When I woke in the morning, I began packing, not sure what to bring or how long I would be gone. I rummaged around for an extra belly-support band, thinking duct tape would work better. Thrusting myself into the back of the closet and holding on to a pair of hanging jeans for support, I found a black maternity dress with a small ruffle on the right shoulder. I had hardly worn any maternity couture, but now I was heading back to see old friends who would appreciate the effort. I found my makeup case, checking for mascara. I hesitated, then thought, Fuck it, the tiara’s coming, too. Dress, mascara, tiara. I was ready. The rock Chris had given me was on the night table. I picked it up and held it to my heart before setting it back down again.
That afternoon Chris loaded the car and I reclined my seat all the way back. Satchie Red hopped in behind me. I looked over at my husband’s hand, willing him to place it on my lap the way he used to, but he kept his eyes on the road, lost in thought. I fiddled with the radio, and for the next few hours looked out the passenger window, watching as the tree-lined Palisades Parkway turned into concrete buildings. By the time we reached the West Side Highway, the wind on my face hit me hard, and some stale, sleeping part of me began to awaken. Chris cursed at a driver in the left lane trying to cut him off as the downtown traffic around Chelsea Piers slowed to a crawl, but I was lost in my own world, admiring the strong bodies of the men and women sprinting along the promenade. I longed to feel as light and free as their wide strides made them look.
We inched through the Battery Tunnel and onto the BQE, and when I saw the old men playing chess at the stone tables along Ocean Parkway, the tension I had been carrying in my shoulders for the past months began to dissipate. As we made a left onto Avenue J, the Jewish capital of South Brooklyn, I raised the back of my seat. Chris’s hands tightened around the steering wheel with each double-parked minivan he circumnavigated. Orthodox women dressed in ankle-length black skirts and white shirts that covered their wrists, surrounded by gaggles of children, were pushing carts and strollers full of groceries. The line was down the block for Di Faro’s legendary five-dollar-a-slice pizza, which I’d never tried. (Who has time to stand in line for pizza?) Isaac’s Bakery was getting a delivery, and the truck was blocking one whole lane. By the time we pulled onto my mother’s street, Chris was speeding and slamming on the brakes, speeding and slamming. I was quiet. We were almost there. We found parking a block away and walked to my mother’s apartment in silence, Chris carrying my suitcase.
Spare key in the door, the smell of other people’s dinner seeping through the walls, an amalgamation of roasts, spices, and Chinese takeout. I found a note on the counter saying food was in the fridge, signed with a stick figure of my mother holding a frying pan. I scanned the living room, catching my eye on the mahogany breakfront. Resting on a shelf was a photo of my father holding up a filled-to-the-brim wineglass at Les Deux Magots in Paris and a Matchbox Ferrari I bought him one Valentine’s Day. This was not the place where I grew up, but my mother, the pink velvet rocking chair, the aroma of sautéed onions and olive oil in the kitchen . . . It still felt like home.
I backed myself onto the sofa, overcome with relief, breathing in the entire city through the open window. It almost felt like I hadn’t been getting enough oxygen for the last few months, and now, suddenly, I was flooded with it. I listened to the familiar buzz of air conditioners and the muffled booms of televisions. A child cried in the alley, a dog barked, construction workers sawed into metal; it all happened beneath my mother’s window. There was a steady hum, a hustling of people in the streets below living and laughing, and though I couldn’t join them, I could be near them, and this loud chatter soothed me. Chris and I made a quick meal of my mother’s leftovers, and then he stood up to leave.
“I have to head back.”
“Okay.”
He planted a small peck on my forehead before reaching for the doorknob.
I knelt down to give the dog a hug, but she wriggled out of my reach and followed Chris down the hall. There was no fanfare in their goodbye.
The next morning I woke up to construction workers banging on the roof above my mother’s sixth-floor apartment and made my way over to the sofa, delighted to find that she had hundreds of cable channels. I was glued to the screen, watching shows about babies, new mothers, and birth—an unexplored television genre! Whereas previously I wanted nothing to do with anything pregnancy-related, now I was hooked. The best part was, there was a marathon of pregnancy-gone-wrong shows, but after the first few episodes, I caught on to the fact that they always turned out just fine. What more could a woman in the final weeks of bed rest ask for? I was four hours into shows about women who had no idea they were pregnant and were now giving birth in random places, when my mother joined me.
