by Leah Lax
We’re in our bathroom. He sits down at the vanity. “Okay,” he says. “I’m ready.”
I cup his chin in my hand and turn his face up to me, in my palm the bony contour beneath his black wire beard going gray. His dark brown eyes and impossibly long lashes still spell out an earnest necessity that once almost held me. Then I flip a switch and the electric clipper jumps to life against my other palm. Row after buzzing row, I mow a month of dark hair away, careful to leave an extra tuft over his temples as the Law requires. He trusts me, I think, as I trace the curve of his skull, high forehead, receding hairline, the gentle turn behind his ears and above his long neck. I tame his wild eyebrows with a comb and hair scissors, his breath warm on me. Levi, normally coiled as a watch spring, is unspooled for now, but his shoulders, they’ve bowed. I think, He’s shrinking, this man who has a fear of falling.
But the order on Levi’s dresser, the piles of stuff he demands we don’t touch, his driven, obsessive style of work, and the hours he spends each day whispering prayers in yet another compulsive kind of obedience, are all on the other side of the bathroom door.
Right now, we are quiet together. Right now, only the humming trimmer is between us. I run my hand over his head, brush off the broad shoulders. We clean up the shavings together, like freshly cut black grass.
“Leah,” he says.
“What?” I say. I can’t make myself want him. I don’t know how to make him want me. I don’t even know if I want him to want me. For a moment, I stop blaming him for my loneliness.
He looks shy. “Thank you,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. “The haircut. You’re welcome.”
I AM OFTEN PULLED to the computer at night, although most of the time I just sit and then write tiny hanging phrases, cryptic unfinished poems, nothing more. I still don’t know how to pull words out of years of silence, and I don’t know why I keep trying. It doesn’t give me relief. But every time I sit down to write, it seems as if I’m taking one small step into some vast space, some place where I know there’s a breathtaking view right up ahead if I could just go further in and get it all into focus. Besides, each day, I’m more fascinated with trying to attach words to speechless impressions, the sweep of experience, inevitable change. What words capture wonder? When connections do happen, I’m almost surprised to see the words appear in front of me, as if I don’t know who made them—like hearing from a stranger.
One night, I dream I am at the computer when women of the Group suddenly appear streaming across my screen. There are many of them in many shapes and sizes, the younger women still showing their own hair, but they are all in the same modest, colorless dress, and they all move in step, all facing the same direction and walking in a steady, relentless, silent stream.
Until one of them stops. The others part just around her and move on, but this one woman stands like an island in a flowing current. Then she turns and looks out of the screen directly at me. Her eyes are as blue as daylight, as blue as my own.
I can’t move. I can’t take my eyes off her. The others continue around her, but she doesn’t move. Then she lifts one hand and smiles. She’s beckoning to me, I think. She is waiting for me. I am hopelessly, helplessly drawn to her and to the other women, to their steady, silent forward flow. My dream self leans forward. I need to blend in with them, move on with them, let myself go. Into the stream. Just float. Up ahead is the perfect combination of bliss and oblivion. I must. Her blue eyes … I stand from my chair and reach for her hand.
She looks ecstatic. She opens her mouth and begins to sing to me. I am overjoyed. For me. Then her voice emerges—as a deep, grinding bass. A man’s voice.
I stop in horror. The woman is inhabited. She’s been eviscerated—a soulless shell of a woman filled with this alien, ancient voice, a voice of rabbis. No soul left of her own. Eishis chayil, the woman sings out in that terrifying, grinding bass. A woman of valor, who can find?
She’s still smiling, her hand still extended in offer, beckoning. Beckoning me to come.
I wake and sit up in bed in a rush, gasping. Shock vibrates through me.
MORE WEEKS, MONTHS, nights at the keyboard. Finally, I write a whole story, line after line. The woman in the story is Liba. She’s not me, I am sure of that; this won’t reveal anything, although she is also Hasidic, with many children, also defines herself through motherhood, and also becomes illogically driven to end a pregnancy. The difference is that her husband is her great love. But Liba will discover how to take his hand and lead him through this trial, and they’ll come out of it together. In stepping outside the Law, she will find herself.
