Adam Levin - The Instructions

Yet one might argue that the clipping could get there in another, non-physical but nonetheless actual way: one might point out that to become inflamed a zealous patriot may only require knowledge that someone, somewhere, is burning his country’s flag.

And one would then go on to argue that a mother feeds knowledge into her womb, as well as processed nutrients, and that the knowledge of a nail-clipping having come into contact with the sole of her foot is enough to still the baby. If this were the case, though, the mother would have to be aware that she has stepped on a clipping — but that is not part of the superstition. According to the superstition, the mother need only step on a clipping to still her baby.

And so the only argument left to support the superstition would be that the sole of the mother’s foot has, itself, not only the capacity to acquire knowledge without the mother being aware that knowledge has been acquired, but the capacity to transmit the knowledge to the baby via non-physical means without the mother being aware that the knowledge has been transmitted.

Which is untenable.

It is untenable not because a person’s body can’t know things that the person herself is unaware of — the body can know things that the person herself is unaware of (e.g., I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve found myself scratching itches that I hadn’t known were itching me til I found myself scratching them). The argument that the nerves in the sole of her foot are capable of “knowing” and thereby transmitting what they “know” about fingernails/membranes/choice into a mother’s womb without the mother’s awareness is an untenable argument because if we allowed for such an argument, then all bodyparts should be subject to the relevant superstition regarding nail clippings. For if foot-soles can have and transmit such knowledge, should not pregnant mothers then fear touching nail-clippings with their hands as well? Should they not fear seeing fingernails? Why should a footsole communicate more to an unborn baby than a fingertip or an eye? It couldn’t, it shouldn’t, and it doesn’t.

And even if it could and should, it didn’t. I am proof of that. Unless you go with my mother’s interpretation, which we will arrive at shortly.

“…So one night,” she told Yuval, “late into my third trimester, I am sitting on top of the couch in the living room, looking at the fireplace, relaxing, when Gurion starts to flop and to punch, and suddenly nature calls me, urgently, screaming. Judah is in the bathroom, clipping his nails over some newspaper that he is planning to crumple into a ball when he is finished in order to trap the clippings within the folds of the ball, and then to throw the whole package into the fire — I mean he is crazy, Yuval: it is a beautiful June evening, seventy degrees outdoors, and this crazy guy has to turn the apartment’s thermostat to sixty-one because he has a fire going in the fireplace, just so that he can burn his nail clippings. Around your eyes, Yuval, I see a question forming. Is it the same question I had? I am sure it is — so ask.”

“Why not just cut your nails outside, Judah?” Yuval said. “Why the fire in the summer? What’s that? What were you thinking?”

“Outside,” said my father, “I may have gotten distracted. It was beautiful outside, like my wife just told you. So if I sit there, on the stoop, cutting my nails, relishing the breeze, then what? I’ll tell you: plip, a clipping falls onto the stoop, but I’m thinking about my childhood, and so I look at the cracks in that nice piece of sidewalk where Yuval and I once hopscotched til the sun went down, and I look at that patch of asphalt where once we drew a four-square court, and oh that smell that comes off Devon when the wind is strong, and how I smelled that smell the day Ms. Gluckman threw the pickle jar at the mailman and came outside screaming, with no wig and no bra, and my sexual awakening had begun, and where did I hear the clipping plip again? To my left? To my right? Do I even remember hearing the clipping plip? Maybe I never heard the clipping plip on the stoop, and maybe I give up trying to find it, but maybe it’s there — a nail-clipping blends so easily into concrete, the stoop is made of concrete, my wife’s soles are callused like a lizard’s belly from all the barefooting she did in the desert half her life and she won’t wear shoes in the summer, and it’s week thirty-seven with that one and she can’t see past her own belly and so what? So I’m going to worry about the electric bill, Yuval? No. I’m not going to worry about the electric bill, Yuval. What I’m going to do is light a fire and set the thermostat to sixty-one. What I’m going to do is spread out some newspaper in the bathroom — clothing ads for high contrast because they’re colorful and my clippings are white — and I’m going to clip and keep track of what flies, and make sure to pick it up, and make sure to set it on the clothing ads. And when I’m finished, then I’m going to fold the ads, very carefully — not ball them up like some shlub, but fold the ads up tightly, so no clipping can escape — and then I’m going to throw it in the fire, because that’s the only way to prevent a woman as reckless as Tamar from miscarrying my boy. Is what I was thinking. And you can go ahead and make fun of it, Yuval, you can laugh your face off at the extremity of my caution, but I’m not the one who had his housekey turned into a tie-clip so that on Saturdays to be spent outside walled cities he could lock and unlock his front door without fear of breaking the sabbath law of carrying.”

Yuval did laugh his face off, and that was when I noticed his tie-clip, and also decided I liked him. “And but why the stoop?” gasped Yuval through his laughter. “No one said anything about the stoop. What about some playground somewhere to do the clipping? Some field? The beach? I just said outside. Why not the backy—”

“Sexual awake!” said Yuval’s second-youngest daughter.

“That’s right, Naomi!” Yuval said, making a Harpo Marx face, “at six you will awake!”

“Six I will awake!” she agreed.

“Can you believe how smart they are?” Yuval said to us. “The rate they’re picking up English — aye! Anyway, back to why your boy’s not Dovid. Or Michael.”

“Well you can imagine,” my mom said. “I need to use the bathroom, I am banging on the door, Judah comes rushing out, this ball of newspaper in his hands, I hear him fall in the living room, he shouts to me he is okay. Okay. By the time I finish up my business, though, Judah is making all kinds of noise in the kitchen, and I go to see, and he is screaming at me, ‘Get back in the bathroom! Take a bath in the bathroom! Stay out of the living room! I spilled! Where is the broom and the dustpan?’

“I do not know where the broom and the dustpan are — when do I clean the house? Do I not go to work like him? Am I not thirty-seven weeks pregnant? Do we not have a nice woman who comes on odd Wednesdays and hides the cleaning supplies? If the broom is not in the pantry or the closet, how am I to know where? I tell him that he is crazy and I go to the living room, and he chases after me. And this is silly, is what I am thinking. My husband, I am thinking, this lovely man, this powerful, beautiful man, is losing his mind over fingernail clippings. And so me, a wiseguy sometimes, I do a little show. A little dance atop the fingernails, a bump and grinding. What can he do? Tackle me? I am pregnant. And what does he say, Yuval? He says nothing, becomes white. Totally white. And yes, I feel awful. Now I feel awful.

“And then we go to sleep. And while I am sleeping, I have a dream. In this dream, I am in the backyard of the house I grew up. My father is there — he has been dead already eleven months, my father, and I am not much of a dreamer, Yuval, I am not someone who remembers what she dreams, but this was vivid. He had tzitzit on under his fatigues, not a custom he adhered to, the tzitzit, and he was wearing tefilin, facing the Old City, his back to me. I said ‘Aba,’ and then, in a very formal tone, not a tone I can ever say I had heard him take, he answered me, saying, ‘Your indiscretion looms large over the child you carry. Only because he is especially beloved by God will this boy in your womb survive your womb and enter the world. If you wish him to live beyond his bris, you will name him Gurion, for a lion cub will he be, and as a lion will he conquer, red-eyed from wine and white-toothed from milk. And you will raise him as would befit a lion cub born of Tamar and Judah lest he depart from this world a boy, trampled beneath the feet of his brothers. And you will take that ridiculous belt off your face. Stop trifling! Now, Tamar!’