Unorthodox

by Deborah Feldman

  Back in my apartment, I go into the bathroom and close the door. I sob into a towel for twenty minutes straight. Where is Golda’s family, I want to know, in all of this? Why hasn’t somebody, after all these years, after all these mistakes, decided to take a stand?

  A kosher Chinese restaurant opens down the street. The rabbis rage against this appropriation of gentile culture, but the young couples who live in our neighborhood love the opportunity to try something new, and although we don’t have the guts to be seen eating there, we order takeout and Eli goes by to pick up the order after evening prayers.

  I plate the spareribs in a bright-red, jellylike sauce on our brand-new, silver-rimmed china plates. Eli and I sit across from each other at the kitchen table; I watch him tear at the ribs while I pick at my food. I haven’t been able to keep anything down lately, so I’ve stopped eating. I think I may be very sick with some strange disease, even now that the shingles have mostly passed, and that maybe it might have something to do with my locked-up vagina.

  Chaya talks to the rabbis, and they send us to their specially approved sex therapist. It’s a married couple, actually. The lady doctor speaks to me, and the man speaks to Eli. Afterward they put us all in one room and show us plastic body parts that Velcro together. The doctor painstakingly explains every small part of my reproductive system to us. I don’t see how this helps. It makes it all the more clinical.

  As she explains my down-there area to Eli, I feel a bit better that I’m not the only one they seem to be blaming at the moment.

  Then the male doctor announces he is going to examine me to make sure everything is as it should be. At first I protest. Having never had a gynecological exam before, I panic and refuse to get on the table. Finally the doctor says he will use anesthetic; he applies some lidocaine before exploring with a gloved finger. After a moment of uncomfortable poking around, he pronounces his diagnosis. “You have two hymens. You’re going to need surgery.”

  I have two virginities, it means. Eli tells his mother what the doctor said, but she scoffs at him. When it comes to surgery, she says, you don’t take one doctor’s word for it. You ask a second opinion. She gives Eli the number of her gynecologist in Manhattan, a high-risk specialist who delivered all her children.

  Dr. Patrick has an office on Fifth Avenue that overlooks the snowy expanse of Central Park, and peering out from her window, I can see the taxicabs slicing through the slushy roads, some coming to a stop in front of the Pierre at the signal of the valet. I feel very small here in this office, in this uppity section of Manhattan, knowing beyond a doubt that the nurses and doctors look down at me for being married at seventeen, to a man who wears black velvet hats and long silk coats, whose payos swing energetically with his movements.

  Dr. Patrick’s face is stern and furrowed in concentration as she shoves the steel speculum into me and steers this way and that. “You may have a septum,” she says. “There seems to be some scarring, and that can happen with scarring sometimes. It’s like another wall in the vagina. We’ll send you for an MRI to confirm.” She looks up at me as she says this, but she doesn’t appear to expect a reaction. It’s like she already assumes I don’t have any real feelings on the matter. She bustles importantly out of the room, and as I’m getting dressed, the nurse comes in to give me the prescriptions, her face unsmiling. I don’t know why here in this office I feel so unbearably ashamed just to exist, when I never feel like that in Williamsburg.

  When I get my first MRI, I discover I’m claustrophobic, and I cry so hard in the tube that my body shakes and they can’t get a clear image, and they yell at me from their little intercom, “Keep still!” The MRI is inconclusive, says Dr. Patrick. Sometimes longitudinal septums don’t show up on MRIs. There’s nothing to be done, she says, except visit another therapist, and she gives us a referral.

  Eli has stopped approaching me the way he used to in the beginning, when every night held the possibility that our long string of failures might be broken and that he might still somehow be able to pick up the pieces of his shattered masculinity and make something of our marriage. While we are going from doctor to doctor, he feels there is no point, not until we know what’s wrong. I think that he may be hoping something is seriously wrong, anything to propel the blame away from us, from him. Although I never really believed it when they told me it was my fault, I think he did. He takes what his family says very seriously.