Also, she dotes on her youngest child.
I bought a wire cart on wheels last week, wide and low to the ground, that I keep tucked deep under my bed. Sometime after four in the morning, I print out the new story and then delete it from the computer. I drop the pages into the cart, which I shove back into safe darkness just before falling into bed for the few hours left before the alarm clock starts another day.
Lying there before sleep, triumphant about the new story, scared, I think of the Group. We are people of words that create worlds. God made the world with such words. But our legitimate writers are bearded scholars. Those Hasidic women who do write create marginal works only for a religious female audience, and they write in a man’s voice lecturing the women, exhorting them to stay carefully within the fence of the Law. The more I do this odd thing, writing in my woman’s voice, the more I become separated from the Group. I can’t seem to help that, and I remain afraid of the stony silence they aim at anyone out of line. But in a way, I think, lying there, there is no Group. We’re not really one. Each of us is alone with our secrets. I picture the stark isolation of a Giacometti figure, and then a whole field of those lonely totems. I am just one among them, set out on a colorless plane.
NOVEMBER 1989. Shalom is ten months old. While the children shovel down breakfast cereal, I open the newspaper to find the Berlin Wall is going to be torn down. I lay out the page before them. “Look!” I say. I try to make them understand the decades of remorseless cutoff and isolation for the people of East Berlin, what it might have been like to have been kept in that box. And now, this opening, this freedom.
The children look bored, as if blind to their lives. They look blankly at the page. Within days, I will read of Rostropovich, himself a refugee of communism, flying to Berlin to play Bach’s cello suites at the wall just before it comes down. The master sits down with his cello in front of the graffiti-scratched wall, chair on the cracked concrete walk, and plays. People stop and gradually surround him. He plays on. I can hear the music. It is sober, elegiac, yet resounding with understated harmony and joy.
ONE SHORT STORY WASN’T ENOUGH. I go to the computer every night by around ten and don’t stop until three or four in the morning, sometimes later. I write on and on, hundreds of pages. I don’t know why I do that.
My own secrets aren’t enough. I am of the Group even now; bits of their secrets seep into my work as if they are my own—their open wounds and half-hidden stories. Each of my new stories is filled with sin and fear of gossip and struggles with faith.
One morning, Levi notices the wire cart. I didn’t shove it under deep enough before I went to sleep. “What’s that?” he says.
“Stuff I’ve been writing. Personal papers.”
“Oh,” he says. “I heard the printer in the middle of the night.” But he’s distracted, late for work. He puts on his suit jacket, grabs his briefcase.
All that day after he leaves, I think, I am one terrible mother. If it gets out that I’m writing this stuff, my family could be labeled, ostracized, in the community. No one would let his or her children marry ours.
Worse even than writing about rebellion and sin is that I’m not trying to inspire people with my writing, to make them turn to God. Here’s my newest secret: I don’t want to bring people to God. I don’t want God hovering between the lines of my stories, like a stowaway.
&nb
sp; The group is a wall of eyes.
I share what I’ve written with no one.
NOW I’VE HAD THREE YEARS without pregnancy or teaching. Shalom is three; Leibl, the oldest, is thirteen. I give my days to the children, my nights to reading and writing. But just now, I’m headed out I-45 South in the mom van to Friendswood, an old Quaker town filled with NASA engineers, to my sister Debbie’s apartment. We talk frequently on the phone but don’t see each other very often. The hope that we’d raise our kids together isn’t happening. When we do get together, Debbie comes to us with her kids but not with her husband, since the few times non-Jewish Robert did come over, Levi was so stiff with him that conversation drained away.
I’m in a hurry. Leibl’s bar mitzvah is coming, and so is Shalom’s upshernish ceremony for his first haircut. In order to make time to come out here and still get to today’s shopping, I had to arrange for Shalom and Itzik to stay after school. I need to meet with the caterer again for Leibl’s bar mitzvah and go buy more paper goods before the children get home at three. After they get home, I have to get Leibl to his session with Rabbi Frumen’s son, who is training him to chant his Torah reading. But Debbie said I had to come out to her place right away and wouldn’t say why. “Don’t bring kids,” she said, and, “Come before mine get home. When we can be alone.”
