Unorthodox

by Deborah Feldman

  “So tell your mother to just let him marry her, for God’s sake! She’s being so stubborn! Really, what’s the big deal?”

  “Everyone will talk about it. If Yossi marries a Sephardic girl, the whole family will be affected. Everyone will think there’s something wrong with him.”

  “So your mother will let Yossi kill himself just to prevent a little gossip?”

  Eli reluctantly agrees to talk to his mother. Eventually she consents, saying that if the other side agrees to the match, she won’t do anything to prevent it. Eli has a meeting with his brothers around our dining room table one night, and they agree to get someone to talk to Kayla’s father. I think the battle is over, but after Shabbos I hear Yossi is back in bed and won’t talk to anyone.

  Eli and I go visit him together, and I marvel at how identical they look, except for the fact that Yossi wears his payos curled around his ears and trims his blond beard very short. Eventually we manage to pull it out of him. Apparently Kayla’s father took her to a Kabbalist who told her that terrible things would happen to her in the future if she married Yossi, like warts and diseases, and then Yossi’s friend found out that Kayla’s father paid the Kabbalist to say that, but Kayla won’t even talk to Yossi because she’s scared.

  I sit down on the chair next to Yossi’s bed, pulling my shirt down over my pregnant stomach, and look earnestly into his eyes.

  “Look at me,” I say emphatically. “You know Kayla for how long? Three years? You think one moment of fear is going to just erase that? That’s not how it works. If she’s that crazy about you, she will get over this kabbalist thing. Just give it a couple of days and she’ll be calling you, I promise.”

  Yossi sits up on one elbow, looking at me pleadingly, his strawberry-blond hair mussed under his black velvet yarmulke. “You really think so?”

  “Of course! If this is the real thing, no kabbalist is going to get in the way of it, I promise.”

  Sure enough, three days later she calls, and she promises him she will fight her father. Eli’s brothers get people to put pressure on Kayla’s father and he gives in, agreeing to allow the match.

  The engagement is fast and hush-hush, and a wedding date is set for six weeks later, to avoid too much scandal. There are rumors that Kayla is pregnant. Surely that’s just idle gossip.

  We stay at Shprintza’s house in Kiryas Joel the weekend they get married. I hate staying there, because she is all sweetness to me as long as Eli is around, but the minute he leaves for shul, it’s like she switches personalities. It disgusts me that she can be that two-faced and unashamed of it.

  I have to drag myself and my pregnant belly in my ugly maternity dress up the hilly inclines to the synagogue where my mother-in-law is hosting the sheva berachos. I haven’t been doing very well lately—I’ve been feeling ill and tired most of the time—and pasting a smile on my face after that difficult walk is hard. Friday night when I get back to our room, I have a hard time sleeping because my stomach is cramping and I feel sick. Finally at three a.m. I roll out of bed and get to the bathroom just in time to vomit. The force of it is so violent that stomach debris shoots out my nose and I can feel the little veins around my eyes strain and pop.

  Eli hears me and comes out to hold my head, which is something he is used to doing for me. The pain in my stomach doesn’t go away. I’m six months pregnant. I tell Eli we have to call the doctor, even though it’s Shabbos. For a life-or-death matter, phoning is allowed. We call on my cell phone and leave our information with the answering service and wait for the return call.

  The doctor on duty listens to my symptoms and tells us to come in, that stomach cramps and vomiting in pregnancy are usually a sign of labor and it’s too early for me to be in labor. Eli says to ask if we can wait until Shabbos is over in twelve hours. The doctor says it’s up to us and how we feel. I can tell she doesn’t understand why we called if we want to wait to come in. Kiryas Joel is at least an hour away from the hospital.

  When I put down the phone, Eli begs me to wait until Shabbos is over.

  “If we leave now, everyone will know, and my mother will go crazy from worry, and it will ruin everyone’s simchah from the wedding.”

