Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  When I did get married, it was with as much hope as Chaya must have harbored. To her, my husband represented legitimacy; she assured me that if I succeeded at building a family with him, it would redeem the shame of my past. I may never have fit in with my blood relatives, but this new family would be rightly mine, she reminded me. I would be the head of it; there would be no chance of being an outcast within my own home.

  Sadly, my marriage was doomed from the moment my husband and I entered our new apartment for the first time and found ourselves unable to consummate the arrangement. This was unacceptable according to Jewish law, and Chaya’s plans for me. “A man must be a king in the bedroom,” she told me the next morning, when Eli had absconded to the synagogue for prayers. I will never forget that particular aphorism she shared with me, although I could list many others as disturbing. In that moment, she tried to reveal her secret, her means to gain the power she so craved. Satisfy a man in the bedroom, she implied, and you will be ruler everywhere else.

  I could not make my husband a king in the bedroom, no matter how much I wanted to, just to get everyone off my back. Rabbis, religious counselors, my in-laws—everyone put pressure on me to achieve intercourse, as if all it could possibly take were the right words, just threatening enough, or just cajoling enough. In the end, it took a year of fruitless doctor’s visits to figure out what was wrong with me and try to fix it. In the process, my husband’s family mutinied and tried to convince him to divorce me, which he almost did. Only when I finally got pregnant was I left in peace.

  Three years later, it was Chaya who informed me over the phone of the messages that had been discovered by my uncle Jacob. They had been exchanged between his youngest unmarried daughter and my husband and had begun in our first year of marriage. Chaya didn’t say anything as to their content, but she didn’t have to. Eli and I had not received an invitation to Jacob’s eldest daughter’s wedding. It was clear that my entire family knew, or would know soon enough, that Eli had crossed the line.

  Chaya expected me to be enraged, I could tell. She reacted with discomfited surprise when I responded calmly to her news. This was her problem, not mine, I thought. She had so forcefully arranged my marriage to Eli. She had chosen him for whatever qualities she had seen. If he had failed her, that was a reflection on her judgment, not mine.

  All this I thought about before I said anything to her. I knew I already had one foot out the door of my marriage, and my world. She had always wanted to control everything, and I realized how angry she must be that she hadn’t been able to control this particular event. Surely, she would want to control it now.

  “Well, what would you like to do?” I asked her. There was no rage, only matter-of-factness, in my tone. Her will would be done regardless. I heard a pause at the other end of the line, barely a beat, but Chaya was not one to pause before she expressed her opinion or intent. I had rattled her.

  “I’ll make sure you get invited to the wedding,” she assured me. “And I’ll have my husband talk with Eli, make sure he knows he can’t ever do this again. That we’ll have our eye on him.”

  “Whatever you say, Chaya,” I replied. “I have to finish folding the laundry right now, but I’ll talk to you later.”

  I showed up at the wedding with straight shoulders and a firm jaw, but spoke to no one. It wasn’t that I was ashamed. No, I felt only a vague sense of triumph. It seemed to me that they had all failed, that the circumstances were a product of their mistakes. Finally the tables were turned. I was no longer the one at fault; instead, I was the blameless white sheep in a sea of black ones.

  I watched them approach me delicately, not knowing how to act. I saw only mortification on their faces, and a particular squirming guilt on the face of the cousin who had been the seductress. Her eyes could not meet mine. But I bore no resentment toward her.

  It was only after I had been separated from my husband for three weeks that I received another call from Chaya. Eli had asked her to entreat me to return to his house. Ironically, back when I had been unable to perform sexually for a year, he had also asked her to tell me he wanted a divorce. How she had yelled and abused me then. I listened to her voicemail. Her voice was coated, practically dripping, in false kindness.

  “Whatever happens,” she said, “blood is thicker than water. We’re your family and we will always support you.”

  I took the message for what it was: an effort to play to my vulnerabilities and engage me in conversation. She was saying the words she thought would melt me, remembering me as the child who above all wanted nothing more than to be accepted. She dangled the promise of a newly loving family in order to manipulate me into conversation, where surely, she must have reasoned, I could be bribed and threatened into my rightful place.

  I didn’t call back. I changed my number. And when her condemnations of me were published in the newspaper a few years later, I remembered her message with a sense of bittersweet satisfaction. “Whatever happens . . . we will always support you.”

  The New York Post printed an interview with my family after I had suddenly attained notoriety in my community, and my uncle, the same one who regularly sent me poorly spelled death threats and insults, often in emails cc’d to my entire extended family, said to the reporter that, in essence, all of this had always been my problem, because I had simply “lacked happiness.” This, despite all my family had done for me, he said. They had arranged a marriage to a good man, he said, spent thousands on a wedding—clearly I was abnormal if, even after all that, I lacked happiness.

  Certainly this attack was less vicious than the ones my uncle lobbed at me in assumed privacy. Phrases like “ugly horse-face” should have stung more, but it was the “lacked happiness” comment that eventually led me to my first real therapist; it had hit that deep and sensitive nerve in me that had always throbbed with the fear that in some undeniable way I was marked for unhappiness from the beginning.

