On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  “Are you talking about the Holocaust?” How did she even know about that? They were all so careful not to mention it in front of the children.

  “No. I’m talking about a kind of revolution that happened. People stopped caring about what other people thought of them. They stopped listening to their parents and the government and their teachers. They were called hippies. I was horribly afraid of them. Everything they stood for, every sound they made, terrified me. I did everything I could not to be like them. All of my friends were the same. One of the things the hippies did was talk about … the kinds of things you might find in my book, as if that was the only thing in the world.”

  The little girl leaned against her. “Bubbie,” she said, “were you ever pregnant?”

  “I’m pregnant now,” Surie blurted, putting her hands on her enormous belly. “With twins.” She snuck a look at the child. “Would you like to feel them?”

  Miryam Chiena laughed. “I’m pregnant too!” she said. “I ate too much food. Just like you, Bubbie!”

  * * *

  Late that night, Dead Opa motored up the stairs to tell Surie that Dead Onyu wasn’t feeling well.

  She found the old woman sitting up in bed, her fist curled around a piece of paper. Her breathing was ragged and her face was purple.

  “How could you?” she hissed. “You’re lucky it was me and not Tzila Ruchel that Miryam Chiena talked to about her drawing.”

  Surie felt sick. She was mortified.

  “I told her to give it to me and I was going to burn it.” Surie hoped that Miryam Chiena hadn’t told her great-grandmother about the textbook and the photographs she’d seen. Dead Onyu shook her head and muttered, “Gottenyu. The expression goes that one can’t fool the children, but neither can you fool the elderly.” She told Surie that Miryam Chiena had come downstairs and eagerly described her drawing and how she knew what to draw. She asked Surie what she was trying to do, get the girl expelled from school? All very well, teaching her something interesting, and yes, the girl was very intelligent, but to teach her something like that, something that no girl knew anything about, and then to send the child back to a school where everyone was ignorant, it was like firing a missile, first through her granddaughter and then through her own house. Are you crazy? she asked. Don’t blame me if this child ends up marrying some wild, long-haired shaygetz with tattoos up his neck.

  “And how could you tell her you are pregnant when you haven’t even told your own husband? I used to think you were the smartest person in this house, but now…”

  “Lots of Jews think there’s nothing wrong with telling a daughter when you are pregnant. I see women in the clinic who bring their daughters with them to the appointments, five years old, ten. That’s too young. But Miryam Chiena is old enough to know. She’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Firstly, she’s not your daughter. She’s your granddaughter and it’s not your decision to make. And secondly, since when do we ever tell our girls that kind of thing? That hospital has infected you with some kind of crazy germs.”

  “Onyu, really. You grew up on a farm. You knew how things got born when you were much younger than Miryam Chiena.”

  “That book had a detailed description of what happens before a child is conceived. She told me she’d started to read it when you took the book away! If I thought you’d told her anything about that—”

  “I didn’t say anything!” Surie said quickly. Though she couldn’t help thinking of the other little girl, the one in the clinic.

  Dead Onyu snorted. “Now she won’t be like the other girls in her class. She’ll be different. And that difference will mark her, it will erode her sense of belonging. She’ll be one of those who leave us.”

  “She’s different already. She’s so smart. When Mattis was learning his parsha, she knew the songs before he did. She had the words and the tune memorized the second or third day. And she was nine.”

  “When she is older, she will leave us. When there is a wedding, she’ll call up and say she’s too busy to come, and when she has her first child, she won’t invite us to see it. She’ll say to her husband, ‘My family believes in the evil eye. When they see how beautiful our baby is, they’ll spit on the ground and say she should grow with her head in the ground like a beet, and my mother will say she looks exactly like a little worm.’”

  “Onyu. Stop. Miryam Chiena will never be ashamed of us,” said Surie.

  “Maybe,” said Dead Onyu, and she shook her head. “But if there comes a time when we are ashamed of her, it will be because of what you did today.”

