by Leah Lax
How good is this? I think. It’s not that no one of consequence out here will see my bare head. It’s that no one cares. I continue walking, shaking my head and laughing at myself. I’m still chuckling as I pass him, as he blows out his cigarette smoke in a tight stream. Those squinting Texas eyes follow me. Weird city girl.
RATHER THAN MEETING face-to-face back during those first cancer weeks, I called Rabbi Frumen and recommended Janice to him over the phone. I emphasized that her work would be beautiful and thus make mikvah look beautiful and perhaps inspire someone to want to perform the ritual. I guess I still had some influence, because he agreed to talk with her. When Janice went to meet him, he made her promise that the images would be modest, no frontal nudity, and preferably shown only to women, but he allowed her to do the work at our mikvah.
A few weeks after I return from Dallas, I visit with Janice in her home—a short, precious chance to unburden and to listen—and the new photographs astonish me. Blue-toned underwater nudes caught from the back or in modest profile, arms obscuring breasts, watery outlines of hip and thigh. Each floats without weight in unconscious sexuality, unaware of her beauty, focused inward and not on enticing some object of desire. Transcendent nudes, as if the spiritual is most present when these women are in their most physical state. Janice understands. She gets it.
When the show opens the following month during Houston’s biannual Fotofest, the gallery fills with women in black and dangling diamonds balancing drinks and men in perfectly cut suits who hover over wives and dates. Critics move in close to examine the images, wander away, then return for more. The Houston Chronicle compares the work to that of André Kertész and exclaims, “This show is not to be missed.” And in the midst of that bustling, thrilling crowd, Janice holds court before her artist’s statement on the wall as several perfectly coiffed women whisper to her, I could tell you about my mikvah experience.
“It’s like they had a secret,” she tells me later.
“That’s been built-in for centuries,” I say. “Jewish women have never talked about mikvah.”
“Let’s get them to talk,” she says.
“What?”
“You know women we can interview, right? And you’re a writer. Work with me. Expand the exhibit. Let’s interview women, and I’ll take their portraits.”
“It’s too private.”
“We’ll keep it anonymous.”
“And they’ll never let you show their faces.”
“Who said I’ll show their faces?”
Twenty-One
Within days I’m sitting with a voice recorder and a seventeen-year-old Hasidic girl about to be married. After Janice proposed The Mikvah Project that day, we had a flurry of phone calls between us, thrilling late-night creative sessions in which we bounced ideas and images and plans off each other. I cautioned her that I would participate only when I could, but I came alive with tingling excitement as we finished each other’s sentences, ideas tumbling out like puppies. I think perhaps doing this work, as long as I am judicious about it, could help me through this cancer time.
It’s crazy, I know: Levi sick, the house, kids, no sleep ever, and here I’ve agreed to interview and help Janice photograph women talking about mikvah. It’s crazy that at a time like this I would unhook myself even one step from all that to undertake something that has nothing to do with them, or me. But Janice and I are going to get silent women to talk about this most hidden and central of rituals. No party lines—I’ll get them to be real.
The girl before me is just a girl smitten with her fiancé, whom she can admire only from a distance. She calls me Morah Leah, Teacher Leah. I promise not to reveal her name.
She begins to talk with shining optimism about the great spiritual experience she expects to have in the mikvah the night before her wedding. She closes her eyes as she imagines the mystical light that will descend on her along with God’s unending love, both of which she will pass on to her children. As she has been taught almost since birth, she believes her wedding will introduce her to her role as a mother. She feels that in bearing Jewish children, she will experience the fulfillment of every moment she has lived until now.
Janice photographs the girl at her wedding ten days later, the first of a series of anonymous portraits, the bride’s face hidden behind an opaque Hasidic veil. She’s sitting in a white wicker chair, and her groom has just lowered the veil after first looking into the face of his beloved. She clutches a tiny photograph of the Rebbe in her hand.
