We both had prominent proboscises—and we had instant chemistry—so we were paired together in a scene, which resulted in hilarious mayhem. We were fearless in terms of character and physical comedy and kept finding ourselves in some kind of embrace or compromising position.
Then a month or so into class, Maggie sent me a letter in the mail. I knew it was from her before even looking at the return address. Her rose perfume wafted through the envelope. I could almost taste it.
The stationery was surprising. Four sets of luscious ruby red lips at the top, all puckered in different poses. The context was casual, mundane really, just saying “hi” and she was looking forward to seeing me at the next class.
Still, not conscious of the potential, I didn’t give it a second thought. Next time I saw her at class, she was a little shy. She asked if I got the letter. I told her I did and she blushed a little. Then she asked if I wanted to go for a ride in her nifty ’75 VW van after class. She drove me to the Pacific Bay, beautifully lit in the salty moonlight, waves gently touching the shores. She turned off the engine and sat back in her seat. I turned toward her.
“Have you ever kissed a woman?” she wondered.
“No.”
“Would you like to?”
Every cell in my body responded in the affirmative, but . . . but . . . I have a boyfriend . . . I like boys . . .
Still, I nearly jumped into her lap, but then I just leaned over and softly reached out with my lips to hers. Nose to nose, her mouth smelled good. She lunged a bit for my mouth, and this chilling thrill rippled easily through my loins. Pearled loins. Inhaling her dusky floral aroma, dozens of ripe red roses bloomed in my secret garden. Could anything else on this Earth be so extremely unearthly?
“Heaven,” I sighed, the tenderness folding me softly into the winding, swirling labyrinth of her orchidaceous lips.
Even now, thirty-five years later, sitting here, writing this, I am intoxicated with her fragrant memory, and it makes me cry.
We opened our eyes. There we were: cheek to cheek, beak to beak, her forest-green eyes glimmering, glistening. I was in rapture, joyous and innocent. This felt like safety and freedom and playful wonderland. We kissed and kissed and kissed and kissed again. We couldn’t and wouldn’t stop kissing. At last, she withdrew and asked me if I wanted to come into her bungalow on the bay.
I got so very shy all of a sudden, like a little girl with her first blush, but I was grown-up, a consenting adult—and the wild combination of that unnerved me.
“Um,” I tried to orient myself to the sparkling night, the bay, and get a deep breath. “Yeah, I would, but I’m . . . I have my period. Wow, did I just say that?” I shook my head.
She laughed her goofy high giggle, displaying her overlapping two front teeth, which made her extra adorable.
She said, “I don’t mind. I get my period too.”
“Right.”
She gently grabbed me by my hair and pulled me into her mouth again.
I surrendered.
I’m not going to go into all the super-intimate details of what happened in her luxurious boudoir that night, but I will tell you that there were veils involved. And upon the immeasurable softness of full female immersion, I was profoundly informed by my deepest psyche that THIS is what I like.
I like girls.
Birth Day
BY LEAH LAX
Excerpted from
Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home
Introduction
WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE HASIDIM. You’ve seen them: Jewish ultra-orthodox men in black hats and suits and untrimmed beards, their wives in wigs and modest clothing, more often than not with children in tow. I was a Dallas public-school kid from a sixties liberal home and the world invaded my living room every night on television: Vietnam—guns and body bags, protests, race riots; Catholics and Protestants fighting in Ireland; Israel under siege. And those women burning bras. My family life didn’t clarify anything. Where was a peaceful island?
Who was I? Who knows at that age. But I wanted to know. And digging into the old-world religion my immigrant family had left behind for clarity—for a return to an older, simpler truth—seemed a good defiant thing. Besides, I had begun to think that the ache in my chest must be my soul. Maybe, I thought, maybe there is a God.
I had this girlfriend (of course there was a girlfriend) with whom I’d fallen in love, and I didn’t dare tell her. We had planned to go camping one weekend but it looked like rain. Instead, we chose the Live and Learn Sabbath Experience at our local synagogue, sponsored by visiting Hasidim who had come offering a taste of their “authentic” Judaism. We went as voyeurs. My life changed because of a caprice in the weather.
