On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  His head snapped up and he looked at her. “Them? What are you saying?”

  “I’m naming them,” she said. “Like I did before. And one of them, the boy, I am naming after Lipa. The other one, I think she was a girl, I’m naming her after Onyu.”

  His face crumpled. “What have you done, Surie?” His shoulders collapsed into his chest, but his cheeks flooded with color. “Was it with someone at the hospital?”

  “You fool! You know me!” she said. “I would never be with someone besides you!”

  “But why didn’t you tell me?” he asked piteously, and then he turned and—on the holiday—dialed the number for Hatzolah on their old rotary phone. He requested an ambulance be sent to their address. At the sound of the siren, the neighbors would gather around to hear what disaster had caused an ambulance to be called and they would whisper among themselves in hushed tones, guessing. But no one would know what had really happened. It was too late to stop the ambulance from coming, but that didn’t mean she had to go downstairs with the paramedics, her scarf askew, the back of her housecoat bloody. She would refuse.

  The moment he hung up the phone, he lunged toward the bag, snatched it from her, and looked inside. Then he clenched the top of the plastic shut and sat down and fat tears oozed from his eyes and fell into his beard.

  “I don’t want them buried in that cemetery. I want them to go somewhere nice. Where there are trees and maybe some flowers. Wind blowing over them. Water. There must be somewhere like that. Maybe they could be buried with Lipa in San Francisco.”

  “Oh Surie,” he said. “Such a miracle came to us and I didn’t even know. Why? Why didn’t you trust me?”

  She picked up the cake and put it down again. It fell apart. “I can’t understand myself,” she said.

  After a long moment, he whispered, “Please don’t leave me.”

  He was just like one of the children. Yidel poked at the cake, pushed the two pieces together. It broke into several new pieces, disintegrated, became merely a mass of yellow crumbs. He looked up at her, and when she still didn’t say anything, an odd coughing sound came from his mouth and Surie, to her horror, realized he was sobbing.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” She poured him a glass of tea and pushed a sugar cube toward him. “I should have told you. I tried to. I just left it too late.” But this was not the worst of it. Their little faces. The blood vessels luminous in their tiny ears. She gripped the edge of the table.

  He whispered the blessing over tea—everything is created through Your word—and swallowed several times. He looked around the kitchen before saying, “I want our babies to be buried with my mother. If it’s allowed. What do you think?”

  “I’m going to tell the children what’s happened,” she said, her voice much too loud. “I told Tzila Ruchel last night. Before … this. And I’m going to say the whole story about Lipa too.” The transparent strands of their hair falling like mist through her fingers, vanishing.

  “What does this have to do with Lipa?”

  “I’m going to tell them. You can’t stop me. I’m sick to death of not talking about things. We’re a family.” Their mouths. The fragile bones of their jaws.

  “No,” he said. “Surie! That’s not the right thing to do. I know you’re not feeling like yourself. I’ll get help. Maybe you can go to one of those kimpeturin houses? Would you like that? I think the Seagate one is closed, but there’s that gorgeous house in Kiryas Joel.”

  “Are you crazy?” She was almost yelling. She who never yelled. “Me? I’m going to go to a recovery house full of young women and their newborn babies?” She clawed at her scarf, scratched her neck. “Sometimes you have no sense.” She closed her eyes. She opened them. Still she saw their pursed lips, the peeling skin. Still she smelled them on her hands.

  His head drooped. “It’s true,” he said. “If I were a better husband, the husband you deserve, I would have noticed that you were…” He waved his hand toward her belly. “What kind of a man…?”

  She didn’t know what it was about him: the way he kept on glancing at the paper bag, the tears that hung like tiny jewels in his beard, his inability to say the word pregnant, the way he was always so nice even when she was very, very not nice. It made her long silence feel almost justified. And she did not want to be right. Their skin. Their eyes. Their toes, so small. She wanted, more than anything, to be wrong about the community, about Yidel, about them as a couple. She wanted to be wrong about herself too. And so she said, “I’m tired of the way everything is a secret.”

