On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

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.

You’re at risk of hemorrhaging. I’m talking to you. Can you pay attention, please? Blow your nose. This is not the time to fall apart. Do you know what hemorrhaging means? Bleeding. To death. The

She was the only person in her cohort who’d been willing to work in the slums of Williamsburg with women who couldn’t speak English and had a baby every year. Val

The Ecksteins raised their own chickens. They didn’t eat red meat. The poultry lived in the backyard in a large coop Dead Opa, Yidel’s father, had built in 1951. He’d had chickens in the displaced persons camp in Austria too. The birds picked worms and rusty screws out of the dry, pale gray dust. The Ecksteins owned twenty-five chickens at a time, thirty before Rosh Hashanah, but never a rooster. On Sukkos, when Tzila Ruchel, Surie’s oldest daughter, had a sukkah that stretched across the entire front of their house and the doors opened and shut constantly, the chickens wandered out into the road and caused collisions.

Yidel had always been the most loving of fathers, infinitely patient. Though he’d be surprised at the situation, he would be proud of the twins.

Every day, he would roll the twins to shil and his friends would have to tell him to shut up, they’d already heard all his stories about the babies, and no, they didn’t want to see his new photos either. At two in the morning, when she would be too exhausted to lift the babies out of their cribs to feed them, he’d help her. Afterward, when she was lying in her tousled bed, smelling of sour milk and unwashed linen, she would hear him murmuring lullabies, an infant over each arm, rocking them in the front room so as not to disturb her.

She hated when people thought she wasn’t intelligent or couldn’t follow a conversation in English, even though she often couldn’t.

Surie had never seen an image of the inside of her body. Her bones. Her parts. Prior to this pregnancy, the midwife had always come to her and she hadn’t brought along pamphlets, photographs, diagrams, and maps. Surie would have burned such obscene literature.

Imagery of any kind was forbidden in her house. Photographs. Paintings. Sculptures. There were a couple of needlepoints of flowers in the dining room, a piece of black velvet painted with the Western Wall and sewn with spangles. She’d barely convinced Yidel to allow their wedding portrait to be hung in the privacy of their bedroom. Now, flustered, she mistook the word pelvis for peltz, a fur, and thought Val was talking about the way goyim liked to pose their naked babies on bear rugs.

“It’s not our way,” she said. “We take a photograph of the firstborn child on the thirtieth day. We cover it in gold necklaces and dress it i...

“You are a good man, Yidel,” she said. He untucked his sheet and blanket and tossed the edges onto her bed. He fell asleep quickly with his face against her back, his knees tucked under hers.

Now, though it took longer, they still enjoyed one another. They’d adapted a little, changed positions, used a lubricant recommended by the doctor, but he had not lost his touch and neither had she. His hand between her thighs was just as exciting as the first time.

He tickled the nape of her neck. His body was very warm, lying against hers. Would it be so terrible if he found out? Yes! It shouldn’t happen like this! Despite how confused she felt, her body began to respond. But when he lifted the hem of her nightgown, she pulled away from him. She wasn’t ready. She was too tired. She had a headache. The truth was this: If he lay against her, hip to hip, he’d know she was five months pregnant. Fat in the belly was soft. A child, children in the belly were not. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking when she put his hand on her skin. She hadn’t allowed him to touch her for two months, the longest they’d ever gone. Yidel looked like he might cry.

Every so often, a metallic crash as something was let fall. Who knew what they did in the Navy Yard these days? Once, it had been the city’s car pound lot. Now, it was businesses she didn’t know anything about. A film studio, they whispered in the butcher shop.

The new children would be ashamed of her, of her terrible age, of her frailty, of the way she still used occasional Hungarian words even though their friends’ parents all spoke pure Yiddish. They wouldn’t bring their classmates home to taste her kokosh cake.

You know this already, but most babies are born headfirst, Mrs. Eckstein. If they come with their feet first, it is known as a breech. It’s far more common with twins. Don’t you remember what happened with your third kid? I don’t have to tell you what labor feels like. You know better than me!

Never, during any of the births before her youngest son, Chaim Tzvi, had Surie screamed or even moaned.

During her labor with Chaim Tzvi, Val had told her she should make sounds. Heck, she could go ahead and scream if she thought it would help. Sweat broke out under Surie’s turban and streamed from her body. The midwife had encouraged Surie to moo or bellow or cry. Something. Anything. But Surie had remained silent until almost the very end. “What is it with you women?” Val had asked.

Returning to the midwife after several circuits, Surie had said, “Why should I scream, why should I moan, when I am doing the exact thing I was made for? When I am fulfilling my part in creation? Thank God, I know my place in the world. The Torah speaks about many things, but always, always it talks about the children that come forth, the children that one is to sacrifice for. Every part of my life is turned towards children, the having of children, the raising of children. “The strollers standing in the synagogue on yontiff, they are the Jewish people. And the yellow school buses that clog the streets in the morning, that is the Jewish people. And all of the crying babies under their father’s white prayer shawls during the priestly blessing, that is the Jewish people. Their small hands, their feet, their shaven heads, their long curling payos, the singsong of their voices, at the end of the Holocaust when we thought no children were left, the sound of one child’s cry was enough to fill every heart to overflowing. Families that didn’t have money for blankets had money enough to bear children because that was the true and only wealth of the Jewish people. When the nations of the world say that we have stolen all the riches, there is no denying it, for aren’t our places of worship full of gems, and aren’t our schools full of diamonds, and aren’t all the beds in our homes filled with gold and silver and onyx? When they say we have the blood of Christian children in our matzos...

Yidel had been clean and presentable. He’d worn new clothes that didn’t smell like mothballs. He hadn’t looked at her as far as she could tell. She sometimes joked about that brief meeting with him. “I took a peek at you at the b’show,” he always responded, smiling. “Ooh la la.” “No, you didn’t,” she replied. “You thought I had red hair. I remember. You thought I wore a pink dress.”

So Yidel and his family were really the only family she had. He smiled at her slyly, then glanced over at Tzila Ruchel. He took one end of the broom she was holding and began to sway and hum along. “Don’t tell your siblings about the shameful mixed dancing you are witnessing in your own home, eh, Tzila Ruchel?” he said. “Family secrets.”

“Old,” Surie said, right as her daughter said, “Obese.” They stared at each other. Surie felt a terrible pain in her stomach. She tried to smile. “I’m excited,” she said. “They’ll keep me young.” “Stop it!” Tzila Ruchel said. “Uch, it’s so disgusting! I don’t want to think about it anymore!” She backed away from Surie, who continued smiling. “I can’t even look at your face.” Would Yidel react this badly? The other married children? Surie’s lips were so dry that they began to crack.