Uncovered

by Leah Lax

  Besides, I had plans. I had handled college applications myself and gotten into the honors program at North Texas State on full scholarship. I’d be starting in the fall, finally free of family. I was going to be so many things, but here at the institute, in the skirt, I felt reduced to a narrowed category in which I was only a girl, nothing but a girl, and over everything I thought I could become there was a booming rabbinic voice that made me meek. It was confusing, how that diminishment shrank my voice. In the classes, I couldn’t argue or question, as I had back in high school. I had to remember to lower my voice, be quiet around men. I practiced taking smaller steps. When I sat, I awkwardly put my knees together and to one side, crossed my ankles and tucked them under my seat, folded my hands in my lap.

  Ana and I had both chosen a class taught by Isser, with his chest-length beard, mellifluous voice, and grave pronouncements, whose children I had babysat. The class was held around an old picnic table in back of the mansion, under a cluster of trees.

  The girls were all smitten with Isser. Evenings, they waited in line until midnight to meet with him and recite teary details about conflicts with parents who didn’t like their religious ways; cry about boyfriends, teachers, jobs; ask how to plan their futures or how to find kosher spouses or how to determine what part of their former, secular lives was permissible. Isser gave advice laced with quotes all aimed at smoothing their path to God. The girls came away with starry eyes and shared his words with the rest of us like gems. All day I heard, “Isser says …” They called him a mashpiah. Rivka told me that the word meant “flowing font.” She said it with adoration.

  I tried to emulate the girls’ attitudes about Isser, although I didn’t get into those evening lines or seek his counsel. I had noticed lapses in his logic that sometimes distressed me, but I also felt small before the Law, its booming voice of God. Isser represented this voice. His voice, deeply secure within itself, hummed through my confusion, reassuring us, commanding us.

  “Kadesh atzm’cha bemutar loch,” Isser read out loud in a Yiddish shtetl accent, although his English was unaccented. Sanctify yourself in what is permissible to you. “This means you should make yourself holy by abstaining, not only from what is forbidden, but from anything that you don’t actually need,” he said. “Particularly from unnecessary indulgence. To do that,” he continued, his tone compelling, “you have to know the difference between need and desire.” Needs, he said, shrink when you feed them, like when your hunger goes away after you’ve eaten. “But feed desire, and it just grows. That’s how you know the difference.”

  Never feed desire? Wait a minute, I thought. My need for food doesn’t shrink—even after eating, I’m still a physical creature with needs. Just my hunger comes and goes. I started to wave my hand to get Isser’s attention so I could articulate my objection to his logic, how needs don’t shrink when you feed them, but then I glanced at the others and put my hand down. Desire grows the more you feed it. My secret desires could grow into a monster that could rip off this skirt, expose me, and get me thrown out of here—the one place I’d been made to feel I belonged. Dallas somehow didn’t seem like home anymore. It was far away, unreal. If I argued with Isser, I could be homeless, out on the edge of the world. Maybe he was right. Even the desire to speak my mind should be monitored.

  “Feeding a physical desire,” Isser added, “feeds only the animal within and not the Godly soul.” In that moment, every simple physical pleasure that didn’t have a specifically Godly purpose became a shameful thing.

  Ana sighed. When she moved on the bench, her thigh pressed warm against mine.

  I began to sit apart from Ana at meals and chose only the morsels of food I absolutely needed. At the end of a meal, the lifers planted among us as role models, including proud Rivka, led the song of thanks for our food. The girls banged the lively rhythm as they sang, palms hitting the tabletop, happy and loud. But in my mind was Isser’s voice: “Kodesh, holy,” he’d said, “means separated for the purpose of sacrifice.” I sat alone and kept quiet.

  MY MOTHER FORWARDED A LETTER from Lula, who used to sit next to me in algebra, my first black friend after integration of the Dallas schools. We had promised to keep in touch. But the wall was now up between me and the world with its varieties, us and them. I couldn’t fit in here with Lula as my friend. I put the letter into my journal, wishing I could make her understand.

