by Leah Lax
It seems each fall backward is a fall into memory, each return upright a return to now. When she tips forward, it is a dip into her future, giving her one tiny glimpse of her imagined life that will be mine, if she will just keep looking and hold on. At that farthest-forward point just past balance, she grins a near-wild grin.
I remember the thrill of that dizzying pause at the endpoint just before the reluctant pull upright back to life as it is. I was so sure then that I knew my horse. I knew its music, knew imagined life more than the real one.
Inside the house, in the darkened entry, the ghost of my child self has slipped in ahead. She sits down at the dusty old piano in the front room, opens the top, adjusts a student piano book, and slowly picks out “Three Blind Mice” in a confusing round. And here’s Pinkie, beloved housekeeper, with her hand on the girl’s shoulder, listening to her failed efforts, encouragement and warmth flowing through that hand, just before she leaves we three blind children.
But the girl abandons the tune in the middle. She is frowning, heading into the dark hallway. She is already beset with a terrible tenderness for her mother. Already she’s learning to try not to feel, because the world of feeling belongs to her mother. Already she wants to run to her mother and away from her at the same time. I wish I could remember my mother holding me. I shake my head to make the ghost child disappear.
The place feels discarded, but, strangely, most of the piles are gone. There’s a noise from the back room. “Mom?” I call out, and instantly hate the plaintive sound in my voice. “Mom?”
Down the hall. Push open the door. I find her in bed. A great grief is shaking her. She’s in full-body despair, sobbing, her sheets and blankets mounded around her like lonely hills. She sees me and reaches.
“Mom?” I say. “What is it?”
“I’m alone,” she sobs. It isn’t right that she should have to be alone.
I go to her. She grabs me and cries against me, her cheek against my stomach. “Lisa,” she cries. “Lisa!” I am completely unable either to touch her or to move away, stuck in a dreadful need to move both forward and backward at the same time. I want to cradle her in my arms, give to her everything I ever needed from her, and also fling her away and run.
And I can’t leave. I mumble something hopelessly awkward and ineffective. “It’s okay,” I say. I touch her shoulder with the fingertips of one hand.
She clings, sobs.
“Don’t cry,” I say. “Don’t cry.”
She is smearing my dress with tears and snot. “Lisa!” she says.
But I’m not Lisa. Not anymore. I can’t do this.
I pull away with a jerk and put up my hands in surrender. I back up. “No,” I say. “I can’t. No. I’m sorry. No.”
I turn and run.
I back the car out of the driveway peeling rubber, as if pursued by a ghost, as if I can get away. The snot will wash out, but before I get back to Levi, my mother’s tears have seeped through the dress and through my skin and lodged there inside. They become a phantom pain that won’t leave. Lisa!
BACK IN AUSTIN, Mr. Paul Olefsky’s music studio is covered floor to ceiling with shelves of music books and the floor space is taken up by a baby grand, two cello cases, three chairs, and four music stands. And Mr. Olefsky, short and gruff, with a solid wide-foot stance and a face like a bulldog’s. I still do not know that he studied with Piatigorsky and Casals, soloed with Eugene Ormandy and in Carnegie Hall, or that his students are spreading across the country as concert cellists, orchestra principals, music professors. To me, he is just Mr. Olefsky. He has just stopped the ticking metronome, and I am breathing hard, bow in hand, cello neck against my shoulder.
I graduated last December. I didn’t go to the ceremony, made no announcement save a single call to my mother to collect her distracted, tepid congratulations. My university studies have been reduced to one corner section of books on a bottom shelf of the brick-and-board bookcase in Levi’s office—art history books, artists’ anatomy, history, English literature, my diploma barely examined, then stuffed in a file drawer, life-drawing sketches rolled in a tube in the corner. I found a secretarial job in the engineering department to support us while Levi finishes school; I can’t even imagine pursuing my own career. But I enrolled as a postbaccalaureate just to continue studying cello. I hold on to this one thing. I’ve been working with Mr. Olefsky for two years now. Conversations between us are rare. It’s all music in here.
