by Tova Mirvis
“It’s fine,” he said, but even so, I wanted to apologize. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had endangered us—as though I’d tarnished the wedding photo that was displayed by our bedside. Any sin, I knew, wasn’t mine alone—now that we were married, we represented each other. If I didn’t cover my hair, Aaron was less religious just by being married to me. We had signed the ketubah, the official marriage contract, at our wedding, but I knew that another contract existed between us as well. In this unwritten document that was equally binding and unchangeable, we agreed that we would stay the same as we were now. We would always be Orthodox, not just observing the rules but living within the communal expectations. When we had kids, we would move to one of the nearby Modern Orthodox communities in Riverdale or Teaneck, as our married friends were starting to do. We would send our kids to the Modern Orthodox schools where our friends sent their kids. We were young, but the years ahead were already scripted.
A few months after I’d briefly removed my baseball hat, I was walking home from school, and, amid the crowds of pedestrians, I caught a reflection in the storefront mirror of a Love’s drugstore. A girl in a T-shirt and long beige skirt. On her head, a matching beige hat with a floral decoration, her dark curls barely visible under the brim. She looked strikingly familiar but my mind did a double take.
For one moment, I didn’t recognize this religious woman as myself.
People bustled around me, in a Manhattan hurry, but I stopped walking. I stared at my reflection. It was hard not to rip off the hat right there, not to strip down on Broadway to the person I sensed waiting below. A voice, stronger than I knew I had, whispered in my head: This is not who you are.
I continued to cover my hair but started wearing pants again. I reveled in the long-lost pleasure of jeans—they hugged my legs and made me feel powerful, capable of confidently striding anywhere. Was it this feeling, I wondered, that was actually the most forbidden part? When I was in college, wearing pants had seemed like a grave sin, but now at least I didn’t have to worry that the Orthodox boys I liked wouldn’t date me. I still worried about being judged by my community, but being married bestowed a level of immunity.
“It’s just this one thing,” I assured Aaron, who seemed to be okay with it, though I didn’t know for sure.
One day, I came home to a message on the answering machine. I’d shown a finished draft of my novel to the literary agent for whom I’d interned one summer and had spent the past three weeks in a state of nervous anticipation waiting to hear from her. Every time the phone rang, I jumped.
“I’m calling to say that I read your book and I loved it,” the agent said in the message.
Thrilled, I went to meet the agent without my hat or fall. I felt as though I’d never before walked outside so bare, as though I’d gone out without pants or a shirt, but I couldn’t imagine talking to her about my novel while feeling so false and covered. I was still afraid of any negative reaction to my portrayal of Orthodoxy, yet in the three years that I’d been working on the book, I’d fallen in love with the feeling—rare, but there sometimes—that I could find a way past the erected barriers; the words were not in my mind but actually in my hands, my fingers sprinting freely toward the fences.
After I met with the agent, Aaron and I went out to dinner to celebrate, my hair still uncovered.
“I’m going to stop covering my hair,” I told him and looked into his eyes, wanting him to see all of me. I tried to tell myself that this was just one more slight adjustment so that I could better stay inside, but I understood that when you began listening to that quiet internal voice, it might grow louder.
“I guess it’s okay,” he said.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” I asked, as though I were squeezing him for some darker truth. He was trying to be comfortable with what I had decided, but I recognized the anxiety in his smile.
“Do you think you’re going to change any more?” he asked.
“I won’t,” I assured him, but I too was uneasy. It was too late to change. Once you were married, you were supposed to know who you were. Unsaid, but present between us, was the story we both knew—not about anyone specific but a general threat that the good girl could inexplicably morph into something unrecognizable, a Medusa-like creature whom the laws could not tame.
Once I stopped covering my hair, I felt like I could see more clearly, as though I’d started wearing glasses I badly needed. I made a pile of my everyday hats and gave them to a friend who was getting married, saving only the dressy ones I would still wear to synagogue on Shabbat, where there was no choice. I wasn’t sure what to do with the fall. It seemed like some sort of body appendage that should be buried with ritual and ceremony or else an unwanted item set on the windowsill so that the city birds could carry it off and make, somewhere in Central Park, a nest crafted from genuine human hair.
My own hair was matted from being covered and had thinned at the front of my scalp. Since getting married, I’d paid little attention to my actual curls. In need of restoration, I went to a Manhattan salon that specialized in curly hair. Here, curls were treated as exotic, endangered creatures. Rather than straightened, curls were sculpted, gathered, cherished. Before I’d covered my hair, I might have been frustrated with the unruliness of my curls, but now they were an indispensable part of who I was.
That week, I invited a tableful of Shabbat guests, as I always did, baked challah, made chicken and vegetables and kugels and desserts. Before Shabbat started, I set up my silver candlesticks, and when it was time, I lit the candles, waving my hands three times in front of me as though ushering the light toward me. Placing my hands over my eyes, I whispered the blessing, adding a prayer for our families, as my mother did each week, as my grandmothers had done as well. In doing so, I was linking myself even more with them, as though I were lighting my candles not from a match but from their still-burning flames.