  “Onyu, do you know the story about Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach? The way he caught eighty witches and brought them to be hanged.”

  “Whenever you change the subject, it shows you know you are in the wrong.”

  “I can’t bear to think anymore. I just want it all to be over. The telling. The pregnancy. All of it,” Surie said, and she took the old woman’s hand. “I’ve changed my mind. Could you tell Yidel for me?”

  Dead Onyu drew her closer. “I wouldn’t be you for the world,” she said, moving her hand in circles on Surie’s back. “You’ve made a mess of it, for sure. And why does that make me love you even more? I’m a back-to-front old woman.”

  Surie breathed in the scent that was Dead Onyu, the homemade tar soap she used, the woolens, some smell that was indefinably old and from another country. She was closer to Dead Onyu than she’d been to her own mother, God rest her soul. She’d known Onyu for longer, and they’d gotten along. Dead Onyu had seen her through every one of her early marriage fights, through the rough days of nursing, through the trial of postpartum depression, through financial troubles, and through the hospitalizations of her children. Even newly blind, she’d been there when Surie came back from California and all she’d wanted to do was put her face down in Dead Onyu’s lap and sob. She was calm and wise and honest and gruff. Other people complained about their mothers-in-law, but Surie felt blessed.

  She knew that when she finally told Yidel about the pregnancy, Dead Onyu would be there to smooth everything over. Dead Onyu would glare at anyone who stared at Surie and the twins in the streets. She’d hiss a few choice words in Hungarian and the staring would permanently stop.

  “I’m sorry, Onyu,” she said. “I was just getting up the strength to tell Yidel. Practicing. Sort of. I’m ashamed that I said anything to Miryam Chiena.”

  They sat in silence until Dead Onyu fell asleep and her hand fell from Surie’s grasp. Surie took Miryam Chiena’s drawing and put it inside the incinerator, and when she closed the door she made sure to do it very quietly.

  THIRTEEN

  The last trimester was the time when all the customs must be kept and none forgotten: Surie kept canned chickpeas in the cupboard in case there was a bris; under her pillow lay the book Noam Elimelech and a knife to scare away the Angel of Death; she bit the end off an esrog; every knot in the house was untied to make sure that there would be nothing holding her back from an easy labor; she didn’t lift her arms above her head; she washed her hands and ate a full meal on Saturday nights after Shabbos ended; birth amulets and copies of the 121st Psalm were hidden behind pictures in every room and especially near the front door; each morning she put extra coins in the old tin charity box before she prayed; she set up an appointment with a mikva in Far Rockaway where nobody would know her, so her babies’ skin would be clear of pimples; she avoided looking at the dogs and cats that roamed the streets. When Yidel adjusted a tapestry of flowers Surie had made years before and an amulet fell out, he was puzzled and thought that perhaps it had been forgotten there, from before the birth of their youngest son, Chaim Tzvi.

  Just before Shavios, in the first week of May, shortly after Surie had made up with Dead Onyu, Val told her she couldn’t take any more days off. The clinic was too busy. She’d be paid the same wage as a nursing assistant. Now birth and its rituals dominated her home life and her work life. During the week, she was at the hospital, assistin
g Val. On the weekends, she rested at home with her family and studied increasingly more difficult sections of the textbook. Though she didn’t look at the feral cats that yowled around the garbage bags outside her building, she looked at photograph after photograph of teratology, the disasters that can befall fetuses when there is slippage between their chromosomes or when environmental troubles break into the sealed room of the uterus. On Sundays, when Yidel and her sons came home from synagogue, they often found her at the dining room table, bent over one of these books, and Yidel would clear his throat and the boys would shuffle their feet and she would look up, red-eyed with exhaustion, and wipe her hands on her housecoat, close the book with a snap, and go into the kitchen to make toast and porridge and eggs.