You know,” he says. “I’d like to see you audition for the Austin Symphony.”
I look at him, puzzled. “What?” I say.
“You could get in. It would be a good experience,” he says.
I know, from high school, what it is to play in an orchestra, my bow hand moving as if tied to the baton. I remember what it is to become a part of that musical machine, all with the same downbeat, the same pulse, the same centered immersion in driven sound. We went to the Austin symphony last Saturday night. Levi wore a jacket over his jeans. On the stage, the men were imperial in their tuxedos, the women in black chiffon pants. They played Sibelius. The Enchanter. I try to imagine myself part of that, cello between my chiffon-covered knees.
Pants. The women wore pants. And they play on the Sabbath. The realization hits. I shake my head.
“Why not?” Mr. Olefsky says. “I know some of the music will be difficult—you’ll begin at the back of the cello section—but I think you can do this.”
“I can’t,” I say, still shaking my head.
My teacher raises his voice. “You can do this,” he says.
I finger my wedding ring. I signed a different kind of contract. “You don’t understand,” I say. Music carries me away. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. “No,” I say. “No.”
A week later, Tuesday at three, Mr. Olefsky steps outside his studio in the music building and peers down the hall, then looks at his watch. At home in my room, I have scattered dog-eared pages of sheet music and exercise books full of pencil markings in my teacher’s angular handwriting on the bed around me. I’ve been reading and “listening” to the music. I get up and take the bow out of the cello case, turn the octagonal metal knob at the end, and loosen the horsehair until it goes flaccid. I collect the music from the bed, push it all into the outer bag of the cello case, and zip it closed. Then I open up the case and take out the cello.
I lay the cello across my lap, sitting in the chair beside the bed. The scroll is nestled into the crook of my arm. I lean forward. My body becomes a canopy over the open, vibrant middle. I close my eyes and lower my forehead, then run my fingers around the long, rounded rib, cool and smooth and polished, in at the waist, around the hip. Years of music: Vivaldi and Bach, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Brahms, van Goens, Weber, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—all those voices at once, clashing, against a rising orchestra and the steady tock of a metronome. Again, Mr. Olefsky snaps. Again. No one has told me to do this, not Levi, not a rav. No one has to.
I sit up. I turn a peg at the top of the cello’s long, smooth neck and loosen the growling C to silence. I do the same to the peg for the sonorous G; the warm, liquid D; and the tenor A, which has allowed me to climb into rarefied air, until all are drained of their cries and shouts and distracting songs. Then I just sit, hand on burnished warmth. A car passes. The clock ticks. Too-long moments empty of music. I get up, heavy, slip the cello into the case and zip it closed. I wedge the case into the back of the closet behind a hanging line of Hasidic skirts.
Mr. Olefsky looks down the hall and then at his watch. Scratches his head. He goes back into the studio, packs up his briefcase, and leaves.
I never see him again.
BABIES. Babies in the grocery store, in the drugstore, in strollers on the street. Babies at the breast, on benches on campus, in advertisements and on covers of magazines at the checkout stand. Cute babies, ugly babies, babies bright and dull, drooling, sleeping, cuddling, cooing, screaming babies. This single creative outlet left me as a Hasidic woman is an invitation, a nob
le title, a purpose, a future, my one open realm of possibility. No career, no music, no friends left, without a baby what is my marriage, what is my life, what is left for me, what have I done? Fear of pregnancy melts away, revealing a hollow place from which all the dreams have fled. I want a solid, sleeping baby right there, warm, soft, and pliant, filling the vacuum. One morning I put my scarved head down on the table and refuse to move. Home, work, work, home—it all feels colorless, two-dimensional. “I’m tired,” I say to Levi. “So tired.”
In the afternoon that same day, a pimply high school delivery boy knocks on our door with a single red rose in a bud vase. “Cheer up,” Levi’s note says. “I love you.”
I take his note as a promise of something in the future—he will love me—but then I rise to that. I can live for promises. I pull myself up from the table. We live for tomorrow. God will love me for following the Law. The Messiah will come, and our struggles will melt away. Levi promises he will love me. It will all come. I march off to cook for the Sabbath.
