by Naomi Ragen
Her mother, who finally arrived three hours later, was unapologetic. “It had to happen sometime, Daniella. You are old enough to understand the situation. It couldn’t go on. It wasn’t good for anyone.”
She studied her mother’s mouth as it formed the words, not hearing anything, thinking it looked like some yawning, spongy whirlpool of quicksand that swallowed people whole. The more you struggled against it, the deeper you’d sink. She’d never been able to win an argument with her mother.
The next day, her dad called, asking her out to dinner. Sitting across the table from him in a dark restaurant, she realized that in his own way, he was no easier to talk to than her mother. He seemed to have lost his grip on reality, talking about a “little break” and how “things would soon be getting back to normal.” Any attempt to talk realistically about how he would manage, where he was going to live, what he was going to do, floundered into silence.
She wished so much that her older brother, Joel, was home. She needed his confident, flippant practicality, his sense of humor, his big-brotherly advice. But he was off in Boston doing a summer internship at a prestigious law firm. While in their long-distance phone conversations, he tried his best to be helpful, what she really needed was a hug and for them to take a long bike ride together.
The only other person she could open her heart to was her granny, who told her wisely, “Your relationship with your father has nothing to do with your mother’s. Remember that.”
“But, Granny, why does she have to be so cruel to him?”
She sighed. “Honey, your mother is a very tough businesswoman. She believes in cutting her losses. She’s always felt she got the wrong end of the bargain when she married your father. Don’t count on her developing a soft heart all of a sudden. There is nothing to be done.”
Nevertheless, Daniella ached for him, for his summary dismissal, never doubting that the same fate awaited her, too, should her mother ever discover she was not the clever, accomplished daughter she felt she had coming to her after so determined an investment of time and money.
She was glad when the horrible awkwardness of High Holy Days dinners, split between her parents, was finally over and her first semester began. Her father offered to drop her off at campus. He looked weary and gray as he struggled with her suitcases.
“Try to have a good time, not just study all the time,” he told her as they walked side by side through the campus.
“Oh, Dad!”
“Yeah, glad your mother can’t hear me, right? She doesn’t know everything, Daniella. Remember that.”
She sighed.
“Look, this is just temporary between your mother and me. You’ll see. Sometimes separation makes the heart grow fonder.”
She looked into his dark, distracted eyes, hooded by newly sagging eyelids, then looked away, walking with him in silence toward her dorm. What could she say? Try to convince him there was no hope? Better unrealistic dreams than no dreams at all, she told herself.
“Well, this looks nice,” he said, putting down the suitcases, his eyes briefly and hurriedly flitting around the dorm room. He patted her shoulder absently, then turned to go.
“Dad?”
He turned around. “Hmm?”
“The rest of my stuff? It’s still in the trunk.”
“Oh, is there more stuff? Well, sure, let’s go back and get it.”
They worked silently, like two strangers going up in an elevator, each waiting to get off at his or her own stop. His clothes looked unironed, she thought, and there was a distinct stain on his sweater that looked like baby spit-up but was probably yogurt. Where would he find a baby?
She kissed him lightly. “You take care of yourself, Dad. Even if Mom … even if it doesn’t … she doesn’t … Don’t … don’t depend on Mom.”
“You know your mother. She can be harsh. But she doesn’t mean it. She’ll come around, she’ll come around,” he murmured, as if to himself, his head nodding as he walked out the door.
She was alone, her one acquaintance—a large, rather morose girl who’d been in her Bnei Akiva group—having chosen to study art history and live off campus. Her roommate was a polite girl from Idaho named McAllister. Daniella considered switching—there was no shortage of Orthodox Jewish girls like her on campus—but decided there was no point in going to college if you were not going to open yourself up to new experiences. Besides, McAllister was also pre-med.
Despite her best efforts and intentions, she found it hard. The campus was a Gentile outpost saturated with unfamiliar symbols and loyalties. Even the library, with its opulent windows looking out at the verdant campus, seemed grandly foreign, somehow, a place for the descendants of the Mayflower or the offspring of foreign oligarchs to study about the Pilgrims or the French Revolution. What had it to do with a Jewish girl from Pittsburgh? Brought up to see the world through the binoculars of faith, heritage, and peoplehood, for Daniella Benjamin Franklin and the Founding Fathers seemed distant and small, while Maimonides, Rashi, and Herzl loomed large and demanding.
She tried joining the vibrant and multifaceted programs for religious Jews on campus. They were a smorgasbord: Shabbat, holidays, Israel, social justice. And for a time, she felt hopeful she might yet find a place for herself there. After all, these people were not so different from those she had befriended in school and camp. But while she had grown to know her school friends over a dozen years, this new crowd felt unwelcoming, her attempts at friendliness strained and unreal. She never considered the truth: that she had become estranged from herself, weaving a bandaging cocoon around the raw wounds caused by her family’s implosion, shutting down protectively, afraid to open up to new activities, new friends, new ideas,
She might as well be an orphan, she thought with a self-pity that was often debilitating. She was furious at her mother, pitying and a bit contemptuous of her father, neither of whom had time for her anymore. Even her brother, Joel, seemed to have abandoned her, apologetically cutting their conversations short, explaining he was just trying to keep his head above water during his demanding senior year at Harvard. Besides, she thought, beneath his flippant attitude toward the family woes, he was no doubt nursing his own wounds.
