by Leah Lax
A single, communal Group Voice becomes part of me, the voice of judgment and conformity, voice of Law. My own voice melds into it. The community becomes my world. The rest of humanity recedes, glimpsed sideways in the grocery store or at the mall, as I hurry past.
A GREEN CLOTH IS DRAPED over my knees and the office air conditioning is set too low, the air tinged with the smell of alcohol. Dr. Borowitz’s smiling face hovers above the green, a sentinel nurse at his side. It’s been months since I threw away the diaphragm. “I suggest a pregnancy test,” the doctor says, “just to be sure.”
Floating now, stumbling out of the office, squinting at sunlight, almost unable to open the glass and metal door for weak knees and shaking hands, I am full of silent shouts and laughter. Forget the memory of my infant sister crying in her bed, forget the visceral shock of seeing hugely pregnant Frimmy in Minnesota. Forget the freedom time with the diaphragm. I’ve been empty too long, with no goals or purpose, save the Rebbe’s words of you will build an everlasting edifice and his catching me with his piercing gaze. My life has changed in a moment. We will make our home and family everything mine wasn’t. We are creating the world.
I smooth the skirt, check the wig. Then I head across the baking parking lot. It is immodest to speak about one’s body—the pregnancy will have to announce itself. The cicadas buzz in low-hanging trees over the lot, deafening, a flock of grackles pecking at the ground beneath them, and as I approach our old Dodge, a police car passes with siren blaring. I fumble for the keys, and the flock rises and caws, flapping sloppy black against a painfully brilliant sky. The world is a welter of sound, but for me, this is a wondrous day of hushed female Hasidic joy.
Shortly after, Mrs. Frumen asks me to teach religion in the new school. Through the coming months, I will have a purpose, a grateful mission, infusing my empty days.
A SCHOOL BELL RINGS, and my troupe of impossibly small, perfect six-and seven-year-old students tumbles into the classroom, sweaty and rumpled and fresh from the playground. The girls are in long skirts and tights, the boys in yarmulkas painted with slogans or Hebrew names: CAMP GARDEN OF ISRAEL. YEHUDAH LEIB. MENACHEM ARYE. WE WANT THE MESSIAH NOW! The boys have shorn heads with extra dabs of hair left to hang over their sideburns. The children put their backpacks and sweaters on assigned hooks and take their seats.
Religious studies—prayer, Bible, Law—fill the first half of their day. All of it involves learning to read Hebrew in two different alphabets and writing it in a third. Eventually, they will add Aramaic and Yiddish. I spend twenty hours a week teaching these children beginning Bible studies. In Hebrew. My job as a first-grade teacher, besides beginning their Jewish literacy, is to mold them into little Hasidim, snip away their wildness, arguments, questions, and make them love holy study. Knowledge brings obedience. Knowledge compels. I quickly write out the day’s vocabulary on the board in large block Hebrew letters, from the first lines of the Bible: shamayim, eretz, ruach, elokim. Heaven, Earth, Spirit, God. Yehudah is class monitor and hands out the prayer books while the others talk and laugh. “Morah Leah!” one of the children calls. That’s my name—Teacher Leah. I turn just as Mrs. Frumen appears in the doorway.
The children instantly sit up and fold their hands. I tuck in a stray wisp of hair. With pursed lips, Mrs. Frumen strides over to the board, takes a piece of chalk, and corrects my spelling. “There’s no vav in that word,” she says. When she leaves, I glower at the door. Then the children launch into their singsong march through morning prayers. They sing as if loudness constitutes enthusiasm. Adon olam! O Master of the World! He is King, his name proclaimed! Some hunch over and peer at their books as they sing, like little old people, little fingertips on each syllable. I require them to read as they sing, even though they’ve memorized the words. I walk through the class, gently correcting the placement of a finger and redirecting wandering eyes. Eitan throws a sly grin at Yuval, who good-naturedly kicks him across the aisle. Then the two notice me and shrink back into singing. Ash rei yosh vei vay se cha.
