Uncovered

by Leah Lax

  He floats above my bed now, just a darker shadow framed by shadows. Even through my sleep, his presence is comforting. He sits down in the same place on my bed, and I shift, smile, slip back into dreams. But his mild smell and darker darkness are like tentacles pulling me to the surface. Then: warm, rough skin of his palm on my mouth. A hand strokes my head.

  My father is the gentlest of rapists. My eyes open, brain still mostly asleep, but I see only black velvet. The hand clamps down. My nostrils flare. Then. Now.

  Heat. Pressure. Rhythmic, heavy breath on my face. A hard, deep internal push that caves in my stomach, rolls my child hips forward, child head lolling back.

  Flailing. In the distance: a sound like whimpering.

  The form, the shape of the body memory that forms, will soften and expand beneath the surface and loosen itself from time. My mother’s clueless face in the daytime will help to disconnect the memory, but his imprint on muscles and skin will remain. Eventually, I won’t know if he did this once or many times, each time perhaps falling into a single, collective bruise, until I won’t remember he did it at all, will never be sure. But my body will hold this memory. My body remembers. My body remembers.

  The drive to find a safe place where I can cocoon, the drive that will propel me out of this home, began here.

  My fear of the dark grew. Then one night I awoke terrified and got up determined to get down the hall to my mother. To safety.

  I DREAM AND DREAM DADDY. He appears at my door with his head a coconut, painted with a garish grin, that I hit with a baseball bat. It cracks open and I watch it spew, dripping, front still marked with that frozen smile. The two halves of the coconut fall to each side—that for all his betrayals. But the painted mouth smiles on. And on. The coconut milk swims through my veins, teeming with seed, the way pond scum teems under a microscope, and I am full of him and in him and from him and of him. I look in the mirror and see his one-sided smile—not his, but mine.

  I multiply and divide him, stamp him out from each angle on little cards, and then sift and sift the cards with their differing images, trying to figure out what to hold and what to toss. I count the dream cards without stop. I am a wild-eyed miser hunched over in clandestine count.

  LEVI ACTS AS IF HE doesn’t notice my tossing in the night or my agitation in the day. For him: Home. Synagogue. Work for money. Home again. Say your prayers. Study holy books. Keep the blinders on and don’t look up. Wave your hands if anyone gets in the way. Shout if you have to, in order to stay on the train. Wind up tight to keep it going. Go to sleep like an assignment, alone, so you can do it again tomorrow.

  The glass wall is completely shattered now, shards at my feet, children huddled around me. I am my childhood family, irrevocably a part of them, and my family is a part of me. That is who I am. There is no safe place. There never was escape, really.

  I stop writing. Prowl the halls at night.

  “I HAVE TO TALK TO YOU,” I tell Levi one day in the dining room where he’s studying Likkutei Sichos, discourses from the Rebbe. He puts a finger on his place and looks up.

  I know I’m interrupting, but I’m desperate to talk, trying for the first time in a very long time to treat him as friend and confidant. I sit down in my place to his right. Children’s voices float in from the playroom. “I spoke with Debbie,” I say. “I went out to her place the other day.”

  Levi looks like he’s trying to be patient, like he’s working at being attentive. His finger stays on the page.

  I tell him. Everything. I tell him about Debbie at the tiled table, her courage and shaking hands. I tell him about little Debbie in the hallway, leading Daddy in the night away from me and from Amy. I tell him about the tilting table, the photograph, the nausea, and how Debbie’s confession felt like a confirmation of something I already knew but forgot. When I finish, Levi laughs out loud in a mirthless guffaw. “No way,” he says, and turns back to his book.

  My mouth drops open. I try to tell myself he’s just shocked, off-balance from the news. His parents are good people, so he doesn’t have such things in his vocabulary, doesn’t know what to do with such information. “No, it’s true,” I tell him.

  Levi sniffs. He purses his lips like sour lemons. “I don’t believe it,” he says.