  Every night at the institute held the same late-night camaraderie, every morning the same groan of exhaustion, the same fogged effort to grasp esoteric teachings and complicated laws. Every day ended with the same tired surrender. One day I found Ana taking her skirts off the aluminum rack. “Ewww,” she said. “This reeks of cigarette smoke.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but could I borrow another?”

  “You don’t smoke,” she said. She handed me a navy skirt. “Here,” she said, “but you cannot smoke in it. And you’ll have to give it back in Dallas.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Lisa,” she said. Then she cocked her head to the side like a parrot. “How are you today? Baruch hashem. How’d you sleep? Baruch hashem. How’s the learning? Baruch hashem. I hate the baruch hashems that come out of your mouth!”

  The term means “bless God.” It means “I accept God’s will.” “But everyone says that,” I said. “Really. Everyone.”

  “You,” she said, “are not everyone.”

  I knew I sounded like a parrot to Ana. I wanted to tell her that I was just learning. I wanted to say that I loved her. Instead I said, “There’s a reason for saying it, you know.”

  “Is there, now?” she said. She went back to her packing. That afternoon she left.

  THE NIGHT AFTER ANA LEFT, I lay alone across from her empty bed and suffered fits of longing I believed to be longing for the ultimate union with God Isser had described in class, even unto death. I imagined my soul straining to fly far above my demanding body into ecstatic fusion.

  God was a giant screen, and anyone I had ever loved was part of the God image on it. Ana was up there, opening her arms wide to me. You are abiding love. There was my mother with her delicate hands and almond eyes, but her image was changed into one of reliable nurture, beckoning, wanting to gather me in. You give strength to the weary. There was my father with his white hair and lopsided smile, but he was healthy, his eyes alive, become my shield who never hurt me and never died on the inside. And somehow, any pain I’d ever had was also up there, distilled down to a brilliant point of aching light.

  Ana left and didn’t tell me. My father’s face had changed into a bearded rabbi’s; my mother had transformed into a nurturing God. I could be, would be, could feel myself becoming a tzaddik saint. I would rise above my stubborn body and its inordinate demands. I could see God. I was suffused with painful yearning. I would touch God and escape this world of betrayal.

  I rose from my bed and, in a sweep of fervor and need, took the blanket off of what had been Ana’s bed and folded myself into her warmth. I lay back down, wrapped in her, dreaming of escape and breathing in the smell of her, until I slept.

  Seven

  It was a clear night outside on the front stoop of the institute on the night of my seventeenth birthday, June 29, 1973. The girls had sung to me over dinner. The star-studded sky teased me with its promises. I leaned up, reaching toward those stars. In my studies with Rivka, she had just told me that all secular art was empty and dangerous, that artists must devote their art to God and the Law. Images from my mother’s art books that had been childhood friends and teenaged inspiration streamed across the black sky, the cathedrals at Rheims and at Notre Dame, Michelangelo’s Pietà, Leonardo’s dreaming Madonnas, Kline’s slashing black vigor, Rothko’s dreaming color clouds, all against a crashing backdrop of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge. Was sublime beauty just shtus—spiritual nonsense? I had planned to go back home from here to study art and music in university. Had my plans been reduced to an empty exercise that mocked the commandments? If so, in my n
ew costume, I had no future, no one left to be.

  What if I get off this stoop, cross that street, and don’t come back? I could knock on any door and ask to use the phone to call my mother. She’ll help me get home. But those stars were too far to reach, the sky too vast, the narrow street too wide to cross, my cello too far away, my mother gone. Inertia, fear, uncertainty held me down. Who was I? The girl I had been was gone. So how could I go home? If I abandoned the skirted woman I was still becoming, what then? I would be left a blank page, no definition or content, at home nowhere. I would be out in the world without a path, in a void. But I would not risk becoming a lost, blank face like my father.

  Late that night, I wrote my parents. “I have changed my life and become a Hasidic Jew,” I wrote. “Every minute of my day is now devoted to becoming a better, more moral person. You began by shaping me, but as much as I love and respect you, it’s my turn now. I promise to stay in touch, but I won’t be coming home.” This is how I said goodbye, with these lies.

