On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  “I’m studying,” she told Yidel when he found the textbook in the laundry basket. He’d thought to surprise her with a pile of freshly folded clothes. Her face had flushed. Miryam Chiena marrying one of those hipsters on the bicycles. Chaim Tzvi, an old unmarried man at fifty. A grandchild born with some terrible illness, God forbid. It would all be her fault.

  Yidel had taken the filthy thing—such images!—and dropped it down the incinerator chute, but Surie dragged home another one, exactly the same, the next day. Afraid of what it meant for a woman to bring such a treif thing home, worried about the chill chemical smell of her words, he turned his eyes away from her and didn’t ask her any more questions. Now, each night, when she went into their bedroom, the beds were pushed far apart, on opposite sides of the room.

  They fought with Mattis and he denied having a DVD, despite the evidence. They didn’t find a lep tup in the basement, and on the surface, the family was calm again. The lilacs along the chain-link fences bloomed, and then the red buds and the wisteria. Dead Opa was mailed a batch of day-old chicks in a cardboard house with little circular holes punched into the sides. Bright green grass grew long in each vacant corner and sparrows nested inside the streetlights.

  Surie returned home by train or by foot to her neighborhood a half hour before candlelighting on Friday afternoons with barely time to wash herself and change into her best clothes. “Mamme,” Tzila Ruchel said one evening just before candlelighting, “why are you coming home so late?” Usually, the family was dressed and ready for the holy day at lunch. “Where do you go? Tatie won’t tell me, and”—she looked around as if someone might overhear her—“it’s really time for you to start looking for a shidduch for Mattis.” The seventeen-year-old lep tup pornographer. “It’s not going to be easy to find him a good match. Please tell me everything is normal and that people won’t have anything new to say about our family.”

  Surie looked at her daughter, that pale rose of a girl, her pride and joy, blocking the way to the candlesticks. As a child, Tzila Ruchel had wanted to wear her tights to bed as an additional stringency, and Surie, proud, had pasted gold stars on her daughter’s mitzvah chart. Thank God she hadn’t told Tzila Ruchel that she was pregnant with twins. She almost laughed out loud from horror. And imagine if she told such a stickler that she was studying to be a midwife! The less said, the better. Their family’s reputation couldn’t come to any harm if she didn’t tell anybody what she was up to and was meticulous about dropping off cake each time she traveled to Manhattan. Once three people knew, it would no longer be a secret. And so she tilted her head and smiled and said she was just busy with the bikur cholim, and Tzila Ruchel sighed and went back downstairs to her own apartment. Surie, full of adrenaline and self-loathing, rushed around the house, checking that all the lamps were switched on or off, the toilet paper was torn, the challos were on the table next to the salt and the spices. At seven o’clock, she was ready to light her candles, one for each child and grandchild. Each flame would be reflected in the bright silver of the candelabra and the trays and the old brass mirror that stood above the buffet cabinet, making it seem as if there were hundreds of candles, thousands.

  Surie stood alone in her dining room. Her husband and her boys were at shil, praying. Tzila Ruchel and Miryam Chiena were downstairs reading to Dead Onyu. The whole room felt alive, shimmering in the last rays of light from the sun as it slid below the horizon. On the polished floor, slowly moving rainbows of color. She could hear her own breathing. In her hand, she held the burning match. It felt as if the room waited for something, and she too waited.

  Just at that moment, she felt the twins move within her, both somehow turning as if to face the candles, as if they could sense light. There was such a silence. No noise came from the Navy Yard or from the street. Time stretched out. The match had barely burned. She reached into the top drawer of the buffet and took out two extra candles and put them into the candelabra. It was completely forbidden to light candles for the unborn. Yet it felt completely right to her in the moment.

  The smell of late lilacs floated in to her from the open window, and the smell of the East River. Something like the woods up in the Catskills, like ferns and duff and damp soil. Lights went out across Williamsburg and were replaced with the gleam of the Shabbos candles. The air-raid siren announcing the last minutes to light the candles rose and fell away to that same huge silence. Outside, the streets were empty.

