The doctor, retrieving a container of bhindi masala, said, “It’s not reportable yet, but Val, you’ve spoken with her. Does she seem in the right frame of mind to make good choices for her health and the health of the fetuses?”
Val sipped her tea. “She’s already refused the amniocentesis.”
“Lots of women refuse that.”
“Not in their fifties,” said the physician’s assistant.
“No. Not in their fifties,” Val agreed.
“She will blame us if anything goes wrong.” The doctor frowned at Val.
The ultrasound technician found them clustered around the coffeepot, their arms folded. It wasn’t a birthday party. It was much too solemn for that. The technician waited for the doctor to speak, but he was searching for a packet of salt in his locker. His white coat was spotless. He wore five-hundred-dollar shoes. She’d been working on him for several months and hoped he might ask her out soon, despite South Indian tradition and the lack of a family go-between.
“Maybe we should make a note on her chart, just in case something goes wrong,” said the physician’s assistant, who had the most to lose if they were blamed. She was a recent graduate with massive school loans. She stabbed at her cold noodles. Metal chimed against the side of the steel bowl.
The ultrasound technician looked around. They were all nodding their heads. The doctor was making some notes on a piece of paper. She rubbed her fingers together. She looked at the doctor and then she looked away. “How can you say that? That’s not right,” she said. “That woman is a good mother. She’s just been surprised. That’s all. You’d be surprised too, if you were fifty-five and suddenly pregnant.”
“Fifty-seven.”
“She couldn’t even point to her uterus.”
“And?” said the technician. “Do any of you know the names of any of her children?” She didn’t want to make a guess at the number. “Do any of you know how to speak Yiddish or Hungarian or Hebrew?” Maybe Surie couldn’t speak Hebrew. She’d read about that kind of Jew in the Sunday paper. Anti-Zionist flag burners. “Do any of you have any idea how many grandchildren she has living in her house?” She didn’t know either. She’d been too scared to talk to the woman with the silk helmet and the oddly unfashionable clothes stretched tight over the enormous tummy. But nobody else had even tried, not even Val. They barely looked at Surie. Especially the doctor. “This would be unforgivable racism if it were aimed at any other minorities, but it is acceptable when it comes to religious people?”
There was a long silence in the break room. A couple of the midwives pushed past the technician and left.
“There’s no excuse for ignorance,” said the doctor.
“Yours? Or hers?” said the technician.
* * *
Back in her office, Val was eating a turkey-and-mayonnaise sandwich, pondering her next move. She liked to introduce these Chassidic women to modern culture, to an appreciation for their bodies, to the terms for things they had no name for before her intervention, even though it never seemed to stick. The younger midwives deferred to her. They had not laughed when the technician berated the doctor. They’d watched Val’s face and imitated her calm, even when the doctor left, slamming the door.
“What can we do to support Mrs. Eckstein?” they’d asked in respectful tones. Most of them were twenty or twenty-one.
“Birthing videos,” Val said. Or the loan of some of their books. Or prenatal yoga. More vitamins. Or hypnosis.
“She’s ashamed of her body. It’s going to negatively impact the birth if she’s holding back.”
Val was about to say, “I’ll suggest labor classes,” but then she thought how foolish that would be, since the Chassidic woman had already delivered ten infants and raised them to adulthood. To see that heavy old woman squatting on the floor with the thirty-year-olds, the yuppie mommy crew, huffing and puffing in her orthopedic shoes, her scarf falling down over her eyes! She would frighten all the hipsters away. “I don’t think she is,” she said to the younger women, “ashamed.” It wasn’t quite the right word for the way Surie held herself. Perhaps the word was private. In a world in which everything was common knowledge, there was a fence around Surie that said KEEP OUT.
