On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  “If that’s your decision,” he said. He flicked a finger against the frame of the door as if he were getting rid of something unpleasant and then left.

  Sitting outside, on a plastic chair, was the girl. She was back in New York, recalled from wherever she’d been by ACS and the police and who knew who else. She was waiting for an appointment with Surie’s doctor, and from the look on her face, she had overheard their conversation. She tilted herself to stand and then came over to Surie.

  “Rebbetzin,” she said, slipping her small hand into Surie’s, “will you come in with me? Will you tell me what the doctor is saying?”

  And though it pained Surie to see the slim body of the trembling child in the much-too-large gown, to see the twelve-year-old climb up onto the examining table and put her feet into the stirrups, though Surie had to wipe her eyes every few minutes, she sat there and rendered the doctor’s words into something resembling kindness.

  * * *

  Shabbos came in after 7:00 p.m. in mid-April. After scrubbing down the counters at the clinic, Surie washed her hands and put on her woolen coat and tried but failed to fasten the buttons. She stood in the empty waiting room, and after a moment, Val came out to join her.

  “Why are you still here, Nurse Eckstein?” she asked.

  Surie had been upset since lunch. “I can’t read those textbooks you loaned me. I read English like an ax swims.”

  “You don’t have to. There’s a program for lay midwives. Midwives who have learned by doing, rather than by studying. It’s how I started, though I’m a certified nurse-midwife now. If I teach you and you keep on working at it, I am sure you could get a lay certificate.”

  Surie was afraid of certificates. Secular education had a stink to it—you give the devil a hair and he wants the whole beard.

  “What’s that face?” asked Val. “How far do you plan on going with your education?”

  “No one will take me seriously. People do not think Chassidic Jews can read or even speak English. I see how some of the patients laugh at me. The way I pronounce words. I can’t even say ‘doctor’ right.” Daktir. “My clothes. No one will trust me to deliver a baby. And bottom line, soon I won’t have time to do anything. I’ll have babies to take care of.” Surie sighed.

  She would miss the mental stimulation. It was almost unbearable to listen to her old friends talking about the most effective ways to remove a stain from a tablecloth or the best methods for cooking a moist chicken.

  “Then you won’t do it. But in the meantime, until the birth and maybe afterward, you are learning something.”

  Coming to the hospital, learning midwifery, it was all temporary. Something like the way other women craved fried ice cream or pickles. To continue studying afterward would be to divorce herself from her community. And that Surie would never do.

  “Aren’t you enjoying yourself? I could be wrong, but you really seem happier. You helped that family today. You’ve been trying to help that little girl. You will help other women in your community either way.”

  It did feel good to get up each morning with somewhere to go and something to do that wasn’t what she had been doing for forty years. Surie loved seeing the women come in deflated and leave pink and glowing. She loved to see the looks on their faces when they heard the heartbeats of their babies, the fast lub-dub echoing throughout the room. Women came into the clinic and signed in and sat down and other women left. Doctors were paged over the intercom, and just outside the windows, cars rushed past, their tires hissing in the heavy spring rains. Surie had even enjoyed her efforts to track down the aunt in Monroe and the missing girl, though they’d been unsuccessful. The police also couldn’t find the girl. Surie wondered how she’d been caught.

  It was the first time in her life that she wasn’t afraid of everything outside her community. Instead of her usual terror, there was this new thing, a cautious curiosity about the world.

  * * *

  When she arrived home that Friday, Yidel had already heated up some soup and cut up hothouse tomatoes and laid everything out neatly on the table next to a glass of orange juice. He sat beside her as she ate and then put his hand on the back of her neck.

  “I thought you might be hungry, so I made you an erev Shabbos snack. Schlepping around the hospital all day like that with heavy packages. It’s a lot for a bubbie,” he said when she finished. “I ordered you some of the good support stockings at the pharmacy.”