  She hadn’t known Yidel was hovering at the edge of rage. On the outside, he’d looked the same as always. His shoulders still curved around his chest as if to protect his heart. His hands lay quietly on the table. The lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth made it seem that he might, at any moment, smile. But a dark shadow she had never seen before moved across his face, a dark purple, the blackening of the skin of an eggplant as it roasts over a fire just before it turns to ash.

  “Are you joking?” he said. He stood up. His fingers curled tightly into the palms of his hands. “It’s you who has been keeping secrets.”

  “Because I had to.”

  “You didn’t have to. You wanted to. Am I the kind of husband who has ever been upset with news of a pregnancy? Am I the kind of man you can’t talk to?” He was patting himself all over his chest, his big fat hands going pfff pfff pfff. “Are you afraid of me? What aren’t you telling me, Surie?”

  She stood up and almost knocked into him by mistake, and he raised his arm against her, as if to ward off a blow. Perhaps he was just surprised.

  Shlimazal, she thought. His shirt was untucked, he had cake crumbs in his beard, watering, red-rimmed eyes, a fusty unwashed smell drifted from his clothing. He was the very picture of a charity collector, the kind of man who begged on street corners for copper coins, avoiding meaningful contact with other people, staring at the gutter. It was only through him that she knew his calligraphy was desirable. He’d told her at every chance. Gloating.

  He was fat too.

  She was always having to make apologies for him. “Oh, my husband doesn’t really go out much. He’s far too busy.” Yidel didn’t like strangers, he socialized only among family members and then on holidays. He didn’t like people’s quirky little ways or variations in accents, when he had so many quirky little ways and a strange accent somewhere between Amish and dog. Yidel had a bad attitude toward life, a superior look.

  It had really been Yidel who couldn’t accept Lipa. That much had been clear after the funeral. Had her son come to her first, she would have learned to love him in that state, that gay state of his. Yidel just said things, but he didn’t mean them. Forty years of marriage and here they were. All those years of faithful commitment meaningless, if he was going to accuse her of adultery. He really didn’t know her at all. She gripped the edge of the window and lifted the sash. The birds weren’t out yet, but there was the smell of the river, the rush of sound from the bridge. Maybe, after all this was over, she’d go down to the bus as she did every day: the overly warm seats, the rise up into the sky, the steel girders flashing by, the water far below, and then back down into the city, a different city entirely, though only twenty minutes away, the thermos of coffee warming her lap, the textbook with its photographs of the unseen and unimagined, her Post-it notes in bright pastels spilling from the pages. Sometimes she’d fall asleep on the ride. By nine, she’d be at the hospital, in the aqua-colored coat with her name embroidered in the front. She’d be pulling on her first set of nitrile gloves and checking the list of patients for the day. But where was Yidel in that dream? Where were Tzila Ruchel and Miryam Chiena and Dead Opa?

  Surie leaned forward, peering out into the soft blue morning light. The sun made the white tiles of the kitchen glow, one by one. She readjusted her scarf. It used to be her favorite time of day, this moment when all of the children had left and the mothers vanished and the streets were empty and silent
and only an occasional plastic bag tumbled across the asphalt. It was three floors down to the chickens in the yard and the concrete. I want something different. It seemed to her that she had been thinking this thought many times a day for many months.

  * * *

  “It’s chilly,” Yidel said. She hadn’t noticed. A brilliant fire was burning inside her chest, eating her flesh from the inside out. “Could you shut that?”

  “You can,” she said, “if you care that much.” But she took hold of the window and levered it closed. It had always stuck a little. It stuck now. Her irises, in the reflection, seemed orange.

  “I’ve called the midwife,” he said.

  “Val.”

  “Who else? I think I hate her. But you could die. Couldn’t you die? She said I should take you to the emergency room.”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  He studied her with his tired red eyes. She smiled.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I mean it.”

  “The Hatzolah men will be here soon.”