* * *
In the demonstration kitchen, the dietitian smiled as she remembered the doctor’s defeat. She had grown up in Williamsburg, in an Orthodox home, though she wasn’t part of the Chassidic community. Her family were Oberlanders, Vien people. Punctual, educated, more worldly. But she knew enough about the community in Williamsburg to be able to picture the clean simplicity of the woman’s kitchen and the orderliness of her home. The dietitian was one of the oldest women on the staff. She thought she knew everything there was to know about Surie, what the Chassidic response would be to anything unusual. She knew how unlikely it was that Surie would sue anybody. “God’s will,” was what the Chassidic woman would say. She’d do her mourning if anything went wrong, but she wouldn’t come after the doctor or the midwives. The dietitian was the one who had brought a little sealed cup of orange juice to Surie after she’d gotten the news about the twins a week earlier. She’d seen her old neighbor perched on the examination table, crying and trying to hide the tears. She’d torn off the lid and held the juice out to Surie, who didn’t take it.
“It’s kosher,” the dietitian had said, offering the juice again. “I took it out of my own lunch.”
* * *
The mental health counselor, peeling radishes, wondered if it was too soon or too inappropriate to bring up the subject of adoption. It was too late, of course, to discuss abortion. She’d grown up in Brooklyn, in Bed-Stuy. Though they’d talked about Judaism briefly in her college classes, she didn’t really know much about Jews. She didn’t know why, but she had the feeling that those women in their silk scarves were secretly laughing at her. Mrs. Eckstein seemed perfectly nice, but still, there it was. Her very young clients were often convinced to give up their infants, and she was sure it was for the good of all concerned. She wasn’t sure what the protocol was for very old clients. Surie was her first Chassidic client and her first pregnancy over fifty.
* * *
On the second floor of the apartment building in Williamsburg, Tzila Ruchel woke up from a bad dream and wondered if it would be terribly rude to slip her mother a brochure for Weight Watchers. Her mother was large, but lately things were getting out of hand. There seemed always to be a wedge of petticoat exposed between her mother’s shirt and the waistband of her skirt.
* * *
On the third floor, Yidel also awoke. He had a scratchy throat, and he went into the bathroom, where he found Surie’s bottle of kosher prenatal vitamins. She’d torn off the label. Without turning on the light, he unscrewed the lid and popped two pills without reading the container. He thought they were vitamin C with zinc. Then he went back to bed and patted Surie’s haunch. “Thanks for picking up more vitamins,” he said.
* * *
Sometime near dawn, Miryam Chiena dreamed that she had a new auntie and uncle. They were younger than her and they stood in the middle of the room holding hands. “Hello,” they said in unison. They were blue. Somehow she knew that they were her grandmother’s children. She woke up sweating and crying out for her mother, but when Tzila Ruchel came, the child swatted her away and began to cry for her grandmother.
* * *
In the cemetery in California, Lipa lay in the ground, staring up at the stars. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know where his mother was. But he missed her.
SEVEN
The Tuesday after the Chanukah party, Surie stepped out into the bright cold light of winter. She pushed a lone chicken back inside the entryway with her foot. The air was still and Williamsburg rested in the peaceful moment just after the school buses departed. Dead Onyu, bent over a straw broom, swept the strip of concrete between the house and the street. The rosebush the old woman had brought with her from Romania sprawled across the entire front of the house. A few r
ose hips dangled from the empty branches. The children were in school and most of the women were inside, avoiding the cold.
Surie walked down to the end of her street and looked out on Wallabout Channel. A tugboat was towing a barge full of garbage. It sounded its horn and the echoes bounced between the decrepit warehouses and the cement walls. The hum of traffic came from the Williamsburg Bridge and a helicopter passed overhead. She nudged a spray can with the tip of her shoe. As often as she could, she came to look at the river, endlessly moving, a different color every day. Twenty feet below her: black, turquoise, hell green, teal, olive, lime. A few flakes of snow came down out of the bright blue sky and melted on the water. The wind was fierce. That night there would be a Hatzolah party at the Eden Palace. The following night her niece was getting married.
