Punishment
She wrung her wrinkled, well-worn hands deeper and deeper into a knot in her lap, and considered her current list of transgressions. Even now, assuming her principle stayed put, her interest was accumulating: she had not recited a bracha for anything in the past three days, not over bread, not for washing of the hands. There was just too much to handle, too much piling, and she'd given up keeping track—at this rate she’d never make it to the high holidays to repent without first some great misfortune (one that she was duly owed) coming to full fruition. A permeating grayness filled the pre-dawn streets, and the window she leaned her forehead against was wet with sooty condensation. In a past life she’d been a sinner too, she knew this for a fact; a woman during the temple times, probably, one who’d been unfaithful to her husband and had been made by the high priest to drink the cursed, bitter waters. Only now she was feeling its toxins set in, and was paying the price outlined in the Torah: “her belly shall distend and her thigh shall sag; and the wife shall become a curse among her people.” For at only twenty-four years of age with only three children, her stomach flopped over her belt like wet challah dough (she’d heard whispers of other women at shul use the fancy English “muffin-top”) and her thighs had become webbed all over with purply, spindle-like veins. She often became jealous of Shoshana Rifkin, who was one of the only ones left who’d sit next to her at shul. She was only twenty-seven and had more than twice as many children as she did, but looked like she’d never even though about giving birth (stretching, blue in the face) to a screaming newborn in her life. Some women had it easier than others, her doula had assured her, but she knew the harder and truer truth, the one that everyone else could feel in the air when she walked in the upper balcony at shul: she’d become a “curse among her people,” just like Moses said five-thousand years ago. Ari’s birth had been the easiest, too, that is until they’d all realized it was on account of his unusual smallness. He was quiet and nearly purple all over, and was rushed off with the neonatologists before she could even get to hold him—she only heard much later that he’d been deprived of air for too long during the birth, and he had gotten cerebral palsy as a result (although again, she knew the real reason for this). She fainted from the news and her husband, immaculately dressed and disappointed as always, began to rock back and forth even more intently (this was the last thing she noticed before her vision narrowed-in on blinking, nauseating stars) than he had been during the delivery.
He thankfully wasn’t here with her on the bus this morning to watch her fiddle idly with her hands, she always had the impression that he blamed her for everything terrible in their world, and she had good reason to suspect this too, as their world together consisted almost purely of their marriage and children, and it had been a supreme failure right from the moment they’d been auctioned off under the chuppah. He’d want her to be reciting psalms of course, although he’d never command her outright to do anything. His gaze was his tactic. And he’d also disapprove of the gift she’d gotten for Ari—a plastic Super Mario hat she’d picked up in secret from Walmart even earlier this morning.
Ari loved Mario with a passion, from the time he’d been introduced to him at his special school. He loved him more than Torah and the Sabbath combined, which became a daily reason her husband cited for them to transfer him back to a ‘real’ school, one where he would learn about the holy books of his forefathers and not secular nonsense like Super Mario. Of course it didn’t matter to her husband that Ari’s current school was the only one in Queens that would work with his condition, let alone acknowledge it—as his many yeshivot had refused to do—but he’d always storm off when she brought this up.
But mostly, she was grateful he wasn’t here to question and (in her opinion) harass the doctors who more and more these days felt like the only ones she could rely on. It was his fault in the first place that Ari had gotten admitted: she knew something was wrong with his cousins who’d come to visit from the holy land last month. When Ari began coughing up coppery-looking foam she immediately knew it had been them that’d transmitted the sickness to him. For they too had been coughing over dinner every night that week—this was the only time she saw them, of course—and they definitely hadn’t had all of their proper shots.
Still, when Ari started to grow even skinnier and cough it became her fault: “look what those goyishe schools have given us now!” His father had said, to which she did not find it inside of her to respond.
Now, shaking off her umbrella in the hospital lobby, with all of its fluorescence and beeping, she wished she’d gathered up the courage to stick it back to him. “You’re the one who should be punished! Not me!” She would’ve yelled. “And certainly not Ari!” She would’ve added too for dramatic effect, and to really drive the guilt home. That’s what she wanted him to feel, mostly—guilt. He constantly was floating above it all somehow, insulated in the lofty realm of Torah-study, like a perfectly incorporeal angel separated from all the worldly going-on’s, and indifferent to the daily suffering that she felt down here in the mud. She could only imagine the type of suffering taking place in the roomy, warmly lit halls of the study house.
