Only she has no family heirlooms. Nothing left of the elegant Klimt chairs or Biedermeier dining set. The silver Shabbat candlesticks or the Italian gilt-wood menorah. Nothing of her eema’s Turkish carpets or the Silesian porcelain coffee service. Not anything. Not anything at all. Not even a speck of schmutz has survived from under the rugs. Her uncle Fritz is the only family antique that comes close to qualifying.
In the bedroom, while the ambient fuss of street traffic drifts up from below, the bedside lamps are switched off. Rachel and Aaron climb under the blankets. But it’s immediately obvious that Aaron is interested in pursuing a little something other than the nightly routine of good-night pecks. The smell of him as he pulls her closer can still intoxicate her, even after five years of marriage. The feel of his skin, the hair on his chest, that head of thick russet curls. It’s easy for her to lose herself. The small ceramic night-light she bought for twenty cents at the hardware store is plugged into the electrical outlet under the window, and every night, she snaps it on because she cannot tolerate total darkness. In total darkness, she will drown. So the night-light glows like a petite yellow star.
Aaron has opened her pajamas. The blue silk pajamas he bought in Chinatown for their fifth anniversary, though probably picked out by his sister Naomi. Still, they are so luxurious. She slides her fingers through his hair as his lips brush her skin. His hand moves slowly, gently, as he slips the Chinese silk from her hips. Exposed, on top of the blankets, she feels the vulnerability of her body deepen. His lips find the curve of her neck. She kisses his ear, her desire tightening.
“Aren’t we forgetting something?” she whispers softly. “Aren’t we forgetting something?” But he doesn’t answer. His hands are moving. His mouth. She can feel herself warming, her breath expanding. A void opening. But when she whispers his name, she is still repeating her drowsy question. “Aaron? Aaron? Aren’t we? Aren’t we forgetting something?”
Aaron’s answer is to shift her body under him, and she feels a liquid craving, but also an edge of fear. Doesn’t the Talmud teach that the obligation to be fruitful and multiply is on the man? So siring children is a mitzvah for the husband, which has contributed to Aaron’s disdain of condoms. And Rachel would rather be in control of the process anyway. Women have more leeway. So she whispers sensibly, intimately. “Aaron, I don’t have my shield.”
She means her diaphragm. A word she mispronounces enough to elicit an indulgent correction: Die-a-fram, says Aaron. Like die-a-thousand deaths. Not dee-a-fram. So instead of die-a-thousand-deaths diaphragm, she calls it her shield, because that’s what it is, isn’t it? Her shield to keep her safe from her own body. She can slip through Eve’s loophole and escape her own biology. Her own history. “Aaron…”
“Would it be so terrible, honey?” her husband wants to know. “Would it be so terrible if we made love like man and wife? Think of Ezra Weinstock,” he tells her. “He has three little Weinstocks already, with a fourth in the hopper.”
“Aaron.”
“My own cousin, that fucknik Ezra, is ahead of me, Rachel. Ezra Weinstock from Coney Island Avenue, so fuckin’ smart that, when he was ten, he stuck a pencil up his nose—is ahead of me. Do you know what that’s doing to my mother? Every Wednesday, she’s playing mah-jongg with Aunt Ruth, and oy what an earful she gets about the adorable Weinstock grandkids. How much longer can the woman stand the disgrace? She’ll have to adopt a different son.”
Rachel absorbs the smile in his voice. The spreading warmth of his touch. “Aaron,” she repeats.
“She’ll have to replace me with Hilda Auerbach’s boy. He’s a doctor now with his own practice in Prospect Heights. An eye-ear-nose-and-throat man.” He is saying this in the funny way, kissing her belly button and breasts once for each specialty: eye, ear, nose, throat. But Rachel can tell that he is also deadly serious. How can he face the world as a man? How much longer can he face himself with no children? Without that gift from his lovely wife? Time is running out.
He is moving into her. Pressing his advantage, exploiting her weakness for him, and she is feeling her resolve melt. “I can’t” is all she manages to say, but it’s tough to win this debate in the closeness of their room, in the sweetness of their bed. Words are slipping away from her. Sometimes, she thinks that she should just let him be fruitful. Let him cook up a baby inside her. Put a bun inside her oven. Their bun. But then the elevated West Side freight line roars past, and something in the unrelenting thunder from those tracks panics her. Trains lead to death.
“Stop it,” she hears herself snap. “Stop it.” A terror has gripped her, seized her by the bones. She feels like she might suddenly suffocate under his weight. Like her heart might stop. “Aaron!” she pleads, frantically now, and this time, he’s had enough. He quits, disconnects, and rolls onto his back.
For a moment, they simply breathe roughly into the darkness hanging above them. Rachel feels the tears heating her eyes. Is it really so much to ask? A child for her husband? He never made any secret of the fact that he wanted a baby. “I’m sorry,” she breathes, smearing at her tears. “I’m sorry,” she repeats, but it makes no difference. Her husband has become a solitary island beside her.
“No, it’s okay. I get it.” He sighs. “Not angry. Forget it,” he tells her thickly. Issuing a quick peck on the cheek, he rolls over, turns his back on her, shifting the bedclothes to his side. Leaving her to the darkness. Alone in her body, her guilt is insistent: What right does a murderess have to create life? Blanketed by the night, only a small halo of yellow from the night-light keeps her from going under.
As far as talent is concerned, she must make do with what she has been able to scavenge. Her mother always encouraged her. Rachel was the daughter of Lavinia Morgenstern-Landau, Portraitist of the Great and Near-Great. One of only two women to be elected to the Prussian Academy of the Arts! The founder of the Berolina Circle! Of course the daughter must show talent.
But only up to a point. She could never be so skilled that she mounted a challenge to her eema’s hegemony as the supreme painter of the family. Her father, she had learned, had gathered his laurels as a poet, which had been sanctioned because poems were only words, and words were no competition in Eema’s mind. And Abba was dead by the time Rashka was a toddler, so she was not old enough to retain memories of him. He survived the war, survived the influenza, but then was devoured by consumption in 1928 when Rashka was only two. Her single memory of her father is shaped by the portrait that hung in the salon. Eema had painted him in shadows not long before his death, a gaunt, handsomely distant face, half in the dark, already partially consumed by the disease that would claim him.
As she grew, people commented on how Rashka had his eyes. Sometimes his nose. Also, they said, his stubbornness and his silence. These ghost features, these traits that she has inherited from a dead father, were always like the spirit of a dybbuk possessing her but in a quietly paternal way. Eyes, nose, stubbornness. Silence. These are her abba’s lone bequests to her. All else is Eema. Rashka was permitted to shine as a reflection of her mother’s genius. This single fact defined Rashka’s development as an artist. Even now, years after her mother’s demise, it is there, sewn into Rachel’s heart as she scrutinizes her reflection distorted by the aluminum face of the Proctor electric toaster.