On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

Genres: Jewish Fiction

Synopsis

** Winner of the 2020 Jewish Fiction Award **

“A novel of wisdom and uncertainty, of love in its greater and lesser forms, and of the struggle between how it should be and how it is. It is impossible not to be moved.”
—Amy Bloom, author of White Houses

"This book brings the reader into the heart of a close-knit Jewish family and their joys, loves, and sorrows . . . A marvelous book by a masterful writer.”
—Audrey Niffenegger, author of Her Fearful Symmetry and The Time Traveler’s Wife

"As beautiful as it is unexpected.”
—Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl

Through one woman's life at a moment of surprising change, the award-winning author Goldie Goldbloom tells a deeply affecting, morally insightful story and offers a rare look inside Brooklyn's Chasidic community

On Division Avenue, just a block or two up from the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Surie Eckstein is soon to be a great-grandmother. Her ten children range in age from thirteen to thirty-nine. Her in-laws, postwar immigrants from Romania, live on the first floor of their house. Her daughter Tzila Ruchel lives on the second. She and Yidel, a scribe in such demand that he makes only a few Torah scrolls a year, live on the third. Wed when Surie was sixteen, they have a happy marriage and a full life, and, at the ages of fifty-seven and sixty-two, they are looking forward to some quiet time together.

Into this life of counted blessings comes a surprise. Surie is pregnant. Pregnant at fifty-seven. It is a shock. And at her age, at this stage, it is an aberration, a shift in the proper order of things, and a public display of private life. She feels exposed, ashamed. She is unable to share the news, even with her husband. And so for the first time in her life, she has a secret—a secret that slowly separates her from the community.

Into this life of counted blessings comes a surprise. Surie is pregnant. Pregnant at fifty-seven. It is a shock. And at her age, at this stage, it is an aberration, a shift in the proper order of things, and a public display of private life. She feels exposed, ashamed. She is unable to share the news, even with her husband. And so for the first time in her life, she has a secret—a secret that slowly separates her from the community.

Release date: September 17, 2019

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 288

Sample

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.

“Please,” she begged no one. “Please.”

The midwife leaned forward, wanting to put out a steadying hand, but feeling some coldness, some rejection, before she even reached out, she rattled off words about Surie’s exasperating body: Condom. Withdrawal. Rhythm. IUD. The Pill. You are responsible for your own fertility. Val had made her own peace long ago with this occult knowledge. She’d grown up in a religious Catholic home but left her faith behind forty years earlier when she started working as a midwife. Faith was no excuse for ignorance. For her, this was a core belief.

Surie was no stranger to her own fertility. She still checked her menstrual chart every morning, even though she hadn’t bled in over ten years. She’d been delighted when the chemotherapy had sent her straight into menopause. Only after many cancer-free years had she thought she was in the clear and stopped taking the tamoxifen. Maybe her body, rejoicing at being free of the drug, had bounced right back to whatever was the opposite of menopause? Maybe that’s how the pregnancy had happened? But Val said tamoxifen wasn’t a form of birth control. It seemed obvious to Surie that the midwife was mistaken.

Val was older than Surie. Loose wattles wobbled under her chin, though she was rail thin. She talked until white flecks appeared at the corners of her mouth and then she removed the spittle with her blue-gloved fingertips. Surie couldn’t remember this woman speaking at all when she’d delivered the other babies. She’d had the impression that the midwife was a little afraid of her back then. But now she rattled on and on. Remember how you bled the last time? 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 midwife’s gabbing must have been sanctioned by someone somewhere.

“Your husband is going to have such a surprise when you tell him!”

Surie usually told Yidel everything. But strangely, two months in and for some reason, she still hadn’t opened her mouth to announce that they were going to be parents again. How had she allowed the time to pass? She hadn’t realized she was pregnant for the first few weeks. Then, once she had, the pregnancy seemed like a bad dream, something that just wasn’t possible. Later, there’d been the flickering at the edge of her vision, faces that couldn’t exist, the scent of freshly turned dirt, mint and apples. The madness of old age, she’d thought. It was a miracle she’d made an appointment at all. And at the wedding, she’d danced as if she were an ordinary grandmother, not a pregnant woman. Although, of course, she hadn’t known she was expecting twins.

