Nail Bed

He dreams of them sometimes, five pairs of hands, reaching for him, swiping at his eyes, wrapping around his midsection. Fifty squirming, grasping fingers, sticky with candy already eaten and always demanding the next piece. “More, Daddy, more,” their voices cry from unseen mouths. Always in the dream it is the hands, detached somehow from their bodies, imbued with twitching motions and will and want of their own. Child-scaled limbs, dismembered, somehow horribly alive.

In the morning, he is awakened by one of those hands, small, warm, urgent as it scrabbles over his blanket, pulling back the corner, exposing his skin to the morning chill.

“I’m hungry, Daddy. I want breakfast.”

He squints at the clock, too groggy to register time from the light filtering through the lace curtains over his bed. Six. Technically morning. He looks over at his wife, the twisted arrangement of her limbs. The baby is entangled in the opening of her nightgown, playing at her breast with fingers too small to be controlled in their motions, doll-like cheeks flushed with the hourly repast of a nighttime’s nursing.

“Okay, Jonathan,” he tells the two-year-old, “I’m coming. Go wait for me in the kitchen.” He is rewarded with the toddler’s momentary withdrawal from his bed, the receding slap of vinyl footed pajamas tracking his progress towards the kitchen. Ignoring the pull of his bladder, he shuffles his own bare feet down the tread of the hallway carpet, twitching involuntarily at the transition to the cold tiles of the kitchen floor.

“I’m hungry, Daddy,” his son repeats. “Cheerios.”

“How do you ask?” he responds automatically, already reaching for the box. He feels how light it is. There are four other children to feed this morning.

“Please,” comes his son’s surprisingly deep voice, edgy with hunger and demand.

He fills the bowl, trying to conserve something for the coming siblings, but Jonathan sees through this ruse.

“To the top, Daddy.”

With a shrug, he complies, adding milk until the small, bobbing Os rise precariously close to the ceramic bowl’s blue tinted rim. His wife, he knows, will be mildly upset at him later for forgetting to use a disposable bowl. Leaving Jonathan intent on his repetitive spoon-to-mouth motion, he walks back to his bedroom, dispelling thoughts of choking toddlers abandoned to their solitary fates at darkened kitchen tables.

Cheerios, he reminds himself, are the perfect first food. Their round shape means they slip right down throats accustomed only to warm mother’s milk.

He is not even cognizant of falling back asleep until he heaves himself suddenly awake, the red clock display glinting evilly as it bears the news that it is now seven-thirty. “Shit,” he whispers quietly, automatically looking at the bed next to his for his wife. He has no desire to upset her further. His sleeping through Morning Services will more than undercut any appreciation she might have shown him for getting up for Jonathan.

He dresses quickly, silently cursing again, this time at the buttons on his shirt. Opening the door to the bedroom in an exaggerated rush, he hopes his posture of irritation, anger even, at this interruption in his relationship with God, will diminish his wife’s resigned disappointment with him.

Esther looks up at his entrance to the living room, his frenetic motion of belt closing and sock tugging. Her face shifts for a moment, slipping from the artificial curve of a cajoling smile she is offering Isaac, the four-year-old, into something harder, her lips becoming  straight-edged.

“Isaac, sweetie,” she continues, on her knees to be at Isaac’s eye level, acknowledging her husband’s presence by ignoring it. “You can play some more as soon as you get dressed.”

He clears his throat, facing his wife’s kneeling form. Praying at the altar of her God, he thinks. “I slept through Shacharit. I’ll pray quickly at home, then take the boys to school.”

“Okay,” she says, still not looking up at him. “Thanks.”

He stands there a moment longer before returning to the bedroom to wrap himself in the instruments of prayer, his prayer shawl and tefillin. She does not allow the children to see an open display of misplaced ritual. Praying belongs in the synagogue, not inches from his still warm bed.

The bedroom door is open a crack. He can see into the living room, see that she is wearing a pink satin robe, the one he bought her from Victoria’s Secret. She has removed its sexy provenance by pulling it closed in a straight line, equal across her breasts and midsection, no hint of a V of cleavage. The oversized button on top, intended for titillation, is pushed through its hole with twisted finality, and the snood covering her hair is pulled down almost to her eyebrows, revealing only a compressed, creased section of her forehead. He thinks for a moment how only the most stringent rabbinic opinions require a married woman to cover her hair in the privacy of her home.

