On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  “Listen, my little lamb, you and Yidel are wonderful parents and that won’t change just because you are old.” Dead Onyu snorted. “You’ll pull yourself together when you need to. Stop that sniffling or the others will be out here in quick time.” She slipped the damp handkerchief inside the sleeve of her cardigan. “Didn’t your own mother have you very late? It must run in the family.”

  “After Lipa…”

  “Shhh, shhh.” Dead Onyu put a finger on her lip. “Less said, sooner forgotten.”

  “Do you have any photographs of Lipa?”

  “Why would we keep something we can’t see?” Dead Onyu snapped. “Opa and I had already lost our sight when Lipa … after California … it must be an atonement so that no more bad should ever come our family’s way. You know how I loved Lipa, but really … such a thing … such an evil decree he brought down on us! God forbid the punishment for his actions should land on one of my grandchildren! Opa and I accepted our blindness with gratitude to the will of God for all of your sakes. So let’s not talk about that anymore. You’ll do a better job this time round.” Lipa stood behind Dead Onyu, his face long, his eyes closed, earth falling from his beard. If Surie just reached out her hand, she could hold his jaw in her palm.

  “I hope so,” she said, her hand skating the nothingness that shimmered where her boy had been. “I just don’t know. And I’m so afraid of dying. That’s all the doctor ever talks about. Me. The babies. Every single time I see him he tells me some new way I could die.”

  “And so? What if you do? Dying is not the worst thing.”

  Surie shook her head. “It is! All I can think of is Lipa on that table. The smell.” She had spared Dead Onyu the details.

  “Is that why you haven’t told Yidel? Because you think you might give yourself an evil eye? Somehow cause yourself or your babies to die? Oh, lamb. You’re more likely to have something go wrong if Yidel doesn’t know. He’s so capable. He’ll help you through it.”

  “But the women … they’ll talk about me behind my back. They’ll laugh at me. And Tzila Ruchel will be ashamed of me. All the children will.” Surie sniffed. Yidel stuck his head out the door and raised an eyebrow. She gave him a watery smile and waved him back inside.

  “Let them, the yentas!” said Dead Onyu, who still made her own old-fashioned padded scarves out of scraps she cut from ripped curtains and used-up housecoats. She put clean white sheets on the tables every Shabbos instead of the embroidered Swiss cloths everyone else used. She’d never cared what the community thought of her. “Feh! If that’s the worst thing they could find to say about you…”

  Surie leaned in to hug the old woman again. “I love you, Onyu. I feel like you just saved me from … I don’t know what.”

  “The eyes are useless when the mind is blind. It’s been years since the thought of a pregnancy was on his mind. Yidel won’t know unless you tell him. So for heaven’s sakes, tell him already!” Dead Onyu patted Surie back into an upright position, as if she were molding a clay model of a proper Chassidic mother. “Make sure you eat your vitamins and a little bit of meat every day, darling,” she said. She looked sternly at Surie as if she could see her. “You can kill yourself later.”

  * * *

  “What a day,” Surie said to Yidel as she lay in bed that night, warming her feet between his.

  “I can’t remember one like it,” he said. He touched her cheek. “You’re all rosy from the wind. Glowing.”

  “What do I look like?”

  Again, he looked at her and wondered what it was that he saw. Again, he couldn’t name it.

  “Beautiful as the seven worlds. My wife.” Somehow he imbued these words, my wife, with great meaning.

  “Silly man.” She blushed but pressed herself against him. “If you dress up a broom it looks nice too.”

  “Broom? Who’s talking about a broom? You look like a sweet little lobster. Like you’ve been boiled. That can’t be normal.” He patted her cheeks. “So red! Are you blushing?”

  At the day’s end, to talk like this, quietly, before Yidel took out his hearing aids, was unbearably precious, one of the great joys of her life. She knew it. Her belly rose slowly, remained extended for a minute, and then twitched back to its normal shape. Far too early to be able to feel kicks, and yet. And yet. Twins. They were a whole new parsha. She put her hand in Yidel’s beard. If he didn’t notice the twitch, she would tell him in just a moment.

