Unorthodox

by Deborah Feldman

  “No one has ever gotten an A in my class, and no one ever will,” Mrs. Berger announces with finality. “The closest anyone came was an A minus, and that was last year, the first time since I came here fifteen years ago.” Everyone knows it was Mindy. She was the first girl to get that grade with Mrs. Berger.

  Now I am determined to get that coveted A. Around me I can hear the students shifting in interest. A challenge, no matter what kind, is something exciting, something to break up our routine. We’re all delighted at the prospect.

  I do get an A that year, after a few months of hard work. When I finally see the scarlet letter stamped on the paper Mrs. Berger returns to me, I look up at her triumphantly.

  “See? I did it! You said no one could do it and I did it!” There is a hint of condescension in my tone, because a part of me is thrilled to be able to give her a taste of her own medicine.

  Mrs. Berger looks at me blankly, no reaction in her face. After a moment she sighs suddenly, dropping her shoulders in defeat, and I mistake this for surrender.

  “And so?” she retorts, looking me in the eye. “What are you going to do with that A, now that you have it?”

  I don’t understand the sadness on her face when she keeps giving me my perfect grades back, A after A, because I think she should be proud, that my good work is a reflection of her teaching skills.

  This has been an excellent academic year for me in general, in both English and Yiddish. Knowing it was my last chance, I finally buckled down and got the perfect report card Zeidy always wanted me to get. Understandably, I’m nervous about next year; only good grades and references can help me get the job I want, teaching the English program in elementary school. I have this idea that if I could have had myself as a teacher when I was younger, it would have made all the difference, and that maybe somewhere out there is a girl like me, who wants to know more than she is allowed.

  Mindy, the girl who also loved to read and write, has a job teaching seventh-grade secular studies. Everyone is talking about it. It’s shocking, really; you would’ve thought, if she’d teach, that she’d teach religious studies, considering her background. I wonder how she got away with it, how her family allowed her to pursue such a vocation. Her mother wears a shpitzel wrapped around her head with only a thin band of synthetic hair sticking out the front. Even Zeidy wouldn’t have ever asked Bubby to wear something like that. A wig was good enough for him.

  In order to be considered for a teaching position, I have to give a model lesson in late spring, for an eighth-grade classroom. Mrs. Newman, the curriculum adviser, is observing, as is Chaya, my aunt, the English principal. Everyone thinks I am guaranteed a job because my aunt is the elementary school principal, but I think they overestimate her power. She is a puppet in the hands of the male authorities who control the school, in a position of false power that comes with a kind of shame. Being an expert in secular studies is not exactly something to be proud of. She started out supervising grades 1–8, then, slowly, they took it away from her, and now she is reduced to grades 6–8. Of all the English principals in the school, she is the best, and therefore the worst. She’s the only one who wears a wig and nothing else on top, no hat, no scarf. It’s not like it passes for real hair, but they are worried it makes a statement. They don’t want the Satmar girls to wear their wigs frankly like that, with no sign that their hair is fake.

  In late August I get the notice. I have a job, teaching sixth grade. I will earn $128 a week. I buy a straight skirt and a blazer in navy blue wool, with a light blue oxford shirt to match. I choose navy blue leather loafers with chunky square heels that make deep tapping sounds on the freshly waxed tile floor of the school hallways. I remember this building, the time when I feared the powerful people patrolling the hallways, the ones with the key to the creaky elevator, the staff who could get us in trouble on a whim. Now I have the key to the elevator and no longer have to climb the crowded stairwells.

  The students look at me with awe. I’m barely seventeen, but to them I am looming on the cusp of adulthood, basking in that twilight moment between childhood innocence and the shackles of womanhood.

  Mindy and I become instant friends, just like I always hoped we would. Finally, we are on equal footing. After we finish teaching, we walk to Lee Avenue Pizza and sit at the small table behind the counter nursing foam cups of hot coffee between our palms and talking about our jobs and the politics that go on in the office. Gradually it comes out that Mindy used to sneak books too, wherever she could find them, and we’ve read many of the same titles. Shockingly, she even listens to FM radio on headphones, and she shows me how to turn the dial on my stereo.