  Some people speak of inherited Holocaust guilt. The children of survivors repress their feelings and squash their own dreams, I’d read. The Hasidic sect I grew up in was a community living with a pooled inheritance of residual trauma. Although I was reminded of that every time I thought to even feel resentful or deprived, I came away from childhood with the knowledge that nothing would ever be as bad as it could really get. I knew that even at my lowest point, I would still have a lot.

  At the very core of my character, underneath the abuse and self-hate that came later, is the legacy I inherited from the people who raised me. As sure as if it were etched in stone, I know I am a survivor. This is the primary identity I inherited from my war-ravaged grandparents, from my ancestors who survived centuries of persecution in Europe, from my people, who wandered in exile for millennia. This is how I think of myself, first and foremost. Yet how was I to access that reserve of strength from underneath the weighty pile of emotional garbage heaped on top of it?

  “What are you angry about?” Ed asked.

  For a moment, it didn’t come to me. My mind drew a temporary blank. Then it filled suddenly, with one giant, pulsing word.

  “Sex.”

  Ed’s fingers dug deeper into my skull. “Good,” he said. “Now blow it out.”

  I tried, but I was shaking too hard to breathe normally. My torso lifted jerkily off the table as I convulsed with the memory of betrayal and powerlessness. I never thought I could feel this enraged. I was filled to the brim with the kind of rage that you could use to set the world on fire, to simply explode everything. It scared me.

  “Just blow it out,” Ed said. “You’re doing great. Do you want to stop?”

  I shook my head no; I couldn’t speak at first. My eyes were screwed shut, my jaw tense.

  “I’m seeing red,” I finally said.

  “That’s protection,” Ed said.

  No, that’s pressure on my cornea, I thought.

  I started to cry, the tears coming
faster and faster, beyond my control. I didn’t want to cry; I wanted to be a woman who didn’t fall apart when confronted with the force of her own emotions. I couldn’t believe all that anger was in me all this time, waiting for permission to come to the surface. I had been too busy trying to survive to process what I had been through—until now.

  I remember thinking that it would be a good thing, getting married. I would finally have my independence. I didn’t know that I had a defunct vagina or that sex would become the new tool of oppression in my life. Eli and I were married for one year before we achieved successful intercourse. I call it successful because there was partial penetration. After what felt like unbearable pressure from my family and Eli’s family, despite the fact that every muscle in me screamed no, despite the fact that even the barest attempt felt excruciatingly painful, I gave in. It was August 2005. His family was threatening me with a divorce if I didn’t cooperate. My family had made it clear to me that such an event would render me homeless, without support. Eli had disappeared; he wasn’t answering his phone. It was clear he was letting his family do the talking. I was out of options.

  Eli came home in the end, all apologies, and I promised to try harder. I visited a hypnotherapist, once, and then we tried again according to her instructions. I clenched my teeth and swallowed my screams. It felt like a hot poker was rubbing against my insides. But it was happening. However reluctantly, my vagina had opened just far enough, grudgingly, bitterly, to allow for penetration.

  When it was finished, that first time, I cried silently, my body trembling from the effort of trying to withhold a display of pain. Eli looked at me then, and I smiled and tried to make it seem as if they were tears of happiness. He cried too and hugged me, and the sensation of his body on top of mine felt like a cement block.

  A week later, we were pregnant. I thought I was off the hook. His mother had only wanted grandbabies, after all. She exclaimed all manner of thanks to the lord when she heard the news. But then Eli wanted sex all the time. After a few tries, I could tell he realized that it was still painful for me, but that I was trying to hide it. And yet, it didn’t seem to bother him. Suddenly he became a man who didn’t mind forcing himself on someone, who felt that sex with me was his unquestionable right. We slept in separate beds, as did all Hasidic couples, but he still asked to come into mine, and refusing him felt dangerous. Each time he covered me with his body, I felt like I was a machine he was using for his pleasure. I waited until he fell asleep across the room and then cried silently into my sheets.

  After my son was born, sex became an incrementally less painful but no less humiliating experience. I became panicky during sex, unable to rein in my emotions. I often started crying before Eli had even withdrawn, which then meant I had to halfheartedly convince him that it wasn’t about the sex. I didn’t have the energy to try to explain to him how I felt. I was so sure he wouldn’t understand, and even if he did, what good could come of it? I would still always be obligated to have sex with him. I didn’t see a way we could work out this problem of my hating the experience of sex; I was sure I could never learn to feel it differently. I wanted desperately to escape, even through death, but I couldn’t bear the thought of my son being alone in the world without a defender.

  I had a strange guilty feeling, lying on Ed’s table and admitting this, as if somehow it was not okay to complain about being forced into sex when you’re married, because that’s the expectation. You were married, you had bad sex, welcome to the club. I know I’m not a special case. But where did this come from, this feeling that I didn’t even have a right to claim that pain? From the community that told me my desires were invalid, my emotions irrelevant?

  “Blow it out,” Ed urged me. “Breathe deep.”

  I still couldn’t calm down enough to take a complete breath, but the tears had slowed.

