Upstairs I pass the dining room and try to sneak off to my room, but Zeidy notices me and calls my name. “Nu, Devoireh!” He looks expectantly at me. “Do you have the wine?”
I nod quietly. “I gave it to Moshe,” I say.
Sure enough, Moshe comes panting through the door, burgundy in hand, setting it down on the table with his signature smirk as if nothing happened. He turns to look at me, authority in his gaze, something proud and powerful behind his eyes, and I turn on my heels away from him, hands pressed to my hot cheeks.
In my room I don’t turn on the light, lying instead in the almost-blackness marred only by the weak peach-colored light filtering in from the streetlamp outside my window, the shadow of maple branches creating patterns on the walls of my narrow room. With my hands I trace the outlines of my body, fingers trailing down my neck, past the space between my breasts and settling on my stomach, trying to see if the tingling sensation burning from there can be felt in my skin, like the heat from a fever. My skin feels cool and smooth and quiet. I lie on my bed for a while, even as the noises from the dining room begin to fade, and I hear people clunking heavily down the stairs and out through the pair of front doors and into the street. I can hear Tovyeh get into his car, and in a moment the big blue Dodge Durango purrs off into the night.
I hear Bubby getting ready for bed, Zeidy learning by himself in the dining room, and finally Moshe coming into his bedroom at two a.m. I stay awake for a very long time, hands resting on my stomach, still in my clothes, listening for something, but no sound comes from my throat. At dawn I fall asleep.
When I’m sitting at the Shabbos table on Friday night, listening to Zeidy sing the traditional hymns, I burst into loud, gulping sobs, stopping him in midrhyme. No one can understand my sudden penchant for hysterical tantrums; Zeidy tells me I should pray for menuchas hanefesh, peace in my soul. “What could you possibly have to cry about?” he asks gently, looking up from his holy books. It’s true, I want to shout, I have nothing to cry about, nothing when it compares to you, and the pain you can claim as your own.
For me to tell him why I’m crying would seem ungrateful. Is it Zeidy’s fault that God sent me into a world that had no place to put me? How do I explain to him about the giant hole that threatens to swallow me up if I don’t fill it with things; how do I tell him about pride and desire, and about the misery that comes with not having?
Everything in this world that you think you own is not really yours, Zeidy says. It can be taken from you at any moment. Small comfort, to think that my few possessions can be stolen in the night. A parent, a sibling, a house, a dress—all of those things are possessions; in the long run, they don’t matter. Zeidy says he knows this because he knows what it is like to lose everything. He says that the only thing of value one can achieve in this life is menuchas hanefesh, the deep, inner serenity that prevails even in the face of persecution. Our ancestors were so strong, they could maintain complete calm even under the gravest of circumstances; grievous bodily torture and unspeakable anguish did nothing to sway them from their tranquil position. When you have faith, Zeidy says, you can grasp how meaningless life is, in terms of the bigger picture. From the perspective of heaven, our suffering is minuscule, but if your soul is so weighed down that you cannot see beyond what’s in front of you, then you can never be happy.
How to find such inner peace that nothing can sway it? The world around me is so real and tangible, I cannot resist; heaven seems hardly as wonderful a prospect.
Moshe was finally suggested a match this week. Zeidy is thrilled that someone might be interested in the grandson he had almost given up on. But when I get a call on the girl’s behalf asking for more information about the boy’s character, I don’t praise him as the custom entails. Instead, I brazenly defy tradition, I call him a bad apple, a crazy, a shlechter. And when my zeide finds out what I did, he sits me down to yell at me, but before he can finish, I beat my two palms down on the table and cry out.
“What? What is it?”
“He tried to . . . He tried to . . .” But I don’t know what he tried to do. I give up and leave the table, even as I hear him calling after me to come back, but now I don’t have to talk if I don’t want to. Now I have the right to go away.
Zeidy asks my aunt Chaya to talk to me, and she uses soft words to get me to open up, and I tell her, not all of it, just enough so that her face twists with rage and she mutters softly, “Animals. They’re just animals.”
“Who?”
