by Leah Lax
Uncovered
Copyright © 2015 by Leah Lax
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Excerpts from this book have been published in Moment Magazine, Lilith Magazine, Survivor’s Review, Intellectual Refuge, Crab Orchard Review, The Double Dealer, and in the anthologies Keep Your Wives Away From Them (North Atlantic Books, 2010), and Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religion (Seal Press, 2013).
The lines from “What Is Possible”. Copyright © 2013 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright (c) 1981 by Adrienne Rich, The lines from “Twenty-One Love Poems.” Copyright © 2013 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright (c) 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., from LATER POEMS: SELECTED AND NEW, 1971-2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-63152-995-5
e-ISBN: 978-1-63152-996-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015933018
Book design by Stacey Aaronson
For information, address:
She Writes Press
1563 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
She Writes Press is a division of Spark Point Studio, LLC.
for Mom
I never did let her read this.
And for covered women everywhere.
Back in 2006, still celebrating my new freedom, I traveled with Susan to New Orleans for the first Mardi Gras after Hurricane Katrina. That parade was particularly, defiantly raucous. As a comment on the recent devastation, one of the passing revelers was handing out toy vermin. He gave me an especially ugly rubber rat, ‘Lying Rat’ painted on it in green puff paint. I kept that rat beside me as a warning through the long process of writing this memoir. Yes, memoir is written with the flawed tool of memory, and individual experience distorts the view, and yes, I found it necessary to change names, approximate conversations, and gather repeated events into single scenes, but this is to attest that I looked within myself on every page trying to capture the truth as best I could. As best I could.
“But hope deferred is still hope.”
—MARILYNNE ROBINSON, GILEAD
One
Ya’ancha adonoi b’yom tsarah y’sagev’cha shem elohei ya’akov. A bride is to fast and recite the entire book of psalms on her wedding day, and so I stand at attention in a back room of my grandparents’ elegant Dallas home on an August day in 1975 in a wedding gown that covers me to chin and wrists and to the floor, sounding out Hebrew words I don’t understand from a softbound prayer book, a shining train of fine cloth puddled on the vacuumed carpet behind me. My mother and two sisters are fixing their makeup at the vanity. My mother and grandmother have been holding their chins high all day as if practicing for tonight, lips pulled tight, pretending they’re not embarrassed by my new religious demands. They are determined to still have their Dallas society wedding even if the bearded Hasidic men I have invited taint them with the ignorant superstitions of the old country.
I smile and whisper the Hebrew words, keenly aware that they feel exactly as if hillbilly relatives just showed up uninvited to take over their nouveau-riche affair. Syllables separate and march, each equal in weight and mystery, like a steady drum drowning out their petty materialism. Yish’lach ez’r’cha mikodesh umitsion yis’adecha. I just turned nineteen, and I’m proud and determined to accomplish this exit from my family by trumping them all with God. My psalms will draw down God’s blessings on our auspicious occasion and suffuse us all with holy light on this day of my Hasidic wedding.
Outside, the sky is electric blue over a North Dallas neighborhood of manicured lawns and privacy walls, not far from the country club my Jewish cousins were only recently allowed to join. It’s another in a string of ninety-five-degree August days. Sounds of clinking and muffled voices from the front room have dwindled. Much of the furniture in the front of the house is now cleared away, the lovely smell of a kosher feast spread on long, covered tables wafting back to us. A ghost of an ivy-draped wedding canopy out on the patio is partly visible through the floor-length curtains. Hurricane lamps on pedestals dot the vast lawn beneath old shade trees of mimosa, pecan, Texas ash. Soon, the sun will go down and I will be given to tall bearded Levi in his long black satuk coat under the stars. Then my photograph will appear on the society page in next Sunday’s Dallas Morning News, August 17, 1975: The bride wore satin with her grandmother’s veil of handmade lace.
