by Leah Lax
But just then, Levi pulls away, abrupt. “We have to separate right now,” he says.
“What?”
He gets out of bed.
“No!” I say.
He looks apologetic. “Dam niddah,” he says. “Virginal blood. It’s the Law.”
Here it is, that ancient fear drummed into both of us. The mystical threat of a woman’s blood rises up like a wall between us.
“And cover yourself,” Levi says.
I grab the sheet to my chest, find the scarf, and tie it behind my neck. “But I’m not bleeding,” I say.
The ghost of my father has climbed into this bed.
“No matter,” Levi says. “I’m still not allowed to see you after.” He shrugs. “There are plenty of women who don’t bleed the first time, I read that, but still, now we can’t touch for twelve more days.”
“I know the Law,” I say.
Near the bathroom light, Levi takes a hand towel to wipe himself clean. Of me. He inspects the towel carefully for blood. There’s nothing. “Get dressed,” he says in a firmer tone. I grab my nightgown from the floor. Levi gets into pajamas and settles into the other bed, turns his back, and falls quickly into a light snore.
Late into the night, I lie awake wondering how it is that the great sense of finding home in his arms was so fleeting. I tell myself just to wait until the next mikvah night when we can sleep together again, but my childhood comes back, its clutter and chaos and secret unspoken betrayals. I think, We will build an orderly home structured by the clean Law and have children who will feel safe because God’s rules guarantee good behavior. God’s safety net. Forget my immigrant family, never quite at home in blond, Baptist Dallas; forget my curious otherness, my loneliness and amorphous need. Grow up. Have a woman’s patience. Home and belonging—we will make our own, blessed by God.
Levi’s warmth, his smell, linger in the sheets. Slowly I fall asleep thinking, This was our wedding night.
Three
Austin. We develop a routine. We leave early in the morning for classes. For me, it’s a short walk down Manor Road to the university—cracked sidewalks, plunk-plunk of cars under the I-35 overpass, and then between the football stadium and LBJ Library—for daily cello practice in the musty old music building, then on to classes on the sprawling campus. Around me, the grounds are alive with forty thousand students walking, laughing, talking, bicycling, lounging on grassy areas and on and around the old sculptures and fountains, visiting, studying, strumming guitars, in and out of the huge buildings as I make my way around them. I greet a familiar face, and there are even one or two with whom I chat before class. But our life is not theirs.
At home, we dip daily into Hasidic books, labor over Hebrew and Yiddish, share a vort of Hasidic thought over the Sabbath table. We practice peppering our speech with Hasidic expressions of faith and self-abnegation. Baruch hashem. Hakol bidei shamayim. Bless God! It’s all in heaven’s hands.
A growing guilty patter of Hasidic teaching is easing me into my role, like a rasp applied steadily to my rough edges. When I need, I humbly ask Levi for money. I let him decide what time we will eat, or what we will eat, pushing myself to use a respectful tone. He doesn’t demand this of me. The rasp is in my own hands.
As for Levi, there are times, when I hand off a decision to him, when he seems hesitant, uncertain, burdened. Perhaps lonely, or scared, suddenly holding this new weight of making a decision alone. He looks hopefully to me, but I don’t extend a hand or a word of advice or support. I wait. Then he pulls himself up as if it’s a great effort and issues his final word.
I wake with a weight in my chest, wake each morning to blank white walls. Levi flies out of bed after too few hours of sleep, washes, and throws on his clothes. Soon he is draped in his prayer shawl, reciting the voluminous Hebrew prayers and psalms he must cover daily. The language remains elusive to him, his tongue awkward and slow, and so he bends his head over the book, furrows his brow, a picture of grinding determination through boring hours that does not seem to get easier. The prayer book will go with him when he leaves for classes, and he will fit in more in every crevice of his day, only to find himself living behind a wall of prayer.
Separated in our defined roles, I begin to feel unspontaneous, heavy-footed, alone. I grow quieter, become indecisive. Levi and I pass each other with few words, propelled into our separate routines. Neither of us seems to understand why that might be.
At home, the choice of music, when we have any at all, is his. Each day I take my cello off to the music building and close myself into one of the practice rooms. There I can spend hours simply making each string vibrate, rosined bow setting off loose, long, sonorous notes. Each step of a simple scale grows complex, full, magical. Only when alone in that stark little room does the cello sing.