“Boys. Young boys. I don’t know what Zeidy was thinking, bringing him here with you in the same house.”
In the end, Moshe got engaged to an Israeli girl. Everyone knows that an Israeli shidduch is a last resort. Fathers in Israel are so poor, they will give their daughters to anyone who can pay. Moshe will have to move to Israel to live near his wife’s family, and I will never have to see him again.
Bubby is on the phone with one of her daughters when I discover the thick, viscous blood in my underwear, and I can hear her voice through the bathroom door, full of lamenting sighs. I want to wait until she puts the phone down before I break the news of my impending death to her, but I’m too terrified to control myself, so I open the door a crack and motion for her to get off the phone. She asks the person on the other end to hold on and comes toward me with a slightly irritated look on her face.
“Nu, what is it, mamaleh?” she asks hurriedly, pulling her turban back over her ear.
“I’m bleeding,” I say, in my most quiet voice, waiting for her to spring into shocked action, maybe to call Hatzolah, the volunteer EMS team, to take me to the hospital.
“Here, mamaleh,” she says briskly, opening the bottom drawer of the bathroom vanity. She takes out what looks like a long, narrow swath of cotton and hands it to me. “Put this in your underwear,” she says, “and I will go to the pharmacy soon to get you some pads.”
I don’t understand how she can be so calm. She tells me it’s no big deal that there is a gallon of blood gushing out of me, because apparently it happens to everyone, and it’s healthy. Think of it as your body cleaning itself out, she says. It will go away in a few days.
When she brings a box of Kotex home from the pharmacy, she tells me to keep it hidden at the back of my closet so no one should see it. Such things don’t need to be talked about, she says. It doesn’t do anyone any good.
It’s hard to make a secret out of the process of changing the pads, like bandages, every few hours. I have to wrap them in paper and a plastic bag, like Bubby showed me, before putting them in the garbage can nonchalantly, so that no one suspects. I feel strangely depressed, as if I have somehow switched bodies and the new one isn’t to my liking. I can’t wait for the bleeding to go away, like Bubby promised it would. I hope it never comes back.
Soon I can no longer count on my body being the same every day, bony and sleek like it used to be. Now it seems as if every day my clothes fit me differently, and the mirror never shows the same reflection. I become frustrated with my inability to control what my body does or looks like.
My friends have become obsessed with diets, bringing plastic containers of iceberg lettuce for lunch instead of the usual bagel with cream cheese. Try as hard as I want, I can’t resist the silky taste of peanut butter on white bread, or the way the chocolate shell breaks delicately off a vanilla ice cream bar.
Some girls take the diets too far. Chani Reich spends her recess time jogging up and down the hallways to burn calories she doesn’t appear to be consuming. Bruchy Hirsch is hospitalized for weeks because she collapsed during classes once. Even her parents couldn’t get her to eat.
Modesty is the highest attainment for a young woman. Indeed, the modest girls are the skinniest, hiding their natural bodies from curious view, maintaining the innocence and purity of childhood. How long, I wonder, can girls turn their backs on impending womanhood?
After all, it won’t be long before we all become mothers. These years form the twilight of our childhoods, o
ur last carefree moments before real life begins.
I go off to summer camp with my new underwear and a stash of maxi pads, feeling like one of the older girls now, like I’m on the verge of something huge and important. The sprawling campgrounds are located in the farthest corner of a moist, sweltering valley in the Catskills, miles off the main highway. Satmars like to be as far away as possible from the gentiles who live in the Catskills year-round, and they don’t want us to be able to walk into town or interact with anyone on the outside, so we spend our summers deep in a property that can only be reached by a primitive, hard-to-find dirt road that stretches for miles.
The grounds are springy with moisture, with mushrooms popping up under the shade, as the rains settle into the concave areas and the resulting pondlike puddles trickle down hillocks for weeks before finally thinning out and evaporating in the humid air. Only the large, raised field areas are kept dry for camp activities.