  “You’re so patient with me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” he said.

  “There’s so many things one person can never know about another person.”

  “Have you been up to mischief? Should I be worried?”

  “Always,” she said. “You know me. Nonstop trouble. But I’m the one who should be worried. What kind of religious Jew sleeps with a lobster?”

  They laughed, but then, instead of telling him about the pregnancy, she began to tell him about what she’d seen at the hospital that Friday, the old woman who had fallen and who had been placed on dialysis, the little child with no hair, the boy who had been hit by a car service and now wore a crown of iron bolts. Just as she got to the end of the tale, she felt the soft puffs of his sleeping breath on her chest. The following morning, by the time she woke up, Yidel had already left for morning prayers.

  NINE

  Often, in those January weeks, Surie tried to say something to Yidel about Lipa, and then, when she couldn’t, when something held her back, her anxiety about the twins increased too. Never before had she kept a secret from Yidel. Never had she felt so lonely or so powerful. Her mouth tasted like ashes. Lying in bed at night, awake hour after hour with the routine aches of pregnancy, she held herself back from speaking, from reaching out to Yidel, who had always been her comfort. Again and again, the words rose into her mouth, and again and again she swallowed them down. Sometimes she knew that Yidel was awake too, but they didn’t turn to each other. What kept him awake? What were the worries of a slightly-beyond-middle-aged man? She had no way of knowing.

  Dead Onyu asked her every day if the babies had moved around overnight, going on and on about what a blessing it was to have twins and how every lady on the street would be jealous of the little bubbelahs in their matching outfits and the brand-new carriage that she, Dead Onyu, wanted to purchase in their honor from the nice shop, the one that sold the European models, and after saying that, she spat three times on the ground to ward off the evil eye. “But why haven’t you told him yet, darling?” she asked and asked and asked, and Surie didn’t have an answer. Every day, Tzila Ruchel thumped up and down the stairs, glaring at Surie’s belly, her mouth in a prim little line. Even Surie’s modest sons raised their eyebrows when they caught her picking at a piece of chocolate babka.

  The day before Tu Bshvat, right after the children had left for school, she asked Tzila Ruchel what she’d done with all of the photographs of Lipa. It seemed to her that if she didn’t find some way to talk about Lipa soon, she would never be able to speak about the twins.

  “Who?” said Tzila Ruchel, her face reddening.

  “I’d just like to see … you know … one photograph of my boychik. Where did you hide them?”

  “Mommy.”

  “Is it so much to ask?”

  “What we don’t talk about ceases to exist.”

  Surie wanted to strangle her own daughter. If the family talked about Lipa, which rarely happened, it was only sideways, in whispers, when no one else was around. If Surie picked up his prayer book by mistake, she knew it was his because the front page, where his name had been, was torn out. Lipa’s tefillin had been given to one of her grandsons after Lipa’s embroidered name had been unpicked from the velvet tefillin bag and replaced with the name of the new bar mitzvah boy. But it didn’t matter if every trace of him had vanished. Lipa still existed. He was still her little boy. Nothing could erase that.

  “Give me the photographs.”

  Tzila Ruchel wiped her hands down the sides of her face. She
took Surie by the elbow and led her down into the basement, to the incinerator. She opened the door and pointed inside at the red flames and the ash rising up the chimney.

  * * *

  Surie ran up the stairs and threw all of the photo albums off the shelves. On almost every page, there were empty rectangles under the clear plastic sheets. She turned the pages so quickly that some of them ripped out of the binder. There had to be one image left! Tzila Ruchel stood in the doorway, frowning, her hands on her hips. “Why is this so important to you?” she asked.

  “I need them!” Surie wailed, not able to put into words how a single photograph could be a key to life, to health, to a peaceful home.

  But there were no photographs of Lipa, not even the edge of his back or a glimmer of his bright eyes peeking from between the other children.

