by Tova Mirvis
There were their opposites as well, those who started joining Shabbat dinners and wearing yarmulkes or long skirts until they had transformed themselves into one of us. I was curious about them as well: What made them want what we had? There were quiet whispers about possible problems these people were trying to leave behind, but that wasn’t a sufficient explanation. Unlike those who left, people who became Orthodox had seen the truth—they came of sound mind and pure heart. They were proof of the meaninglessness of secular culture. They served as reassuring confirmations that we indeed held the truth.
“I felt God,” Elizabeth declared when I broached the subject of how she knew she wanted to become Orthodox.
Though I nodded in agreement, I mostly felt envy that she seemed to possess such unwavering belief, envy that was followed by a wave of relief. If someone as sophisticated and smart as she chose this, then it had to be true, though she eventually grew disillusioned with Judaism and became an Evangelical Christian. By the time I met her, at the start of my senior year, I knew I wanted to be a writer. She too loved to write, and sometimes we shared our writing with each other, though she had far more experience than I did to draw on. “Write about Memphis,” she advised me. “Write about what it was like to grow up in such a tight-knit world.”
For our first blind date, Aaron and I met at the 116th Street gates of Columbia. He was sweet and gentle and soft-spoken, and I immediately felt I’d known him far longer than I actually had. The lines of connection were already in place. Two of my closest friends had gone to high school with him. Our fathers had gone to the same medical school. Our mothers had overlapped at an Orthodox women’s college. (“I think we were at his bris,” my mother recalled when I told her his name.)
Before Aaron, I’d had no real relationships, just that one camp boyfriend, a few set-up dates with boys from Yeshiva University uptown, and a couple of flirtatious entanglements with Orthodox boys at Columbia, always under the guise of being just friends. We lived next door to one another, hung out in each other’s rooms, sat on each other’s beds, ignoring the way the air in the room sometimes became thicker and expectant. Follow every rule, I continued to admonish myself, even ones that sometimes became more challenging by the minute. I assumed I was the only one to feel this pull of attraction—surely all the good Orthodox boys had conquered their evil inclinations. But if this was so, then why did we sit closer and closer, why did we allow only a sliver of air between us? Only occasionally did we succumb to a few illicit kisses, which caused soul-searching and guilt-ridden promises to each other that we would never allow such an infraction of the rules to happen again. It confirmed what we had arrived knowing: You always had to be on guard. No matter how tightly you were secured, you were always in danger of falling.
Before Aaron, I was drawn to boys who were dark and stormy, who had poetic souls and moody dispositions. These aspects of myself made me nervous, but even so, I was pulled to the pleasure of uncovering the layers, down to the darkest, most complicated parts. But with Aaron, there were no hard edges; there was no wrestling, no fighting. We went out three times that week and three times the next week as well, to dinner, to play mini-golf, to a Shakespeare play in the Village. My roommates, well versed in the rules of Orthodox dating, had advised me that you were supposed to discuss, by the third date, where a relationship was going—as though there were various options for where this train might be headed, an Amtrak board of changing destinations, when really the only possible endpoint was marriage.
As we sat in the common area of my dorm one night, Aaron and I marveled at how similar we were—though both Orthodox, we weren’t as rigid and dogmatic as some of our friends. If I felt sometimes that I was still a little unformed, he seemed the same way to me. Neither of us was especially forceful; we were both gentle and yielding and eager to please. We stayed up all night talking, and from the row of windows in the common area of our suite, we watched the sun rise over the East Side of Manhattan—pink and orange streaks in a blue-gray sky.
The next day, he came back to my dorm and handed me a rose that he’d concealed inside his winter coat.
“I really like you,” he said.
“I really like you too,” I said.
“You’re going to marry him,” Elizabeth predicted. I was twenty-two and the fact that I’d never before had a serious boyfriend didn’t seem particularly problematic. As far as I could tell, there was little difference between a boyfriend and a husband. Never having been in love, I was overcome with exhilaration. I walked across campus and looked at the people I passed. Did they too know this feeling? Didn’t everyone in love feel ready to burst from euphoria?
