Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  And then, as if this faith was a thing to be naturally rewarded, a miracle did indeed occur; that is to say, I found the small two-bedroom apartment with a view onto the church’s courtyard and the spindly locust tree growing awkwardly in the middle of it, and I was naturally convinced that it was the work of some higher power. The sexton of the church, a tall, fair-haired man named Schultze, had met me for a short interview and promptly offered me the apartment for two thousand dollars a month, a rent that normally wouldn’t have gotten me a studio in Harlem. There was still eight thousand dollars left in my bank account from the book advance I had received. I knew that wouldn’t last me longer than three months in Manhattan, and I did not have a long-term plan for life at my new address, but there was this strange and stubborn faith, and the old, deep-seated belief that people who had faith were rewarded. Perhaps these convictions would do more to cripple me than help me.

  I packed my few belongings and drove them into the city over the course of several trips. A van service delivered my mattress and sofa. In order to sweeten the deal for Isaac, who had recently turned four, I purchased a new Lego set, hoping it would distract him from yet another change in his short life. Being much smarter than me, he did not fall for this ploy. As soon as we got out of the car he realized what was happening and refused to enter the building. He screamed and cried; he shouted at me that he wanted to go back home; he hit me; he pulled wildly at my clothes; he said he hated me; he quivered with a panic and fury that was outsize and yet exactly right. I understood with perfect clarity in that moment that I was failing one of the primary maternal obligations; I was proving unable to provide him with a stable home environment.

  In the end, I carried him up the three flights, sadness and shame erupting from the pit of my stomach to form a bile in my throat while I struggled to keep hold of his flailing limbs, wincing as his yowls echoed into the landings. I unlocked the door to our new apartment and we practically fell into the hallway, my muscles relaxing in relief. His temper tantrum escalated; I sat him on the sofa and he jerked away from me, kicking and punching the sofa cushions, and because I felt helpless to offer him comfort, I sank to the floor and started to cry as well. The weight of my disempowerment fell suddenly like a block from above, and I buckled under the blow. My shoulders heaved in relief then, as all my own suppressed fear and grief escaped as if from a pressure valve. There it was, first the blessed emptiness, the freedom from the nonchalance I had been feigning to myself and others, the conviction that leaving wasn’t so dramatic after all and my life was now ordinary and common. Then, here was the truth I had been avoiding, swarming in to take its place: the fragility of our standing in the world, my fearful lack of resources both practical and internal, the impossibility of anchoring onto anyone or anything.

  Isaac looked at me, perplexed by my own heaving, ragged breaths. His tears stopped. As I continued to gulp and wheeze through my own sobs, he crawled into my lap, put his thumb in his mouth, and promptly fell asleep. I held him in the dimly lit, cheerless room, looking out the window at the labyrinth of brick, steel, and glass and the patch of flat gray sky visible above it, feeling mentally and bodily how lost we were in this new world, with its eight million inhabitants clawing at survival, the supply of which was more than usually limited. We were well and truly alone, my son and I, and our story might very well end here, I knew, in this city, where keeping a roof over one’s head was an impossible battle, and where people like me disappeared into the sinkhole of failure every day. A rough blade of panic had been unleashed from within, and it would saw at my nerves for many years to come.

  Terrible moments pass if you are willing to wait them out. The practical things in life need doing; they intrude insistently into the grief-induced paralysis until one grasps at the rope provided and hauls oneself up and out. To enable a perception of stability, I made endless to-do lists; looking at them gave me the much-needed sense that there was still purpose to my existence, and purpose was important because it gave my life form and texture; it was an antidote to the tyranny of terrifying nothingness.

  Isaac was first on my list. I needed to return some sense of normalcy and routine to his life as soon as possible. He needed friends; he needed stimulation; he needed structure. So I would enroll him in preschool, but since my current temporary custody agreement dictated that Isaac had to attend a private school with Jewish affiliations, and I was still maintaining the pretense of an observant Jewish life, I made an appointment at a Modern Orthodox primary school not far from where we lived, hoping to apply for a need-based scholarship. With the submission of my application, I had to appear before a board to qualify for sharply reduced tuition. The board consisted of three middle-aged Jewish men, all scions of prominent, moneyed, upper Manhattan families. I was unprepared for the first question they directed at me.

  “Tell us something, why are you here? Why don’t you put your son in a Satmar school, or at least a Hasidic one?” the board member asked, looking from my application to me and back. “After all, that’s where you come from, right?”

  I would have thought the answer to that was obvious. Nonetheless I tried to suppress my discomfort and answer the question politely. “Well, because I’d like for him to have a high school diploma someday. I want him to have a chance at a real education and the opportunities that come with it. Isn’t that something any mother would want for her child?”

  “But why us?” he countered. “Why should we take responsibility for you? You’re not part of our community, after all.”

  The implication was clear. Funny how that cliquey group mentality that I had sought to escape seemed to exist everywhere else as well. Everybody was an “us.” Would I always be an outsider, no matter where I went?