  “You’re being silly,” Tzila Ruchel said, but still, she helped her mother up and into the kitchen and made her a cup of tea and patted her hand, and after she’d taken a few sips, her lovely daughter whispered, “Do you remember when Lipa used to get up in the middle of the night to make gingersnap cookies because he had a craving?”

  Surie smiled. Photographs would have been nice. But this was where Lipa really lived. In stories. “He used to make a dozen and take them all into his bed and hide under the blankets and eat them. His payos would be covered in molasses.”

  “The other boys would be so jealous!” Tzila Ruchel was still whispering and looking around, making sure that no one overheard, though who would, in the middle of the day? “They’d tear his bed apart, hoping to find crumbs!”

  Surie put the molasses and the ground ginger on the counter. “In his honor,” she said.

  “Just this once,” Tzila Ruchel said.

  Lipa, watching from the doorway, licked his lips.

  * * *

  On Friday mornings throughout February, when Surie went to the clinic for her appointment, the midwives greeted her with a cool familiarity. They still felt, as she felt, as she intended, the distance between their lives, so that when she saw how they greeted the other mothers with hugs and high fives and laughter, she felt even more isolated, as if she wore a shroud over the person she knew herself to be.

  Weeks and weeks passed like this, and then, the Friday before Purim, something changed. She had urinated in the cup an orderly gave her and stood, in stocking feet, on the scale, waiting for someone to come and record the numbers. She’d successfully avoided discussing with the dietitian the amount of cake and chicken fat she was eating. Most of the other women had already checked out and gone home, but it wasn’t yet lunchtime. Val brought Surie to take a three-dimensional ultrasound.

  They waited for a free technician in silence. Every wall was covered in posters of babies at different stages of their development, and on the counter was a pink, bulging, knitted uterus with a doll’s head emerging from the neck. The doll smelled of vanilla and did not look like any of Surie’s newborns.

  “I already took an ultrasound,” Surie said when she grew tired of waiting.

  “It’s a different kind,” Val said kindly. “It’s not so much for me to see the babies as for you. I think you need a little boost.”

  “I can wait by myself.”

  “True. But it seems to me that maybe you do a lot of waiting by yourself.” Val turned to look at Surie. “I canceled three clients so I could wait with you.”

  She put her hand on Surie’s shoulder and it took everything Surie had to stare at the floor and close off the well that had opened up inside her chest.

  Lying on the table in the dim room after someone finally came to do the ultrasound, Surie drifted toward sleep. As the technician waved the wand over her belly, though, a moving image appeared on the screen. First one baby’s face and then the other’s. These babies somehow looked like their grown siblings. They looked real and alive and human, unlike the kind of ultrasound she was used to. Their familiar faces lay close together, and one was sucking the thumb of the second, their movements small and slow and somehow sweet to her. Surie was wide-awake and paying close attention to every detail. One baby’s legs kicked out and the other baby moved away and flailed with its arms. She could see the movement on her belly. She could see what the movements meant on the screen. The babies flinched and frowned and pouted and smiled. And then the technician wiped off the wand and turned off the machine and it was over and Surie had not wanted it to end.

  “They can hear me now,” she said softly. “I sing to them sometimes. Do you think the sound from the wand could ruin their hearing? They made tumblesauces away from it whenever the technician tried to get a closer picture.”

  Val leaned forward and for the first time she smiled a wide and genuine smile. “How did you know that?” she said. “Have you been reading one of those pamphlets I gave you?”

  “No,” Surie said. She hadn’t even taken the pamphlets out of the plastic shopping bag. She’d dropped them into the incinerator when no one was looking. “We believe that unborn babies hear and see everything the mother does, and mothers try to listen to peaceful things for the sake of the new child. I would rather limit what waters I sink my child in. The sound of a bird singing, yes. Looking at private parts, at kishkes, no.”

  The midwife nodded. “We are the same, you and me,” she said. “Because I want to protect babies from unnecessary interventions. I remember delivering your children by candlelight. It was very peaceful. Those were good births. And your babies were very calm babies. I miss it.”