One particularly cold winter evening fifteen years earlier, she and Yidel had taken Lipa and his older brothers down to the frozen inlet with borrowed ice skates. They’d climbed down to the ice on a ladder and wobbled around, falling over, throwing snowballs at one another. Her heart had been in her mouth: What if the ice wasn’t thick enough in the channel? She had never seen the East River freeze. Lipa, who was surprisingly good at skating, had taken her hand in his little mittened paw and towed her under an overpass and back to the end of their street again. How she’d laughed and laughed! Was Yidel beset by memories like these, or did he go through his days closed off to the pain? She didn’t know. It seemed impossible to chip away the ice that had formed around Yidel’s heart to find the tender man, the grieving father she knew he was inside.
Everything seemed impossible. When she’d tried to open the hood on the old carriage, the waterproof woolen fabric ripped in the folds. She couldn’t find the screws that held the spare cot together. And when she took out the box of cloth diapers she’d pushed behind the washing machine to use as rags, they’d been ruined by moths. Her fingers rested on the thick scars left after her mastectomy. Just to feed these new babies would be a constant labor; to bathe and clothe and comfort them would occupy every minute. There would be no leisurely walks to stare at the river.
She went upstairs to Tzila Ruchel’s apartment and stood in the doorway. Her daughter. It should have been easy to tell her about the pregnancy. They’d become best friends. There were no secrets between anyone who lived in this building. She wondered if Tzila Ruchel had already heard her vomiting each morning and guessed; if her daughter was in the kitchen, waiting for Surie to make an announcement. But there was a ring of dirt just above the wainscoting, fingerprints on the doorjambs, toys lying everywhere on the floor. The apartment was silent. Tzila Ruchel must have gone out.
Her daughter’s apartment had no curtains and no decorations aside from children’s drawings taped to the walls. In the kitchen, all of the cabinets had child locks on them that Surie no longer remembered how to open. She had thought she’d make herself a cup of coffee while she waited for her daughter to return, but instead she began to fold and put away the piles of infant clothing that spilled off the chairs. When she finished, she washed the dairy dishes left over from breakfast, dried them, and left them in stacks on the counter next to their cupboards. She’d always wanted, more than anything, to be a good mother, but something about that simple wish felt strained. She wanted to be a good mother for the children she had already birthed. She wasn’t sure how she felt about being a good mother to the twins. And she suspected that if she were a good mother to the twins, she would be a bad mother to her older children. Or they would think she was.
She’d been helping Tzila Ruchel for years, but that would be one of the first things to change. After the twins were born, Surie would have to get up even earlier every morning, to stand outside with the other mothers, in the rain, in the snow, in the sleet, in the unbearably hot sun, and wait for the school buses to arrive and depart, twice a day, forever. When would she and Tzila Ruchel ever again find a moment to share a cup of coffee? The companionship, the familiar jokes and ready assistance and frank comfort that had slotted into place between them would be thrown out of sync. She was glad that Tzila Ruchel wasn’t home. She wanted to enjoy these last few months with her daughter before it was all lost. No need to rush.
After she’d wrung out the blue-striped dishrags and hung them on the security gate outside the kitchen window, she went upstairs and looked over her own apartment. She had three bedrooms, one medium and two very small, a kitchen barely large enough to hold a refrigerator and a tiny table, a dining room, a living room, and a bathroom. The walls had been painted many times with dark green oil paint about two-thirds of the way up, and above that, they were cream. The plaster bulged in the center the way she did. The corridor ran almost straight back, but where it made a slight dogleg, an iron ladder went up to the roof. She hung bananas on the rungs to ripen. Underneath the skylight, the wood was dark and the grain was raised like black and furry velvet from the rain that seeped through and dripped onto the floor. No matter how many times she scrubbed the walls with bleach, ferns of mold grew up from the skirting boards in that corner. From the front end of the corridor, a steep staircase zigzagged past Tzila Ruchel’s and Dead Onyu’s apartments and ended in the claustrophobic foyer. Scooters, a triple stroller, a folding wheelchair, and their shopping carts took up most of the space in the marble-tiled entrance. The stairwell was made half as wide by the automated chair and its tracks.