“If necessary, take time off from work. Do you work? Don’t drink any wine.” Too late. She’d gulped several glasses to quench her horror at the wedding. Val could probably smell the alcohol on her breath. “It’s been known to cause fetal alcohol syndrome.”

Val said this as if Surie had, at some time, been familiar with fetal alcohol syndrome. As if she should have heard about it. Well, she probably had, but she didn’t remember. She wasn’t a bad woman, Val. Each time Surie didn’t remember something, the midwife went away and came back with another pamphlet to stuff into her hands. Each time, Val patted her on the shoulder as if to say it would all be all right. Expecting twin babies at Surie’s creaking age couldn’t ever be all right.

“Coffee brings on preterm labor, a major risk for geriatric mothers,” she added.

Geriatric. That word … did it mean old people? Did Val think Surie should be in a nursing home instead of a birthing center?

“If you don’t want to carry these babies at your age, you don’t have to.” Val lowered her voice, drew closer. “Most older mothers miscarry. If you want, I could talk to the doctor about a therapeutic abortion.”

Surie wanted to vomit. Her mouth was full of saliva. Her throat burned. She shook her head. Such hideous and forbidden words. God forbid! Chas vecholila! Abortion.

A long silver knife in the midwife’s hand, an unearthly screaming, blood everywhere. Hushed whispers behind closed doors, her three sons who still lived at home pointing their fingers, an iciness encasing the few friendships that had survived Lipa. A stone wall disconnecting her from Godly light. What hushed comments had she heard about abortions? It was all bad, that was for sure. Only other people killed babies. Only goyim thought fetuses weren’t really alive.

* * *

The next morning, Saturday, she washed all of the dishes from the fancy Friday night meal her married children had prepared for the new bride. It made Surie’s skin crawl to see how her daughter smiled at the obscene groom, as if she liked him, as if she would have chosen him herself, as if he were just like her holy brothers. How could her daughter think that Surie would choose such a man for her if she had better options? Her beautiful, innocent granddaughters took turns lying on the couch, massaging one another, complaining that they weren’t getting the full five minutes, groaning from the pressure of a hand between their scapulars, completely unaware of the tragedy that had befallen the family, that would soon befall each of them! Their matches would also be affected.

Surie’s mouth wanted coffee and a big slice of cake. Could she? Her stomach rolled over every time she saw a chocolate bar, but mysteriously, she craved chocolate cake. Only a day later and already she couldn’t remember any of the midwife’s advice. Maybe, besides being pregnant, she had early-onset Alzheimer’s? Val spoke too fast. A Yiddish translator might have helped, but Surie would have been ashamed to cry in front of someone from her own community. And not just that … she could picture the translator totting up the years—thirteen!—since Surie’s last birth and shooting her a glance of surprise and disbelief. Der Oibershter knows what he does. Der Oibershter will give you strength. No evil eye, darling! Your babies will keep you young! It’s bashert. But silently, the woman would be thinking it was time for Surie’s kids to be raising babies, not Surie. She’d be wondering who she could tell this crazy news to first.

To give birth was to announce publicly that she and Yidel still found each other desirable long past the usual age of childbearing. None of her peers had been pregnant in a decade. The girls she’d grown up with, her friends, never discussed their private lives. It was easy to assume that they never even looked at their husbands, to imagine they had returned to the virginal state of their youth. These girls who she still imagined in school uniforms and braids were now grandmothers, one even a great-grandmother. They would ponder the logistics of her pregnancy. Most mothers in the community had shut up shop as they passed their early forties, and that seemed right, appropriate, modest. No one wanted to bring home a baby—two babies!—with Down syndrome or some other disaster of getting older. Here she was, fifty-seven, grandmother to thirty-two grandchildren, still going strong. The women of the community would say mazal tov, but privately, they’d blush for her, the sex-crazed hussy. And this strange news on top of Lipa’s death and Gitty’s match … her poor granddaughters! They’d never be able to escape the family’s new status, no matter how perfectly they or their mothers behaved.