A month later, I return to continue the girl’s interview. Her posture has opened; her manner is more frank, her clothing more elegant and mature, including a new, long wig made of human hair. I think, She’s become a woman. “Now tell me,” I say, remembering her starry description before the wedding. “What was mikvah really like?”
She cried through the whole mikvah ritual that night and didn’t know why she was crying. “Now I realize I don’t even know what ‘spiritual’ means,” she says. “I didn’t understand what was coming, but I had an overwhelming sense that I was going in that water a girl and coming out a woman.” She speaks tenderly about her husband. She says she is delighted at how the Law upholds their desire, celebrates and escorts it through mikvah.
I hear and remember our wedding, mine and Levi’s. I remember trying to coach myself into desire. But for this girl, instead of teaching herself to want him, desire rose up and taught her something about who she is. It wasn’t in me.
Janice meets someone while on a trip to Denver whom she’d like me to interview, and I conduct the interview over the phone. The woman says she’s a lesbian but when she came out to her parents, they rejected her, their only child. Brokenhearted, she reached to religion and ritual for solace and so she went to a mikvah. She planned the visit, went there “with spiritual hunger and a script.” But it was the unscripted part that changed her. Underwater in that ancient chamber, she realized “there were larger things working my life.” Then, in the dressing area, she saw herself wet and naked in a full-length mirror and had to confront the irrefutable fact of her being.
I didn’t plan for these interviews to push me like this. They leave me pensive, questioning myself; the bride and the lesbian are my full-length mirrors. I stiffen myself to stay in my roles; Mother must remain Mother, Cancer Wife the same. And always there’s the work—details, lists, minor upsets to soothe and straighten, meals to cook.
Within days of this interview, I am in pain, full-body ache, every joint, as if I’m dying inside and birthing myself all at once. I crawl through my days. I am tortured with the sense that I don’t belong anywhere, not at home or school, not to myself or to my children, not anymore, and I can’t protect my children from my perfidy. When I manage to sleep, I wake in the dark in a sweat to find myself sitting up in terror.
One morning well into the chemo, I find Levi already dressed but facedown on the bed, forehead on his bent arm, waiting for the strength to sit up and put on his shoes. Finally, he sits up on the edge of his bed and carefully puts on the right shoe first, in the same manner in which he has always donned each item of clothing—the right side first, as the right signifies God’s power and holy Law, and then the left, the weaker side, symbol of God’s mercy. This is an acknowledgement that God’s justice precedes His mercy. Then Levi ties the left shoe first in a mute prayer to arouse God’s mercy and let it prevail over the strict judgment we all so deserve.
With cancer, for Levi, even putting on shoes is a prayer for survival.
JANICE SENDS ME TO A MASSEUSE, her friend Kelly, a deep-voiced lesbian jazz singer with great hands. When I finally find her office in the unfamiliar Montrose area, I am directed by a receptionist and stumble into a room with walls painted deep green, the air candle-scented with herbs. I peel off long layers of clothes and crawl between black starched sheets to music and the rhythmic sound of waves hitting the shore. In the dim room, Kelly slowly plies my muscles with warm, oiled hands. Gradually, fatigue overtakes me. I wash in
and out of a half-conscious state to the sound of waves. But this is the first time I have ever felt a woman’s hands on my body. I think, How profound, this, this touch.
Then, as if locked doors are being opened, there is an immense surge of warmth. Relief. And I am tumbling, waves crashing overhead. Sobs rise on their own from the ocean floor.
I lie there facedown, heaving shoulders, tears dripping through to the floor. Kelly doesn’t try to talk to me, just works on through the hour, sometimes emitting a low crooning sound. When she is done, she leaves me, still emptying myself. I fall asleep in that room, finally, deeply asleep, on the narrow table in the dark green room between black starched sheets with a flickering candle, and the recorded sound of waves around me.
