Uncovered

by Leah Lax

  Levi opens the sliding glass door to examine the mechanism that fits it into its track. He pulls. It drags and makes a noise. He looks quizzical, absorbed.

  “Look at me,” I sob. I take my glasses off and throw them at him, but I throw wide and they hit the wood frame of the sofa.

  The pieces fly. Levi becomes a blur, his blurred hand moving the blurred door; his blurred face with no expression.

  I’ll make it on my own. I’ll take the kids, go back to Dallas, get my mother to help. I’ll find a job, anything, it doesn’t matter. But I’m afraid. Anything would be better than to live with this obsessed stranger who pours his money fears all over us, to live with endless work labeled Women’s Work so that he doesn’t help, and never a hug or a kind word. But I don’t reach for him, either. It’s so much lonelier to live with a stranger than to live alone. Aren’t our problems my fault? And then there’s this: I’ve never supported myself before, never lived as an adult in the world. Out There.

  For days I run circles in my head. I’ll do this, leave. I can. But live with my mother? Then I realize—the secular world looms too big, too threatening. I look different, don’t know my way as an adult outside the Hasidic community. I no longer speak the language. I don’t even own a car, don’t know how to sign a lease or get insurance.

  I promised my children God. I promised them security and peace. Leaving is failing them, as if I lied. I’m afraid to stay but afraid to leave.

  Days later, I am still whirling. One day after I get back from teaching, Leibl and Libby are napping when the phone rings. I race to get it in the kitchen, so as not to wake them. It’s Mrs. Frumen. “I’ve been asked to speak at the midwinter Nshei Chabad convention,” she says.

  “And that is?” I say. I don’t know why she is calling to tell me this.

  “An international convention for Lubavitch women,” she says. “It’s huge.”

  “Well … congratulations,” I say.

  “My husband and I have chosen you as the delegate from Houston. The synagogue will sponsor you to come with me.”

  Has she caught me out as a rebel? Is that why she’s singled me out? Does it show? Is she trying to pull me back in? God is calling you back. Let the arms of the Law fold you in.

  I’ll get away for a few days and calm down. I’ll take Libby. Levi will have to take off half of Friday and look after Leibl all weekend, but he can’t argue because the Rebbe has blessed these women’s conventions. This is for God. I take a deep breath and say, “If I bring Libby, could someone there help me find a babysitter?”

  THERE ARE OVER A THOUSAND Hasidic women seated in the huge Chicago banquet hall around dozens of round tables draped in white, every one of the women dressed according to Hasidic dictates. The “girls,” meaning anyone who isn’t yet married, regardless of age, have been relegated to another room and a separate program. In here: a thousand skirts, a thousand wigs. At our table, Mrs. Frumen chats with an old friend. She gave her talk about outreach earlier to a large crowd. “Just plant a seed,” she said, “and the soul will respond.” I sit awkwardly among strangers.

  Our table’s centerpiece contains a plastic doll woman in long sleeves and skirt standing stiffly next to a pair of Sabbath candles half her size. There are also two small, glossed challahs and a miniature calendar to symbolize the formal counting of days before mikvah; the smiling doll woman is beholding the Three Great Commandments for a Jewish Woman.

  A waiter deposits a plate in front of me with chicken, kugel, carrots, and a roll, then does the same for the others. “And I didn’t have to cook it!” one of the women says with a laugh. “You mean I can sit and eat?” another says. I figure there must be between fifty and seventy-five children among the ten women around the table. The others also laugh. They dig in.

  Next to the centerpiece is a can with a slot in the top to slide in coins and bills to fund Lubavitch outreach. Giving money for outreach is even better than giving money for the hungry or the homeless, which feeds only the body, which is temporary. Outreach feeds the soul. One of the women puts in a bill and passes the can around. The hand must be trained to give. Thus exposed, everyone else pulls out purses and fishes for coins and bills.

  “This is Leah, from Houston,” Mrs. Frumen announces. I know she’s showing me off as one of her recruits, her badge of success. Then she leans close to her friend and says something I can’t hear in the noisy room, gesturing at me with her chin. I sit like a gleaming new purchase.

