by Deen, Shulem
“Fine,” she said.
Now we stood watching the lights passing in the distance over the bridge, like colored dots against the black backdrop of a low-resolution video game. She was dressed in a warm coat, but she’d forgotten her scarf. She got a tissue out of her pocket to wipe her nose, and I realized that my mustache felt moist on my upper lip. I reached my hand behind her arm, then moved to take her hand. Her hands were in her pockets, and I put my hand inside. Her fingers reached for mine, interlocking, although I could feel hesitancy in her movements. She would never have allowed it in public within our own neighborhood.
I remember thinking that it would make a nice photograph, the two of us against the night sky, the lights of the bridge glistening against their reflection in the water.
“Isn’t this nice?” I asked.
Her shoulders were hunched, her eyes darting around. She noticed that I was looking at her, and she smiled stiffly. After a minute, she said, “I’m cold.” Then, looking away, “I want to go back.”
It was chilly, not freezing, but cold for November. Still, she’d said it irritably, almost as if the weather was my fault. Frustration, annoyance, a touch of anger finally burst inside me.
“For once, can we want the same thing?”
Gitty scowled, and I regretted saying it, but it was too late.
“You want different things,” she said, repeating what she’d said a thousand times already. “Weird and crazy things. Goyish things. All those things you read in books or see in the movies. I have no interest in any of it.”
She unclasped her hand from mine, and we lapsed into silence. When she looked at me, I could see the wetness on her cheeks.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said softly. “Maybe we just can’t make it work.”
PART IV
Chapter Twenty-Three
On a Tuesday afternoon in December, during Chanukah of 2007, Gitty and I climbed two rickety flights of wooden stairs to the meeting room of a local rabbinical court. The room doubled as the women’s section for a neighborhood shul, and through the slats of the latticework along the far wall, we could see down to the sanctuary, where several dozen men sat over their Talmuds, swinging their thumbs and stroking their beards. Nearby, in a room the size of a large closet, a scribe, feather quill in hand and inkwell at his side, wrote twelve lines of Hebrew script onto a square of parchment. A short while later, the rabbis, the scribe, the witnesses, and several curious busybodies assembled.
“Thou art hereby divorced from me….” The words stuck in my throat as I held the square of parchment in my hand. Gitty stood with her palms together, open and upward, tears running down her cheeks, her body trembling. I could barely see anything but could only hear, as if from inside my head, the silence in the room. I could imagine the rabbis’ thoughts, Nu, finish already. But I couldn’t get the words out. It was fifteen years, almost to the day, from when we’d first met, and now, after I said these last few words and dropped the parchment into Gitty’s palms, our bonds would be severed. I swallowed hard, and forced my mind into numbness. “And thou art hereby permitted to all other men.”
“A beautiful divorce,” one of the rabbis said afterward. “Such lack of acrimony, such genuine tenderness.” Gitty and I smiled through our tears and rode home in our car together.
Before we split, Gitty and I had agreed that the children were the most important thing. Evenings, as the children slept, we would talk late into the night, sweetly, sadly, of civility, of continued friendship, of cooperative parenting. For the children’s sake, we said, we’ll make this the most amicable split in the history of amicable splits.
Gitty and the children moved back to New Square, while I took an apartment in Monsey, a ten-minute drive away. The children came to my place twice a week for dinner and homework, and visited every other week for Shabbos, rotating three at a time. I bought a bunk bed from IKEA, along with several air mattresses and lots of pillows and blankets in bright, gender-neutral colors, and set it all up in the extra bedroom, which doubled as my office. It wasn’t very roomy, but the kids didn’t mind. It felt like camping, they said. I stocked up on books, toys, board games. Gitty and I spoke on the phone nearly every day, and with her guidance, I learned to prepare basic meals.
