On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  “What therapist?” the woman said. “She has a boyfriend. She’s a bad girl. She doesn’t know how to listen.”

  “It was him. The therapist,” Surie said. What a world! It seemed it was more damaging to one’s reputation to admit to having a therapist than to having a boyfriend! She felt as if her skin were not connected to whatever was inside her body, and none of that was connected to the part of her that could think. She looked around the room again. Chair, table, laundry basket, pegs. Only then could she feel her toes inside her orthopedic shoes. Never in a million years had she imagined having this conversation with someone, and she felt, sorely, her lack of preparedness, her inability to help this woman or her child in any real way. “She doesn’t have a boyfriend. She told me she told you but you didn’t believe her. But it was the therapist. I am sure. She told me details…” The woman’s face. Surie stopped. She put out her hands and took the woman’s in her own. “But just tell me that you will tell the court what you know. That man is stealing the innocence of our children and if no one is willing to state the truth, nothing will change.”

  “He’s the best,” the woman whined. “That’s what the school said. We didn’t have insurance, but my husband took on another building and I was babysitting for a while, just so she could go to get psychologized and learn to be like the other girls. Normal.” The woman pulled away. She picked up the asthma inhaler and turned it over and over. “What will happen to my other daughters? They will never get married! If anyone hears…”

  “Every family has secrets,” Surie said.

  “But some secrets are worse than others!” the woman shrieked, and Surie had to acknowledge that it was true.

  * * *

  When Surie arrived home, she telephoned Val’s private number. “The mother knew,” she said. She didn’t tell Val about the way the woman picked at the flesh of her wrist or about the smell of rodent droppings or about the sense she’d had that the girl was standing someplace very close, unable to speak.

  * * *

  The next day, on Friday, Surie went to the clinic, though Yidel had hoped to take a family trip to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in honor of the holiday. The men on the floor panting with their wives in the labor classes reminded her of Yidel’s sweating face as he’d pleaded with her. How would those women like their husbands panting in their face during actual labor? They would be screaming for the men to get out. Better to be honest from the start.

  She wandered from room to room, picking up discarded items and putting them in their proper places. She wiped down counters and organized vials. Every so often, Val would call her into an examination room and ask her to help with something. Most of the time, Surie stumbled through whatever it was. Urine sticks. Fundal height. Due date calculations. “I’m training her,” the midwife told the patients. “She’s going to be the first Chassidic midwife in New York.” It was a joke, but not a joke to Surie.

  “They arrested that man, but I just got word that he is already out on bail,” Val said at the end of Surie’s first full day as they were sitting with their feet up in the lunchroom. “A million dollars’ bail and your community raised it in a single night for a pedophile who has been molesting their children for twenty years. It’s obscene.”

  “It’s not him they are protecting. It’s the reputation of the community.” The emergency fund-raising party had been called that Thursday night, right after the school had fired the therapist. Surie had refused to donate any money, but she’d had calls from friends who said that her absence had been noted.

  “And the girl has gone into hiding.”

  Surie nodded. It was true. The moment she had left the apartment in the projects, the girl’s mother had called a distant aunt and spirited her daughter away. The child had missed her Friday appointment and now Surie had no way of knowing if she was getting prenatal care.

  “That bastard won’t be prosecuted if no one else comes forward to say, ‘Me too.’ It’s the word of a young girl against a respected elder. No one will take her side. But I heard that the mother is going to court to support her daughter. The father refuses to have anything to do with it.”

  Surie was surprised. What had changed the mother’s mind about the girl? Usually, no decent family would go to a secular court about such a thing. But the girl’s family were already regarded as strange. They weren’t related to anyone important; there were no rabbis or sofrim or teachers in their family lineage; the girl’s sisters would marry garbage collectors, janitors, the children of the man who moved the Porta-Potties from place to place. There was no one lower in the system than they were already, so what did they have to lose? Nothing. Exactly nothing. Even today, if someone were to ask Surie to testify against Lipa’s therapist, she would refuse. Though she had lost so much, there were still further depths of alienation that she didn’t want to explore.

