On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  “We don’t really have teachers in zal, Mamme. We’re supposed to be independent learners.” At seventeen. Eighteen. She’d missed his birthday, running to the hospital.

  “Did I know that?”

  “Yup. We’ve all told you.”

  There it was again. While she’d been congratulating herself on being a good mother, the everyday stuff of her children’s lives had been passing her by. Her chest felt tight and hot, though supposedly there was no breast tissue left to fill with milk. Her sons went to school in a dark old building she’d never been allowed to enter. Their entire lives, really, were a mystery to her. She was sure that Mattis had not come to her room voluntarily. “Would you tell me a funny story that happened in school? Something that made you laugh?”

  He looked to the right and then to the left, as if there might be another Mattis sitting nearby. He was so much like his father. “I don’t know. Maybe? Why do you want to hear one?”

  She didn’t remember being hard on him, but she must have been, that he feared punishment at his age. “I won’t get you into trouble.” She hadn’t punished her children. It had been Yidel’s job, though he hated it.

  Mattis glanced at her and then looked away. He sat on his hands.

  “Last week,” he said. “Something happened last week…” She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him speak about anything with her, anything that didn’t have a definite outcome. His voice changed as he told the story, dropped into a note that if she had to describe it, she would have called friendly. Is this what it had been like for Yidel and Lipa, walking by the side of the river?

  “Are you going to be all right, Mamme?” Mattis stood next to her bed.

  She looked up at him. When she was feeling better, she’d call the matchmaker. There was nothing wrong with him. He was lovely. “I lost a baby,” she said. “Two babies actually, but I’m fine. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

  “Tatie is very upset.” Poor Lep Tup. His face was bright red. Unmarried, uneducated about birth, he’d been told she had a very bad stomachache. Nothing more.

  “Your father gets upset easily. You know how he is.” Weak. “Mooshy. Tzila Ruchel thinks he should throw me out of the house for keeping the pregnancy secret. She said she would, if she were him. Who on earth does she take after? Where does she get that goyishe attitude? Not your father for sure.”

  “The next time she needs you to babysit, she’ll forget everything she said.” He already had his hand on the mezuzah. He was backing away. A fine sheen of sweat covered his skin.

  “True,” Surie said. “I should tell her no if she asks, after those dreadful comments. But I won’t. My grandchildren don’t need to suffer.”

  * * *

  The days were just beginning to lengthen toward the great long stretches of summer. The meal, in the dining room that she had decorated as a young bride in the sixties and never updated, went on and on. Chairs scraped back from the tables. People moved to and fro. Songs were sung. It was late before Yidel returned to the bedroom carrying a plate of cold food.

  “Eat up,” he said.

  “I was waiting for my meal for a long time.” He could have put his head around the door and seen her wide-awake, but he hadn’t. She’d spent countless hours training him to be a good husband, and still he had no qualms about leaving a postpartum woman without food. The worst nurse in the hospital knew better than that.

  “We thought you were sleeping.”

  She didn’t like it when people made excuses. Do it right the first time. That was her motto. Then you won’t need to make an excuse.

  “Awake-dreaming only,” she said.

  “I wish I’d had the chance to dream about our twins.”

  She snorted. “I wish I’d had the chance to talk about Lipa. But everyone shut me down.”

  “Surie, you told me not to talk with you about Lipa. You said it was too upsetting…”

  She remembered now. Shouting at him in the kitchen. Throwing something. Maybe it had just been a dish towel. Well, it had been too difficult. She’d been glad, at the time, not to hear Lipa’s name, not to see his photographs in the albums. His small and shining face.

  “I wanted you to notice. By yourself.”

  “All you had to do was ask.” He stood close to her and bent down to speak quietly. His big brown eyes searched out hers. “Surie. It must have been hard, keeping that secret.”

  A thin wail rose from her, though she tried not to let it out.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I know.”

  They sat like that, her crying almost soundlessly, him nodding, until the lights in the main rooms went out. Sitting in the park with a double stroller, two children kicking their legs in the sunlight. Their hands on her skirt, her back, her face, so many times in a day. The pleasure. The wish for some solitude. Their tiny fingers. Their pale blue skin. The regret. And then it was as dark as it had been the night before, an inky blackness, and she was so afraid.

  “Can I get up?” she asked. “I don’t want to be in here.” The corners of the room bulged outward. Her nightgown seemed huge and coarse, a soggy sausage casing made of flannel. She’d made it herself with room to expand if need be but perhaps had gone overboard.

  “Come on,” he said, and he led the way out of the room, along the hallway with its stripe of mildew, and to the front window. She was an ocean liner to his tugboat. “I’ll get you a chair,” he said. “You don’t have to stand.”

  “How do you know where I want to sit?” she asked. He sat on the lowest step of the folding step stool, which squeaked under his weight.

  “It’s your favorite place. How many times have I come home from shil, and you are standing here, watching the river.” He looked up at her. She leaned forward and pointed out a nylon hammock floating in the water, to the bright green light on a warehouse on the other side of the channel.

  “Is that where you go in your mind?” he asked. “When you don’t want to be here in Williamsburg? With us?”

