“You have a gay son?”
“Had.”
“What happened to him?”
“He is lost, farloiren, he has lost himself to this world and the next,” she said, very slowly. “He is wandering somewhere, and I only rarely see him.”
“Well, that’s exactly what I mean. Your community spits these kids out.”
“It wasn’t like that for him.” Surie wiped her hand again. It would not stop bleeding.
“Don’t you want something better than a community like that for your twins?”
“I will make sure that doesn’t happen to them,” Surie said. “I don’t know how I will, but I won’t lose another child.”
Surie stood like a pillar in the train station, someone people thought they knew everything about—a foreigner, a fanatic, an anachronistic joke, an uneducated mother. Even her family thought they understood her. The wind from the incoming train flattening the ugly coat against her round belly, tickets and gum wrappers flying into the air, the smell of ripped steel and rat dung and loss. She raised her hand and moved it sideways once and then turned and walked away.
TEN
In mid-March, the young men began to return home from their faraway yeshivos and mesivtas and kollels for Passover. School was let out from the beginning of Nissan and the streets filled with children pushing other children in strollers or carrying home dripping paper packages of fish for their mothers. Older girls who would soon be engaged walked hand in hand, their heads close together, their thick braids down their backs, swaying. The smells of bleach and polish wafted from the open windows. Tulips bloomed in the rough grass of the empty lots. Men ran through the streets, their tzitzis flapping, their arms piled with boxes of freshly baked matzos, and in the space created from their passing lingered the scents of well water and wood smoke and flour.
Hugely pregnant women in their ninth and tenth months rested on the benches in the weak sunshine without shame, talking amongst themselves as their other children played at their feet. Though she was already at the end of the fifth month, between visits to the clinic Surie often forgot that she was pregnant. It felt so distant, something that was both true and not true, her and not her. She’d started a story about Lipa at the Shabbos table and Yidel had walked to the front closet, taken out his overcoat, and left the building. Two weeks before Passover, when she was buying horseradish and potato starch and coconuts, she’d asked him what he wished he’d done differently with regard to Lipa, and he’d said the sort of obscene word his father sometimes said and asked her to stop, but then, when she hadn’t, he’d left her with two heavy carts in the middle of Lee Avenue. As a result, the secret of her own pregnancy had become like a stubborn walnut that would not be cracked, no matter the pressure.
She could not imagine a time when she would ever tell Yidel. Even as she grew larger and larger, even as her feet swelled and she had to remove the wedding ring from her finger and slip it onto the necklace inside her shirt that held Lipa’s nipple ring, even as she was no longer able to reach the faucet, no one noticed what seemed to her to be obvious. Perhaps it was her age. Or her large girth to begin with. But most likely it was because she had not said anything, and her family could not believe she would ever withhold anything from them.
In bed a week before Pesach, Yidel even felt the twins turn under his arm, but he only frowned and moved away from her, saying that she should not eat so many macaroons if they caused her gas and that there was nothing less romantic than a woman making a bad smell in bed. She hadn’t said anything and the moment, like so many others, had been lost. And now she lay on the far edge of the mattress, turned away from him so he could no longer place his arm around her waist as he had always done.
It was odd, this dark thing, to hold herself away from the person she was forever bound to and loved. Lying on the far side of the mattress and rejecting Yidel’s arms should have made her sad, but instead it filled her with a curiously tantalizing sense of power, something almost like a piece of meat stuck between her teeth that she could worry at all night.
“Do you love me?” he murmured into the darkness. It had been months since they’d lain together. He approached, she rebuffed with excuse after excuse. They’d never gone longer than a month or six weeks in the past.
“Love is good, but it’s good with bread,” she murmured. The expression accidentally made it sound like he wasn’t a good provider, so after some little mew of disappointment from him, she said, “Of course I do. Love you.”