I COUNT THE DAYS UNTIL MIKVAH, but before I can get back to it, my cycle returns. My days pulse with the counting rhythm the Law imposes on us, and with the memory of lying in Levi’s arms.
To use the mikvah nearest our home, we drive the night highway ninety miles on I-35 south to San Antonio, where there is a little mikvah in a decaying area of town at the back of Congregation Rodfei Shalom, the old Orthodox synagogue. Mikvah attendants are supposed to be women, but the San Antonio rabbi, Rabbi Kornbluth, ruled that Levi had to come with me because it is unsafe there at night. Besides, the rabbi chuckled, his wife long ago announced she was no mikvah attendant.
Levi and I stop at the Kornbluths’ to pick up the key. Both of us are uncomfortable with this immodest announcement that this is our mikvah night, as if we are stopping off to announce we will have sex this night.
We meet Rabbi Kornbluth and his wife at their partially opened door, their faces peering out like two adjacent moons. I stand half hidden behind Levi. “We just came for the key,” Levi says, but they open the door wide and say, “Come in, come in!” and soon we’re perched on their formal sofa, balancing delicate china cups of weak tea on gold-rimmed saucers.
The Kornbluths are old, in their fifties at least. Unlike Hasidic beards untouched by a blade, the rabbi’s is trimmed close. The two look only at Levi, address only Levi, even Mrs. Kornbluth in her slacks. “What are you studying?” she asks.
“Accounting,” he says. “I’m working on an MBA.”
In a way, I prefer being an invisible female, no eyes on me. Because beneath this tea conversation is the tacit understanding that we’re here for me to immerse in the mikvah. I feel certain that creates an inevitable shared image in the room, as if I’m standing nude before them right there on the Persian carpet. “Sugar?” the rabbi’s wife asks Levi.
WE GET TO THE SYNAGOGUE well after dark. The old, ornate building is a looming thing in shadow, too large, we’ve been told, for its aging, dwindling congregation. The area around the building is poorly lit, as is the broad, cracked veranda. Levi grimaces and jiggles the key in the old lock. “We’re gonna get mugged,” I whisper, glancing down the empty street. “Shluchei mitzvah,” he says. “Don’t worry.” His shoulders are tight. But there is no danger for those engaged in a commandment.
When we finally get in, we tiptoe through the empty lobby, where prayer shawls hang like body sacks on the wall, and through an echoing foyer to the door marked women’s bathroom. We look at each other. Levi opens the door, and then another on the right to the mikvah. “My God,” he says.
Someone must have been here earlier. The floor is wet, and an electric heater has been left on, weakly glowing coils and a frayed cord in a puddle. Levi yanks the cord from the socket.
The heater hasn’t done much anyway. The cold room, just big enough for the little pool, is narrow and dank, and there’s a humid sheen over the tiled walls. I crouch, touch the water and wince. Then I stand, resolute. “Turn away,” I tell Levi. The rabbi may have ruled that Levi has to be my attendant, even though that means he will see me uncovered before immersion, but we can minimize Levi’s exposure. I turn my back to strip off my clothes, pull off the headscarf, ru
n my fingers through my short hair.
The water isn’t cool. It’s cold. I force myself to go down, Levi watching at the rail.
Under the water, it’s too cold to think of the symbolism of this ritual or to try to make the act into a prayerful thing. The monthly rebirth, seventh heaven, emergence from holy water into purity, all starry ideas that floated through my first mikvah—all of those seem superfluous in the stark clarity of this cold immersion. There’s no place here for dreams and ideas. What is left is swift obedience. God’s command. Why, I think, it’s the act, this cold dunk; that is the thing. Holy obedience. Sacrifice. Not some effort at transcendence. Up now, above the surface for breath, wet and shivering, spluttering blessing words into damp air.
“Amen,” Levi says from above, like a validation. He pronounces it awmeyn.
But, I think, he’s warm and dressed. I force myself back under. The fierce shivering effort fills me with religious pride. Up again, teeth chattering, to brush water from my eyes and blurt out in fast Hebrew, “It should be Your Will O God that the temple be rebuilt, bimheirah beyameinu.” Levi responds with a quick and automatic “amen.”