I choose a lower bunk underneath Layala, a husky girl with blond hair and blue eyes who’s always stirring up trouble. When the night supervisor steps out on the porch for fresh air and conversation with the other girls on duty, I lift my legs and pound the bottom of her mattress as hard as I can, and the metal bed frame vibrates with movement. Layala inevitably bursts out yelling, and that brings all the ODs (what we called those doing “overnight duty,” like a night watch) running in, shining their flashlights between the beds, trying to determine the source of the commotion. I lie still beneath my thin summer quilt, eyes closed, breathing measured and slow, a portrait of innocence.
Summer is a time for mischief. I do everything I’m told not to do. I stay in the bunk during swim hours and hide in the bathroom when they come check the bunks for stragglers. I hate swimming in my long blue swimdress with the palm tree emblazoned on it to remind me that I am a Satmar girl. That is the meaning of the rabbi’s last name: Teitelbaum is German for “palm tree,” and the symbol is everywhere—on the cabins, the buses, the stationery, and the swimclothes. The minute my swimdress gets wet, it bags heavily around my knees, slapping my calves with each step.
Some girls roll up the legs and arms of the swim costume and lie on a towel they have spread over the hot concrete, trying to catch the few rays that penetrate the swimming area’s high enclosure. The looming brick walls throw a deep shadow over most of the pool area. Almost everyone is tan by the second week of camp—everyone, it seems, but me, who can’t coax the faintest glimmer from my pasty-white skin. While Layala turns dark brown and limber, all I have to show for myself are scabby knees and a sprinkling of freckles on my nose.
I run up demerits quickly, as I fail to show up for shiur, the daily sermon, and get reprimanded for nodding off during prayer. The only building on the campgrounds that isn’t simmering with heat is the humongous dining room, in which the entire camp eats their meals in shifts. The dining room fits about fifteen hundred people at once, and its ceiling is striped with whirring air-conditioning units that keep blessedly cool air circulating throughout the cavernous space.
We say prayers out loud before and after each meal, with one girl chosen to lead on the microphone. I wait all summer to be picked, but only the good girls get to go up front. I try out for a part in the major play, and I dazzle the counselors with my loud, clear diction, but I am given only a small part, while the big parts go to Faigy and Miriam-Malka, well-behaved girls whose fathers have clout. Perhaps if Zeidy were to involve himself more, then people would feel they had someone to answer to about their treatment of me, but Zeidy doesn’t know about such things, and because the counselors know that they won’t be held accountable, they don’t really care about my happiness. Occasionally, if I ask for it, Bubby will send a package with the bus that comes up to the Catskills on Fridays, but they are never like the packages other girls get, the ones that are stuffed with sweets. She sends foil-wrapped sponge cake and fresh plums. Still, it is better than nothing. It is a way to show that I am cared for, like everyone else.
This is the summer that Milky and Faigy shower together, and the rest of the class whispers about them behind judging palms. Layala tells me lurid tales of the two girls in their bathing suits splashing themselves in the bathtub with the door closed. She crawls into my bed one night while the OD is chatting outside and everyone else is sleeping, putting her hands on my breasts and asking me to feel hers to see if they are bigger. Of course they are bigger, and she lords it over me like it’s something to be proud of, like she won a competition. I change bunks for second half. I choose a bunk above Frimet, who’s quiet as a mouse except for when she cries into her pillow; then she makes tiny squeaky sounds like the rubber tires of a toy truck.
There are two summer camps now, one for people like me who come from families that support Zalman Leib, the Satmar Rebbe’s youngest son, and one for people who come from families that support Aaron, the eldest son. Both sons are competing to inherit the dynasty when the current rabbi passes away, and the prolonged battle has turned ugly.
Golda is in the camp for the Aroinies, as we call them, so even though we spend the school year together, I don’t get to see her all summer. She comes to visit me on my birthday, and when she gets off the big air-conditioned coach bus that stops at all the Hasidic colonies and camps in the Catskills, we walk as far as we can away from the sound of the foot stamping and hand clapping in the main cabins so we can have privacy.