  “What?” I say. I think, I know you better. I know the man behind this callousness. I become animated, determined to get through. I pull out the trump card, the Law. “Look at me!” I say. “I’m your wife. You’re supposed to believe me.”

  Levi waves the back of his hand, makes a pfff noise with his lips. “I met your father enough times,” he says. “He’s a harmless man.”

  Silly annoyance. A wave of the hand will do it.

  “Is that how it goes?” I say. “I know. I get it! What you want to believe is real! And what you don’t want to believe just doesn’t exist. Magic! That works!” I say, waving my hand back and forth in front of his face. “Gone with a wave!” I wrinkle my brow, shaking my head at this betrayal. “You were supposed to suffer this with me, and you won’t even acknowledge it.”

  “But, Leah,” he says.

  That hand holding on to his book. Once, I too sought stories from those books to know who I should be, instead of just looking in the mirror to see who I am. But my family formed me far more than those books. Good or bad, our stories are who I am. “This is me!” I say, hands flat on my chest, as if he’s just attempted to erase me with that wave.

  Eventually I will understand that I am not just their stories. But in this moment, in my fury, I am my mother, I am my two sisters, and, yes, I am my father. Because only now I understand that laced all through the nastiness in my family are the purest shreds of real love I’ve ever known. I won’t relinquish that with a wave of Levi’s hand. “You don’t get to do that,” I say, and I stomp away.

  “Leah!” he calls. “You’re falling for your sister’s story!”

  I stop and look back, at his quizzical brow, his untrimmed black beard and yarmulka like a bowl on his head, pressed white shirt, in his hands a book of the Rebbe’s exhortations that he will quote at the Sabbath table. “Who has fallen for what?” I say. My family with all its flaws is with me as I walk away, and not God, and not the Bible or the Law, the Rebbe, or the community. And not Levi.

  I keep that anger, like fuel, but I am still part of the machinery of home and family and Law. There are the children and their trust in what we’ve put into them, which we have taught them is trust in God. My anger seems powerless before all that. But it is still my anger.

  That anger may be why, the following week, I take the children to the public library and offer them all kinds of books about girls, as well as boys, who all have voices and goals, books in which people speak honestly and admit mistakes and dream and strive, people of many faiths and colors and societies, the men with no beards, women in pants and uncovered heads, unkosher animals and unfamiliar professions. There is no Other, I am trying to tell them, even if I feel myself an “other” now within the community. Oh, I never meant to narrow their ability to dream.

  At home, the children spread through the house with their books, enthralled. Leibl is on his stomach on his top bunk with a whole stack, Mendel cross-legged in the corner with a book on his lap, Libby curled up in the old recliner, lost in a story. Each is perched on his or her own rooftop. They devour the books like hungry people, trade them, chatter about them, reread them, then beg for another trip to the library. And I take them.

  We begin to go to the library every week. And yet, I am still Hasidic Mom: One evening, I hear Leibl stirring in his bed and go into his room. He’s in the top bunk above sleeping Mendel. “Are you awake?” I whisper.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Can’t sleep.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Thinking, I guess.”

  “You’ll be great,” I say, thinking he’s worrying about his upcoming bar mitzvah.

  “Mommy, it’s not that. I know my parsha and my maamar. I can recite all that.�
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  “So?” I say.

  He blurts out like a sob, “I’m going to be chayav mitzvos.” I’m going to be obligated like an adult to keep all of the commandments. It is the weight of the Law, put on him formally at his bar mitzvah for him to bear forever after, that is keeping him awake this night, that and all of the expectations from the community that will come with it. All of those eyes.

  This boy, my firstborn. Soon we will send him away to become a Hasidic soldier. The yeshiva will replace us as parents. I take his smooth hand, a little chubby and as long as mine.

  “Squeeze,” he says. “More.”

  I encompass his hand in both of mine and squeeze as if I won’t have to let go.