She felt lost and alone.
It didn’t help that pre-med was as difficult as they said it would be. There was absolutely no time for anything else but study. Calculus with analytic geometry, basic concepts in biology and biodiversity, chemical principles, honors English, and her one elective, Hebrew. That first semester was like walking uphill in a snowstorm, dragging a heavy sled behind her.
She’d always been so good at science and math and had breezed through her high school courses. But now she wondered: Was that simply because she’d been in yeshiva, among yeshiva girls, a big fish in a small pond? Here, her classmates—most of them top of their class, valedictorians of large, competitive high schools—were all so smart, so quick to catch on. She just forced herself to work harder, and the harder she worked, the more isolated she felt.
At the end of the first semester, her grades were passing but not brilliant. She was heartbroken, vowing to do better. But the second semester was mostly a continuation of courses she’d stumbled through in her first semester, only more difficult. She found it almost impossible to fall asleep at night, and when she awoke in the morning, her heart began to pound even before she got out of bed.
Her hair grew out of its cut, but there was no time to go to the hairdresser, so she tied it back messily. Her meals consisted of pizza and a Coke, or pasta and cheese, anything filling and easy. She ate alone, quickly, never looking down at her food, her eyes fastened on the pages of a textbook. All the information began to merge: periodic tables and math formulas and biological terminology. It swam around in her head, like little silver fishes, flashing information at random intervals, then merging into an inseparable goo, like the combination of all colors that produces, simply, black. She was tired, irritable, lonely, overwhelmed with stress.
On holidays, she avoided going home, telling her parents she had to study. Only Joel didn’t buy it. “You’re driving yourself nuts, Daniella. Nothing is worth that.”
But she couldn’t fail. She couldn’t go home and face her mother’s disdain, admit she was another loser, like her father—that she’d wasted a year’s tuition.
Besides, ever since she was small, she’d been taught to finish what she started. Piano lessons, for example. She’d started at ten and despite knowing early on she had no talent for it, she had taken seven years of lessons, practicing diligently but without pleasure, producing correct but uninspired music she—and everyone else—never really enjoyed. By age twelve, she declared her desire to become a doctor, repressing her horror of blood, her squeamish dislike of hospitals, delighted at the gleam in her parents’ eyes. It proved she was smart, capable, a winner. She, like them, was entranced by the title, the status.
But now, second-semester finals over and her grades only marginally better than before, she felt like those little kids in her tadpole swimmers group who paddled and flailed with all their might but still only managed to keep their heads slightly above water. She decided not to take the summer off but to volunteer at a hospital.
“Yes, that’s exactly what you should do!” her mother agreed. “Exactly what you need to do. You know the competition out there for medical school, internships, residencies.… You need to be up on your game, Daniella.”
“Take the summer off,” her father advised her.
“Go to Israel and cover yourself with black mud from the Dead Sea,” Joel agreed. “Really, Dani, what you need is rest. You’re killing yourself,” he warned.
“So says the man who interned at law offices during every college break,” she mocked.
“Yeah, but I enjoyed it,” he answered pointedly. He knew her better than anyone.
She joined the pre-med volunteer program at Bellington Hospital, spending her first week bringing doctors and nurses coffee, emptying bedpans, and sterilizing beds while the orderlies whose jobs these were sat and watched her. But then she was assigned to the ICU.
A young man with leukemia arrived, unable to breathe, accompanied by his panicked girlfriend and frantic family. The young intern wanted to intubate him, but the young man resisted. “No, no!” he kept saying. “All I want is painkillers. Give me painkillers!” All the while his parents and girlfriend hovered over him, shouting, trying to convince him, making it impossible for the young doctor to even get close to him. And then suddenly, in the middle of resisting, the young man collapsed, setting off all kinds of bells and whistles and doomsday buzzers, which felt like stone pellets raining down on Daniella’s head.
The blond girlfriend, who looked fifteen, backed up against the wall and stared, while the family screamed and moaned until they were herded into the corridor to make room for nurses wheeling in machines, followed by senior doctors. Daniella listened to the noises coming from the closed and curtained room, the doctors’ low, frantic tones punctuated by the hiss and pump of machines that seemed to go on forever. And then the door opened and the young intern, no older than the patient, emerged, the bad news written all over his face. A scream went up, a roar of disbelief and raw grief.
This, she thought, nauseated, was the sound in Egypt during the final plague. The family pushed open the doors, invading the room, circling the dead man’s bed protectively as they hugged each other and wept. The keening went on for hours.
Daniella was stunned. Just moments before, he’d been alive, a handsome young man. And now he was dead and absolutely nothing could be done about it. No one had been able to save him. Or, perhaps, there had been some mistake, some lapse, that had cost him the remaining fifty years of his life? And if so, who had made that error? Was it the family for not trying hard enough? Or the patient himself, battle-scarred and weary, who had decided he’d had enough of doctors and hospitals and lifesaving techniques? Or in the final tally, had it been the young intern, who hadn’t intubated him fast enough, who hadn’t been wise, persuasive, or simply commanding enough to convince him and his family to do the right thing in time? It was one thing to get a mediocre grade on an exam, but quite another to fail in the actual practice of medicine, she thought, suddenly terrified.
