The Two Hearts of Eliza Bloom

by Beth Miller

  Concrete and fur

  Socks

  Leech curry with vomit

  Live baby

  Woodlice

  Bits of my own body

  The very first item was a cheeseburger! Made from non-kosher beef, served with cheese, thus mixing meat and milk. Not to mention fries, cooked in who-knows-what oil, possibly even animal fat.

  ‘You shall not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk,’ I said, trying to smile.

  ‘Does your quoting Genesis at me mean you’re feeling anxious?’

  ‘It’s Leviticus. I am a bit anxious. But it’s fine, honestly. Bring me that damn cheeseburger. Try everything once.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Alex said.

  No. ‘Yes.’

  The day Alex and I got engaged, he asked if I was up for the journey. And he wasn’t talking about the journey from North to South London. He meant, was I up for integrating, for leading a secular life? Was I up for trying new things, breaking some of my long-held beliefs, shedding some taboos? Yes, I said, and I meant it. Yes, emphatically. I’d spent most of my life feeling out of sync with my own community. I wanted to fit into the Real World, and I’d already missed out on so much.

  ‘I want you to teach me everything you know, too,’ he said. ‘I want to know what you know.’

  But what did I know, in comparison to him? The rules and rituals by which I’d led my life felt limiting, not enriching. Nonetheless, Alex insisted I write some of them in the back of the culture book, so he could learn them. And I did, but they seemed about as useful to our new life together as a blank Valentine’s card.

  ‘So, let’s start the food list,’ Alex said, when he got in from work that evening. ‘First item: a cheeseburger. There’s a McDonald’s in town.’

  ‘Alex! I can’t go into one of those! Please don’t make me.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m not really going to take you to McDonald’s. Not ever, and certainly not on Valentine’s Night. What kind of barbarian do you think I am? There’s a place in Hampstead that does a great burger, tastes like homemade. I booked us a table. You hungry?’

  I shook my head, and he kissed me, and said I would be by the time we got there. Maybe he guessed that I’d put this off for ever, if I could. It had been a big enough deal eating non-kosher cereal, butter and bread. Though that was my idea. Alex made it clear he was happy to shop in a kosher supermarket for as long as I wanted, for ever if necessary, but I knew that if I was going to embrace my new life properly, I needed to eat what everyone else ate.

  On the way to the tube, Alex tried to take my arm, but I was bleeding, my second one since we’d married, and I pulled away. The first one had been two weeks after our wedding day and I’d tried to explain then about the need to keep separate from each other, but he looked at me as though I was mad. Until that point I hadn’t thought of telling him about those particular laws. It seemed extraordinary that there could be anyone who didn’t know about them, who needed to have them explained.

  ‘We’re not supposed to have sex,’ he’d said, incredulous, ‘because you’ve got your period?’

  I recoiled in horror. I had never had a conversation about this with anyone before, let alone a man. ‘Not only, er, that thing you said! We’re not supposed to touch at all!’

  He pulled me close to him, and it took all my willpower not to shove him away. It was the first time since meeting him that I’d not wanted to touch him.

  ‘Look at me!’ he yelled to no one (we were in the living room). ‘I’m touching the unclean lady! Unclean! Unclean! Where’s that bell when I need it?’

  ‘Alex, don’t, please, it isn’t funny.’ I was close to tears.

  He let me go, and I saw that he wasn’t finding it funny either. ‘Don’t you think we’ve had enough enforced separation?’ he said. ‘I slept in the spare room for more than two weeks after we got engaged! My balls were bright blue by the time we finally… you know.’

  ‘It was important to be married,’ I said, sliding my toes underneath the rug, hoping to change the subject back to an earlier, but now-solved, argument.

  ‘This is definitely one you have to get over quickly,’ he said, refusing to be deflected. ‘I’m way too modern a guy to think of periods as taboo.’

  ‘It’s just – those laws are so entrenched in my mind.’

  ‘Eliza, you married me.’ He pressed his hand against his chest. ‘Not an Orthodox guy. Me. I’m trying my best, but I don’t know how many more fucking rules like this I can handle.’