Because I fell right in. There is a homoerotic undertow in gender-divided communities, and there was the easy sense of belonging I found there when I had always felt different, since all you had to do was follow the rules and you belonged. And, ever dangling just ahead, was their great, enticing promise of God’s eternal love.
Later, at university, I found other Jewish kids equally enamored with the Hasidim (who had conveniently set up an outpost right near campus). But it wasn’t just Jewish kids who were turning toward fundamentalism. We were just reflecting a greater sweep to the right and to right-wing religion occurring on campuses across America. I believe this to have been in part, for all of us, our adolescent rebellion.
Soon, I was a new wannabe Hasid moving through the world as if in a glass bubble. You out there became cardboard cutouts, no depth or heart, your voices muted. As an effort to ratify the ERA marched state to state, as new feminists were planning what was going to be a historic convention in Houston, for me, the world receded. The baby lesbian in me became a distant cry.
One day, our rabbi sat me down and proposed a match with a young man in my new community. That I had no such attraction was, of course, irrelevant.
My memoir, Uncovered, begins with my wedding, then takes readers deep into my life as a Hasidic wife, mother, and closeted lesbian, because I took my place in the ranks. Over the next ten years, I bore seven children, as birth control was forbidden. My children became my everything.
The following excerpt of Uncovered takes place twenty-five years after I left secular society behind, at a time when I had almost forgotten myself. I had just recently met Jane.
BIRTH DAY
AFTER DUSK. We get out of the car and walk quietly into a deserted neighborhood park far enough from my home and sit down on a wooden platform, part of a children’s climbing gym. A mosquito whines past. There’s a rope bridge, ladders, more platforms, a slide, all mute with child echoes. I wanted more seclusion than this, newly aware of people who may hate us if I decide to hold her, if she cries. Jane slaps at a mosquito on her arm. We get up, cross a path that bisects the park, settle on the other side of a bench in deep shade. She does cry. I put my arm around her delicate shoulder, my palm cupped around her arm. Something in me melts away then in the dusk, old trees folding us into olive-green shadow. As she cries. Resistance, care, leftover propriety for God . . . evaporate.
I pull myself away, but my hand and arm feel painfully empty. I take a deep breath and suggest we walk on. I don’t know what I’m doing, or why I lead her. She is in pain, meek, and follows. Trees overhang the dirt path, remaining light filtering through. “I used to bring the kids here when they were small,” I say. My ghost children circle on tricycles and dart around us.
At the end of the path is an enormous birdcage standing on the ground, perhaps ten feet by twelve by ten, with swings and perches, dishes of water and seeds, and dozens of exotic birds, so many colors. I’m familiar with them, though the light is so dim here I have to conjure the details. In the shadows the remembered colors are reduced to vague silhouettes and intimations of color. “Look,” I say, at captured beauty, wasted wild luminescence—I want her to be able to see all of it. I project myself among those birds, but imagining being one of them in the
cage is unbearable. “I wish I could let them fly,” I say. We listen to rustles and coos, the flap of a shadow.
Beyond the birds is a grassy enclave enclosed by walls of tall bushes where my boys once played ball. The moon is out. “We used to call this the secret garden,” I say. We settle inside it on another bench in the shadows. Branches above us form black lace across the moon glow. A breeze grows cool. Before I can stop myself, I say, “I’m cold,” knowing it’s an invitation.
When Jane puts her arm around me, I simply can’t take any more, can’t just talk and think and hold back like I do every day of my life. Fear slams into me so strong it almost lifts me from the seat, but I know this is it. I may never have this door opened again. I turn and kiss her.
I DON’T SLEEP FOR DAYS. Everything around me is in high resolution, exposed. All my hypocrisies, exposed. The Mexican tile, the kitchen walls covered in washable vinyl I once chose with care, are all disintegrating. Soon I’ll be standing in my kitchen in an open wind, alone.