Along the long balcony at her apartment complex, I pass potted plants, an outdoor grill, two hibachis, open doors, and the sound of the morning news on television, the smell of bacon. I wrinkle my nose. And here’s petite Debbie in her apartment, her hair as dark and straight as when we were kids, brown eyes the same color as our mother’s. Three pieces of her floral needlepoint hang on the wall, and on the tiled dining table there’s a free-standing, framed photograph of Great-Grandma Esther in a shapeless dress, hair in a white bun, with a china doll baby that was our mother on her ample lap. It was 1927. Thin, young Grandma Kate is kneeling next to them, dressed like a flapper. Like the Mom baby, both women have our heavy-lidded eyes. Both look with delight at the baby, but the baby looks out at us with a solemn face.
Debbie sits down at the table and moves the photo aside, then gestures for me to sit so that we face each other. She folds her hands in front of her. Clears her throat. “We need to talk about Daddy,” she says.
I tilt my head a little sideways, eyes narrowed. “We need to talk about him?” I say. “Who says I want to do that?”
But she launches right in, as if she has a job to get done. “I don’t know how young I was when he first started,” she says. “I must have been very small.”
His shadow in the night has been gone from memory for a very long time. But I feel queasy. My limbs, my mouth, feel as if something is pressing hard on them. “Debbie,” I say, shaking my head.
Debbie keeps her eyes on the blank white square of tiles in the middle of the table and doesn’t blink. Her shoulders are tight, her voice quavering. “When I was a kid,” she says, “I used to sleep like someone with one ear open.”
“Why is that,” I say, but my tone has no question in it. I don’t want to know.
She stops, takes in a breath, starts again. If she were walking, it would be with the determined plod of an old workhorse. “I tried to get up at night when I heard him in the hall.”
I think, I can’t stop her. I’ll leave. But I can’t seem to get up.
“I wanted to keep him away from you,” she says. “And Amy. You were both so little. I would run out when I heard him in the hall at night, take his hand, and pull him into my room.” Her face is inscrutable, her eyes too bright. One tear escapes, and she swipes at it with a shaking hand, as if annoyed with herself.
I don’t remember what I remember. I don’t know what I know. I don’t understand memory, hers or mine. “When did he stop?” I ask. I don’t ask, When did he start? Did he start before I was born, habit set and waiting for Amy and me to come along, or when you were beginning your fifth year and I was an infant in his arms, looking up into his adoring, startled face, like in the picture I save? Or when … but I want this to be your story and not mine. The room is tilting, turning over the sofa and needlepoint florals, the tiled table, the picture of three generations of mothers.
“I was sixteen when he stopped,” Debbie says.
“When he got sick,” I say. “That was the year.”
She nods. “You were twelve.”
I’m trying to comprehend the mental hospitals and shock therapy as a gift to her. How I had hated the Daddy zombie he became, the thief who stole my father. For a moment, I am small and riding with him before he broke down, on his route selling women’s dresses door-to-door. The windows are down, Dallas’s hot wind in my hair. We stop at Krystal, and he lifts me onto a tall chrome stool at the counter, where we sip a frosty, frothy malted. This is the Daddy who raped her. Then: “Sixteen?” I say. “You had been old enough to tell him no for a long time!”
Debbie looks almost frightened. “I … didn’t know how.”
Queasiness. Pressure on my mouth and limbs. Something in the dark I can’t identify. “I can’t think,” I say, shaking my head.
But she presses on. “When I was little, I used to think I was up on the ceiling, looking down on his back, and he was on top of a different little girl.”
“Enough,” I say. I put my hand up. “Why must you tell me? Why now?”
“That’s what I remembered first. Looking down from the ceiling.”
Some kind of panic in the dark. Sweat dripping onto my forehead. I plead, my voice trailing, “It was a long time ago.”
“I watched that little girl so calmly,” she said, “but I felt bad for her.”