  Lipa sat opposite her, his mouth open, his teeth showing, his fists up beside his head. It looked exactly as if he were screaming but she could hear nothing. She closed her eyes and opened them again, but Lipa was still there, his mouth still open. She shuddered. Was it true? Would she, through her silence, side with a molester instead of with an innocent child?

  “So, you told him everything?” Val asked, and Surie faltered for a second and said yes, yes, of course she had. She had no idea what Val was talking about, but she knew the answer should be yes.

  Val stared at Surie, her eyes sweeping across the other woman’s face, and then she shook her head. “Here,” she said, hanging an old stethoscope around Surie’s neck. “Watch and learn. When taking a blood pressure reading, you have to listen for the slightest difference, a faint tapping. The change is so tiny, you might not even notice if you aren’t paying attention.”

  Surie tried to pay attention, but her mind was elsewhere. The girl’s mother had probably had a nervous breakdown. This was why she was willing to testify. The mother, the whole family, the girl, they were all damaged goods, like the crushed cans of beans Surie was afraid to open.

  Before coming in to the hospital, Surie had gone back to the squalid apartment to try to talk with the mother and make sure the girl was getting prenatal care. “Just tell me she’s seeing a doctor,” Surie had said to the peephole. She could hear someone breathing on the other side. Down the hallway, a door opened a crack and a woman’s face peered through. It was 6:00 a.m. “At least give me your sister’s name!” The shwush of an inhaler. Surie banged again. “Where is your daughter?” Another door, another face. Erev Shabbos in the mikva, the men would be saying that Rebbetzin Eckstein broke down a woman’s door, that maybe the Rebbetzin needed a little rest somewhere upstate.

  * * *

  Surie had thought she’d have time over Passover to tell Yidel about her own pregnancy and about working at the hospital, but instead, she’d spent most of her free time worrying about the girl. Working at the hospital was ridiculous. Look what kind of horrors she was exposed to. She couldn’t keep this up. Why had she ever thought working with Val would be acceptable?

  But Tuesday night, immediately after she turned her kitchen back to normal and trudged out to buy a bag of flour from the non-Jewish grocery, Surie baked a chocolate cake to bring to the hospital the next morning. Yidel told his friends that his wife was getting very active in the bikur cholim—she went every day and didn’t come back home until after three!—and that there was no bigger mitzvah than comforting the sick. By Wednesday evening, Yidel arrived home with a new pair of orthopedic shoes in her size and he gave her his old pager so that he could reach her if needed. He left a little pile of her favorite chocolates under her pillow that she flushed when he wasn’t looking. “You’re like the Rebbe’s wife,” he said. And upon his face shone his pride, a pride she didn’t deserve.

  * * *

  That Friday, after telling a Chassidic couple in their forties from Borough Park that they were expecting IVF triplets, Surie and Val sat down together in the break room. There were thirty minutes until Surie’s own appointme
nt.

  “I feel ancient. And so tired.” Surie eased her foot out of her new shoe and rubbed her calf. “I don’t think I’ve ever stood on my feet so long. And definitely not when I am twenty-five weeks along!” She sipped from the little thermos of tea she had brought with her.

  “You really need to eat more,” Val said. “Your babies aren’t growing very fast.”

  Surie barely noticed the weight of the twins. It was as if they were floating along together with her, buoyant. She thought she might call one Frimet, if it was a girl. If one were a boy, Hirshy would be a good name. Val peeled and ate an orange. The room filled with the bright smell of citrus.

  “You were very good in there, Mrs. Eckstein.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I think she was on the verge of hysteria, happy and afraid all together. And you were very comforting, with the Yiddish and the practical advice.” Surie didn’t know much. She often mixed up the vials, the labels, the paperwork. She dropped things. She mispronounced basic terms. But the pregnant women did love her.

  They leaned back in the cheap plastic chairs and Surie tried not to look pleased.