Slowly, imperceptibly, it began to dawn on her that she couldn’t, mustn’t, do this, take lives into her own hands. She didn’t want that responsibility. She didn’t want to play God. She told no one, because there was no one in her life to tell, no one who would understand and not condemn.
So when the summer was over, she decided to do what she’d done with her piano lessons: keep plunking away, ignoring her feelings, which she had never been taught to trust. Instead, she went back for her third semester as pre-med. She took seventeen credits, including organic chemistry, well known as the Scylla and Charybdis of all pre-med students, and had been since 1910. She wasn’t overly concerned. Plenty of people still passed it. Why shouldn’t she be one of them?
But nothing prepared her for the reality of studying how molecules containing carbon interact. For the first time, all her tried-and-true methods of intensive study and memorization simply didn’t work. It wasn’t the same as math or physics, where there were equations you could master. There were too many exceptions to the rule, the same molecule dancing to a different tune in base or acid, dark or sunlight, heat or cold. You needed to use intuition, to extrapolate the answer from specific examples. Someone once likened it to the skill of diagnosis. And as with music, she knew she had no aptitude for it, however hard she tried and however long she studied.
For the first time in her life, she knew she was headed for certain failure. There was going to be an F in organic chemistry on her record: an indelible black mark that nothing could erase. So deep was her depression and foreboding that she actually decided to spend less time studying.
For some reason, she found herself wandering into the Sabbath service at Chabad House. It was not really a place in which she felt comfortable; most of the students congregating there were either Hassidic wannabees from secular homes or rebels from her own background exploring the idea of giving the finger to their parents’ boring, comfortable, middle-of-the-road Orthodoxy. There, on the other side of the women’s partition, was Shlomie.
He looked taller, somehow, and certainly better dressed, his hair longer, the hint of payot gone, a newly grown mustache and goatee giving gravitas to the boyish young face she remembered. He was the cantor, leading the Morning Prayer service, his spirited voice awakening the room, setting it clapping and swaying in joyous rhythm. She smiled, singing along, feeling suddenly lighter.
When the prayers concluded, she saw him wave to her across the room. She waved back, approaching him shyly over the wine and cookies set up for kiddush.
“Wow, Daniella!”
“You remember my name.” She smiled, flattered.
“What? Of course! I’ve thought about you a lot.”
“Really?”
“Why are you so surprised?”
She touched her face, which was suddenly hot. Was she that obvious? “Well, you just didn’t seem all that interested.”
“I was. I just didn’t think you’d be interested … in someone like me, that is.”
“Someone like you? What does that even mean?”
“You know, no college degree, low-paying job, very religious, headed for Israel.”
“And I thought you couldn’t be interested in me: nerdy, all work and no play, who wore sandals and no stockings.…” She paused. “You never even asked for my number.”
He smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I know. I only thought of it when your bus had already pulled out. I’m an idiot!” He grinned.
She blushed once more. “So, what are you doing here?”
“The Chabad rabbi hired me as his assistant.”
“You’re Chabad!”
“No. Not exactly. At least, I don’t think I am. I’m exploring it. Reading the Tanya.”
/> She looked mystified.
“You know, the Tanya, written by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi two hundred years ago? He was the one who founded Chabad. His Hassidim are really the only ones who study it. It’s their most important book.”
“More important than the Bible?” she said archly with a sideways glance.
He didn’t answer. He seemed confused.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be sarcastic. What’s in it, anyway?”
“Would you really like to know?”
“Sure, why not?”
“I’d be happy to teach you, at least the little I know, if you’ve got time,” he said happily.
She certainly had that, given that studying wasn’t going to save her, not this time. They met that very evening. Finding a quiet corner in the campus Chabad House wasn’t easy. Something musical was going on, along with lots of eating and socializing.
“We’ll just start with the first chapter,” he said. “Here’s a copy of the Tanya in English.” They sat close, poring over the text together, conscious of their nearly touching shoulders, the warmth of their thighs just beneath the table.
“‘An oath is administered to him,’” he read.
“To whom?”
He looked up, as if surprised she had to ask. “To your unborn soul. You are made to swear an oath before you descend to earth.”
“And what do we swear?” she asked, bemused.
“That you will be righteous, not evil. But along with that, you must also swear to think of yourself as wicked.”
She shook her head. “That makes no sense. Besides, isn’t it written in Ethics of the Fathers, ‘Never be wicked in your own eyes’?”
His face lit up, impressed. “Exactly! That’s written here, too. Look.” He pointed excitedly to the words she had just said. “And it gets even more complicated. As the Mishnah says, if a person considers himself wicked, he’ll be depressed and not be able to serve God with joy. And if he tells himself to serve with joy anyway, then this might lead him to flippantly ignore his sins.”
“So what’s the answer?”