Surie leaned against the sink, cringing. Several noodles floated in the cold soapy water. It was revolting. The morning sickness rose in her throat again. It was much worse with the twins than it had been with the singletons. Because of her size, because her belly swelled out in front of her and overflowed at the sides, and because her flesh was hard, not soft, she could barely reach the taps behind the sink. Stretching, she flicked off the stream, turned, and went out on the fire escape, to the cool breeze from the river.

She was careful with her feet because she was off-balance with the extra weight. She stood on a section of rusty metal grid. The railing was loose. It wouldn’t do to fall three stories down to the street and splatter on the road like an overripe watermelon. Paper wasps had made colonies under the eaves, and though it was already early December, already cold, they fell clumsily out of their nests, stunned, one by one. They spread their wings but did not move. The empty lots behind and to one side of the apartment building were full of wilting Queen Anne’s lace and blackened golden rod. When the wind blew, the aspen leaves clapping together sounded like rain.

Yidel was just above her, on the flat part of the roof, walking among the hides stretched on frames and placed in the sun to dry. He couldn’t touch them on Shabbos morning, but he liked to look at the skins when he came back from the synagogue. He was a sofer, a scribe. He called out to her.

“Good Shabbos, little wife!”

The pregnancy, which had shown from the very first moments (she’d thought it was more change-of-life fat!), rose up from between her hips in a dense ball and pressed against her thighs as she crouched, her back against the wind. She was enormous. It was insulting, really, that her family thought all of this flesh was her own. Yidel called again, urging her to climb the last flight of rickety steps and join him on the roof.

“I’m too fat,” she yelled. A Chassidic man, passing below on the street, looked up, shaded his eyes to see better, and then hurried on.

“You’ll need to come into the clinic every week so we can keep an eye on you. Don’t look so horrified. It’s not a death sentence. You know I’m not scary,” the midwife had said. “Aren’t I pleasant to talk to? Together, we’ll learn a lot about these babies.” Val had awkwardly patted Surie on the shoulder as if she were a small child. Surie wanted to bite her.

Such a stereotype! A sandal-wearing graduate of the Peace Corps, makeup-free, gangling, large-nosed Val. A confirmed spinster if only because she was, underneath everything, intensely shy. 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—lonely, idealistic, eager to love everyone and make their lives better—had wanted all the mothers to laugh at her funny T-shirts and her dyed bright orange hair, but the Chassidic women didn’t know where to rest their eyes.

“You’re not fat!” Yidel bent over the parapet, smiling down at her, beckoning. In the marriage raffle, she had won first prize. Before the pregnancy, she’d tipped the scale at 263 pounds. “Even if you were, double my money’s worth! Come up.”

He would not be so delighted with her if he knew he was in for two more tuitions, two more weddings, at a time when he had been preparing to retire. They’d been hoping the whispers about their family might die down. Double the financial drain, double the shame. Not double his money’s worth.

For almost twenty years, he’d trained their two eldest sons, Usher and Eluzer, to be the same kind of meticulous calligrapher that he himself had always been. Klei kodesh, holy vessels those boys were, both ordained rabbis and scribes. He’d steadily transferred all his clients to them. These days, Yidel was a specialist. He never wrote mezuzahs, megillos, marriage contracts, divorce decrees. He only wrote new Torah scrolls, all of them special orders from the Rebbe. A single scroll took an entire year of writing from nine till noon, Monday to Friday, with a hand-cut feather. Each afternoon he sanded the stretched skins of fetal calves until they were smooth and glassy, cut them to size, ruled lines into the parchment, sewed the sheets together with dried tendons. He carved the wooden rollers, cut his quills, mixed his own jet-black ink. Their basement was always full of frames holding dried hides. It smelled of rotting meat and lime, wet oak and burned hair. The odor was the first thing guests noticed about their home. Surie could smell it three floors up, on the fire escape, in a strong wind. But in the past four years, Yidel had only written two scrolls. Now weeks went by without him bringing home fresh hides. The hides on the roof were the last he’d ever stretch. He’d told her, with glee in his voice, that he was going to retire on his birthday. Six days before her due date.