When the children came on Shabbos, I kept up appearances, wearing my shtreimel and bekishe for their sake. I took the boys to shul, and we ate the Shabbos meals and sang the Shabbos songs. I tested the boys on their Bible and Talmud studies, and warned my daughters that playing Monopoly was forbidden according to some opinions, as it was a simulation of weekday business practices. I maintained a strictly kosher kitchen, with two sinks and two sets of dishes for meat and dairy. I even disallowed watching movies—Gitty had become more strict about it, and I made it clear that, wherever the children were concerned, we would go by her rules.
On Saturday afternoons, the children and I took walks down an old country road a mile from our home. At the end of the road was a pond shaded with elms and weeping willows, where we would watch the geese swim and catch glimpses of deer in the nearby woods. Once we spotted two turtles resting on a tire that stood upright in the shallow end, its bottom half buried in rocks and dirt. The turtles faced each other, their necks outstretched, as if in a stare-down. For a long time, we stood and watched, waiting for them to move, until dusk fell and the turtles were barely perceptible bumps on the tire’s dark silhouette.
I was thirty-three. After fifteen years of marriage, and five children, I did not feel very young. Still, I told myself, it was not too late to begin a new life as a citizen of the world, a life guided by my own values, no longer driven by the fear of social ostracism.
My job kept me occupied during the day, but in the evening, I could catch up on the education I had missed. I would make new friends and learn about the world. The future seemed bright. I wanted to be a writer and an academic. I would get my GED, my bachelor’s degree, my master’s, my doctorate. I dreamed of leafy New England college campuses and ivy-covered stone walls and a tenure-track professorship. I wanted to be a scholar of Near Eastern studies or of comparative religion. Or a professor of psychology. Or creative writing. There were suddenly so many options. For now, I would start the process. Within a decade, our youngest would be nearing adulthood; with an empty nest, I’d have the second half of my life to pursue my dreams. I would create possibilities not only for myself but also for my children. I would teach them that they, too, could pursue their aspirations, to be writers or academics or scientists or car mechanics or circus performers. “I want to be a mom,” Freidy would say, and I would tell her that was a fine thing to be, if she chose it herself.
None of it was going to be easy, but we would make it work. I would continue to support Gitty and the children, and we would find a reasonable way to share custody. Soon enough, Gitty would find someone to marry. She had many good qualities, and I was sure that there was a man somewhere who would make her happy.
A week after Gitty and I moved to our new apartments, I drove to the Rockland Community College campus, nestled in a forested nook at the tip of Monsey. Down a corridor from the gleaming lobby of the main building, I found a room with brochures and course catalogs and application forms of all kinds. I took one of everything, and spent the better part of a long night reading registration policies, tuition details, and course descriptions.
I wanted to study it all: art history and ornithology and cartooning and calculus I through III and automotive technology and restaurant management. But I could take only night classes, and I was further restricted by my lack of a high school diploma. After two semesters, I would get my GED; but for now, I had to stick with a limited list of classes. I chose English 101 and elementary algebra from the list of requirements, and added one class in psychology and another in general philosophy.
During my first algebra class, after I found a seat in the last row, a woman sat down beside me. She had chin-length, soft blond hair and the clearest skin I’d ever seen on an adu
lt human. Her features were exquisite, almost doll-like. She wore a white jacket and tight jeans and short white boots with furry cuffs. She struck me as vaguely Eastern European. I imagined a Russian accent.
I knew that at some point, I would want to begin dating. But now, sitting next to this woman, I did not think I wanted to date her, or be friends with her, or even speak with her—I only had the visceral awareness that next to me was such an extraordinary presence that I wondered how I was to concentrate on the algebra lessons. As the professor spoke of polynomials and rational numbers and factorization, I could think only of the woman beside me, her knees nearly touching mine, the pen in her slender fingers moving steadily, filling her notebook with gracefully looping numerals.
Were my feelings normal? Did other men’s minds, too, freeze into a near-comatose state in such situations? I wondered what would happen if I tried speaking to her. Would she respond? Or would she cast me a withering glance?
