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Dina Jehuda is a teacher and writer. She has an M.A. in English literature and teaches in Kinneret Community College. She helped found Mizpe Netofa, a wonderful community in the Galilee where she lives happily with her husband Yair Jehuda and their children. Come visit!
The following work is copyright © 2011. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
The Baby
It was not her egg, Mindy told me. Her husband Ira’s sperm, but not her egg. Though I carried him , gave birth to him, she said ”sometimes I wonder if he’s really mine.“
Sometimes, she told me, when she looks at Davey , now two and a half, she’s upset that he doesn’t cry when she leaves the apartment. I say, “Be happy, it means he’s well adjusted. Of course he loves you. You’re his mother.”
Mindy had done everything wrong, well maybe some right things but always at the wrong time. Like Abba Eban said about the Palestinians, she never lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity. In our twenties when we were all dating, trying out different relationships, she decided that she had to get into med school. It wasn’t enough that she was a nurse and had a good satisfying job and that her patients liked her. She had to prove to herself that she was smart. When she couldn’t get the grades, she woke up, looked around and realized she was in her thirties, all her friends married and starting families, getting on with it.
We had been best friends from third grade and almost all through high school. She was funny and street smart but had trouble in school, because, as I only found out years later, she couldn’t hear out of her right ear, but had kept it a secret even from me, her best friend. She thought it was something to be ashamed of. Therefore she missed most of what happened in class and always felt stupid.
She was pretty, with dark hair and soft brown eyes. She would belt out a song and pretend to be Streisand, another Brooklyn girl. We put on musicals in her back yard. I used to sleep over her house and I’d go over homework with her or we’d cram for exams while her Mom burnt steaks but we thought that’s how they should be, bloodless. I remember we stayed up late eating a whole gallon of Dolly Madison vanilla ice cream right out of the container and giggling. Her grandmother lived downstairs, was usually yelling something in Yiddish up the stairs. Mindy ignored her, rolling her eyes. Her mother kept Shabbat and kosher, but her dad, a concentration camp survivor, worked on Shabbat in the small grocery store.
Her dad was 10 years older than her mom. Her mom read racy novels like Desiree and loved buying clothes. Her dad didn’t speak much. It was a pretty crazy household. For example, her older brother, Gary, would bring Playboy into the house and her mother would be embarrassed, what with the ultra-religious Yiddish speaking grandmother lighting Shabbat candles and praying and crying all the time.
I guess everything seems normal when you’re eleven. You don’t know better; you just accept what is and only think about it all much later.
In her twenties, Mindy studied to be a nurse and moved to Manhattan. She crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and hardly ever came back home. When she saw her mom it had to be in Manhattan, on her terms.
At 26, Mindy said she felt like a freak because she was still a virgin. It was the seventies. I remember Cosmopolitan had a cover story then “Is Virginity Immoral?" So Mindy decided to choose a likely candidate, good looking, healthy, and sleep with him. It seemed a little cold blooded to me, going about things that way, but what made me really crazy was when she called me the next day bawling, “Why didn’t he send me flowers?” That was Mindy.
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She started sleeping around. A Scandinavian guy she met at the airport, an aristocratic older man with a lovely Sephardic name, Gabriel Luria, who had been her patient, in for a hernia. She really believed him when he claimed he was separated, until she got his home phone and address from hospital records, surprised him at home and his wife answer the door.
She had short flings with half the married doctors, but seemed to get no joy out of any of it. She dated a guy who was impotent, and went with him to therapy. She dated another guy who only wanted to sleep with her and then ignored her when he saw her in Lincoln Center. And those were only the men I knew about. She worried about getting pregnant and about getting AIDS. But Mindy said she needed the attention, the warmth of someone holding her, saying nice things, falling asleep with. She had long since given up on the flowers. Now she was happy if someone stayed the night. It was ironic that she was always just out of fashion, jumping on some trend, just as it was not the thing to do anymore. Here she was, finally sleeping with lots of men, liberated like Erica Jong promised her in the seventies but now it was the eighties and people worried about AIDS. Promiscuity was out and modesty in again.
When Mindy was thirty nine, she met Seth while they were both waiting for the elevator . He lived in a less classy apartment. They didn’t seem to have much in common or any real spark, but she married him. He was good looking, dark the way she liked, and made a decent living as an accountant. He turned out to be verbally abusive and after less than a year, she had the wedding annulled. Mindy knew that it wouldn’t last, but she had wanted a wedding, she told me.
That’s pretty much when I stopped keeping in touch. She never asked about me, my life, didn’t want my advice, didn’t really know how to be a friend, maybe never had. Maybe we had just drifted so far in our lives, chosen such different paths, that we couldn’t find a way back or forward.
It wasn’t until twelve years later that I heard from her. She told me that she was getting married again... This was the real thing, she said. She was happy. Ira got her and all her mishigas. He was also a New Yorker, from the same Jewish Eastern European background. She liked his mother. Ira was a guy who liked being with people, liked to tell stories. He was always making deals, chatting people up. He thought Mindy was great. They moved in together after only a month of dating.
They did everything together; they were inseparable. Another mistake”. I thought, “Here goes.”And sure enough, Mindy started calling me, complaining. “His stomach is flabby.” Mindy said, “He’s stopped going to the gym. It’s hard for me to look at him.” She started complaining to me about his first wife who Mindy never called by name, only referring to her as ”the bitch”.
I told her, ”It’s demeaning to call her that, it cheapens you. You be the good one, the one he comes to, the one he loves.” But no, Mindy said she resented the seventeen years he was married to the bitch, seventeen wasted years when he could have been with her. And then there were the alimony payments for the bitch who lived off her daddy’s money in Long Island and didn’t work. Why should Mindy be working like a dog in the hospital and have to pay for her clothes and ski trips?
When Mindy turned fifty she decided a baby was all she had ever wanted. She didn’t want to miss out on the experience of being a mother. “But it ‘s not my egg" she told me. “Will the baby ever be really mine?" I said, “Mindy, that’s not why you have children. They are never yours". But she still doesn’t get it.
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