When they first got married it was a game between the two of them, seeing how far she could get away with pushing back her scarves and snoods in public. Her hair was long then, dense with its raven sheen and her newlywed glow. No matter how tight a bun she wound it into, first wisps, then thick ringlets would assert themselves out from under the cloth, glinting like diamonds refusing to be blunted by layers of coal dust. She’d go through the motions of trying to recapture them, but her eyes too would glint at him, not unlike the way they did when she reached for him in the bedroom.

With each childbirth, it seemed as if her defiance turned in the other direction. She began testing him, tugging the mandated coverings down over her forehead until his eyes would narrow into angry slits that matched the sliver of her upper face she allowed the world, him, to see. She took to covering her hair in the intimacy of her bedroom, where he used to find her lounging in her bra and panties, reading People magazine.

When they made love, he had to wrestle it off her head, like the bra straps he’d once fumbled with, cursing his own inexperience.

“I need to buy the boys holiday shoes,” she says to him fifteen minutes later from the doorway to their bedroom, startling him as he folds his prayer shawl. He looks down at the black and white wool cloth in his hand. Refolding it after the Sabbath is supposed to bring harmony between husband and wife. Today is Tuesday, he thinks.

“How much will they cost?” he asks automatically.

“I don’t know, David. Fifty dollars, seventy-five. They’ve both outgrown their shoes from last year. They need new ones. Pesach is coming, David.”

Passover, the festival of freedom. His wife, he knows, is edgy with nervous impatience for its arrival and the attendant cleaning, and has been since February, though Passover falls in the middle of April this year. March has only just begun, the wind roaring through the streets carrying just a hint of the warmth ahead.

“It’s about making ourselves lighter,” she explained to him last year, after coming home from one of her classes. “We get rid of leavened bread to show we want to lose what’s unimportant in our lives, what’s inflated.”

“And replace it with what—clothing we can’t afford?” he’d shot back, still smarting from the receipt he’d found, a dress she’d bought for Shira, their oldest.

She hadn’t answered him, although he knew she wanted to remind him that God would repay them for holiday outlays.

Now she persists. “Can I buy them shoes this week? I’d like to get it out of the way.”

He thinks of the balance in their checking account, of the five credit cards nestled in her wallet, the seductive shine of their metallic hues. The two new ones already carry a debt. Still, how can he fault her for clothing children they’ve brought into the world?

“Okay. Buy them the shoes,” he says. “But please don’t spend more than you have to.”

“Of course.”

“Maybe buy yourself something nice, too. For the holiday,” he adds.

“My shoes are fine. Thanks for offering.”

She turns to go. The soles of her slippers are worn smooth, the backs crushed down so that her heels slip out with each step. He wants to ask her if she misses complaining about how cheap he is, how everything with him revolves around money. He doesn’t mind her new devoutness so much as the way she no longer challenges him or life about anything. He shares her adherence to the precepts of their religion, but his conception of God still leaves room for him to rail against the little, human desires kept just out of his reach.

He wants to ask too if she remembers the sexy, black slingbacks they once bought on impulse while window shopping on Madison Avenue. They were satin, whisps of material clinging to soles tottering on five-inch spikes. She could hardly stand in them, but when he ran his eyes over the defined curve of her calves, he told the saleswoman to ring them up. “David,” she’d cried, bemused and shocked at the same time. “They’re so impractical.”

“So?” he had answered, signing the receipt while looking her full in the face.

She’d worn them for him in their bedroom that night, both of them knowing these shoes could never walk the streets of their community. Their height brought her eyes level with his so that she didn’t have to tilt her head upward to kiss him. “I like this,” she whispered. “My neck doesn’t hurt.”

He wonders if she even still has them. Did she label them as unimportant last year while searching her closet for errant crusts of bread? A week ago, when he suggested getting a babysitter for a night out, she told him she had to be home to put the kids to sleep. “Their needs have to come first, David,” she had said.

Still, he doesn’t think the boys’ black, patent leather dress shoes, no matter how preciously detailed, could ever replace Esther coming towards him on heels so provocative they were worth half a month’s food budget.

He is on the subway that evening, listlessly turning the creased pages of someone’s left-behind New York Post, when a statuesque blonde, clothed to match, gets on at the Times Square station.

She doesn’t so much elbow her way through the crush, as walk unperturbed into spaces left by men folding themselves into corners that didn’t exist until her arrival. He follows their gaze at her slow-motion, catwalk stride, sees the empty circle remaining around her as she grasps the pole in the center of the car, swinging her purse in her free hand with equal nonchalance. She smiles, her lips perfectly creased as she rotates her head, taking in the dispatched minions who didn’t even know they were in her service until she entered the car.