  She leaned forward and lit the two extra candles. It was as if she could hear the twins whispering to her. They were her children. She did want them to live. The way she behaved at the clinic was not a lie. She wasn’t acting. It was how she truly felt, underneath the complications that beset her at home. She wanted to see their infant faces, wanted to sit them on her knees and teach them to read the alef-beis. She wanted to sing them the songs that Jewish children learn from their mothers. She wanted to knit them miniature matching cardigans and bonnets with pom-poms on the top. She wanted to put them to her breasts and nurse them, and at that, a little sob escaped her. To lie again drowsily in bed in the afternoon, bathed in slanting golden light, with an infant sleeping next to her, a trickle of milk at the edge of his lip, his soft, warm body curled up next to hers.

  Yidel would again be a father, whether she told him or not. He wouldn’t be angry. Thrilled, that’s what he’d be. But he’d been unrecognizable when he’d thrown the textbook into the incinerator chute. His face livid, his lips tight. An entirely different man from the one who’d walked with Lipa along the river and listened to his story. Hearing a noise on the steps, she pinched out the two extra candles and shoved them to the back of the drawer.

  It was nothing. It was nobody. Look how she’d startled, like a criminal! Tomorrow, after kiddush, she’d tell Yidel and Tzila Ruchel. She lit the rest of the candles, waved her hands, covered her eyes, and said a prayer for everyone she knew, for the healthy and for the sick, for the born and for the unborn, for the wise and for those who needed wisdom, for the adults and for the children and the grandchildren, for Yidel and for Dead Onyu and Dead Opa, and for herself, last of all.

  TWELVE

  Lag B’Omer came on a Sunday at the beginning of May. Surie had reached her seventh month. Many of the men and older boys traveled to Kiryas Joel, the community village in upstate New York, and those who stayed lit bonfires in the streets. Yidel broke rotting boards off Dead Onyu’s old chicken coop and lit a fire in their backyard. Small children ran screaming through the streets, firing arrows from their plastic bows, and teenage boys carried legless chairs to throw onto the piles of wood that were accumulating in the back alleys and the abandoned lots. Groups of girls peered down from the windows of their school, pointing as men carried their dried-out palm fronds and the old green s’chach from the roofs of their sukkahs to the bonfires. Two- and three-year-old boys, dressed in their finest, had their long hair cut off and weighed and their payos shaped, and men danced around the fires and late into the night, the musicians played the old songs, and singers took the microphones to sing the new.

  The first truly hot days had arrived and the hipsters—the real Americans on their bikes—had begun to roll through the neighborhood, flashing their tattoos and their breasts, their voices loud and their music full of words and sounds that were forbidden. In the coming weeks, the young children would be kept inside and girls told not to walk out unless they were in groups of four. The teenage boys would spoil for a fight and occasionally throw rocks at the backs of the bikers when they were far enough away. But on that Sunday, they were all out on the streets together. When Surie walked up Division, she felt a strange wind blowing through her neighborhood, and when she stood on the edge of the huge communal bonfire, the women were whispering about this strange wind and the men whispered about it behind the smoke and some of the children inside the synagogue sat next to the barred windows and looked out at the street instead of toward the Torah scrolls, and this was a new thing, a thing that had never happened before.
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  In the afternoon, she spoke about it with Yidel. He was reading his newspaper over a cup of tea with lemon before he got to work on the Torah scroll, the last he would ever write. In two months, he would retire.

  “What is happening to our community?” she asked.

  Yidel put his newspaper down and looked at her. He picked up one of his hearing aids, turned it on, and screwed it into his ear. She repeated herself and he snorted. “You’re one to talk.”

  “Forget me,” she said. “Can’t you please forget me?”

  “If you’re talking about the gonef who stole the silver atoros off the talleisim, the Shomrim will catch whoever it is. Or is this about Mattis?” Yidel jogged his cup and some tea slopped out onto the newspaper. He mopped it up and then poured a cup of tea for her and slid it across the table. “Has something else happened?”