  On Radio Disney at 1560 on the AM dial, Lizzie McGuire is singing “What Dreams Are Made Of” and I’m hooked. “Last Christmas” by Wham! seems to play on repeat at every station, and a lot of sugary Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys and Shania Twain. I lie awake for hours at night with my headphones on, listening to foreign, promiscuous tunes I never knew existed. I like electronic and trance music. Mindy likes teen pop.

  I think I am in love with Mindy. I write her poems. I dream about giving her the world. We buy popcorn and slushies and sit on one of those benches behind the projects where no one ventures because the hooligans buy drugs there. We huddle on benches under scaffolding and shiver with cold until four a.m., unwilling to retreat to our respective homes.

  One Shabbos in January, the snow comes down thick and powdery and Mindy doesn’t come over to visit as usual, and I am lonely all afternoon. Sunday morning I call her and say, “Let’s spend the day in the city. Let’s sneak onto the J train and get lost on Broadway. Let’s go see an IMAX. What if someone sees us? I don’t care. We’ll wrap scarves around our faces. No one will recognize us.”

  I love that, like me, Mindy is impulsive. Even reckless, perhaps. We take the subway to Manhattan and keep our heads lowered in the train car for fear of being recognized.

  To get to Lincoln Center we have to wade through piles of blackened slush and tall snowbanks, but it feels like a revolutionary trek. The woman behind the desk at the Sony theater must think us strange: long skirts and thick beige stockings, matching bob haircuts tucked behind headbands. I look for auditorium 2. I think I see it, at the very top of the glass building, and we enter a small theater with a balcony and red curtains and red velvet seats. When the movie starts, I can see it is not an IMAX at all, and the characters aren’t animated like they looked in the poster. Mindy is frightened suddenly because this feels like a bigger sin, seeing real live people in a movie. I’m scared, too, by my own boldness, I think, but it would feel silly walking out now.

  The movie is called Mystic River. A child gets kidnapped in front of his friends, and I think something bad happens to him. Then a girl gets murdered. A lot of people get killed, and everyone seems angry and full of secrets. It’s my first movie and I don’t quite understand what movies are for yet: if they are representations of things, if they are true narratives, or if they are mere amusements. I feel both violated and guilty; doesn’t this prove that I was wrong all along, that my independence and rebelliousness will only lead me to grief?

  When we get outside, the sun is blinding and the glare reflects off the snow on the ground. I blink repeatedly in the light, standing there on the corner of Sixty-eighth Street and Broadway with Mindy’s gloved hand resting in mine. Neither of us says a word.

  We don’t go back to the theater after that. Later when I try to remember the movie, I cannot recall the faces of the adult actors, only their bodies, laced with foreboding. Even when I am older and have watched many films and can recognize celebrities’ faces, I will never be able to recall Sean Penn’s appearance in that movie, or the faces of other famous members of the cast. The people in that movie seemed frighteningly real to me. Having no frame of reference for their voices, their expressions, I believed that those characters were as alive as Mindy and me, trapped in a frightening tableau.

  Perhaps they are right about the outside w
orld, I thought at the time. What a nightmarish existence it must be, to live in the shadow of such violence. When I grew older, I would realize that the dangers that movie presented existed in my own community as well, only they were shrouded in secrecy and allowed to fester there. And I would come to the conclusion that a society that was honest about its perils was better than one that denied its citizens the knowledge and preparation needed to fend off their approach.

  If you are forced to confront your fears on a daily basis, they disintegrate, like illusions when viewed up close. Maybe being always protected made me more fearful, and I would later dip cautiously into the outside world, never allowing myself to be submerged completely, and always jerking back into the familiarity of my own life when my senses were overwhelmed. For years I would stand with a foot in each sphere, drawn to the exotic universe that lay on the other side of the portal, wrenched back by the warnings that sounded like alarm bells in my mind.