  LEIBL STANDS PROUD AT HIS bar mitzvah in his new black hat and sings out his Torah portion in a clear, sweet boy voice. He recites his Hasidic discourse and translates line for line in a way that incorporates explanations of the tangled, abstruse metaphors explaining God’s desires. Even my mother comes in and sits nicely behind the partition with me and with Levi’s mother, and they both join the family at the seated Sabbath feast in the synagogue that we make for the community. The men make speeches and sing songs. The whole affair is one big community embrace for yet another who has arrived.

  AS A KID, I tagged along with my mother as often as she would allow to the galleries and art openings she frequented. Once there, she would ask me to look at the pictures and describe what I saw. The more fanciful my response, the more her eyes shone. These moments fed a stubborn thirst. One weekday morning when I was eight, we came up the marbled staircase at Dallas’s Museum of Fine Arts to the grand upper lobby. The place seemed empty, except for the artist Louise Nevelson, who stood like one of her totems in her flowing scarves and tunic top and famously huge false eyelashes. Behind her was a broad, low platform that held two of her constructions. There was something so beautiful and strong about Nevelson that I went right up and said, “Did you really make those?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, quite serious and not at all condescending. She asked me about myself, questions I answered while my starstruck mother nodded approval at a discreet distance. Nevelson said more, but I was looking at her gauzy layers and makeup.

  Then, past the guards and into the first gallery, we found a whole room of Nevelson’s tall constructions of found wood, each painted in black or in white. The shapes and layers, arches and tiny rooms she had formed seemed to conceal what they held, and fascinated me. Her overlapping planes were worlds within worlds. Nevelson’s work gave me a wondrous tongue-tied sensation, a strong desire to see what was hidden inside those spaces, as if they held (I would imagine later, looking back) both mystery and redemption. Best of all, I shared this wonder with my mother.

  I stepped right up and reached into one of the black hollows. But there was a guard right behind me. “Better not touch that, little lady,” he said, and that’s when I saw the uniform, the badge, the admonishing face. I pulled back, stung, but then behind him was the artist, and behind her my shy mother. “You can move on and do your job somewhere else,” Nevelson told him, and then told me, “Touch whatever you want, sweetheart.”

  I did not dare touch the art again, but I did step up on the platforms to get close. The sculpted spaces opened up in front of me like face-to-face mirrors reflecting endless repeated passageways.

  One day, headed home from the downtown library with the children, I pass the Enron Building at Allen Place and I notice a tall Louise Nevelson construction installed in front. I think, She must have cast it in metal. I slow the car and point. “I met that artist once,” I tell the children.

  The next time we go to the library, I find a biography of Nevelson written for young adults and bring it home with us. I encourage the kids to read it, and then I spend most of the night reading it myself. I read how Nevelson’s art consumed her until she left her marriage and sent her son to live with her parents. She put a church pew in her living room in place of a sofa to discourage guests. I laugh at that, but it’s a laugh of secret recognition. During all of those nights when I used to dive into tinkering with words, I would lose all sense of time, then look up in surprise at the rising sun; I know how making art can become more compelling than the real world. I’m beginning to think letting loose a creative drive is like releasing a bull from its pen; a project can follow you into the day and make even people you love seem like an intrusion. Then I laugh at my preposterous self for even imagining a life like hers.

  And yet, I begin to write again. One night, a young Debbie arrives on the page. She watches Daddy from the ceiling, and then in the morning he makes her toast and eggs. Real morning comes before I expect it, cars whiffing past, birds calling from the backyard elm, as I drop the pages onto the pile in the wire cart and shove it back under the bed.

  SOMETHING IS HAPPENING TO ME. It’s a disturbing loss I don’t understand. God used to be ever at my sleeve, a nearly palpable presence, and now, after months of intense writing, He seems to have retreated somewhere far away. But I’m just writing stories.

  My secret questions have flowed out night after night. Why is it so terrible to speak the truth about sins and failing? Why are the texts that I love full of misogyny, and why did I never notice before? Why is it that the more I write, the more the mystique of a pure, perfect Word of God fades?

