Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  I left Chicago that night, anxious to return to New York, vowing never to venture out into the unwelcoming territory of greater America again. The sun set over the flat, impoverished plains of Indiana; Ohio and Pennsylvania passed by me unnoticed in the night, because I drove intently without stopping, until I crossed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at dawn.

  To get to Manhattan, I drove through Brooklyn, and even in those early hours, the city was sweltering and stagnant in the summer heat. Although the streets teemed with spectral memories, nothing about New York City struck me as particularly welcoming on that day, for I had come home to that familiar and unescapable feeling of homelessness; I had flung the door wide open to a paucity of roots that had only been emphasized by my journey across the country, forming a bowl of emptiness in my soul. My grandmother had always said that it was bad luck to present an empty dish; she had filled any borrowed container with gifts of fruit or cake. “No one wants to open the door to an empty container,” she had said. In abandoning every reference in my own life, had I opened mine to just such a ghastly vision?

  3

  HANDLUNG

  ACTION

  Manhattan in the early fall seemed softer, more harmless somehow. As the last of the sticky heat faded, and the frenzy of the temporary summer infusion waned into the more solid and reliable tempo of routine city habits, I began to recognize the locals again: the women under polka-dotted umbrellas sloshing through those brief, cooling rains in their multicolored Hunter rainboots, pulling the umbrellas shut and looking up as the sun, infinitely kinder now than in those past months, winked briefly from behind a patchy cloud cover. Transitional weather in New York had always been a delight to me, those thunderstorms and hail squalls that came as fast as they went, the way the air positively vibrated with change and movement. Now the city swung ahead at a pace I could recognize, and as the familiar autumn gales arrived to pluck the leaves from their branches, strangely I felt relief. I had wanted to forget about the trip, forget that the summer had ever happened, for I had learned something frightening during that time that I was not ready to face, and yet it was something I still could not quite articulate to myself.

  Nonetheless, looking at my bank account now gave me an unmistakable thrill of satisfaction. For it truly was a miracle, to look at my account balance and see numbers on a date where I had long since expected to have arrived at empty. And although technically the miracle had come from myself, it was difficult to draw the line between circumstances that arose from me and those that were stimulated by other factors. I had learned as a child that God could act through oneself or others, and a part of me did not trust that I alone was capable of this magic. If what I had once considered impossible had become real, then it was not me who was responsible. Such tremendous inversions could only be attributable to God.

  I moved through my life quite muddled in those days, because everything around me seemed to be suddenly encased in spiritual auras, charged with negative or positive energy, and it was as if I was trying to tune my own aura until it was just the right degree of receptive. Now it was no longer about signs or signals; now everything was shot through with invisible potency. The desperation of the last year had finally delivered its impact; now it was as if my mind had fallen under the influence of a low-dose psychotropic drug. In search of the supernatural, I had lost the thread connecting me to the prosaic.

  * * *

  —

  I floated through September and October on what felt like a cloud of spiritual intoxication. Everything that had seemed terrifying to me last autumn now seemed exhilarating instead. My whole life seemed like an unreal adventure, a game in which the cards could be played in an endless variety of ways, where nothing was at stake. This euphoria was likely purely internal insofar as no one around me seemed to notice it. Isaac certainly did not seem affected by it, but nonetheless there is no denying the rapturous mood that enveloped me then; when I look back, all my memories from that short time seem swathed in a brilliant haze. I hardly need to point out that I was bound to come crashing down from this artificial high very soon, and so I did, as I paid November’s rent and realized that, once again, I had no money.

  I remember meeting my agent on one of those days, a day when the trees were mostly bare, the sky gray, and the wind chilling to the bone, a day when I felt the pain of my anxiety once again in a primeval and bodily way that made me feel dirty and ashamed. I did not know then that I was at the beginning of a pattern that would last a long time for me, a pattern in which I was flung to the most agonizing depths by fear of failure, only to vault to ecstatic dizzying heights each time I was saved by a hairsbreadth from the jaws of ruin. On that day, as I handed her the edited manuscript to pass on to the publishing house, I asked her when I could expect the next portion of the advance, which was due at manuscript delivery, it said on my contract. What this meant, my agent had explained, was some sort of official notice that the bureaucracy would churn out once the manuscript had survived every critical eye and had been pronounced ready for print. She couldn’t predict when the next advance would come through, she said. Best-case scenario, the official acceptance process took two months, bureaucracy included, and ideally I’d be above water again in the new year. But be forewarned, she said; nothing happens quickly at a publishing house. And then, seeing my miserable face, she softened and said to me, “Why don’t you just get a job? You know in my day I’d walk into any shop on the street and ask if they were hiring!”

  I wanted to laugh, but the situation was too serious for that. In her day. Before the internet, when there were jobs to be had everywhere, and nobody was saving them for someone they knew or had networked with, when employment had been a given and educated people from middle-class origins didn’t live on the street with their yoga mat from a previous life doubling as a sleeping bag. What reality was this woman living in? How could I make her understand? I couldn’t. She had amassed her fortune and had been about to comfortably retire before taking me on as a last client. Even if I described my situation to her in detail, it could never feel real to her. She would never be able to feel it in her body the way I did.

