“I’m not going to tell you your business, but I think you’re digging your own grave if you don’t say something to your husband soon.” And then the midwife said a harsh word that Surie knew was obscene, so she erased it from her mind.
* * *
That Sunday, a crisp early March day, the midwife dressed carefully in opaque tights and a long skirt and a black turtleneck and she took the B44 bus from the leafy, single-family Victorian houses of Ditmas Park, through Flatbush’s narrow, dark red two-story duplexes and up Nostrand, along the edge of the gracious brownstones of Crown Heights. The bus bumbled through Bed-Stuy, with its street vendors and boarded windows and mothers walking to church with their children, the little girls with dozens of brightly colored plastic baubles in their braided hair.
In Williamsburg, the streets were full of men pushing baby strollers and children in costumes towing wagons full of food. Music blasted from trucks and vans. One group of about thirty young men, all dressed in gray lab coats with bright orange hats, grabbed some policemen and danced with them in the middle of the road. Cars beeped their horns, trying to pass. The young men ran to the cars and gestured for the windows to be rolled down and then extracted donations from the drivers. Laughing children sat in the front seats of the private ambulances that lined the roads and pressed the buttons that worked the sirens. On every corner, there were clusters of men and boys holding out plates with money on them and passersby quickly dipped into their wallets and threw down coins as they passed.
Val, who had scribbled Surie’s address on an appointment card and thought she remembered roughly where the Chassidic woman lived, had to ask for directions multiple times. Everyone, it seemed, knew the Ecksteins. She rang the bell and climbed the three flights of stairs that Surie climbed every day. Ten years earlier, she would have visited a pregnant woman several times by the fifth month. She would have seen the track of the lift chair. She would have noticed the steepness of the stairs and that they smelled of oil soap and weirdly of chickens and something dead or decomposing. At the top of the steps, Surie waited for the midwife. She wore a long white apron over her usual black skirt and a light pink cotton turban instead of her silk scarf. Without the strip of fake hair, the many lines of her face and her gray eyebrows were prominent. Here, in her own house, she stood straighter; the fabric ran smoothly over her body, her eyes were full of laughter. Surie and Val stood on the landing together for a moment. Val wasn’t sure if a hug was appropriate or wanted. The building was full of sounds. Children’s voices, the calls of the elderly, telephones ringing, the clunk and hiss of the steam.
“Have you ever been in a Jewish home on a holiday before?” Surie asked, and Val said she had, but not the home of a Chassidic person. In the foyer on the ground floor, Val had noticed a sign from the local rabbinic organization banning children from owning bicycles and another one with an edict against noisy high heels.
They went into Surie’s apartment and a grandchild dressed as a bride jumped up from the couch and came and put her arms around Surie’s leg. “Tsatskeleh di bubbeh!” Surie said, kissing the child’s head. What did it mean? Val asked, and was told “toy of the grandmother.” So strange.
Someone who could only be Surie’s daughter, for she looked exactly like her but in a more trim, less neat version, gave Val a cellophane package of fruit and cookies, saying it was something that sounded like “shuluch muh-nes” from her mother. It was strange to think that at some time in the distant past, Val must have brought this woman into the world as a naked infant. And was she supposed to open the package, eat the fruits? She looked around. There were literally hundreds of wrapped packages on every surface. None of them were open.
In the narrow kitchen there was no space for an extra chair, so Val leaned against the counter, staring at Surie’s grossly swollen ankles. Surie could almost hear the midwife checking the boxes for eclampsia: Elevated blood pressure—check. Water retention—check. High percentage of body fat—check. Swollen extremities—check. But Purim was a time for joy, for happiness without limit. God would not allow her to die on such a happy holiday.