We wade into the gan yehudah, the large field area at the front of the camp where they let the grass grow tall to obscure the view, even though we’re in Kerhonkson, New York, and the nearest neighbors are twenty miles away. Golda and I sit pretzel-legged in the grass and make daisy chains out of the weeds, our fingertips stained green from splitting grass shoots. We both hate camp. We hate yelling our guts out for no reason. We hate playing on the hot concrete all day the games counselors invent for us. Golda writes songs. I write in my journals. I wish I could sing like her, or at least look like her, with her deep olive skin and warm, beautiful smile that lifts up her cheekbones, turning them into glowing mounds, her teeth like diamonds in the sun. Golda is pretty, even with the beginnings of acne on her forehead. I think she will have a dream of a life, that fantastic things will happen to her, because she has that face, the face of a woman to whom earthshaking things are bestowed.
In the field, I doze off at one point, and Golda’s words scroll down like Chinese calligraphy in the background of my dreams, then fade. The sun burns the fabric of my clothes, and my clothes burn me. The metal zipper on my skirt turns white hot. Golda too dozes off beside me. Through half-closed eyes I can see her black hair glint in the sun, tangled with weeds. I feel an ant bite my leg, and it hurts, not like a mosquito bite, but like the pinch of a minuscule tweezers, and I scratch. I feel blood trickle down my leg, seep through my stocking, and the fabric dries instantly into stiffness.
Golda and I are both startled by the sound of the siren. The field is empty, as well as the parking lot beyond it. Everyone is in the main cabin watching the machanayim game, Hebrew for a more modest version of dodgeball. The wailing sound rolls closer and farther away, its volume erratic, the sound scratchy. It’s coming from a megaphone. Golda and I peer through the grass and see Mr. Rosenberg, one of the few male residents on the campgrounds, as well as Mrs. Halberstam, the grossly overweight camp director in her housecoat and turban, wading into the field, Mrs. Halberstam holding the megaphone in one hand.
Golda and I look at each other in puzzlement. Should we get up? Should we lie low? Why are they here?
“Maidlach!” Mrs. Halberstam’s voice cracks through the old megaphone. She’s talking to us!
“Come out of the field, girls. You need to come out right now.” I can see her now, cheeks splotchy from the heat, eyes squinted almost shut. She won’t go any further, but it’s clear she sees us. We are probably in trouble for not being where we’re supposed to be. Or maybe they’re afraid of ticks. The grass here hardly ever gets cut.
Golda and I scuffle out of the
field. We try to mold our faces into innocence, even as our teeth clench to contain our giggles. Mrs. Halberstam looks panicked, and it’s not pretty. Mr. Rosenberg looks extra stern, his eyes open wide and staring, his scraggly orange beard seeming to stand straight out. They escort us out of the field in silence.
I wonder why the two most important people in the camp staff were sent to discipline us for such a minor infraction.
At the edge of the field they stop, Mrs. Halberstam turning to address us, Mr. Rosenberg standing behind her in a show of tacit support, his manic gaze focused on us, both hands twirling his burnt-orange payos in superfast motions, betraying his fury.
“What were you doing in there?” Mrs. Halberstam asks.
“Nothing. Just schmoozing,” Golda answers flippantly. She’s never afraid of authority, especially since they’re not her authorities. She goes back to the other camp at the end of the day, and she has different superiors to answer to there.
Mrs. Halberstam grows angrier. “Do you know what that looked like out there? What’s wrong with you? What do you want people to think about you? Do you want to be sent home?”
I’m completely confused. Golda looks like she just got slapped in the face. What on earth can she mean?
“Look, we really were just talking. We’re friends. We haven’t seen each other all summer. She’s from the other camp,” I say, trying to placate her.
The director pauses to look at Golda. Mr. Rosenberg steps in. They whisper to each other. “Is that true?” she asks of Golda, and Golda nods in response.
“Well, if you wanted to talk, why would you go all the way into the field? Why can’t you just sit at one of the picnic tables? Or even one of the field areas where the grass does get cut? This proves you didn’t just come here to talk!” Mrs. Halberstam pontificates triumphantly.
Unorthodox Page 9