The deep wish to tell him about the twins filled her, rushing into her like water into a jug held under the surface of a pool, but still she didn’t say anything. There were two desires twisting within her, to tell and not to tell. To blurt out the secret and be free or to hold the secret and hold a shred of power. The stories about Yaakov and Eisav were alive for her then: Yaakov wanting to be born when his mother, Rivka, passed the synagogue; the other twin, Eisav, bearing down when she passed a place of idolatry. What had the matriarch Rivka done? Surie wished she knew how to study the Torah herself. But girls were not taught, and though she could read the basic story in her Yiddish, Tzeina U’Reina, the commentaries, where the helpful insights would be, were beyond her ability.
* * *
The final Friday before Passover, when Surie was about to enter her sixth month, Val told her that there was a woman from Israel in the clinic who required a procedure. The woman didn’t understand a word of English and Val had not been able to make her understand. They had Hebrew translators in the hospital, but this woman spoke only Yiddish. Would Surie mind coming to help her?
Surie protested that her own English wasn’t the best, but in the end, she agreed to translate for that woman and for another woman a bit later that day, and by then, she had already missed the bus, so she stayed and said she would translate for the last patient of the day. Could she please go to the room at the end of the long hall and ask for some basic information? “She doesn’t have a file?” Surie asked, and Val said no, not yet. The patient hadn’t been willing to talk to any of the less senior midwives and Val had not had a chance to try yet herself.
When Surie reached the closed door and listened from outside, she heard nothing, and when she entered the examination room she saw only a young girl dressed in the style of her own community, sitting with her hands folded in her lap, her fair hair held back with the type of padded headband used by very young children. No one was with her.
She was a refined girl, lovely even, her hair in a shoulder-length bob, her hands smooth with lavender-scented cream, her flat black shoes spotless. She sat with her back against the chair, her head high but her eyes downcast, and at first, Surie did not recognize her.
“Where is your mother?” Surie said. “Or your sister?” An older woman, a relative, must have gone out to the bathroom. But no mother in her community shared news about a pregnancy with an unmarried daughter. Who would bring a teenager to a prenatal checkup? She looked at the girl, puzzled, trying to figure out what was going on. The part of her that had been born in her community and would die there, the part of her that was connected to the oldest mores and traditions of Jewish life, refused to see what was right in front of her, just as Yidel could not see her pregnancy because he assumed she could not be pregnant. She stood at the doorway, waiting for the child to say something. There was only silence. After many awkward minutes, the child slipped off the chair, and in the strange twisting motion she made as she stood, Surie recognized her own gesture to balance herself, to offset the change brought on by a growing pregnancy. Inwardly, she complained to God. Was it not enough that you gave me twins? Was it not enough to take Lipa? Was it not enough to send me here, where I deceive my husband every single week? You have to send this child to me too?
The girl looked up because Surie had said some word of complaint in Yiddish. When she recognized the sofer’s wife in her silk scarf and her dark taupe stockings, the old woman’s bare face without a shred of makeup, the girl’s eyes grew wi
de and fearful.
“Excuse me, Rebbetzin,” she said in the mother tongue. She made as if to leave, and Surie silently cursed God and Val and men everywhere and the innocence of young girls in particular.
“Wait,” she said, catching at the girl’s arm. It had been years since the girl had come as an eight-year-old with her mother to buy new mezuzahs. She couldn’t be more than thirteen now. “Don’t go. It is braver not to go.” What could she possibly say to this child?
Like a dragonfly hanging motionless above the hot summer pavement, the girl hovered between sitting and darting toward the door, both options equally possible. Surie sat down on the rolling stool next to the examination table as if she were sure the girl would sit too, and gradually the girl’s fear subsided and she sat. She did not ask the girl’s name because she already knew it.
“Does your mother know?” she asked. She could not see the girl’s face now because the child had taken off the headband and twisted it between her hands and her hair fell across her face like a screen. And she couldn’t quite picture the girl’s mother either. Had there been something not quite put together about the woman? A dirty scarf? A crumpled dress? “Does anyone know besides you?”