  Coming home from the hospital, rushing, late on Friday, Surie was brought up short by the sight of a woman standing in the vestibule of her apartment building, a gaggle of chickens around her feet. It was the mother of the little pregnant girl. Though she was hidden away somewhere out of sight, the mother must have wept over her daughter’s swollen belly. The mother wore a neat maternity frock and a small black hat with a short wig. If Surie looked closely, she thought she could tell that the woman was wearing a pillow under her dress.

  The building was very quiet. Usually, at this time on Friday afternoon, it was full of the cries of Tzila Ruchel’s children, but even the sounds from the Navy Yard were absent. The children should have been out of school, but no one ran down the stairs and held her around the legs. No one was outside, playing with Zaidy. Where were they all?

  “My daughter wants you to stay with her,” the woman said. Mrs. Shnitzer, that was her name. She lifted one foot and kicked at one of the chickens. “When she has the baby. She says she doesn’t want me to come to the birth.”

  “I like her,” Surie said. “I could try to go to her. If she wants me there.” Only after she said this did she realize she’d have two-month-old twins at home.

  “One time, she painted her fingernails red. And the fingernails of her little sisters. Who does that?”

  “It’s normal,” Surie said, though she would have spanked her own girls for such wildness. She was the older woman, a respected teacher and a grandmother. The younger woman would listen to her. “But let’s not stand here talking about fingernail polish. Is someone taking care of her? A doctor, I mean?”

  “If her modesty had been like the other girls, she wouldn’t have been his victim,” Mrs. Shnitzer said. She wanted to distance herself from her child. Surie understood. She had done the same thing with Lipa. She was doing the same thing with the twins.

  “No,” she said. “Your daughter is not a bad girl. She is only thirteen. That rapist is in his sixties. You sent her to him for help and this is the help he gives?” Hadn’t Val said that the mother had sided with her daughter? Val had said that the whole family would be receiving counseling. And the police would be provided some counseling too. But six weeks later, the mother still seemed ambivalent.

  “Promise me you won’t tell anyone about what happened. Promise!”

  “I won’t. I wouldn’t do that to your daughter. Call me when she goes into labor. I’ll try to come.”

  The woman leaned against the wall. She pressed her fingers against the green tiles and she sought out the lines of grout with her fingernails.

  “She’s not here.” That little girl, all by herself. Surie felt herself fill with a cold liquid. “Afterwards, we will move somewhere else. Buenos Aires. Or Antwerp.” One of the pullets leapt up and pecked at the hem of Mrs. Shnitzer’s dress and she flapped and squawked, a bit like a chicken herself.

  “Your husband won’t have a job there. You have other children. How will you eat? Just tell me where she is and I’ll go, even if it means a plane flight. Tell me!”

  “I should never have allowed my children to read English books.”

  “It wasn’t the books. It wasn’t the library. It was one of our own.”

  Mrs. Shnitzer’s chin shook. “Maybe it’s not true,” she said. “It could be a growth. I’ve heard about things like that. They can do a surgery…”

  “Is that what you want?” Surie asked. “It’s too late for an abortion.”

  The woman reared back and struck at Surie with her handbag. “Shame on you!” she hissed. She hit Surie again.

  “I’m pregnant,” Surie said. “Please don’t hit me. You could hurt my babies.”

  The woman dropped her handbag. She began to cry.

  “I told you so you know that I will keep your secret. As you will keep mine.”

  “It’s not possible,” Mrs. Shnitzer whispered. “You’re lying. You’re a great-grandmother. What kind of witch are you?”

  Surie sat down heavily in the chair lift and pressed the button. She was exhausted. The chair began to rise, jerking on its tracks, groaning. The girl’s family would respond out of fear, no matter what she said. “It wasn’t her fault,” she said in parting. “She’s a child. That monster threatened to hurt her family if she said anything.”

  “What is a woman like you doing at a place that does abortions?” Mrs. Shnitzer called after her. “So many people respect you. If they only knew what a goyta you really are.”

  Surie lifted her head. She folded her hands over her belly. She did not look down. She had forgotten to ask Val to check the babies’ heartbeats.