Surie stirred several huge pots on the stove. She threw a handful of salt into one that was full of a bubbling red sauce. Cabbage rolls and chunks of apple bobbed on the surface. The room filled with steam, the window was open; there was no electric range hood, but a box fan was brought in and propped up in a second window. The cupboards were the metal kind, from the forties or fifties, still spotlessly clean. A girl who looked about ten years old carved produce at a tiny kitchen table using a razor-sharp knife, but she worked with a skill that Val herself did not have, cutting tomatoes into royal state carriages, carving apples into swans to draw the carriages, radishes into roly-poly infants. She turned curiously as her grandmother began to speak in English.
“Soon, everyone will arrive. My whole family comes to me for the holidays. We bring Dead Onyu and Dead Opa upstairs.” And then, seeing Val’s puzzlement, Surie added, “My parents.” She looked up, searching for the correct phrase on the ceiling. “In-laws. They do not speak English and they are blind, so they will not speak to you. Don’t be insulted.”
Today, even Surie—disconnected, anxious, exhausted Surie—looked happy. Three teenagers in long coats and plastic cowboy hats—Surie’s sons?—came into the kitchen firing off cap guns. One called out, “Giddyup!” and they all burst into laughter before noticing Val and falling silent. They gathered up armfuls of the wrapped packages and left again. The doorbell rang and rang, and costumed revelers arrived to sing and dance and perform small plays for the family, and when they were finished, Surie’s husband wrote them checks and handed out shots of whiskey. Outside, hundreds of sirens went off, police and fire trucks and other unfamiliar ones; a wild cacophony of beeping and wailing and roaring rose up from the street. Inside, Val startled when the enormous old clock at her back loudly struck the time. Women climbed the stairs and handed Surie’s daughter elaborate baskets of food that she gave to her mother, and then Surie gave her daughter small baskets of home-baked treats to give to the women. It was obvious that she was important in her community. Some of the younger women—it was hard to say if they were relatives because they all looked so alike—asked Surie questions about the laws of the day and she gave her answers in simple language, clearly and well.
“The children are wild animals today.” She did not seem upset about it. “Full of sugar and high spirits. The women get to show off their baking. The men, though they do not drink the rest of the year, drink glasses of the brown stuff, the white stuff.” She gestured at inexpensive bottles of whiskey and vodka. “Today they all have flies in their throats and want to drown them. They sing and hug each other and tell the story of Purim, which is the story of the survival of the Jews. The same story from the Holocaust, the same story from the Cossacks, the pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition. But fresh, somehow, in each generation.” Val asked why Surie didn’t hand her guests the parcels directly but instead had her daughter hand them over. Surie smiled but didn’t offer any explanations.
Soon, Surie’s oldest son arrived with his family, and he banged on the door to the living room and yelled at the women in Yiddish. He’d said for them to tame down because he would be reading the megillah, Surie translated. Then there came a chorus from the young men standing in the dining room. “Nushim, zeit shtil!”
“I need to learn them some manners,” Surie said, laughing, when she saw Val’s face. “They have no geduld.” Surie herself seemed infinitely patient. Val was already exhausted from the noise and the crush.
Some of the women and girls moved toward the door to the dining room, but Surie put her hand on Val’s arm. “Stay here with me. I already heard it, and you can hear from the kitchen if you are interested.” Val was relieved because the dining room and the living room were crowded with children dressed in costumes and identical pregnant mothers and terrifyingly identical fathers, and even the elderly all looked the same, as if the community consisted of bla
ck-and-white cookies made by a machine on a conveyer belt. Chunk, chunk, chunk. They all looked at her when they thought she didn’t notice and then looked away when she turned to look at them. Surie must have felt like this each day when she came into the clinic. All those women in lipstick and jeans. The midwife, intimidated, thought about excusing herself and going home.
Val took a deep breath and looked around again. There was not one pregnant mother over the age of forty-five. Poor Surie. No wonder she hadn’t said anything. In this community, in this place, everyone followed an invisible pattern. Surie didn’t fit in at the clinic either, but pregnant at fifty-seven, she’d be anathema in this community that so valued sameness.