By the end of the first class, I had worked up enough courage to look her way. When our eyes met, she smiled lightly. During the next class, one week later, she leaned over and asked if I’d caught something the professor said. I pointed to my notes, and she copied from them eagerly. Emboldened, I turned to her during the five-minute break. I do not remember what I said, but I remember being astonished that she not only spoke to me but that she was shy and soft-spoken and entirely, though still exquisitely, human. Her name was Aliona, she said. She was twenty-six, lived two towns over, and was in her second year in college.
I wondered if we might become friends.
I thought I knew all about the outside world by now. I had watched hundreds of movies, read dozens of books, devoured thousands of newspaper and magazine articles. I imagined that the language and the cultural nuances and the behavioral peculiarities of non-Hasidim would come to me like a second skin, once I shed my old one.
I would learn soon enough: A world presented on film or on the page was not reality. One does not become a homicide detective from reading crime novels, or a trial lawyer from watching courtroom dramas. All the movies in the world could not adequately prepare me for living in this new world. Even without my yarmulke, with my payess shorn off and my wide-brimmed hat and long coat abandoned, I could not shake the feeling that I still carried the aura of a Hasid, emitting vibrations of alienness to all around me.
My attempts to strike up conversation with my classmates felt awkward and strained; it seemed as if their sentences carried a subtext I could not decipher. “Hey, man,” a classmate said to me one day in greeting, and I wondered about the meaning behind the idiom. “Man” struck me as a strange form of address. Could one say, “Hey, woman”? What about, “Hey, person”? The dictionary did not say.
Another man peppered his speech with “yo,” “dude,” and “bro.” Even though I knew these words, it felt odd hearing them in real life, and I wondered whether there was some crucial element to living as a non-Hasid that would prove forever elusive. I had been told over the years that my English speech carried a slight Yiddish accent, and I now found myself self-conscious each time I spoke. My name, too, was a source of discomfort: “Shulem,” with its Hebrew and Yiddish distinctiveness, felt wholly incongruent with the ethnically neutral persona I now sought for myself.
When shopping for clothes, I found that I could make little sense of contemporary fashions. After I bought a new sweater and wore it to work one day, an acquaintance from the office next door stepped into the elevator with me, looked me up and down, and said, “Preppy sweater.” I looked at him for clues to a deeper meaning, but he looked away, hummed a tune to himself, and stepped off the elevator. I was left to wonder: Was preppy good? Was preppy bad? I turned to the Internet, but the answers were elusive. Preppy. Urban. Sporty. Business casual. So many terms, but how did one know what was what? What style suitable for whom, and for what occasion?
One day, I came across the term “dad jeans.” Dad jeans, I came to understand, were bad, so I immediately ran to my closet and held up the single pair of light-blue washed-out denim I’d purchased only a few weeks earlier. Dad jeans!
One day, Aliona told me that she hoped to graduate with an English degree. She wanted to be a schoolteacher, she said. English majors liked English, I thought, which meant they liked words and sentences and strange language constructions.
“Do you know the longest grammatically correct sentence containing only a single word?” I asked.
She gave me a puzzled look.
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
She offered a half smile but looked no less puzzled. “What?”
I had seen that fact on Wikipedia earlier that day. The word “buffalo,” the article said, with its various definitions—as a regular noun (the animal), a proper noun (the city), and a verb (“to annoy”)—made this construction possible. I found myself reading this information with such delight that I immediately filed it away, hoping for an opportunity to share it.
“It means—” I began to explain, then noticed her blank expression. Perhaps offering random bits of information collected from Internet encyclopedias was not a good way to make conversation.
“Sorry,” I said, with an embarrassed chuckle. “I guess not everyone’s a word nerd.”
She laughed. “A word nerd. I like that.”
Her laugh encouraged me. Also encouraging was that each Wednesday evening, as soon as I arrived, she would look up and nod: “Hello, Shulem.” Her voice was like silk, soft and smooth and precious in its sparseness. Occasionally, she would look at me with a kind of expectant expression. Yet I could not think of much to say, and my meager attempts at conversation fizzled into nothingness.
