by Leah Lax
Trying to understand all of this makes me feel like my mind is finally becoming three dimensional, like a cartoon character who has been steamrolled, then, toddling away into the world, pops into herself. Pop. Pop. Pop.
The world changes. People are fascinating bundles of contradictions without labels or judgment. Events are the same. I no longer need to draw conclusions; I just want to get close and examine all the strands and colors and surprises.
There are so many new rules in writing. True to form, I first work to learn and follow the rules. And yet gradually I begin to understand that these rules are different from those that still govern my life. I own these rules for my writing self, and they don’t own me. I can stretch them, break them. That’s when I become a writer. And an adult.
I’m changing in other ways. Maybe it’s reading all those books, each with a different standpoint or philosophy, each with a different heart, forming in my mind a new collection of voices that aren’t a Group in lockstep. Maybe it’s all the time I’m spending outside of Hasidic land in heady academic freedom. I don’t know. But now I can see that religious life has filled me with grandiose convictions, made me believe I knew God’s words and thoughts and that I truly changed the world with the strike of a match or the proper tying of shoes. Now I just feel small and ineffective. Is this what the world out there is? No clear path—just an enormous jumble of conflicting beliefs, events, personalities, desires—and nothing I do will change it? I’ll die, a blip, and leave no mark at all. And it doesn’t matter how I tie my shoes.
Yet, after all the years in black and white, I still don’t even quite know what color is.
Although I can see paradox and irony everywhere I turn, I’m ill prepared to deal with it. In the secular world, I’m a child, or a new immigrant, without insight or reference points.
In class and in the student lounge, I sidle up to conversations, but they talk about movies and television shows and politics and I don’t know most of what they’re talking about. Students meet and hang out in bars and coffee shops and restaurants, where I wouldn’t know what to order or how to figure tax and a tip.
I throw myself into schoolwork while trying to keep up with house and children, too often coaching one of the older ones over the phone. Find two packages of hot dogs in the freezer. Set the oven on 350º. Keep an eye on it! At home, I do housework as if it is vital, but also as if I have been robbed.
Conversation That Never Happened with the Group—Greek Chorus with a Yiddish Accent
In Which I Finally Talk Back
ME [pointing an accusing finger]: Now I know you showed me only what you wanted me to see of the world. You said the world was full of filth and lies. You made me miss living.
GCYA: We told you—we told you—about the pig that shows its cloven hoof to fool us into believing it is kosher. Nothing is as it seems. Be careful, we said. Evil is mixed with good, good with evil. Don’t claim we said otherwise.
ME: Then you consoled me by claiming reality was just a bad dream and your dream of perfection was reality. You did that to make me turn my back on the world and accept your Torah. Now the world has passed me by.
GCYA: But we did say truth has many facets. Don’t accuse us of simplistic ideas.
ME: That never helped. You warped my mind, pressed it flat.
[Group fades away.]
IN ROBERT LOWELL’S POETRY, I find he despaired when he lost his faith. I write Rosellen. “Someone should have warned Lowell that developing himself as a writer would demand such brutal self-honesty that he would never be able to embrace religion wholeheartedly again. I wish I could have warned him. I would have told him that the vision writing required of you is going to break down all of your illusions, your props against the wind. Stop! I want to tell him, because faith is our most precious illusion, impossibly fragile when the screen obscuring the world is removed. Stop! Because you can’t stay happy if you don’t stay blind. Lowell didn’t stop believing in God,” I write. “He lost his ability to find Him.”
IN CLASS AND OUT, fellow students are never so much as available for coffee, and I don’t realize it could be how I look. Then one day I find real, live gay students congregating in the student lounge, full of ease and brazen humor. I sit down on the periphery of that golden group in my long skirt and scarf. They fall silent and quietly disperse.
I switch to shorter skirts. The scarf slips back on my head. I lose the pantyhose. I run into one of the Hasidic women at the grocery store, and she looks at my exposed hair and bare legs and drops her eyes. No one calls me anymore to supervise a mikvah immersion or teach a class.