  I thought quickly. ‘I probably need to build up to it, get used to the idea.’

  ‘Try it tomorrow, you mean?’

  That was a bit faster than I’d been thinking. ‘How about this month, we hold hands. In a couple of months, three or four, we sleep in the same bed. And, er, at some point, we try, you know, the whole thing.’

  ‘We’re not sleeping in the same bed because you’ve got your period?!’ His voice rose into a squeak.

  I decided it wasn’t the right moment to say that I was meant to keep apart from him for seven days after the bleeding stopped, as well. Come on, Aliza. If I’d wanted to do that, I should have married Nathan. ‘I’ll sleep in the spare room.’

  ‘This is absolutely nonsensical.’

  I tried to look winning. ‘It makes the times we have together more special.’

  Alex sighed. ‘It’s lucky you’re worth it.’ He leaned across to take my hand, and I jerked away. ‘I thought we were holding hands this month?’

  ‘Sorry. Yes, we are.’ I let him encircle my hand in his. Resisting the urge to rush and scrub both of us with soap was something I’d just have to come to terms with.

  Now as we walked together, a month later, I was still nowhere near used to it. He’d only touched my arm, but all I could think was how unclean he now was. I took a long breath and linked my arm through his.

  ‘Well done,’ he said, grinning. ‘You look totally relaxed with your teeth gritted like that.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I can tell. There’s a pulse going in your eyelid. Incidentally,’ he went on casually, ‘some of the best fucks I’ve ever had have been with gals on the rag.’

  ‘On the what?’

  ‘I had this one girlfriend, Emily, she was really turned on during her period. That’s when she most wanted to do it.’

  I genuinely thought I was going to be physically sick. I unhooked my arm from his, on the pretext of getting a tissue from my bag, put it to my mouth and breathed into it, nice and slow. There was still so much I didn’t know about Alex. In terms of how often we met before we eloped, it was, ironically, not that different from an arranged marriage.

  However, I did know him well enough to recognise when he was deliberately trying to shock me. I stored away the information about sexy Emily for another time, and focused on practicalities. ‘Doesn’t it make a mess?’

  ‘Well yes,’ Alex said. ‘That’s part of the attraction.’

  Later that night, he added ‘making love during Eliza’s period’ to the ‘sexy things to try’ list.

  We changed at Green Park for the new Jubilee line, and got out at West Hampstead. Alex led the way to a noisy restaurant full of people. We sat at a wooden table, and he poured me a glass of water which I almost immediately knocked over. A sweet waitress had to come and mop up, and I felt that everyone was looking at me.

  It wasn’t that I’d never been in a restaurant. We were religious, not hillbillies. I remembered going to a kosher place in Stamford Hill a few times with Mum and Dad before the younger ones were born, when it was just Uri, Joel and me. But going out to eat wasn’t something you could do with seven kids, not unless you were Rockefeller. I’d been to cafés, of course, with my siblings, and with Deborah. We used to hang out in Munchies. But we never had more than coffee and a cake.

  Alex ordered me a cheeseburger called, rudely, ‘The Fat Bastard’. When the waitress had gone, he said, ‘I’ve realised that this a two-taboo deal, isn’t it? Non-kosher me
at, plus dairy with it. Is it too much?’

  All at once it did feel way too much, but I didn’t want to back out. I shook my head indecisively, neither yes nor no.

  ‘Would a burger without cheese be better, at least?’ he said. ‘I’ll call her back. Or you can have a veggie burger if you can’t face it.’

  Him giving me a get-out made me determined to do it. In for a penny, in for a quarter-pounder, haha.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘This is what I want. I want to live in the secular world. With you.’