Every night, Aaron and I stayed up late talking in my dorm room, sitting next to each other on my bed but never touching. We were shomer negiah—literally, “guardians of the touch”—adhering to the prohibition against any physical contact until marriage. Outside the resident adviser’s room a few doors down, a manila envelope offered condoms free for the taking, but in our room, the door was cracked open slightly so that we weren’t technically in violation of another prohibition, this one against being alone in a room with a member of the opposite sex.
Follow every rule, I still told myself, but what about this spreading, bursting feeling that would not be contained—the part of life that did not want to stay within the confines of the law? Conquer it, subdue it, resist it, I had been taught, even though now, my body tingled with the feeling of proximity.
“Should we?” Aaron and I asked each other as we sat ever closer, a Zeno’s paradox of desire. How close can you lean and not touch? For how long can one arm graze another and both of you pretend it hadn’t happened?
“We shouldn’t,” we whispered, “we definitely shouldn’t,” yet his hand was tentatively on my face. We shouldn’t, yet we kissed and then pulled guiltily away.
“Do you think badly of me now?” I asked.
“Of course not,” he said, though we both worried that we weren’t who we aspired to be. I still carried a small scolding rabbi in my head, but I was growing accustomed to the idea that you could divide yourself as you did the rest of life, a line between allowed and forbidden, a separation between holy and profane. In one of my English literature classes, I’d read, in an Emily Dickinson poem, Ourself behind ourself, concealed— / Should startle most, and I’d felt like I was coming upon confirmation of a truth that I’d quietly known all along. Where every part of life was legislated—where even a gentle brush of arms, this sweet rousing of desire, was deemed bad—it was sometimes necessary to carve secret places inside yourself. You needed to harbor a private, second self.
A month later, during winter vacation, the dorm was mostly empty, just a few students who had stayed around as I had, trying to figure out what came next. Technically I’d already graduated—I had enough credits by the middle of my senior year and was planning to spend the upcoming semester in Israel, once again studying Jewish texts. I had applied to graduate programs in creative writing for the following year but didn’t yet know if I’d get in. And if I did get in, I didn’t know if my desire to become a writer was an impractical dream.
“You’re going to go to Israel . . .” Aaron said playfully as we sat next to each other on my bed.
“Yes . . .” I said.
“And then you’ll come back . . .”
“Yes . . .”
“And then there’s August . . .” he said.
“August . . .” I repeated hopefully.
“Should we say it?”
Each word dangled. Each word, a path down which we took one more step. We could get engaged now, twelve weeks after our first date. We could get married eight months from now, in August.
It seemed so clear to me that this was the intended story of my life. It didn’t occur to me that this was only one of the possibilities that could exist. Getting engaged so quickly was an essential part of the story, as though the speed itself confirmed that we were meant for each other. I felt the giddiness
of love, but also of relief, as though before I were in danger and now I was pinned more securely to my world. Until now, I had worried that I would remain perpetually single, waiting for my life to begin. Orthodox women who didn’t marry were doomed to wait and wait—our own version of a princess hidden in a tower—wait and wait for the husband who would open the doorway to everything else. Wait and wait, and if it didn’t happen, then—the picture in my mind froze. If you didn’t get married, there was nothing but a blank screen.
I told my parents we were planning to get engaged, and though I worried they would think twelve weeks of dating was too fast, they didn’t object. I seemed so happy, so sure. The weekend before we made it official, we took the train to visit Aaron’s parents in Boston. He had been nervous about telling them we were getting engaged and only snuck it in as an anxious aside at the end of a phone conversation. We might have been on the brink of engagement, but I felt like we were children, seeking permission for something we weren’t old enough to do. They protested but then, to our relief, relented; they liked that they knew my parents, that I was by all accounts a good girl.
“You seem like someone who’s always happy,” Aaron said to me as the train neared Boston, and I worried about making a good impression on his family.