  “Nothing new happened,” she said, though she had barely been home and wasn’t sure. Many mornings, she did not make the beds. At night, she was too tired to spend time talking with her children. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat down with Mattis the lep tupper. “I’m talking in general. We aren’t the only family that has a son, a daughter, a grandchild who left. My friends blame the Internet.”

  “Books,” he said. They stared at each other through the steam from the cups.

  “I like studying.”

  “I hope you like when all your children bow down to idols and turn into apikorsim.”

  She was the same as she had always been. Even if she learned how to be a midwife, she would always braid the challos for Shabbos and prepare the chulent and shave her head and cover it with a scarf. She would always be a believer. She told herself that reading a midwifery textbook would not cause her children to deny their faith. Could not.

  “Please,” she said, placing her finger on the lip of his glass. “I am worried. Every summer it’s the same craziness. The tattooed ones come out of their houses and they walk our streets. Most of our children turn away, but some are fascinated.”

  “Is Mattis one of the fascinated ones?”

  “I saw him on the street listening to the way they throw words around. He wants to speak English like them. Didn’t you hear him on Shabbos with his friends? Every second word was English. He is ashamed of his accent. He is ashamed of us. He wants to wear deodorant and a shirt with cuffs. He wants to brush his beard. He’ll want to have a say in who he marries.”

  Yidel winced. “It’s Lipa all over again.”

  “I won’t have another child die because I don’t like his glasses.”

  They both glanced up at each other, ashamed, then looked quickly away. Surie was afraid to look in the corners of the room for fear Lipa would be standing there, listening to them.

  Yidel cleared his throat. “We must find him a wife. Settle him in the community.” His glass was empty, so she put the used teabag back in and refilled the glass with hot water from the stove. She sat down.

  “He has time. He’s only seventeen.”

  “Your own brother was married at seventeen.”

  “What if it’s too late for marriage already? What if we would merely be causing pain to more people—his wife, his children, his in-laws?”

  “What if it’s you who are causing him to want to leave? With your books, your … freedoms?”

  Her face filled with color. It wasn’t the textbooks, really. It was her. It was the pregnancy. It was all the things she wasn’t saying, Lipa, the twins, the young girl, that court case. She’d ruined one of her own children, and now, it seemed, she was ruining another one. Secrets. She looked out at the street and at the greenly flowing East River and she said, “If I knew for sure? I would take my books and throw them down the chute myself.” She had wanted to talk to Yidel, but she couldn’t tell him when they were arguing, so she opened the kitchen window and, crouching, with much effort, climbed out to the little platform between the roofs where they usually built their sukkah.

  When she came in, she noticed that the midwifery textbook was missing from the kitchen table. She went looking for it and found it in the hands of her granddaughter Miryam Chiena. The girl was seated just inside the wardrobe in Surie’s bedroom and she was reading.

  “Is this what you are studying, Bubbie?” she asked, and she stood up and carried the book over to Surie and pointed inside to the photographs of the developing fetus. She did not seem upset. If anything, she was eager. And yet this was not a subject that was ever discussed with young girls. They went to their weddings, as she had done, with the barest of information about the process of procreation. The name for a leg was foot. The name for a toe was foot. The name for a thigh was foot. The name for the place inside their thighs did not exist. Front, her granddaughter said when she had an itch. Back. This place. That place. Here. There. Miryam Chiena, in her excitement, forgot to be modest.

  “Is this what a baby looks like when it is in the mother’s tummy?”

  She did not know what to say to this child. They did not talk with children about mothers having babies in their tummies. Babies came from God. And yet, this lack of knowledge had contributed to the situation with the young girl at the clinic. Surie faltered. How had Miryam Chiena learned even this?

  “Is this the place where the baby comes out?” her granddaughter said, turning the page and pointing. She was not distressed. She was curious, much as Surie had been, and at the same age. Thirteen. Maybe fourteen. Not much older than Surie’s patient, who would be five months along. Showing.