  Her great betrayal of this gentle man ballooned in her throat and she hung her head and began to cry. He might not have even known she was crying except that her tears spread like dark stains on the white damask cloth.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, standing. “Is something the matter?”

  She shook her head. “I’m just tired,” she said. “And there’s so much sadness in those hospitals.”

  “We are so lucky, you and I, to have our health.”

  She cried harder.

  He put his arms around her awkwardly, from behind the chair. “Maybe you shouldn’t go to the hospital,” he said. “You’ve always been so sensitive. I know you love to help and to do kindnesses for everyone, but you have to take care of yourself as well.”

  “Oy, Yidel, loz mich tsu ru.” She shook him off and put her head down on the table.

  He paused, a long pause, and then very softly asked, “Is it that sickness? Did it come back?” The cancer. She laughed with anguish.

  “Women in my condition,” she began, “we are extra emotional. It’s hormones. That’s what the doctor said.”

  There had been a time, after Lipa, when she hadn’t been able to get out of bed, and then, when she had finally emerged, the sight of the hipsters walking down Lee Avenue had caused her to burst into tears. “I killed him, just as surely as if I put the noose around his neck myself,” she’d said to Yidel as he loaded her into the chair lift and followed her up the stairs. In those days, he’d thought that the slightest wind would blow her away. Or at least blow her into Bellevue.

  “Are you talking about when black pepper grows?” he asked her now. It was their private euphemism for menopause. “Is that why the tears?”

  “I’m fine. Really. You don’t have to worry about me so much.” Oy. It was all so complicated! Why didn’t she want to tell him that, on her worst days, when she was tired and stressed and afraid, she saw Lipa leaning against a cabinet, walking down the street, playing his violin in the living room? Maybe if she told Yidel about the twins, or about Lipa, her son would no longer make his appearances. She didn’t want to risk it. Seeing Lipa after all these years caused a sting in the back of her throat, a tightness in her chest, but she could almost feel the weight of her little boy in her arms again, the fresh scent of his hair. So though it was wrong, she couldn’t help herself.

  “Come on, tayerinke, a little sleep helps everything.”

  Yidel pulled her up from the chair and led her to the candles and watched her light. Then he guided her to the bedroom and eased her shoes from her feet and turned away as she replaced her scarf with the cotton turban, before tucking the blankets around her and kissing her forehead. And this, even though they were supposed to go downstairs to Tzila Ruchel for the meal. He would go by himself. He turned off the light and closed the door.

  * * *

  During the weeks of s’firah, the forty-nine days of mourning when nothing new could be purchased and no weddings celebrated, everything went wrong.

  Each day she woke with cramps. The babies made violent jerky motions, unlike anything she’d felt with any of her previous pregnancies. The roof leaked, and not just under the skylight but over her bed and over the kitchen sink, and the space heater shorted out and almost started a fire. “I smell burning,” Dead Onyu had shouted up the stairs. “Surie! Something is burning!” Mold grew on the walls and inside the kitchen cabinets. Lipa appeared to her several times every day, and though his visits remained a secret joy, the unexpectedness of them could also be startling. She received a letter fr
om a lawyer, requesting her to appear as a witness against the therapist, and a day later, another letter arrived from the state prosecutor, demanding the same thing. That evening, hauling herself up the stairs hand over hand, she’d pulled the wooden railing out of the wall, and now it lay, waiting to be repaired, completely unusable, blocking the already blocked stairs, a hazard. None of her clothes fit her, and she couldn’t ask Yidel to bring the box of homemade maternity clothes up from the basement. And when she found a moment to go and find them herself, to secretly dig through the box and bring things up one at a time, she found the boxes full of those kinds of centipedes that live in New York basements, shivery, thousand-legged things that ran in every direction when she pulled out the first enormous dress. She threw the clothes into the incinerator. “Of course,” she said savagely. “Everything is perfect. Everything is always perfect.”

  “What is perfect?” asked Miryam Chiena, who had come down to fold the long lines of washing zigzagging through the basement.