The girl shook her head.
Surie was full of questions it was too soon to ask. Who could have done this to the child? How did the girl know that she was pregnant? How did she find the hospital? How had she enrolled herself in the clinic? How had she managed such a difficult thing when no one would have helped her with information? How had she gotten out of school for the day and paid for the train? What would happen to her when she returned to her school and her family?
“You must despise me,” the girl whispered, and Surie searched around inside herself and realized that she did not. What she felt was closer to despair and a deep sadness for the child and for the child’s family and for the community, for they would never be able to accept such a thing and would vomit her out.
“Here,” said Surie, “I have some salt crackers left over from lunch. You feel sick to your stomach, yes?” She touched the green glasses she kept in her pocket, then pushed them aside and took the crackers and held them out to the girl.
“If I eat, I will get bigger,” said the girl, “and then everyone will know. But when I don’t eat, I feel so sick. Do you think it would kill the … could I kill it if I don’t eat?” She asked this hopefully, unaware, almost, of what she was saying.
“Don’t open your mouth for Satan!” said Surie. “No. No, I…” She hesitated, but this girl deserved nothing less than absolute honesty. “I am also pregnant.” Such eyes she had, this child! “And, as you might imagine, I cannot tell anyone. Different reasons, but I know how it feels.” The girl nodded. “When I found out I was expecting twins…” Those eyes again. “I hoped the same thing. I tried not to eat for as long as I could. But babies”—the girl flinched at the word—“are stubborn. You will harm yourself long before you harm the fetus. The baby.” She touched her own belly. Translation. Always translation.
The girl pushed the cracker into her mouth, took it out again and said a blessing, then ate it quickly. She brushed the crumbs from her skirt and sat up straight and put the headband back into her hair.
“Twins! You’re lucky! My mother always wanted twins. The babies will keep you young,” she said. The traditional blessing for a woman who has children late in life. “Excuse me, but do you have any more crackers? I’m hungry all the time.” Perhaps the girl had moved out of the first trimester and into the second. She was terribly thin, but beneath the loose school cardigan and the plain blouse, Surie thought she could see a roundness to the girl’s stomach.
Surie went out into the hallway and came back with her Harrods bag full of chocolate cake. “Help yourself,” she said. The girl took out a thick slab of cake and devoured it.
The babies did keep her young. Surie was far busier than she’d been for years. She woke up earlier, worked all day on her feet, and with it all, she felt lighter, healthier, more alive. She smiled. When they were born she’d be busier yet, but she’d built up some stamina in the past months. The hipsters wouldn’t believe their eyes when they saw Surie taking daily five-mile walks with the twin stroller. And they thought they were fit! She laughed out loud and the girl looked up from her second slice of cake.
“Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach once tricked eighty witches into getting caught and hanged,” Surie said. She wanted to offer the girl something better than crackers and cake. Better than the late confession of an old woman. “Eighty! Just think about it. Witches are so wily, so clever, maybe they even see the future. Yet one man who wanted to trick them into losing their own lives was able to do it. One man could trick eighty witches! For sure one man, if he wants something, will always find a way to do it.”
“It wasn’t one,” the girl said. She swallowed some more of the cake. “It wasn’t once.”
“Can I get you some water?” asked Surie, who suddenly felt dizzy, as if the floor had tilted slightly and everything was at odd angles. “An orange juice? It’s kosher.”
But the girl had come to tell her story to someone, and now that she had said something, she could not be stopped. The story spilled out. Surie listened. She felt frozen on the tiny, unstable rolling stool.
The father of the unborn child was an unlicensed therapist, a Chassidic man well-known in the community, who worked in the main girls’ school. He was someone Lipa had gone to speak to about his own issues; she’d planned on sending Mattis to talk with the therapist about his problem. Mattis had been caught by the principal of his school, looking at the magazines on the racks near the subway station. The therapist had a good reputation, but this thing between him and the girl had been going on for months.
