Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  “It’s an expression, Isaac,” I said. “I’m trying to teach you not to take food for granted, or waste it, because there is hunger in other parts of the world. It’s bad behavior to waste food when there are others who need it desperately.”

  “But, Mom, why don’t they have enough food in Africa?”

  “Because they’re poor.”

  “But why? Why is America not poor?”

  I tried to explain to him the differences between first- and third-world countries, but nothing I said seemed to satisfy him. He started coming up with ideas about how we could make Africa wealthy.

  “Mom, what if we opened businesses in Africa? What if we opened restaurants? Why can’t we just go and bring them food from here?”

  I told him about some of the issues that were preventing progress from being made in Africa. There was tribal violence, lack of education, lack of safety, lack of cleanliness and health care. I tried to summarize delicately; I wanted to educate, not traumatize.

  He still wrinkled his forehead, as if determined to solve world hunger in our brief conversation, before he was dropped off at school for the day. As if he wanted to approach his studies with an unburdened conscience.

  “Hey, I have an idea for you,” I said. “You know there are already some people who are making a big difference in developing countries all over the world. Those people are effective because they’re very educated; they know what they’re doing and how to do it. If you keep doing well in school like you already are, someday you’ll get to go to a great college, and while you’re there, I bet you can figure out the solution to world hunger. That’s the amazing thing about getting an education,” I said, “the more you know, the more you’ll be able to accomplish.”

  “Okay,” Isaac said, “but it will be a lot of years until I go to college.”

  I dropped him off in front of the school building and drove away smiling. I had this feeling that somehow my sacrifice had already paid off. My son was already embarking on a journey of education that could take him anywhere. Every door in the world might open for him, if he chose to knock on it. If I continued to nurture his curiosity and courage, he would never feel the sensation of walls closing in on him the way I do all the time. Wasn’t this enough for now?

  One morning soon after that conversation, as we were driving down the same roads, my son told me about waking up in his father’s car and finding himself alone. After waiting for a while, he proceeded to open the car door, cross the street by himself, and wander around a few shops to see if his father was in one of them. Eventually Eli came out of the fish market and saw that the car was empty, at which point he went back to look for Isaac. He found him, looking lost, at the cash registers of a supermarket.

  “I was very scared,” Isaac told me. “I waited for Dad, but he didn’t come back.”

  My fists clenched tightly around the steering wheel as Isaac told me this.

  That night Isaac had a bad dream.

  “I was on a ship with my dad, and it was sinking, and I was afraid I would never see you again.”

  He crawled into my bed and huddled close to me, his body trembling. I put my arm around him and blinked back tears. Only too vividly did I remember my own dreams of abandonment as a child. Would it be like that for Isaac? Would he never be granted the security of knowing that someone would always be there? I had never left him unattended, nor would I, but repeated attempts to convince Eli to do the same had failed. I couldn’t bear to see my son endure even the smallest part of the fear and anxiety I had grown up with.

  It seemed so clear to me what that dream meant. I had to send him off most weekends to be with his dad, while I remained helpless at a distance. I had not been able to save him when he was abandoned in that car; I had not been there to advocate for him. I could only be in control of his life with me. It was terrifying to consider that things would always be this way. That I would never be there when his father lost his temper, or simply his judgment, that Isaac would have to navigate those situations for himself.

  Eli expressed no remorse for his decision to leave Isaac in the car on his own. He reacted angrily when I asked him to sign an agreement saying he wouldn’t leave his son unattended again. I was beginning to understand that the fight was far from over. I would be battling for my son until he became an adult, until he could decide for himself. I was forever tied to the man I had not chosen, to the fate my family and community had chosen for me. I would always be only half-free. This knowledge drove me wild with frustration and anger. How could it have come to this, after so much struggling? Would I always be dragging my chains around, swallowing the bitter remorse surrounding the irrevocable decisions that had been made for me in my youth?

  What was it they said about that heedless charge down the hill to freedom? That it would inevitably end in destruction. The price I seemed to have paid for my escape still didn’t seem as high as the one I would have paid if I’d stayed, but I struggled now with a new enemy: perpetual exhaustion of the spirit. I wondered if I’d emptied an unrenewable resource in my dash toward freedom, if I’d somehow exhausted a store of psychic capital designed to last me for a lifetime.

  It might have seemed to some that I’d whittled my life down to the bare minimum, but for me, it became just enough. Living in the middle of nowhere was what I wanted. I needed a life that reflected what I felt on the inside: a profound sense of alienation from the society of my origins and the society I had transplanted into, a sense of being in limbo and therefore of being nowhere.

  Ironically, I’d found myself unable to create a sense of home, or identity, in the city where I’d been born and raised. Now, here I was, in a place that seemed just quiet and empty enough for the outline of my spirit to take shape. Here I might become visible, the way a cul-de-sac might merit a spot on a map of a barren locale. And even if it could do nothing for me in the end, certainly it was the place for Isaac to figure out who he was and what kind of person he might want to grow into.