  “Everything,” said Surie.

  “If everything is perfect, then why are you so sad?”

  “This isn’t sadness,” Surie said. “It’s energy.” She threw another handful of her maternity clothing into the incinerator and swung the heavy steel door shut with a crash. She wiped some soot from her face with her sleeve, blew her nose, and then crushed a centipede under her orthopedic shoe.

  By the end of her twenty-sixth week, Surie needed to time the cramps. They built up painfully until they were five minutes apart and then stopped. On Tuesday, she and Yidel returned from grocery shopping. He was just pulling up the second cart of groceries when he caught her looking at the stopwatch he used for his chemicals. “What on earth are you doing?” he said, angry. “Are you timing how long it takes me to bring these carts upstairs?” She denied it, but he was hurt, and that Thursday when she went shopping, he didn’t go with her and she had to climb the stairs a dozen times, carrying two plastic bags in each hand. Exhaustion felled her. The boys came home later that night and found that the stove wasn’t lit, there was nothing to eat, and their mother was on the couch, a book fallen from her hands and her scarf askew, asleep sitting up.

  After dinner, Dead Onyu climbed the stairs to talk with her, worried. “Lipa?” the old woman said. She couldn’t understand the connection between Lipa’s secret and Surie’s. “This secret keeping is wrong, darling. A true sin.”

  “I can’t do it,” Surie said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I just can’t.”

  “I’ll tell Yidel myself.”

  “Don’t!” Surie cried. “I know I have to. I will. Just … not now.”

  “This is not the kind of thing to spring on a man. Especially not Yidel. He doesn’t deserve this. I really don’t know what’s gotten into you.”

  Dead Onyu ran her hand over Surie’s head, checking the scarf, the nylon bangs, Surie’s bristly shaved neck at the back. She slipped her fingers inside Surie’s collar, testing how high it came. Surie tried to pull away, but Dead Onyu held her tightly by the wrist. Then she pinched the fabric of Surie’s cardigan, seeing if it was too tight.

  “You’ve put me in the worst position,” the old woman said. “Perhaps, maybe, you should stay upstairs and not come to visit? I don’t want my son to be angry at me too when he finds out what’s been going on.”

  * * *

  Surie had been trying to go in to the clinic every day, even if only for a few hours, because she knew that once the twins were born, the opportunity to learn would be lost. But this saddened Tzila Ruchel, who missed her mother’s company and her help. “Did I offend you?” she asked as Surie scurried past her landing close to midnight that same night, on her way to throw in a load of dirty towels.

  “No, no,” Surie said, but she couldn’t stop to chat because she had a new textbook hidden in the laundry basket, and Tzila Ruchel would notice it and have words to say about that too. “I’ll see you some other time!”

  “You are not like I thought you were,” Val had said to her that very morning, the day Surie left Tzila Ruchel crying on the stairs. “And by you, I really mean Chassidic women.” How so? she’d wanted to know, and Val had smiled. “You wear different clothes and speak a different language, but you are just like me.” Hardworking and curious. Deceitful, thought Surie.

  * * *

  Surie had began to know many people she would never have come into contact with before the clinic. She knew the young Mexican mother who had given birth to five children before finding out, in America, that she had two wombs. Surie told her that it didn’t really matter. Cats also had two wombs and they gave birth without any problem, and she whispered in the woman’s ear not to heed the words of the doctor, which were almost unintelligible to both of them, and they laughed and slapped their palms together. She knew the forty-year-old lawyer who lived by herself and who had one day decided that she needed a child, but as stretch marks appeared, began to regret getting pregnant and wanted to somehow end the whole process. “But you have to wait for the good part,” Surie said. “Good things don’t come easy.” And the woman listened to her because Surie had nine living children and several miscarriages and was pregnant with twins and knew what she was talking about. She sat with the young woman who had miscarried for the sixth time and she said nothing. She was only a compassionate presence, and when the woman finally rose, she leaned down and put her arms around Surie’s neck.

