by Leah Lax
I follow all the rules. I count the Seven Clean Days after my period. Each day, I take a white square of cloth and swab inside to check for lingering blood, protecting Levi from this ultimate impurity. In the evening after the seventh day, I take an hour-long soak in a hot bath. Lying there in the bath, moist air, the room a steamed blur, I think of Levi and Jane. I think, It comes down to this, the naked undeniable self. What I am, who I am, who I can’t be.
There is no woman of the community left whom I can comfortably ask to take me to mikvah and supervise my compliance to the details of the Law, announce “kosher” after I immerse, and say “amen” to my blessing. Gossip is everywhere, although now I welcome it—tittering, pursed lips, silence in my presence, all preparing the way. Instead, I ask Janice to meet me at the mikvah late at night when the place is empty. I park where Mira and I parked through all those years, where we had our long visits in a dark car. Inside, here is where I used to meet all those women to supervise their immersions, hundreds over the years.
And here is where I watched from the rail as their wavering images sank beneath the water. Kosher, I announced to the new bride, the satisfied wife, the tired mother, and blessed them with my eyes: Go home to your husband. Be relieved after the wait, eager for his arms. Let your children sense what you have with him.
I can’t trust anymore that the mikvah will mean anything to me or that I will be honest with myself here like nowhere else or that God will be here—whoever, whatever God is. I’m doing this one last thing for Levi.
When Levi was sick, I still believed in attentive divine control that suddenly seemed cruel and capricious, and I was defiant. Only the mikvah could stop my frantic charge. Only here did I become still, crouching in the warm pool until something washed away.
I refuse Janice the job of mikvah attendant to check for stray hairs; a hair won’t separate me from some Hasidic God. I descend the stairs into the water.
Chest-deep, I take in a breath, bend my knees, and go under. I pause, weightless, and I am a new bride again, and a new mother seven times over. I am all of the hope that I brought here. I am all of my confrontations with God in this place. Maybe I was just confronting what I couldn’t control. Maybe need or desire alone created our God and placed Him here. My desire. Collective desire.
I come up. Go under. Come up. What is left? Rippling water, blue tile, echoing drips, echoes of my life, Levi left behind. I have no one here, not even Janice and her friendship, or Jane. Just me, and maybe God. Maybe.
I immerse seven times, Levi’s mystical seven. Then I wave and Janice steps out of the room. She knows I want to be alone.
“This is it,” I say to the wall, to God, to no one, or, yes, to God.
I wish I could draw the water around me and stay, not go home to Levi ever again. But we have lived together twenty-seven years. I have to at least try.
TALL LEVI STANDS LOOKING at me in the bedroom late at night. I float forward over the hurdle of natural hesitation and into our years of intertwined lives. “I’ve missed you,” he says. “All the months I didn’t think … and then you went to the other room to sleep at night.” He wraps his arms around me.
Here in his arms is where I once thought I needed to be, through hundreds, thousands of nights alone watching his breathing, the place I supposed should be my refuge. Suddenly in this moment I am a child feeling my way down a dark hallway. “Just don’t let go,” I tell Levi. I can shrink into this cosseting place in your arms. I don’t want to be an adult. But I feel him harden against me. His hands begin to wander my back, neck, arms, onto my chest. He pulls at the buttons of my blouse. His hands are large and awkward. No cool feminine touch. My stomach sinks. If I can’t be a child here, then I … I can’t do it. I can’t anymore. I put my hand on his arm. “Wait,” I say.
We sink onto the bed, me in his arms. I talk against his chest, and it all comes out. Almost. After our years of mutual silence, I tell him about all the nights lying alone watching him, the years left alone and overwhelmed with the house, the children, how flattened I felt by the Law, how panicked I was during his illness. I tell him about lost faith, how I can’t live within the Law anymore. I sob, murmur, repeat myself, splutter, say it all crying into his chest beneath his graying Hasidic beard. I tell him everything, except that I am a lesbian. Everything but the way I would flash images of women when we had sex and my aversion to his naked body, or why it always ended so quickly. Everything but that, because right now, that doesn’t seem to matter. Right now, that doesn’t seem to be the reason for the long loneliness. Somehow I don’t know that he has known for a long time—that I am a lesbian, that I have been sleeping with Jane, that I am leaving him.