I stand up, shoving the table. The photograph falls over. The crack in the Hasidic glass wall around me from the abortion and learning to write breaks wide open, but only darkness pours in, not light. The tilted room goes dim, no more color, and turns up and over. Framed needlepoint florals and decorative pillows fall through the air in shades of gray.
“I have to tell you,” Debbie says, rising out of her chair.
“No, you don’t,” I say. I turn to go.
“I have to tell you because I failed.”
My knees go first; I sink back into the chair.
“You. Failed?” How very small Debbie is. What does she weigh, maybe ninety pounds? “But you took his hand in the hallway …”
“I didn’t always wake up. I didn’t always keep him away from you and Amy.” Tears are running down her cheeks.
The heartbeat, speechless impressions, sweep of memory. “But of course,” I murmur. “You were a tiny thing and he was an animal.” I meet my sister’s eyes, sitting there. “Of course you failed.” I reach for her hand. Child troop of one. Of course he broke through the ranks of one little you and got to us. To me.
I don’t remember what I remember. His hand on my mouth. Why can I feel that? She failed. Mom slept on—or did she? I would hear her glide into the kitchen at night, the running faucet, clink of her glass. His hot pressure on my legs in the dark. Am I just imagining or remembering? Is this why I crept down the hall at night, and why I climbed to the roof? Rough, stippled wall under my fingertips in a dark hallway, seeking mother refuge.
I squeeze her hand. “You were my frontline soldier,” I say. I look at the grief in her face and think, This must be love. I had it all along from you, Sister. I wish I’d realized. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“But Amy,” she says. The little sister we left behind. Pressing her nose against the window as I walked away.
“I know,” I say, patting her hand. “I know.”
I will not remember the rest of our visit. Perhaps she pours me a Coke over ice from the stash in her refrigerator. I will remember how gradually the room rights itself and color returns to the polite little florals on the wall. I will remember how we hug a long time, how I feel no longer alone. I speed down the Beltway to get home in time to greet the kids I’ve spent my life protecting from such things. When I arrive, Debbie, Amy, my mothe
r, and, yes, my father, all step across the threshold with me right into our house, as if for the very first time. They are unavoidably part of me. I see that now. No more wall. I escort them in.
Sixteen
My mother’s father—we called him Papa—had a clothing factory where my father worked when I was small. Daddy would often come home late, after I’d already gone to bed. He used to come in to bring me a glass of milk, sit on the edge of my bed in my darkened room, and wait while I drank it down. This was our bedtime ritual. He was a child of immigrants, thirty-five when I was born, past forty at this point, with a shock of prematurely white hair, a lopsided smile, and the lingering accent of a long-transplanted New York Jew. He called me “dahling.” Amy would be already sleeping in her room next to mine, Debbie reading a book in hers. There was the low hum down the hall of my mother’s incessant television.
Daddy prompted me to sing the shema prayer, as his Jewish father had taught him to do before sleep. I handed him the empty milk glass, wiped the milk mustache away with my pajama sleeve, and sang with him, the same Hebrew syllables I had learned in Sunday school—shema yisrael adonoi elohaynu. As my eyes grew heavy, he talked about his Brooklyn childhood and Yiddish-speaking parents, the twisted challah loaves his mother baked for the Sabbath, how, when he came home from school, she cut him thick leftover slices that she smeared with chicken fat and warmed in the oven. I tried to imagine bread from an oven and not from a plastic bag in cottony squares. Then he’d stretch out beside me and sing old show tunes in a one-note monotone. You say potato, I say potahto. Let’s fall in love.
He stood then, tucked me in, his form silhouetted in half light. I begged for the hall light and for the door to be left open, afraid of shadows in the night. After he was gone, I turned around on the bed, my head at the foot, so that I could keep my eyes fixed on the glowing fixture in the hall, before I finally crawled back to my pillow and succumbed. Then—dark swaddling, the great depth of child sleep, empty, paralyzing sweetness. Warm and still, sleep time drifting unmeasured. There were only nourishing childish images and dreams, blind suspension in a teeming mind. I knew nothing. Until: the smallest swish of a turning doorknob.