Modern Girls

by Jennifer S. Brown

  “I have to help her now,” I said to Perle. “Can you imagine Ben’s heartache if he learns of this? If nothing else, I need to do this for him. I need to make the problem go away.”

  Perle turned and took my hands in her own. “You will. You will do what needs to be done.” She gave a little squeeze before letting go.

  Placing my hand on my belly, I said, “May this one be a boy. Girls are too much trouble.”

  Perle gave me a hollow smile. “From your mouth to God’s ears.”

  • • •

  THAT night, a knock on the door proved to be Bayla. “I was out for a walk. I thought I would stop by,” she said.

  Looking in the hallway to make sure no busybodies were about, I said, “I am glad you did.”

  Ben rose from the couch. “Hello, Bayla. How is Mendel?”

  “So-so. He has work, thank God, but his back? Oy, his back. But did I come here to tell you of my troubles? No. Rose, I brought you the name of that new shopkeeper. The one I told you about who needs sewers.”

  Ben interrupted. “Rose doesn’t need to work.”

  Bayla shrugged. “Just in case. It never hurts to know.” She handed me a folded piece of paper. “You should go by, talk to him. Make an appointment to show your work.”

  I nodded. “Thank you. You never know.”

  “I know,” Ben said. “You are not working anymore. Especially not now.”

  “Shah, Ben! Hush your mouth and leave us women be,” I said. That man could be frustrating with his determination to spill my secret.

  Shaking his head, Ben retreated to the bedroom with a “Stay well” to Bayla.

  Bayla whispered, “It’s fifty dollars. Have her bring the money with her when she makes the appointment. I wish your friend the best.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered back. “You will never know how grateful she will be.”

  Bayla smiled sadly, and turned to leave. “Oh, I have some idea.”

  Dottie

  Thursday, August 22

  ON Thursday, I was ensconced in the numbers at Dover Insurance when the sound of the front door opening registered in the back of my mind. A smattering of giggles tittered throughout the room, but I paid no mind, running my finger down a column of lovely numbers. The bell was about to chime the end of the workday and I was determined to finish the row of tabulations before I left.

  “Looking for Dottie, I am,” came a familiar voice in broken English. My head shot up at the sound.

  “Mother,” I said. I’m not sure what was more shocking: my mother’s sudden appearance in the office or hearing her speak her stilted English.

  Florence laughed. “Of course,” she said, not quite under her breath.

  “What are you doing here?” I was embarrassed to see Ma in these surroundings. She wore her Shabbes dress, but even that was sorely out of fashion. I self-consciously smoothed the front of my frock, as if to flaunt how in vogue I was, while Ma looked more Old Country than lower East Side, never mind Midtown. The girls were enjoying the show, the greenhorn mother out of place in the modern office. My embarrassment was replaced by anger when I realized the others were looking down on me and Ma. It wasn’t as if any of their mothers had been born in New York. What my ma was here, their mothers were at home. Worse. At least Ma could put herself together and get through the city. How many of their mothers ever left their neighborhoods? I threw back my shoulders and gave Ma the slightest of smiles.

  Ma said, “I thought we take a walk. An ice cream we’ll get. We should go? You are done with work?” I knew how much Ma hated speaking English. Listening to her—the longest stretch of English I’d ever heard from her—I finally understood why. In Yiddish, Ma spoke eloquently, like an educated person. In English, she sounded ignorant.

  “Give me a moment, Mother.” I spoke firmly, in a tone I never would have used at home, a tone directed more to the room, to remind the others that I was in charge.

  By the time I finished my column of numbers, the bell rang and the girls were putting on their hats and gathering their purses. Taking the already neat pile of papers in hand, I tapped them on the desk, lining up the perfectly smooth edges. I wanted to make sure all the girls were gone, so we wouldn’t have to walk out together.

  As I stacked the ledgers, I snuck a peek at Ma in that shmatta she thought of as her finest dress. Looking at her, I couldn’t help but think of the poem we’d memorized in grammar school: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Huddled mass was exactly how I thought of Ma.

