by Leah Lax
After the reading is chanted, we move toward our seats through a throng of handshakes and exclamations. People call out yashar kochech—upstanding and strong. You were strong. I have crossed the now-imaginary partition and taken ownership. I have stood up and been counted, and I can’t imagine going back. In my seat, overwhelmed with relief and with what may be ahead, I pull the shawl over my face once again and cry.
HOUSTON. I finish wiping the long kitchen counter on the meat side, then take a broom and sweep the dirt from the Mexican tiles into a careful mound just as a gangly male body rushes past and scatters it. “Stay away from my dirt!” I yell. Levi, still hairless and weak months after the chemo, is lying down in the back room. Itzik and Shalom, the two youngest, now twelve and thirteen, are on some crucial mission, interspersed with a stop-start basketball game out on the drive. Gladys works here only once a week now, and I’m training the boys, along with Sarah, to cook and clean, but I let them go, grab a dustpan, and rescue my pile for the trash just as the timer goes off. I have to get the bread out of the oven, but I want to finish the floor, and then the telephone rings.
I know who it is.
If I don’t lift that receiver, I can stay here for some time, grow the kids, continue to sleep in a separate room, no marriage left but still partners running our complicated little ship together. I can finish graduate school and The Mikvah Project with Janice and pour my fantasies into writing fiction. I can continue to toggle back and forth between two separate worlds and keep fooling myself into believing that one doesn’t leak its news into the other. If I don’t lift that receiver, I can continue to content myself with vicarious experience through lesbian friends I have found, like Jane, whom I met now perhaps ten weeks ago. And if my new lesbian friends have pain, as Jane has been having over the breakup of her relationship with her partner, well, that pain won’t be mine. I’ll take care to leave a space between other women and me until the kids are grown. But I lift the receiver.
“It’s over,” Jane says. “She’s leaving. Already gone. She’ll be back for her things.”
I don’t ask why she’s calling me and not older, closer friends or her mother. We’ve had lunch together four or five times, but I haven’t asked why she’s asked me to meet her so often in the short time we’ve known each other. I haven’t acknowledged our little spiral dance. “Don’t sit alone in the house,” I say. “Come here. Come get me.”
The bread. The kids. The floor. Dinner.
“And go where?” she says.
“I don’t know. Somewhere where we can talk.”
Within a half hour, I leave the challah loaves cooling on the rack, dish towel thrown down on the counter, dustpan left on the floor. I don’t know that these few paces from kitchen to door to her car will be forever tinged with wonder and regret. “I’ll be back!” I call to the boys. I don’t know that that’s a lie.
AFTER DUSK. We get out of the car and walk quietly into a deserted neighborhood park far enough from my home and sit down on a wooden platform, part of a children’s climbing gym. A mosquito whines past. There’s a rope bridge, ladders, more platforms, a slide, all mute with child echoes. I wanted more seclusion than this, newly aware of people who may hate us if I decide to hold her, if she cries. Jane slaps at a mosquito on her arm. We get up, cross a path that bisects the park, settle on the other side on a bench in deep shade. She does cry. I put my arm around her delicate shoulder, my palm cupped around her arm. Something in me melts away then in the dusk, old trees folding us into olive-green shadow. As she cries. Resistance, care, leftover propriety for God … evaporate.
I pull myself away, but my hand and arm feel painfully empty. I take a deep breath and suggest we walk on. I don’t know what I’m doing, or why I lead her. She is in pain, meek, and follows. Trees overhang the dirt path, remaining light filtering through. “I used to bring the kids here when they were small,” I say. My ghost children circle on tricycles and dart around us.
At the end of the path is an enormous birdcage standing on the ground, perhaps ten feet by twelve by ten, with swings and perches, dishes of water and seeds, and dozens of exotic birds, so many colors. I’m familiar with them, though the light is so dim here I have to conjure the details. In the shadows the remembered colors are reduced to vague silhouettes and intimations of color. “Look,” I say, at captured beauty, wasted wild luminescence—I want her to be able to see all of it. I project myself among those birds, but imagining being one of them in the cage is unbearable. “I wish I could let them fly,” I say. We listen to rustles and coos, the flap of a shadow.