We are God’s machines. God working us. I go back under with new strength, up, down, seven times in all, telling myself, I will get strong from this. Then I stand for the last time, head above water, shivering so that I can’t speak.
My body is again purified for my husband. Levi holds up a towel, just as Seema once did. I go up the steps, drops yet again cascading off wet skin, take the towel from him, and get dressed, and we go out to the car. We stop to slip the key into the Kornbluths’ mailbox, then drive home ninety miles over the night highway. We are aliens skimming across the sleeping Texas Hill Country, with its laconic peoples, its rivered lands.
SOMETHING HAPPENS DURING SEX that night in our little student apartment near the University of Texas campus, our second time having sex. I can’t seem to slip out of passive, obedient mode, can’t get off of religious female automatic. I feel flat, dispassionate, in spite of my body’s response, and throughout there’s a lump of loss in my throat as if I’ve swallowed something. At least when Levi is above me, when his powerful knees and hands hem me in, I don’t feel trapped this time, don’t feel much of anything. But late that night in Levi’s bed, as I start to drift off next to him, he pulls me close and wraps his arms around me again. I nestle into the pillow we are now allowed to share and heave a deep sigh. Breathing eases. The long loneliness abates. How I’ve waited to get back to this, I think, this safe place. Levi falls asleep then, wrapped around me, his chest in its slow rise and fall, and I thank God that the days of separation have passed. I think, Is this love? I want this to be love. I tell myself, I’m finally home.
SLATS OF MORNING SUNLIGHT through yellowed blinds. I wake with the sense that I am caught in something. Then I sit up in full-blown panic. Levi’s mouth is hanging open in his sleep, his night yarmulka fallen off his head. I turn, heart racing, trying to catch my breath. What is this box? I can’t seem to get out of this box. A swarm of everything I’ve tamped down is rising all around me, overtaking me. I splutter, “Why didn’t I think?” I gasp and jump out of the bed. I turn and grab Levi’s arm, shake his shoulder. “Wake up!” I say.
“Wh-what?” he says, struggling, his voice rough from sleep. “What is it?”
“Why didn’t I think? Why didn’t I know?” I say. “But I did know. Of course we knew.”
“What?” he says, raising himself up on one elbow. “What?”
I’m standing over him, shaking his shoulder. “We had sex last night!”
“And?” he says.
“And we didn’t … we can’t use birth control!”
“And?”
“What was I thinking? I can’t have a baby!”
“I don’t think …,” he says, and, “But you knew perfectly well.”
“I was wrapped up in wedding stuff!” I say.
I’ve been floating on the wedding dream and on the Rebbe’s blessing/command: get married, be a good Hasidic girl, do the right thing. No harm comes to those who do a mitzvah. The joy in the wedding air, misty picture of happy families, the family we will have that will be everything mine wasn’t. But all that is suddenly different, very different, from the very real babies that can form inside nineteen-year-old me, university student me, maybe one already has, a baby that will overwhelm my life, derail school, that I won’t know how to care for—a baby that I could hurt. Hurt as I was. I’ll make all of my mother’s mistakes. “I can’t do this!” I say. I’m shaking. I shake Levi with both hands. “No!” I say. I sit down and sob. “I can’t get pregnant. It’s too much. What have we done?”
Levi sits up, gropes for his yarmulka. Then a little gasp, his eyes wide. He puts a hand on my arm and whispers, “Do you think you are pregnant? Already?”
“I don’t know!” I moan.
It’s as if I hear my mother saying, Lisa. Lisa! in my ear. Lisa, come home. Listen to me!
I’m not Lisa anymore, I tell her. So why do I feel stuck inside this “Leah,” as if I don’t even know who she is or where I am?
Lisa, my mother whispers.
I try to reason with myself. Being Leah means becoming a mother. I knew that all along.
If you get pregnant, you can’t leave. You can’t come home.
That can’t be true, I tell her. You don’t mean “home” to me anymore. Levi’s my home.