  Surie was surprised. The midwife had delivered all of Surie’s other children at home. This time she’d been told it wasn’t an option. High risk. She’d assumed Val still delivered other women’s children at home. But Val had stopped doing home births entirely! “Why did you stop?”

  A shadow blew across the midwife’s face. Her lips puckered and darkened. The policy change hadn’t been her choice. As the most senior midwife, she was required to work in the high-risk clinic. In one more year she would retire and she would be glad never to see another cesarean, another mother bent over a pillow, her back bared for an epidural.

  “By law, all babies in New York City are supposed to be born in the hospital.”

  Surie, still lulled by the semidarkness, turned over on the technician’s table to look at the midwife. “You did not answer my question.”

  “Babies are supposedly more likely to die when they are born at home.”

  “You didn’t tell me that when you delivered the others in my bedroom. And babies die here in the hospital too, I’m sure. With children so small, the Angel of Death has easy pickings.” His sword was always raised, ready to harvest, and not just the weakest. Oh, how she knew that now. Ever since Lipa. How quickly death came.

  “If it were up to me, I’d prefer to deliver most of the women at home, but it’s not up to me anymore. The hospital where I had my backup doctor went bankrupt. The medical association is very powerful and convinced all of the local hospitals not to support home-birth midwives, and these days, women who want a home birth have to do it illegally, underground. Parents who have bad outcomes sue. The doctors go after the midwives for practicing illegally and take away their licenses. The cost of malpractice insurance is crazy. Bottom line, I want to help pregnant women and I have to eat.” Val sighed. She picked up a pen and put it down again. “But even if I could, I wouldn’t deliver you at home, Mrs. Eckstein. At your age, there’s too much that can go wrong. You need to be near an operating room and a good surgeon.”

  Surie gripped the railing of the table and pulled herself upright. “I didn’t realize how many rules you have.”

  “Did you think you were the only one with strict rules?”

  Surie almost laughed. “I see you looking at my scarf, my clothes. This.” She brushed her hand across the nylon bangs. “I don’t know why it makes me like you more, to know you have all kinds of crazy rules too, but it does.”

  “Misery loves company,” said Val, and then Surie did laugh.

&n
bsp; That morning, fully dressed and on her way out the door, she’d stopped to pull two trays of kigel from the hot oven and the steam had fused one side of the fringe into a sticky brown mass. The bus was leaving and it was either go out with a melted front or stay at home all day. Just wearing a scarf was not an option. A scarf with a front was her family’s custom. She wore it. Dead Onyu wore it. Except for Tzila Ruchel, her daughters wore it. Her daughters-in-law did too. Marriages were made based on adherence to this custom. People would stare at her, but they stared at her anyway. “I never said I’m miserable doing what I do, but”—she batted again at the melted wig—“sometimes…”

  Val glanced at Surie’s forehead. “I wish I knew more about your world.”

  Surie didn’t know how to respond to this invitation. It was forbidden to proselytize non-Jews, to tell them details about religious practice. Maybe it would help another woman, though? Maybe it would make Val kinder and more understanding toward the newly married ladies from the community who came to the clinic? And though she could barely admit it to herself, it had been a long time since Surie had felt seen. It had felt good to laugh a little about her burnt wig with somebody who knew she was expecting twins.

  “If you want,” she said, and then she bit her thumbnail very hard and tore off a chunk, “you could visit this Sunday. It’s a holiday, Purim, a good day to come.” She felt a chill rush of heat, thinking about this merging of her two worlds, and then an additional flush as she remembered the difficulty involved in inviting the midwife to her home. “If you do come, though, say that we volunteer together in the main part of the hospital. Please.”

  Val, seeing Surie’s red face, frowned. “You still haven’t told Rabbi Eckstein?” She began to giggle. “Is he on night shift or blind or what?” She spread her hands to the sides of her hips to suggest Surie’s enormous belly.

  “I told his mother, my shviger. She actually is blind, but she figured it out herself.”