to him. Tzila Ruchel no longer wore a wig under her scarf like Surie and instead wore the holier shpitzel, a piece of unraveled brown silk over padding that looked nothing like hair. She always wore sleeves down to her wrists; she wove rubber through her collars so that they would stand up higher on her neck.
Tzila Ruchel’s little daughters grinned and ran for their matching rabbit-fur hoods. They rarely went anywhere besides school and home. The new baby and the two-year-old stayed behind with Dead Opa, who couldn’t walk far. Surie held Dead Onyu’s hand and led her to the bridge and up the entrance ramp. “Lift your foot higher. There is a curb. A puddle. A dog. A bag of garbage. Bend to the left a little. There is a girder. A cyclist. There, Onyu. Below us, the river is so far down! You can’t imagine how far down the East River is.”
This was the bridge Lipa had taken on his way to some foreign part of Manhattan, to that glittering stainless-steel-and-glass life he had lived. When he had crossed the bridge, had he looked back toward his house with its crown of red fencing, or had he only looked forward?
“I can smell it,” Dead Onyu said. “Like onions and cabbage and the ocean.” She smiled. “Like the Tisa! Tell me what you see down there. Are there caves?” Her mother-in-law had walked next to the East River when she could see. She knew there weren’t caves, but Surie told her about the long, narrow barges and the stumpy little tugboats and the way the water rippled like a flag in a strong wind. When they came to the middle of the bridge, she pointed down at the river and slowly enunciated, “The Eeeeeast River,” and Surie’s grandchildren copied her pronunciation and giggled.
Afterward, she sat in her armchair and Dead Onyu sat next to her in Yidel’s armchair and Yidel sat at the table together with Tzila Ruchel and Tzila Ruchel’s husband and their children, and everyone was talking all at once, and laughing, and their faces were bright red from the cold and their ears were red and their fingers were itching, but they were happy.
Dead Onyu leaned forward and sniffed Surie and tilted her head.
“Don’t say anything yet,” she whispered in her mother-in-law’s ear. It was an ordinary request, because all of the women of that community withheld the news of their pregnancies from their friends until past the fifth month and even afterward didn’t refer to it directly. “Not even to Yidel.”
Standing closely so that no one could see, Dead Onyu pressed her wrinkled palm into Surie’s belly.
“It’s too early,” Surie said, “to feel them kicking.”
“But you are very large,” Dead Onyu said. “Them?” She frowned and smiled at the same time.
“Twins!” Surie said. How good it felt to speak about the pregnancy! The East River sweeping New York’s garbage out to the sea. She leaned forward and pulled her mother-in-law against her, and for a moment, Surie rested her head on the old woman’s shoulder.
“But I can’t do it this time,” she said, turning her head and whispering into Dead Onyu’s ear. “I can’t. It’s impossible. I’m too tired. I need time. I want to rest.” She began, very quietly, to cry. “I’m too old.”
“If you don’t want to be old,” Dead Onyu said, “hang yourself when you are young.”
Surie pulled away with a gasp.
“It’s just an expression my mother used to say! I’m sorry, darling.” Dead Onyu stood up and pulled Surie to her feet. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Nobody thinks,” Surie mumbled. “Nobody ever thinks…”
“Take me downstairs, darling. I need to rest.” In a whisper, Dead Onyu added, “Sha! It’s Shabbos! No crying.” She handed Surie her handkerchief and Surie guided her out into the stairwell.