Unorthodox

by Deborah Feldman

  “But she’s Jewish! She said so herself! Why can’t I eat it?”

  “Because not all Jews keep kosher. And even the ones that do, it’s not always kosher enough. Look, see that mark on the wrapper? It says OUD. That means it’s kosher dairy. It’s not cholov Yisroel dairy, which means the milk that went into it didn’t have the proper rabbinical supervision. Zeidy would be horrified if you brought this into his house.”

  Mimi takes the chocolate from my hand and drops it into the garbage can next to us.

  “I will get you another chocolate,” she says. “Later, when we get back. A kosher one. You can have a La-Hit wafer; you like those, right?”

  I nod, placated. As I finish my tuna sandwich, I gaze thoughtfully at Stephanie, who is executing jumps on the rubber floor. The serrated front points of her skates make dull thuds each time she lands, her poise perfect. How can you be Jewish and not keep kosher? I wonder. How can you know the aleph-bet but still eat Hershey’s chocolate? Doesn’t she know any better?

  Aunt Chaya has her most disapproving face on. She’s sitting next to me at the holiday table, teaching me how to eat my soup without slurping. Her glare is frightening enough to provide incentive for a fast, effective lesson. I live in fear of attracting her attention; it’s never positive. Aunt Chaya has always been behind every major decision made about my life, even if I don’t really see her very often anymore. I used to live with her, back when my mother had just left for good, driving off in her little black Honda while everyone on the street poked their heads out the window to witness the spectacle. Perhaps she was the first woman in Williamsburg to drive.

  I was very unhappy living at my aunt Chaya’s. She would yell at me every time I cried, but the more I tried to stop, the more the tears would fall, betraying me. I begged to come live with Bubby, and even though my grandparents were old and had finished raising their children a long time ago, eventually I was allowed to move back. Zeidy still takes advice from Chaya about how to raise me, and I wonder what makes her the expert, with three daughters who took off their seamed stockings as soon as they graduated from school, and moved to Borough Park after they got married.

  Before Sukkot, Bubby sent me up to Chaya’s apartment on the fourth floor to help her clean for the holiday. Chaya had laid out mousetraps, because despite twice-weekly visits from the exterminator, we have always had a mouse problem, just like everyone else who lives in an old house in Williamsburg. Chaya always smears extra peanut butter on the sticky yellow trays and slips them under the furniture. When I got there, she was checking all the traps. She steered one out from under the stove with a broom, and there, making pitiful chirping sounds, was a mouse, squirming desperately on the tray. There was no way to remove it once it was stuck, I realized, but still I longed for a more merciful solution, like catching a bug and releasing it on the street. But before I could say a word, Chaya picked up the trap with two hands and folded it in half in one quick, slapping motion between her two palms, instantly crushing the mouse to death.

  I gaped for a moment. I had never seen anyone get rid of a mouse with such relish. When Bubby found one, it was usually already dead, and she wrapped it in plastic bags and took it down to the garbage can in the front yard. A few months ago I opened one of my dresser drawers and found a family of mice nesting in a folded sweater of mine: nine pink, writhing creatures, each the size of my thumb, skittering happily amidst a hillock of shredded aluminum foil and paper that I supposed their mother had provided. I let them stay for a week without telling anyone of my discovery. One day they were gone. I had, stupidly, just allowed ten more full-grown mice to frolic freely in our house, while Bubby fretted constantly about how to get rid of them.

  It’s not that I like mice. I just don’t like killing things. Zeidy thinks that compassion like mine is inappropriate, misplaced. It’s like having compassion is a good thing, but I don’t use it right or something. I feel bad for things I shouldn’t feel bad for. I should have more compassion for the people who are trying to raise me, he says. I should work harder to make him proud.

  All my aunts and uncles are hard on their children, it seems to me. They berate them, embarrass them, and yell at them. This is chinuch, child rearing according to the Torah. It is the parents’ spiritual responsibility that their children grow up to be God-fearing, law-abiding Jews. Therefore, any form of discipline is all right as long as it is for that purpose. Zeidy often reminds me that when he is delivering a harsh lecture to a particular grandchild, it is only out of a sense of obligation. Real anger is forbidden, he says, but one must fake it for the sake of chinuch. In this family, we do not hug and kiss. We do not compliment each other. Instead, we watch each other closely, ever ready to point out someone’s spiritual or physical failing. This, says Chaya, is compassion—compassion for someone’s spiritual welfare.