JANICE WANTS AN INTERVIEW with a Hasidic woman willing to talk about wearing a wig, so I call Dinah, a woman of our group who keeps her expensive wig beautifully styled and luxuriant. I wear my own wig to the interview to make her comfortable in our solidarity.
I remember when Dinah was still new among us. I remember taking her to the mikvah and how she folded her long body in the shimmering water and reminded me of paintings by Delacroix and Ingres. I know about Dinah’s life before, she used to talk to me about it, and that pre-Hasidic life wasn’t always pretty. But when I turn on the recorder, Dinah launches into a sanitized story that is all polemic, no difficulties, no struggles, every event in her past aiming her straight toward her Purpose in God, culminating in purification in a mikvah. Then she depicts the Hasidic community as a perfect, collective Godly embrace.
I am appalled, both because she knows that I know her real story and because I can hear how she’s lying to herself. Janice glances at me with an odd smile, then says to her (is she goading me?), “Tell me about putting on a wig.”
“Well, now,” Dinah says. “Even Rabbi Frumen trusts me now that I wear it. He lets his own kids eat my food, trusts how kosher it is, even though my kitchen is exactly the same as before I put on the wig. Mrs. Frumen even calls me for advice! And now my kids are proud that their mom looks like the other moms, and they don’t get embarrassed.” I think, Her reply was all about conforming and gaining status, and she is smug and satisfied. She didn’t say a thing about modesty before God, or about the wig as a symbol of identity. She didn’t indicate that putting it on was an act of faith or because it is a commandment of God.
She will find excellent spouses for the children of this beautiful wig.
Why does this interview make me so angry? But it’s as if I’m looking in a mirror and seeing hypocrisy. I’m not Dinah, I try to tell myself, but I can’t stand it. I can’t stay. I get up abruptly, apologizing, I simply have to get out of there, and I go, convinced that beautiful Dinah has swallowed herself and that I have just seen for the first time what she’s done. I leave Janice behind to take the photos on her own. In my car on Dinah’s driveway, I hit the wheel and shout a defiant “No!” at God, You cannot ask this of us, and at myself. What have I done? I stomp the accelerator and lurch out of the driveway, head home doing fifty on a residential street, shouting “No!” all the way. I roar into our driveway, jump out of the car, and slam the door, starting to cry, picturing that smug satisfaction as Dinah made herself disappear. Still sobbing, I march into the empty house and slam that door, too. The windows rattle.
I stop short at the head of the hallway and rip the wig off my head. Then I pitch that wig down the long hall like a bowling ball and watch it roll.
Cool air hits my scalp like morning rain. The wig careens in a floppy zigzag and lands upside down at the end of the hall a discarded rag. I stumble after it, kick it aside as I pass. But I am not Dinah. Once, my wig was my symbol of identity. Once, I put it on out of real desire for God. The wig didn’t erase me then—it meant something. Something real. But it’s no use. In our wigs, Dinah and I are identical members of the same faceless ranks. Besides, I didn’t know what I was giving up then, but now I do. There is only one way not to be her.
It takes until the end of the day before I can even lift the thing from where it lies flaccid and abandoned on the floor. I pick it up with two fingers, grimace, and give a halfhearted swipe at the dust it collected in the long tumble. All those years of devotion. What is left?
ACROSS TOWN ON MY way to class the day after the wig incident, I pull into a huge, empty parking lot in front of a boarded-up furniture store and pull out a new pair of jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. I wiggle into the clothes inside the car, then open the door and stand to pull off the skirt. I open the shirt wide at the collar. Back in the car, I brush out my hair in the rearview mirror. It’s grown long again.
At school, the difference in how I’m received in my new clothes and natural hair is obvious that first day and grows from there. Students include me in conversation, lean back and laugh. I come to love anonymity, love the way no one can assume my beliefs just by looking at me. In clothing that is not a uniform, I’m just a person, not a label. I don’t wear a label. I find anonymity is like an invitation: if you want to know what I believe, come up and ask.