Over the following week, the rose petals dry and shrivel and darken. One by one they drop, brittle red and black, from the cheap white vase onto the polished table.
ANOTHER MORNING, Levi skips down the concrete steps from our apartment balcony down to the parking lot and off to classes and teaching. His steps clatter and disappear. Only then do I head down the stairs myself and out to the back lot, where there’s a blue steel Dumpster beneath the fig tree. I have the yellow plastic case with the diaphragm in it in my pocket. I am grateful for the year with this diaphragm, for teaching me my body’s secret folds and caverns.
The sky is Texas clear, the sun small and intense, no escape, no shadows, a hard glint on the rusted Dumpster edge. I take the plastic case, shield my eyes as I look up, draw my hand back, and throw the case high up over the edge. The yellow case flies high upward in a tumbling arc and then down, followed by the small sound of an invisible landing. There’s nothing left to me now. Just that last flash of yellow and the glint of sunlight.
MONTHS LATER, Levi peers into the bathroom mirror in his suit pants and undershirt with the door open. He leans in close, pushing his cheek out with his tongue forming a bulge, and plucks hairs with a pair of tweezers, neatening the beard line without using a forbidden razor. He takes his long, thin beard and twists it until it is a coiled rope, then twists the rope onto itself until it is a tightly coiled ball, which he tucks deep into the hair under his chin. The effect is the appearance of a short, trimmed beard and clean face. He dons the rest of his one suit, three-piece brown, and a new tie, and then switches his big, bowl-like black yarmulka for a small black leather one in the hope that it will be less obtrusive. He’s going to the university employment office. He puts a copy of his résumé into his satchel. His father has been fretting over the phone that Levi won’t find a job with his beard and a yarmulka. “Don’t listen,” I tell him. “Don’t think about that.”
“How do I look?” Levi says.
“Like you’re going to get a job,” I say. “Your resumé is stellar. How many interviews today?”
“Four,” he says.
At the end of the day, Levi comes back dejected. I set the table, lay out food. “They see the résumé and give me interviews,” he says, “but when I get there, I see how they look at me.”
“Why do they treat us like aliens?” I say.
He shakes his head.
“How many more interviews tomorrow?”
“Two.”
“Look,” I say. “We’re gonna have to be practical here.”
“I won’t—”
“It’s not so outrageous,” I say. “Just trim it. Just for now. And maybe leave the yarmulka off for the interviews.”
Levi rises a little from his seat. His face and voice fill with disdain. “What? Of course not,” he says.
It takes so little, living in the Law, to feel ashamed. That enormous set of demands stands before me every morning, impossible to fully satisfy, so that each day brings its failures. Here is today’s: lacking trust in God’s care for the faithful.
I am weak and Levi is strong. A soldier doesn’t wear his uniform. He is his uniform. That’s what a Hasid is, a faceless soldier for God. Never mind the jeans; beneath the beard, Levi is still a faceless soldier. Head down, I leave the room and go into the bedroom. As I pass the mirror over the dresser, my own face, stubbornly, is still there.
Eleven
Tropical, coastal Houston. After Levi looked for a job for nine months, his father made a few phone calls and now Levi has a new job in Houston, as a systems analyst writing computer programs. It’s far below his qualifications, but it’s a job. We joined Rabbi Frumen’s small but growing Hasidic community in southwest Houston. It’s steamy late August, temperatures in the high nineties, humidity above 90 percent, but every Sabbath, the people in our new community walk from their homes to the synagogue. Most of us are new acolytes, but some of the men walk in the long black Sabbath coat, like Levi, even in Houston heat.