  Soon, plates half empty, a speaker is announced, a rabbi. As the rabbi ascends the podium, the women all stand in a rustling wave of female respect. He looks across the crowd with a wise and serious expression, waiting as we sit back down under that gaze. At our table, Mrs. Frumen’s upright posture and raised eyebrows ostentatiously demonstrate proper respect for a wise man. One by one, others at the table look at her, put down their forks, and sit up at attention. Female humility settles over the room.

  At first, I only half listen. But then, in his German accent, the rabbi mentions mikvah. “Beneath the water in the mikvah,” he says, “is a place of transition between before and after, between this world and the next. A place between time.” And then I am in that momentary breathless place, the blue water, blue tile, blue walls. He says, “A woman hovers under the water like a fetus. There, like a baby, she is pure of sin. She emerges to life renewed, cleansed of the last month. Every month is another chance.”

  Another chance. I should give Levi another chance. Maybe I’m causing his tension. I don’t try, don’t know how, to attract him, how to draw him to me, how to soothe and calm him. I should learn. Why haven’t I? I don’t try to make him aware of himself, as a wife should do, or get him to change. I haven’t done my job.

  The women are applauding. The rabbi descends the dais. Even before he’s gone, the crowd begins to sing a lively, defiant Hasidic melody with a quick and dancing rhythm. A song of outreach. Another chance, I think, and I’m singing, joining my voice to a thousand female voices. Ufaratzta, we sing. We wave our fists in the air against the foreign secular world that is blind to God. We will spread out. East and West and North and South. We will spread out! The melody grows, a thousand strong. I am in a sea of woman, part of one huge, roaring female voice, immersed in a mikvah of song. We rise, and each puts a hand on the shoulder in front of us. We sing. I dance right past the hollow place inside me, past protest and exhaustion. Let me be. I’m carried on those voices, walking, stepping, dancing to the beat that pulses through the room and through my body. The huge room fills with our curling, snaking lines of connected dancing women, waves of bobbing wigs. We sing until we are hoarse, and still we continue singing. Beneath my hand is the humming outline of a woman’s shoulder, but our singing is a bursting forth from mikvah waters. We are renewed. Another chance!

  FIVE MONTHS LATER, long past midnight in our darkened house, Levi is asleep in his bed across the divide. I am pregnant. I lie awake and listen to his even breathing.

  I must try to sleep in this life of mine, which gives even its sleeping hours to God. God writes my nights just as He writes my days: Prepare water next to the bed for morning hand washing. Go to sleep in a separate bed during the menses and for seven days after, or every night forever. Recite the testament to God’s oneness before sleep, the prayer of martyrs, and then the prayer giving one’s soul to God for the night—or for the rest of your life. Sleep in a night scarf and long gown with sleeves and a high neck, even in Texas summer. For health, go to sleep on your left side, wake on the right. Now close your eyes. Picture the Rebbe and meditate on his image. Feel yourself drawn to his holy soul, to assure auspicious dreams. Do not speak until morning. God will write what comes.

  I fall asleep sometime in the early morning, but after a short time I wake in full-scale panic. Choking, heart racing, clock face glowing an ungodly hour. I pant and try to orient myself. Breathe. Slow down. Breathe. Breathe it all in: loneliness, and children’s laughter, their little rebellions and how I love them. Breathe
in the constrictions in my life and the simmering resentments, but it all stacks up inside my chest. My chest burns; my throat is tight. Air whistles through narrowed airways. Doctors don’t know what to do. Asthma medicine does little to open up my life. I exhale, but without release; I have to hold on. One more day. And another. Hold tight. Now try to breathe.

  Much later, I find myself in a bed on top of a woman. She is mute but not still, on her back as my knees straddle her thighs. Oh, but it is astonishing, this exquisite softness, delicate skin of her breast on my tongue, the languid, seductive rub of her limbs on mine. I feel more than see her hands running down my prickling arms and back, the sensation liquid, acute almost to pain. I lose language. Flow forward in a wave. I am the wave.