They were not alone in the kitchen. The terrifyingly thin grandmother crouched like a gargoyle over the counter, braiding dough. When they were introduced, the woman’s face turned fifteen degrees away from where Val was standing and she smiled at the empty air and nodded her head and put out her hand, and Val remembered that the old woman was blind. Dead Onyu, not dead, just the name for “great-grandmother” in Hungarian. Then she was introduced to Miryam Chiena, the granddaughter, who was picking thrips off strawberries with a pair of tweezers and drowning them in a glass of water. And still Val did not have a chair or anything to eat, though every room she had passed through was full of food. Despite the bounty, nobody was eating or drinking. Not even a glass of water. And she saw that Surie was watching her, waiting for her judgment. Sure of rejection.
From the other room came the song of the scroll, the megillah, so strange to her ears, an unearthly wail, more in keeping with the call of the mu’addhin than with the Lord’s Prayer. The children, even the babies, were silent, listening to this ancient story. Without warning, the room erupted in hisses and clangs and shots and horns and boos. The granddaughter banged the heel of the knife on the board. Several babies burst into tears and were shushed. The grandmother smacked two cans together and cackled. She had no teeth. Surie wrote something on a notepad and pushed it across to Val. “They are drowning out the name of Haman, who tried to murder the Jews.”
At lunch, when everyone was seated around three long tables, Val felt comfortable for the first time. It was a feast. The windows were open to the cool breeze from the river. Simple white muslin curtains bellied into the room. The men sat at the table in the living room. The women sat with the children at the two tables in the dining room, closer to the kitchen. Four courses came out and a dozen different desserts. The children ate everything and then lay on the floor, playing the games that children play when they are utterly content. The doorbell rang, people arrived and left. The family laughed and told jokes and sang long songs without words. Surie, seated next to Val, translated some of what was said into English so she would understand.
“Missus Val from the hospital came to see us, how it is to be us,” Surie announced in English after they had sung the final blessings. There was a long silence.
Then Miryam Chiena, the girl with the knife, said, “It’s good to be us.”
Dead Onyu, the great-grandmother, upon hearing a translation, said in Yiddish that she was too old to figure out what it was like to be herself. She just was. And if you were going to be like someone else, then who would be like you? She stood up with a groan and said she was going to go downstairs to sleep off the big meal. Surie led Val to the south-facing front windows and Miryam Chiena joined them after helping her great-grandmother go to her apartment. They all stood back from the glass to avoid being seen from outside and looked down into the street.
The road was blocked and no traffic could get through. Shopping carts and strollers were pushed straight down the middle of the street by people dressed in all kinds of elaborate costumes. There was a wheelchair that had been decorated as an old-fashioned popcorn cart, and inside it, surrounded by the popcorn, the head of a small child turned and laughed as people approached. A young man covered in purple balloons like a cluster of grapes wheeled a barrel full of bottles of wine. A father led six daughters all dressed identically as brides into the new apartment building opposite Surie’s house and then they reappeared briefly in a window on the second floor. A real beggar in a broken hat and fallen stockings came down Division, weaving from side to side. Every Jew went to him and put coins in his hand and gave him food.
Later, they saw men performing a kind of line dance to raucous klezmer music from a boom box. “It’s a wedding dance. That boy”—Surie pointed to a boy with a few tufts of red beard on his cheeks—“just got engaged. He’s my brother’s wife’s cousin’s nephew.” One group pretended to be the young man, awkwardly meeting his bride. Another group pretended to be the blushing girl. The groups ran at each other, making their twin gestures of shyness, the “girls” twirling their braids, tugging at invisible dresses, the “boys” stroking their beards; the two groups almost but not quite touched hands, retreated. Then they were at the wedding. Then they were married. Then they were pregnant. And then they had a baby in a carriage. The men laughed. Surie laughed. But Val suddenly felt annoyed by the restrictions of the religion, as if she were somehow being forced to believe as the community believed, live as they lived.
“Even your dances are about marrying and having children,” she said. “Is there nothing else to look forward to?”