  Now he comes home from work later every day, and he runs off to evening prayers as soon as he gets home. In the beginning he would skip prayers all the time just to be with me. I don’t mind, I let him go, but when he comes back, I reprimand him for abandoning me. I want to be left alone, but I don’t want to feel unloved. Which is it?

  While he is gone, I take long baths. My new bathroom has become a great consolation to me, after all the trials of the last few months. It has a big tub and shiny expensive tiles, and with some scented candles placed strategically around the room, it becomes my personal oasis of peace.

  Eli sometimes comes home to find me still in the tub. “You’ll turn into a prune,” he says. I check my fingertips, but they don’t look especially wrinkled. After I finally come out of the bathroom, I always feel dizzy and weak. It must be the heat of the water.

  One night I get in the tub as usual and run the hot water, relishing the warmth on my constantly cold feet. But after a few minutes, it feels as if my entire body is burning up. My face, which is not even near the water, feels like it’s on fire. I get out and try to cool off, but I can’t seem to chase away the sensation. It rises in waves toward my chest and head, and because I do not understand what is happening, I begin to feel panicked, my pulse racing quickly. Within minutes, my dinner is propelled up my esophagus, forceful fountains of vomit splashing into the toilet bowl. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve vomited without feeling any sort of stomach upset. I have no idea why it happened, and for a while I convince myself there was something wrong with the food, even though Eli suffered no such effects. He always says he has an iron stomach.

  After a while, Eli renews his efforts. The rabbis have told him to keep trying, regardless of what the doctors say. Our lives become clearly marked by the clean days and the unclean days: two weeks in which we gingerly approach each other, knowing the attempts are futile, and two weeks in which we carefully avoid each other, making sure not to violate the laws of niddah. The pattern has me feeling perpetually unsettled. At the end of each two-week period of forced intimacy, I find myself finally adjusted to the new tone of our relationship, only to be thrust back into the niddah state, feeling discarded and unwanted.

  It feels like a form of psychological torment for Eli to alternate between wanting to be next to me and wanting me as far away as possible. I cannot understand what his true feelings for me must be if it is so easy for him to snap back and forth, shut off and turn on. Why can’t I exhibit the same self-discipline? Eli lives by the letter of the law; it seems that God’s commandments are his one true love. He only wants me when I fit into the parameters of his pious devotion to halacha.

  My feelings are such fragile, scared creatures; they must be coaxed out slowly, and by the time they get comfortable, they are sent into hiding again. Soon I cannot bring myself to reach out to my husband at all, because I dread the day when he will once again reject me. I find that I’ve become very cold; each day that passes, people recede further and further away from me until they feel like specks in the distance. My own body becomes detached from me as well, and I can make it do things without feeling as if I am present.

  The impulse vomiting has been happening a lot lately, and I find that the only way to avoid it is to stop consuming food. I can’t throw up if there’s nothing to get rid of. Giving up food is easy because I have completely lost my appetite. The sight of a chocolate bar, once such a temptation, makes my intestines curl. Because I cannot eat, I lose weight. I only notice this when others point it out to me, remarking about how big the clothes I purchased only
a few months ago have become, skirts slipping from my waist to my hips, sleeves skimming my knuckles instead of wrists. Everyone has always made fun of my plump cheeks; now they have become drawn and pale.

  If I become surrounded by too many people, I start to feel my heart beat fast, and my limbs are overtaken by a quivering sensation of weakness. I fear that I may have a terrible illness. If I do try to force myself to eat something, within moments I am vomiting profusely, unable to stop dry heaving for hours. My body feels as tired and wretched as an old woman’s.

  My doctor performs many tests, sends me for X-rays and CAT scans. One day in his office he gently offers me a handful of white pills, a kind look in his eye. “They’re Xanax. Take them every time you start feeling sick. They will make you feel better.”

  “What are they for?” I ask hesitantly.

  “Anxiety,” he answers.

