An Observant Wife

by Naomi Ragen

  They were one now, Leah thought, truly. Pray God that would never change.

  4

  SHAINDELE’S NEW BEGINNING

  What a difference a year had made, Shaindele thought, settling into the familiar, rickety wooden chair with its long, scuffed writing arm, junked from some New York public school that had long since modernized to plastic. In that the furniture mirrored the building, an old public school whose Irish and Italian second-generation tenants had long since disappeared, replaced by Hasidic Jews who had bought the abandoned building, outfitting it with scraps and leftovers and their own version of an education, which would have scandalized their American-born predecessors.

  She was seventeen, going on eighteen. Long gone was the dread of running into the likes of Freidel Halpern, the principal’s perfect daughter, who had graduated months before, taking her perfect French braid, her snobbery, and her ugly insinuations with her. Gone, too, was Gnendel, her sidekick and echo, who had left without graduating to marry the son of one of the area’s butchers. With glee, Shaindele imagined her in a stained white apron standing behind the counter.

  Although one was forbidden to hold grudges, she would never forgive those two who had orchestrated and led the vicious bullying she had suffered in wake of her mother’s death: the little hints about how early death was a punishment for sins and the high-handed disdain over her father’s relationship with a baalas teshuva. How they had made her suffer! She wondered if the recent wedding was going to put an end to it or, as she most dreaded, become the jumping-off point for yet another round?

  But so far, the girls had been kind about her father’s new wife.

  “Such a beautiful wedding, kaynahora,” little Esther Shulman had whispered sincerely. “May your family know only joy from now on.”

  “It must be a blessing to have a mother to take care of your little brother and sister and the house. Now you won’t have to work so hard,” Raizel Liba added sweetly, while chubby Adina Sara had stood by, nodding in agreement, dispensing a big, warm hug.

  But it was not the approval of the B- and C-listers she craved—daughters of pharmacists and shopkeepers—but those of the elite group who had once been her peers, daughters of rabbis and kollel-heads. Freidel’s father was principal of the school, while Gnendel’s headed his own kollel (no doubt the reason she’d found anyone at all to marry her, with her face! And no doubt they’d held the wedding three weeks after the engagement so as not to give the groom an opportunity to change his mind).

  When her mother had lived and her father had been a full-time scholar, her place among them had been assured. She’d been a princess, community royalty, her lineage linked from both sides to distinguished rabbis and scholars going back a hundred years.

  But her mother’s sudden death had put an end to all that. For not only had the shocking details surrounding it fueled the rumor mill, but it had also triggered the economic necessity for her father to leave the kollel and take up full-time employment—a disgrace in their scholarly community. Perhaps worst of all was her father’s shocking determination to make a redheaded baalas teshuva his wife.

  Now, instead of concrete, she stood on beach sand, she thought, her status shifting with every new wave of community gossip. In every word, every glance, every gesture toward her by others, she searched feverishly for sly suggestions of disdain, conjuring insults and slights out of thin air. And even when she failed to find them, it did little to assuage her anxiety or dissipate the clouds of disparagement she imagined hanging over her head. The only thing that had so far kept her from collapsing altogether were her grandparents. Living and dead, they were still all indisputable community luminaries.

  It might still be all right, she comforted herself, still buoyed by the wedding in which her grandmother’s power and influence had been displayed in all its glory, bringing together the top echelon of the community’s Torah scholars to lend an aura of respectability to what would otherwise have been a disgraceful debacle that would have muddied the family’s name and ruined her chances of finding a good husband. As it was, despite the mother of the bride dressed like a harem dancing girl toting along her gentile boyfriend in his Aladdin headdress, no one had dared to boycott or even breathe a bad word. That is, at least not to their faces. To do so would have been to openly challenge the stamp of approval given the occasion by the community’s éminences grises of Torah scholarship and piety. And no one would, she thought, unless something happened that set the pot to boiling once more. Shaindele found herself obsessing over what that something could be.

  There were so many things.

  First, Leah could make a mistake—an innocent mistake—that would set the whole neighborhood wagging their tongues. She could, for example, wear socks and athletic shoes. After all, she had friends who went Rollerblading, and even skiing down the streets in Boro Park! Or she could buy the wrong clothes for Chasya, something red, or forget to dress her in long tights when the weather got warm. But that was the least of it.

  What if down the line her father and Leah argued and the neighbors heard? She remembered that terrible time between her parents before her mother … Oh, how awful that had been! What if it happened again? What if her father realized how different Leah was? What if Leah realized what it was to live such a strict, difficult life? What if they fell out of love, separated? The whole burden of caring for her family would once again fall upon her shoulders.

  It was all horribly plausible. More than once, she had pondered the strangeness of a young, secular woman choosing to live among them despite all their niggling rules and annoying restrictions. Why would you take that on yourself if you didn’t have to? Surely, it must have been fun to be secular, to go to movies and plays, and go ice-skating in Rockefeller Center in the winter, and swimming at Coney Island in the summer, all things forbidden to haredi women by virtue of the endless strictures concerning modest dress and deportment? Until Leah entered their lives, she had seldom, if ever, given such possibilities a moment’s thought.