  She sat down in the chair again. He sat down beside her. “Tea?” he asked, and he poured her another cup and pushed a cube of sugar across the table.

  She missed Val, who was easy to talk to, a sort-of friend who had never known Lipa, someone with whom it had been briefly possible to be a mother with a dead gay son. How she stared and stared at the old-fashioned Bakelite telephone. But Val probably hadn’t forgiven her for telling Yidel about the girl from the community. Telling other people’s secrets, when all along she hadn’t been able to tell her own! And for pretending to have told Yidel about the pregnancy when she hadn’t. That too. Surie didn’t think there’d be any going back to the hospital. Val thought secrets revealed something about strength of character, and for a while, Surie had felt the same. But now, she knew that they didn’t. Secrets were the root of all weakness.

  * * *

  When the men from the ambulance service arrived, they talked about Surie as if she were not in the room with them, and she gazed off into space as if she were not there.

  “Patient is fifty-seven.” The senior EMT, one of Yidel’s best friends, speaking into a walkie-talkie, tapped his finger on the table. “And she just gave birth, alone, on her bathroom floor, to twins. Obs wobbly. Call in a dirty birth and bring up a trolley.”

  “What difference does it make?” Surie said. “The babies are dead. My worst fear has already happened.” She lined up the knot of her scarf on her spine, untied it, and then pulled the knot tight. An image: the babies’ cords, wrapped around their necks. Had that really happened? Or was she conflating their deaths with Lipa’s? She thought that something else, not strangulation, had afflicted the twins. Those sounds, the whining hisses, so similar to the breathing of asthmatic Mrs. Shnitzer. A cascade of unfamiliar words from the textbook: fetal lung maturation, prophylactic corticosteroids, surfactant, stress.

  “You’re looking better, I think you are, at least. Do you want more tea? A cookie before they take you to the hospital?” Yidel asked. Her eyes were still on the window. Every minute or so, a seagull flew past. Or a pigeon. Yidel blew his nose.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “Unless it’s to my own bed.”

  “My mother died and now this.”

  She had, for the moment, forgotten about Dead Onyu.

  * * *

  “Don’t say a word to anyone,” Yidel said to the ambulance crew after Surie refused to go with them. “Not even your wives. This can’t get out.”

  The emergency technicians waited half an hour for her to change her mind. Finally, they looked at their former chief, Yidel, shook their heads, and went away.

  “I can make you some eggs. Or a sandwich? Maybe heat up some soup?”

  “No,” said Surie. “I’m not hungry.” She was freezing cold. Her whole body shook. The attending on the crew had checked her blood pressure three times. Dirty birth is what he’d written into his notes. Oxygen offered. Obstreperous patient.

  “All right,” he said. “What’s next, then?”

  She wouldn’t let Yidel near her. A half hour later she went into the bathroom and came out wearing a different nightgown. Staring at the tiles had taken a long time. She had waited for something to climb out of the grout. Her children had been there, and then they hadn’t. Where had they gone? Her hands ached with emptiness.

  “I’ll check in on you in a bit,” Yidel said. He put his EMT pack on his bed, opened it, and began laying out paper packages. He looked as raw as she felt.

  “Stop it. I don’t want you to be nice to me. You should send Tzila Ruchel.”

  She lay in bed, imagining telling the whole story of the pregnancy and the rushed birth to her mother. “Poor lamby,” her mother would have said. She had lost her husband, Surie’s father, when he was fifty. She would know what this feeling was like, the blank emptiness unfurling ahead of Surie. The fear of all those years of solitude. “Make it right,” Surie’s mother would have said. Anything not to live alone.

  She should say something to Yidel when he came in the next time.

  “Good plan,” her mother said.

  At eleven o’clock, Yidel came in backward, pushing open the door with his rear end, carrying a tray of tomato soup and bread and grape juice.

  “How are you doing?” she asked, not looking in his direction now that he was in the room.