Their eyes meet and she raises her right eyebrow in the direction of his head covering.  He shrugs slightly in response. I too am human, his shoulders say, the faded yarmulke on my head does not render me impervious to your charms. I notice the nylon encased form of your legs, the hint of thigh flashing in the breeze of the opening and closing doors, the form-fitting, deceptive simplicity of your black minidress.

Her makeup is flawless, liquid and skin combined into a perfect palette for the earthy darkness of her ringed eyes, the defined fleshiness of her lips. Once my wife too could cut through rush hour’s sweaty density, he also means to say. Her skirt may never have been that hiked or her neckline scooped so deep. Still, her face inspired many a man to slow midstride, arching his neck for a glimpse of her passing reflection in the store window. My wistful look is not for your unexpected perfection amidst the swaying, filthy cacophony of a five-thirty D train. It is for what lies just out of my reach, the look of a man who holds a treasure that has lost sight of its own value.

The train hurtles through the tunnels, grime-coated windows reflecting the packed human cargo within. Carrying him home, sweat turning to a black stain on his shirt collar, where the back of his neck meets the slickness of the seatback. Back to Brooklyn where his five children wait, and his wife, nervously rushing about the apartment, is trying to get them to sleep early in preparation for her visit to the mikveh. There, she will first bathe herself raw in a plain-tiled, profane bathtub, then slip under the purifying waters. She will come home cleansed, cheeks flushed with exertion, permitted to his touch after thirteen days apart, a separation brought on by her first period since having the baby.

“Where did you put the nail clipper after you cut the kids’ nails last night?” she asks him when he gets home.

He looks up at her question from his solitary, takeout chicken dinner plate. “On the shelf in the bathroom.”

“It’s not there. I need it, David. Where did you put it?”

“I told you, Esther. On the bathroom shelf.” He gets up to help her look, but she has already turned away, the hunch of her back radiating religious fervor. He catches a glimpse of her hands as she clenches them to her side and sees that her nails are already short, bare of any adornment. They are ragged at the edges from her interactions with the kids. He thinks for a moment of the wine-colored nails of the woman on the train, perfectly edged tips tapping against the pole in time with her swaying.

“They’re short enough,” he volunteers at her receding back.

“Rabbi Itzkowitz says it’s important to make sure they’re cut to the quick.”

“Of course. Rabbi Itzkowitz.”

She catches the edge to his voice and half-turns her head, still moving down the hall. “Don’t start. I want to be as kosher as possible. Why is that a problem for you?”

She continues on her quest for the nail clipper, looking nervously at her watch. He knows she wants to get to the mikveh early so the attendant doesn’t rush her out of the bath. She will be meticulous in scrubbing off any possible separations between her body and the waters of the mikveh, as Rabbi Itzkowitz has taught her to be. If the nails protrude at all beyond the fingertip, he hears Rabbi Itzkowitz’s ingratiating, singsong voice say in his head, they constitute a separation. They can invalidate the entire procedure.

There are other dangers associated with nails, he knows. Once cut, they must be destroyed in their impurity. Useless dead cells, they are the opposite of life. Tradition warns that if a pregnant woman steps on one, she will lose the budding life within her. He finds it ironic that the timing of the ritual bath, two weeks after the end of her period, ensures that sexual activity resumes just after she ovulates. Yet the immersion mandates a preparation that, with the careless loss of one nail, could undermine any successful conception.

“Never mind, I found it,” she calls out, triumphant, and he returns to the kitchen.

Resuming his dinner, he looks over at the living room not two feet away from where he sits in the kitchenette. The scale of the room seems miniature, couch crowding coffee table crowding rocker, all three overwhelmed by the children’s play sets; the artificial kitchen and dollhouse threatening to drown their real-world counterparts with their shiny, day-glo colored largesse.

He remembers what this room was first like, back when it was just the two of them. How composed it seemed to Esther after the bustle of the large family she came from, how still it seemed to David after the chaos of his parents’ marriage, with it the cold hostility blooming into all-out battle with no warning or discernable pattern. A leather couch, a glass top table with no marring fingerprints, arranged, it seemed to them, in the hushed tones of a design magazine. Now, even without the children’s constant motion, the room seems to vibrate with life too generous to be contained by its crayon-marked walls.