  And Chaya has the most compassion for my spiritual welfare of anyone in my family. Whenever she visits Bubby, she watches me like a hawk, pointing out what I’m doing wrong every few minutes. My heart beats quickly when I’m around her; its rhythm thrums loudly through my ears, drowning out the sound of her voice. It’s not that no one else in the family criticizes me. Aunt Rachel is always looking at me like there’s dirt on my face that I forgot to clean off, and Uncle Sinai slaps at my head when I get in his way. But Chaya looks right at me when she talks to me, her mouth hard with something close to anger that I don’t quite understand. She is always dressed in expensive matching suits and shoes, somehow managing to avoid getting wrinkled or dirty even while serving and cleaning up. When I get a fine spray of soup on my collar, she makes a clicking noise with her tongue in disdain. I get the distinct sense that she takes pleasure in the fear she evokes in me; it makes her feel powerful. None of the others seem to notice how I feel about them, but she knows that she frightens me, and she likes it. There are times when she even pretends to be nice, her voice oozing sugary sweetness but the glint in her narrowed, pale blue eyes hinting at something else, asking me if I want to help her bake cherry pie, then scrutinizing me carefully as I knead the pastry dough in the big steel bowl, waiting for the slightest slipup.

  Chaya is the only true blonde in the family. Although I have two other aunts who wear blond wigs, everyone knows their hair turned ashy long before they were married. Only Chaya has the coloring of a genuine blonde: fair, even-toned skin and eyes the color of blue-tinted ice. It is very rare in Williamsburg for someone to be a natural blond, and I can tell Chaya takes pride in her beauty. Sometimes I squeeze lemon juice on my head and run it through my strands in the hope that they will lighten, but no change is apparent. Once I put Clorox cream on one section, and it worked, but I was worried that people would notice because it looked too obvious. It’s forbidden to dye one’s hair, and I couldn’t have borne the gossip that would have ensued if anyone were suspicious of my new gold streaks.

  Chaya has convinced Zeidy to let her take me to another psychiatrist. We have already been to two, both of them Orthodox Jews with offices in Borough Park. The first one said I was normal. The second one told Chaya everything I said to him, so I clammed up and refused to talk again, until he gave up. Now Chaya says she will take me to a woman doctor.

  I understand why I need to see a doctor for crazy people. I expect I may be crazy too. I keep waiting for the day when I will wake up foaming at the mouth like my great-aunt Esther, who is epileptic. After all, Chaya implies that it runs in my mother’s side of the family. Surely, with my unfortunate genetic inheritance, I can hardly hope for mental health. What I don’t understand is, if these doctors can help, why didn’t they send my parents to one? Or if they did, and it didn’t work, why would it work on me?

  The woman’s name is Shifra. She has a paper with a chart on it that she calls an enneagram. It’s a list of nine different personality types, and she explains to me that you can be one of the nine personality types but still have “wings” in the other personalities, so you can be a five, with four and six wings.

  �
�The four is the Individualist,” she tells me. “That’s what you are.”

  How quickly she has put me in a box, within the first ten minutes of our meeting. And is there something so wrong with being an individual, being self-sufficient and private as she says? Is that the neurosis that Chaya wants to drive out of me, so she can make me more like her: rigid, disciplined, and, most of all, conforming?

  I storm out of the session early. Surely the “doctor” will use this as proof that I am indeed a problem to be solved, a disorderly personality to be rearranged. I walk up and down Sixteenth Avenue, watching the women and girls doing their preparatory shopping for Shabbos. The smell of old herring wafts up from the grimy gutters and I wrinkle my nose. I don’t understand why I can’t be like these other girls, in whom modesty is so ingrained that it runs in their veins. Even their thoughts are still and quiet, I can tell. With me, you can see on my face what I’m thinking. And even if I never speak the thoughts out loud, you can tell that they are forbidden. In fact, I’m having a forbidden thought right now. I’m thinking that I’m not expected back in Williamsburg for another hour and a half, and just a few blocks north is the public library I have passed so many times before. It’s safer for me to sneak in here, in a neighborhood where no one knows me. I don’t have to be so scared of being recognized.