“Rebbetzin Eckstein!” he called again, and he put his hand on the railing, his foot on the first step down toward her. Very few people called her Rebbetzin, though she was married to a rabbi. It was his little joke.

“Don’t come down!” she said, shaking her head and backing away. “I have work to do.” She needed time to think, time to figure out how to tell him.

Surie was no longer sure of that flash of light she’d seen in the midwife’s eyes. At the time, she’d hoped it had been admiration. The old-fashioned Jews who lived in Williamsburg, the midwife’s bread and butter, belonged to a people that had never been part of the secular world. They lived the way they had always lived. They cured skins in their basements and laid them in the sun to dry as they had done in Europe. They read books about laws and ethics and history from two thousand years ago. They dressed in styles from the forties and fifties and revered elders who had never read a word of English. The men sat and studied the word of God their entire lives, and instead of becoming wide and stodgy, they grew lean and speedy, and their eyes burned with the bright light of sharp intelligence. The women raised beautiful families, glorious families with hundreds of grandchildren, thousands of great-grandchildren. Surely the midwife, when she told Surie the news, had viewed the twins as a miracle and Surie as a holy woman? Surely that flash in Val’s eyes had been respect? She wouldn’t be able to hold herself together if that light had been pity.

* * *

She went inside and drained the sink, took off her damp apron, and pulled on her Shabbos ponzhelo. She transferred the green-rimmed glasses from the pocket of the apron to the new garment. The hem of her housecoat smelled of vomit from the previous evening, but it couldn’t be cleaned until after nightfall. Surie closed her nose to the smells coming from the Crock-Pot and the blech. Chulent. Kigel. Fatty soup. In the evening, she’d have to dress up again and go out for a huge sheva brochos for her daughter. She’d wear a tight smile like a girdle on her face. The big clock in the living room chimed twelve times. She poured a cup of coffee, but her stomach turned and she slid into the bathroom and closed the door.

“Are you all right?” Yidel waited outside the bathroom door, as he had almost all the days he had been married to her. He was sixty-two, older than her by five years. A respected rabbi, he wore long white socks and a silk coat, a bekishe, that came down past his knee-length pants; his gray beard reached the third button of his shirt; his fur shtreimel, real sable, lay curled on a chair like a cat. Under his arm was the folded yellow tallis she’d given him on the day they were married, forty-one years earlier.

His work with the holy scrolls had engraved itself on his body. His shoulders were rounded, his hips ached, he had arthritis in his ink-stained fingers. He had varicosities and a belly from so many hours of sitting. But his work had marked him in positive ways too. Yidel could concentrate on a single thing for hours. He never lost his temper. His face was as calm and innocent as an angel’s. Over time, he’d become famous. People across the world knew instantly when they saw a parchment he had written. Eckstein’s, they said. Beautiful.

Surie flushed the toilet and spat into the water. Most of the vomit spun down the drain. She cleaned her teeth and her tongue with a dab of toothpaste on her finger and then flushed again.

“Give me that izei?” she said. “The brown one?” He knew what thingamabob she meant from years of experience, and her favorite towel was slipped into the gap created by the partially opened bathroom door.

“What do you want to make kiddush on?” she asked after wiping her face. She covered her mouth with her hand, afraid that he might be able to smell the twins on her breath. “When will the boys get home?”

“What’s that?” Yidel said. He fumbled with his hearing aid, remembered it was Shabbos, jerked his hand away. “What’s that?” he asked again, cupping his good ear. His hearing was ruined from the screaming of the rotary sander he used to polish the skins.

“I defrosted a bundt and two bilkelach,” she said softly as she passed.

When she’d rapidly gained weight, she’d had herself checked for all those fat-lady things, reflux, diabetes, a thyroid imbalance. Her regular doctor—not suspecting—told her to cut back on sweets and eat more protein. She’d finally figured out she was pregnant a couple of weeks earlier, at the end of the sixth week, when she realized that fat couldn’t squeeze her bladder or make her nauseous. The early weeks of the pregnancy had passed in a blur. She’d been too busy with the engagement and the wedding to tell Yidel. And now it wasn’t just one baby she’d be confessing, but two. Maybe she was hoping for a miscarriage? For shame!

