Waiting for Daisy

by Peggy Orenstein

  “But don’t you miss that time?” I asked. “Wasn’t that what you expected?”

  He shrugged. “You can only feel the loss of something you’ve had.”

  “I just don’t get it,” I pushed. “You work eighty hours a week. You don’t see your wife and kids. You don’t take vacations. You don’t even sleep. What kind of quality of life is that?”

  Larry nodded, leaning back in his char. “Two things give me pause about everything. Time and money. I use all the time I have and I’m still always behind with everything. Whenever I do one thing there’s an accounting of what I’m not doing.” He pointed to a broken electrical plate against the wall. “So am I going to fix someone’s bike, or fix that electrical plate? Am I going to clean and straighten, which could be a full-time job in this house, or am I going to take the kids to the library?

  “And money. I have no idea how much it costs to keep this family afloat, but it’s definitely more than I make. But what is financial strain? We can still pay for clothes, for food. We could move to a smaller house, with three kids to a room. Stress is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “You know that sounds insane,” I said.

  “I know it does to you, yes,” he said. “But part of this for me is realizing we’re not in control of everything. Some people don’t use contraception and have no kids at all or, unfortunately, have difficulty.” I smiled weakly. “Other people have two children or six. If we have fifteen children, that’s what’s supposed to happen.

  “And I like everything I do,” he added. “I like the kids. I like my job. By Tuesday I’ve worked as much as some people work in a whole week, but I never feel like I don’t want to be doing it. Everything is a gift from God, everything. To an outsider this all can look like a burden. But tomorrow I could have a stroke. I could have an accident. I could lose my wife, my house, my kids. So I work hard. But everything I do I find precious.”

  Suddenly, Larry leapt up. “I almost forgot,” he said, and pulled out a volume by British poet Robert Service from his shelf. "Listen to this.” He read “My Prisoner,” about a World War I Tommy’s encounter with a German soldier, in a full-on cockney accent. “Isn’t that brilliant?” he asked, and without waiting for a response, launched into a second poem, “The Ballad of Sam McGee. “The swashbuckling saga wasn’t something I would’ve picked but Larry was so jazzed to share it with me. Every few lines, he would glance up eagerly, eyes shining, voice rising. Almost unconsciously, I slipped off my shoes. As I propped up my stockinged feet, I listened to my friend—I tried to hear what he was hearing.

  A poster of the poem “Eishet Chayil” ("A Woman of Valor”) hangs framed on the wall of the Browns’ living room. A woman of valor, who can find? it begins. Her worth is far beyond that of rubies. It’s the traditional serenade by a groom to his bride, the song a husband sings to praise his wife at the Sabbath table. Most Jews I knew had dropped the custom long ago, considering it demeaning. It’s true, the Eishet Chayil is the original woman who does too much, staying up deep into the night and rising while it’s still dark to do for her family, denying her own needs, seeking no glory. On the other hand, our Ms. Chayil earns her own living selling cloth, farming, or acquiring real estate. She manages a household staff, gives to the needy, serves God. Rather than her looks, she’s cherished for her integrity, dignity, and wisdom. I’d always suspected the Eishet Chayil model was part of the reason that so many feminist leaders were Jews, from Betty Freidan to Gloria Steinem to Susan Faludi to Rebecca Walker.

  If “Eishet ChayiF has ever come to life, though, it is in the person of Beth Brown. Shortly before my visit, a pregnant friend of hers with six children went on bed rest; Beth moved the woman’s entire family into her home for two weeks. This on top of her own fifteen children and full-time job. And I didn’t hear about it from her—Larry told me. To her it wasn’t a big deal: “I enjoy having a lot of people around” was all she would say. “There’s always something happening.” When I’d suggested that was what most people would dislike about it, Beth had only smiled. “It’s not an imposition,” she had insisted. “If our kids get sick, people are there for us, too. That’s just how it works.”

