by Leah Lax
The things my mother collected filled my childhood: dozens of unused cans of tuna fish, empty cans from tuna fish, glass bottles (always good for something), yesterday’s newspaper and today’s. Books and plants and tubes of hand cream and face cream and leg cream and eye cream, and lipstick and foundation and eye powders in blues and browns. She bought all of the newest offerings from the Avon lady and filled the bathroom counters, cabinets, and drawers to overflowing with bottles in different shapes that she admired. She collected magazines and junk mail, which wasn’t really junk, and dishes from the latest grocery store offering, and empty packages and parts and pieces of things, because she said she will need them. And shoes and pants and dresses and coats. And purses. She likes purses. Dozens of purses. Piles of purses. Tubes of paint and canvases and portfolios and dozens and dozens of brushes for her painting. I was surrounded by her stacks and collections and piles. Even as a small child, I knew rules: I was not to move her things, or she would wave her arms and shout. I was not to say, “throw out,” or she would launch into scathing criticism of my character.
I leave Levi’s study and return with Lysol cleaning spray, a dust cloth, and a wet rag. I put books back up on the shelf, arrange the rest in orderly stacks against the wall, dust everything clean. File folders go together into one place in the corner. Sports equipment and shoes in the closet. I clear the desk, stack papers, spray and wipe the surface, telling myself seder iz kedusha—order is holiness. I will bring order and holiness into our home. Gradually, space opens up for a chair for cello practice, a music stand, a few inches on the brick-and-board bookcase for music books. I won’t have to carry the cello to a practice room in the music building. I’ll fill our home with music. That will be the sound of our home.
I am too busy to notice the front door opening, Levi coming in. Then, behind me, a shout of “No!” in such anger and dismay I whirl around, his old racquet in my hand, the dried-out black tape hanging. He’s waving his arms at the room, yelling, “What have you done? Put that down!” Spittle flies from his mouth. “Don’t touch that.” I’m sure the neighbors can hear. “What kind of person are you?” he says.
I throw the racquet down and stomp out of the room. I am not a child—I don’t live with my mother, don’t have to take that.
Except that leaving the room is a capitulation. Except that, even as I walk away, angry heart yammering in my chest, I’m spinning Hasidic demands planted in my head and trying to stop my own march. He is your husband. I should not touch his things. The Rebbe said to make an everlasting edifice. I am just a woman. Bend your will to God’s will.
A deflated unspoken truce sits between us the rest of the day. Later I tell Levi, “I don’t need a music room. I’ll go practice my cello in the music building.”
IT SEEMS OUR WEDDING WAS a last goodbye to most of our friends at Chabad House. Tuvia and most of the others graduate and move away, taking their religious rebellion with them out into the world. There are just a few guys left who gather for the daily minyan service, not even enough to make the quorum—no more raucous group Sabbath meals and study groups. The new semester will start soon. Levi will be my only companion.
We edge toward friendship. We shop and cook together. After the years on my own with little or no money, I eye the high price of strawberries one day in the grocery store and push past, but Levi stops, then puts two sumptuous cartons of the luscious fruit into our cart. “It’s good to do little things,” he says.
That night, over vegetarian dinner, we exchange polite conversation like two people on a blind date. Levi gets up from the table and puts on the radio. It’s the classical station, something lyrical and passionate. “What is that?” I say.
“Brahms,” he says. “His first. But it’s almost over. This is the finale.”
This isn’t the first time that I’ve heard Levi identify classical music on the radio. I’m impressed. I’m the would-be musician, but he can recognize more music than I can. “I’ve heard that before,” I say, a little embarrassed.
He takes a forkful of fish, then chews with his mouth open and sets his elbows on the table. I glance away, swallow hard. “Um, where did you learn to recognize all that music?” I say.
“At Penn,” he says, and soon, he’s relaying an account of his years at the University of Pennsylvania before he turned to religion. He’s eager, happy. He sounds as if he’s there again. One elbow remains on the table, his hand in the air, while he leans over his plate and shovels in food with the other. “I got to work on a pet project of one of my physics professors—a new machine to take pictures inside the body using sound waves,” he says. “They’re called sonograms.”