  I walked home from our meeting feeling lonely and resentful, especially because my agent was probably the only person in New York City who had all the information necessary to fully grasp my circumstances and yet was able to employ the distance of professionalism to remain insulated from them. For her it was only important that manuscripts were delivered, contractual promises kept, and of course, her percentages earned. I reminded myself that even though I had managed to sell a book on spec at the height of the late-aughts recession, as a total unknown at the age of twenty-two, this didn’t translate into any commercial value. I recalled the meeting we had with my editor recently, where she had solemnly informed us that although Unorthodox was a very “niche” title, they were going to go ahead and order a very generous run of eight thousand, as a gesture of good faith. It was obvious to my agent, as she explained to me later, that eight thousand was the absolute bare minimum number of copies a big house like that would order. Naturally that meeting had accelerated my decline into horrid self-doubt and the gnawing anticipation of certain downfall. For I regarded the book as my only chance now, the only possible way that my situation could change from something barely resembling survival into relative, fundamental stability. I needed someone else to believe in the book I had written. I needed more than a little bit to tide me over; I needed a boost up into the echelons of the middle class, the feeling of a floor, however thin and weak, below me.

  I collected Isaac from school, where, at the very least, he continued to reap the benefits of the demonstration I had staged a year before. He had really settled in among his peers, even made some friends. We rode the bus uptown to our apartment, where I warmed up mac and cheese and we settled on the sofa and ate it together. I watched him eat, looked at him as if for the first time, for he had grown so much in the last year. He would be six
in the spring, and next year he would have to start first grade, although God knew where. This school was only a preschool. Most of the children there went on to Modern Orthodox day schools. But I couldn’t possibly live out this lie much longer. I was hoping that by the time we reached that point, I would have a civil divorce and Isaac could attend any school he liked. Of course, I’d have to get him in, and without money, how would that work? Off I went again, thinking in panicky circles that led nowhere, that simply closed in on themselves until they became little imploding fireworks of despair.

  I looked at his silky blond hair, the dimple in his left cheek that I so loved, the big blue eyes that he had gotten from his father, eyes that had made me so happy when he was born, because it was exactly those features I had wanted him to inherit from the man chosen for me, the all-American coloring that would perhaps guarantee him more ease in his own skin than I would ever have in mine. I knew Isaac would be my only child. I would never get to a point in my life where I felt safe enough to take on this wholesale responsibility for another human being. It occurred to me in that moment that because I was young and had already given birth, I would be an ideal candidate for egg donation, something that had often been advertised at the Sarah Lawrence campus, college-educated young women being especially valuable products in the portfolio of any private fertility clinic. My intelligence had been assessed, my fertility had been proven, and perhaps my Jewishness could even prove valuable in this case. I knew that most rabbis had decreed that a child born from egg donation would be seen as Jewish only if both the carrier and the donor could prove their Jewish ancestry.

  Yes, it was an abject bodily exploitation, an invasive procedure that would have both physical and psychological effects, but unlike the other forms of exploitation available to me it was both fully legal and well paid. Not regulated, but not forbidden either. And did I have any other choice? I could not afford to wait for miracles any longer, to live in that airless limbo. I was tired of constantly being forced to walk up to the edge of that cliff, of having my limits tested to the extreme. There would be no miracles. This time, when I conjured up the money I needed to keep going, it would not be God acting through me. It would be my body producing sustenance, in the most corporeal way possible.

  The great irony in this undertaking lay in the fact that although I would offer my body up for utilization, it would for the first time in my life be my own decision to do so, and therefore it was also doubly sad, for this was one of the reasons I had left after all, to free my body as much as my mind, and I had not thought to find myself in such a situation, where once again I would have to offer up my physical self for inspection and use by others. Yet my resolve was fierce, and with it a small sense of that previous satisfaction returned, for I knew in that moment that I had the reins in my grip again, and with it the knowledge that I would always be ready to do whatever it took to maintain that grip.

  * * *

  —

  I visited the clinic on Fifth Avenue the next morning. I sat among older, well-heeled women, my cheeks red because I knew how obvious it looked, me among them, and I was mortified by the unspoken yet acknowledged public display of my poverty and desperation. And yet, I admit I was surprised that every woman in that room, coming from privilege and the education that usually comes with it, had been able to suspend whatever ethical principles they might have had for the chance to have a baby. I could not ignore the different tone and cadence in the voices of the doctors and nurses who interacted with me when I compared it to the way they spoke to those slim, smooth-browed women. When I left the office, after having taken all the requisite tests and left the vials of blood and bodily fluids with the nurse, I stepped out into the windswept street as if into a different world. Now it was clear that there were two layers in this world, the upper and the lower, and the latter only existed to be utilized by the former. My body was my last resource, and once again, even in this new life, I longed to be outside it.