“Surie,” he said, and he caught her hand and held it without any pressure. There was a very pale light like clouded crystal behind his pupils. Was that what love looked like? Was this fog the thing that caused old people to go blind? Catinkelach? Something like that? Maybe he wanted to lie down with her? Or was he upset that she hadn’t gone upstairs? So many years of this wordless communication had passed between them that he thought he could read her silences. He usually could. She, however, still struggled to understand this unspoken language of theirs.

She’d always been proud of his craftsmanship, proud that she was married to the man who wrote the Torah scrolls for the Rebbe. She would no sooner interrupt his morning hours writing than go outside without her stockings. The first year they were married, they had developed a sign language so that she might ask him if he needed something and so that he might respond without speaking and interfering with his holy work. A slightly raised eyebrow, a hand gesture, a smile, a nod. Yidel noticed everything down to the smallest movement of her lip. She’d often laughed and said that he could read her mind. Now this silence was a deeply ingrained habit.

They both assumed that anything important would float from one to the other. With words, they were a little out of practice. She waited for him to notice the hard bowl of her stomach, to turn to her one morning and casually ask for her due date. When this didn’t happen, she was lost. She worried that there was something wrong between them, that Yidel no longer loved her in quite the same observant way. And so she waited, hoping he would see.

He’d guessed she was pregnant all of the previous times, bought her pregnancy tests before she knew to ask. They’d hugged each other, laughed, started suggesting names. They both loved being parents. He always remembered the mystical words he’d been thinking when each child was conceived, and he’d written each phrase in a tiny book he’d given her on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. For a man, he was intuitive. But not now. What was wrong with them? Why didn’t he guess? Why didn’t she say?

She gently pulled away from him and took a few steps down the hallway.

“The boys will be home any minute,” she said, looking pointedly at his hand. She could somehow feel what he wanted through the light touch of his skin on hers, the way the dark place at the center of his eyes widened. “It’s not right.”

“Surie,” Yidel said, but when she turned away from him, he just sighed and shrugged.

How could she tell him she was pregnant when he had so happily refinished the old baby furniture for Tzila Ruchel’s sixth child? Four years earlier, right after they’d returned from their trip to California, he’d hauled out their battered crib and the changing table and the high chair and painted them with rural scenes from Romania. How could she take that away from him, his relish at being a zaidy after all the dry and terrible years of being a disciplinarian, something not in his nature? He’d know she’d known and kept it from him. He’d always adored her, announced to their children that their mother was a saint, a love, his favorite, the best of all women. What would he think of her?

“I am a lucky man,” he said, walking after her. He took her hand again, pulled her toward him, and raised her fingers clumsily toward his mouth. He made the same gesture to his mother on Friday nights. Surie had an idea that he was supposed to kiss her fingers, that it was the proper conclusion of the gesture, but he simply held her hand aloft for a moment and let it go. They went into the kitchen together, and she laid out the challah rolls and the cake and poured him a glass of wine, and when her three youngest sons came home, she sat and watched them all eat, her lips pressed together, barely breathing for fear she would vomit.

* * *

The next morning, she dressed in her good black cardigan and houndstooth blouse. She smoothed her bangs to one side of her scarf. The nylon hair was stiff and coarse and refused to be swept. Yidel had given her a gold choker at their engagement and she wore it whenever she left the house, even though it was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. Every Sunday morning, when the big clock—her mother’s clock—chimed ten, they went out into the crowded Williamsburg streets. Yidel went in front, both of them towing a shopping cart with one hand and holding an umbrella over their heads with the other. It was like him, to go shopping with her, something he had begun the first week after they were married. “Wait,” he’d said then, when she’d put on her coat to go out for the groceries. Even though no other husband she knew helped his wife in that way, the brave young man he’d been, twenty-one years old, had put on his coat and carried the grocery cart down the stairs. He’d waited outside on the sidewalk until he