He apologizes, many times. He kisses my forehead, strokes my back, murmurs, repeats himself. We both do, many, many times. He cries. We cry together. Finally, after four o’clock in the morning, we fall asleep, the last time that I will ever lie in his arms.
In the morning, ghost memories as I walk through the house: I am bringing in bags of groceries through the kitchen door, then lugging in boxes of produce for Passover. Scraping the oven at two in the morning while laughing with a friend. I am at the stove, cooking up our life. Emptying the dishwasher, lining up dishes of hope in perfect order. Here is the old orange recliner where I coached children in lisping prayers, the blue carpet in the den that was their ocean for swimming, the chipped hearth where they recited and sang. Here are the children’s rooms, their pictures and books, treasures from school and old clothes stored as if each is about to return, the bunk beds that formed a curtained stage for Mendel’s plays as I watched and clapped, and the playroom, cabinets filled with Legos and blocks and board games, all the pieces carefully counted and stored. Just outside the kitchen door is the rack where bicycles are still lined up, and beyond that, the basketball hoop on the drive. Here is the Sabbath table in the dining room, empty now of steaming dishes. Here’s our bedroom and the bed where I would lie awake in the shadows, the desk where I learned to write through the long nights, the bathroom where I prepared for the mikvah, where I cut Levi’s hair, where he found a lump on his neck.
And yet somehow I can’t see my own mark on this house. I did all that, all those years, and left no mark. Every item, every corner, is marked with children now grown or nearly grown, and with Levi. When I leave, I will put my few things into a box or two and fit the boxes and the few clothes I’ll take with me into the backseat of the mom van.
The house is Levi’s. White walls and beige furniture, his piles and boxes, the way he wouldn’t allow money spent on decoration, on color. Here is his dining room where he studies, his living room walls lined in his books.
Nothing lasts, really. Levi can keep the house, in the Hasidic neighborhood. The kids will want to come home when they visit and stay in their own rooms. I can leave him that when I go.
I call my mother. I tell her, “Mom, I’m leaving Levi, and the Hasidim. I’m taking off the wig. I’m taking the cello with me—I’ve still got it. Maybe I can find a teaching job or something. I’ll figure it out. I’ll sack groceries if I have to. And, Mom … I’m a lesbian.”
“Lisa!” she shouts into the phone. I can see her arms open wide. “You’re coming home!”
Epilogue
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”
—FLANNERY O’CONNOR
JUNE 2003. Two Houston men standing up in a yellow Volkswagen convertible with the top down, John Lawrence and Tyron Garner, roll slowly down the street at the Houston gay pride parade, waving at the crowd. Arrested for consensual sex in the privacy of Lawrence’s home, they just won their case with the Supreme Court, striking down sodomy laws across the country. “It is not the job of government to legislate individual morality but to guarantee freedom,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “The law as it stands demeans the lives of homosexual persons.” Up and down the street for blocks, hanging a hundred deep over fences,
crowded on rooftops, thousands of people are waving and cheering, and I am one of them.
Now it is the first night of Passover 2005, in my little apartment. Instead of spending weeks cleaning and cooking for the holiday, I rewrote the Haggadah seder guide and sat at the head, where Levi once sat, leading the seder myself. A journey, I wrote, into collective memory. My guests are just leaving—Susan, my new lover; Janice and her family; Leibl, who flew in from Seattle and cooked the turkey; Mendel with his current girlfriend; Itzik, and Shalom, although Itzik lives with me and will be back later. The boys are headed to their father’s seder (two in one night!) to join their other siblings.