Though she had a reputation for being a baleboste and her apartment was always clean, it was falling apart. She wanted the rooms to be light filled, painted in the kinds of pastel colors babies are dressed in, fresh and sanitary and safe. The size of the clock and its dark wood, though beautiful, made the atmosphere in her front room solemn. Heavy. She couldn’t imagine asking Yidel for help. “I’d like a paintbrush. I’d like several gallons of paint.” How long had it been since she’d stenciled the walls in the hallway and polyurethaned the floors herself? The last time must have been just before the birth of her youngest. Nesting. That’s what Val called the impulse to tidy and rest and clean and repaint. But maybe there was something toxic in paint that might not be good for the babies?
She put on her slippers, sat down on the couch under the window, and began to say the daily psalms. She added some extra verses for people who were sick, one for a friend whose daughter needed to get married, one for Lipa, who would have been twenty-six on the first night of Chanukah. When she said the chapter for Lipa, something grew in her throat, and she swallowed and swallowed but it would not go down. Did she really want to imitate his secret-filled life, all that running to Manhattan?
When she completed her psalms, she asked God, “What will I do?” She didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one, but while she was sitting on the couch, she watched the dust motes floating in the slanting winter light, a constant eddying and turning, the rhythms of which she found calming.
“Mamme?” called Tzila Ruchel, startling her out of a sleep she hadn’t known she’d fallen into. Tzila Ruchel had a brochure in her hand. Surie had fallen sideways on the sofa, one round and dimpled thigh exposed above the top of her stocking, her slippers off, a wide gap between her waistband and shirt through which could be seen a white slip stretched tightly over the bowl of her belly. She pulled her skirt and her shirt down and readjusted her turban.
“I want to show you something.”
The moment Surie saw the Weight Watchers brochure in her daughter’s hand, she had a vision of a particular beggar who sat on an upturned bucket outside the grocery. Though she usually gave every beggar whatever coins she had in her purse and smiled at them and wished them well, this beggar’s legs were sunset colored and her toenails curved like golden scimitars. Her flesh was everywhere. There was no containing it. The beggar was a vast desert of despair, waiting for assistance from others instead of working to find her own solutions.
Surie jumped from the couch and jammed her feet into her slippers. “I don’t need that silly old thing,” she said to Tzila Ruchel as she briskly swept
the floor.
There was a smell, much too sweet and catching in the throat, of burned caramel. She had swept the nylon broom too close to the space heater that had almost killed her parents-in-law. If only her daughter had been home earlier, perhaps they could have sat with their heads close, whispering, and her daughter could have put her arms around Surie after all the secret telling was done, and together they would have figured out the best way to tell Yidel.
“It was all the kigel over Tishrei. And the cake. I won’t freeze any next year. I don’t need to open a bundt at every meal.”
“Oh Mamme, I’ve upset you.”
“Not at all. Just reminded me that I need to be more careful of my weight in the future. Thank you, darling.” She swept so vigorously that the air was full of sparkling particles. “I can diet on my own. No need to waste money to have other people weigh me! I’m perfectly capable.”
How her daughter would cringe when the twins were born and she remembered this day. Surie swung the broom through the air as if she might be able to sweep away the airborne dust. Her daughter took a step backward. The green linoleum in the kitchen creaked.
“It’s not Pesach yet,” said Tzila Ruchel, who tried to leave holiday spring-cleaning until the last week and then mostly called it quits after tossing a pillowcase of Legos into the washing machine and bleaching the floorboards. “Why so much fuss today?”
“That’s my job,” said Yidel, coming up from his parents’ apartment and reaching for the broomstick. “You hear better, but I see better. You miss the ants on the floor when you sweep.”
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