“I want to talk about my funeral,” she said.
“Right now?”
“I have insurance.”
“Great, we’re all set then.” A woman was giving birth in a gas station, screaming at the attendant to call an ambulance. She had just gotten out of the car, holding her stomach, saying that she thought something was wrong. Suddenly, her water broke, right next to the squeegees. There was no way she was going to make it to the hospital.
“I also have papers,” my mother said.
“You have papers?” I was riveted to the screen.
“You’ll have to shred them.”
I turned to her now. “Are they top-secret papers?”
“I want you to use the same funeral home that we used for your father.”
“Are you planning to die today? Because if not, I’d really like to see if this lady gives birth in the gas station. Don’t push. Don’t push. Hold on. Help is on the way,” I called to the TV.
“I’m etching your initials into the furniture that you are going to inherit. This way you don’t fight over it with your brother.”
“Ma, I don’t want your furniture.”
“You don’t want my furniture? What about your father’s armoire?”
“Look, look,” I said, pointing at the television, “the baby is coming. Push it back in!”
“Why are you watching this?”
“You’re right, Ma,” I said. “I’d much rather talk about death and armoires. Etch Mark’s initials on all the furniture.”
“You just stabbed me in the heart.” She grabbed her chest and threw herself backward, then continued, “I wrote down exactly what I want to happen and how I want to be buried. And I don’t want my tombstone sinking like your father’s. I swear when I visit the cemetery, his plot smells like cigarette smoke.”
Then we spent the next fifteen minutes deciding on what New York Jews refer to as appetizing for my mother’s funeral, which is basically any kind of fish you can put on a bagel—lox (nova, because belly is too salty), sable (make sure it’s filleted), and whitefish salad (taste it so you know it’s fresh). Oh, and tuna fish (you can make it yourself because it’s just as good as store-bought).
Just when I thought my eyeballs would roll into the back of my head, my friends began arriving for visits. Most had called and emailed while I was on bed rest, but now I was finally seeing them in person. My friend Stella, whom I had met at Cunningham Junior High, bustled in with a big bouquet and shopping bags from Lord & Taylor that weren’t for me but filled with skimpy dresses for a wedding she was attending that weekend. We gossiped about boys from our high school, and my mom pulled out my old motorcycle jacket and sweet sixteen pictures just for fun. As Stella was leaving, my friend Laura stopped in. Every morning during college we had met on the steps of the quad to drink coffee and judge our classmates. Now she told me stories of her house renovations and the challenges of teaching underserved kids. As the day wore on, I noticed myself slipping back into my Brooklyn accent and dropping that exhausting letter R. Upstate people always asked me to “talk Brooklyn” to them, as though I were a sideshow distraction, so I had worked hard to hide it. Here, I was just like everybody else. My friends and I discussed everything except my pregnancy. To these people, being pregnant was only a small and temporary part of who I was. And because of this, the depression that I had felt so keenly in the early days of bed rest abated until it was just a shadow in the background.
My mother and I fell into a routine. When she came home from work and the temperature dropped from ninety-five to eighty-nine degrees, we would go for a short outing on Avenue J. We often bumped into her friends, women who had full disciplinary authority over me as a kid, and they would joke, “Who gave you permission to be up and about?” In this neighborhood, people were watching out for me.
Growing up, we had been a close-knit community with houses right next to one another; nothing was private and everyone could hear each other’s conversations and fights, both our simchas and our shandas. These women had fed me, yelled at me, and sprayed antiseptic on my naked tuchus when I sat on a bee at age three. The kids played handball in the alley and slid down the tops of cellar doors until the sun went down, while our mothers traded recipes and our fathers drank Heinekens on the back steps. As a curly-headed kid who’d never been farther than Long Island and spent most of her time collecting stickers and riding her floral banana-seat bicycle up and down the sidewalk, I had always felt secure around these people.
Once back at the apartment, I would wait for Chris to call, never sure what to say or if he even wanted to speak to me. On most nights the phone would ring after 9:00 p.m., and when I picked up, I could hear the television blaring in the background. I talked to him about my day, told him about the people I had seen, and he responded monosyllabically. He said his days were busy, that he was fine but tired, and after a few minutes of silence, I would tell him it was time for me to get to bed.