He thinks of their friends who have moved from first, tiny apartments to first, tiny houses, where at least the sprawl can spread vertically to upstairs bedrooms, to damp, unfinished basements. His wife, he knows, thinks of Rabbi Itzkowitz, of the sacrifices she’s been taught to make on the altar of halacha, Jewish law.

“There are more important things than space,” she reminds him when he explodes after tripping over a doll carriage. Their friends in houses have at most three children. “They can afford mortgage payments,” she says. “Our money goes to something more permanent than bricks and mortar.”

“But you also wanted a house. Remember, the walks we took on Avenue M, picking out front porches and window treatments?” he used to ask, before finally learning the question’s futility.

“That was before Rabbi Itzkowitz showed me what was really important,” came her invariable response.

“I’m going,” she announces to him fifteen minutes later, hand on the front doorknob. Her face, scrubbed already of any makeup, softens, and he can tell she’s looking beyond the grueling ritual ahead to when she comes home to his hug. “I’ll see you soon,” she says. He hears a girlish hint of the once flirtatious young wife. Then, she’d leave the apartment flush with her power over him. He had been the edgy one, bursting with the restrained energy built up during their separation.

“Okay,” is what he answers now. Then, “Did you speak to Rabbi Itzkowitz about birth control?”

She flinches at his open use of the term. “Yes.”

“And?”

“He said what I told you he would. According to halacha, family planning is left entirely to the wife. I don’t have a problem with another child, David; you do. If you’re the one with the issue, there’s no basis to permit it. He said to remind you that the same God who gives us children will give us the means to support them.”

“I’m sorry,” she adds, the door to the apartment already open, her apology swallowed in the tiled echo of the hallway. “Goodbye.”

In her absence, he thinks of calling Rabbi Itzkowitz himself, but to tell him what? He cannot fight the man on his knowledge of law; Rabbi Itzkowitz is a world-renowned expert on the area of marital obligation. Besides, he knows that the ruling Esther received is correct. Family planning is a decision left entirely to the wife, a fact he’s heard Rabbi Itzkowitz proclaim often in defense of Judaism’s treatment of women. “We’re not Catholics,” the rabbi would say, punctuating the foreign religion’s mention with an overly hearty laugh. “We don’t ask our women to martyr themselves.”

The irony is that Rabbi Itzkowitz was his rabbi first, from the yeshiva he attended while simultaneously completing his accounting degree at Brooklyn College. When he’d taken Esther to meet him as a nineteen-year-old bride, she’d giggled nervously when the rabbi asked her if she was ready for the seriousness of her role as a Jewish wife and mother, managing only a nod. They were in Rabbi Itzkowitz’s study, separated from his black-clad bulk by an ornately carved table laden with hefty religious tomes. The books’ fraying edges were adorned with the occasional wiry, salt-and-pepper hair, tugged free from Rabbi Itzkowitz’s tangled beard as he struggled to divest the truth from their contents. So dense were the volumes on the shelves surrounding them, that their musty maroons and browns seemed to support the walls of the room rather than the other way around.

“I give a class to women on Tuesday nights,” he told Esther. “Maybe you’ll come. If your husband allows, of course.”

“You didn’t tell me he was so fat,” was what Esther said when they left the rabbi’s house. “He looks like Santa Claus with a gray beard.”

Still, she went to his class, sporadically at first, out of a sense of courtesy and David’s reminder that it was the polite thing to do. By the time she began to go regularly, she no longer came home with cutting remarks about the rabbi’s diction. Instead, she walked through the door close to midnight with a dazed look of concentration on her face, holding swollen notebooks full of densely written pages.

Today, the dangling swell of the rabbi’s pot belly no longer strikes David as the childlike indulgence of a grandfather’s sweet tooth. The rabbi’s corpulence reads as sinister, a manifestation in the flesh of how he’d absorbed Esther into his circle of religious control.

“The question of martyr is merely semantics,” is what he’d tell Rabbi Itzkowitz on the phone call he won’t be making.

The night before, with no compelling reason for Esther to push the children into bed early, he’d come home to the full thick of it.

“Daddy!” he heard Shira shrieking over the scraping of his key in the door. “Daddy!” they all cried as he made his entrance, the ever-eager chorus following the first-born’s lead, draping themselves around his legs as he tried to disentangle his briefcase. They were all in various states of undress, obviously on their way to the bathtub.

“Shira! Isaac! Jonathan! Shoshana! Baby Rachel!” His nightly roll call. “How was your day?” He was carried away on the dueling shouts of their responses, noting the yellow of Shira’s painted sun, exclaiming over the design of the boys’ Lego tower.