I love my classroom. It’s an enclave, a magic space. I love the giant colored Hebrew letters and colorful prayer posters, love the job lists on the walls, the name tags in bright block letters under each coat hook, the labeled shelves, the neat lines of books. Order is holiness. This orderly space devoted to God is just like the home I want to make for our children. Baruch sheamar, the children sing. God spoke, and the world came to be. The students are vulnerable, willing, small. Each day, I offer them this magic place devoid of irony and doubt, where each can easily believe with holy innocence that God made the world in six days, that the snake stood up on legs and spoke to Eve, that Moses climbed into heaven and carved God’s commandments into a block of sapphire. In this classroom, faith is normal, attainable. I want to build this faith into their makeup so they won’t face the same conflicts with self, with desire, that I have.
Every day, I give out awards, sweets, ribbons, stickers. All of them are for obedience and skill mastery. There are no awards here for creative thinking, initiative, or leadership.
We teach the children exactly what to think. At times, I give them logical word puzzles to develop thinking skills, but the solutions all draw the same conclusions about God and Torah.
Train for obedience. Fill their minds with foregone conclusions. It is not that I fail to realize that what I am doing is more like indoctrinating than educating. It’s that the very idea of indoctrination has lost any dark tinge and has become a proud goal. I am training the ranks of soldiers for God.
And soon to bear another. I told Levi that same evening, with a simple, quiet statement over dinner. “I’m pregnant.” Levi stopped the fork halfway to his mouth and blinked. I wanted to throw my arms around his neck, but he drew into himself as if he had to muster something. Resolve. Then his face softened. “Baruch hashem,” he said, with the small beginning of a smile. Bless God. I saw fear in his eyes. Since then, Levi has doubled his efforts to pray more, study more, earn more, be a more obedient Hasid, hoping to earn merit for his children from on high. This, I will come to understand, is his form of love for them.
My students bring their singsong to a close. Today is an auspicious day. The children are to receive their first primers in Bible study. We’ve been preparing for this. They’ve learned to translate the first line. They’ve learned a new song. Tov, tov, lilmod Torah, they sing with me, because here, for the sake of educating children, behind closed door, here I can sing. It is good, so very good, to study the Torah. Even little Eitan sings, his body lifting with the song. As they sing, I remember my own introduction to study, Seema showing me the world of Law flowing from a web of commentaries, Rabbi Rakovsky describing mystical worlds, and I lift my arms, and the children rise, still singing. Torah, our precious Torah! I give out the primers into eager hands. They have made book covers decorated with crayons and glitter and glue. I help each one to slip his or her new book into the cover. One by one, I write their Hebrew names on the front with a thick marker, the name of their Jewish soul. Naomi Devorah. Yehudah Leib. Eventually, I glance up to see that Mrs. Frumen has come back into the room. She is standing near the door to witness this initiation, her arms folded across her chest. She smiles.
MARCH 14, 1979. In labor, near dawn, I’m in our Dodge Dart in a back parking lot behind Three Brothers Bakery. We were on our way to the hospital, but Levi turns on the oven here every Wednesday morning so that the kosher breads and challahs this bakery produces can be labeled “bread baked by a Jew.” According to the Law, “baked by a Jew” means bread commercially baked by a man who adheres to Jewish Law and has never violated the Sabbath. Or, if the real bakers, like those at Three Brothers Bakery, are clean-shaven and their heads are uncovered (or are not even Jewish), then “baked by a Jew” means bread for which a proper Orthodox Jewish man with a beard who keeps the Sabbath came for a minute to ceremoniously turn off and then reignite the giant commercial oven with its rotating floors, even if, in his home, he considers baking a woma
n’s task. Never mind. Levi does this as a service to the community, a religious obligation.
So I wait. Close my eyes. I have to breathe very slowly. There’s a rippling sense, a gradual tightening through my body, that weakens me. But here’s Levi’s face in the driver’s-side window, hat on the back of his head, creased forehead and worried eyes. In a moment, we’re moving. I’m being carried in the car out onto empty streets and up the hill as the sun rises. We have to cross the train tracks to get to the hospital. Another liquid ripple, but this one turns into pain and my head falls back and to the side; my mouth hangs open. The scarf shifts sideways. I groan. Levi stops the car at the crest of the hill. There are flashing lights, a train horn, red-and-white barrier arms going down. Twenty minutes pass while a chugging train crawls across our view. Or is it twenty years? Another pain, and another, easier this time. Levi tries to chat. I try to laugh.