I finger my ring. But I’m no longer teetering between then and now, between Lisa and Leah. I know who I am. So why am I in a panic? (Come home!) When I even think of being pregnant, why do I see myself dashing this way and that through a maze of Jewish Law with no way out? (Lisa! Listen! Come!) Where is home? (I told you so, she whispers.)
Even away from my mother, with a baby I might become her. There has to be a way out.
“I had to study the laws about marriage before the wedding,” Levi says in a reasonable tone. “The Law’s not so rigid. Really.
Sometimes birth control is allowed—if you’re sick and pregnancy would be harmful.”
“I’ll die if I get pregnant,” I say. “Inside.”
He is conciliatory, and kind. “If the Law gives a concession, that’s not breaking the Law. If you’re sick,” he offers again. “You know,” he says, “v’chai bahem.”
V’chai bahem is both a promise and a command—you will live within the laws, and the Law will help you live. That’s what we’re taught, that Jewish Law is both stern and loving, strict and flexible. The Law is a good parent.
It is clear Levi is willing to look for a legal concession. He has faith that there is one for us within the Law. I think, He’s in this with me. My panic ratchets down a notch.
He doesn’t say whether or not he wants a baby, but I don’t expect him to. That would be irrelevant, even inappropriate. Babies aren’t chosen; they come from God. But, I think, maybe he’s also afraid. We have no money. His wife isn’t ready to mother a child. Then—another tailspin. “What? The Law gives a concession for sick people? I’m not sick,” I say. “I just can’t bear the idea. What good does a break for sick people do me?”
Levi gets up, barefoot in the pajama bottoms and undershirt he slept in, tzitzis undergarment on top, white strings hanging to his knees, his knitted sleep yarmulka back on his head. I flash on an image of his naked silhouette above me in the night. “Wait. I’ve got a book,” he says. “I remember something I read.” He goes into his office and takes a volume from the brick-and-board bookcase, both Hebrew and English print on the front. He clears a space at his desk and sits down to read.
I go splash water on my face. Try to breathe. Brush my teeth. But the minutes are heavy.
Soon, he comes out with the book open in his hands. “Look at this,” he says. “Conception involves a mystical relationship between the father, mother, and God. To interfere with that relationship by stopping the natural process is to thwart God’s will, a grave sin.”
“Oh boy,” I say.
; “Wait,” Levi says. He flips to another page. “It seems there’ve been times when Rav Moshe has allowed birth control. Listen.” He reads, “Although a condom is forbidden, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein has ruled that other types of birth control that create a simple barrier and do not impede the natural process by killing sperm or preventing ovulation can be allowed if necessary for the mother’s health.” He looks up. “Like a diaphragm,” he says.
A sliver of hope. “For the mother’s health. Is the mother’s mental health part of that?” I say. But then I realize whom Levi is quoting. “Wait! Rav Moshe allows it?” I say. Panic returns.
It took me a while to figure out the hierarchy. There are just-plain-rabbis, like Rabbi Frumen, who lead individual congregations as spiritual shepherds. They are also kind of like lawyers qualified to impart to their followers expert knowledge in the Law. But even they defer to a rav, a rabbi who is more like a judge. He can rule on new applications of the Law or parse out thorny conflicts between people. Or grant dispensations.
A rebbe is both rabbi and rav, but this rebbe chooses to stand above all that. He is our guide, our inspiration, but when people write him with problems that can be addressed within the Law, he writes back, “Ask a rav.”
Rav Moshe Feinstein, whom Levi quoted, is venerated among non-Hasidic Orthodox, but Lubavitcher Hasidim do not speak well of Rav Moshe’s leniencies, even though the Rebbe himself has been known to send him people who need his gentler rulings. Only the Rebbe can bend like that. Otherwise, we should turn to our own.
Levi frowns. “Maybe we should ask a Lubavitcher rav first,” he says.
“Can we find one who will understand?” I say.
“We’ll go to the top,” Levi says. “We’ll ask the head rav of Lubavitch. We’re also Lubavitcher Hasidim. He’ll take care of us.”
It’s confident Levi who makes the call and requests the conference. It’s Levi who tells the rav, after our nervous wait, “My wife feels unable to bear a child.” It’s Levi who explains the problem. My problem. I listen in modest silence on the extension for the rabbi’s decision about my body, my life.