“Mom. A little modesty, please?” I say, fussing at her because her gown is sleeveless. I add in a stage whisper, “Rabbi Frumen’s in the next room. Put on the bolero!” Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Frumen is a shaliach, the emissary over all of Texas for the Lubavitcher Rebbe, our Hasidic leader. “He’s doing the ketubah about now!”
“The what?” my mother says.
I roll my eyes. “The wedding contract.”
She gives a little huff. “Put the book down for a minute, would you?” she says. “Come here. Come to the mirror. I want to put the veil on you.” She picks up the lace crown and her eyes go moist. She wore that crown, that veil, once. So did her mother.
I don’t want to see her eyes. I think of the secret of her hoarded clutter, how her elegant mother refuses to walk into our home, how we were left alone in it growing up, how often she forgets to make meals. I think, Put the veil on me? Now you care? Fortunate for you, Mom, the gown isn’t the dirty gray of our life. The white dress covers all that, and now here you are, offering to help me to disappear.
ONCE, WHEN I WAS SMALL, I searched for and then found my mother in her studio in front of a tall canvas on an easel that stretched high above my head. On a square table nearby lay an array of half-squeezed tubes with the tops off, tiny, bright circles of orange, green, red, white, glistening in fluorescent light. In her hand was a palette marked with feathered strokes, on it a curved line of little mounds of color. The air was filled with the familiar smells of turpentine and linseed oil, words which I already knew. She was dabbing with a brush, seemed lost in the canvas.
My mother didn’t look down or acknowledge me, so I stood and watched. I was soon filled with the inexplicable sense that she’d gone away and left me behind. I peered up into her canvas at those yawning spaces and vivid colors as if I could find her in there, but there were too many places where she could hide. I needed to climb into the painting to find my mother, but then I would be lost in a strange landscape, and that would prove her an ever-receding figure.
She was busy with her brush and unconcerned about leaving me, and she was using a color language I didn’t understand like a tool of escape. I felt then, and know now, that in a way, the painting was her shape on the inside. If I could just decipher her color language, maybe I could follow.
I would remain obsessed with grasping strange language for wordless things. And even a very long time after I would still feel as if she had left me behind, wandering and peering into strange landscapes, ever looking for her. For home.
SHE’S HOLDING OUT THE VEIL. Her eyes are wet. Helpless, I go to her and sit down at the vanity. She takes bobby pins from my grandmother’s gold filigree box and secures the netting and heavy lace to my head with her tapered delicate hands. Above her image in the mirror, as she bends over me, are the reflections of my sisters, Amy and Debbie, watching.
Tuvia comes in. He heads our burgeoning
Hasidic group at the University of Texas. There are many more like us discovering orthodox religion at the university, all of us part of a wave across campuses all over the country. Jesus freaks with long hippie hair cluster and sing on campus corners, approaching us with drugged eyes and Christian pamphlets as we walk to classes. The more conventional Christian student unions are flourishing. Muslim students gather in shouting demonstrations denouncing the shah. Our Hasidic group is just one of many preparing us to take our conservative religion out into the world. We meet at Chabad House in Austin, just off the main street along the north side of the university, and we are led by Rabbi Frumen with his fierce and pious beard.
Under Rabbi Frumen’s guidance, most of us have turned our focus away from our university studies to the Godly lives we plan to lead once we’re married, and the large Hasidic families we will raise. Most of our parents are not too pleased.
Tuvia is wearing a blue suit on his thin frame. His sandy beard is neatly combed, his manner respectful, eyes downcast. “Mrs. Mallett,” he says to my mother, then indicates with a nod and an open arm that she is to join him in the next room, my grandfather’s study, where the men have gathered. My mother drops the bobby pin and stands up like a startled fawn.