  From birth, she had lived in a walled city on a planet in which all the paths had been clearly delineated, the rules made crystal clear. And behind those battlements, she had been happy with those childish amusements that had been permitted her, never feeling any sense of deprivation. But the encounter with Leah, coupled as it was with the loss of her mother, had made it shockingly clear that those walls were not in fact made of bricks and mortar. If you pushed against them, they gave way immediately, opening up a road toward a million unexplored possibilities.

  Looking beyond them to see where her stepmother had come from, trying to imagine the life she had lived, had begun as an exercise in contempt to strengthen her opposition to a match of which, she told herself, no one approved; an attempt to strengthen her solidarity with those respectable and wise people around her who had so clearly communicated their disgust and rejection.

  “Baalas teshuva with the wild red hair,” Freidel had called Leah, egging Shaindele on to do things that almost destroyed her relationship with her father simply to placate what she now realized were an ignorant and hateful girl’s ugly prejudices. Why, she’d even been ready to run away from home and get married, convinced that Leah would destroy her family’s reputation, reducing her own value in the marriage market to little more than zero!

  Had she really been that silly, she wondered, that self-absorbed and vengeful she’d been prepared to destroy the happiness of her family simply to assuage some worthless acquaintance’s sense of propriety? She shook her head in self-amazement, thinking of the home she had come from that morning. The smell of coffee and orange juice had filled the clean, orderly kitchen, and folded laundry sat in baskets waiting to be put away. Chasya and Mordechai Shalom, both beautifully dressed, their little faces scrubbed, their hair combed, sat chattering amiably over a table of freshly made omelets and toast. Most of all, she recalled her father’s newly serene eyes as he’d sat back watching, a gentle smile on his lips.

  It was his last we
ek in kollel. What a relief it probably was to him to know that when he started work full-time in the city, his home and his children would be in competent, loving hands, not those of some silly, resentful teenager who couldn’t cope, she thought with surprising candor, both surprised and pleased at how much she had grown to finally admit such a thing. She looked down gratefully at the blouse she wore, newly laundered and ironed by her stepmother, and the brown lunch bag filled with nonfattening, nutritious treats Leah carefully prepared for her each day.

  Right after the wedding, she had found it hard to become accustomed to such luxuries. “I’m not a child! I can take care of my own clothes and make my own lunches, Leah,” she’d protested. But Leah had only laughed.

  “There is plenty I expect you to do, Shaindele. Don’t worry that I’m going to spoil you! Now off you go, you’ll be late.”

  “But don’t you want me to drop off the children?”

  “I’ll take them in the car,” Leah said. “It’ll be quicker.”

  The car—the gleaming blue Honda Civic, purchased secondhand with Leah’s income and the wedding gifts—now parked on the street right outside their apartment building, ready to take them on Sunday picnics and to museums and zoos. If anything delineated the border between their old lives and this new one, it was the car, and her father’s suddenly youthful face as he kissed everyone goodbye in the morning.

  As Shaindele walked to class with carefree ease, she couldn’t help but remember the old days when all of it had been her responsibility: cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare; the feeling of panic and self-hatred as dirty dishes and pots left over from the Sabbath piled up on the counters and hampers stinking of a week’s worth of soiled children’s clothes fouled the air. The disorder, the unhappy, crying children, her schoolwork, the missed days of classes … She must never go back to that again, never!

  She sat down behind her desk, closing her eyes for a moment before steadying her shaking hands to grip a pen and notebook as she waited for the lesson to begin. She wasn’t the same person as the young girl who had come to school the year before, she realized, her heart broken from the loss of her mother, her head a mass of confusion, struggling with an anger and resentment that often boiled over, threatening to tear her fragile young heart apart.

  But with the healing had come some scars. In witnessing the pitiless end that had come to her mother, part of her youth had been robbed from her, part of her innocence. She would never again be able to look out at the world through the eyes of a child. She had seen a part of the world she had never been meant to see, and which now could never be unseen.

  She wanted so much to live a good life. She wanted to be happy, with that unique yearning felt by the young who are full of health and dreams and energy. Even with all the pain she had experienced, the optimism that is part of having lived so few years was strong inside her; the idea that it is possible to change things, to make them different, better; the idea that it is perfectly feasible to overcome the past and forget it. The proof of that was in her father’s eyes. He was walking a new path, and so could she.

  She could go forward in a way unique to her alone. And it could be light-filled, with a luminescence that would shine brighter and brighter with each step, the way her father’s eyes shone now with something new, something surprising and unexpected, that had happened to him. She did not yet know where to find that path, only that it was out there, waiting.

  Leah, the young woman she had fought against for so long, was now part of her life, taking on herself so many of the burdens people had thoughtlessly piled on her, mistaking her youth for competence, resilience, and strength, when just the opposite was true. She’d been inexperienced, rigid, and weak. But that was the past. She felt confident that at the very least all her tragedies and missteps had taught her something about the world and particularly about herself. She felt sure it was possible to grow and get better.