  I head to the kitchen, adjusting the scarf to better cover my growing hair. I expect it also to cover the growing questions and the growing sense that I’m living a lie.

  I am a liar—because I am determined to hide my stories and questions and simmering doubts and carry on as if they don’t exist. But in a way, isn’t every mother a liar? “Mother lies”—they’re only lies of omission to protect the children, right? Common enough. The kids don’t need to know. They don’t need to carry my questions and doubts. Besides, within the Group, we all hide the little dark places in our souls.

  A new truth rings on in my head like an incessant bell: It is not my nature to be a modest covered woman. And more: My father was not a good man. And more yet: I dream about women. That tree that falls in the forest—is a lie really a lie if it is never spoken?

  JUNE PASSES AND I turn thirty-six, outwardly, resolutely, a Hasidic mother of growing soldiers of God. Here’s the proof: Leibl will soon be leaving for yeshiva in New York, proving that I am fostering the growing ranks. Here I am with covered hair, my husband the beard, my neighborhood streets filling like Brigadoon on Saturday mornings with Hasidic families walking to the synagogue. Listen to the Hebrew and Yiddish terms that pepper our speech. Sit down in our kitchen with its doubled kosher appliances and separate sets of dishes, for milk and for meat, as our seven children run in and out with more Hasidic kids from the neighborhood, boys with tzitzis strings flying, hands on automatic to cap a yarmulka on the run, girls chasing after them, unencumbered by their long skirts and tights, because such clothes are as natural to them as skin. Note the shelves and shelves of bass-voiced tomes that line the family room and dining room wafting rabbinic pronouncements into our air, the twelve-foot dining table that I cover with steaming dishes for the Sabbath, the worn prayer books dropped in random places throughout the house, wherever they were last used. If I put my ear close to any one of them, I will hear the secret hopes whispered into them that don’t otherwise get heard. I shut the prayer books that have been left open, stack them together. Hasidic Wife, that’s what I am, and I don’t know how to change, even as I stop at the dining table a changed woman. There, I go through the morning mail one of the kids just brought in.

  Among the bills and grocery store circulars I find a brochure, a simple trifold in black and white, no gloss. It reads: “First Texas Conference on Feminism and Judaism.” I laugh and drop the thing on the pile of junk mail. But that afternoon, as I work in the kitchen, I remember the early days of the feminist movement, when I was a budding teen. I picture those vehement chanting young women on television. I think, Judaism coupled with feminism? To me, that means “rules, yet no rules
.” Preposterous. Don’t they understand the contradiction? I think, Those audacious women have gone too far. I remember Sally Preisand, the first woman rabbi, twenty years ago. I remember telling Rabbi Goldenberg that I, too, wanted to become a rabbi. I think, How shy yet bold I was. What a child I was. How little I understood.

  I straighten the dining room and pitch the circulars, together with the brochure, into the trash. Then I stop, and fish out the brochure. I don’t know why I do that. I drop it on my desk in the kitchen. Later, I tuck it into the desk drawer. There it sits for days before I go back and pull it out one quiet morning. I think, Those women are asking for the impossible. They want to be spontaneous yet committed Jews, when under the Law there’s no place for spontaneity. They want their Jewish God without submitting themselves to the Law.

  Those women. I glance around the kitchen and living room, mezuzah amulets on every doorway holding inscriptions insisting as we pass that we make sure we think of God first. The wall of books. I whisper, “My life is already written.”

  And yet I open the brochure. Inside is a list of events and keynote speakers. Then I see that this is more than an announcement. The conference is months away. They’re looking for speakers, inviting people to send in proposals. I laugh at the picture of a Hasidic woman walking into a feminist conference, but for a crazy minute I wonder what it would be like to meet a whole collection of those illogical women. The gossip would surely get back to the community, and how it would fly.

  No way. I leave the brochure on the desk and start making dinner.