  I am instinct. I am touch. My arms encircle her as I meld into wet warmth.

  I want.

  I am Want.

  I wake, this time in a sweat, heart pounding again. I lie very still in the dark in my night scarf, in the modest nightgown, the small mound over my stomach, listening to the drum of my heart against my husband’s snore. As the clock face glows in this room of shadows, I wonder, Why do I keep dreaming I’m a man? Because I refuse to admit that I might have been a woman making love to a woman in this, my most erotic of dreams.

  THREE YEARS AND TWO more children later, I am still plagued with asthma, with dreams and sleepless nights, and the space between Levi and me has solidified into routine. One Sabbath, I take the mile-long walk to the synagogue with four-year-old Libby.

  The partition in the synagogue between men and women has a screen at the top through which we can see if we sit close. When Libby and I arrive, we’re happy to get seats in front. Services have already begun. Mendel and baby Avrami are at home with a babysitter. I peer through the partition at Leibl sitting with Levi on the men’s side. Libby picks up a prayer book. She is beginning to sound out Hebrew words. “Sit nicely for thirty minutes,” I tell her, “and then you can go play in the hall with your friends.” She nods, her eyes big and solemn.

  Beneath my best Sabbath dress and new human-hair wig, I am shapeless from pregnancies and my head nearly shaven, but all of us here are in beautiful clothes and perfect wigs over stretched bodies, shorn heads, and tired hearts. Perhaps our silence and sense of inadequacy before our tasks are part of what draws us together.

  Leibl and Levi are sitting on a bench on the men’s side against the front wall. Leibl is good at his Hebrew reading, but I’m worried because he’s restless and bored, and because I can’t imagine this child fitting any mold. Soon enough I’ll be his teacher, but secretly, I don’t want to snip away his questions and little rebellions. Leibl lets his prayer book fall slack. He jumps down off of the bench, but Levi puts a firm hand on his shoulder. Leibl twists away.

  Blessed is He who spoke and the world came to be. The jumble of male voices speeding through prayers no longer puts me off. Now they form a kind of backdrop while, since I can’t openly participate, I’m free to begin wherever I please and at my own speed. I understand a lot of the old Hebrew now. I love its cadences, alliterations, and rhythmic speech. Poetry. I read and muse and drift, free to sink into those centuries-old supplications. My prayer voice is almost imperceptible, lips mouthing syllables. Slowly, the whistle in my chest relaxes. Through the screen, the men are distant, shawled mountains chanting to God.

  We hide behind the partition because our bodies can arouse the men and distract them from their obligations. Some of my friends here are proud of this position. They feel strong and enjoy this acknowledgment of their sexual power. Two friends down the row are whispering to each other. A third bends over her three children, who are scrubbed and dressed in their Sabbath best. But it doesn’t matter that they aren’t praying. Aino domeh metzuva v’oseh l’mi shelo metzuvah v’oseh—since women aren’t required to pray, their prayers don’t have the holiness that comes from fulfilling a commandment, that only men can attain. Officially, it is enough for a woman to bring her children to the synagogue so that they can absorb the prayers into their souls.

  But today, I am not satisfied with that “enough.” Avram Ayor’s meditative reach for truth has stayed with me. “You can go now,” I whisper to Libby, who looks happy and jumps down, looking for her friends. I grow quiet with prayer, listening to ancient words march through my mind as if my voice is not my own but God’s, whispering His poetry to me. Through me. The lines are full of metaphors for my life, each a key that unlocks something.

  Now the men descended from cohen priests assemble at the front of the men’s side to bless the congregation. They pull their prayer shawls down in front to their waists to hide their faces, forming a new row of shawled mountains. Little cohen sons, big and small, crowd under their fathers’ shawls so that beneath the line of hills is a collection of pant legs and shoes of all sizes. Their song rises muffled through cloth. Y’varech’cha. May God bless you and keep you. May God shine his face upon you.