  “But I’m not worried!” I protest. “Why would I need those?”

  “Maybe you don’t feel anxious,” the doctor explains, “but your body does, and your symptoms won’t go away until you address the problem.”

  I can’t bring myself to take the pills from his hand, so I get up and put on my coat, ready to leave his office.

  “Well, if you won’t take pills, at least let me give you a referral.” He hands me a white business card. “She’s a good friend of mine; she might be able to help you.”

  “Biofeedback,” the card reads. “By Jessica Marigny.”

  The office is in a doorman building on the Upper East Side, just off Park Avenue in the most genteel of neighborhoods. In the waiting room I am assaulted by glitzy magazine covers, their pages thumbed by women with long, manicured nails and gleaming, bare legs.

  When Jessica invites me into the examination room at the back, I’m surprised to find it lacking in the usual equipment. There is no table to lie down on, only a comfortable chair. To the right I can see some machinery, but not what one would usually find in a doctor’s office.

  Jessica attaches wires to my palms with little pieces of gray tape and presses some buttons on the machine they are attached to. Instantly a number pops onto its small screen, ninety-eight, but the number changes rapidly—ninety-nine, one hundred two, one hundred five.

  “Stressed out, are we?” Jessica says with a smile, tucking a curtain of blond hair behind her left ear.

  I smile back, unsure of her meaning.

  “Those numbers reflect your stress levels,” she says kindly. “Biofeedback is about learning to read your body’s signals and understanding how to respond to them. I’m going to teach you how to recognize when you are having anxiety and how to regulate it so that it doesn’t make you sick.”

  For an hour each week I sit in her chair, learning how to breathe so that I put pressure on my adrenal glands, learning how to clear my mind and relax my muscles, until I can watch the numbers on the screen go down of their own accord.

  “Just remember, you are always in control. Your anxiety can never get the best of you unless you let it,” she tells me.

  As I leave after my last session, Jessica gives me her usual parting words.

  “Mind over matter,” she says, tapping her forehead. “Mind over matter.”

  Eli watches as I spend my evenings lying on the couch, concentrating on the breathing exercises. His presence instigates waves of anxiety that I am forced to battle nonstop, fighting each upsurge with a powerful breath. I feel as if I am putting up a poor fight, the fight of someone under siege who knows that she will run out of energy before her enemy ever will and that defeat is inevitable. Still, I keep doing the exercises. The anxiety never goes away, but I can hold it at a distance, always keeping my eye on it should it decide to creep up on me and catch me unawares.

  Sometimes at night I am half awakened by a violent hallucination in which my blankets and sheets are trying to devour me. I race from the bed and cower in the kitchen until the feeling of being attacked fades somewhat, although it still feels as if the air itself is trying to smother me. The room seems to bend and twist in its efforts to crush me; even the chair underneath me feels precarious. I feel as if I have no physical refuge. What a curse it is not to feel safe in one’s own body, when everything else is going wrong. My body should be the one thing I can rely on; instead it has become my worst enemy, undermining my every effort.

  Eli has been watching me go through my panic attacks but he doesn’t understand them. Perhaps he thinks that I am going crazy and that I will never recover. One day in June he doesn’t come home from work, and when I try calling his phone, he doesn’t pick up. I wait till late in the evening, but he still hasn’t been in touch, so finally I call his mother to see if she knows where he is, but before I even ask her, she says coldly, “Eli isn’t coming home tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he doesn’t want to come home to you anymore. And he doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  I hang up the phone in shock. I call my aunt Chaya, who already knows what’s going on. She says my mother-in-law thinks Eli should divorce me because I can’t have intercourse. I can’t understand how Eli could decide to do that so impulsively, that he could choose his mother over me, without even telling me in advance.

  Suddenly I feel a well of anger surge up in me where previously there was fear. I don’t know who or what I’m angry at, but I am enraged by the unfairness that seems to have characterized my entire life up to this point, and I am fed up with being blamed for everything.