Jane has done nothing, just changed me, so that if I thought I could stay in this sheltered place while remaining newly conscious, I was wrong. Jane had done nothing, just made me admit I’m an alien in my own home, so that now it feels unreal to wake in the morning, prepare a meal, empty the dishwasher, as if I’ve been violently displaced by someone else. Jane does nothing, just wakes up in the morning at her place and pads alone into her own kitchen for morning coffee, then to the shower, where she lets beads of hot water rain down on supple skin.
The kids speak and I can’t hear. Food swirls in my stomach without feeding this hunger. I stop eating after a few bites.
I can’t function, can’t think.
Which may be why I stand in Jane’s house a week later on a Sunday morning, and why she says so little, why we both hardly speak as if we’re shy as schoolchildren who have just been introduced. Perhaps it is why I try to keep up the pretense this is just a visit, wanted to say, Hi, nice place you have. Wanna show me around? And it is why when we get to the bedroom my brain stops and then we are in the bed and I am holding onto her as if I have to make sure I don’t fall. “Teach me,” I say, a ridiculous line that makes her laugh, because no one need teach me a thing as all thought melts away. Her softness is a sound that fills my ears. Compared with this, memories of Levi are paper that rustles and scatters. There is no will, no words, just this hum of touch, and her mouth holds paint that outlines my shape on a new canvas. Somehow, the movement of my hand amplifies sound. I have been here for a thousand years, and here I will be. Her body is shaped to fit mine—that’s the proof.
Here is where I am born. Oh, my children, how can you ever understand? Your mother was just birthed today.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER MIDNIGHT. I edge open the back door and try to make sure it doesn’t creak. I put the car into neutral and slide down the drive with the driver’s-side door ajar. Once in the street, I ease the door closed and start the motor so that I could be anyone, a passing car that stalled, a Hasidic mother escaping to her lesbian lover.
Biting my lip, foot on the pedal. There’s the crisp night air, nostrils flared, rub of seemingly superfluous clothes on heightened skin, the motor vibrating up my legs and spine and humming through my seat. Cold hard wheel on my palms. I glide through the sleeping Hasidic neighborhood like a reptile, narrowed eyes trained on dark empty streets looking for betrayal, propelled by a body scream. My family shrinks to a pinpoint behind me and blinks out.
Soon, I will tell myself that I do this as a matter of survival, pikuach nefesh, that like Levi scrubbing his hands on the Sabbath, the Law stipulates that survival supersedes the Law. I will soothe myself with this justification even though I’ve had little regard for the Law for some time. But that’s how I feel—that I go to Jane to survive.
I hide the car in her garage, let myself in with her key, into the house where she now lives alone. Inside, I pull off the wig, shake out my hair, drop the scarf to the kitchen floor. Through the still den, down a dark hall, fingertips along a stippled wall. I slide into her bed. She wakes. She turns to me.
There in her arms, I cry. For Levi (which she doesn’t appreciate). For all those lost years. For thinking I could live without so much as knowing the simple peace of . . . of this: warm body that echoes mine, steady breath on my hair, silent constant presence through the night, tandem pulse roused to electric in the morning. For now, this is all that matters. I imagine that won’t be true for long. I leave her at sunrise.
But it’s nearly six-thirty. I slip in the back door of my home to a sleeping house, must wake the kids for school. Line up lunch bags, eight slices of bread on the counter, no thought allowed beneath the patter. Slice cheese and lettuce, zip baggies, nectarine for Itzik and apple for Sarah, both will be wasted, did Sarah finish her homework get Itzik out of bed Shalom needs to pump his front bicycle tire I hear Levi stirring in the back.
Broken and True
BY JEANETTE LEBLANC
IN THE END, A FADED BLUE DISHCLOTH WAS MY UNDOING.
It was years later. After the leaving and the tears and the burning down of all that was and was to be. After loving and new breaks and building new lives.
