ONE
After the appointment, Surie sat at the bikur cholim bus stop, staring at the stream of people walking into and out of the Manhattan hospital, trying not to cry. It was late Friday afternoon, the day after the fiasco of her daughter’s wedding. The lab-coated professionals, the trim secretaries with their folders, the mothers in leggings and transparent tops, their ponytails sweeping their backs, all were racing toward their weekends. There was even a young Chassidic man who looked just like her son, Lipa, standing on the other side of the road, staring straight at her. So much for privacy! The hospital rose up behind him, a tower of glass and steel, smelling of germicide even from a distance.
“This is All Things Considered.” A taxi stopped next to her, blocking her view of the young man and blaring an American radio channel. She didn’t ever listen to the radio. The announcers spoke in English and were much too fast to follow. Though for some reason, her husband, Yidel, kept a broken radio from the fifties in the basement and occasionally opened it up to tinker with the tubes.
Yidel loved puns and riddles and the old jokes that came off the wrappers of the candy the children liked to eat. He loved to sing in the shower at night before he went to bed, even though Chassidic men try not to make sounds in the bathroom. It was a transgression, but a little one. He loved to build fires in their backyard and feed rotten tree branches into the flames. He loved to take control of situations, figure out solutions, do the right thing. It could be a bit annoying, but on the whole, it wasn’t the worst thing ever. He loved to sit with his whole family piled up around him on his bed and tell stories in the semidark. He’d loved all of his sons. All of them. Even though she was a deflated fifty-seven years old, he hadn’t stopped loving her either. But could he continue after the news? Or would something close in him like a mousetrap?
She put her hand in her purse to find her prayer book. For the past four years, her mouth had needed to say the words of the psalms the way other mouths need to chew gum. But there was no book. There was nothing in her bag except for a pair of green-framed glasses, a pamphlet about pregnancy, an appointment card for the hospital because apparently home birth wasn’t an option this time, a bottle of prenatal vitamins, and a free disposable diaper. Every time before this she’d been filled with bubbles of delight, a baby-scented seltzer of happiness. She’d wanted every one of her children with something close to craziness beginning from the moment she found out she was pregnant. But this was different. She was too old. It had been an invitation to the evil eye, to schedule a doctor’s appointment for the day after a wedding!
Last night Yidel, annoyingly upbeat Yidel, had been oblivious to all of the wedding’s disappointments. “It’s so good to see the whole family dressed up and in one place,” he’d said in the back of the taxi bringing them home from the wedding hall. “Such a good-looking bunch! Such nachas!”
“The groom’s mother,” Surie said, scandalized, “was wearing an uncovered wig. Why didn’t we know she was that kind of woman? That they were that kind of a family?” It was after three in the morning. Her innocent daughter was off somewhere with a boy who trimmed his side curls, a boy who wore long pants to his own wedding instead of dignified three-quarter length, black socks instead of white stockings. His cheap shtreimel—dyed squirrel tails, probably!—sat on the back of his head as if he’d never wear it again, dripping modernity. In the kabbolas ponim room, everyone had seen this spectacle walking toward her beautiful child and turned their noses. All Surie’s friends snuck glances at her, to see how the former queen of their circle felt about such a low-class match for her daughter. Even her best friend slipped out ten minutes into the dancing, mumbling something Surie hadn’t caught. Never mind. She knew the real reason.
During the usually solemn covering of the bride’s face, the boy grinned at her daughter without a shred of modesty. He hadn’t just timidly held his wife’s hand after the chuppah. He’d snatched it up with a gleeful smirk. Her daughter’s face had been crimson and so had Surie’s. And her friends’. Who knew what was going on in their hotel room? She wanted to close her eyes and not open them again for a long, long time.
Yidel patted the sleeve of her beaded black gown. “Our daughter is twenty-two,” he said. “She was already long on the shelf. We should be thankful. And they are nice people. Really. The boy has a good job selling electronics.”
“You knew?”
“It’s not like we are a perfect family anymore, Surie. People talk.”
“What?” she asked, hot, flustered, her powdered face turning red for the twentieth time that evening. “What do they talk about?” But she knew, of course. Behind their hands, the community gossiped about Lipa, her sixth child, who had died four years earlier. And as a result, her little pearl, her seventh child, had to settle for a husband and a new family well beneath her or risk remaining unmarried.
* * *
Earlier on that awful Friday after the wedding—would she ever forgive herself for the timing?—the midwife had given her a handful of materials and said, “Take a vitamin every morning and every night. You need folate.”
“What is folate?” she’d asked, translating the midwife’s sentences slowly into Yiddish in her head. Which was still full of the wedding. “What is a neural tube?”
“Neural tube defect,” Surie muttered in English, before reopening her purse and placing the bottle on the concrete. The vitamins weren’t kosher. She’d have to buy her own at a pharmacy outside the community. They’d stare at her scarf, her clothes, giggle about her accent, but at least they wouldn’t spread gossip.
The midwife, Val, had delivered all ten of Surie’s previous babies. But Val, for all her skill, was childless; she couldn’t know how it felt. She couldn’t know what it was like to be tied to a small and demanding physical body for years. To feel the burden of keeping something alive. All those hard years raising them up and for what? A marriage to such a lowlife? Such shame and embarrassment?
And then, a strange look had come into the midwife’s eyes. A glancing light, like sun across the dark river, an illumination but a temporary one. What had Val expected from Surie? Tears of joy? Smiles? Surie was ancient. From the moment she had noticed the early symptoms, she had known, in her heart of hearts, what they meant. Despite her shame, she’d almost resigned herself until Val said it was twins. Twins! Since the breast cancer, the muscles of her arms were so stiff that she could barely get her cardigan on in the morning. How would she lift two babies? As Surie sobbed, the midwife looked away and said something about glucose stress tests and multiparous women. The words were unfamiliar. There were no words for neural tubes and stress tests and private places in Yiddish. There was no Yiddish word for please, so she said it in English.
Copyright © 2019 by Goldie Goldbloom