  How, exactly, did it work for me? If Beth was a righteous woman, what was I? My own sense of obligation seemed shallow by comparison. Although I’d like to be the sort who whips up meals for sick friends, I rarely followed through, pleading the excuse of a busy life. Even at my most generous, I wouldn’t move someone else’s family into my home. Nor did I expect much from anyone else beyond Steven; I usually considered that to be a mark of self-sufficiency. Watching Beth, though, I began to wonder where—without children, without community—I truly belonged.

  Back in my hotel room, I flipped on the TV to a flickering image of Kelly McGillis in a white lace snood. The film was Witness, the romantic thriller in which a cop played by Harrison Ford is forced to hide out among the Amish. Eventually, his derision is overcome by their simplicity and caring, he recognizes the soullessness of contemporary life. “I’m right there with you, Harrison,” I said to the screen.

  Larry was wrong. I think you can feel the loss of something you’ve never had, or at least a phantom longing for it. I’d never had faith; it had sometimes buzzed toward me, as improbable as a hummingbird, only to retreat when I reached for it. Mine is a messy, inconsistent philosophy, one that is dominated by the shades of gray Larry shunned: the gun metal of agnosticism, the storm clouds of contradiction, the dove breast of ambivalence. How reassuring it must be to know precisely what was expected of you, to be free from the uncertainties of finding your own way. How consoling to feel that your miscarriage, or your infertility, or your fifteen children were God’s will. I could never do it, but sometimes I dearly wished I could.

  Beth and I were repelling magnets. I was no Eishet Chayil and she was no feminist—she didn’t even expect her daughters to go to college. I would never want her life, was grateful to live in a time when it wasn’t forced upon me, and yet, to my surprise, part of me was jealous of her. Somehow she’d managed to “have it all”: a respected career, a loving husband, a warm family, a supportive community. Happiness. Could I say the same about myself?

  “So can you recite their names and birthdays?” I asked Larry. It was almost dinner time again. He’d just popped the lasagna and garlic bread into the oven and was pouring lettuce out of a bag, chopping up cucumbers for a salad. A cluster of the boys were doing gymnastics on the kitchen floor, Menashe dangling upside down from twelve-year-old Akiva’s waist, Noam swinging from his back.

  “Yeah, I can,” Larry said, laughing. “But when they page me at work I have them punch in their number in the birth order. Otherwise, whoever answers the phone when I call back asks the first five people he sees if they’d called me and I eventually get tired of waiting.”

  He moved on to a pile of dishes in the sink. My secular friends would be envious; their purportedly egalitarian husbands don’t do half of what Larry does around the house and they have twice as much time. In addition to laundry and dishes, Larry mops the floors and does all the mending. (”Beth has never sewn on a button,” he boasted.) Every Friday afternoon, he gets down on his hands and knees and scrubs six bathroom floors to prepare for Shabbos. That domestic competence predated his piety—credit his mother, who made sure her three boys pitched in at home. At any rate, equality in housework is one thing; in the House of God it’s another. Larry’s daughters don’t attend yeshiva. They can’t study Talmud, can’t hold positions of leadership at the synagogue, can’t become rabbis or cantors. Beth’s authority at school stops at the door of the Hebrew classrooms. Women have fewer mitzvot, or commandments, to fulfill, too (supposedly because they’d conflict with the higher calling of household responsibilities). That’s why Orthodox men will tell you they thank God each morning for not making them female.

  “What you don’t understand is that we may have different roles for men and women, but the wife is not inferior? Larry told me. “Beth is no
t inferior. It’s a distortion of American culture to think that the person who has the greatest influence on a child’s values and development is inferior to the one who brings in the money. Men may have imposed that ideology, but the women who didn’t glorify the domestic role contributed to it, too.”

  I flinched; I’d been one of those renegade women and secretly feared my miscarriage was retribution. At the same time, Larry’s perspective seemed as skewed as my own. Separate could never be equal when one half of the equation was economically dependent on the other. Housework would never be valued until men participated in it fully. I doubted that transformation was possible in a community so invested in differences.