“Interesting idea,” I say. I wish he’d just close his mouth when he chews. “Is that safer? Than X-rays?”
“Sure. And you can see the organs!” He takes another forkful. “In the evenings, I’d go watch Eugene Ormandy conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra. I’d sit on the third balcony with a student ticket—tried not to miss a concert. I was sure I was watching something great.”
I eat like a prim matron. But look what’s unfolding, I think. Look what he loves. The music changes to a piano concerto.
“That’s Liszt,” Levi says.
We fall quiet. The notes layer and build, cascading over us, rising up and up toward a crescendo. I try to picture him as a clean-shaven undergraduate, alone in a crowd on a dim upper balcony, focused on the legendary conductor.
Then, “Tell me about Richie,” I say.
The light in his face goes out. He puts down his fork. “What is there to say?” he says.
“Were you close?”
“Yes.”
There is a photograph on the mantel in his parents’ house of Levi’s lanky, long-haired, mustached younger brother. My mother told me Richie’s story before the wedding: how Richie knew Tuvia from childhood—Tuvia, who ran Chabad House before he graduated and moved away. How because of Tuvia, Richie decided to try out a New Jersey Hasidic institute for men much like the one for women I went to in St. Paul. How Richie was an avid bicycler and had always wanted to cross the country on his prized bicycle. “I came here for graduate school because of my brother,” Levi says. “We fought a lot as kids. I wanted to know him. As an adult.” Across the courtyard, a window is open and some student is practicing the flute. Airy arpeggios float over the weedy lawn and weave around the Liszt. “I discovered I liked my brother,” Levi says. “That was new. He talked a lot about wanting to be a lawyer. We played chess almost every day. And racquetball.”
“With that racquet in the office? The one I had when you came in?”
“Yes.”
He skips the rest—the drunken truck driver who hit Richie somewhere in Louisiana, the mangled bicycle, the body unidentified for days in a county morgue. The laconic night voice on the telephone to his frantic parents, who hadn’t heard from him: “Uh, sorry no one called sooner. We have your son. Where? Oh, here in the morgue.”
“After the funeral,” Levi says, “Tuvia kept calling me to come to Chabad House. Until I did.” He stops. Doesn’t say anything about how religion proffered structure and answers to cosmic questions at a time when nothing seemed to make sense, doesn’t talk about how need can make “proof” irrelevant to the point where you might not even want proof. But then, neither of us can articulate those things. On the radio, the concerto slows to an adagio, cellos forming the melody. We grow quiet, my husband and I, in the music.
THE OLD METAL DOOR to the mikvah at the back of Dallas’s Tiferet Israel Synagogue shuts behind me with a clang. “The mikvah’s in there,” Seema Rakovsky says, giving a nod aimed at the dim interior. She switches on the lights.
The long wait has passed. Levi is waiting for me back at the Motel 8. His parents are expecting us in Dallas tomorrow, along with the U-Haul we’ve hitched to Levi’s car to haul the rest of the wedding gifts and their old dining set back to Austin. But we came in early for this.
“You think they’ll figure out we’re a
lready in town?” I asked him, while still in the motel. Levi was putting our suitcase up on the luggage rack. He turned, eyes shining. “It’s our secret,” he said. He stepped toward me then, closer than any stranger would come, close enough for me to feel his warmth. I picked up his car keys, looked away. “Seema’s waiting,” I said.
“Soon …,” he said, looking down at me. “I’ll be waiting here for you.” He bent over, his eyes deep in me, his breath, a small smile. I swallowed and made myself look up at his face.
“GO ON IN,” SEEMA SAYS, pointing through an inner doorway to a small tiled pool and railing. A moth flaps against the dull yellow glow of the ceiling fixture. “You get ready in there,” she says, indicating a bathroom beside the pool. “Call when you’re done.”