  5

  Possessed of a Purpose

  The purpose which now took possession of her was a natural one to a poor and ambitious girl, but the means she took to gain her end were not the best.

  —From Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

  The matchmaker calls almost every night now. I know because when Zeidy takes the call, he goes downstairs to the privacy of his office, and every time I pick up the upstairs phone, he gets quiet and says hello, hello, in his quivery, tired voice and I’m forced to replace the receiver gently so that he doesn’t hear the clicking noise. Bubby stretches the wire of the phone all the way to the bathroom, where she closes the door and lets the water run as she speaks, pretending it’s one of her daughters calling to talk.

  Do they think I don’t know what’s going on? I’m seventeen. I know how it works. At night Bubby and Zeidy have hushed conversations in the kitchen, and I know they are talking about matches.

  Zeidy will want someone pious, someone with a strong Satmar family background, someone he can be proud to be associated with. After all, marriage is about reputation. The better the match, the better the family name. Bubby wants a boy who won’t look down at the floor when he talks to her, like the farfrumteh boy that my cousin Kaila married, a boy so religious that he won’t even talk to his own grandmother because she’s a woman. I want someone who will let me read books and write stories and take the subway to Union Square so I can watch the street musicians play. Mindy still has a twenty-four-year-old brother ahead of her and knows she has time, at least two years, but I have nothing to stop me. She thinks I will marry someone more modern, maybe someone who listens to secular music in secret too, who watches movies and goes bowling like the modern Orthodox Jews in Borough Park.

  I have more freedom now than I did when I was in school. I’m a working girl, which means I have earned the right to spend time unsupervised without having to account for it. I can meet other teachers for lesson-planning sessions; I can shop for school supplies. But it seems to me that what I’ve really earned is a sort of precarious trust. I did well in my last year of school, I landed a prestigious job, and ostensibly I am everything Zeidy and Chaya ever wished me to be. To their credit, they think, I turned out perfectly. Apparently my chances for an advantageous marriage have much improved as a result of my positive outcome, and although I am not apprised of any of the goings-on, the excitement suddenly swirling around me is palpable. All the hushed conversations, the looks—they make it clear that I am somehow ripe for a fortunate happening. I have never been so conscious of myself. Looking in the mirror at my newly grown-up face framed by a mature layered haircut, I am flushed with my own sense of importance. Is this not the best time in a girl’s life, when the whole universe is pregnant with mysterious possibilities? The most miraculous happenings are possible when things are still unknown. It is only when all has been decided that the excitement fades.

  I do not concern myself with the details of the heated talks between my grandparents and my extended family about my marriage. I understand that knowledge cannot possibly matter anyway; all it can do is drive me crazy with suspense and anxiety. What is meant to happen will happen regardless; what my family wants will come to pass. The best thing I can do is enjoy this time as much as possible.

  Zeidy doesn’t inspect my room anymore, not like he used to. I can read books more freely without fear of being discovered. Now I go to Barnes & Noble and buy hardcovers with my own hard-earned money. The first books I purchased were ones I had already read in the library but remembered fondly. The recent edition of Little Women lies between two slips in my bottom dresser drawer, a stark contrast to the tattered copy I held in my hands a few years ago. When I was younger, I delighted in the shenanigans of the spirited sisters, but now, in my second go-round, I feel delicate pangs as I see Jo’s struggles for what they really are. She’s a woman who can’t fit comfortably in her time, whose very life and destiny are unnatural to her. How cursed are these characters who appear in all the books of my childhood. They are burdened with the constant ache of absurdity; the pressure of society’s desire for the reformation of their character is like the binding feeling of an ill-fitting dress they attempt to thrash their way out of. Surely I will also be softened and tamed by society in the way Jo is presumed to be. If there is any promise in the reading of this book, it is that somehow they will all find a way to fit comfortably in their world, even if both participants must give a little in the struggle. Perhaps I too can carve a place for myself in this world I have always been at odds with. Now that I’m grown up and changed, like Jo, I can be myself and still be a proper young woman. In the end, the winds of love and marriage made Jo into the lady she resisted becoming for so long. Perhaps my temperament will be magically calmed as well.