  She didn’t know what the future would hold, but her young heart yearned that it be a better life than a short and troubled one filled with pain like that of her poor mother. Her heart still ached for her mother, but now, finally, she felt the possibility of healing was not so far off. Only then, she told herself, could her heart truly open to all life’s possibilities.

  How strange that this young woman she had feared, despised, rejected, and battled against had become the catalyst for that opening! As if she were a flower and Leah rain.

  Whatever ugly things people said about baale teshuva, there was something comforting—inspiring, even—about a woman raised in the great, free outside world leaving it all behind to join them in their narrow lives. Far from weakening her faith, it had strengthened her belief and her understanding, making her feel that she needn’t doubt the path she had been raised to follow, because even others, who had followed a wider road, had voluntarily chosen to find their way there.

  By the time school ended, the short daylight hours of winter had already faded as she headed home through the smoky glow of streetlamps that filtered through the thinning autumn leaves. All around, she saw people moving, hurrying—bewigged mothers pushing baby carriages, young Talmud students carrying heavy books, children balancing on bicycles.

  There was something beautiful, she thought, in just putting one foot in front of the other, propelling yourself forward through the onrushing flux of time; something rewarding in motion itself. The life force inside her rose to the surface of her consciousness in a way it had never done before. She was aware of herself being alive, being human. And this seemed to her the opposite of where she had come from the year before, when her heart had been filled with death, with stasis and mourning.

  She could feel the world yearning for her. She wanted so much to embrace it, to become part of it. But could she? Did she have the ability, the will, to push her life force, frozen by the agony of loss, into vitality again, into the future? What could she do? How could she make this happen? She felt paralyzed, afraid of missing her chance. And yet, because she was young, so hopeful, too.

  She wondered if everyone felt like this at some time in their lives. But no one she knew talked of such things. I’m lonely, she realized, wishing once more she could talk to her mother. But she would have to do this alone now, this reaching, this growing. And the thought of that terrified her.

  5

  JOY

  Something was sweeping over her, Leah thought as she strapped Mordechai Shalom securely into his car seat and helped Chasya close her seat belt. The rhythm of her life, so long dictated by her own ideas and needs, was no longer under her control. She was surprised at just how radical the change had been from her previous life once she moved into the Lehman household.

  She had not expected that. After all, she had been taking care of the house and the children for months before the actual wedding. But coming in during the day was not the same as living with them, she realized. Lifting the baby out of his bed as he awoke first thing in the morning, his body soft and still heavy with sleep as he curled up in her arms, caressing her cheek with his own; Chasya jumping into her lap as she sat drinking her morning coffee, the lingering smell of her evening bath and shampoo rising like incense from her warm scalp.

  The very sound of their voices whether in unhappiness, hilarity, or sweet entreaty—even their silence behind closed bedroom doors—made demands on her attention, her heart, her mind, evoking a vigilant watchfulness and a degree of obligation she had never before experienced. Most of all, the magical, transformative word Mommy, addressed to her in laughter or bawling misery, tugged at her heart, burdening it and filling it with joy in ways she could not have foreseen or even imagined.

  Their own mother had been Mameh. If Mordechai Shalom remembered her at all, he showed no sign of it. But Chasya did. Once when Leah had found her sitting by the window looking out into the street, her little face somber and forlorn, she’d made the colossal error of asking her what was wrong. The little girl’s response had been devastating.

  “She di
dn’t come to the wedding,” Chasya answered without looking up.

  “Who, sweetie?”

  “Mameh.”

  Leah stood staring down at her, dumbfounded.

  “I haven’t seen her in such a long time,” the child continued, shaking her head. “Maybe she forgot where we live? If I see her, I’m going to go get her.”

  The lump in Leah’s throat made it impossible for her to speak. So she gathered the little girl into her arms and sat with her silently, stroking her hair, accepting and sharing her matchless grief. The idea of making up stories about heaven and angels and paradise and how one day she would see her mother again seemed wrong somehow. As much as Leah wanted to believe in such things, she knew that telling that to Chasya was simply a heartless detour around the inescapable heartbreak of her present reality. It was almost obscene.

  “If I do a lot of mitzvoth and daven, will HaShem send her back?”

  Leah swallowed hard, remembering her own magical thinking when her fiancé Josh had shockingly slipped and fallen to his death: the hope that it was all a mistake, that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed; that a doctor would come and give him a magic little pill that would cure him. He’d open his wide, brown eyes and smile his unique lopsided smile, his eyes filled with familiar, self-deprecating humor. “Wow,” he’d say. “That’s something I won’t try again!” And they’d pick up their backpacks and continue their pre-wedding hike through beautiful Zion National Park.

  She held the child closer, shaking her head. “You are the best little girl in the world, Icy, and HaShem loves you just the way you are. But that’s not the way the world works, sweetheart. When someone dies, they don’t ever come back to this world, no matter how much we pray and how much we miss them.”

  The child seemed to accept that as if she’d known it all along. “Mommy, I have a secret,” she whispered, snuggling closer.