Endure. But every day I endure: loneliness and embarrassing erotic dreams that wake me in the night, a muted cello song, muffled memories like muffled voices trying to push me off my stubborn path for God. What should be different now? In a delivery room at Sharpstown General, the cold metal stirrups are too high for my short frame. Somewhere far away a woman is shouting. A nurse ties down my hands. In the background beyond the waves is Levi’s furious whispering of psalms, like whistling rockets to God.
A nurse switches my wig for a green surgical cap, takes away my glasses, and drapes my thighs. If I open my eyes I will see only pain, yellow, red, black, in rhythmic waves. I am breath and counting, expectation, the hit, white heat, and more breath. Then again. And again, until there’s a growl somewhere I don’t recognize, but it’s me, and then power I didn’t know I had pushes the baby out in an animal surge, a bumping rush.
Quiet, a blanket over murmurs, rustling attendants, clinking equipment, the air cold on my bare, wet skin. I turn to Levi for grateful eye contact at the baby’s pristine cry of arrival. A voice says, “It’s a boy.”
“Where are my glasses?” I say. Then there’s a doll bundle in a nurse’s arms beside me. My hands are still tied down.
First comes protest. How can tiny you be all the way over there in their warming box when you belong under my heart? Then wonder: When they release my hands, I get to hold you. And I do. Dot round fingertips. Skin a whisper. Hair like down. Your tiny wrinkled brow. In a single leap, the yearning for love and home that I had focused on Levi shifts onto helpless you. The Rebbe didn’t promise I would have a home, or find one, I think. He said to build a home. I picture our sterile little apartment, a box without a dream. I press you to me and pour in silent promises. You are the dream, and there’s a mental rolling-up of sleeves. I will work to make anywhere we are a home where you can thrive. You find my face. We lock eyes and I pour in gold—something new to me, its root a new love that overtakes everything. I will never leave you.
WITHIN A FEW DAYS, I am drained by his cries. I wait for Levi to come home the day of the baby’s first bath. “I can’t do it alone,” I say. “I’m kind of scared.” But when I fill the little tub, Levi backs up wide-eyed against the wall. So I bathe the baby alone while he flails and cries. At night, Levi covers his head through the crying. “I’ll never be able to work tomorrow,” he says. “If I lose my job, how will we eat?” But when I hold you, son, well, you change. You are change, your newborn frown already smoothed on your forehead. And now you have cheeks! As you slip back to sleep in my arms, one drop of breast milk hangs on at the corner of your mouth, at dawn.
Eight days later, we are getting ready to bring our as-yet-unnamed son to the synagogue for the bris circumcision. Levi’s parents are on their way from the hotel. In the bathroom, I slip into my dress, put on the wig, and examine myself in the mirror. Before me I find a shapeless almost-woman, sexless, but something new and fierce sparks her face, a new purpose. I will shield my son. I will grow him and nurture him and guarantee him an easy path without danger or wandering or loneliness. Without uncertainty, or doubts. Our life will give him God.
I pull off the wig, untie my hair from its awkward twist, and shake it out—my tiny hidden difference. This is for you, son. I will give you a home that is an enclave without shadows, where you will feel certain Moses climbed into heaven and carved God’s Word into sapphire, certain your world is a good safe place ordered by our Law. I take out a pair of scissors and grab a thick strand. The hair comes away in jagged chunks. Out in the room, the baby begins to cry. His sound becomes a backdrop to this work, through the locked door. I drop the sheared strands in the sink, where they gather, curled, like a stunned animal. Then I take out the electric clippers I use to cut Levi’s hair, bend over, and run the buzz over my scalp until my head is stubble. I leave one long piece of hair at either temple that I can tuck behind my ears.
The shapeless postbaby woman that is me looks like a small, drooping man with sidelocks, but missing his yarmulka. He is a man who is a woman. A woman who is a man. Now the wig will fit, secure, no offending bump. I just won’t look at myself in the mirror without the wig. I don’t have to look. I slip on stockings and a dress. The wig slides easily over my head. It is time to leave for the ceremony.