  In the library, it is so quiet and still that I feel my thoughts expand in the space that the tall ceiling provides. The librarian is arranging a display in the children’s section, which is blessedly empty. I like the children’s section because there are places to sit, and the books are already picked out for me. The librarians always smile when they see me, silent encouragement in their eyes.

  I don’t have a library card, so I can’t take books home with me. I wish that I could, because I feel so extraordinarily happy and free when I read that I’m convinced it could make everything else in my life bearable, if only I could have books all the time.

  Sometimes it feels like the authors of these books understand me, that they wrote these stories with me in mind. How else to explain the similarities between me and the characters in Roald Dahl’s tales: unfortunate, precocious children despised and neglected by their shallow families and peers?

  After I read James and the Giant Peach, I dreamed of rolling away in the womb of a fruit from Bubby’s garden. It seems to me that in the literature revolving around children, children who are strange and misunderstood like me, at some point something comes along to transform their lives, to transport them to the magic netherworld to which they truly belong. And then they realize that their old life was just a mistake, that they were extraordinary all along and meant for bigger and better things. Secretly, I too am waiting to fall down a hole into Wonderland, or pass through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia. What other possibilities could I consider? Surely I will never be at home in this world.

  I cross my legs in delicious anticipation when I read about Matilda discovering her power in class one day, in that desperate turning moment that every story seems to have, when it is thought that all hope is lost and then suddenly it shows up again, from somewhere unexpected. Will I too one day find that I have a power that has been kept secret from me? Does it lie dormant within me right now? It would make sense then, all of this, if I were like Matilda and I went home with Miss Honey in the end.

  There is always a happy ending in children’s books. Because I have not yet begun to read adult books, I have come to accept this convention as a fact of life as well. In the physics of imagination, this is the rule: a child can only accept a just world. I waited for a long time for someone to come along and rescue me, just like in the stories. It was a bitter pill to swallow when I realized that no one would ever pick up the glass slipper I left behind.

  An empty vessel clangs the loudest. That’s the adage I hear continuously, from Chaya, from the teachers at school, from the Yiddish textbooks. The louder a woman, the more likely she is to be spiritually bereft, like the empty bowl that vibrates with a resonant echo. A full container makes no sound; she is packed too densely to ring. There are many proverbs repeated to me throughout my childhood, but this one stings the most.

  I try, but I can’t help my natural impulse to talk back. It’s not smart, I know, for me to always want to have the last word. It results in a world of trouble that I could easily save myself from, if I could only learn to keep quiet. Yet I cannot allow another’s mistake to pass by unnoticed. I must comment on the grammatical slipups and misquotations of my teachers out of an unexplained duty to the truth. This behavior has branded me a mechitsef, an insolent one.

  I go to Satmar school now. Chaya decided which class to put me in; she is the principal of the elementary division. The other students were initially jealous of me, assuming I had unlimited grace, but the truth is it’s another opportunity for Chaya to keep tabs on me and report back to my grandparents. She says she put me in the smart class, so that I would feel challenged. There are twelve sixth-grade classes, and each of them is known for a particular trait. The girls in my class are dedicated and studious and don’t understand my desire for excitement.

  I’m tapping my pencil quietly on my desk as the teacher elaborates on the Torah portion of the week. I simply cannot endure this for hours on end, listening to her drone on in her usual monotone. If only she would care to make it a little more exciting, so I wouldn’t find it so difficult to sit still. Well, if she won’t provide excitement, I will.