“What else is there?” Surie asked. “The whole life of a Jew is devoted to family. There is no end to that cycle. Think of Dead Onyu. In another community, she would be in a nursing home, alone. No one would know that she makes excellent poppy-seed jam. Instead, here, she is loved. She is treasured. Her great-grandchildren sit in her lap every day. She will never be moved to a nursing home because there will always be someone to take care of her.”
“Are you sad to have another child?” Val asked. “Children?” And Surie’s face flushed carnation pink as she twisted around to see if anyone had overheard.
“If I could have another child, it would be a blessing. Every child I am given is a blessing from the Oibershter,” Surie said. “But of course I won’t. I’m much too old.” She glared at Val, who looked at her watch and then out the window.
Surie’s granddaughter Miryam Chiena, who was standing with them, said, “I want to be a teacher and I want to be a mother and maybe I’ll be a lady Hatzolah person too, but so far they don’t let girls, so I probably won’t, but I definitely want to be a teacher and a mother. Are you a mother?” And when Val shook her head: “Are you sad?”
Val looked at the child. Surie thought that the midwife’s apartment must be silent. She smelled faintly like empty rooms. Even the people who lived on either side of her probably didn’t know her name. What a life! Surie was relieved that her grandchild had not understood the midwife’s comments. She leaned down and kissed her granddaughter and her face was hidden. “When I am old,” Surie said to the child, “you are the one I want to take care of me, as I take care of Dead Onyu and Dead Opa now.”
“Everyone wants to take care of you, Bubbie. We fight over you! But I will be the one who wins.”
On the way to the train station, Surie and Val did not speak. When Val was about to go through the doors, she felt compelled to turn and face Surie. The Chassidic woman’s confidence in her world was troubling. Did she really think that it was enough to just be a mother? Didn’t she ever have questions she wanted answered? Didn’t she ever want to get out of her chicken-scented house and discover the real world? “Miryam Chiena, is that her name? She’s so bright. Don’t you want her to go to college? Have a career of her own? She could easily be a doctor, never mind an EMT. And what about your new babies?”
“Miryam will always be surrounded by people who love her and so will the new children. That’s something special.” Under the overpass, a group of men sat on the cold concrete, bundled in blankets and newspapers. One of them was erecting a tent that flapped wildly in the wind. A tall, thin man in colorless clothing held up a piece of cardboard on which he’d written HOMELESS VETERAN. WILL WORK FOR FOOD. Surie walked over to drop a
quarter in his cup and then, when she returned, she said, “My children and grandchildren will always have homes.”
“But what if,” said Val, “what if one of your children turned secular? Or turned out to be a Hitler or an Osama bin Laden?”
Surie grimaced. “So extreme!” she said. “Can’t you think of anything more reasonable?”
“Okay. What if you had a son who was gay?” Val said then. “Do you know the word gay? Could he live at home? Would you still love that child?”
Surie’s face felt like a stone and a cold, sharp wind ran between her ribs. “He would still be loved.”
“But isn’t it true that your community in Williamsburg rejects children like that? That’s what I’ve heard. Kids who stick out for one reason or another?”
Inside the pocket of her coat, Surie squeezed the lime-green glasses so that the metal hinge dug into the palm of her hand. She shook her head.
“They do! There are articles in the papers about it. There was something just the other day, a writer who said he’d been ‘raised like a veal’ and then slaughtered when he didn’t fit in.”
The glasses were cutting Surie’s flesh. Hot wetness slid over her freezing-cold hand.
“If that’s not conditional, what is? ‘Be like me and you will be loved.’ Isn’t that your belief?”
Surie brought her hand out of her pocket and wiped the blood on the black wool coat. She coughed from the hard bite of the wind. “I had a child who was both gay and not religious, and though he pushed me hard, though everything he did felt like he took a razor to my flesh, I could not stop loving him. And if I had the chance again, I would bring him home and put him to sleep in the best bed, and I would tell him to bring home his boyfriend and I would tell all of my children and my grandchildren to smile at him and to love him and never to stop. And that is because a parent’s love does not end. Should not end.”
On Division Page 10