I dream I am walking through a watery universe that is actually a giant mikvah. All of the group is here under the water: Mira, my old mikvah buddy, who barely speaks to me now; Shterna, who brushes past when we meet, no more late-night chats; Rabbi Frumen and his angry, righteous wife; even Levi. There are children everywhere in this watery world, ours included, playing, jumping, and no one seems to notice that no one can breathe or that the water is contaminated with human waste. But I’m just a visitor, just passing through.
Yet I continue going to the mikvah each month. I do it with dismay, with spiritual greed. I go in spite of new awareness of misogyny and primal fear of a bleeding woman that informed these laws and now stains the process for me. For seven days after my period ends, I perform the internal inspections to make sure I’ve stopped bleeding. I formally count the days and take care not to touch Levi until after immersion. I do it because that moment when I emerge from the chest-high water, stand back up, and turn toward the damp tiled wall to mouth ancient words is the only time left when I can pray. Naked in the mikvah, I know who I am. Rabbis and their books are gone. What will happen to me now?
Nineteen
It’s been over twenty-five years since Ana and I once sang with a girl named Janice who came to the Sabbath Experience—our three-part harmony that night, voices blended in common innocence and confidence, brimming with young plans. How brief that encounter, and yet when I recognize Janice at the grocery store, I call out her name and rush over with an oversize “Hi!” We exchange numbers, and after several good but brief telephone visits, I pull out “Munya’s Story” once again from the wire cart and send it to her. We meet for coffee not long after, on a Sunday, Levi home with the kids, and fall into the kind of girlfriend conversation I’ve never had with anyone in the community or the university. It’s just a taste, I tell myself, feeling the pull toward freedom. Don’t forget who you are.
Fatigue in her eyes, furrow in her brow, Janice seems as if she might also need a friend. What different routes we’ve taken! She became a globe-trotting photojournalist, married and had a son. She does corporate photography but also works as an artist. We talk about kids and making art, as if resuming an old friendship—one we never had. I don’t miss the irony.
“Hey,” she says. “This gallery—Diverse Works—they invited me to put my photographs in a show.”
“Wow,” I say. But I pull back a bit. I’m shy, a little jealous.
“It’s a big deal,” she says. “I’ll have two walls to fill.” She leans forward. “I read ‘Munya’s Story,’” she says. “You know, I always thought mikvah laws were outdated and misogynistic. I never imagined someone might use a mikvah their own way—outside Jewish Law, like that woman in your story.”
“What are you saying?”
“I want to take pictures in the mikvah.”
“What?” I say. “But that’s so private. No one’s gonna let—”
“I don’t want to intrude on anyone. I’ll bring models and have them simulate the process.”
Models. Nude models. In the mikvah. “But why?” I say.
She grows quiet. “Taking pictures. That’s how I understand, and I want to understand.”
“But you’ll get your camera wet!” I say.
“Very wet,” she says, smiling. “Particularly since I’ll be sitting underwater.”
“Now, what self-respect
ing rabbi is gonna let you take nude photos in his mikvah?” I say. We both laugh. Then in my mind I’m back in the mikvah, eyes open to slits in that liminal blue space—floating limbs and hair, bubbles, the sound of heartbeat. “First,” I tell Janice, “you have to go to the mikvah yourself. You have to know what it is.”
“I’d like that.”
Then we’re brainstorming, animated, excited.
“Can you help?” she says.
I wonder. We could remind the rabbi that beautiful mikvah photos could help give mikvah a good name in the world. They’re always looking for new tools for outreach. Janice would have to be careful with the nudity. “I might still have some credibility,” I say. “I’ll put on the wig and introduce you to Rabbi Frumen.”