There’s only one other couple beside the Frumens who were raised as Hasidim and grew up in yeshivas—the Zalmanovs—and both families are like royalty among us. They can move with ease through our difficult texts, speak with nonchalance about complexities in the Law, chat with one another in Yiddish and Hebrew, while the rest of us look on with jealous pride like adoring children and try to emulate them. Of the rest of us, only two of the couples are Texans—Levi and I, and a pair of successful local professionals whom Rabbi Frumen managed to recruit to help support the cause. The Yoffes and Bardans are from Israel, the Weissbergs and Basels from South Africa, the Seligsons from South America, descended from European refugees. The Gorodetskis and Epsteins are from the USSR. All of us are young, idealistic, college educated, all new to the cause. And all of us are new to Houston, unmoored here without family or an established network of friends.
Years from now I will remember how the immigrant couples in the Group had a pioneering spirit about them that made them willing to listen to an outsider rabbi with a forceful manner, outrageous beard, and disarming smile, and it will seem as if every one of my new group backed into Hasidic life almost accidentally precisely because of their independent thinking when they were young. I will imagine that most our group also originally wanted to pluck the beauty and spirituality out of Hasidic teaching without sacrificing their free will. I will remember watching how a deeper pull overtook each of them, and how the community cocooned around each of us, offering much-needed “family.” With telephones otherwise silent as newcomers in a new city, kind new friends called daily to come to prayer services and listen to emotional, inspiring lectures that at the same time were so complex a newcomer couldn’t possibly understand enough to question. Once abstractions and logic were unraveled, the ego wanted to embrace what it had struggled to understand, as I had once done at Rabbi Rakovsky’s table. And so, gradually, they all did.
LEVI AND I JOIN the budding new community. Before that new group of eyes, he packs away his jeans and classical-music records and leaves his stereo silent. I don’t cut my hair, can’t seem to, but I tie it up and hide it beneath the scarf, not even the old strip peeking out in front. And even though some of the other women have yet to begin covering their hair at all, I wear the wig outside the house every day, because that is proper. I am ahead of most of them in this game, and I aim for the top, with Mrs. Frumen as my role model. Soon enough, the others will comply. But the knot of long hair beneath my wig makes an awkward lump of protest.
Our community continues to grow, often attracting immigrants. At gatherings, newcomers eye one another, eye each other’s children, and squirm in their differences. But the children find friends, pulling their parents in. Families gradually conform, and as they do insecurity in the new place or new country is replaced with an anchor of group faith and belonging, the reassuring strength of standing shoulder to shoulder, voices in unison.
Levi spends long hours at work. Then, at home, he says he can’t get to
sleep if we sleep together. The bed is too narrow, he can’t afford to go sleepless into busy days, we have no money to buy a bigger bed, and besides (trump card), it is the way of rebbes and their wives to sleep in separate beds even after mikvah.
So escape from loneliness must be the opposite of holiness.
One night I dream I am a child. I wander into a room with a large mirror set low enough that I can look into it on tiptoe, and I do, with a child’s guilelessness. But there’s no image in the mirror. I have lost my face. I have no image.
We store our secular books away and line our apartment with Hebrew and Yiddish books, wishing that we could read them, and invite our new friends over. With Levi working fourteen-hour days, no novels, art, or varieties of music, no secular studies of my own, no television, no hoped-for pregnancy, no classes to attend or cello to practice or job to go to, I find my days as silent and empty as our apartment. We go to the synagogue on the Sabbath, but in spite of the varied and interesting backgrounds, the women seem all the same. They imitate one another, everyone demonstrating her piety, trying to conform.
Well, so do I. But I am unsure how to share my heart, and no one offers his or hers. In our world of conformity, no one dares confide. I go obediently to women’s study groups, and to gatherings where we work together to prepare food for community celebrations. We laugh and talk about cooking or shopping and little more. I am getting to know the women without really knowing any of them, and they are the same with me. Unlike with any clutch of female friends I’ve had before this, we don’t trust one another with secrets and allow only rare, tiny hints about worries or needs. We express piety to one another but never dissent, never imply that the Law imposes undue restrictions, express no resentments about ritual obligations or feminine burdens. We hide any struggles with faith. Which means that we talk about husbands and children, not about ourselves. We live together in the same web but with few lines binding us to one another. Put a fence around the Torah, the Law says. We put fences around our hearts.