  “I bet it’s the first time she’s ever seen a Chassidic woman who is a midwife! She looked so surprised when I came in. She gave me the once-over. You know…” Surie looked from the top of Val’s head down to her toes and back up to the top again.

  Val smiled. “Did you just call yourself a midwife?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.” Surie’s face bloomed.

  Val smiled even wider. “I’m proud of you, Mrs. Eckstein.”

  “For goodness’ sakes,” Surie said. “Nobody calls me that. It’s Surie.”

  ELEVEN

  The Friday after Passover, the high-risk doctor had insisted on meeting Surie for her preadmission checkup at the clinic. He was a new hire, a young man who was afraid to appear soft and less adept. After one of his first patients had asked him his age and when he’d graduated, he’d grown a mustache, decided it wasn’t enough, and added a beard. The old doctor, his mentor, had retired after forty years and moved down to Florida. Initially, the new specialist had tried to flirt with the Chassidic women who came to the clinic. He was a good flirt, a handsome man who liked women, but they didn’t even smile. Their little hats and the strangely stiff scarves they wore seemed like helmets, the women themselves like soldiers in some silent army. They wouldn’t shake his hand, even though his fingers had been in far more intimate places. Why had he studied so long, practiced his bedside manner and received As, only to land in a hospital with people who would not speak to him or meet his eyes? He only wanted to help! He wanted to save lives! But these women didn’t listen to his advice and they ran to their holy rabbis for every little thing, and then they came back and said that they couldn’t do what he recommended.

  He particularly hated their physical examinations. Their stricken faces as he probed. He felt like he was raping them. With time, he became angrier and less talkative and more brutal. Suspecting that half the time they didn’t even understand what he was saying, he no longer gave warnings of what was about to happen, and from the break room, where Surie was chatting with Val, she heard a woman cry out, “Gottenyu!” Maybe she should go home and miss her appointment? Inwardly, she cursed the dreaded doctor with thunder in his belly and lightning in his pants, before knocking on the door of the examination room. She asked if she might come in and translate, which really meant explain to the woman all the things that the doctor did not say.

  Afterward, when it was her turn, she had to peel off two layers in order to lie down on the table: the first, the professional sense of capability and calm remove she had in the clinic; the second, her fantasy that she was not really pregnant, just getting fat in her old age, a belief that served her well in her apartment in Brooklyn but was not helpful at the clinic in Manhattan.

  She asked the doctor if she might remain dressed and take off only her underthings, but he said no. From experience, she knew it would not make a difference to his examination. Val always allowed her to maintain her modesty. “Everything off,” he said from the corner where he was washing his hands. He left the room for a moment and then came back in while she was fully exposed, struggling to put on the tiny hospital gown he had provided. Without asking, she pulled several yards of crackling white paper off the roll at the head of the examination table and used it to cover her arms, her chest, her backside. Then she sat on the end of the table, her feet dangling.

  “There are many risks when an older woman decides to get pregnant,” he said to the air somewhere over her head. “But you’re not the oldest Jewish lady to get pregnant. There was a woman in New Jersey, a therapist, who was sixty and had twins just a few weeks ago.”

  “Dr. Frieda Birnbaum. It was in the newspaper. But I didn’t do IVF. It just happened.”

  “Listen, Mrs. Eckstein, the likelihood is good that we will end up with gestational diabetes, placenta previa, preeclampsia.” He squeezed her ankle. Yidel had also recently squeezed her ankle, but his touch had been so gentle.

  “What is going on with your feet, dear love?” Yidel had asked. “Maybe your stockings are stretched out? Do you want I should get you some new ones? How about a massage?” He’d begun already and she lay back against her pillows and sighed with relief. Each dimpled foot had a turn in his lap. He’d walked his fingers around her ankles and then milked each bone, each toe, each tiny joint, until she’d tingled all over. And never once had he raised the possibility that she might be pregnant, and never once had she, either. He couldn’t have missed the signs. He must know! He must be waiting for her to tell him, growing more and more disappointed as the days passed. Yidel was not as blind as his parents. It had turned into a silent power struggle, this wanting him to say something before she had to tell him. How well can you really read my body? How well do you actually know me?