  Stop it, she wanted to say. You think you know me, but you don’t know alef.

  Still, in the whole world, there was only one person who could have led her to that window.

  Another man would be yelling, throwing things, stamping around the room, demanding answers. Is that what she wanted? He was almost … the word she was looking for was impotent. And yet was that the worst thing? He sat next to her, folding a sheet of newspaper into a boat, remembering it was a holiday when folding was not allowed, forgetting again. The boat had three sails. It had tiny flags fluttering in an invisible breeze. Any other woman would have been thrilled to get off so easily. Why did she hanker for a sign of brokenness in Yidel?

  She and Yidel had always kept secrets, but all of them had been shared with each other. Their first kiss in the yichud room after they were married. How he’d closed his eyes and lightly pressed his face against her ear. The next time, he’d kept his eyes open. His lips had touched hers and it had been thrilling. Yes! That was something she’d never talked about with anyone and never would. All those times at night, well, that was something everyone kept secret. It was private, what happened inside the four walls of their bedroom. And if she was truthful with herself, she only wanted Yidel—not some other nebulous person with a whole new set of faults. All she wanted was for him to take her fingers between his and make that gesture he was so fond of, lifting her hand in the air as if she were a queen.

  But what a fool he was! He couldn’t even yell at his wife when she deserved it. He’d barely cried for the twins. He was afraid he’d be eating cat food instead of Surie’s good gefilte fish. For goodness’ sakes, in sixty years, he’d never even left home! Those people in the hospital, they’d laughed when she’d said that. “Mama’s boy,” they’d said, winking. “All kinds of special. I bet he’s the sort of man who wants to nurse. Like a little baby.”

  Surie had been so afraid of bringing home damaged babies, children with some problem that would tie up her every waking moment for the last forty y
ears of her life and who would mark the entire family with an indelible stain. Paradoxically, she was still furious with Yidel because he hadn’t been worried about those things. Even though she hadn’t told him she was pregnant. Anger was such a slick character. It couldn’t be defeated with logic.

  They would never divorce, but there would always be this thing between them now. Did every couple, married for a long time, have such awkward, lumpy tangles in their history? Did they think about it at night, or did they try to forget? Dead Onyu and Dead Opa had not seemed to have anything like it. Surie would have known. But perhaps not. Perhaps there was no way to know what really happened in the lives of other people.

  But if she died? For a moment, she pictured Yidel sitting in the matchmaker’s living room, meeting older women who were thinner than her, who wore fancy earrings and modern suits. Those women wore high heels and nice diamond necklaces and their hands were moisturized and they smelled faintly of roses. The matchmaker would describe Yidel as a catch. A holy Jew. A good father and grandfather. And he was all of those things. But if Yidel, God forbid, was the one to die first? What would the matchmaker say about her, Surie? At best, a distracted mother, forgetful, fat. Slovenly in her personal habits. At worst, a liar. A sneak. Seduced by the secular world. Behind her hand, the matchmaker might mouth the word murderer. Surie thought about the concrete pad in the chicken yard where the shochet slit the throats of her hens. It was right underneath her bedroom window, three floors down. That concrete could at least be a quick end if the complication between them proved unbearable.

  EIGHTEEN

  “We should go to a therapist,” Yidel said sometime in the night when they both weren’t sleeping. “That man who sees people in his apartment?”

  She almost hated him then. Hadn’t he heard her when she told him the story of the little pregnant child in the clinic? The Ecksteins had already sent one son to that man, the so-called therapist, and look where it had landed her boy. In the morgue. She didn’t want to send her marriage to cold storage.

  And she didn’t need a therapist to tell her about her own life. She’d been lonely since California, since Lipa. It was as if, somehow, the reliable transistor radio that was her marriage had slipped off a frequency that played soothing classical music, and all she could hear was static. Same machine, different results. She hadn’t even tried to put it back on the correct station. Instead, she’d twisted the dial and played the kind of music that she knew was forbidden. Anything to block out the awful silence.

  “Go to sleep, Yidel,” she said.

  “I don’t want to lose you over this.”

  “Nobody’s losing anybody. Can’t you just let it go already?”

  “Besides the twins. We lost them.”

  “Besides the twins.” And Lipa.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon of the second day of Shavios, after she thought everyone had left the house, she went downstairs, one step at a time, and out into the street. She was wearing an old housecoat and a turban, her house slippers. The stockings she’d found under the bed soiled with bloody fingerprints and crushed banana. The people she passed stared at her but did not say anything. So as not to have to see them, she crossed onto the houseless side of the street and continued walking. Hypocrites. It was difficult even to lift her feet, and she trembled, drained.

  She walked slowly down Division to the river. It was the same as it always was. The line of gravel at the intersection of the road and the path. The sound of water. The smell of it. The call of the birds. The boats going to and fro, the tall, twisting mirrors that were the buildings of Manhattan, the purple-and-yellow clouds massing in the northwest like bruises. The slop and gurgle of the waves under the pier. Somewhere behind her, small boys playing tag. She leaned against the broken railing and watched the water unfurl like a flag, like a silken scarf. It moved so fast. It was never the same and always the same.