  Every now and then, I wondered about the journey she’d taken to America. She was brave and strong; I don’t know if I could have survived what she’d gone through. From the stories she told me, I pictured her, wrapped in rags and scarves, crowded on the deck of the ship. She gazed at the horizon, willing the shore to appear, each day growing more desperate. Ma told me she would focus on a point in the distance, using every last bit of her strength to keep from getting seasick, because that’s how it started; she’d seen it in the other passengers. First they’d empty their stomachs; then, weak and dehydrated, they were laid bare to the thousand diseases crawling on the ship as freely as the mice scurrying on deck. Ma knew even the hint of illness was enough to keep one from passing through the vaunted doors of Ellis Island. She’d heard the tales of those turned away, sent back home, despondent and broken.

  Was Ma expecting streets of gold or at the least indoor plumbing and a bathroom of her own? Did she die a little inside when she realized she’d left the life she knew for a cold-water flat up six flights of stairs on the lower East Side, the shtetl of New York City?

  As mortifying as Ma could be, I also felt a smidgen of pride. My mother made it. With a smile, I patted the last papers into place and said, “I’m finished.”

  “Where do we go for ice cream?” Ma asked, switching back to Yiddish now that the office was empty.

  As usual, I responded in English. “There’s a place a few blocks away.”

  We walked out of the office awkwardly. I made way for Ma to exit first, but she stepped aside for me, and we ended up bumping shoulders on our way out the door. How odd to see Ma off the lower East Side. It was as if I were with a stranger. I was doubly proud of her for being able to navigate her way to the office on her own.

  As we made our way down the street, Ma glanced around, and if I hadn’t known her better, I would have said she looked nervous. But nothing made Ma nervous. Office workers bustled past us, everyone in a rush to get home. Stores were shuttering and the streets smelled of the day’s rubbish being put out for morning pickup.

  With another skittish look over her shoulder, Ma said, with no preamble, “You’ll get rid of the baby.”

  Her voice was more rumble than words, yet what she said rang clearly in my ears. Her words chilled me, making me shiver on such a warm day, and my hand involuntarily jumped to my belly. Surely she wasn’t suggesting what I thought she was. “Ma!”

  “It’s the only way. You’ll get rid of the baby and it will be as if this never happened.”

  “I told you! Abe and I are going to Camp Eden this weekend. That will make the problem go away.”

  “Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. But if it’s ‘won’t,’ then you get rid of the baby.”

  I couldn’t look Ma in the eye. She couldn’t mean this. I was upset enough that I replied in Yiddish. “What do you mean, ‘get rid of’?” I knew exactly what she meant, but I refused to acknowledge it. All of a sudden, a new thought struck me: “Have someone else take the baby?” I didn’t think of this before, but it made perfect sense! Tante Kate had watched Eugene when he was a baby. Perhaps she could take this baby? Or . . . it was too much to even think about, but what about Ma? We could go away, me and Ma, and have the baby somewhere else. Pretend the baby was Ma’s. Not that I knew if Ma was still young enough to have a baby.

&
nbsp; But Ma dashed my hopes before they were even fully formulated. “Get rid of. Don’t have. There are ways.”

  I stopped in my tracks. Ma, oblivious, kept walking. I could hear her voice even as she walked ahead. “I’ve found the name of a specialist. You’ll go.” Ma noticed I wasn’t with her and turned to face me. She took three steps toward me, maintaining a cool distance between us. “You do it the day before Shabbes. Stay in bed the next day and Sunday, too. By Monday you are good. Back to work. Back to Abe.”

  My body felt like it was collapsing upon itself, my own weight too much to bear. I leaned against the wall. The words swam in my mind, mimicking the turmoil rumbling in my belly. What Ma said made sense—it could make everything right—but my whole body screamed No! I looked at Ma and she was blurry.