  He smiled his dazzling smile, the smile I fell in love with. The one that made me leave my life behind, that led to me sitting here, waiting for a cheeseburger to arrive. His smile calmed me, and we talked about non-contentious things: some new films he’d added to the list, my latest letter to Deborah, which other couples were on a Valentine’s date. I felt a flutter of panic return, though, when the Fat Bastard arrived. It was well-named; a large disc of meat, with a thick slice of cheese on top, onions dripping from the sides. It was served in a bread bun with seeds on top, which reminded me of platzels, the plaited rolls I ate with Zaida every Sunday, which reminded me who I was.

  So, this was really happening. Here I was, embarking on the next stage of my new life: eating non-kosher meat with cheese.

  Copying Alex, I picked the burger up with both hands, and raised it to my mouth. It smelled lovely. I took a tiny bite. Don’t think about what it is, I told myself. Think about how it tastes. The sensations, not what it actually is. That’s how I managed my wedding night with Alex.

  And like him, the burger was delicious.

  On the way out, feeling buoyed up by the success of the outing, I proposed an idea I’d been thinking about for several weeks.

  ‘Can we go past my parents’ house?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We’re married now.’

  ‘I don’t think this is a good idea, Eliza.’

  ‘Dad’s changed the phone number and no one’s answered any of my letters. I just want to see.’

  ‘OK, if you’re sure.’

  We got on a train and then changed on to the familiar Victoria line. I stared up at the list of stations, and said, ‘It’s only two stops.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Alex said.

  ‘I don’t know. My hands are sweaty.’

  ‘Let me tell you,’ Alex said, ‘about the last time I was at Seven Sisters.’

  I knew he was trying to take my mind off our ultimate destination, and I was grateful. And he hadn’t ever talked much about what it was like for him, the day we ran away; we had focused almost completely on how it affected me.

  ‘Well. You can imagine I was a bit of a wreck, waiting for you at the station, not knowing if you were going to come.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘I drank so much coffee that my knee kept jiggling up and down by itself. It was a massive relief when you called. And the truth is, I was pretty keen to get more involved. I was never sure about your low-key plan to meet at the tube. Not what I’d call an elopement.’

  ‘Well, you got your drama then.’

  ‘And then some. So, I pretty much ran to your street, and I spotted the house straight away, because its front door was wide open and people were swarming in and out. There were loads of men in long black coats standing around smoking, women running about with plates and trays, and kids playing outside on the pavement. It looked like a scene from long ago, the kids in their old-fashioned clothes, the boys with those curls at the side of their heads. What is it you call them?’

  ‘Payos.’

  Alex laughed. ‘At the training session you did, do you remember, someone asked why Jewish men have those long side-curls? And you said, “One theory is that their purpose is to give young men something to fiddle with, to distract them from masturbating.”’

  ‘I can’t believe I said that. I was feeling very skittish that day.’

  ‘It’s no wonder I fell in love with you.’

  ‘You fell in love with me the day we met?’

  ‘I did. Anyway. I sat on one of those uncomfortable slanted plastic benches at a bus-stop near your house, and texted you. Then you emerged from the house in your coat, tall and proud, like Cleopatra in the desert, commanding an empire.’

  ‘Pretty impressive for a Stamford Hill gal, right?’

  ‘You are extremely impressive. OK, we’re here. You sure about this?’

  I nodded, and we got off the train. We smiled at each other as we walked through the ticket area, where we had, two months earlier, stood and pledged ourselves to each other. But my heart was thumping, and it only got worse as we walked the familiar route to my old home. Alex took my hand, and I squeezed it tightly every time I saw someone coming towards us. But our luck held, and I didn’t see anyone I knew.

  ‘Then,’ Alex continued, as though we’d had no break, ‘the men in the garden started clustering round you. I guessed that most of them were your brothers. One of them was pointing at your bag, and though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I guessed they were asking where you were going. It sounded light-hearted though; they didn’t seem to suspect anything was wrong.’

  ‘Not at first.’

  ‘I worked out which one was Nathan.’

  I flinched slightly at the sound of this name. ‘How did you?’

  ‘Your brothers are all dark. He had light-coloured hair and a kind of rusty beard.’

  ‘Sandy, not rusty.’

  Alex looked at me. ‘Uh huh?’