One evening, my mother came home from work saying her friend Zahava was on her way over for coffee and rugelach. When I was four, Zahava and her family had moved in downstairs from us on East Eighteenth Street. On the day of their arrival, my brother and I stood on the stoop, a suspicious two-person welcome wagon, sizing them up, trying to decide: friend or foe? Zahava smiled as she passed, and her Israeli husband, carrying their young son on his hip, stopped to say something to us. We couldn’t understand a word of his gruff accent, so we cowered backward, wide-eyed and mute.
A week or two later, as I was sitting on the stoop making pot holders with a loom, Zahava asked if I wanted to go for a walk with her while she pushed her baby in the pram. I hopped off the stoop, leaving both loom and loops strewn on the steps. We were halfway down the block when my mother’s shriek rattled the front windows of every house within a half-mile radius. I turned to see her running in our direction. When she finally caught up to us, she let loose a tirade on Zahava for kidnapping her child. I don’t know what transpired after that, but they must have worked it out pretty quickly, because Zahava became one of my mother’s closest friends.
As my mother was in the kitchen preparing coffee, Zahava sat down next to me. I asked her if she had news of any of my Orthodox friends, and she told me who was having babies and who had made aliyah—the act of moving to Israel to elevate oneself in the eyes of God. Part of me wanted to see them, and the other part of me still felt forsaken, now more than ever. I couldn’t imagine sharing my current marital problems with Rachel—I didn’t want to prove her right, that Chris and I were too different to make our marriage work.
“How’s the farm?” she asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow over her wire-framed glasses.
“I think my marriage is in trouble,” I said.
“C’mon. I don’t believe it. Look, men get scared when a baby is coming.” She patted my belly.
“We have so many differences. Our values, our beliefs. Even the way we argue.”
“Of course! You come from different backgrounds. You knew that when you married him.”
“What if it was a mistake?”
She reached over, taking my hand in both of hers. “Look, you married him. You’ll work it out. You think Jewish men are easy to live with? Not a chance. Trust me, Jewish men can be very stubborn.”
“All he does is work.”
“Same with my husband. For years it was just me raising the kids. It’s not a religion thing. It’s a man thing. If he didn’t work, it would be worse.” She pushed my hair back behind my ear. “This is not Brownies; you don’t just get to stop showing up to marriage.”
“You know about Brownies?”
“The whole neighborhood knew about Brownies. Your mother was very concerned you should quit. How would it look?” She winked.
I shook my head, watching the green leaves flutter on the oak tree outside the living room window. “I don’t know how to go back. I don’t even know if he wants me back.”
“You’re not a little girl. You don’t get to run away just because it’s tough.” She got up to shut off a lamp. “Your mother has so many lights on.”
“I know. It’s like living on the sun.”
“What does she have to say about this?”
“I told her Chris was busy with renovations and work, and that it was better for me to be here. She may know something is up, but she’s happy she can keep a constant vigil over me and the mealy moths at the same time.”
“Your mother knows more than you think. Wait until you have the baby, and then see how you feel. Besides, what are you going to do, live here?” She swept her arm around the room. “You and your mother will kill each other. It’s going to work out, cookie. It’ll be tough, but it will work out.”
My mother came into the room with a tray. “The rugelach might still be frozen. They’re a little hard, but they should be okay.”
“We don’t need the rugelach,” I said.
“I defrosted the rugelach, so you have to eat it. Zahava, eat. What can I get you?”
Zahava grabbed a frozen rugelach and took a chomp. “What are you going to do? You have to eat it. She defrosted it.” She smiled, shrugging her shoulders as my mother went to retrieve a pot of decaf.
That night I lay in the glow of the streetlamp, unable to sleep. I knew Zahava was right. I couldn’t move in with my mother. I wasn’t a kid anymore. If I stayed in the city, I’d be committing to raising a child on my own. I thought about my wedding day, how nervous Chris and I were standing at the altar. We’d taken vows, signed a ketubah. We’d pledged to be loving friends and partners in marriage, to talk, to listen, and to trust, to cherish each other’s uniqueness. The ketubah actually said those words: “Cherish each other’s uniqueness.” I had gotten so caught up in this pregnancy, and Chris had been so distracted by the business, we had stopped seeing each other. We were both cracking under the pressure, but I didn’t know if the fissures could be repaired.