  I want to throttle him. Does he not hear himself? How do I contend with his view of reality? It’s obvious to me that he doesn’t think he is asking for much. Is it that he is naive and ignorant, failing to realize the urgency of the situation? Or is it that he has, once again, put his family before me?

  Because I don’t want to wake up Shprintza and her husband, I agree to wait as long as I can. I don’t want to fight with Eli and give his sister more ammunition to bash me. After Shabbos is over, we pack up as if everything is normal and drive to the hospital. First the nurse shepherds me into a room full of pregnant women who think they’re in labor but probably aren’t; she hooks me up to a machine and tells me she’ll be right back. Within moments I hear an alarm bell clanging at the nurses’ station and she is back at my side, looking at the monitor. She shows me a strip of paper with lines wiggling wildly across it. “Are you feeling this?” she asks, mouth agape.

  I nod my head.

  They wheel me into a private room that has a little plastic incubator near the bed, with holes in the top like the ones they have for premature babies. At the time, I don’t really register the implications of its presence.

  The doctor gives me little injections in my thigh to stop the contractions, and the medication leaves me feeling really woozy. I start hallucinating or dreaming, I can’t tell which.

  Eli drags two big plastic-upholstered hospital armchairs together to create a bed and promptly falls asleep. I toss over the wires attached to me all night, repeatedly woken by the nurse who comes to check my blood pressure. The baby’s heartbeat goes boom-boom on the monitor, and footsteps patter up and down the corridor outside. I watch a pregnant woman waddle slowly past my door, one hand on her lower back. She looks sad and lonely.

  When the doctor discharges us two days later with a prescription for terbutaline and bed rest, we don’t tell anyone about the incident and go back to our routine, except that Eli is a little nicer to me now and doesn’t complain if the dishes aren’t washed or dinner isn’t on the table when he gets home.

  I spend the next few weeks on bed rest. Eli comes home early on Fridays to prepare for Shabbos, tidying up the house and warming up the challah he purchased because I’m not strong enough to bake and cook anymore. One rainy Friday I’m lying in bed, reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting for the umpteenth time, when I hear Eli muttering agitatedly in the kitchen. He’s on his phone, speaking in hushed but anxious tones. I wonder what it could be about.

  After he puts down the phone, I amble into the kitchen and lower myself gently onto a kitchen chair.

  “Who was on the phone earlier?” I ask innocently.

  “My brother Cheskel. You know he’s an EMT, a Hatzolah member. He just had a call before Shabbos, and by the time he got there, the boy was dead.”

  “A boy? What do you mean? What happened?”

  “He told me they told him not to tell anyone, but he called me, he said, because he was traumatized. He doesn’t know how he can sleep tonight.”

  “Why? What happened?” I straighten my back in expectation.

  “When he got there, the father pointed him to the basement, and the boy was lying there in a pool of his own blood. His penis was cut off with a jigsaw, and his throat was slit too. And the father wasn’t even upset. He said that he caught his son masturbating.”

  It takes me a moment to process the implications of what Eli is describing to me.

  “So he killed his son for masturbating? And then he called Hatzolah? I don’t understand!”

  “No! Don’t jump to conclusions. Cheskel told me he doesn’t know for sure what happened. He said the neighbors told him they heard loud arguing coming from the house. When he called the dispatch, they told him to go home and keep quiet about it, that they would take care of it. He said the
y buried him in thirty minutes and they didn’t even issue a death certificate.”

  “So they’re not going to report it? They’re going to let a possible murderer roam free to protect their reputation?” I can feel a twinge in my lower back and remember suddenly that I’m supposed to be resting for the baby. “Oy,” I say. “What is this world, that we only punish for trivialities like wearing a short skirt, but when someone breaks one of the Ten Commandments, we keep quiet?”

  “Ah, you can’t know for sure. The Torah says there have to be two witnesses for a man to be tried for murder. What are you gonna do? You can’t bring back this dead boy anyhow. And you better not tell anyone about it, because Cheskel could get in big trouble for talking to me. Please don’t get him into trouble; you don’t know what these people are capable of.”