  A month after my surgery, we celebrated Isaac’s seventh birthday. The weather was unseasonably warm that week; we planned to have a shindig at our house so the kids could all run around outdoors. My mother took the regional train up from New York, loaded with party favors and balloons she’d found in a 99-cent store. I bought the snacks and cupcakes.

  The day of Isaac’s birthday happened to be Grandparents’ Day at his school, so I dropped them both off in the morning and returned home to blow up the balloons. When I picked them up at lunchtime, they’d created a wreath together, Isaac being the designer and my mom wielding the glue gun. They got along well with each other, having none of the baggage that my mom and I grew up taking for granted when it came to our families. To Isaac, she’s just my mom. She’s another person who loves him, and it’s uncomplicated.

  Isaac knows that my mom didn’t raise me, but he’s never asked why. I would like for him to be able to take for granted that a mother is always there for her child, but I can already tell, by the way he clings to me, that he doesn’t see me as the immovable caregiver most children see their parents as. He already senses that I come from an unstable, secret world, and this makes his world seem somehow less certain.

  In many ways, I am a repeat of my mother’s life. Perhaps that is why I’ve always struggled with feelings of anxiety and fear when I’m around her. Am I doomed to simply relive her life experience and pass it on to the next generation in an unstoppable cycle of misery? Her marriage was also arranged when she was a teenager. She too was forced to have sex, to have a baby, with a man she didn’t love. While I was being raised mostly by my grandparents, she was working menial jobs to put herself through college, an act that constituted her final rejection of our family and community. My father had presented three wives with a religious divorce by the time she was able to obtain her legal one.

  My mom and I can’t talk about these things—it’s too painful for both of u
s—but talking about books is our safe conversation, the one thing that binds us together. She tells me how she, too, used to sneak out to the library as a child, filling her days with books by British authors, like the Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton. She was a child of divorce as well, a symbol of scandal among her peers. What made her feel most isolated, though, was her intelligence. She felt perpetually surrounded by the unintelligent, much like the characters in Roald Dahl’s books did, including the one I identified with so much as a child: Matilda.

  I have no doubt my mother is happy. Her life began as mine did, it progressed as mine did, and yet here she is today, accomplished, educated, and independent. She’s also single, and I worry about that. My mother and I both acknowledge that we have enormous difficulty trusting others because of our experiences in the Hasidic community. If she hasn’t managed to get over it by her late forties, I can’t help having that sinking feeling in my heart that I, too, may never learn to trust someone. Is this then the ultimate risk that we take when we escape the only world we’ve ever known: the possibility that we’ll never truly be moored in a new one?

  My mother designated herself the photographer at Isaac’s birthday party. I set my bulky Canon to automatic so it didn’t feel too complicated for her. The event was a huge success. That particular early-spring afternoon was very hot, and the kids arrived in bathing suits ready to jump into the lake. We distributed water balloons and challenged them all to stay dry for the duration of the throwing contest.

  I watched Isaac running around, cupcake icing smeared around his mouth, looking gloriously happy to be the center of attention. I knew how special it felt to him, to have everyone here to celebrate. We’d never been entrenched in a place or community as we were now; it was the first time he could feel a sense of permanence and security. I wished that, in the process of providing that for him, I could have figured out how to provide it for myself simultaneously, but this didn’t seem to be enough. There never seemed to be a simple answer to what was missing in my life.

  When I’d fully recovered from the hernia surgery, I returned to Ed’s sunlit room. This time around, I chose a smooth white crystal with crimson veins.

  “Maybe this time we can go inside and find something good?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Ed said with confidence. “Let’s go looking in the underworld.”

  I lay down, and Ed shook the rattle feverishly over my body, his eyes squinted tightly shut while he performed energy-clearing motions for about fifteen minutes. He told me to imagine myself going deep into the earth, to the still waters underneath, and having everything washed away. “Only the purest self is left behind,” he said.

  I tried to visualize it. I’m lying in a stream and the water is washing over me. I’m part of the earth, the flowers, the animals; it’s all one. I’m integrating.

  “Step into the circle,” a woman whispers. “You need to care for everything around you in order for it to care for you in return. If you want to be included, just step in.”

  I couldn’t decide whether the voice was a memory of someone who once spoke to me or a presence outside myself. As soon as it stopped, it was almost like I had never heard it.

  Ed stopped shaking the rattle abruptly and told me to sit up.

  “What did you find?”

  I told him what I’d heard.

  “That’s very good,” he said approvingly. “What you just learned is what we shamans call ayni, or ‘being in relationship.’ It’s about being aware of how everything is working around you and with you. You’re in the circle of life.”

  “What were you doing while you were performing the ritual? What did you see?”

  “I went looking for the parts of your soul that had chosen to leave for whatever reason. We all have that—the soul has four chambers, and one chamber is for the wound. That’s when a part of you can split off.”