Together, Aaron and I went to the synagogue across the street from our apartment. In recent years, the congregation had dwindled to a few old members, but friends of ours had started a Friday-night service there that was spirited and soulful—part of a small transformation under way in Modern Orthodoxy to create more participatory services. Instead of the women being relegated to the balcony, a divider was placed down the middle of the mostly empty sanctuary, and the women were invited to sit downstairs, separate but at least a little more equal. From my spot in the newly made women’s side, I watched as the people in the wooden pews around me began to sing, melodically, joyfully. There was no perfunctory performance of obligation, no hurrying through to get home quickly. Sing unto God a new song. Sing unto the Lord all the earth, we sang in Hebrew. Columbia students and professors and neighborhood families, retired men who had come here since they were young, elderly women who looked askance at these changes but eventually relented and sang as well. Let the heavens be glad. Let the earth rejoice. Let the sea roar. I sang along with the others. All these contradictions and places of constriction—they weren’t all that mattered. There was this too. The words of the prayers, old and new, above me and inside me.
Then, with our friends assembled around the folding table we’d set up in the living room of our apartment, I brought out the food I’d spent all day making, using the platters we had received as wedding gifts, feeling as though I were serving a piece of myself. When I cooked and served Shabbat dinner, I was like all the other Orthodox women I knew.
One week, we were invited to Shabbat dinner by friends of ours who’d recently had a new baby. Their silver candlesticks were lined up on the white tablecloth, three candles burning, one for each member of their small family. This was a scene I’d imagined whenever I envisioned how my life was supposed to look.
“I think we’re ready to have a family,” I said to Aaron.
Josh’s question hangs over me. Will you love me if I’m not like you? Will you love me if I choose something else?
“Oh, Josh,” I say again. As we get our slices of pizza—
oversize triangles with sturdy crusts and thick layers of cheese—I begin a series of proclamations. “I will love you whoever you are. I will respect the choices you make. I will not be happy if you harm yourself or others, but the decisions will be yours.”
He’s looking at me with eyes wide open, wondering if he can believe me. He wants to give himself over to my reassurance, yet already, at the age of nine, he understands that, given the world to which he was born, it’s a complicated proposition. All I can do is assure him that, in my love for him, there aren’t edges past which he can’t venture. My love for him is capacious enough for him to grow and change; it has ample space for whoever he wants to become.
“You’re only at the start of figuring out who you’re going to be. You don’t have to be held back by what others think of you. You have the right, the need, to decide what you believe,” I say, trusting that he will understand at least part of what I’m saying.
I’m in high gear, speechmaking mode, talking too fast, with far more passion and honesty than he expected. His eyes are open wide as he listens intently to me. Any moment he will change the subject, to the Patriots or the Red Sox. His eyes will drift to the ESPN-blaring TV attached to the wall behind us, but until then, I’m saying words that I’m starting to trust, offering sentences that are becoming truer in my own mind as I say them.
“This is the most delicious pizza in the world,” he exclaims, though I’ve privately decided that I prefer the thin slices at Regina’s in Boston’s North End.
“Life,” I continue on, wanting to impart this not just to Josh but to my younger self, “is about exploring and grappling and growing. You’re allowed to change, even when it’s painful. You’re allowed to decide who you want to be.”
Josh has sauce dotted at the corners of his mouth. He is savoring the slice.
The Underworld
The day looms. Another Day of Judgment. In one week, on December 20, the divorce will be entered. Ninety days from now it shall be sealed.
In the school parking lot, where I’m sitting in my car waiting, chronically early to pick up the boys, I talk on my cell phone to my lawyer. I’m glad that none of the mothers who are also talking on their phones in their parked cars—all of us an armored fleet—can hear what I’m saying. They know, of course, about the divorce, but the details of how exactly one becomes divorced seem mortifying, like something bloody that ought to remain out of sight.
Even when I get off the phone, I feel exhausted from constantly thinking about the divorce. There has been fighting, far too much of it, for the most part done via text and e-mail. We trade recriminations. The commodity most plentiful is anger. How, I wonder, had anyone gotten divorced before the advent of electronic communication? Did people write letters? Actually speak on the phone?
There is a knock on my car window, and I startle. It’s another mother, a woman about my age, not someone I know well. Until now, we’ve had only a few passing conversations as we’re picking up or dropping off kids.
“Can I talk to you?” she asks tentatively.
Even before she says anything more, I know what this will be about. The grocery-store shunnings are something to which I’ve become accustomed, but there are also women who seek me out. These are fellow mothers whom I know from the kids’ schools or activities. On the outside, they give little away, but quietly, they bear their own unhappiness. For them, divorce is not an unfathomable choice but one they can imagine all too well. I now hear about marriages that are closed off or shut down, about fights and standoffs and means of escape. We are the undercover agents who live among the happily married.
It’s freezing out, so we sit bundled in coats in my car. She tells me how she and her husband have struggled for years; she had been afraid to act but realized that she had been thinking about divorce for more than half of her marriage.