I drop my bag inside, lock the door, then linger under the hot shower, pelting wet heat, rivers down my back. I remember the first time I sat down with Seema to study with her at her dining table. I was still a high school girl in red overalls and saddle oxfords, smitten by my girlfriend. I had no idea I would wind up studying at a Hasidic institute for women, or that within three years I would have an arranged marriage and find myself here at a mikvah. I put my face up in the steaming waterfall. Oh, but it was fascinating the way Seema decoded the Bible’s Hebrew words and letters, the ancient commentaries unfolding around the text like a mystical conversation across centuries. I massage shampoo into my scalp and put my head back to let the water stream through my hair. “The Torah begins the story of Creation with the letter ‘bet’ which is also the number two,” she said, “because God made the world in twos—dark and light, good and evil, male and female. The pairs of opposites are all mixed up now,” she said, “but a life lived by Jewish Law reveals God’s original truth. Good and evil become clear, so that we can then choose correctly, and live in a world with clarity. That’s what God wants.”
I squirmed then—good and evil, male and female—thinking of shades of gray and not understanding where I could fit myself into that picture. But before the open Hebrew Bible with its web of commentaries, I was the ignorant one. Caught. If Seema said that Jewish Law was God’s Truth, who was I to question?
I began to need that Truth.
RINSED AND GLEAMING, I step over the edge of the pink tub into married life. Mikvah will be part of that life, every month. I look around and take a pink flowered towel from a pink wicker shelf over the pink toilet and wrap myself, shivering. The whole place seems like a cliché of relentless femininity. “I’m ready,” I call out.
The mikvah room is small and square, covered in pink tiles. We meet near the pool at the rail. Seema shuts the door behind us. The light over the pool is low, the air warm and humid and laced with the smell of chlorine. “Well, now!” Seema says, sounding proud, as if summing up how far I’ve come. She beams and holds out her arms.
She’s treating me like a queen. That’s the Hasidic metaphor for a new bride. My stomach knots. I shift my feet, look down.
The mikvah will wash that away. I want the mikvah to wash that knot away.
But first Seema has to inspect my back for stray hairs, which she does with a tap-tap of fingertips on wet skin. I flinch at her touch. It seems impossibly inappropriate to be wet and naked before this admirable, motherly woman who … who is touching my bare skin. Worse, I understand that, but don’t understand how, or why, her touch is a breach. I can’t identify what’s wrong, and that doubles my embarrassment until I almost can’t speak. Then I have to drop the towel in front of her and descend the stairs into the water. I try to cover my breasts with my arms as I go down the pool stairs, but the water is still and clear to the pink tiles at the bottom. An awful sense of exposure overlays any sense of welcome or blessing in the water, erases awareness of my waiting husband, makes it impossible to pray in this moment.
Serene proud proper Seema tosses me a washcloth. I am to cover my hair before pronouncing God’s name. I try to think how God is waiting for this immersion, which will make the categories of opposites come clear again and set a binary world into proper order.
As I spread the cloth over my head, falling drops from my hands make a watery echo in the room. I extend my arms and lower my body until warm water touches my chin. I bend still deeper and bow my head, then sink beneath the surface. I wait beneath the water, hoping for awe, then emerge. “Repeat after me,” Seema says, and there’s pride and motherly fondness in her voice. “Blessed,” she says. Baruch.
“Blessed,” I say.
“Are You, O Lord.” Atah adonoi eloheinu.
“Are You, O Lord.”
Three words at a time, she leads me through the blessing, al mitzvas tvila. Then I sink back beneath the surface into an airless place far from the world and go into a fetal float. Underwater, I feel the shadows of my past and of my parents, which I wait for the holy water to dissolve and wash away. That is my prayer, for the mikvah to dissolve my past. To emerge with a clean slate on which I can create a new self. I focus fiercely on this duty, on what I should be, will be, before God.
I come up, take a breath, go under again, seven times under, up, down. I think of the seven circles I paced around Levi under the wedding canopy, Rabbi Frumen’s voice counting “five, six, seven,” and the seven heavens that lead to God. I emerge then, standing on tiptoe to keep my head above water. Another breath, and I sink under one last time, telling myself, Into the water of blessing, into marriage. When I come up the final time, it’s to be a new birth. I should be pure as a newborn.