  “It is,” Surie said.

  “Where is that on me?” the little girl asked, running her hand from her head to her knees.

  Surie said nothing.

  “And what is this?” Miryam Chiena said, pointing to another picture, and Surie gently closed the book, not wanting to frighten the girl, but also not willing to answer, and afraid of what Tzila Ruchel would say when she found out that her daughter had been reading about birth in one of her grandmother’s books.

  “I will give you another book,” she said. “This afternoon.” But when she went to get the book she had given to her daughters when they were twelve and thirteen, a plain pamphlet about the holiness of menstruation, she knew it would not satisfy Miryam Chiena. And she thought about her options. She could say that she could not find the book. She could tell the girl she was naughty for wanting to read such a thing. She could let her ask some questions. But if she quashed the girl’s interest or didn’t assuage her curiosity, what would happen? Is this what happened to the lost children in the community? If every place and every thing was forbidden, the tiniest shred of curiosity would automatically lead the children to forbidden things, and then the schools would send them to unlicensed therapists where anything could happen. The worst things.

  * * *

  That evening, almost everyone fell asleep early from the smoke and the arrows and the excitement, but Miryam Chiena came upstairs and sat down next to her grandmother on the couch. In her hands, she had a crayon drawing of a fetus floating in an orange-red ball. In the fashion of the textbooks she saw at school, the baby did not have a face.

  “You drew the picture you saw this afternoon,” Surie said.

  “That photograph was so beautiful,” Miryam Chiena said. “But where was the angel?” The angel who teaches unborn infants the Torah.

  “May I see what you made?”

  Miryam Chiena showed her.

  “Why didn’t you draw an angel?” Surie asked, sweating a little bit inside her high collar.

  “I didn’t draw it because I am not sure that people can see angels,” Miryam Chiena whispered. “But if I did, I would have drawn the angel pale blue and I would have put it right here.” She pointed.

  The fetus was pink and headless. It was covered in fine gold hair, just like the picture in the book. Across its chest ran a blue-and-red umbilical cord.

  “It’s wearing a seat belt,” Miryam Chiena said. “See?”

  “For safety,” said Surie. “May I have your draw
ing?” She thought she might be able to get rid of it before Tzila Ruchel saw what her daughter had been doing.

  “I’m not finished,” Miryam Chiena said. She did not release her hold on the paper.

  “What if there were twins? What if there were two babies inside the mother? Could you draw that?”

  What if she turned to this child, her favorite grandchild, and very simply said, “You know, I am expecting twins.” From this child, there would be no judgment, just curiosity. She would want to put her head on Surie’s belly and listen to the babies. She would want to feel them kick. But if Surie told Miryam Chiena about the twins, Tzila Ruchel would burn her own mother at the stake.

  The girl was nodding. “I can draw anything. I’m an artist.”

  “Yes,” Surie said, smiling, “you’re a good artist and a smart girl.”

  “I’m going to give it to Mommy the next time she gets fat. Gets pregnant.” She pronounced the foreign word carefully in English.

  “You know, not everybody uses those words. I don’t think your mommy would like it if you said that to her. And not everyone knows what babies look like before they are born either. It’s specialty information.”

  “Why?” Miryam Chiena asked.

  “You know how the most holy things are covered? Like the Torah? Like a mezuzah? Well, babies are very holy before they are born, so they are covered.”

  “Ketchup is kept in a bottle. Is ketchup holy? What about socks? We keep them in the drawer.”

  Surie winced. This girl. Too smart. She sat motionless on the couch, clenching and unclenching her hands. The babies within her were motionless too. She wondered how long it had been since they had turned or kicked. She couldn’t remember.

  “When I was a young girl, your age, maybe a little bit older, the non-Jewish women didn’t look so different from us. They wore hats and gloves and skirts below their knees. The men wore hats and neat suits. The outside world wasn’t so scary. But then, something changed and the whole world went crazy.”