  “So what was the wound?”

  “Well,” Ed said, hesitating for a moment before going on, “I saw something metallic, an object. At first I couldn’t quite tell if I was seeing it right. It was a bicycle. I think that’s what it was.”

  “The wound is a bicycle?”

  “That’s what I saw when I went looking for the thing that made your strongest, purest self peel away from you. There must have been a moment when you gave up and decided to just be a good girl and suppress your true self, and somehow it’s connected to a bicycle.”

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, I remember it vividly: I’m sitting on the stoop, eyeing the neighborhood boys as they zoom by on their two-wheelers. I tentatively approach the bicycle when I think no one is looking. I put my feet on the pedals and the next thing I know, I feel like I’m flying . . . pedaling faster and faster until I’m almost around the block. And then I hear them come up behind me, a gang of boys on bikes. They knock me over to the ground, and their leader slaps me on the face, saying, “Girls don’t ride bikes.”

  And I never did again, until this year.

  “Well, there you have it,” Ed said. “That was the moment when you figured out it was safer if you buried the part of you that thought for yourself, that was unafraid. And eventually she gave up trying to come back.”

  I started riding last summer, after we moved to the lake house. My college friend’s dad had patiently taught me to ride his wife’s bike. The first time I pushed down on the pedals and coasted on my own momentum felt like a miracle. I rode the trails and the roads, planning different routes for myself each time. Some days I’d struggle up a hill only to discover a whole new world on the other side, a stretch of mountainside, a lake collecting in a valley, horses meandering in a meadow.

  In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes the distinction between traveling by car versus by bike. The car window serves to frame the scene one is passing, he explains, making it similar to seeing it through a television or computer screen; the driver is removed and insulated from that which he is viewing. On a bike, however, the traveler is immersed in the world through which he traverses. There is no frame but the perimeters of his vision.

  So it feels to be on a bike again for the first time since that childhood incident—fully immersed in the world, alive to its noises and colors, susceptible to its movements. How different it is from the sheltering of my childhood, the limits that were constantly placed on where I could go, and for how long, and with whom.

  I had my first inevitable accident sometime in autumn, after a summer of triumphant journeys, of forty-mile days, of hills beaten and declines fearlessly embraced. They say a cyclist must fall, as soon as possible, if only to understand the physics of it. There is a right way to fall, and once you do it, the fear of falling no longer holds you in its grasp.

  It was a beautiful, crisp day. The leaves were only just starting to curl at the ends; deciduous trees were lit up in fiery halos of red and orange. I climbed up a cracked, ill-maintained shoulder of a main road, and as I approached the crest, I heard the noise of an oncoming car behind me, a shrieking honk, and I panicked. I didn’t have time to look behind me to see the red Jeep barreling my way; I simply aimed my body away from the road and lost control as the bike spun in the gravelly ditch and toppled me to the ground.

  I had the wind knocked out of me for what felt like a few minutes, and then I righted myself, preparing to get back on my bike and head for home. When I looked down, I noticed bright rivulets of red running down my legs, from holes in the flesh where the sharp scrape and gouge of pebbles had done their work.

  I experienced what felt like a slow pulling away, a detachment from the scene. Somewhere outside my body, an eye winked and a voice said, Good, that’s good. That’s what you deserve, isn’t it? And the sound of that cruel statement echoing in my mind was so devastating to me that I started to cry, because who would say such a horrible thing about someone, and moreover, who would be generating that voice but myself, the lone traveler left
on this road?

  I limped home, rolling the bike along with me. I couldn’t feel the sting where it should have been, in the wounds in my legs and palms, only the horror of satisfaction at my own injury.

  In my bathroom I scrubbed aggressively at the blood, remembering the moment when my friend Heather had shown me the bandage she used to cover the place where she cut herself. I shouldn’t have been feeling this frightening thrill, this enthusiastic response to the sight of bloody lacerations marking a trail on my legs.

  I had never cut myself. I had heard that cutting was a practice in search of feeling, and feeling had never been an area in which I sensed a lack. To hurt oneself because one loathed oneself, that I understood, but surely I had grown up and past that terrible voice, the one that said my existence was a burden on everyone around me, and I should do them all a favor and die.

  I am ten years old, looking at the full bottle of thyroid medication in my drawer and wondering what would happen if I stop taking the medication that had been prescribed to me since birth. It seems that I can no longer nurture any reasonable hope of gaining the approval of my family; will this, then, earn me the title of “good girl”?

  I put the bottle back in its drawer without taking a pill, and don’t look at it again for months. In the spring I become flattened with a tremendous fatigue. I climb into bed and stay there for three weeks, floating in and out of wakefulness, but never once leaving the bed. It takes a long time for someone to notice how ill I am. The next thing I know, I’m eating farina my grandmother has prepared and wearing some new hand-me-downs for school. I am back on the medication. I feel thwarted. How can I cease to be a blight on my family and community if all my efforts are defeated?