  Later, when I was living in Germany and mentioned having donated my eggs, my revelation was met with the shock Americans might have exhibited had I spoken about prostituting myself. Yet while prostitution was a legitimate vocation in most European countries, it was paid egg donation that was illegal. It was as if things were the other way around, as if I had betrayed myself more abjectly than I could have imagined. Had I not comforted myself by saying at least it wasn’t prostitution? Later, dealing with the medical aftereffects, I could no longer see clearly which was the truly lesser of the two evils. After all, I had known so many women in New York who had prostituted themselves informally, through nebulous underground networks, for extra cash or nice clothes—basically an easier lifestyle. And many more had done so just to survive. It wasn’t that radical. It was practically part of the culture. Was my decision to donate my eggs a part of that generally exploitative culture as well?

  The syringes filled with hormones arrived via special refrigerated delivery, along with detailed instructions. The period of injections would last two weeks, at the end of which I would have to administer a special trigger shot, and forty-eight hours later the aspiration procedure would occur. The manual explained that I should pinch a fold of skin in my stomach and keep it pinched until the entire vial had been injected. I should expect bruising to develop at the site; should this make future injections painful, I should just choose another location on my abdomen. I was warned that if I developed any symptoms, such as abdominal pain, bleeding, and so on, that I should call the clinic directly, but go straight to the hospital if this happened after clinic hours. The guide did not explain the origin of such symptoms, or their likelihood.

  I looked at the long thin needles and was surprised at how they failed to elicit the anxiety that injections had always sparked in me. When had I become this person who had abandoned all her old fears as if they were luxuries she could no longer afford? The first injection went in fine; I didn’t really feel much of the needle itself with the flap of skin squeezed so tightly between my fingers, but the cold fluid oozing underneath my skin was painful; I had to go slowly, pushing it in drop by drop until the vial was empty. But I felt relatively normal that day, as well as the next; it was perhaps only on the fourth afternoon that I began to notice a vague sensation of swelling in my pelvis. Even then, I told myself that the process really wasn’t half as bad as I expected, and perhaps it was after all a very small sacrifice to make for such a generous paycheck. A few days later the vague swollen feeling had turned into an unmistakable heaviness, as if I was carrying small rocks in my abdomen. By day ten the rocks were big and hard; their weight pulled me forward so that it was hard to stand up straight. In my reports to the clinic I described this sensation but was told it was normal, a result of the ovaries filling with follicles. “Normally, human ovaries never reach a size larger than that of a walnut within a woman’s lifetime. Yours are now expected to grow to the size of, say, an orange.” I shuddered at the image, and the telephone slipped from between my clammy hands. If ovaries could never naturally reach the size of an orange, wasn’t it safe to assume that they probably shouldn’t?

  That night I was awoken by a sharp pain in my pelvis. I tossed and turned but it did not go away, only growing more insistent with each change of position. I knew the instructions said to go to the hospital, but I did not want to leave Isaac alone, so I called a friend who I knew would be woken by a vibrating cell phone and explained that it was an emergency, could she come and watch him? I didn’t offer any details, but twenty minutes later she was at the door, at which point I was dressed and ready to hobble the few streets over to Mount Sinai’s emergency room.

  Once there I tried to explain about the egg donation and how I had been instructed to go to the hospital if I exhibited these symptoms, but I quickly noticed that the nurses in charge of the intake were nonplussed, as if they had never handled this scenario before or been prepared to do so. They called for a doctor, and I discerned from his aimless questions tha
t he too had never had a case like this, that is, never treated an egg donor, and was completely uncertain as to the protocol. He went to look something up and came back to tell me I might have OHSS, that is, ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, and that although this was an identified syndrome, not much was known about how or why it occurred, or what the short- and long-term consequences of it might be, and that the most important thing was to rule out ovarian torsion, so he would be ordering an ultrasound. As he said this to me, I got the distinct impression from his curt tone and dismissive body language that he saw me as a student who had taken a silly risk for some spending money. He didn’t imagine that there could be deeper reasons for such a decision.

  In the ultrasound room the technician kneaded away on my pelvis and acted similarly confused when he finally realized that those grapefruit-size spheres were my ovaries, remarking that he had never been in this circumstance and couldn’t recommend what should be done, but that something like this could not possibly be beneficial for my body. I detected the fine layer of judgment in his voice, but I was still concentrating on the word “grapefruit.” Hadn’t the woman said orange? Wasn’t a grapefruit bigger than an orange? They sent me home in the morning and told me to call the clinic, as they had more experience with such matters. The doctor didn’t think torsion was an immediate threat but couldn’t be sure.

  At the clinic they gave me an appointment right away, and we ran through another ultrasound on their fancy, expensive machine. The doctor said not to worry; everything was fine: I was doing great and producing lots of eggs. In fact we could go ahead and do the trigger shot already and schedule the aspiration. I was relieved to hear this, as I couldn’t imagine how it might feel if my ovaries got any bigger than they were now. After the aspiration they would surely go back to their normal size and everything would be as it was before. I was anxious to get the procedure over with and move on. I thought I would simply forget it ever happened and all would be okay again. At the sight of my paycheck, everything would be worth it, I imagined.