  She wasn’t ashamed of the work she did. It was good work and she was proud of it. She thought that if Lipa were to come home now, she would handle him differently. Better. Perhaps not in the eyes of her community but in her own eyes. And she would be a different mother for the twins too, more compassionate, kinder, less afraid.

  As the chair rattled past Dead Onyu’s apartment, the old woman came out to the stairs, and Surie wondered what she had heard of the conversation. Her mother-in-law’s hearing, unlike Yidel’s, was acute.

  “Onyu, what will become of me?” she asked, but Dead Onyu only smiled at her as the chair turned the corner and continued upward.

  “People are awful, but I couldn’t love you more,” she said.

  The chair kept on rising and rising, all the way past Tzila Ruchel’s apartment and up to her own.

  That night, for the first time in months, Surie pushed their beds together and curled up with her face pressed against Yidel’s chest. He blinked at her, his hands not knowing where to settle, hovering above her shoulders. “May I?” he asked, before drawing her closer. She told him a little bit about her day. She tried to describe how she felt without telling him too much, and Yidel, without asking any questions, held her.

  “I’m not an abortionist and I’m not a witch,” she said. “I’m just trying to do something good for the women of this community. Something that hasn’t been done before.”

  “Remember,” he said, “when you had your miscarriages? You always named the babies. You wanted to know where they were buried. You wanted to hold them for a while. Surie, you have never been one for living entirely within the community. You have often made decisions based on your heart. Nothing the rabbis or I could have said would have changed your mind. Small-enough things. And you know I don’t live one hundred percent by the rule book either.” His love of news programs on the radio. Singing in the shower. “We can live with such small deviations. They aren’t hurting anyone.”

  She was sure that he knew she was pregnant.

  “A little girl came into the clinic at the hospital while I was working today,” she began, yearning for Yidel’s wisdom and insight, yearning for truth. Without him, she was nothing. “She grew up in Williamsburg. One of us…”

  FOURTEEN

  The middle of May and the holiday of Shavios always brought the most beautiful weather, the soft winds, the cornflower-blue skies. Robins tugged worms from the soil. Cardinals called from the power lines. Ducks returned from wherever they went in the winter and sailed once again on the river. Surie found a black duck and ten ducklings in the paddling pool that had been left out all winter in the backyard
. The mother duck sprang from the pool, but the little ducklings weren’t strong enough to make it over the lip. After watching the duck get out and then return to the water several times, all of her ducklings frantically peeping and calling for her, Surie took a plank of wood and floated one end of it in the pool. The ducklings climbed onto it and were able to get out. They waddled to the side fence in their little red shoes and waited at the chain-link gate until Surie opened it.

  Tzila Ruchel’s children made paper roses and taped them to the windows of their apartment. Outside, a few real roses bloomed and the tree of heaven bloomed too and the streets filled with its pale green pollen. In the very early morning and late evening, rabbits emerged from under houses and nibbled on the long grass. Skunks climbed up from the banks of the river and pawed through the bags of garbage at the doorways. They snuffled at the fence and tried to dig underneath to get at the chickens in the backyard. Everyone would be coming to her house, so Surie got up early each morning before going to the clinic to make cheesecakes and cheese Danishes and blintzes and cheese dumplings, the special dairy foods for the holiday.

  She made gingerbread men, and as she piped on their faces, she thought of what her babies would look like when they were born. Their tender pink skin, the rosy stork bites on the backs of their necks, the wisps of hair over the soft spot on the tops of their heads, their fingernails, so flimsy and small that they couldn’t be cut with scissors but would have to be bitten off.

  “You made gingerbread babies!” Miryam Chiena squeaked when she saw the biscuits with their pink bows and little blue yarmulkes.

  There was a little less than two months until the babies would be born. Her skin was tight and hot and itchy. Embarrassingly, her belly button showed in the front of all of her dresses. It was hard to find a comfortable position in which to sleep for the pain in her hips and knees. But it seemed that ever since she’d met the little girl at the hospital, she’d been eager to see the faces of her own babies.