In the study, she will find Ruth, mother of Levi, my chatan, other half of my soul, destined since Creation to bind himself to me. Ruth calls her son Eugene. The two mothers will be told to stand to the side of that room full of men, dark wood paneling, heavy masculine furniture. Most of our family friends have yet to arrive, but Rabbi Frumen is in there, as are our fellow students Tuvia, Dovid, Vulf, and Mendel. I imagine the two mothers in their long gowns, the line of young men in new, soft beards, Levi at the carved, polished table, looking regal holding a piece of holy text. The room will grow quiet. Levi’s father will look perplexed, and my once-debonair father, awkward and a little empty-eyed from his meds, simply afraid.
Levi will launch into an analysis of the mystical Godly union elevated into higher spheres by the ultimate union of bride and groom; always a piece of holy text will ritualize the moment. The young men will burst into forced lively singing. They will stumble over the Hebrew words, clapping, dancing in place, following Rabbi’s Frumen’s lead. Then the rabbi will unroll the ketubah, the ancient marriage contract in Aramaic, which Levi will sign. Two male witnesses, trusted by the Law because they are men and because they honor the Sabbath, will also sign.
I am the object of that contract. I am being given to him.
My father will be called to sign the ketubah last, in my stead. He’s wearing a light tan summer linen suit with a carnation in his lapel as white as his thick white hair. But in there he isn’t Herb and I am not Lisa. The rabbi will write my name on the contract as Leah, Lay-ah, daughter of Yehoshua, son of Yaakov—my father’s Hebrew name, which means God will grant salvation. This is how he will be told to sign.
To commemorate the ancient temple in Jerusalem, someone will direct the mothers to take hold of a china plate and then on cue from the rabbi together dash it to the polished floor. Alone with my psalms, I listen for the muffled crash adding loss to Jewish joy and imagine the two mothers’ self-conscious smiles, the blur of their thrusting hands. Then the crash, the cries of “mazel tov,” distant clapping and singing. But don’t you know, Mom, the plate isn’t really the temple; it’s my past, it’s my years with you finally over, it’s just another thing broken? Later I will hear how Levi’s father was distressed seeing the shards fly. I will hear how he scurried around the room, picking up the pieces, but there were too many.
IT WAS BACK IN FEBRUARY, six months before the wedding, when Rabbi Frumen called me from the Austin Chabad House. He had driven in from his home in Houston to give his weekly classes. Chabad House was our meeting place, actually a cleared storage area in a student apartment complex. The members were my only friends. All of us had fairly withdrawn from general university society.
Rabbi Frumen had a gruff style and a dismissive manner with women. The boys, although insecure in his presence, were in awe of him, but I was simply afraid, struck silent as soon as he walked into the room. And yet in my mind I had become a Hasidic soldier ready for orders from an emissary of our rebbe. It was a given that Rabbi Frumen could interrupt my studying for a test in government and my plans to spend the afternoon practicing cello. “I’ll be right over,” I said, dropped my schoolwork and rushed across the enormous campus, students strolling, the diesel smell of the campus bus, across the East Mall and around the Tower library, long skirt slapping my calves in the cold wind.
Then we were sitting in Chabad House face-to-face. The Sabbath tables were folded and stacked against the wall, a poster of the Rebbe’s smiling countenance tacked up above us. I pulled the back of my knees in hard against the cold metal edge of the folding chair and my heart pounded in my ears. I sat very still, beginning to guess why he had called.
When Rabbi Frumen smiled, his lip dropped to show his lower teeth surrounded by dark beard. “How’s your life?” he said in his Russian/Yiddish accent.
“Baruch hashem,” I said—bless God.
Someone in the apartment below turned on a stereo, and the rock bass line hummed up through my feet, mixed with pounding in my ears.
“And your grandparents?”
Was he looking for a donation? “Baruch hashem,” I said again. God gets the credit. For everything.
“I wanted to ask you, have you thought about any of the boys? As a husband?”
I was right. Panic. In my mind was Ana’s warm face, who once had my dreams. I once scrawled two-inch letters into my high school diary: ALONE. Ana. Ana. “Mom,” I said, placing my hand on my chest as if she could see the ache. “I think I have a soul.”