  “I do now. I know exactly what they’re capable of.”

  I’m dying to say something to someone. I restrain myself at the Shabbos table, because I know Eli would never forgive me if I brought it up, but just this week no one has anything interesting to share, and I can’t help but wonder if someone else is holding their tongue too.

  I will hold that secret to my chest for a long time, but I have many nightmares about it, only in my dreams the boy is my own son, and Eli is standing over his prostrate, bloodless body with a look of vicious satisfaction on his face. In the dream I am always paralyzed, my limbs suddenly frozen, my tongue limp and apathetic. I wake up in the middle of the night and immediately put my hands over my belly to feel the baby’s kicks. I’m worried that with all this stress I will end up like Aunt Chavie, who was in her ninth month when the baby just died all of a sudden in her belly. I’m constantly checking for signs of life in my abdomen. What a hostile environment this baby must think my body to be. I imagine he will always resent me for it.

  I communicate wordlessly with the burblings in my womb. I don’t want to bring you into a world where silence is a cover for the worst crimes, I tell him. Not if I can’t protect you from it. I won’t keep quiet forever, baby, I promise. One day I will open my mouth and I will never shut it again.

  I get so big, none of my maternity clothes fit anymore except one blouse with pink flowers on it. I need to buy more maternity clothes, but I have to buy modest ones at the Jewish shops, which are expensive, and we don’t have the money.

  I get mad when Eli says that, because if we can’t afford maternity clothes, how can we afford baby clothes? And all the other expenses that come with having a child?

  I’m still a teenager. The work I do teaching rudimentary English to high-school-aged girls barely pays for groceries. Eli works as a laborer in a warehouse, but we don’t always manage to cover our bills. How, I ask him, does he see things getting better for us as a family?

  “None of my brothers are entrepreneurs or businessmen,” says Eli. “The Feldmans are workers and wage earners; we aren’t cut out for anything else. I’m trying my best.”

  I find myself unable to comprehend that way of looking at oneself, as unable to supersede the accomplishments of one’s family. I always set high standards for myself; why can’t he? If he won’t plan for our future, for my baby’s future, then I must take it upon myself to change things.

  I know as a woman I will never get paid even half as much as a man if I work in the Hasidic community, but the only way for me to get a job elsewhere would be to get a degree. Then maybe I could be a nurse or a real teacher. Those jobs would still be okay for me to have. After my baby is born, I promise myself, I will look into getting a degree, so I can give my child a better life.

  I don’t know how I will convince Eli to let me do it, but I’m determined to figure it out one way or another. However, before I can even start doing my research, Dr. Patrick tells me it’s time to go to the hospital. At one of our routine appointments, she taps my knee with a little metal hammer and it jumps wildly.

  “Hmm . . . extreme reflexive action.” She takes my blood pressure. “One thirty-five over eighty-five.” She removes the band from my arm, ripping it off in one swift motion. “I think it’s time to get this baby out.”

  Stunned, I take the elevator down to the street, where Eli is double-parked.

  “We have to go to the hospital,” I tell him.

  “What do you mean? What happened? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, I think,” I say slowly, “just I have some sort of problem with my blood pressure, I don’t really know, but it can’t be a big deal because otherwise they would make us go in an ambulance, right?”

  Eli nods his head. I direct him across town to St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital, where we take the elevator up to the labor and delivery ward on the seventh floor. We pass the birthing center, where women balance themselves on giant plastic balls, breathing through contractions. I manage to laugh at the sight.

  I get checked into a pretty room with flowered wallpaper and a pink quilt, with a view of Midtown. The doctor comes in as soon as I’ve changed into my gown. She has very short blond hair and a pair of rimless glasses perched on the edge of her nose.

  “So your doctor asked me to speak to you,” she says, “and tell you the reason we admitted you is that you have preeclampsia, which is dangerous for the baby. Think of it as your body having an allergic reaction to the little person inside you. It’s seeing it as a threat, and we can’t have that, because your baby needs a friendly environment.”