  I’m seven months pregnant, my belly already enormous against a figure rendered slight from the weight loss that occurred during my stressful first year of marriage. I’m kneeling on the floor, washing my husband’s feet in a basin of soapy water. I’m massaging the soles as he leans back and enjoys the relief. He’s worked hard all day.

  It’s as if I am seeing myself from above.

  I’m so diminished. What kind of woman have I become? I’m pregnant and kneeling at the feet of my husband. My belly hurts, my knees are burning from the bedroom carpet embedded in my skin. I’m aware that somewhere out there pregnant women are getting their feet rubbed by their husbands. Somehow, I know I don’t deserve that.

  During the day, when Eli is at work, I lie on the sofa. I am hopeless and depressed. I touch my stomach a lot, feeling for elbows and feet, wondering what’s going to happen to this irredeemable child growing in me. There’s a little bump that I keep touching behind my belly button, which I swear feels like one of the baby’s fingers. I touch it with my own index finger, pushing it in, around in circles, until it becomes a habit.

  At one of my doctor’s appointments, my gynecologist informs me that it’s not the baby’s finger after all. It’s an umbilical hernia, common in pregnant women, a result of my abdominal muscles separating.

  “You’ll have to take care of that before you have another child,” she warns me.

  I can’t imagine having another child. I hope I die in childbirth. I hope the hernia kills me. More than anything, I hope I don’t live to see my own unhappiness passed on to another human being because of my actions. It may not have been my choice to become pregnant, but somehow my body made a home for this baby even when I didn’t want it, even when I was so frightened and horrified at the thought. It went ahead and made a child, and in the end, I’m accountable for that. Because I still think I could have stopped it. Just like my pelvis clamped shut to protect me from sex, why couldn’t my uterus have shut down to prevent a pregnancy?

  “All right now,” Ed said soothingly, as my breathing slowed and fell back into a rhythm. “Let’s wrap this up for today. We can work on this some more when you come back.”

  “I have surgery in three days,” I said.

  Seven years later, and that old umbilical hernia, which I’d almost forgotten about, was back. Obstructed, this time, between the slowly tightening walls of my abdominal muscles. I could feel it squeezed just under my belly button, and it felt sore and tender, like someone had punched me in the stomach a few days ago. My doctor said it would be a simple procedure. The hernia would be repaired and the separated abdominal muscles would be sutured together.

  “I can schedule another session when I’m recovered, I think.”

  “Before that,” Ed said, “I need you to start a ritual. When you go home, go out into nature and create a circle somewhere, with anything you can find on the ground. It can be any sort of circle. Then I want you to visit it every day until your surgery.”

  I promised to heed his instructions.

  At home I walked down the hill to the frozen lake, my galoshes leaving deep footprints in the layers of crusty snow. At the foot of the hill, just before the start of the lake perimeter, I drew a deep circle in the snow with a twig and placed some fir limbs in the center. I stamped on the snow in the circle until it was packed hard—a clear, round depression like a coin in the snowbank.

  I came back to it the next day and nothing had changed. Nor had it the next. But on the very last day before my surgery, there it was. A slim, curved crescent on the underside of the circle where the snow had melted, leaving a smile of brown earth like the crescent moon I had seen earlier. How had that one sliver of snow melted when the weather had been below freezing, and there wasn’t a patch of earth visible for miles?

  I went in for surgery that morning and walked out of the clinic that same afternoon. My recovery was remarkably anticlimactic. It felt very similar to my recovery from labor and delivery. I lay on the sofa and cradled my stomach, and it brought back those memories of lying on the sofa all those years ago, feeling my ba
by flail his limbs against the wall of my belly. Whatever had gone wrong in my body during that time had now been corrected. I had been, in a very technical way, made whole again.

  What was it about seven years? I tried to remember . . . then it hit me—the Shmita year, or in English, the Sabbath year. In the ancient Jewish tradition of agricultural cycles regarding the holy land of Israel, the land was supposed to lie fallow every seven years. As a child, I had learned that among other commandments, the fallow year had involved such prohibitions as no planting, pruning, or gathering of fallen fruit. At the time, it had struck me as wasteful. Now I regarded the memory of the phenomenon almost reverentially. A Sabbath year: a year of rest, a time to allow the land to replenish its reserves and restore itself to full strength.

  Was this my Sabbath year? Seven years after I became a mother, during which time I struggled to raise myself as I raised my child, is this the milepost on which I can lean and take a breath?

  II

  mercy

  The goal, the reason for moving, for starting a new life, was to heal and recover, but being a parent made the matter more urgent than abstract. I worried I’d never be the mother my son deserved if I didn’t fix what was wrong with me. No matter how much I gave my son, he would always have to deal with a mother who was anxious and overwhelmed. What were his chances, then, of developing a healthy approach to living?

  A few months after we moved, I was driving Isaac to school, and we came up over the hill that leads to an old college campus, an assortment of dignified buildings gracing an enormous slope of land behind our lake. The sun was just rising behind the buildings on the left, golden rays melting into the illuminated treetops.

  “Mom, why do you always say to eat my breakfast because the kids in Africa are starving? If I eat it, how does the food get to Africa? I don’t understand,” he said from the backseat. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the thoughtful expression on his face.