Could this man have touched Lipa too? Such a man would be capable of anything. Had he made Lipa gay? They’d forced Lipa to go to therapy once a week for years, even though Lipa had pleaded with them not to send him. Had he said something, once, about the therapist? That he’d made him undress? Or was she imagining that? It couldn’t be right. Or was she only able to remember with this child in front of her, the proof of the therapist’s wrongdoing permanently carved into the girl’s tender skin? What a terrible mother she’d been. But it seemed she had learned something in the past four years, and though she hadn’t treated Lipa with compassion, she could start with this girl.
She stared out the window, and of course it was raining. It was always raining. She could just see the tops of people’s heads as they walked past, precariously balancing umbrellas and cups of coffee, their glasses steamed over so that their eyes were no longer visible. Cars hissed by, buses, and the sounds they made were hoarse and disturbing. In the fractured light under the clouds, their colors seemed unbearably garish. Their windshield wipers flicked sprays of water toward the pedestrians. One man walked past carrying a boom box on his shoulder. It was covered with a grocery bag, and the window shook to the bass of whatever growls it was making. It was as if the world had been shaken and refolded and now the dark inside seams were showing.
Poor Lipa. She had tried her best, but she had failed him in so many ways, ways she was only just now beginning to understand. He had definitely come in one day after therapy, deeply weary. Not the tiredness that all of the boys carried with them from long days in yeshiva studying, but a weariness that was inscribed on his young face, permanent. What made him look that way? She had known even then that she would never hear the whole story of his life. Of anyone’s life, really. So much of a person’s life is hidden from even her husband, her best friends, her children. A whole world of thoughts and images that no one ever knows about. Had Lipa wanted to be hugged? Had he wanted a kind word? Had he just wanted her to notice him? Had he wanted her to see that something was wrong? In just such ways had she failed him. Simple ways. If she had only taken the time to listen to him.
She put her hand in her pocket and touched the green glasses again. After a moment she took them out and laid them, folded
, on top of her belly as if it were a shelf. The girl stared.
“Those are a nice color,” she said. “Like grass, in the spring, when it’s all new and fresh, you know? If I have a boy, I’m going to make him a onesie in that color. Can I touch your tummy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe? Yes.”
The girl put her small hand on the front of Surie’s dress.
“It’s hot!” she said in surprise. “And hard!” She pulled away her hand and touched her palm against her cheek. “Do they move around? Can I feel that?”
“They aren’t moving right now,” Surie said.
“Is that all right?”
“I think so.” She hoped so. She should have Val check the heart tones after work. “I heard that babies move less when they are closer to being born.”
“How do you know when the baby is going to come out? The due date?” The girl said “due date” as if they were words in Chinese and full of unpronounceable syllables.
“Do you know the date of your last menstrual period?”
Almost eagerly, the girl sat up and answered and then she listened and took notes in her school notebook. She was in the fourteenth week, due exactly two months after Surie. The conception must have taken place on Chanukah. Surie gave the girl a Ziploc bag of expensive kosher prenatal vitamins from the bottle in her own handbag and told her where to buy more.
“We could choose a name for your baby. A boy’s name for a boy. A girl’s name for a girl. You wouldn’t have to tell anybody or even write it down, but it would be something to hold on to. Would you like that?”
The girl nodded shyly but said, “I thought we aren’t supposed to name babies before they are born.”
“It’s not really naming. It’s just imagining a bit. A nice kind of imagining.”
“Did you do that for yours?”
Surie paused. “No,” she said. “Not yet.” She paused again. The girl looked toward the Harrods bag and licked her lips. Surie laughed. She was filled with love for this young girl and for the girl’s baby and for her own twins. “We could talk about names together. We wouldn’t need to say which ones we chose. How about that?”
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