  “Fine,” I say, hardness in my voice. “I’m not going to fight it. If he really wants a divorce, he can have it. I don’t care.” I hang up the phone before she can say anything.

  I do care, deep inside, because I’m afraid of being on my own. If my husband divorces me, I will have no home, no friends. I will probably never be able to remarry. But I don’t think about those things, because his betrayal is bigger than all of that, and I stay awake until dawn, frozen with numbness.

  Is it fair, I think, that because I have the vagina, the receptacle, I have to do all the work? What if I had the penis; would anyone blame me for not being able to put it somewhere? What about all those nights that I stayed up with Eli comforting him because he couldn’t maintain his own erection? Am I responsible for that too?

  I drive myself crazy with these thoughts, but I don’t know who to be angry at first: Chaya, for always telling me what to do without ever earning that right; Zeidy, for being clueless enough to think I could ever be happy married off to a boy from a dumb, fanatical family where I was the only married woman who didn’t wear a shpitzel or hat; Eli, for being a spineless husband from the start, for blurting out the truth to his father without even giving us a chance at privacy; my mother-in-law, for constantly butting into our business and gossiping to her daughters about me behind my back, for marrying Eli to me and then telling him he could have done better; my father-in-law, who seemed to take distinct pleasure in our failure to consummate our marriage and who uses every opportunity to lecture Eli about halachic sexual practices. The list goes on and on, until in the dark before dawn, I fear I may be entirely consumed by rage. I muffle my wails so as not to wake the neighbors.

  At seven a.m. Eli comes home. He prostrates himself in front of me with apologies, but I can’t hear any of it. All I see are his lips moving, and all I can think of is his lack of character and strength. In my heart I have already cut him out, and I know that if I stay married to this man, every day will be a performance of a good, loving wife, but I will never care for him as a human being again. Mutely, I nod at whatever he says, and he hugs me gratefully when I agree to take him back.

  His mother has told him not to let me read any more library books, as if my illicit glimpses into their pages were the cause of all our problems. If I ever want to read again, I must revert to the wiles of my childhood, and the thought of such deception now tires me. I am too old to fight for these small freedoms. It was never supposed to be like this.

  I have to get rid of a
ll my books. I used to be so excited by the way they lay nakedly on the table near the sofa, by the way I lived in my own home and no longer had to hide the evidence of my preferred pastime. Now I can’t afford for anyone to see them and report back to my mother-in-law. I put them all into a big plastic garbage bag that Eli will take to the Dumpster outside his office.

  I thumb my well-worn copy of Anne of Green Gables before placing it in the bag along with Watership Down and Jane Eyre. Anne was plagued like all the beloved female characters of my youth, but she was my favorite, because for all her spunk and mischief, she earned the undying love of those around her the way I always wished to. I thought it would be Eli, finally, who would love me despite my inability to be ordinary, the way he promised to when we first met and I warned him I would be a handful. But perhaps what he meant by being able to handle me was not love but the power to make me bend to his wishes and conform to his world.

  Eli tells me it was his sister Shprintza who was behind his sudden disappearance. Now that he thinks he’s back in my good graces, he is anxious to blame all the unpleasantness on someone else. He says he found out that Shprintza had been bad-mouthing me to everyone in the family all along, making up lies about me. So they convinced him to leave me, because they believed her. I remember her bitter, angry expression at my sheva berachos, and it suddenly makes sense to me.

  “Do you think she was just jealous that we stole her thunder?” I ask Eli. After all, a newly married woman is fawned over by her family and friends for a full year before she must surrender the attention to the next bride. Instead, she was forgotten as soon as I got married. Still, it had been her choice; she could have waited and stolen my thunder instead. I don’t think I would have minded it.

  “I don’t know,” he answers. “It could be that, but it could also be that she’s jealous that you are closer to me than she is. We were always so intimate with each other when we lived at home. Maybe she feels like you are a threat to our relationship.”