  All of us look away from the priestly power of the singing men. Libby reappears; someone has shooed the children back in for the priestly blessing. Head averted, I give her a quick hug. Then I whisper the written response to the blessing. “Master of the world! Chalom chalamti ayni yodea”—I have dreamed a dream I do not recognize. Suddenly, I am waking in the night from a vision of strange love. I glance around, as if the others can see, then down at Libby. The priestly mountains sing on: “May God’s countenance shine upon you.” I turn back to soothing whispers and the reach for God, trying to hold on. Chalom chalamti. I have dreamed a dream. Libby clings to my dress. The burning in my chest returns. On the other side of the partition, Leibl puts his book down and tugs on Levi’s sleeve.

  HOT BATH. Tired muscles sunk beneath steaming water. Stretching, heat, eyes at half-mast. Slowly taking in warm, moist air. Only the Law could get me to indulge myself like this, but this long, hot soak is required before mikvah. I’ve been very few times in recent years, exempt during pregnancy or nursing, but I’ve finished the Seven Clean Days and it’s time. Levi will get the children into bed tonight. No swift shower while worrying about babies. I slowly ease away a tiny softened scab, smooth the cuticles on each toe and finger, scrub off makeup, and stains from my rough hands, so that nothing will keep the mikvah water from touching living me. I slide the sudsy cloth from toes to hip until I am perfectly clean, smoothed and softened. Finally, I get out and dress in a fading housecoat snapped down the front and a red jersey snood. I put a fresh towel into a shoulder bag. Mendel and Avrami are sleeping. “Mommy’s going out to see a lady,” I first tell sleepy Libby in her bed, with a kiss, then Leibl, who is still awake and reading. I give his hand a squeeze. “Be back soon.”

  This is what I was taught before marriage: The on-again, off-again rhythm of mikvah enhances intimacy. Before mikvah, conversation and chaste companionship should deepen our knowledge of each other and thus deepen our bond. A delicious anticipation will grow, leading up to mikvah night. But I don’t know what that anticipation feels like. I’ve lost any boldness I gained after Rav Moshe granted our yearlong reprieve long ago. Levi has grown remote and flat. I remember his hunger for me, once. Sex has become a once-monthly act of obedience to the Law. I head out the back door. Levi is studying Talmud at the dining room table. He says nothing as I leave.

  Outside the mikvah in the mom van with Mira, my mikvah buddy—she’s also in a housecoat and snood. We’ve taken each other to mikvah for years. She’s the only one besides Levi who knows this is my mikvah night. We like to park and visit. We linger in the dark car, shadowed under the tall light over the lot. Another car pulls up. Two women get out and go to the mikvah door. One works the combination lock. In a nod to the privacy of mikvah, although we know them both, we don’t acknowledge who they are. But this is our time. Mira and I, we’re in no hurry to get out of the car. Between the two of us, we have nine children, and we both know there will be more. So we talk. This is one of the only places where I talk, protected by mikvah modesty. We talk about our children,
our struggles raising them, the Hasidic school, the rabbis. She talks about how much she wants to implant Hasidic values in her children. Sometimes, as she quotes her Jewish studies, her voice grows shrill. Inside, I back off when she does that, but then we share recipes, talk about our husbands, finding bargains, and dealing with housekeepers. Once, I was shy and hesitant on these outings, but Mira is more than a once-monthly friend now.

  In the mikvah waiting room, several women are chatting in the few available chairs, others standing. Officially, no one will report whom she saw here. All came in pairs, one to immerse and one to supervise. One of the women, newly married, doesn’t speak or make eye contact, just looks at her feet, her hands gripping the rolled towel in her lap as she waits her turn. I remember how exposed I felt here when I was newly married. I was embarrassed that everyone here should know I was to have sex with my husband that night, or that, since mikvah comes at the most fertile time, I could get pregnant that very night. But I’ve come to like this exuberant, private women’s space where sex is tacitly acknowledged. We share the secrecy, the anticipation, the changes that might come. I join the conversation.

  Four adjacent doors around the perimeter of this central waiting room lead to four connected rooms. Two contain mikvah pools. Each is linked to a bathroom in which to prepare for immersion. A woman comes out of one of them fresh and dressed, her cheeks pink from the hot water. Mira nods to me. It’s my turn to go in.