  She closed the distance between us. “Are you all right? Sit, sit.” Ma took my arm and drew me toward a bench. She sat me down. “You going to pass out? Put your head down.”

  I set my head in my hands, which I then rested on my legs. I closed my eyes, trying to calm my body, yet images flew behind my lids, taunting me, images of myself in the office, of me with Abe, of a babe in my arms. Could I not have all of it?

  Opening my eyes, I saw Ma, wrenching her hands, unsure whether to touch me. She said, “You can do this.”

  “It’s not so simple,” I whispered. Yes, I’d toyed with the idea of throwing myself down the stairs, but I didn’t do it. And besides, it might not have done anything; it still would have been in God’s hands. If the baby were to disappear naturally, well, there was nothing to be done about it. But to intentionally get rid of it?

  Ma’s hand reached out to my shoulder. “But it can be that simple.”

  Revulsion shot through me and I shook off Ma’s caress. “I can’t do that. I can’t simply ‘get rid’ of the baby. It’s . . .” It was what? I scrambled to find the adequate word, the word that would encompass every contradictory feeling flowing through me, explaining how as much as I didn’t want to be with child, this was my child, and I couldn’t shed her like last year’s lip color. But nothing came, so I alighted on the one word that, while completely inadequate, at least said something concrete. “It’s illegal.”

  Legality was the least of my concerns, although the stories I’d heard did warrant a fresh shade of fear, stories of dirty rooms, of crooked men posing as doctors. Stories of women made barren. Or who died. Was this what Ma wanted for me?

  “There are ways around ‘illegal,’” Ma said.

  Get rid of the baby. It hadn’t even occurred to me before; that’s how foolish this situation was making me. “This is your grandchild!”

  “My grandchild?” Ma looked to the sky, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe what I was saying. “Later, when my own children are grown, may God will it, there will be grandchildren. But not now. Now you get rid of it.”

  The bench felt as if it would swallow me. My limbs were stiff and I needed to move, to escape from these words. I stood and walked. I heard Ma trying to catch up with me.

  “You get rid of it,” Ma repeated.

  “But why kill the baby? It’s not the baby’s fault.” Weren’t there other options? And my own ma, who had lost a child . . . How could she even think of killing this one?

  Ma’s voice dropped all notes of sympathy. “A baby? It is not a baby. It is something growing inside of you, but it is no more a baby than we can take an orange seed and call it orange juice. If you keep this baby, your life is done. Will Abe take you after a baby? What respectable man will? You think Willie Klein will marry you? His mother will have you in her fancy-shmancy Park Avenue apartment?”

  With envy, I eyed the workers on the street waiting for the streetcar. What’s the worst problem they could have? I wished I could be anyone else. I tried to picture myself in Willie’s life, but his world was so alien to me, I couldn’t even imagine it. “They may not have a choice.”

  “A choice? Of course they have a choice. They have all the choices. You, though, you have nothing. No money. No husband. No choices. Enough of this nonsense. You go to a specialist. You make the problem go away.”

  I tried to put this into numerical sense, but nothing added up. One mother minus one baby equaled Abe and college and whatever else I wanted. One mother plus one baby equaled . . . ? That was the question, wasn’t it? No easy formula would solve that problem. “How do you even know of such things, Ma?”

  Ma shrugged. “You think this problem is new? You think you are the only one with this kind of problem?”

  I peered at Ma as we walked another block. Getting rid of the baby. I had to admit, it was the most logical conclusion. But I couldn’t erase the vivid pictures in my mind: Eugene’s face as he crawled next to me on the sofa in the dead of night, when he was haunted by nightmares and no one else could console him. The torment of losing my brother Joey, the pangs that still struck me in quiet moments when I watched Alfie play, wondering what it was like for him, losing someone with whom he was so intertwined that they breathed the same air, slept the same sleep, practically shared the same thoughts. I remembered Ma, sobbing in her bed, after those times when her belly was full and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Yet, in spite of those memories, I knew getting rid of the baby was the prudent thing to do. Ma made sense. Ma always made sense. It made me brim with fury.