  I took a deep breath. I steadied my voice. When I answered again it was in a tone of exaggerated humility and respect.

  “Chas v’sholom,” I said, a Yiddish expression, the equivalent of “God forbid.” My hand was on my heart. “It’s definitely not your responsibility. I have faith that everything happens for a reason. If for some reason my son goes to public school, I know that will be because he was meant to. That won’t be your fault.” Of course I knew that public school was the ultimate evil, even here, among the more cosmopolitan Jews. Nobody wanted the blame for that on their celestial record.

  One of the men, his expression indignant, raised his finger as if to lecture me, but his colleague reached over to touch his arm, restraining him. He turned to me and said I could go; the board would deliberate and apprise me of their decision. The following week, Isaac started kindergarten there. Although the teachers were kind and he was able to form some tentative friendships, he became more and more guarded each time he entered the building. He was starting to realize the differences between himself and the other children and beginning to understand that he would be punished for those differences. Much like the world we had come from, this new world of wealthy Jews was a similarly conformist environment, in which we were now marginalized not only because of our poverty, but also because of my youth and my status as a single mother, and because my Jewish background was not like that of the other families. The Upper East Side congregation was composed of people with similar incomes, backgrounds, and ideals; in a way it was as uniform as the world we came from, if not more so. I had taken Isaac from one oppressively homogenous environment and plunked him down into another. How could I sentence him to the same childhood experience when the whole purpose of everything I’d done was to save him from it? Was it the case, I worried, that we could never hope to find a community, Jewish or not? Once an outsider, always an outsider. That’s what my teachers had said about those who didn’t fit into our community. Failure to fit in promised to be a permanent disease. Deep down the fear that the maxim held truth gnawed at me. I couldn’t accept that my fate, never mind my son’s, had already been decided. I told myself this was all temporary. Someday soon the divorce would come through, and then we woul
d really be free to start our lives over, on our terms. We’d find somewhere they didn’t make us feel like we didn’t belong.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next item on my list was finding a job. I dutifully filled out applications and printed résumés, but it was well-known even at Sarah Lawrence that getting a job that paid enough to survive in New York City involved having the right social connections to set you up with desirable unpaid internships so that you could work your way into a good position someday. It was just after the financial crisis of 2008, and I had never heard of anyone getting a decent job, one you could actually live off, straight off in Manhattan by applying for it the old-fashioned way. Nevertheless, it was clear I had to do something. God helps those who help themselves!

  Did I already know back then that some stories just as easily end in disaster as they do in triumph? Today I know that the only structural law of a narrative is that it have a beginning and an end, whatever their nature might be.

  As I waited for responses from the companies I’d applied to, I tried to keep myself occupied during the hours when Isaac was at school. I found cafés where they let you sit for hours while sipping the same cup of coffee. I brought a book with me but often peered past its pages to watch the young waitresses bustling about; they were my age, and I wondered at the lives they were at least partly financing with this job.

  * * *

  • • •

  Some days I rode the subway all the way down to the lowermost tip of Manhattan and then back up, simply to pass the time. At first, I used my perch to regard the denizens of the city, feeling as if they were part of a theatrical display that was touted as the great reward for the high price of living there. But gradually, as the months passed and the weather changed, and as I watched those who moved around and past me, I became aware that I had slipped out of my story. I noticed all the stories that were constantly taking place around me, and they were a sharp contrast to the distinct emptiness and stagnation in my own life. I could glimpse a person and immediately I would perceive the narrative that they were a part of. My imagination would fill in the blanks; I could envision where they came from and where they were going; I guessed what they did for work and who they would have dinner with that evening; and I realized that because I had exited my narrative structure, I now was stuck in an inert space, where my life could no longer develop or move forward, as I was missing the connections to people and places that would normally serve to propel movement.

  For a reader (I do still primarily identify myself as one) this is a particular devastation. Since I have always valued nothing so much as the sacred act of infusing meaning into chaos, it was all the more painful to realize I had been squeezed out of the space in which narratives can germinate. I remembered then how as a child I slowly came to the realization that just like all those characters I was introduced to in my clandestine reading sessions, I too was a character, as were all the other people around me, and it occurred to me then that it was up to me to become the main character, the protagonist of my story, for if I sat idle I was doomed to play the small role that had been allotted to me, thereby sacrificing the story to someone else.

  I had been so hungry for the form of autonomy that would allow me to construct my own narrative that I had catapulted myself beyond any framework that could contain my story. In fact I had landed in a kind of narrative vacuum. Because I had burned all my bridges before reaching the other side, I was now stuck in the ether between active and passive, a character in literary limbo.