  As a treat, Beth had arranged for the kids to swim at a friend’s house, but since her nephew, Sha’uli, was visiting—and tsnius prohibited the Browns from seeing members of the opposite sex, aside from parents and siblings, in bathing suits—the girls were going to one pool with her and the boys to another with Larry. She explained this to me so deftly that it wasn’t until later I realized Sha’uli wasn’t the only concern: the Brown males couldn’t see me in a bathing suit, either.

  I hadn’t brought one anyway, so I only dangled my legs in the water. In capris and a tank top, though, I was still flashing more skin than Beth. On the off chance that the husband of the couple who owned the pool might come home and catch a glimpse of her, she swam in her sheitl, a calf-length skirt, and an enormous T-shirt which read, “Who Are All These Kids and Why Are They Calling Me Mom?” Of all of the customs I witnessed at the Browns, tsnius rankled me most. Nineteen-year-old Shira worked out on the treadmill in the basement wearing an ankle-length skirt and long sleeves. Even five-year-old Esther Neima covered up. “We’re taught that what’s important is the inside of a person,” Larry had told me. “So the idea is not to advertise your body. You shouldn’t neglect the outside, but if you dress to call attention only to your physicality, what does that mean?” I got the point, but to me it seemed that tsnius, like the Muslim practice of purdah, could be too easily manipulated to silence women, to bar us from public places, to force the shrouding of ankles and eyes.

  A bank of thunderheads rolled in. I shifted to a lounge chair under the eaves where I wouldn’t get wet. I watched Beth shushing and coaxing, playing with and reprimanding the six children who were with us. The rising humidity made her seem far away, as if she were behind glass. I had come to respect Beth, but I’d never be at ease with her. I’d always be comparing us, wondering what it would be like to be her, flirting with the possibility then rejecting it. And I’d never really understand.

  We drove home in silence. I couldn’t tell if she noticed or cared that we’d run out of things to say. I sensed, though, that she was weary of my presence. Maybe that was just me—the novelty of being around fifteen children and hundreds of arbitrary rules was beginning to wear thin. Beth flipped on a cassette of religious-themed doo-wop songs. All of the tapes in her car featured men’s voices; women’s are considered too licentious for male ears.

  Rebbe tried to teach us Torah each and every day

  We just closed our eyes and ears to what he had to say

  Every afternoon we’d sit and watch our TV sets

  Talking about the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Mets

  Harrison Ford be damned—I wanted to return to the twenty-first century.

  By 10:30 I couldn’t stifle my yawns. Beth noticed and offered to drive me back to my hotel. She had to go to the grocery store anyway to buy a thank-you balloon for the couple whose pool we’d used. She wanted to have it waiting at their kosher butcher shop when they arrived for work the next morning. There was still a sink full of dishes to wash, bills to pay, and boxes of trash and recycling to drag to the curb. Larry had to be at work by seven the next morning to start another sixteen-hour day. Even so, he offered to drive me to the airport.

  “My flight takes off at six A.M.," I said, shaking my head.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “When do you want to leave your hotel?”

  Hadassah tugged on my pants leg and I hoisted her in my arms. With her dark eyes and blonde Shirley Temple curls, she resembled the daughter I imagined Larry and I would have had if we’d married. He had noticed, too. “If I couldn’t prove that Beth was her mother,” he cracked, “I’d be suspicious.”

  I held her closer, had a wild urge to cut and run. It’s not fair, I thought. Larry had fifteen children; why couldn’t I even have one? If I had done the “right” thing, followed the proscribed path, would I be a mother now? Hadassah began to squirm. I tousled her curls and—though it ripped my heart out to do it—handed her to her father. We weren’t in high school anymore; I’d made my choices.

  “Larry,” I said, as I turned away. “Do me a favor. Sleep the extra hour tomorrow instead of driving me. Consider it my gift to you.

  I came home from the airport to a message from Risa, who’d called to fill me in on the pathology report from the miscarriage. ”You are the last woman I want to have to tell this,” she said when we spoke. “You had something called a partial molar pregnancy.”

  “A what?”