I met Rabbi Frumen’s eyes, then wondered if he was trying to search inside me for some privately held fantasy about one of the newly Hasidic boys. But I couldn’t produce a coy, modest voice trembling for any of them. I thought of the Rebbe, the way he took off his white plastic glasses and put them on his desk. “You will make an everlasting edifice of a Jewish home,” he said to me with that piercing gaze, my future now defined. Apparently, here it was.
“Levi Lax is interested in marrying you,” Rabbi Frumen said.
I jerked my chin up, then stopped myself from opening my eyes too wide. Levi was seven years older, but our Dallas families knew one another, and he was long overdue for marriage. I thought, I should have expected this. And that was all.
“LET’S STOP AND TALK.” That was Levi two days later on our first and only date, in his Dodge Dart on a cold, dark night. But it wasn’t really a date; it was just the two of us flinging ourselves into what we had been taught to believe was our destiny.
Levi was an Ivy League alumnus, in Austin for graduate school. I knew him as an engineering type, a little messy, a bit of a genius. People liked him, but once, I had seen him blow up over some detail and had been embarrassed. Still, I knew he could get a good job and, with his tall, nice build and handsome face, father beautiful children.
There was Levi’s darkened profile in his hat next to me in the car, and the white path of headlights on the empty road. He was wearing jeans, still becoming a Hasid, still learning the rules, but I knew we wouldn’t touch. I relied on that. I sat huddled in my black wool coat, helpless, determined, my feet not quite touching the floor as we both pelted forward into the rushing universe. My hand rested near the door handle, curled like that of a child.
I didn’t know that I was the third girl Rabbi Frumen had approached for Levi. I didn’t know I was being shopped and didn’t know to ask why the first two girls had turned away. I accepted that the privileged commandment to marry, along with its spiritual rewards, was for men. It was our duty as women to help them fulfill that command. I saw nothing to note in my vacuum absence of desire. A vacuum makes no sound.
I did know by then how Hasidim were supposed to go about matchmaking, how Hasidic parents are to research the prospective match, then gently query their son o
r daughter about what he or she wants in a spouse and encourage the young couple to go out to some public place to talk, as long as they don’t touch. The two are to share their hearts, their goals. They are to decide if they will marry, together, and proceed only if both souls begin to ignite. You will know, my imaginary, loving Hasidic parents tell their inexperienced children. The Law, and God, will love you, protect you. We, too, were there, once.
Instead we had Levi’s accountant dad, deep within the wannabe Dallas Jewish community, and Levi’s mom, who never missed a Cowboys game. We had my hoarding artist mother and mentally ill father, and my newly rich grandparents, who ate schmaltz herring and wore elegant clothes.
Perhaps Hasidic parents would have cautioned us to check inside ourselves for real feelings for one another, or given us their own sense of the match. If we’d had Hasidic peers also preparing for marriage, maybe we would have secretly shared our fears with them, or compared advice we’d received. Maybe we might have even found Hasidic kids who had said no. But instead of Hasidic parents, we had Rabbi Frumen with his fierce and pious beard. In place of peers who might have forged the path ahead of us, we had temporary friendships through Chabad House with young people from secular homes who were also trying on Hasidic life by following printed how-to guides. Marriage was a Duty, an item to check off on the list. In place of courtship, I had had twenty minutes in front of Rabbi Frumen on a folding chair in an emptied storage room beneath a tacked-up poster of the Rebbe.
Levi pulled into a broad, black-tarred Sears parking lot and parked. We got out of the car. We stood there looking at one another, alone in a dark landscape held down by a tarmac grid of white parking lines and litter. We were supposed to talk, but it didn’t seem to matter what we said. We knew we didn’t determine our destiny. Besides, Levi had already chosen me. “Well,” he said. He looked at his shoes. “What do you think?”