  “I’m pretty sure we’ll be doing a C-section here. And we have to worry about an increased risk of ovarian cancer, uterine hemorrhage. Dr. Bhatnagar tells me we are still refusing amniocentesis. Well, what if our babies have birth defects? We’re talking Down syndrome. And worse. Can we understand what is being said here? Should I speak slower?” the doctor said, speaking louder and just as fast. It was only because Surie had begun trying to read Val’s books that she knew what the man was saying. She felt even more sorry for the woman who had gone before her. And she wished a sweet death—being run over by a sugar truck—upon obstetricians who used the collective “we” when they really meant “you.” The doctor wasn’t pregnant. She missed Val. She even missed the regular man, Dr. Bhatnagar.

  The specialist tinkered around. A door slammed. He drew a line on her belly with his finger to show her where he would make the cut if (when) a cesarean became necessary. “After so many babies, your uterus probably doesn’t have the coordination to push out twins.” Overextended. Placental insufficiency. Geriatric pregnancy. Preterm labor.

  It didn’t matter what happened to her or to the babies. Their births, her own health, it was all in God’s hands. Only those without faith worried about such things. Either there would be a disaster or there wouldn’t, and stressing oneself, worrying about it, wouldn’t change a thing. It might even be harmful to the babies. The doctor pressed his hands around the babies’ heads and wiggled them from side to side. It hurt. Surie wanted to kick out, she wanted to grab his hand and push it away. But instead, she began to silently mouth one of her favorite psalms.

  Val came in and reminded the doctor that Surie was helping them at the clinic, as an intern. He frowned and looked down at Surie in surprise. “Who decided that?” he asked, as if it had been a bad decision on someone’s part.

  “I did,” Val said. “We are woefully understaffed and the majority of our patients don’t understand the medical terms we use.” She stared at the doctor until he looked at his hands, which were still spread on Surie’s belly.

  “We should be gaining a pound a week from now on,” muttered the doctor. “
Maybe even more than that. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in our case, because these babies are very small. Of course, with such a large mother, it’s hard to tell exactly due to the panniculus. Place your legs in these stirrups, please.”

  Surie was rowing down the Tisa River. A thick fog blanketed the water and muffled the sounds of the villages she passed. The boat in which she lay wallowed in the swell caused by a larger boat going in the opposite direction. A foghorn. A dog. A herd of goats. Tinkling bells. Small wavelets plashed against the wooden sides of the rowboat. The water gurgled and chimed. Smoke from many woodstoves hung below the fog, wet and dank. She slid past a cormorant sitting on a pylon. He, like her, hunched over his belly, black, sinister. Her dreams, recently, had a darker edge to them. Underneath her bottom, a small amount of lukewarm water slid from one side of the boat to the other, wetting the back of her clothing. From far away, she thought she could hear men on other boats calling to one another, but it was faint and distant and difficult to understand.

  “Well, there’s plenty of room in there, at least,” said the doctor, wiping his fingers on a paper towel and snapping off his gloves, inside out. “Everything looks good.”

  “Can Val deliver me? When it’s the right time?” Surie asked. The doctor was already halfway out the door. He turned back.

  “This is a high-risk pregnancy,” he said. High. Risk. Emphatic.

  “Yes,” said Surie. “But can she? You could be right there.” She wanted Val’s gentle hands on her children.

  “Impossible,” he said. “Dr. Bhatnagar and I will be delivering these infants. And we will make a public announcement about the birth if everything goes well.”

  “No, I already told Dr. Bhatnagar that I don’t want that, and he said…” Surie didn’t remember what he’d said. She imagined Yidel out with his shopping cart, stumbling upon a newspaper showing her with twins, two-inch letters announcing the birth in graphic medicalese. “I don’t allow it! Any of it!”