All the way home, I am alive, thinking, girlfriends let you try out your wildest ideas. I don’t know about the great women who changed the world only after getting strength from honest friendships with other women—I don’t have such friends. I don’t imagine this chance to work with Janice might hint that I can also create my own life. I just know that somehow it all comes together on this drive home. I lower the windows and turn on country-and-western crooning, loud. I decide I can talk to Levi, really talk to him. I will make him change! I’ll tell him what I need. I’ll open my mouth! I’ll get him to hold me, every day, and help at last with the house and children. He has to change, because I can’t. He has to help me hold it together, because I’m slipping. But he’ll do that. I just have to tell him. He’ll do that for me. For us.
I get home and head to the back room, where I find Levi on his way out. I block the doorway, startling him with “Stay a minute. We have to talk.” And then, the two of us between the desk where I work at night and the two separate beds, my eager oblivious chatter versus his awkward impatience, I pour out years of buildup in a single breath. “I’m unhappy angry alone you have to change hold me help with the house and the children show them tenderness don’t make them afraid of you tell me you love me do your part come home early call every day where have you been.” On and on, pent-up years, a river of words.
His eyes, they settle somewhere over my head. He frowns, looks distracted. He puts his hand on the side of his neck.
“You’re not listening,” I say. “This is important. This is crucial. This is our marriage.”
“Leah,” he says.
“I’ve been wanting to tell you for years I don’t know why I haven’t, something about us, about me, I don’t know why I couldn’t, but this is important I know I’ve been impatient with you, but you have to change I’ll work with you this is crucial.”
“Leah,” he says. “Stop.”
He turns and goes into the bathroom, and I follow him, annoyed, to find him peering at his neck in the mirror over the sink. “Don’t stonewall me,” I say, with growing dismay. I have a frustrating momentary realization that a person doesn’t change in a minute. “Please!” I say, and then, “What is that on your neck? A zit? Is it more important than our life?”
He won’t meet my eyes, stays focused on the mirror. “It’s a lump,” he says. “It’s twice as big as yesterday.” Then he does look at me, an embarrassed, scared, helpless look.
Everything stops. I can hear air in my ears. Air conditioner hum. His fear. I reach out to touch his arm. But I haven’t been to the mikvah yet, and so he steps back like a reflex, forever linking this searing flash of guilt because of my forbidden, pitying touch with this first moment of discovery. “What’s your gut?” I whisper.
He says, “I think this could kill me.”
Twenty
At first, I feel freed. The yene machla, “that disease” in Yiddish, the one fearful Hasidim won’t grace with a name because a name is power—doctors speak it out loud right in our faces, and I feel freed. I can say the forbidden word. I want to march up and down in front of the synagogue and yell it out. Cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer. No more unknown, no more unseen enemy. I see you, cancer. I know where you are and what you’re doing and where you’re going and how we’re going to get you. I know your name. It’s two against one here, cancer. We’re gonna fight this together, Levi and I. We will. You’ll see.
The nodes in Levi’s neck pulsate like saber rattling. Minutes after that frightened look, I called our ENT and insisted he get us in, and he saw us on his lunch hour. Levi had a biopsy the day after and within the week began treatment for lymphoma at Houston’s MD Anderson hospital. The cancer has spread. There’s no telling how long our enemy has been lurking, scheming.
I forget my confrontation with Levi. I forget our sterile life, the loneliness and anger I sleep with alone in my bed. I forget the L word, forget that life happens in three dimensions, forget school and everything I’ve been learning, forget everything except that I don’t want him to die. Faith, no faith, nothing matters, except that now we have this terrible job and our lives are intertwined and I think this must be what love is.
The cancer forces me to imagine life without him, ironic luxury, and I’m afraid that I may really have to do it. Our new enemy lurks in the shadows. I have ignored you, Levi, sole support for the nine of us, and what will I do if you die? I don’t know this country, don’t know how to work, what to work at. I’ll be thrust with the kids out into the world, naked and alone. I crouch down, flinch at peripheral motion. We will pull this foe out into the light together, Levi, front and center. Gather weapons. Steady now. March.