  ‘Carry on with the story.’ We were getting close to my parents’ street now.

  ‘Anyway, I knew it was him because he was holding back, whereas the others were all round you, familiar with you. I thought Nathan was quite nice-looking, by the way.’

  ‘I don’t know how to process that. Hurry up, Alex, we will be there in a minute.’ For some reason, I wanted to hear the end of the story before we got to my house.

  ‘So Gila was crying, and I looked at you hugging her, and I thought, if this was happening to me, would I have the bottle to go through with it? I felt like I was going to hyperventilate. I thought I might have to fight Uri, maybe even several of them, but I couldn’t remember how you actually fight. The last time was when I was eleven and at school, and I got a scratched cheek and torn shirt. Then I noticed how alike you and Uri looked, and I doubted I could even hit someone who looked like you.’

  ‘Heavens, Alex, I had no idea such violent thoughts were going through your mind.’

  ‘I was pretty surprised myself. Then you told Uri that we were getting married, and I thought, we are?’

  ‘Yes, you did look a bit surprised.’

  ‘Well, we’d only known each other five minutes, and we’d never talked about marriage. Oh look, here’s the legendary bus stop.’

  ‘Let’s stop a minute here while I get my nerve up.’

  We sat on the bench – Alex was right, it was very uncomfortable – and he continued. ‘I just assumed you were talking marriage to Uri to show that we were serious.’

  ‘How little you knew!’

  ‘Too right. Then you straightened up, and I saw on your face the expression I fell in love with that first day, when you walked into that training room: I’m damned if I’ll show anyone how uncertain or frightened I am. And when you made it clear that we were going together, I think Uri looked at me with respect.’

  ‘Mmm. His extreme hatred expression is easy to muddle up with his respectful face.’

  ‘Ha ha. Anyway, you suddenly darted off, and I raced after you, and after Dov had followed us you looked at me, and your lovely eyes were glittering, and I thought you were going to say something profound, but you said, ‘Run!’

  This made me laugh, even though I felt terrified by what we were about to do.

  ‘You were mighty courageous then, Eliza, and you are mighty courageous now.’

  ‘Thank you. I am courageous because of you.’

  ‘Ah, shucks.’ He kissed my hand, and we stood up
and went over to my parents’ house.

  I’m courageous, I told myself. Even so, as we reached the door, I was trembling.

  ‘Do you want me to knock?’ Alex said.

  ‘No.’ I took my hand out of his, and rapped on the door before I could change my mind. Please, I prayed, don’t let it be Dad.

  The door opened, and Uri stood there. He gaped at me. ‘What on earth…?’

  Like a scene in a film, there were all at once faces everywhere: my beautiful Gila, Dov, Joel, all saying my name, their eyes flicking from me to Alex. Then, it seemed a second later, everyone disappeared, and my father was standing there. He looked beyond me, down the street, and called into the house over his shoulder, ‘There’s no one here.’

  Then he shut the door in my face.

  Alex looked at me. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

  We turned and walked back to the tube. ‘Yes,’ I said, and I meant it. ‘That’s it, I’m never seeing them again. I’ve given them more than enough chances. I’m done with them.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll come round, given time,’ Alex said, but he didn’t sound too confident.

  There was no more talking on the way home. We were talked out.

  Back at the flat, while he was annotating the Re-education book, I discreetly retrieved the Valentine’s card I’d given him. I wrote in it: ‘Thank you for my new life. I love you. Eliza.’

  I slipped it on to the mantelpiece and dropped a couple of subtle hints that it might be worth looking at again.

  He read it and kissed me. ‘You learn fast, Grasshopper.’

  15 February 2000

  Dear Deborah

  Me again. Maybe my last letter got lost. And all the letters before that. I think this is the ninth one, in case you’re keeping notes.

  How’s Michael? How are you? I miss not knowing what’s going on with you. I miss not knowing what’s going on with everyone.

  I want to ask you some things about what happened after I left. Please will you tell me? I would tell you if our situations were reversed. You know I would.

  How is my Zaida?