I wasn’t sure if this was a wish or an observation but either way, I looked at him in surprise. No one had ever described me this way. Was it possible that he knew me so little? I felt a fleeting urge to press on the brakes and, to an enormous squeal of wheels and track, bring everything to a screeching halt. But I pushed the feeling away. You’re just nervous, I soothed myself. You’re just adjusting to the idea of getting engaged. I had no basis for comparison, but maybe this was how it felt sometimes when you were in love. And maybe he was right. I might have thought of myself as emotional, intense, often moody, but maybe he knew me better than I knew myself.
In Boston, we shopped for an engagement ring, eventually selecting a shining round diamond delicately set in antique platinum.
As we started planning the wedding, we began to fight. “Everyone fights during the engagement,” my engaged and married friends reminded me. Alarmed at how our story of falling in love so quickly had become complicated by the press of family and obligation, I decided not to go to Israel for the semester. I wanted to be with him, I had a wedding to plan, but, most of all, I was worried that it had all happened too quickly—I had the same quiet urge to put all this on pause, maybe postpone the wedding until we got to know each other a little better. But once again I told myself I was just nervous. I grew used to crying every day. The bride with the red-rimmed eyes, I would sometimes think when I looked in the mirror, but I didn’t let myself ask the questions that should have come after such an observation. To do so would have been to admit that the story I so badly wanted to be true was in danger of collapsing.
Instead, I planned the wedding and bought hats at sample sales in Brooklyn. I was planning to cover my hair in accordance with the Orthodox law that a married woman’s hair should be for her husband’s eyes alone. Neither my mother nor my future mother-in-law covered her hair. Laws like observing Shabbat or keeping kosher couldn’t be broken no matter what, but some rules, like hair-covering, were regarded as, if not exactly optional, then still not always done. But in recent years, Orthodoxy had moved rightward, and practices that had previously fallen out of favor had returned. Stringencies, once the domain of ultra-Orthodoxy, had become accepted as the required norm in Modern Orthodoxy as well. Now Modern Orthodox young women like myself routinely covered their hair, especially if they wanted to be regarded as being serious about their observance. I didn’t like the idea of covering another part of my body, but I accepted that I would do what was required of me. You don’t have to feel this way, I reminded myself whenever I felt a surge of doubt. This was not about covering who I was—on the contrary, this was about displaying a sign that I was a married woman. This was a way to wear my belonging proudly on my head.
Of course I saw the conflict between Orthodoxy and feminism—it was hard to miss—but I wanted to be part of this burgeoning movement of Orthodox feminism that was increasingly talked about in the Orthodox community, among my peers, and in articles in the Jewish newspapers, some in favor, some decrying its growing influence. As I’d learned during my year in Israel, some of the laws could be reinterpreted so that women could take on scholarly and ritual roles. I could be one of the women who were pushing the rules as far as they could go. There still remained a gate at the end of the path, sealed shut and guarded, which I tried not to think about. Were these small changes a revolution or an appeasement? I sometimes asked myself but I had no good answer, only the feeling of relief that I could remain traditional while still thinking of myself as something of a radical. Contradictions would persist, but it was possible to live with competing beliefs.
I decided to get a fall—a sort of demi-wig that would clip to the top of my head and cover most of my hair. Because the front of my own hair would be showing, it was regarded as a more liberal approach. I consoled myself that I wasn’t shopping for a wig as my right-wing counterparts might be. I was a feminist who was choosing to wear a fall. The difference between the two may have been a few inches of hair, but at the time, that small amount of space was sufficient to quiet my resistance.
“There’s no way I can get the curls as tight as yours,” warned Esther, the first wig maker I tried, as I sat in in her pink plastic salon chair in Borough Park. I was searching for a fall so curly that it would match my hair exactly.
A friend suggested I try the elusive Clairie, spoken about in reverential tones, renowned for using genuine Belgian hair, which, my friend claimed, was the most desirable for making a wig—sold to her, rumor had it, by Belgian prostitutes in need of cash.