  It was easy to lose herself in the work, to forget about her family at home and their concerns: Dead Onyu, Tzila Ruchel, Yidel. It was easy, too, to pretend that she had already told Yidel and that they were both eagerly awaiting this miraculous birth. She chattered on with the patients, gleefully telling them her due date, how much ice cream she was eating to help the babies grow, how grateful she was to God for such a surprise. Val, hearing these comments, turned to look at her with a frown but said nothing. It was only when Surie returned home that she was confronted with the reality of the situation. So she left for the clinic earlier, returned later, fell asleep right when she came home.

  * * *

  Earlier the same day, still struggling with the complex language in the books Val had given her, Surie had found a simplified nursing textbook on her seat in the break room. As she’d lifted it to return to the shelf, her hand made a slight jerk and she put the book on the table in front of her and opened it to the first chapter as if she weren’t worried at all and put on her reading glasses and bent her head and realized she understood everything that was written there. Later that afternoon, Val had come in and seen that Surie was up to the sixth chapter and was humming away to herself, sometimes shouting in happiness, and then all the technicians had come in and the dietitian and the other nurse-midwives and they’d congratulated Surie on breaking through the language barrier, and she’d blushed and had to excuse herself to go to the bathroom.

  She’d read the textbook secretly down in the basement, tuning out the clanking of the old washer and dryer, and, around 3:00 a.m., crept up the stairs and got under the covers. Yidel rolled over and opened his eyes.

  “I think I’d like to be a nurse,” she said.

  There was a long silence and then he cleared his throat. “You are already. Dead Onyu and Dead Opa appreciate everything you do for them.”

  “I’m not making a joke,” she said. “The wives of Williamsburg need a Jewish nurse.”

  “Next you’ll tell me that you want to eat pork,” he said. He didn’t mention that the women in their community never went to college because she knew that as well as he did.

  “If you’re worried about someone in the family leaving the path of Judaism, maybe you should talk with your son.” She meant their seventeen-year-old, Mattis. Surie had found a DVD under her son’s mattress and shown it to Yidel. The Forty-Year-Old Virgin. A pornographic film. The word virgin itself was pornographic. Neither she nor Yidel had ever seen a film. There’d been no film made of their wedding or at the weddings of any of their children. Tzila Ruchel had
to tell them what the shiny disc was when she’d seen it on the kitchen counter.

  “But how did Mattis watch it?” Surie had asked her daughter.

  “I’d search the basement for a computer, a lep tup.” At the clinic, there were lep tups with thick cables into which the doctors and midwives entered patients’ information. Some Chassidic businessmen used computers at their workplaces, but it was forbidden to bring the Internet into one’s home. An open sewer. It wasn’t possible that her son had somehow brought such a terrifying device into their apartment. People were ejected from the community for less.

  “Surie,” Yidel said, “going to college is worse than looking into a lep tup.”

  “You were an EMT. It’s okay for you to learn how to help people but it’s not okay for me?”

  He frowned and his mouth had opened and he moved his hand as if he were signing some response. He picked up his hearing aid and pushed it into his ear. “You sound like a goy,” he eventually said. “Me, me, me, instead of we, we, we.” He glared at her. “Aren’t you afraid that because of what you are doing, all of your grandchildren will be kicked out of cheder?”

  She shook her head and rolled away from him, disturbed and furious, not trusting herself to speak. It was the truth. That was the whole problem, right from the start. What had become of her? Instead of viewing her life, her home, her marriage, as sacred, as something whole and impossible to divide, she risked cutting them all off from what they valued most.

  * * *

  Spring was a very busy time in the clinic. Though they were always busy, many more women wanted to have spring babies and the hallways were clogged with extra chairs. Now, Val trusted Surie to do many of the basic checks unsupervised—the urinalysis, the weight, the blood pressure—and Surie rushed from woman to woman, amazed at herself for having acquired these new skills.