Esther, he greeted with a quiet hello in between waves. He didn’t try to kiss her, was not allowed to by the rules forbidding marital touch from the onset of her period. She was still counting the days until she could immerse herself in the mikveh, was one day short, he knew. And even if they were permitted to touch, she would have moved away from his kiss in front of the children. He saw her fighting impatience at his interruption of bathtime, barely murmuring a greeting in return.

“I’ll do the baths, if you like.”

“That would be great. And they all need their nails cut. Do you mind? You know I hate to do it.”

“Not at all.”

“Thanks. Don’t forget to—”  

“I know. I’ll flush them.”

She turned from him to attend to his dinner on the stove.

“Come on kids. Let’s see who can get undressed first,” he said to his children, forcing back into his voice the energy drained by the simple interaction with Esther. Once they’d won their battles with shrunken neck-holes and inside-out sleeves, he had them line up next to the bathroom sink.

“Okay. Let me see those hands.” Like marionettes, they obliged. “Look at that dirt. I could grow potatoes under those nails. Who wants to go first?” He positioned a tissue on the toothpaste splattered edge of the sink to catch the nails and their potential harm.

As he began his clipping, he felt more acute danger from the living fingers he was separating the nails from. They were only children’s hands, from Shira’s marker stained, surprisingly long, index finger, to Rachel’s thumbs, so thickly padded with baby fat, it was surprising she could bend them at all. Still, when he contemplated the demand they contained, they took on enormous proportions: Shira’s elegantly tapered fingers calling for piano lessons, David’s awkward grasp for occupational therapy. Fifty unique fingerprints, swirls and ridges, all clamoring for recognition.

It’s not their fault, he thought. That’s what children do, instinctively grab with no thought of who they are taking from. He looked down at the pile of nails growing under the workings of his own hands, seeing how dull they became without the backdrop of pink flesh, how cloudy their dirt flecked surfaces were. His wife was in the kitchen, wiping the table down from ketchup stains and spilled milk. Tomorrow night she would immerse herself in the mikveh, returning home with her own simple, pleasurable demand.

He folded up the tissue and placed it in his pocket, ignoring the places where sharp nail edges cut through, poking his thighs.

Tonight she comes to him in their bedroom, carefully stepping around Rachel’s bassinet to meet him where he stands in front of her bed. He can only just see her form in the darkness. She will not allow any more light in the room, even when he tells her that indirect light is permitted. She grasps his hand for the first time in two weeks, sighing before relaxing into his full embrace.

“I’ve missed you,” she whispers.

“Me, too,” he says back, but he is already leading her to the bed.

He lays her down, running his hand down the length of her body, following the flare of the long, full skirt she is wearing. As her face brushes the sheet she murmurs, “Mmm, I love the smell of fresh linen. Thanks for changing the sheets.”

“Shh. Let’s not talk.”

“You’re right, David. This is a holy time.” Even in the blackness he can see the glint of unshed tears in her eyes. She closes them and he knows she is praying, as she prayed tonight underwater. This is the pinnacle she strives for, transcendence during an experience so often marred by an instinctive grasp for pleasure she’s been taught is base. He kisses her, feeling with his lips the fervent murmurs of hers. Her lips continue their motion for a moment, then they part, beginning to move in concert with his.

She grasps his back as he undoes the buttons on her blouse, still lying beneath him, his hands struggling to move in the narrow space between their bodies, her face hidden in the nape of his neck. She slips her arms out of the sleeves with the tiniest of motions, lifting her back up a fraction so he can reach beneath and undo the clasps of her bra.

He has to sit up to remove his own shirt, and she leans forward with him, pressing her bare chest into his. When he picks up his hands, she moves her hands up his back, sliding the shirt upwards, over his head, her own face lowered, covered now by the warm nest of hair on his chest.

“Let’s get this off,” he whispers, breaking his own rule, and she nods into his collarbone in response, sliding off her skirt and underwear at the same time. He takes off his pants and they lie together naked. He makes only small movements with his hands, over her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. Like a newborn baby, he thinks, placed on top of his mother.

They lay like this for a while, and he listens to her sighs grow deeper, more frequent, until she takes his hand, moving it lower, telling him she is ready.     

“Pray with me, David,” she gasps as he enters her. “Pray for our children.”

“I am, Esther, I am,” he says, moving.

Together, they pray for their offspring. Bodies joined, moving in tandem on a bed he’s strewn with their children’s nails.