  Tuesday I come home from work at a quarter after four and it’s already darkening outside, the sky streaked with purplish-gray clouds, a pink halo outlining the tops of the bare branches. Bubby’s waiting for me at the door, ushering me into the house with a sense of urgency in her movements, her voice distracted and jittery.

  “Where were you so long, mamaleh? It’s late, we have to go soon, schnell take a shower, mamaleh, and make your hair nice. Put your navy suit on.”

  I’m confused. Did we have a special occasion tonight that I forgot about? Maybe a cousin’s wedding or a bar mitzvah?

  “Nu, nu, mamaleh, make fast, make a shower, let’s go.” When Bubby gets distracted, she translates from her original Hungarian and the phrases sound odd.

  I wait for her to explain, but she doesn’t say anything else. I do as I’m told.

  When I come out of the shower in my blue zippered bathrobe with a towel wrapped around my wet hair like a turban, the phone rings, and Bubby puts her lips close to the mouthpiece on the receiver and covers it with her hand so I won’t hear. She murmurs like that for a few moments, then hangs up and makes a face like it’s nothing, and I pretend I believe her.

  As I’m getting dressed in my room, she knocks and says through the closed door, “Devoireh, we’re going to go meet someone at six o’clock. Blow-dry your hair and wear your navy suit, with the pearl earrings. You have makeup? Put on a little bit of makeup. Not too much, just a little foundation and some blush.”

  She knows I have makeup, she’s seen me wearing it, even though I try to make it barely noticeable.

  “Who are we meeting?” I call from inside my room, buttoning my shirt quickly.

  “We’re looking into a match for you, and you are going to see the boy’s mother and sister. Your aunt Chaya and uncle Tovyeh are taking you; they will be here in an hour.”

  I stop in the middle of tucking my shirt into the waistband of my skirt, my hand frozen at my side. My first “meeting.” This is the first step in every shidduch, I know. You meet the potential mother-in-law, maybe a sister too, then the same thing happens to the boy. Then, if both sides like what they see, they introduce the boy and the girl.

  They want to make sure I’m pretty, that I’m not fat or horribly short or disfigured. Th
at’s all the meeting is really for. Every ounce of information about me has already been gathered at this point. Now they want to see how I dress, if I’m a good girl. I know this; I know how to play the game. When my hair is dry, I part it in the middle and tuck both sides behind my ears, an aidel hairstyle that all the really good girls wear. I smear a dab of foundation over my face and it gives my skin an orangey tint. It’s drugstore stuff; I don’t know where to get the better products. I sweep CoverGirl blush over my cheeks with the small, flat brush that comes in the case, a motion that leaves a stripe of pink along each cheekbone that I have to blend furiously with my fingers to make believable. But in the end you can barely tell I have makeup on; my face looks suitably blank, lit only by the faint glow of the pearls in my ears.

  We meet in Landau’s Supermarket, the one with the fluorescent white lighting that makes my skin look ghostly pale, and I twiddle my hands in my black leather gloves as we go inside. Chaya tries to reassure me. “We’ll only talk for a few minutes. You don’t have to say much, they just want to see what you look like and get the general idea that you have a pleasant manner, and then we’ll go. We don’t want to make a scene in the grocery or have people notice what’s going on.”

  I bet people will notice anyway. I’m so nervous. Luckily it’s a Tuesday and not a pre-Shabbos shopping day, when the stores are packed. Fewer people to worry about. For a while we patrol the aisles but I don’t see anyone, let alone a mother-daughter pair that could be the ones. The frozen food aisle gleams; the row of metal-trimmed freezers have glass doors frosted by condensation and I can see my reflection in them, and I don’t recognize the girl with the pale, pinched mouth and expressionless eyes. The freshly waxed vinyl floor feels dangerously slippery under my shoes. I pick a piece of lint off the front of my coat, smooth flyaway hairs, knead my cheeks to make them pinker.