Beyond the birds is a grassy enclave enclosed by walls of tall bushes where my boys once played ball. The moon is out. “We used to call this the secret garden,” I say. We settle inside it on another bench in the shadows. Branches above us form black lace across the moon glow. A breeze grows cool. Before I can stop myself, I say, “I’m cold,” knowing it’s an invitation.
When Jane puts her arm around me, I simply can’t take any more, can’t just talk and think and hold back like I do every day of my life. Fear slams into me so strong it almost lifts me from the seat, but I know this is it. I may never have this door opened again. I turn and kiss her.
I DON’T SLEEP FOR DAYS. Everything around me is in high resolution, exposed. All my hypocrisies, exposed. The Mexican tile, the kitchen walls covered in washable vinyl I once chose with care, are all disintegrating. Soon I’ll be standing in my kitchen in an open wind, alone.
Jane has done nothing, just changed me, so that if I thought I could stay in this sheltered place while remaining newly conscious, I was wrong. Jane has done nothing, just made me admit I’m an alien in my own home, so that now it feels unreal to wake in the morning, prepare a meal, empty the dishwasher, as if I’ve been violently displaced by someone else. Jane does nothing, just wakes up in the morning at her place and pads alone into her own kitchen for morning coffee, then to the shower, where she lets beads of hot water rain down on supple skin.
The kids speak and I can’t hear. Food swirls in my stomach without feeding this hunger. I stop eating after a few bites.
I can’t function, can’t think.
Which may be why I stand in Jane’s house a week later on a Sunday morning, and why she says so little, why we both hardly speak as if we’re shy as schoolchildren who have just been introduced. Perhaps it is why I try to keep up the pretense this is just a visit, wanted to say, Hi, nice place you have. Wanna show me around? And it is why when we get to the bedroom my brain stops and then we are in the bed and I am holding on to her as if I have to make sure I don’t fall. “Teach me,” I say, a ridiculous line that makes her laugh, because no one need teach me a thing as all thought melts away. Her softness is a sound that fills my ears. Compared with this, memories of Levi are paper that rustles and scatters. There is no will, no words, just this hum of touch, and her mouth holds paint that outlines my shape on a new canvas. Somehow, the movement of my hand amplifies sound. I have been here for a thousand years, and here I will be. Her body is shaped to fit mine—that’s the proof.
Here is where I am born. Oh, my children, how can you ever understand? Your mother was just birthed today.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER MIDNIGHT, I edge open the back door and try to make sure it doesn’t creak. I put the car into neutral and slide down the drive with the driver’s-side door ajar. Once in the street, I ease the door closed and start the motor so that I could be anyone, a passing car that stalled, a Hasidic mother escaping to her lesbian lover.
Biting my lip, foot on the pedal. There’s the crisp night air, nostrils flared, rub of seemingly superfluous clothes on heightened skin, the motor vibrating up my legs and spine and humming through my seat. Cold hard wheel on my palms. I glide through the sleeping Hasidic neighborhood like a reptile, narrowed eyes trained on dark empty streets looking for betrayal, propelled by a body scream. My family shrinks to a pinpoint behind me and blinks out.
Soon, I will tell myself that I do this as a matte
r of survival, pikuach nefesh, that like Levi scrubbing his hands on the Sabbath, the Law stipulates that survival supersedes the Law. I will soothe myself with this justification even though I’ve had little regard for the Law for some time. But that’s how I feel—that I go to Jane to survive.
I hide the car in her garage, let myself in with her key, into the house where she now lives alone. Inside, I pull off the wig, shake out my hair, drop the scarf to the kitchen floor. Through the still den, down a dark hall, fingertips along a stippled wall. I slide into her bed. She wakes. She turns to me.
There, in her arms, I cry. For Levi (which she doesn’t appreciate). For all those lost years. For thinking I could live without so much as knowing the simple peace of… of this: warm body that echoes mine, steady breath on my hair, silent constant presence through the night, tandem pulse roused to electric in the morning. For now, this is all that matters. I imagine that won’t be true for long. I leave her at sunrise.