I sink into a leather armchair, put my feet up on a stool, kick off my shoes, and rub my right foot. The dog jumps in beside me. The dark leather is cool to the touch. The dog’s heart beats against my leg. The silence in the room after the clamor is almost palpable. Such a good, quiet joy rises in me, a profound sense of simple being, of presence, that I let my head fall back and close my eyes. It’s a replenishing moment, a simple living moment. One might call this peace ‘God,’ but if so it is no God of yearning sought through prayer and ritual. It’s not a God of history or of holy texts, either, and not the God of the Jews or of any particular people with exclusive ownership. If I were to call this largeness of being, this still core, God, it would be God undefined, who leaves questions standing, asserting simply anochi: I am.
We are simply here. Now.
MARCH 2013. I write this at our dining room table in the quirky Houston home I share with Susan, lined with mementos of our lives, past and ongoing. The back door stands open to a leaf-strewn yard, ushering in the spring air. A ceiling fan makes lazy turns in a low hum. Paintings by each of my parents hang nearby. Alongside them, Susan’s proud rural American ancestors keep vigil. My cello is in the corner in its case, ready for our daily workout, and Pinkie, beloved housekeeper-mother of my childhood, lives not far away. Outside, a brash young cardinal sings, What what what’s with youuuu? against the hollow coo of mourning doves. It’s nesting time.
We had our coffee outside this morning in a grateful pause before the day. We have four new blueberry bushes and a watermelon bougainvillea to set out—a new variety, without thorns. But first, Susan is raking winter away in the backyard while our goofy Airedale jumps in the leaves. Soon, I’ll walk away from this book to help bag the leaves and branches and haul the bags to the curb for city pickup.
When I went back to cello, I had to start over with simple scales. My style is less ambitious now, but deeper, calmer. My hearing seems to have changed; music, like Bach, that I once found austere now seems to brim with understated passion.
I feel surprise every day at the diversity of the American landscape where I have landed, at how rich that is. Writing has led me to art, opera, teaching, and to a terrific community of writers that honors uniqueness at every turn. It has led me to seek out the stories of people from many cultures and shown me our common themes. Unlike the homogeneous society that I left, it seems the sole criterion for belonging here is to be fully an individual. I carry, constantly, a joyous sense that in the breath-taking variety around me is our strength.
Susan has a kayak that she built herself. It is a beautiful thing, a baidarka of northwestern Indian design made of strips of cedar soaked and curved, hand-lashed with gut. The front end rises into the shape of a serpent’s head to cut the waves. The Indians had a tradition of painting a spirit line inside the boat that only the paddler could see. Late one night during the construction, Susan painted that line inside her kayak with her own feminine blood—to her, a private statement of identity and power and spirit. I lived for years with the notion that such blood embodies a terrible spiritual darkness, tumah, and constitutes a spiritual threat to men, lived with that shameful deathly sense of myself half of each month. Now, when Susan isn’t in it, the kayak hangs in our living room.
Together we have explored the Mongolian steppes on horseback, hiked through a Belizean rain forest, descended into a Mexican volcano, wandered European castles and cathedrals, walked the Great Wall. We’ve taken kayaks down the winding Li River around humpbacked karsts, paddled wetland trails on three continents and so much more. I have never stopped ogling like a country boy, always feeling for the pulse beneath it all.
As to my children, I have to say, in the end it was the hiding and the lies that went with it, telling myself that I did it to shield my children and protect their religious life, that struck them the deepest blow. After all, I was their Hasidic mother, their icon of faith and loyalty. They trusted me. When I finally told them everything, I found this: we all know many things about our mothers, fundamental things, that our mothers never enunciated. That I’m a lesbian? Not one of my children was surprised.
It took time, but I didn’t give up. My kids still need me, probably always will, and I them. Today I am, I hope, a steady presence in their lives.
Four left the Hasidic fold. All have grown and moved out across the country. I tell all of them, Orthodox or not, that in spite of living or having lived in a rule-bound life that tells you who you must be, you must find who you are. By yourself. I tell them that strict gender roles leave people in a relationship with lonely burdens, and that the magic of a good relationship comes through sharing across that line—financial responsibility, taking out the garbage, making meals, or providing childcare. I beg them to share both dependence and leadership.