At the synagogue, his father at his side, Levi is triumphant as he carries his son on a white lace pillow into the sanctuary. He is met with cries of “mazel tov” from the men, clapping, and song. The entire community has turned out to receive this newest member. This circumcision is our son’s spiritual birthing as a Jew. Here in the synagogue, it is Levi who has born him, Levi who bears him into the sanctuary and the community. I have done the lesser part. I watch through the partition, hidden away with Ruth, Levi’s mother. When the mohel makes his tiny, swift cut to remove the foreskin, when he sings out the blessing bestowing a name above our son’s squall and the congregation’s welcoming cries, a Jewish soul descends from God and enters the child along with his new name, the name of his soul: Leib, son of Levi.
Leib was the Hebrew name of Levi’s lost brother. When Ruth hears, she bursts into tears. Mrs. Frumen looks shaken. She leans over and whispers, “Don’t you know you are inviting an evil eye by naming a child after someone who died tragically?”
Maybe, I think later, rather than my long hair, this naming is our little rebellion, because we knew Hasidic fears about such things when we chose the name, but we chose it anyway. Right after Leib was born, all it took was a mutual nod and a blurting out of the same name from both of us at the same time to know that this tribute was more important to us even than the community and their opinions. In this inadvertent way we unwittingly hand down tacit permission to our son to depart from Hasidic demands when the need to be human is more pressing.
Within a few months, we assess our future in a small apartment when we don’t use birth control and conclude we need a house. The new place is small but solid, with a big yard where the children will run and play. Signing the mortgage is a great thrill. This will be our nurturing family place that mommy me will make into our home. We have come home.
Twelve
No!” I’m shouting, sobbing. Two year-old Leibl jumps, startled. Daughter Libby, now seven months, puckers her face into a frown. With teaching, the children, the house, cooking, getting up nights with babies, every week stuffed into six days as everything stops for the Sabbath, and Leibl seems to need too much, I don’t get a minute. Days are a treadmill, nights peppered with cries while Levi sleeps. I do it all alone. “You can’t just come home and disappear!” I say.
It is Sunday—for us, a weekday—and Levi is off from work, the daily newspaper, his privileged indulgence, rolled up under his arm, a steaming mug of coffee in his hand. In our family room there’s an old sofa, my childhood piano, and not much else. Leibl is playing on the carpet with his toys around him; Libby is on her back, chewing a teething ring. A sliding glass door opens out onto the broad, empty lawn. Levi has just gotten back from morning prayers. He was heading straight to the dining room to read the paper and then spend the morning studying his daily Bi
ble portion. “Leah,” Levi says. He looks helpless.
“You’re never home, even when you are. You don’t help with the children. And all day, every day you hold a money shadow over us.” Not enough, he says. Notenoughnotenoughnotenough. “You leave for work all tense and don’t even say goodbye.”
Levi looks longingly toward the dining table and books. He sighs.
“You come home the same way, so intent on your own stuff that Leibl’s learned to be afraid of setting you off.” It’s true. When Levi walks in the door, his face is lined, stoic through back pain he refuses to address, and launches into his second job doing private accounting. “You yell if I ask anything of you!” I say.
“I’m doing my job,” he says. “I can’t do any more than I’m doing.”
“You don’t even speak to me! Or touch the children.” Or wash his dishes or pick up his socks. When he’s not working, he hides in his prayer book and holy books. Falls into bed in the middle of the night to start again in the morning. “You don’t hold me!” Monthly obedient sex after mikvah doesn’t count.
Leibl runs out of the room.
“But …,” Levi says.
“But?” I say.
But shame is already on the horizon. This is my job description—to be this kind of woman so he can be the Man. I try to hold on to my anger, but it feels as if I’m challenging God.
Levi insists I continue teaching because we need the money, but the school pays female teachers much less than it pays men, and almost all of what I earn goes to the babysitter. When I get home there is dinner to cook, the children to feed and bathe and get into bed. Libby has already rejected my breast; I wonder every day when I’ll be pregnant again. There are no kosher restaurants in Houston—no break from the cooking. I know all of the checkers in the grocery store by name. With the children, my shopping and cooking for the Sabbath takes all of Thursday afternoon and most of Friday. I think, How is it that this life of the spirit is so utterly physical? Notenoughnotenoughnotenough.