But it’s nearly six-thirty. I slip in the back door of my home to a sleeping house, must wake the kids for school. Line up lunch bags, eight slices of bread on the counter, no thought allowed beneath the patter. Slice cheese and lettuce, zip baggies, nectarine for Itzik and apple for Sarah, both will be wasted, did Sarah finish her homework get Itzik out of bed Shalom needs to pump his front bicycle tire I hear Levi stirring in the back.
JANE HAS A COLLECTION of polished stones, smooth and brilliant, in a shallow copper bowl on her vanity, among them royal-blue sodalite, green malachite, deep-red carnelian. One morning, I find her holding a handful to the early light. She stands, quiet, tilting her open palm this way and that, marking the way light shifts and dances on the polished surfaces. “Look,” she says. “Look!” Her face full of keen observation and wonder. Colors leap. It’s a simple moment of stillness. Earth, stones, color. Being.
The sensory world out there so long spurned, underlying our endless streams of words, rises into three glorious dimensions.
But, day-to-day, I don’t live in a three-dimensional world. Sarah is preparing to leave for yeshiva. I don’t want to send her into the life I’ve lived all these years, but Hasidic life is who she is, and I can’t imagine cruelly shaking her identity just as it’s forming into adulthood. Look at her, I think—taller than I am, shining brunette hair in an elegant wave to her shoulders. She just graduated from the Hasidic school, where she stepped up to the podium as valedictorian and addressed the community with maturity and polish far beyond her fourteen years. I could almost hear the crowd draw in their collective breath. I think, She’s been formed here.
So has my mothering. My job has been to steep her in the Law, inspire her to faith, and none of that has anything to do with my own opinions, which before the huge old stream of history seem small and newly formed. I don’t understand yet that I could gently redirect my daughter, don’t understand that my presence at her side, coupled with her own young vision and the excitement of new freedom, could turn into a tandem adventure. I don’t even understand that instinct can be a mother’s greatest guide. We rise, we rise, the group still says, above our natures. Only God’s Word within us has validity.
“You’ll be leaving soon,” I say to Sarah the afternoon before her departure, and I sit down next to her on her bed.
She grins and nods.
“Listen,” I say. “There’s something I want you to remember.”
“What?”
“Our life, Hasidic life, even when you’re away at school—it’s a gilded cage. You’ll make friends and have fun there, and they’ll keep telling you every day that it’s a perfect life. But it’s only good if you never need out, if you never need more. You might need more someday. If you ever do, that will be okay. I’ll help you.”
“What do you mean?” Sarah says. She looks uncomfortable, puzzled. I take her hand.
But at that moment, Levi comes in. Then, together, her loving parents present her with a necklace of curved links in three colors of gold. Sarah stands, and Levi blesses her with a life in Torah and gives her an awkward hug.
“Wear this and remember what I told you,” I say as I close the clasp at the back of her neck. How deeply I want to believe in this moment that my young daughter will remember what I said through all her coming years away from home, that as she matures she will come to understand my warning, that over time the cage of the Law around her will come into focus.
But Sarah is looking to Levi, her face suffused with ineffable love.
I will live with this: that I sealed her into Hasidic life at this turning point so that she will think this life her purpose, into the joyful, exhausting, endless mothering and workload and silence and loss of choices she will bear. She was born, and all I did was make the bed and spread the sheets, and she’s gone.
AFTER SARAH LEAVES, I cling to Jane, but I make no changes, still afraid to open up to Levi or leave. Jane begs. But when Passover approaches, I throw myself into the holiday, determined to keep up appearances for now. I disappear from Jane for weeks. All the kids fly in. When it’s over, I’m relieved to find her waiting.
Sleeping at my “friend’s” house becomes an open secret. Shalom, always affectionate and attached to me, becomes withdrawn, angry. Itzik plays basketball on the drive, then brings the ball into the house and bounces it on the Mexican tile and against the wall, as if telling us that our home is breaking. Bang. Bang.