  “It happens in about one in every thousand pregnancies,” she explained. “It’s a condition in which two sperm fertilize an egg.” Hmm, I thought: Steven must’ve been over compensating for that insulting semen analysis. Rather than twins, Risa continued, a fetus with too many chromosomes to survive is created as well as abnormal cells in the placenta. If any of those cells remained after the D&C, they could implant, turning into tumors that could spread and, without chemotherapy, eventually be deadly.

  It was a pregnancy that could turn into cancer. Who had ever heard of such a thing? “What are the chances that will happen?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. In a full molar pregnancy the chances are about one in five. It’s not clear with a partial molar. But the way we tell is by drawing your blood every week and checking for a rise in the pregnancy hormone. If it goes up and you’re not pregnant, something’s wrong.”

  “But what if I am pregnant?”

  She paused. “I’m sorry. You have to use contraception for a while. If you got pregnant there’d be no way to tell if you had a tumor. And if you did develop a tumor it would be dangerous to the baby.”

  I could barely speak. “How long do I have to wait?”

  She paused again. “I’m going to do some research. Normally it’s a year, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that long. At least six months.”

  Six months? A year? I thought about Larry and Beth—no way could this be God’s will.

  “Do you want to know the sex?” Risa asked before hanging up.

  “No,” I said evenly, though I felt like howling. “I don’t think so.”

  When I told Steven the news, he wrapped his arms around me. He wasn’t worried, he said. “Even if we have to wait for a year to try again, that’s twelve extra months that we can enjoy being together, that we can do fun things as a couple.”

  I buried my face in his neck and cried, newly grateful, after my visit to the Browns, for his touch. I felt like the luckiest unlucky woman in the world.

  4

  HOOKED

  Clomid was my gateway drug: the one you take because, Why not—everyone’s doing it. Just five tiny pills. They’ll give you a boost, maybe get you where you need to go. It’s true, some women can stop there. For others, Clomid becomes infertility’s version of Reefer Madness. First you smoke a little grass, then you’re selling your body on a street corner for crack. First you pop a little Clomid, suddenly you’re taking out a second mortgage for another round of in vitro fertilization (IVF). You’ve become hope’s bitch, willing to destroy your career, your marriage, your self-respect for another taste of its seductive high. Here are your eggs. Here are your eggs on Clomid. Get the picture?

  It was nine months before Risa gave us the nod to resume baby making. Rather than gestate a child during that time, I had dusted off my diaphragm and submitted to weekly blood tests to make sure my hor
mones weren’t running amok. Aside from that regular reminder that my freaky pregnancy was trying to kill me, there was a certain reprieve in the enforced break. My life, and our marriage, expanded again beyond my ovulation cycle. We made love more, laughed more, fought less. I began to believe, as I once had, that I’d be okay no matter what happened.

  That dream was short-lived. In three rounds of trying, my progesterone was low twice. By now I was thirty-seven. Thirty-seven and a half, actually. For the first time since I was five, half birthdays mattered. I wasn’t infertile, not technically. The official definition of infertility is twelve months of unprotected sex without a pregnancy. I’d gotten pregnant in eight. I was, however, in a time crunch. We could keep going and hope for the best, but infertility drugs become less effective as a woman ages. If I held off much longer, I might pass the point where they could help me. So which was wiser—to put my faith in my body or in science?

  Clomid works by tricking your brain into thinking it’s not making enough estrogen during the first half of your cycle. That puts into overdrive two other among the alphabet soup of female hormones—follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH), both of which affect egg development—creating bigger, better ovulations. Nearly half of women who try it get pregnant, most within three months. Those seemed like pretty sweet odds. The trade-offs can be hot flashes, blurred vision, "emotional side effects,” and—be careful what you wish for—twins. In some women Clomid can also dry up cervical mucous, blocking rather than promoting pregnancy, which meant I’d clock even more time in the bathroom poking at myself to be sure the juices were flowing.

  “I thought you said that drug caused ovarian cancer,” Steven remarked.

  “I said it raises the risk, but only if you take it for more than a year," I said, more blithely than I felt. “No one does that anymore. The longest I’d do it would be six months.”