“I’ve lived for a long time with the knowledge that I don’t love him anymore. I haven’t told anyone else,” she says. “I can barely bring myself to say the words.”
Until now, other people’s marriages have always been the great mystery, a sealed kingdom that few outsiders can enter. It was possible to gather a few clues here and there, but everyone was afraid to say too much. Because what if you revealed more than people really wanted to hear? It was okay to gripe about a husband who didn’t know how to bathe the kids or dress them, but it was not okay to confide a deeper sadness—what if you said that in your marriage, you felt lonely, and then the others retreated to safer ground? Your admission might dangle alone.
But in divorce, the gates are thrown open. There is no more illusion left to uphold.
“How long did you feel this way?” she asks. “When did you first realize how unhappy you were?”
Though she also wants to know about practical matters such as child support and parenting plans, what she wants more is to hear someone say, I felt that way too.
“There was no one moment—it was a slow erosion. I didn’t want to know for a very long time, not until I felt like I was erupting,” I tell her, and even now, it’s a relief to say this out loud. I have become warier, more self-protective over these past few months. From each non-hello, I’m reminded that in certain quarters, my story is incomprehensible.
“And then it was all I felt. I couldn’t do anything else. I couldn’t let myself stop, because I was afraid I would be talked into staying. I was afraid I would get scared and turn back.”
As I tell her more, relief becomes visible on her face. I’ve hardly offered her a map for how to leave—I’m still finding my own way out, and even if I knew the path to the other side, each leaving requires its own map. The trail disappears behind you. But still, this is the starting point—to name what is messy and painful and true. To hear someone else admit the truth you might suspect but that stays buried nonetheless—that you’re not the only one, that the outer versions are just that and beneath are stories you can only begin to imagine. With someone else’s admission, a door cracks open, and there it is: the entryway to an underworld.
Busy was the best place to hide. We had a son now and I divided the days between taking care of Noam and writing. Aaron was working long hours at his law firm, but this, we told ourselves, was temporary.
My first novel came out when Noam was a baby. Just before the book was published, someone in Memphis got an advance copy and told people that it was not flattering to the community. This copy was apparently passed around, with all the “not nice” passages underlined. I was surprised by the angry reaction, though I shouldn’t have been. I had known that to speak too honestly was to walk a dangerous line. My parents, who were entirely supportive of my book, had previously been viewed as troublemakers for disregarding the need to speak only good of the community and its institutions—this was a trait that apparently ran in the family. Though we were in possession of the right number of generations, to be truly inside required a willingness to subsume any errant idea or opinion.
“I read your book,” said a member of the community, too genteel to go on to say what she thought of it, but I knew how to decipher the meaning of her tight smile.
“Who do you think you are?” asked a more forthright community member I ran into in the kosher frozen-yogurt store.
As a daughter of the community, you should give thanks, not offer criticism, read an indignant, chastising letter I received from a high-school classmate.
Despite the negative reaction, I knew this was still my world. There was more space within Orthodoxy, I was sure. It didn’t have to be so narrow and unyielding. If I were a critic, it would be from the inside. During the question-and-answer period at the end of a book talk, I was always asked: “Are you still Orthodox?” Always that word still, and always my same response. “I’m a liberal, feminist, pluralist Modern Orthodox Jew—whatever that means,” I said, playing it for laughs instead of giving the longer, more complicated answer: I was Orthodox, even though I sometimes doubted. I was Orthodox, even though I sometimes chafed. It seemed le
ss a statement of what I believed than a truth of who I was—its language, its rhythms, its customs, all part of me. Its weaknesses, its battlegrounds, its shortcomings, part of me as well. If I had attempted a longer answer, I would have said that I was willing to live with the contradictions and the tensions. I would have said that I didn’t think I would ever leave this tenuous, unresolved position. I would have said: My parents and my siblings and my husband and my son are all inside. I would have said: This is my only version of home.
Now that I had a child, there was also less time to question what I believed. My son was my devotion. When he was born, we were going to a synagogue that met once a week in the basement of a youth hostel and fell on the liberal edge of Orthodoxy. Women were carefully given more roles in the service so long as these changes could be justified within an interpretation of Jewish law. The people who attended, mostly graduate students and young professionals, were interested in creating a religiously observant but left-leaning community. It was a break from the more established, organized structures of Orthodox life, but as Noam got older, we decided we needed some of that—at least some other kids and a play group. We started to attend one of the large Orthodox synagogues in our Manhattan neighborhood, where I sat in the women’s balcony, looking down at the men in dark suits and yarmulkes, the view I had when, as a teenager, I had visited the U.S. Senate and peered down at the lawmakers from the gallery above. I still sometimes felt that low burn of resistance but I tried not to think about it. I had been taught that children needed to know exactly who they were. By becoming a mother, maybe I had to surrender the part of myself that questioned. I clipped on Noam’s yarmulke. I didn’t want to raise a child who wouldn’t belong in his own world.