  “Oh,” I say quietly. “So what happens now?”

  “Well,” she says cheerfully, “we are going to gently induce labor, which is fine, because you are far enough along. We will start by administering medication directly through your cervix, which should help dilate your cervix a little bit while you sleep. In the morning we will give you Pitocin intravenously, which will induce contractions. When they get painful, you can have an epidural inserted, so don’t worry.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So I’m going to have the baby tomorrow?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” she sings, as she smears blue gel on my straining belly, and I can detect a trace of a southern accent. I can’t believe that by this time tomorrow I will have a real live baby instead of just a pregnant stomach.

  The doctor leaves. Fran, who introduces herself as my nurse, starts typing my information into the computer. She flips her dark hair over her shoulder as she turns to me.

  “How old are you, sweetie?” she asks. “You look so young!”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  “Wow! I thought you were in your twenties, but you’re even younger.” She skips a beat. “Well, good for you, getting a head start.” I smile weakly because I know she doesn’t mean it; she’s judging me.

  Twenty-four hours later, Dr. Patrick shakes me awake with a big smile on her face.

  “It’s time!” she sings loudly.

  A black male nurse holds one of my legs because Eli can’t touch me anymore, and his hands look shockingly dark against my pale skin, in a way that feels horrifyingly taboo. I wonder how this is better, having a black man looking at my most private area instead of my own husband. But I’m impure now, and it’s not about me, it’s about keeping Eli pure.

  Suddenly I feel the most incredible pull in my belly, as if my very guts are being sucked out of me. The huge weight in my abdomen slides out of me in a split-second motion and my entire stomach collapses so quickly that I feel as if I just fell from a great height. The force of it knocks out my breath.

  Dr. Patrick asks me if I want to see the baby now or wait for it to be cleaned up.

  “No, just clean him first. I don’t want to see him yet.” A glimpse of squirming, slimy pinkness makes me want to vomit. Eli is already over by the crib, peering between the shoulders of two doctors. I want to remember that feeling, of having my guts sucked out of me, but the force of it is fading fast. I’ve never felt anything like it in my entire life. I will wonder for years if that moment was the only one in my five-year marriage when I was ever fully alive. It made my every other waking moment feel false and nu
mb, like a hallucination. I think it was that moment that served as my wake-up call, that made me start fighting again.

  Dr. Patrick reaches in and pulls the placenta out and sets it on the table next to her. She asks Eli if he wants it, because some Jews bury the placenta to honor it. I shake my head no when he looks at me. The Talmud calls it the “tree of life” because of the treelike pattern on its surface and because of its ability to give life to a child. It looks disgusting sitting there, quivering on the tray. We are not taking that home with us.

  In a minute they bring the baby to me wrapped in clean blue blankets, and I can see the top of his head, with minuscule blond curls stained dark by moisture. His face is scrunched up, but he has the most golden skin I have ever seen on a newborn baby. Eli is tearing up next to me, but I’m calm.

  “Hello,” I say to the little bundle. “How are you feeling?”

  That’s all I do for the first hour. I talk to him, jabbering on about everything and anything while the baby looks up at me with dark liquid eyes never wavering from my face. As I talk, I try to make the connection between this tiny person in my arms and the body it just came out of, but I can’t shake the notion that this baby has just been arbitrarily dumped in my care and that whatever was in my abdomen until now was actually mere stuffing.

  Shouldn’t I feel maternal? Why do I feel like this baby is a stranger, when I spent months poking my tummy, giggling as limbs bumped up against the walls of my uterus? I talk, thinking that with words I can convince myself, convince him, convince everyone that I’m in love.

  After a while the nurse comes in to check on me, frowning when she sees my stomach. I’m not contracting properly, she says, and massages my belly to get the process started. The flesh on my abdomen reminds me of a waterbed, the skin flapping sloppily around as she kneads it like challah dough.