  “I’ve had better days.” He set down the tray and put the glass of juice on her bedside table. “Thanks for asking. For a while there, I didn’t think you cared.”

  * * *

  Soon, the head of the Chevra Kadisha would arrive to take the tiny bodies. It was the first morning of yontiff and the boys would get up and want breakfast and the grandchildren would come upstairs, hoping for a slice of Bubbie’s cheesecake. Life wouldn’t wait for her. That one moment, in the bedroom, when she had asked after him and he’d thanked her, that had felt better than almost anything that had happened to her in months.

  All that running to the hospital. She’d just been running away from a series of conversations for which she couldn’t find words. She thought she might actually loathe the smell of the antiseptic with which they washed the floors each night. And the odors of the foreign foods. That doctor, with his sharp, arrogant face! It had been all right, translating for the women, but it couldn’t replace this, which was real, which mattered, which was hers.

  * * *

  Yidel made her eggs again for lunch. It was the only thing he knew how to make well. Those stupid chickens with their egg-laying songs—she’d been woken up by them, at the crack of dawn, for years, and why? She could have used earplugs. She could have taken the shochet out into the yard and asked him to kill every one of the birds. But the ridiculous creatures had made her happy. Their hopping. Their chirping and trilling. The way they flocked to her feet when she went outside and stared up into her face with adoration. The reliable way they gave her an egg each morning, a fresh egg that she could make into whatever she wanted. When had she stopped getting up at their call? When had she begun setting an alarm so she wouldn’t miss the bus to Manhattan?

  Yidel was sitting on his bed, watching her sleep.

  “Hello,” said Surie, opening her eyes. “Don’t worry. I won’t bite.”

  “You do sometimes.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. It’s a wonder you can put up with me.”

  The corners of his lips almost turned up. His eyes searched for hers, but she was pretending, again, to sleep. She could just see his face through her eyelashes.

  “I don’t want to have to cook food for this family for the rest of my life. For one thing, they’ll all complain that I don’t cook as well as you,” Yidel said.

  “That’s the best you’ve got? Food is what should keep us together?” She was more than a little insulted. Sitting in his bed, he didn’t remember their quiet conversations, their intimacies?

  “I was joking. Surie, you know I was joking.” Never had she heard hi
s voice so subdued, so plaintive.

  “Right.”

  “I’m not used to talking about…” He stood up, walked around the room, opened and shut the wardrobe door. Flashes of light raced across her bedspread. “Anything.”

  “Oh well, no need to change now.” She could have kicked herself. She opened her eyes. “How do you feel? About your mother. Everything?”

  “You know me.”

  She pulled the blankets up to her neck. “You should take a nap. I’m going to.”

  He took his pillow and his blanket and she heard his footsteps descending the stairs to Dead Opa’s apartment. Her heart, also, seemed to be falling through the floors of the apartment building, falling and falling, like the rain that trickled in through the skylight. She didn’t sleep. She looked around the room, at their wedding portrait on the wall above Yidel’s bed, at the card Tzila Ruchel had made for him, tucked under the glass on the bedside cabinet, at his soft black leather slippers, one heel worn down more than the other. She looked and looked and thought of Yidel, the calligrapher, the father, the husband, the man. All those months of wondering what had happened to her. He must have been in hell.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe he hasn’t thrown you out.” Tzila Ruchel was perched on her father’s bed. Her scarf had been tied so tightly that her eyes had turned into slits. “I would have. I think I would have.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Surie said. Her daughter could be so aggravating. “It’s not like I kept a secret from him for forty years. It was just a few months. And it’s not a sin according to the Torah.”

  “It was a pregnancy. Two pregnancies. That’s hardly nothing.”

  Her holier-than-thou daughter was right, of course, and that made it all the more annoying. She wanted to complain about Tzila Ruchel to someone, but Dead Onyu was gone. And besides, Dead Onyu would have told her the same thing. When Mattis Lep Tup came in to say kiddush for her that night, the second night of the holiday, she asked him about his teachers.