My father’s old MTA hat was sitting on top of the armoire. He had started working the late shift as a clerk for the Metropolitan Transit Authority during my senior year of high school. One summer day after graduation, I came home and found him on the stoop. I sat down beside him. Since he had started working, he wasn’t what I would call happy, but he had a sense of purpose, contentment even, and he and my mother were spending more time together.
“You and Mom are getting along so well. What changed?” I asked.
He thought for a while, taking a drag off his cigarette and then offering the rest to me. I took it from him. “Well, I gave up. I just gave up the fight.”
I sort of laughed, surprised at his answer. “How do you mean?”
“I stopped caring who won, who was right—none of that matters. Half the time I didn’t even know what we were fighting about. Why die on that hill?” he said.
In the semi-dark of my mother’s bedroom, with the buzz of the city humming around me, I heard his voice: “Do you want to die on this hill, Kabeen?”
With less than eight weeks left of my pregnancy, my mother announced that it was time to look at car seats and pack ’n’ plays. As one of Brooklyn’s foremost authorities on Jewish superstitions, she insisted we wouldn’t jinx the health of this baby by making sure he had a safe ride home from the hospital and a place to sleep. I even agreed to let her drive me to the store, which was arguably far more dangerous than violating ancient traditions. My brother had given her his fifteen-year-old Toyota Corolla, which she mostly drove from one side of the street to the other to change spots for alternate side parking. As we pulled up to the big-box baby center, I felt a surge of joy. I was starved for a credit card transaction.
The choices of patterns and colors were overwhelming. I was so flustered, I sought out a sales associate, begging him to help me decide on a pattern that would suit my lifestyle. But then, what was my lifestyle? Plaid would look great in a country home. A neutral color would go well in a modern city apartment. This was a high-stakes decision.
“Which do you prefer?” I asked the sales associate. He was a hefty older man with a graying beard, and I got the feeling he was hired for his ability to carry heavy items in and out of the store rather than to pick out color schemes.
“It really depends. What color is your nursery?”
I don’t even know where I live right now, how can I possibly answer that?
“Yellow.” I could have a yellow nursery.
“You can’t go wrong with neutral.”
“But what if it’s for a country house?”
“Then definitely plaid.”
I leaned against a row of boxed baby swings, ready to talk this through. He looked like a pretty smart guy; maybe he could tell me where to live. “I don’t know if I have a country house,” I said.
“You don’t know where your house is?” He scanned the store looking for another customer who might need his attention.
My mother came running at me waving a flyer. “Aileen, look, I found a coupon. The plaid one is on sale!” Sold. Spared the task of deciding the fate of my marriage and the living arrangements for my unborn child, the sales associate carried the boxes to the register for me.
Back at the apartment, surrounded by my purchases, I slid into bed. My mother’s air conditioner was so old and loud, it felt like I was hiding in the wheel well of a 747. It drowned out every thought I had, except one. Should I stay or should I go? I had no idea what Chris was thinking, if he was planning his life without me or just assuming I’d come home. I had been at my mother’s for two full weeks. I missed Satchie Red. I had skipped an appointment with Dr. Specialist, and though his pronouncements now held little weight, I wanted to stay the course. But it was hard to leave Brooklyn. And then I remembered standing on that glacier in Alaska staring down into the unknown, looking my fears in the face and at all the risks I had taken. If I didn’t go home now, I’d be right back where I started.
I turned to the night table and picked up the picture of my father sitting in his token booth at the Kings Highway train station, probably one of the last pictures ever taken of him. He wore a mischievous grin.
I closed my eyes and listened for his voice. “This is real life, Kabeen. You can’t pack a garbage bag full of stuffed animals and run away every time there’s a problem. Go home.” If I could find empathy for my father after all these years and acknowledge the resentment I hadn’t even realized I was carrying with me and then let go of it, if I could finally understand him and love him for the man he really was, and not just the man I thought he was, perhaps I needed to do the same for Chris before it was too late.
When we had first wed, our farmhouse with its false foundation had been in danger of collapsing. But we’d secured it with a solid beam. Didn’t our marriage deserve the same? Maybe seduction could be accomplished in ten seconds, but making a marriage work takes a lot longer. Maybe even a lifetime.
I picked up the phone and dialed.
“Chris, I’m coming home.”