I stand ready now for my husband. But as soon as I see Seema holding out a bath towel like a curtain and looking away out of respect, that same sense of terribly inappropriate exposure returns; I wish she’d leave and let me get into the bathroom to get dressed. Head down, unable to meet her eyes, I quickly take the towel from her and wrap my naked self without breaking stride. As I hurry away, I leave a trail of wet footprints behind on the marble floor. That trail of water, already evaporating, is my wedding train.
AT MOTEL 8, blinking orange neon flashes through the curtains as freeway traffic from Loop 635 roars past. The wig is on a stand next to Levi’s hatbox, our one suitcase open on the dresser, my long skirt hanging over a chair, headscarf on the floor. Sheet, blanket, and bedspread cover my trembling body. The rumbling air conditioner is set on frigid.
I know my unmoved body as a failing. I don’t know what it is to desire him. I know I should; I know I should long for him.
Levi’s face is kind, and his step eager. He is so tall, older and wiser. He gazes down at me, his mouth in a little smile.
There’s the small stab of fear at his sudden weight on the bed, my intake of breath, the smattering of black hairs on his chest. When I reach for him, I’m reaching for hope that Levi will hold me and keep me, protect me, that I can trust him to do that, learn to love him for that. I can give myself to him for that, even with no flutter in me for a man.
He pulls the covers back to look at me for the first time, his wife, whom he still knows only as a hint of curves beneath layers of cloth. Shyly, in wonder, he runs his fingers down my arm. “You are my first,” he says.
I jump the smallest of little jumps. “And you are mine,” I say.
He moves his hand slowly, reverently.
I stay very still. Shallow breath. Chilled. I don’t have to look—at the hair on his chest or the dark line that descends to encircle his navel and broaden below. I don’t have to think how large and rough his hands are, how I wish they were delicate and soft, how large and hard his body is, and almost threatening, when it would be so nice if his body were gently, softly form-fit to mine. I tell myself, This is my husband. He furrows his brow, an intensity of focus in his face I’m coming to know. Sense memories flicker through my skin: someone holding me, crooning to my infant self. Lisa, she says. The tall swing at a nearby park where I’d go alone, and the working, the building, toward soaring weightlessness and freedom.
His nostrils flare. He touches my hip, uncertain and careful, the expression
on his face changing to one of wonder. His hand slips between my legs. Easy, I tell myself, beginning to tumble into a swirl of past and present, dream and breath, trembling, some distant fear I don’t understand a receding pinpoint on the horizon. Then I open my eyes to enormous relief as sensation washes everything away. I pull him into me. I’m hungry, then voracious. It’s true, I think; I can will myself into this—just before I am pitched through the air to a mountaintop beneath gasping stars.
His jaw hangs open above me, astonished, but then he is driven, panting, and I’m trapped—his hands and knees flexed and powerful as he forces his way into me. I panic, grit my teeth—Don’t move; it will be all right—until I am certain I can’t bear another moment, until his own trembling, his sigh.
My purchase, sealed by the signed marriage contract, is complete, blessed in advance by mikvah water. Levi tumbles beside me, throws his head back on the pillow. “Wow,” he says. “Wow!” He pulls me close. Still somewhat in shock, I wrap his arms around me and sink into them. I try to forget the moment of feeling trapped, the aversion after he entered me, no need to make sense now—I am in his arms in this vulnerable, naked moment, and this man has pledged his life to being my refuge. After all the loneliness, it is magical to fall back and be held, to trust someone enough for that. Unorthodox desires don’t seem to matter in the face of this security, this sanctum. I breathe deeply. My body unfolds. “I didn’t know how alone I was,” I say, “until I wasn’t.”
“You’re not alone,” he says. He nuzzles my hair, tightens his arms.
“You have a healing touch,” I say around a lump in my throat. I lay my hand over his and settle my head against his chest—a strange, hard, new place. “I could love you for this,” I say.