  * * *

  • • •

  At this time in my life, I began to drift away from books; the act of reading became a painful reminder of my limitations. I had sustained myself during my childhood by reading, not just because of the simple joy inherent in the act, the escape into fantasy, but because those books were proof that a life could be actively lived, not simply unspooled on a predetermined loop by an impersonal hand. Books had planted within me the desire to truly inhabit my life, and now that I had finally broken out into the world in which I was free to do so, it was crushing to discover that I could not simply pick up the thread of a new story and plunge into the plot with the reins firmly in my grip. I was still stuck in that same position as I had been then, forced to live vicariously, by reading, or by watching others as they navigated the tangible lives they were immersed in. But what I really wanted, what I had always wanted, was to live, and to finally set aside the act of wishful observation.

  Life is made up of people; I knew this much. There are no stories without characters. People create movement and growth; without them there is only stagnation. But there was the problem of making friends in my new environment. I had looked up some old classmates who I knew lived in Manhattan as well, but I soon realized that the primary binding factor in a Manhattan friendship was a common denominator of personal net worth. This is not to say that any of my Sarah Lawrence acquaintances now judged me or rejected me for being poor; it was rather that my being poor inconvenienced them and made friendship difficult in practical terms: when they suggested lunch at a restaurant or a trip to the salon, it was simply impossible to say yes, knowing the exorbitant prices that were standard at such locations. It wasn’t their fault that they could afford to do things that I could not, but eventually they tired of having to think of things to do that didn’t cost any money, especially when it was much easier to simply go out to the restaurant they wanted to go to in the first place, with a friend who could afford it. So I steadily lost the few opportunities for friendship that presented themselves; my economic hardship hammered in my loneliness until it was a permanent, immovable fixture.

  As time went by and no job prospects materialized, the numbers in my bank account began to dwindle dangerously. I tried to stretch the money even further than I had before, living off seventy-nine-cent bags of white beans and forty-cent marrowbones that I cooked with plenty of spices for flavor, just as my grandmother had taught me. I rewarmed it for each meal until only the burnt scraps were left. I wonder now if Isaac noticed, based on the changes to our diet, that I was worried about food. I wanted more than anything to hide my fear from him, to spare him the burden, but I think very few parents manage to do this completely when they are in a difficult position. Today I observe his relationship to food, the way he asks about our next meal, what it will contain, and when it will arrive, and naturally I wonder if this vague worry about future sustenance can be traced back to those days when I actively worried about us going hungry.

  I had known hunger as a child, but never this kind. The hunger I had experienced then had been largely emotional. Always there had been freezers stuffed full of meals and sweets, and my grandmother in the kitchen whipping up dishes for me at midnight if I came out of bed with hunger pangs. Never had I known what it was like to skip a meal, except for those few religious fasts throughout the year, and even then we had celebrated at the end with such incredible feasts that I had almost enjoyed those twenty-four hours of restraint. I considered them worth it when confronted with the fireworks that exploded on my tongue at the first taste of food after sundown.

  But our relationship with food had always been strange; I remembered that much. I had this image in my mind still, of my grandmother sitting on a chair in the corner of the dining room nibbling for hours on a chicken bone, lost in a dream, inattentive to my questions, to my curious gaze. She emitted little moans as she gnawed at the bone, perhaps sounds of pleasure at the taste, but there was something horribly sad about those moans as well, as if she was remembering a different time, a time when there had been nothing to eat except subpar remains. What else could explain her desire to suck the marrow out of spindly chicken bones when we had a house full of food?

  She had always spoken of hunger. It was what she used to get me to lick my plate clean at every meal, guilting me into eating even if I wasn’t hungry, by reminding me of the time when she hadn’t had enough. She seemed t
o be trying to teach me to eat while I still could, as if that great, bottomless hunger that she had experienced would come again, and that I could ward it off by eating more, compensating in advance for future lack.

  But I was hungry now, and those meals that I had once eaten to the point of distension did not serve me. Hunger is a special torture, but fear of it is worse, and I had been raised to fear hunger more than anything else. Truth be told, looking back I understand that I didn’t actually go hungry during this time. Perhaps the quality of my food was less than desirable, perhaps the variety that appeals to us was lacking, but my stomach was full. It was the fear of that great threat my grandmother had described that gnawed in my belly like a beast, making me believe that the worst had already happened. And although my stomach was full, I tossed and turned at night as if I had gone to sleep on an empty one, and each morning I was awake far too early, fighting the endless hollow of fear that was nighttime. I watched as the sun rose as if from outside the haze each morning, its insistent beams illuminating every particle in the smog, reflecting off every glistening trail of dog urine trickling along the pavement. Even the Upper East Side, with its famous broad avenues lined with gleaming shop windows, its squares of gray asphalt trod on by designer-clad residents in dark sunglasses and red-soled shoes, could not be spared the excrement this city produced. It labored to hide its garbage and scrub its sidewalks to no avail. It seemed strange to imagine that this noisy, dirty, odorous place had once captivated my imagination and populated my dreams. I would have liked, for just one day, to walk in the shoes of someone for whom this city was an endless thrill. Perhaps the change in perspective would have melted my resistance.