  WEEKS LATER, it was an afternoon like any other at the institute: girls passing through the lobby to the basement to do laundry or lounge, others paired over texts or visiting on the veranda, more lined up at the phone booth. One asleep on the floor. I was curled up in a love seat in the stone room off the lobby, reading about mikvah, happy I had managed to avoid kitchen duty. I still didn’t know what going to the mikvah entailed, but I was intrigued by the author’s assertion that studies had proven mikvah protected women from cervical cancer. I wondered, though, why nuns had the same low rate of incidence.

  I got up and wandered into the ballroom, where, I remembered, there was another book about mikvah. I turned to the table of contents, hoping this one spelled out the details more clearly. Rabbi Geller was coming up the basement stairs with yet another visitor.

  Then a wave roared through me, of love and fear and need and anger. It was my mother. I saw my mother. With Rabbi Geller. I tried to swallow, smooth out the skirt, hold on to the book, but it didn’t help. She was talking with Rabbi Geller, her face shut down, her body a paint stroke of fear.

  An hour later, there was a tap on my shoulder. Rivka. “Rabbi Geller wants you downstairs in his office,” she said, trying to sound official. She looked at her feet as I left.

  My mother had gone back to her hotel. Rabbi Geller indicated I should sit on the one chair with its creaking canister wheels, the seat too high and slanted so that I had to try not to slide off. The door to the office stood open. The rabbi looked a little nervous. He bounced on the balls of his feet, hands behind his back. “We didn’t know you were a minor,” he said.

  One of the other rabbis passed in a tool belt and tennis shoes. They were closing off space for more beds. There was the air pop of a nail gun, the whine of a buzz saw.

  “I wrote my age on the application form,” I said. “I never lied.”

  “I asked your mother to keep a kosher home for you. She has agreed.”

  “What?”

  “You have to go home.”

  “But,” I said, shaking my head, “I don’t know how.”

  BLURRED STATIC ON AN AIRPLANE INTERCOM, engine roar vibrating through seats, the motion of takeoff pinning us back. The world is a difficult place, but prayer and performance of the commandments are the only reality. Reciting psalms redirects Godly energy, averting punishment. I wore Ana’s navy skirt. Next to me, my mother’s mouth was set in a grim line. Feed needs, starve desire. Purity is the path to God. Ground to blue sky to houses shrinking into toys, rolling clouds in an otherworldly landscape without love. Happy is the one who dwells in Your House. My mother asked the stewardess for a blanket, but her voice didn’t sound like her voice. She covered her shoulders, closed her eyes.

  Somewhere above the clouds, I reached inside my purse and discovered Rivka’s prayer book, her last, secret gift. I pulled it out in wonder, a collection of supplications in my hand like a cup full of hope. Inside the worn front cover was an inscription in Rivka’s looping Hebrew handwriting: Karov hashem l’chol korav. God is close to those who call upon Him. She signed her name with a circle over the i.

  BOTTLES, DISHES, empty cans on the counter. Dust balls in corners. Nothing had changed. Newspapers, canvases, mail, clothes, plants, everywhere. Fleas in the carpets. Roaches climbing walls. Mom’s television, on since I’d left. Daddy floating through aimless, head down, a grim ghost. My mother had mustered the energy to come and get me, then climbed back into bed. In the middle of the night, I heard Amy come in the front door and slip into her room.

  I stayed in Ana’s skirt. The cello in the corner zipped into its canvas case seemed like a relic from someone else’s past. Carole King at the piano was still on the wall, still singing, beside a yellowed newspaper clipping I had once tacked up, an editorial from New Year’s Day, 1970. We’ve lost our innocence, it said, and learned to question.

  At night, from my room down the hall, I heard my mother reading my Condensed Code of Jewish Law out loud to my father. “‘A Jew is not allowed to resemble idolaters, even in regard to shoelaces,’” she read. “This stuff is so isolationist, so primitive!” She sobbed. “They won’t let her follow fashion. She can’t go to restaurants or movies or watch television or read a book, or even date!”