“Ariel Shaufferman, please.” She told the desk clerk, and stood in front of the camera for a photo. It printed out her grainy portrait onto a large white sticker. She frowned at the image: she looked even worse than she imagined she did, somehow both too fat and too frail at the same time. With her headscarf pulling back her hair and dark bags sinking her eyes in, she resembled the grizzled raccoon that she had to fight off of her porch the other week with a broom. And yet strangely, when she stuck the sticker onto her chest she was able to stand up a little straighter: “yes, I am Ari Shaufferman’s mother, doing my job. And yes, my son loves Super Mario more than Torah.” And when she put on the surgical mask she needed to go into his room she fashioned herself a nurse, talking with doctors about real science or rushing into an emergency to administer a life-saving medication like the great Rebbe with his miraculous healing.
In the darkened room she reverted to Ari’s mother, only able to stroke her son’s pale, sweat-dotted forehead and brush away the plastered-on hair that stuck to it. From the waist up (he was half-covered by a blanket) he was a normal boy, just a bit small for his age; but only just small enough that—before he opened his mouth, at least; he had a speech impediment—one would never hesitate to guess correctly his age of eight years old.
She wiped the beads of sweat from his upper lip, quivering gently off in a dream somewhere. He wouldn’t wake up for a while, the nurses told her, it had been a tough, feverish night. Still she placed the red cap on his head for when he would come to. She recited from memory the traditional prayers for the sick, and tried once again in her facemask to become someone that she was not until the doctor arrived at ten.
“Anything happen overnight?” Was the first question the man asked, his thin-rimmed glasses fogged from his breath rising from behind his mask. He was tall, lean, and had blonde hair and blue eyes.
“I don’t know,” she replied, confused as to why the doctor didn’t already know this. She thought to herself all that could happen in a single night. Where would she even begin? Then she realized that she would, for the remainder of her life, remember specifically this question when she would come to envision this encounter. “He’s been asleep since I got here.”
“Mmm. Well, his labs are looking better, and his fever curve seems to finally be coming down. He’s doing very well with the medication we’re giving him.”
“Baruch HaShem,” she muttered while continuing to stroke Ari’s face, which was decidedly less clammy now.
“Once he leaves, it’ll just be a matter of follow-up and prevention. It’s not every day we see Tuberculosis here in America, so we’d like to keep a close eye on him. Now, I know there’s been some different answers from yourself and your husband as to how Ari caught the Tuberculosis in the first place,” his eyes shot to her headscarf and then down at her floor-length dress, “so I’d just like to ask you myself while dad’s away. Is there anyone who you can think of who may’ve transmitted the disease to Ari? Relatives, classmates, et cetera. It’s important that we know these things, you know, the state likes to keep track of certain infections for public health reasons.”
“Yes, yes, I know…” she remembered the four of his cousins at the Shabbos table swaying merrily, banging the table with their fists as they thanked god for their meal, all the while coughing up a storm. Ari’s face was lit up with delight at the festivities, and he too bounced in his wheelchair, trying his best to keep up with his Yiddish-speaking relatives. “The state,” the doctor’s injunction echoed in her tired ears. Her husband had enough to say about the government, especially when it came to matters of surveillance and public health. What would everyone think if the government came knocking down our door…?
“He must’ve picked it up from school, doctor, I’m really not sure.”
He nodded in disappointment—a nod she was well acquainted with—and scribbled on a pad which he handed it to her. “Well if you figure it out, here’s my personal phone number, you can always call me directly.”
“Of course, doctor.” He tore of the plastic blue hazmat gown and washed his hands before exiting back into the beeping hallway.
