Apart From Love (9 page)

“I won’t lie down,” I say, defiantly. “And I really, really don’t like knitting.”
 

Her painted eyebrows arch even higher, and I begin to get an uneasy feeling, because at this point, she’s much too close to me, and the light bounces off her needle much too sharply, and now the tip is right here, against my skin, and it scratches.
 

I point a finger at her, like, right in her face, to make her take note of my nails. “Shove off! Away from me,” I tell her. “I mean it, don’t you dare come any closer to me with them fine needles.”

“I see,” says aunt Hadassa.
 

She wraps the yarn around her index finger and plucks it, as if to transmit a message by wire. “A feisty little kitten,” she says, “are you now!” At which time aunt Frida asks, “She’s a kitten?” and aunt Fruma confirms, “Yes: a feisty little one!”

By now Aunt Hadassa has stepped back, and with a tightlipped expression she sits there and starts sawing the three squares of wool together, using some fancy sort of a stitch, and clicking her tongue, and sighing, like, “My, my.”
 

After doing this for a while, she pushes them glasses up her nose, and raises her eyes to me and says, “I’m trying to talk to you, dear, like I was your ma, you know.”
 

To which I say, “And what makes you think I need another ma? One’s more than enough! And you, you don’t know nothing about my ma.”

“I guess I don’t,” she has to admit. “But being pregnant is not for sissies, dear. You must make sure you are strong, like me.”
 

At hearing this, I can’t hide my disgust. “If this is what strength looks like, I swear, I’m gonna take disease.”

“I see,” says she. “In that case, it’s not too late, you know.”
 

And before I can ask, “What is?” she goes on to drive the point home.
 

“I have done it before, and it can make things so much easier for you, because really, you like to run around and have your fun, don’t you. And here you are, poor dear, lying in bed, confined, probably, for weeks, if not months. Now with all this bleeding going on, my, my, who knows what has happened there.”
 

She points her needle at me, stressing, “Maybe it’s no good anyway, I mean, not viable, if you know what I am saying—”

“Don’t—don’t you dare say it,” I flash a warning at her. “For God’s sake, bite your tongue!”
 

At that minute, aunt Hadassa picks up the scissors; which is when I suddenly remember that piece of music which I heard with Lenny.
 

He took me to some opera, Wagner I think, which was long and kinda difficult to get, but he told me to listen, and he explained it all to me, and from there I remember them, the three Norns: They spun the thread of fate, and they sang, like, the song of the future.
 

Beware, they sang.
 

Beware, I tell myself now, as aunt Hadassa holds up the yarn, and snips it.
 

And with a sigh she leans into her feet and gets up. So do her sisters, and all their images in that oval, standalone mirror, right there in the opposite corner.
 

“Nu, we are going to leave now,” she says. “We are going to hurry out, dear, because we do not want you to tell us we should go. Just think about it, will you? I was just saying... It is not too late, really... You are in pain, dear, I can see it quite plainly. And there is still time to end this.”

The three sisters file out with a quick, matching step, and go out to the corridor, followed closely by a whirl in the air, in which you can spot three bounces—high, higher, highest—of three balls of yarn.
 

And as they make their final exit, I shout at them as loud as I can, despite that sharp pain right here, in my guts, “Aunt Hadassa!”
 

I hear them stopping in their tracks out there, behind that door.
 

“What is it,” whispers one. “What does she want,” whispers another. And the last one answers, probably with a wave of a hand, “Who knows... Maybe, just to meow a little.”
 

Which in turn, makes me roar, “Who needs you! You, who think you can tell me what to do, and what not to do, and whether or not my pregnancy is like, viable, and should it come to full term, or not! I just wish that you leave me alone! Get the hell out! Get out of my womb, where it is not your business to be! And if I don’t see none of you never again, it’s gonna be too soon!”

As Told by Anita

F
or a while I leaf through this book, which Lenny’s bought me. I bet he’s real excited. He so looks forward to becoming a father, the second time around. I can just see him in my head, like, holding the baby’s hand, guiding him already in his first steps. Then, letting go, he’s gonna take a step or two back, and hold his breath, waiting there for the little one to walk into his open arms.
 

Lenny’s gonna buy him a brand new tricycle, and teach him how to set his little feet on top of them pedals, and push, push harder, even harder—yeah! Just so! And again: Go on, push, until—oh boy! With great joy, he’s gonna clap his hands, because here—for the first time—you could detect a move, a slight move ahead.
 

And then, a few years down the road, he’s gonna surprise our child with a large, shining bicycle, and adjust the training wheels as time goes by, until they wasn’t needed no more; at which point, Lenny would remove them, and hold them in his hands, like, to weigh them for a moment, and try to wipe the rust, and wish that time would like, slow down, just a little, because it’s hard, so hard for the old heart to let go.
 

Yes, Lenny needs a son: someone to need him, trust him, and make him trust himself again.
 