Another defiant act: I send “Berkeh’s Story,” about the gay yeshiva boy in love with his study partner, to a national short-story contest.
WE DO MORE INTERVIEWS, and Janice makes more faceless portraits. “Mikvah means monogamy,” the next woman I interview says. “It says that sex is holy and private. Growing up in the sixties, I didn’t know anyone who believed that.”
“Sure,” I tell Janice later. “The Law insists on holiness and privacy, but it also insists there’s only one kind of sex and tells you when you can and when you can’t. The Law puts sex and sexuality into a box, just like it does the rest of our life. A box within a box. Try to get out,” I say, “and you’ll hurt everyone who was in there with you.”
LEVI REMAINS WITHDRAWN and in his books, prone to emotional outbursts, and still insists on managing his own care. I expand the project with Janice. Unable to do anything for him, unwilling just to watch, I make plans to travel with Janice. To widen the demographics of our subject pool, I network by phone, looking for subjects around the country. It seems secular women all over are beginning to reclaim mikvah and use it in new ways, like the lesbian Janice met in Denver. Maybe other, more traditional women have negotiated their peace with the intrusive mikvah laws, even allowed themselves to compromise. I want or need to hear about that. Some may voice their objections about mikvah to me, and that alone has enormous appeal. No longer afraid, no longer clinging to a singular Hasidic point of view, I use this opportunity to get away and really listen to other voices. Through it all is this drive to give the silenced women their voice.
We go to New York. Chana is thirtysomething, Orthodox, with five children. She meets me in a kosher restaurant in Manhattan and gives only this first name I suspect is an alias, drove in from an outlying town she doesn’t identify.
In general, Orthodox and Hasidic styles are changing. The women are going superelegant, wearing long human-hair wigs, expensive clothes, heels, and nail polish, even to the grocery store. Hemlines have gone up to the bare minimum allowed in the Law. But Chana’s clothes are long and wrinkled, her wig dull. She has a rounded posture and a tired face.
Then, as soon as I turn on the recorder, she talks about her first crushes when she was a teen. She recounts them in detail. They were all crushes on girls.
Chana says that this is her lot from God—to defy her nature every day. Tucking a stray wisp into her dishwater wig, she says she’s worked for years to teach herself how to love her husband and how to let him love her. Love from an instruction manual. Then she says, “I’ve had to make a kind of surgery on myself.”
A hot flush near panic rises over me at these terrible words and the image of this woman taking a scalpel to her soul to cut away part of her being, as if I’ve just witnessed the blade cutting into her. I had thought self-mutilation abhorrent, foreign, but something whispers at me, I know the life she lives … I have to get up, turn away, calm down.
I
go to the bathroom. I return after forcing myself back into composure and professional bearing, and we begin again. “Tell me,” I say, wanting to change the subject and get to the point, “about going to the mikvah.”
She describes her process; I walk her through it. Mikvah is very important to her, she tells me, because it helps her to wash away her resistance to God’s holy plan of heterosexuality, marriage, and children. This is what she prays in the mikvah, every month, to be washed clean of herself. She describes standing in the water, praying, and her last words to me are “And you remove, you remove, you remove.”
This is worse than the full-length mirror. Looking at this woman is like looking into two mirrors facing each other, my image repeated in hers into infinity.
THREE MONTHS INTO LEVI’S TREATMENT, he and I go together to a sheva brachos, one of the seven consecutive nights of celebrations in private homes honoring a new bride and groom after their wedding. The event is held in our neighbor’s home. We arrive to find the newly married couple together at the head of a long, covered table in the large family room. The bride is fresh-faced and proud in her shining new wig. The groom looks impossibly young in spite of his beard and new black hat. The women sit on one side of the table adjacent to the bride, the men on the other adjacent to the groom. The two look a bit overwhelmed and clearly in love. Twice I catch the young man looking at his wife with a soft smile in his eyes.