  Two weeks ago someone discovered a dead mouse under the radiator. There was a mad frenzy as everyone tried to leave the classroom at once. The stench was overwhelming. I remember Chaya came down from her office on the fourth floor to see what the commotion was all about. She walked slowly toward the back of the classroom, her square-heeled pumps echoing loudly on the wooden floor, her arms crossed behind her very straight back. She tossed the scarf that covered her short blond wig over her shoulder before bending down to check under the radiator. When she stood back up, there was a withered gray lump dangling from her gloved hand. Beside me, someone choked back a scream. Chaya dropped the dead creature into a Ziploc bag, her lips pursed and eyebrows raised in contempt. Even the teacher looked visibly shaken, her face white. I was the only one who wasn’t speechless with surprise.

  I cannot explain my aunt. She is not a blood member of my family, and I know very little about her past. All I know is that her children, like her, are strange. They all have the same cold manner, the same rigid posture and attitude. And she is proud of them for that and wants me to be the same. It is as if she thinks that I will never feel pain and so will always be able to perform as is expected of me. Sometimes I think she is right. But I am not prepared to erase the possibility of joy from my existence, and to live like her means to give up on emotion. I am convinced that my ability to feel deeply is what makes me extraordinary, and that is my ticket to Wonderland. Any day now there will be a tincture on my nightstand, with the label Drink Me attached. Until that happens, I am stuck in this classroom. I must come up with a way to make the time pass more quickly.

  If only another mouse were discovered. As my pencil taps gently on the desk, an idea comes to me like a delicious chill shooting up my spine. What if—no, I couldn’t possibly. But perhaps—no, the risk is too great. To claim to see a mouse where there is none? But if I pulled it off, who could ever point fingers at me? Is it mischief to be startled out of one’s seat by the sight of a mouse skittering across the floor? One could hardly call it premeditated. My limbs tickle now, in nervous anticipation. How would I execute this prank? That’s it—I will drop my pencil. Then, when I bend down to pick it up, I will jump onto my chair, shrieking in horror. I will cry out “Mouse!” and that’s all it will take.

  My stomach lurches as I slowly roll the pencil toward the edge of my desk, watching it clatter to the ground while I make sure to look as bored and sleepy as possible. I reach down under my desk to pick it up, and for a moment I pause underneath it, in an instant of tortured hesitation, before
I leap up on my chair. “Aaaah!” I scream. “A mouse! I saw a mouse!”

  In an instant the classroom is alive with screaming as the girls jump onto their desks in an effort to avoid the threatening rodent. Even the teacher looks horrified. She sends the class monitor to get the janitor. Meanwhile there will be no more studying until the janitor has inspected the classroom and pronounced it mouse-free, as I know he will.

  Still, he interviews me, trying to figure out the mouse’s path, and the possible hole it could have disappeared into, never once appearing to doubt my claim. Is it because he can’t possibly imagine a good Satmar girl concocting such mischief? Or is it because the fear and shock in my face are partly real? Even I am taken aback by my own daring.

  At recess time, my classmates crowd around me in morbid curiosity, demanding to hear every detail of the sighting. “Your face was so white!” they remark. “You looked truly terrified.” What an actress I am. A white face and trembling hands to go with my scream. To think what I can do with a skill such as this—the ability to convince others of emotions I don’t really feel! It is a thrilling thought.

  Later, when Bubby and Zeidy hear about the incident from Chaya, they laugh about it. Only Chaya turns to me with a suspicious look in her eye, but she doesn’t say anything. For the first time, I feel triumphant, and I look back at her calmly. This, then, is my power. Perhaps I cannot move things with my mind, like Matilda, but I can pretend; I can act so convincingly that no one will ever be able to discover the truth.

  “Bubby, what’s a virgin?”

  Bubby looks up at me from where she is kneading dough for kreplach on the cast-iron tabletop. It’s a humid day, perfect for getting dough to rise. The steam rising from the stove fogs up the rain—splattered windows. My floury fingers leave smudges on the glass bottle of olive oil with its picture of an artfully draped woman snaked around the words extra virgin.

  “Where did you hear that word?” she asks. I notice her shocked expression and realize I’ve said something bad, so I stutter anxiously in response, “I d-d-don’t know, Bubby, I don’t remember . . .” I turn the olive oil around so that the label is facing the wall.