  Yidel hurried out of the house, hopping and tying one boat-sized shoe. His weekday shoe, not his holiday ones, which slipped on. He looked both ways, up and down the street. He walked quickly toward her, breathing heavily.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  She looked at him. He looked a lot like a bulging, leaking chocolate cake in a plastic bag from a second-rate bakery, a babka. But his mother had just died. And the twins had too. “I’m already here,” she said. “At the river.”

  The water was almost black at that time of day. It twisted around the pylons. The cranes in the Navy Yard cast long shadows across the water and over her face. She shook the loose railing back and forth. Red flakes fell into the water, floated for a few seconds, and then sank.

  “My mother came to America on a ship that arrived right over there,” he said, pointing. “And my father.”

  Hers had too.

  “It’s time for shil,” she said. “Hadn’t you better go?” If this were the last time she spoke to him, what would she say? And why did the slanting afternoon sun in his eyes make her think she could see right inside them?

  He said something in response, but she wasn’t paying attention.

  “I wanted to be a good mother,” she said. “I had a notebook from the time I was six, where I jotted down ideas, things I thought would make me … beloved.”

  “You are.” His beautiful brown eyes looked tired.

  “Lipa didn’t come to me to tell me his troubles. He came to you. All of the children do.”

  “And that doesn’t sit right with you? They only come to me because they love you too much to make you sad.”

  In the water, below her feet, was a long black plank. It was filled with deep gouges and shiny with oil. It was chained to a line of floating balls. A bell rang in the yard, and right afterward she heard the automatic end-of-class bell at her granddaughters’ cheder, even though it was a holiday and all the children were at home. The boys behind her shouted gleefully. The littlest one had been tagged. From a window, a turbaned mother leaned out and called for the children, and they called back. Surie put her fingers in her ears. She did not want to hear their voices. She kicked a few pieces of gravel down onto the plank and it tipped and the gravel slid into the water. The colors of the oil slick swirled and changed and blended and came apart again.

  “I wanted to get it right this time and look how I messed it up.”

  “What did you think would happen? Your not telling me about the twins makes it feel like you blame me for what happened to Lipa. Were you hoping to just go off somewhere by yourself?”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not. I don’t think so. I don’t know.” What would she have said if he came to her one day, wanting to redo their life together from the beginning, finding fault with something they had both loved? Would she have stood calmly, as he was standing, one foot resting on the lowest rail, gazing out at the river?

  She moved away, six or seven feet farther away from their home, and she didn’t wait to see if he followed.

  “So, are you saying this was my fault? Because I was the one who talked with Lipa?” he said, catching up to her again. “Both of us talk with our sons. They come to you for a kind of motherly love I can’t give. They come to me for advice that you don’t have. That’s why there are two of us. So that between us, our children are able to get what they need.”

  She wanted to lie down, but she’d never been a farshloffener, the kind of woman who slept in the daytime. She took several more steps without saying anything. Now she was up against the wooden fence of the lumber merchant. Spray-painted on the boards in twenty-inch blue letters, the word peace. The first few drops of rain spattered the front of her housecoat. Yidel’s hand was next to hers on the railing. He was talking loudly. The way her heart carried on. It was difficult to breathe.

  Two children ran down the cul-de-sac, stopped, and pointed at her.

  “Goyta,” cried the oldest like a seagull. Non-Jew, he called her. Is that what it had come to?

  “Farvos hot zi nakete fis?” the younger asked th
e older.

  “Get away from her,” shouted Yidel, and he ran at them, his long black coat flapping, like a crow, like some dark angel. “Her feet aren’t naked! She’s a great-grandmother! And tired!” he said, and he stamped and shook his fist, and they scattered, screeching and laughing. She glanced down and saw that one of her stockings had come loose and crumpled around her ankle. A narrow sliver of bare skin showed below her hem. Her face flushed. She felt scorched. Quickly, she bent, pulled up the stocking, and fiddled with the clip through her clothing.

  A group of women walking and talking together came to the end of the street and, seeing her, became quiet and walked back the way they had come.

  “Really,” he said. “Why do you think Lipa spoke with me instead of you? Do you honestly think he loved me more?” he asked.

  Along the bottom of the massive pylons was a line of bolts. Long strands of green weed hung from them and moved this way and that in the water.

  “No,” she said. “Maybe?” A chain swayed, clanking, in the rising wind.

  “Surie.”

  “What kind of mother am I, that my own son was afraid to talk with me? I wish I could erase it all, every time I ever said something mean to him, every time I criticized his hairstyle or his clothes or his stupid”—she wiped her eyes—“glasses.”

  “You made all of his clothes. Every bite of food that went into his mouth. You taught him to read long before he went to school. And his soft heart? That came from you, Surie. Not from me.”

  “Remember how he liked to run his hand through the fur on your skins? You kept the softest ones out of the lime for months.”

  “He loved those challos with the shiny little noses you made specially for him.”

  “He used to stand behind you, watching, while you wrote. I don’t think you ever knew, he was so quiet.”

  “The last thing he said to me? That he couldn’t bear to cause you more pain. Those aren’t the words of someone who is afraid of their mother.”