Back when Sarah and her rabbi husband had their first baby, I went to Crown Heights, the Rebbe’s neighborhood, and stayed a week helping her. Things are changing there—Internet has invaded, and with it a new sophistication. It has become impossible to keep the walls intact. Young husbands and wives work together to care for their children. The enterprising among the youth go to college. Many of the young women look stylish, their skirts rather short, scarves creeping back to reveal a bit of hair. Quietly, unofficially, some are using birth control. A community organization has been founded to urge families not to shun their children who stray. As I walked each day bareheaded in slacks through a sea of beards and hats, skirts and wigs, to Sarah’s tiny apartment, bits of old fear of being judged were still in me, but, as I do in Houston, I opened my arms to greet old friends. For my grandchildren, I insist on the old Yiddish name Bubbie for Grandmother—a reinvention of all that the name implies, I suppose, but I have held each of my grandchildren and fallen in love. So here I am, a jeans-clad lesbian bubbeh to Hasidic kids. I do exist. I’m not going away. At least, not yet.
Sometimes I think about that long-ago meeting with Rabbi Goldenberg when I was a teen. He was younger than I am now, so maybe he didn’t know to ask the girl that I was why she sensed her soul as such a painful presence, or why she was seeking religion so fervently, or why she was trying to redefine herself and get away from home so young. But if he had asked, if he had drawn out my stories, what might I have become? Would I have taken a different turn?
I also think about my Hasidic years, how we were told that we women were “spiritually stronger” than men and so had less need for the constant renewal of formal rituals. Instead of taking part in daily services or binding phylacteries and donning prayer shawls or ascending to the Torah, we were supposed to be ennobled by hiding our bodies and public silence, elevated by having babies without end and creating a Jewish home. We wanted to believe that. No one ever explained how “less need” for ritual translated into active exclusion from all of public and most private ritual and any leadership role or public voice, thus keeping the great heart of the religion reserved for men.
In those years, my greatest terror was existential, one of what if; since the Law turned even the tying of shoes into a spiritual act, what would happen if the simple daily acts we turned into profound symbols weren’t symbols at all. What if they were simply dressing, eating, putting on shoes, and it didn’t matter how you did them? What if my daily drudgery was just that, and not a test of faith? What if God wasn’t watching and judging? What if there wer
e no God at all?
What if my need to be held by a woman wasn’t just my coarse body fighting the noble soul for dominance? What if instead my disappointment in being with Levi was a central reality of our marriage and not just God’s challenge I was expected to transcend?
In the end, our religion became a great bait and switch. By then I knew the trade-off, the hidden agenda in fundamentalism, the soul-stealing promises of soul.
But maybe, when I was Hasidic, maybe our sheer strength of imagination was in itself something to be reckoned with. We imagined the Torah a collection of powerful truths: the Law is God’s Word; God will one day sweep us all into heaven; our every tiny, ritualized act changes the world. Maybe God could be so simple a concept that He (He?) would intervene according to the intensity of our hope. That’s what we imagined. That’s what prayer was—our group focusing of desire, our collective need to believe, our magnified hope and sheer imagination that our expressions of hope would manipulate events, people, health, and redirect it all for our benefit, so that each of us would be more than a bit of flotsam in a storm. There’s a great deal of power in that. It was Hasidic life that taught me to build a convincing world through imagination alone. Perhaps those years are the reason I write.
In the end, I do at least know this: it wasn’t God, but my fierce clinging to God, that kept me so encumbered.
AT FIRST I COULD NOT imagine shucking off the Law, but I did decide I would not allow Sabbath restrictions to separate me from friends. Then I began to see the sharing of food as a larger human ritual that builds something basic and good between people, and realized that kosher restrictions cut me off from a great many such opportunities, and so I rejected them. Religion for mature people, Rabbi Goldenberg once said, is the charting of one’s own path. Today, my faith has been replaced with questions. I love the way unanswered cosmic questions leave open all possibilities. The universe spreads out in three inscrutable, wondrous dimensions.