  “I’m going to succeed this weekend,” I said.

  “I hope you will,” she said. “But even if you do, what about school? What about being an accountant? Maybe you do this even if you do succeed.”

  “Mother!”

  Ma had the decency to look ashamed. “And if you don’t succeed?”

  “I will.”

  We reached the door of the ice cream parlor. We stared through the picture glass window, looking at cute round tables with curlicued seats for two. The store was made for romance or, at the very least, for young kids who begged their parents for a treat.

  Ma turned to me, grabbed my arm desperately in both hands. “If this weekend works, then good. You have the baby. Problem gone. But if this weekend does not work, you will do it. Yes? Promise me. You will do as I say.”

  “Ma—”

  Her voice turned yet more insistent. “You will do as I say, nu? You will not throw everything away. If you do not succeed this weekend, you will make it go away. Promise.”

  I looked in Ma’s eyes, seeing the pain there. A twinge of guilt flashed through me, aware that I was the one causing that pain. I continued looking, as if searching for some other answer, another solution that might be buried in there. But seeing none, I once again yielded. “Yes, Ma,” I said in a near whisper. “I will. I promise.”

  I looked back into the shop and Ma followed my gaze. We stood staring at the smattering of couples inside. One even had the nerve to share a single-malt glass, sipping from two straws poking out.

  After a moment, I said, “Are we going in?”

  “Hungry I’m not so much anymore,” Ma said.

  “Me neither.”

  And we turned and walked the two miles home in complete silence.

  Rose

  Friday, August 23

  ON Friday morning I rose two hours before dawn to begin the dough for the challah. I pulled out the large tub—the only container big enough to handle the dough—and I placed a cake of yeast in it to proof. I needed to bake ten loaves: two for that night, two for the next day, four for the widower Rogalsky in the next building, and two to send with the committee that brought Shabbes foods to the newly landed immigrants in Battery Park. It was a light baking week.

  As I waited for the mixture to bubble, I hauled out the flour and pulled the eggs from the icebox. The icebox. Such an unheard-of luxury back home. Keeping foods cold right in the kitchen. What miracles this new country brought. And what heartaches.

  My hand went to my back, trying to ease out the soreness. My leg spasmed w
ith each movement, but nothing could be done about that. When I was satisfied the yeast was good, I added the flour, salt, oil, and eggs and, using my arm, stirred it all together. When it held well, I tumbled the entire tub’s worth on the kitchen table and kneaded the dough. I pushed and pulled and stretched and punched. The apartment was quiet, but on the streets already I could hear the bustle of those going to work—or coming home—pushcarts being rolled out, the milk wagon making deliveries.

  With each twist of the dough, I turned my problems over in my mind. Who was I to judge Dottie? Was I any better? How many times had I snuck into the fields with Shmuel? Even now, twenty-five years later, I could practically feel Shmuel’s touch, the gentle caress of his rough hands. His fingers were coarse and callused—he was a leatherworker by trade—but when he stroked my breast, the inside of my thigh, it was as if his fingers were silk. Only luck kept me from the position Dottie was in now. Shmuel and I promised ourselves to each other, even if it meant marrying behind my father’s back. My father would never have allowed a love match. If he knew about Shmuel, Tateh would have beaten me with such fury, who knows if I would have survived it?

  Shmuel’s soft blond hair and dark brown eyes filled me with heat, and his physical presence filled a space. But ultimately it didn’t matter: Shmuel was conscripted into the Russian army, and he never returned.

  Not that I could complain. I had Ben. I loved Ben, intellectually, powerfully, but I loved Shmuel physically, passionately.

  Beneath my fingers the dough took on a smooth sheen. I continued to knead, ignoring the way my body groaned. I had come to America to escape trouble. But it found me anyway. A different kind of trouble, perhaps, but trouble nonetheless. For this I made the treacherous journey across the ocean? For this I left my family, my home, and started anew in this strange land?