I tracked Clairie down, feeling like I’d made contact with a celebrity, but couldn’t get an appointment; she was too busy scouring the Belgian countryside for the perfect hair. Even if I had been able to meet her, she said she couldn’t help me with a wig as curly as my own hair—apparently, there were no cash-strapped curly-haired prostitutes.
“Look on the bright side,” said Suri, another wig maker in Brooklyn whose salon chair I sat in in a small back room of her house. “You can finally have straight hair. You can be anyone you want—a blonde, a redhead!”
She was decked out in a glamorous wig of long, straight blond hair that made her look part religious wife, part Hollywood starlet. It was tempting—my curls had always seemed too wild and unruly. When I was in high school, I’d tried, twice, to chemically straighten them, to no avail. The curls had reasserted themselves in a matter of days.
At her urging, I tried on a sampling of wigs, surveying the unrecognizable girl in the mirror. Was there a way, I wondered, to observe the laws and still look like myself? I didn’t want to get married and lose myself entirely—I had decided that I wasn’t going to change my last name, and I didn’t want to alter my hair, everything about who I had once been.
I continued my search, trying someone in the theater district in Manhattan who made wigs for Broadway shows. When I walked into the small Midtown office for my appointment, the receptionist treated me with sympathy, assuming I was a cancer patient.
In the stylist’s chair, John the wig maker, a short, balding man with a weathered face and a strong New York accent, took a long look at me. I worried I would have to explain why I, with a full head of hair, was in need of a wig, but this was New York and he already knew why.
“I can’t get it that curly,” John warned me. “But don’t worry, I know what to do. All you Orthodox girls want your wigs to look better than your actual hair.”
As he held small ponytail-like color swatches to my hair, he told me how he’d once had a customer who traveled to rural towns for business where he was nervous about wearing a yarmulke. John had crafted a small circle of dark hair that his client pinned to his own; he alone knew it was there. I gave up on the possibility of the fall being curly
enough. All I wanted was for it to be so good that it rendered itself invisible. I had recently been accepted to Columbia’s graduate program in creative writing, and I intended to sit in writing workshops where no one would detect the intricate world I wore on my head. Only those in the know would be able to decipher the coded message I wore, transmitting where I belonged.
At my bridal shower in Memphis, I sat displayed at the front of the room in a pink silk Laura Ashley dress—it wasn’t the kind of dress I’d ever worn before but I’d bought it because it looked appropriately sweet and bridal. Along with the Pyrex sets and the blender and the meat and dairy cutting boards, my mother’s friends gave me their cardinal pieces of marital advice: Don’t go to bed angry, in block letters on a pink index card. Don’t criticize his mother. Don’t keep score, written on light blue and yellow cards. These women from the community, whose recipes were compiled in the synagogue sisterhood cookbooks, knew, without a doubt, the best way to make sponge cakes and brisket, and here was the recipe for a good marriage as well. Anger could destroy you. So could asking too much or pushing too hard. If those women had been handed notebooks instead of index cards, given days rather than minutes, and offered free rein and social immunity, I wondered, what might they have written to me and to all the other brides whom they sent off into their married lives armed only with paring knives and Pyrex?
In the dining room of a rabbi’s wife, I, along with a dozen other engaged young women, sat around the plastic-covered dining-room table, learning the laws of Jewish family purity. We were all virgins, presumably, and we learned that after we had sex for the first time, we were in niddah—a state of impurity—and couldn’t touch our husbands for the week or so afterward. Whenever we had our periods and for the seven days following, we couldn’t touch our husbands—no sex, not a hug, not a handshake. Nor were we allowed to undress in front of our husbands at this time, or pass them a dish, or sleep in the same beds with them. For this reason, we needed not one marital bed but two twin beds, which we could push together when we were permitted to each other, separate when we were not. For seven days following our periods, we were to check ourselves for smudges or stains twice each day with small cloths that were sold at the mikvah—along with, for an extra few dollars, a flowered carrying pouch. On the day when we first believed ourselves to be clean, we were to leave the cloths inside us for thirty minutes, just to be sure.