I turn the page over, only to find some of them words much too long—but I read them anyway and like, I
enunciate
them, as slowly and as clearly as I can, ‘cause it’s gonna make him proud of me, and make me worthy of him.
 

The book says that just four weeks after
conception
, basic facial features will begin to appear, including
passageways
, I repeat, passageways that will make up the inner ear, and arches that will
contribute
, contribute, I say aloud, to the jaw. And it says that the baby may now be a quarter of an inch long, which sounds like they’re talking about some lizard, or maybe a fish.
 

But the book don’t say nothing about what I’m really worried about, which is: how to be become a ma—and at the same time, how to be totally different from my ma.
 

Me, I often wonder about that, ‘cause it’s kinda hard to know the right thing to do, even with the best of intentions, when all you have before you is nothing, nothing but a life cursed by violence, and by misery, and by a long list of mistakes.
 

Like the time when I was fourteen, and ma called me
Bitch
, for no better reason than me telling her that, like, I’d missed my period. I wasn’t sure if she called me that because I was pregnant—or because she didn’t want to hear it.
 

At any rate, ma pondered the
situation
. This was what she called it back then, a situation. And she gave me a smack across my face when she figured it was Johnny's baby, which was real bad, not only because he was already married—but because he was also dating her at the time. And if there was one thing she hated, it was the idea of sharing.
 

After the blow I could taste blood in my mouth. And when I touched it with my tongue, one of my teeth felt kinda loose, and after a while it started to rock back and forth.
 

Once she simmered down, ma said, “There’s still time. It’s not too late.”
 

And she took me to that clinic, where she’d just joined the cleaning staff. And they did her a personal favor, so that instead of paying a full charge, she could put in some extra hours, like, for a few months. And there, they took care of the
situation
, but not of the tooth.
 

And so, I ended up losing it.
 

Me, I’m awful lucky, ‘cause you can’t tell it’s missing—unless I’m having real good fun and busting out laughing, which sometimes makes me forget to keep my mouth shut.
 

But right now I have to bite my lips.

Either that, or dig my nails, like, deep into the flesh of my hand, so that them cramps, they’re gonna stop, or at least fade away. So I close the book, reach over to the bedside lamp, and click its knob.
 

And at once, the place has changed. All these fancy pieces of furniture, and this entire bedroom, in which I don’t really belong, with its walls—those here around me and those over there, beyond the threshold, out in a corridor—all of these things ain’t solid no more. In a blink, they’ve lost their bright, yellow sides as well as their opposite, dark sides.
 

There ain’t no contrasts anymore, so that now, you can’t define no objects as, say, a four poster bed, or a coat hanger in a corner, or a wooden headboard, part of which is reflected there, in that mirror.
 

And instead, the whole space has become kinda fluid, like a gray, smoky swamp, given to the wild storm in my head, in which a shard here, a shard there start floating, in a total muddle.
 

And I ain’t even sure if them shards are, like, in the shape of things that have already taken place, or the shape of things yet to come—but somehow I know that from now on, no matter what happens, I ain’t alone: There’s new life in me.
 

I touch myself under the blanket, brushing my fingers real slow, from the navel up to the crease right here, under my chest, which is where I can feel the change: My breasts, they’ve grown so much firmer than before, and my nipples, they’ve gotten so much larger, like a drop turning into a ripple.
 

I let my hand hover over the place where I imagine my baby, and picture in my head how them things, them passageways start to form, connecting like, by magic, from here to there, forging little nerves in all the right places inside this tiny creature, all quarter inch of him.
 

The two of us feel this bond, this warmth right here, coming across the thin gap between the skin of my belly and the skin of the palm of my hand. And so, we’re happy. And then, then I stop to breathe—I gasp—I breathe deeper, deeper, so I can take it, take the pain.
 

Which in a flash, brings back to me that which I want to forget. It’s the memory of that clinic, where they took care of the
situation
, and of how I came to, in that horrible place, and found myself lying there, flat on my back, feeling wounded.
 

Immobile, I stared for a long while at some blurry sort of a border, which gave a cold, metallic shine, not getting at first that it came from the rail, the side rail of the bed, which was raised, like, well above the level of my head.
 

So even without thinking—or knowing where I was—I felt like an animal, trapped.

Trying to come out of this state of paralysis, I started to notice a slight noise, ‘cause them coil springs, they was creaking under me, which sounded almost like a sigh. There was mist in my head, and I tried to clear it, tried to focus.
 

The bed was awful high, so even if I could somehow gather my strength and take hold of the rail, even if I could lower the thing and then, swing my legs right there, over the edge—still, I wasn’t sure if my feet could reach down, all the way to the floor.
 

All the while, there was a sound, a sharp sound breaking through to me. Someone out there, someone I couldn’t even see was screaming, screaming real wild, like a kid scared out of her wits, crying for help with no clear words, and without ever stopping.