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, aggressive type, mixed cell, follicular. Stage Three. Levi has had pain in his throat and his eye for two months. Is it in his brain?
We gather the children who are at home and sit them around the dining room table, the Sabbath place. What would this table be without him at the head? Levi tells them, Leibl, Avrami, Sarah, Itzik, and Yossi, that he has cancer. He tells them that he doesn’t know if he is going to live or die and doesn’t make promises. He answers their shocked questions. He is patient and kind. Then he calls Libby and Mendel, both away at school, and talks them through with wise and tender guidance. I watch that and wonder where that wise and tender father has been all these years. But it doesn’t matter now. They cling to him, hang on his words.
I am Mother, and I can’t protect my children. Your father could die.
We tell our family and friends. People, including doctors, wave numbers at us. “Oh,” they say, “lymphoma. Highly curable. Eighty percent survive!” Only lymphoma? Well, my aunt Sophie had it twenty-three years ago!
Meanwhile, on his first day of treatment, Levi tries not to scream when a technician shoves a tube through his hip into his bone and then deeper still to suck out marrow. “So sorry, Mr. Lax. Local anesthesia just won’t do much that deep in.” I stand by and look in his eyes, this man whom, right now, I love, who is my husband, whom I can’t desire but seem to need.
“I imagine the pain becomes relative in time,” he says.
This is Levi. He endures. I see now that cancer will strengthen his faith. He prays.
At home, I pick up my book of poetry by Robert Lowell and find this: “Hope lives in doubt. Faith is trying to do without faith.”
But I need to pray.
Lowell, raised in the church, lost his faith and expressed his grief “over hymns that sing of peace and preach despair.”
I hear hymns in that two-toned way now, too. But I still need to pray.
Lowell was also “drawn back to the hymns … because of the way they gave darkness some control,” the way they offered “a loophole for the soul.”
“Listen to the bells!” he wrote, meaning church bells that draw in the faithful. I think, regardless of faith, or lack of it, I can’t help but hear the bells.
The God that I want to defy is the same God I still think has control. How hypocritical, how farcical, how typical I am: the Jew who shakes her fist at God yet never doubts that Presence, who ascribes to God control so great that nothing is left but to confront how small our efforts and how mad our superstitions.
But I have lived too long in Orthodox religion, in Lowell’s sanity of self-deception; I can’t imagine that our God might be just one concept among many. Besides, I don’t know how to just sit in a terrible moment and accept it. I can’t give up at least the possibility that if I hope hard enough, my hopes will come true. But I also can’t mouth rote prayer words like Levi does anymore, can’t believe that simply reciting words can change terrible facts.
And yet I’m still drawn to the bells. One bell is Levi. He is part of what has kept me holding on. Cancer forces me to reconsider my religion and marriage—they are one—before I leave them, even though, as Lowell writes, “it will bring no true tenderness, only restlessness.”
The familiar cadence and poetry of the Hebrew prayer book tug at me. The blissful and then yearning tone. I cry over the words. But it doesn’t help. I stand apart.
The need to pray remains through those first days, through long hours sitting around the cancer hospital, surrounded by thousands with the same disease, through the first rounds of chemo and Levi’s retching. It stays until I go to the mikvah and stand in the water, defenseless.
In the water, there is nothing left but tiled walls, echoed drips, blurred image of my own limbs. There will be no sex after this, no hope of it, either. There’s no desire left in me, in either of us, but here I am. Wet, naked, I am filled with the need to confront an unfathomable will.
I need to pray. I need words that make the immeasurable finite, that chip the overwhelming down to size, words to lift me from anguish. It doesn’t matter that my need for connection with the forces buffeting my life is no proof of God or of the efficacy of prayer, or that my need proves me only a miserable, wet, naked human being who can’t accept circumstances out of her control. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter that I no longer believe in prayer. I need to pray, because I am weak. Because I am alive. I immerse and succumb.