The house, the one we created together, was to be foreclosed. I had not lived there in years, but I was there this night to help pack up the detritus that is left at the end of a move. Flotsam and jetsam of cleaning supplies and the impossibly tiny parts of toys that collect in the corners of kids rooms and all the minutiae of life that sits unseen until the last exhausted moments.
And it was okay, really it was. It was okay until I picked up that faded blue dishcloth and remembered opening it the day after the wedding, back when everything seemed not only possible, but given. And suddenly there was no air anywhere and the room spun and I ran down the hall, opened the first door and shut it fast behind me—because there was nothing else I could do.
In the bathroom, later, I pressed that cloth to my face and released a strangled sob and wondered how everything had gotten to where it was.
Dreams can die inside the walls of a house.
Sometimes, it is the tiniest things that can be our undoing.
I married him in an old white country church. It lies nestled into a curve in a road that winds along the shore. This is a land of green, green grass and the highest tides in the world, and I still hear the echoes of my ancestor’s footsteps every time I walk barefoot on the soil.
Here I am rooted.
I wore a princess gown and carried dark red roses. He wore a black tuxedo and my grandfather’s wedding shoes.
There is so much more I could tell you, about the way the candles dripped all over the deep-red carpet, and how my mother and sister and aunt had to spend hours scraping off the wax the next day. I could tell you about the heat and humidity, the way I sweated in that heavy dress and the way the mosquitos and black flies swarmed and how in most of our pictures someone is trying to swat away an impending bite. I could tell you that our flower girl, with her blonde spiral hair, stood on the balcony and yelled, “Boys are stinky, girls are good!” at the arriving guests. I could tell you about how my father married us and my groom shed tears. I could tell you that for a wedding gift, my new husband accidentally bought a frame that was meant for a fiftieth anniversary, and we laughed because surely that was a good sign.
Or maybe I could just tell you that we promised each other, “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay, your God will be my God and your people my people, where you die I will die, and there I will be buried,” and there wasn’t a sliver of space in me that didn’t mean every word
You see, he was so handsome, and I loved him, and life had given me no concept of anything that didn’t look exactly like forever.
* * *
This is not the first time I have told this story.
If I keep telling what happened, maybe one day the ache will ease. Maybe the only path to healing is in the telling.
Despite all the rest, there is always hop
e in the truth.
We met during our early days of motherhood, she and I. Big bellies and big dreams, both of us mothers and writers and wild women.
Somehow, after all these years, it’s her red couch I remember the most. It sat in her living room, flooded with light from her big glass door. Faded in places, the leather worn soft from years of use. The seat was marred by primitive spirals in ballpoint ink, doodled by budding toddler Picassos not yet constrained by silly ideas that art belongs on paper. Sometimes our thighs or hands would stick, temporarily glued by dried juice spilled from forgotten sippy cups. The kids ran in and out, climbing all over it and all over us, naked, covered in mud from the backyard, warm from the sun. Hour after sweet, simple hour we sat and talked and laughed. A decade later, that red couch stands in my mind as the symbol of a much simpler time—before everything came apart.
It was on the red couch one day that I sat, right in the eye of the storm that had swept into my life and shifted everything forever. I faced her and spoke the words resting heavy in my heart.
“It is as if I have to choose between losing him and losing myself, and how do you make a choice like that?”
It all seems so calm and orderly now, as I reread that question. How can I find the words to tell you that nothing was calm, and I was already spinning, centrifugal force spiraling me into a space that I knew would change everything?
How could I tell you that I already knew the answer? Gay.
I was gay, and I loved him, and both things were equally and impossibly true.
There wasn’t a narrative anywhere I could find that told that particular story.
I wanted to run and I wanted to hide and I wanted to do anything at all that would make this not be so, anything that would take me back to my safe and predictable life with my future laid out before me.
But a truth like that demands reckoning. And in order to fully know—to quell that burning fire inside me that demanded answers—I had to demolish a life.
Greetings From Janeland Page 14