Levi seems distraught. When I corner him, he admits to having dreamed of losing me in a crowd where he wanders, searching.
One morning, watching the news with Jane over coffee, we see the North Tower of the World Trade Center hit. We are a tiny island in a shifting world where bodies fall through air. The second plane hits. There’s the mushroom cloud of collapse, another collapse, the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania field, ghost people in white fleeing Manhattan.
I have that sense again of being jerked over a wall into the American community, finding myself suddenly, irrevocably a part of that, as if we ourselves are trudging that Manhattan bridge dusted in white and changed forever. We have lost color. The world is crumbling.
At home, I hold to my silence about the obvious. I don’t know why. Fear? Habit? Waiting for the right time when there is no right time? I don’t know. I’ve stayed far too long. Levi, the kids, me, we don’t approach our long, slow tumble with words.
Even so I insist to Jane that I must stay long enough to make Shalom’s bar mitzvah. But on that festive day, Shalom will simply read his speech from a printed page and then absent himself from the festivities, stay outside with friends, and (I will find out years later) smoke marijuana with them. Levi will make a speech, with a sad face trained on me, about his gratitude for my devotion to home and family. He is begging me. Or is this his goodbye? Then, community gossip doing its work, preparing the way, Rabbi Frumen will rise to the podium, look at me in blatant reprimand, and deliver a lecture about the merits in heaven that come to a properly modest woman who obeys the Law.
But before all that, when I am still in the midst of bar mitzvah preparations, my short story about two gay boys, “Berkeh’s Story,” wins the Moment magazine contest. Many thousands will read it. Jane whoops and dances. At the university, close to graduation, Dan Stern holds the issue with my name on the cover up to his seminar and says he is proud.
Within days of publication, the phone rings at home while the boys are at school. I pick it up and hear, “Is that Leah Lax?” It’s a man’s voice, vaguely familiar, in a heavy Yiddish accent.
“Yes. Who is calling?”
“This is Rav Shechter.”
The voice of the Law. Rav Shechter doesn’t call people. He’s a rabbi’s rabbi, highly respected in the Law—people, Hasidic people, particularly rabbis, even the most honored and powerful, call him. Then, I remember. This is the same voice—only a voice—to whom I once abdicated the great and terrible responsibility for the decision to abort my unborn child. I’m fighting old fear of the Law, the impulse to submit, as if I am a child watching her hom
e begin to burn. I think, I’m ready. I have to be.
“Is that the Leah Lax who wrote such a story in a magazine?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were a frumeh woman mit a shetl!”
A religious women with a pious wig. “That’s what they say of me,” I say.
“So how could you do such a thing!”
A hard stab of guilt. I swallow. But in this moment, my character in the short story, Berkeh, is real. In this moment, I love him more than myself. And Rav Schechter just called him “such a thing.” Berkeh is not such a thing.
“Have you actually read the story?”
“Of course not,” he says.
“Then how did you know about it?”
“People came to me.”
“If you did read it,” I say, “you’d see Berkeh’s a good boy. He learns, he dovvens. He wants to do the right thing. He does no sin.”
“So?”
I am breathing hard. No turning back. “Rav Schechter,” I say, “Berkeh is many boys in our yeshivas. You know that. And Berkeh was born the way he was born. God made him that way. All I did was show him from the inside. I showed his struggle.”
“But you’ve hung out our dirty laundry!” he cries out. An ultimate Hasidic crime.
“I’ve done. No. Wrong,” I say.
The rabbi hangs up.
I stand shaking. I’ve spoken back to the Law.
I am not dirty laundry.
I HAVE TO KNOW. I have to know whether I am capable of sex with Levi now that I am awake and alive. Beyond religion and rules, it gets down to this. If I leave and never find out, I will be haunted, thinking maybe I could have avoided doing this to the family. I haven’t been to the mikvah for months, but I will go this one last time, so that my touch won’t be forbidden to him. Jane hates the idea, but I tell her I must.