Outside the room’s window was a segment of flat roof, now drowning in several inches of rainwater; its surface hissed and tumbled with intersecting, overlapping ripples. An exhaust vent stuck up out of this water, and vomited a continuous stream of thick vapor into the air, which at first hung around and mingled with the rain—piercing into the core of its opacity and dissipating it—but nevertheless rose upwards, making its way towards the gray sky of almost exactly the same shade: languidly, without hindrance, as if all the churning chaos in the world were being shed of its combustive source right here in this single, spiraling column of exhaust.
She kissed her son on the tip of the nose and walked out into the hallway to leave; she desperately needed to grocery shop. The three Shabbat meals were approaching much too quickly, and she had to prepare three different types of meat—fish, chicken, and beef—as well as soups, salads, and desserts all by herself. Ari may even be healed by the time Shabbat is over, the thought pervaded as she made her way towards the elevator, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that he would get up and walk out of the hospital on his own two feet, although it pained her greatly to think this. In fact, about halfway down the hallway, the image—Ari pushing up out of his bed, walking all by himself—began to physically sting inside her skull. Then the hall began to narrow and darken, and the next thing she knew she was sitting on a couch in the hallway with two nurses attending to her, feeding her water through a straw.
“That was almost really bad, sweetie,” one of the nurses lovingly scolded, “if I’d have been two more rooms down, you’d be in a stretcher right now with a split-open head.” All the images and sensations in her head were still very sparkly and sticky, just like when Ari was born and the nurses told her that he had cerebral palsy. Suddenly in the brightness, a train of three small children—all dressed in bright white hospital gowns and all connected to IV machines rolling behind them—passed right behind the nurses, the three of them holding hands and humming an unrecognizable tune. Where were their parents? The nurses seemed not to acknowledge them.
“Thank you both so much,” she whispered and sat up, “I’ve got to go now. I’m really in a rush.”
“Well alright sweetie—just make sure you stay hydrated now!” One of the two giggled and they helped her to her feet.
~
With bags of groceries now hanging from her every limb, she managed just barely to avoid stepping in the large puddles that had accumulated on every sidewalk and street, but the little ones, despite her best efforts, wet the fringes of her dress, which started to stick to her ankles and shins as a result. By the time she returned to her neighborhood, the entire lower half of her gown was stuck completely to her figure; the groceries too had all gotten soaked. Men in black gabardines hustled about on the sidewalk and street, jumping over puddles too with scornful faces, and most likely rushing from their evening prayers back to their study houses or homes for dinner. The worry and anxiety felt palpable in the air—each one of these men carried a set of troubles on their shoulders, a set that no doubt consumed them along their walk, yet the grand total of which could never be kept track of or even begun to tabulate. Nevertheless it radiated out from each one of them as clearly as their flapping coats. It was this she realized as she turned the corner onto her block, but realizing too that time was running out, she quickened her pace and forgot all about this strange epiphany. All that was on her mind now was the first item she needed to prepare for Shabbat, the trout.
But by the time she unloaded everything, changed clothes, and took a shower, the kids and their father were already growling loudly for dinner. Crying from them and chiding from him were the least of it, though. On her way to the kitchen counter she found several scattered piles of mouse poop on the floor. “Just my luck,” she said out loud now, to which her husband yelled from the other room “what did you say?” She forgot him. In her rising frustration, she even managed to forget the mouse droppings. On the cutting board now lie the trout, its gaping jaw and eye staring stunned back at her. With her large filleting knife in her left hand, she hovered the razor-sharp blade over the fish’s neck, poised to chop off its head in a single slice.
The deep, black eye poured all of its blackness into her soul. She fell into its infinite depth, plunged down into the very center of death. There, memories of the open ocean and transmuted experience of its cold, briny suffering filled her mind. Stinging pain and freezing temperatures gushed through her body as she hatched raw and vulnerable from a million tiny fish-eggs all at once. Then, as quick as she dove into it, a fishing net clasped around her body and pulled her out into the vacuous, frying-hot atmosphere. She flopped about, staring into the sun and scratching at her neck for air, and from there she was put into a box to suffocate to death.
There she was again, blade resting gently against the trout’s flattened, rain-soaked gills. It was always punishment for everyone, over and over again.
Slowly, carefully as to not arouse suspicion, she snuck upstairs into her bedroom and locked the door. She unclasped her purse and removed from it her clamshell phone with her right hand.