Months passed, and I found myself with a kind of loneliness I had not anticipated. For nearly fifteen years, my wife and children had been right beside me. I’d had scores of friends, hundreds of acquaintances, and a community of thousands. Suddenly unmoored, I began to worry: How was I going to replace it all?
A small handful of old friends still called occasionally, but there was a chill to our interactions. “So, are you happy now?” they would ask, their tones flat, rhetorical. I would say that yes, I was happy, or happier than before, or what did it mean to be happy, really? Or I would turn the question back at them—“Are you happy?”—and they would grow annoyed. “You’re the one who made this big change.” Those conversations were awkward and stilted. We were careful to skirt sensitive issues, questions of faith, the details of non-Hasidic life, whether I really no longer kept the Sabbath, or if it was all just theoretical, as my brother Avrumi had once asked. Invariably, my friends would say, “You’ll be back, Shulem. You’ll be back.” They would offer their best wishes, hopes that I find myself soon, find peace of mind, find whatever it was I was looking for, so that I might, the sooner the better, stop all this nonsense for the good of everyone involved.
“We should hang out sometime,” I said to Aliona after class one day. “Maybe get coffee or something.” I placed my books into my bag, then flung the bag over my shoulder and slipped out between our seats. I had hoped for a casual effect, as if the thought had just occurred to me, as if I hadn’t prepared those words in my head, rehearsed them with different cadences and tones to get the effect just right.
Aliona looked up. “Yeah, we should.”
Did she say it brightly? Did she seem eager? Was she just being polite?
“We’ll figure something out,” I said as I took off, not knowing what else to say. Later, I agonized over it: How will she react when she learns about my past? What if we have nothing to talk about? Scenarios of rejection—catastrophe!—played out in my head, which soon became not only possibilities but certainties, as if they had already occurred, instead of the imaginations of my frenetically anxious mind.
Soon there was only one class left. I was dismayed at my own failure to turn Aliona into a friend. I could not bear to attend our last class, so I skipped it and pushed Aliona out of my mind.
A fellow blogger, a Hasidic man in Brooklyn, with whom I’d been in touch over the years, called me one day. He’d become acquainted online with a Hasidic woman who had confided in him.
“She wants to leave,” he said. “But she wants to speak to someone who’s already done it. Someone who is not a fuckup.”
Was that me—not a fuckup?
I told him to give her my number, and a few days later, the woman called. She sounded out of breath.
“I’m sorry, I’m—” I heard her panting, then silence.
Moments later, she was back.
“Sorry, I’m on my way to the library. I thought I saw a Hasidic man following me, so I started running.” She sounded distracted, and I heard a groan. “Ooh—sorry, I almost fell into a ditch here. I think he’s gone now. Gosh, it’s so dark!” Then she laughed. “You must think I’m nuts. I’m not nuts, I promise!”
Her name was Malky, she said, and she lived in Kiryas Joel, the Satmar village in Orange County, thirty minutes north of Monsey. Could we meet? she asked.
We arranged to meet a few days later, at an Applebee’s near enough to Kiryas Joel for her to walk. No proper Hasid would step into a nonkosher eating establishment, so as long as she wasn’t seen entering, she’d be safe meeting a strange male.
I arrived several minutes late. A middle-aged man sat alone in a booth, eating dinner. A few tables down, a teenage couple leaned into each other, side by side, a half-eaten plate of dessert between them. The server at the door raised an eyebrow. “One?”
“I’m supposed to meet someone.” I wasn’t sure how to describe her. “Have you seen … a woman in a …?” I raised my hands to indicate a covered head. Before I could finish the question, the waitress pointed to a corner booth at the far end of the restaurant. Peeking from behind the high-backed bench was a head covered with a floral lavender kerchief, facing away from the entrance.