  “Rita,” my father said.

  “Look at this. They even tell her how to tie her shoes. She’s brainwashed!”

  My mother’s sobbing became a flow of uncertainty that ran cold through my veins. I turned this way and that on the bed. I wanted to rush to her and hold her, promise her anything, everything. Then I got up. Carefully, I set out the plastic basin at my bedside and set a full cup of water in it for morning hand washing. I climbed back into bed and whispered the hamapil prayer before sleep, syllables slow and exacting. The memory of a sea of female whispers bolstered my prayer, Rabbi Geller and Isser standing with haughty approval and folded arms. You cause the bonds of sleep to fall on my eyes. By command of the Law, I lay down on my left side, muted until morning by the final prayer.

  But in my mind the whispering continued:

  Here are the lines.

  Here are the walls.

  This is how a woman walks. This is how one labeled Woman walks.

  This is how a woman dresses. This is how A Woman dresses.

  This is how she sits, how she sits.

  And how she sings and does not sing.

  This is how a woman prays. This is how A Woman prays.

  This is how a woman, even A Woman, gets to God.

  I slipped into dreams of Isser caped like a savior surrounded by clamoring girls, but strangely, he wore red and black and seemed devilish. I woke still in Ana’s skirt, woke to keen regret and the sour taste of having hurt my mother. I carefully spilled the water I had prepared over my hands into the basin—right, left, right, left—cold wet shock of morning. I put on first my right shoe, then the left, to evoke God’s kindness, rather than His judgment. I give thanks before You O King who lives forever. You have returned my soul to me. Great is your faithfulness.

  Another day not long after, I unzipped an old suitcase and folded in my one skirt, the red paisley granny, and Ana’s navy wool, three long-sleeved tops and six pairs of panty hose. I looked up as Amy passed my open door. Underwear, bras, a long-sleeved nightgown, The Condensed Code of Jewish Law retrieved from my mother’s nightstand. Her television was still flickering down the hall. I closed the suitcase, pulled it to the floor. My purse hung at my hip. I put Rivka’s prayer book into it. From the kitchen counter, I took what was left of my loaf of bread from the kosher bakery and slipped that in, too.

  There at the kitchen counter, among stacks of empty cans, unopened boxes of new plates and glasses, piles of mail and magazines, my mother’s pill bottles stood off in one section, a forest of amber sleeves, all filled or once filled with vitamins and with Valium and Darvon—two of my first spelling words. I pictured myself at five, pushing up a chair to this counter and climbing up; she’d left the bottle tops loose so I co
uld count out her pills for her. Another chair at the sink to fill a cup with water, and I brought her the fistful, balancing the full cup like a prize and careful not to spill. She sighed as she swallowed, and clumsily handed back the cup.

  At the entry to our house, I caught one last note of my father’s grinding teeth, a low A flat.

  I left my cello behind. I left my immodest clothing—shorts and pants and short-sleeved tops—plus books I had read through my childhood and beyond: Charlotte’s Web, Harriet the Spy, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, Catch-22. I left my posters—Carole King would never finish that song. I left my sister. I left my childhood. I left the dolls on my shelves that I never did know how to play with, and the piggy banks I never managed to fill. I left unwashed clothes over the desk chair and a scattering of university catalogs on the floor. I left my mother. I left my father. I left my signature red overalls. I left, on the nightstand, a wrinkled, folded brochure for the Beis Chana Lubavitch Women’s Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota. I left my non-Jewish friends and most of my dreams. I left Our Bodies, Ourselves. I left the bed unmade.

  Amy was a young teen, but to me she was a little girl standing very still, blank face, nose pressed to the window, watching as I walked away.

  The sun was blinding in a hard blue sky. I headed to the bus stop, intending to wait until I found a bus going in the right direction. I would go on to North Texas State, take its scholarship and live off of that. I got to the sidewalk before I remembered, then trotted back up the drive and back to my room. This time, I took the cello with me. Suitcase and cello in either hand, bread and prayer book in my purse, Lisa/Leah walked away. I took care to shut the door behind me.