The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  Though I feel the urge, I don’t let myself duck. All that can happen, I remind myself, is that someone I know will see something about me that is now true. In William’s car, on this night, here I am. This Camry of his can drive us not only to a new place but to a new time—not Shabbat but a regular Friday night.

  William turns and we are in Brighton, another heavily Orthodox neighborhood, where the right-wing Orthodox inhabitants are easily recognizable by their dress, the men a parade of black and white, the women in long skirts and head coverings. To them we are probably just another passing car, part of the outside world that exists in a different plane of reality. If they see me staring from the passenger-side window, they probably assume it’s because I view them as exotic. There’s no way they could know the opposite is true.

  At a red light, two wigged women pushing baby carriages cross in front of our car.

  “Is that what you used to look like?” William teases me.

  “That’s right-wing Orthodoxy. It’s different from Modern Orthodoxy,” I correct him.

  “Modern Orthodoxy,” he jokes. “Is that like liberal fascism?”

  “Stop,” I say, laughing even as I protest, playing, as always, the role of diligent explainer, still trying to teach him about the differences among the various groups and the various rules and various ways around the rules, how, for example, these women can push strollers because of the eruv that wraps the neighborhood, the symbolic thread that turns this street into private property.

  “So God came down and said that if you tie a string around the neighborhood, it’s okay to carry, and otherwise it’s too much work?”

  “It’s all part of a larger system,” I say, but every explanation I offer him yields another question. He can see it only from the outside.

  “There are so many rules. If you follow them by rote, do you ever have to think about what it really means to be good?” he asks.

  “Of course you do,” I say quickly, but then I pause, knowing it’s more complicated. His question burrows into me. Here lies the heart of it—not what he is asking but its opposite. When you’re inside, good is a word that automatically belongs to you. When you leave, it’s a word you surrender at the gate. Despite the very meaning of my name, being good is something to which I can no longer lay claim. Until now, I’ve still been asking the questions of my former world, just from the opposite side. Do I still observe? Do I not? Am I bad? Am I good? My answers might have slowly started to change, but these questions still form a tightly woven grid. I’d held on to them even once I’d left, because I didn’t yet know what would take their place. Absent the rules, what gives shape to your life? In the unscripted world, what does it mean to be good?

  We are almost downtown now, driving past the Public Garden and the Boston Common and the rows of old buildings all lit at night, this vast city full of life in which I’ve yet to take part. All the hard truths I’m supposed to know rush at me. I wanted freedom, and here it is—not the freedom of escape, not the freedom of fantasy, but a freedom that is confusing and daunting and complicated. In this freedom, there are no preordained questions, no easy answers, no ready definitions. No assurances of truth, no endless castigations about badness, but also no ready promises of goodness.

  You leave and you leave again.

  My life won’t look the way I’d once imagined. One more separation from that image that has been so long fixed in my mind. End this, I tell myself. End the vision of how it’s supposed to look. End the urge to rebuild what you have already knocked down. Do not require others to believe as you do. Do not be someone who looks continually back at the place you have left.

  “I know it’s time to stop thinking about what I’ve left. I need to decide what I believe now and then live it,” I say.

  “Maybe you need to ask yourself what you’re still so afraid of,” he says.

  A few weeks after I sat in the bathroom and broke Shabbat for the first time, Aaron and I finally started couples therapy. I could no longer force myself to believe in our story. I was ready to admit the problems, yet in my heart, I was already gone.

  Though I was consumed by a dread of what I would unleash if I overturned our lives, another set of questions had started to consume me. What if I continued to tuck myself away? What if I lived without growing or changing or speaking freely? I’d always tortured myself with the emotional cost of leaving, but now I felt tortured with the price to be paid for staying.

  Contrary to what I had wanted to believe, there was no way to make it through unscathed. I didn’t want the kids to grow up with the anger that now coated the house, didn’t want them to harbor an underground kind of awareness that everything was not as it appeared. I didn’t want to be a mother who had to parent with the truest parts suppressed, who had to constantly restrain herself in order to stay within.

  Once a week, in the therapist’s office, Aaron and I fought about the pileup of issues between us—there were many, both his and mine. We agreed about neither the state of our marriage nor the reasons for its unraveling. We presented different versions to the therapist, as though we’d both come here to discuss the problems we were having with some other set of errant spouses. Orthodoxy was one of these issues, but our differences there had only laid bare the larger problem. We had no way to talk honestly about anything that was hard. Together, we were not able to forge deeper, for fear of what we might find.

  “I feel like I’m in a box. I’m not allowed to change. I’m not allowed to grow,” I said while the therapist looked from me to Aaron. The therapist was like a fair-minded parent intent on ensuring that neither child felt the other was being favored, and it occurred to me how often Aaron and I had sat like children before others, awaiting judgment, awaiting instructions, awaiting permission, awaiting rules so that we could earn praise, so that we could remain safe, so that we never had to grow up.

  As the conversation veered back and forth, I stared at the books lined up on the shelves next to me: The Crucible, Paradise Lost. How, I wondered, did the therapist decide which books to keep here—were these supposed to be symbolic? Instead of fighting one more pointless round, I wanted to enter these pages, write myself into these sentences, and become part of their stories. I had always believed that unexpected plot twists, life-altering epiphanies, and dramatic changes happened only to characters, never to someone like me.

  No matter where our conversations in therapy began, they always wound their way back to the subject of Orthodoxy, because that seemed to be the most resolvable problem. If the problem was simply Orthodoxy, an easy solution might be proposed. I wouldn’t have to be fully Orthodox; a small hole in the dense fabric of our lives could be cut. Realizing that my religious discontent wasn’t going to recede this time, Aaron had started urging me to attend an egalitarian service that met nearby while he took the kids to the Orthodox synagogue we had always attended. On my own, I could make small changes, as long as I promised that the rest of the family would remain the same. I knew I should be grateful for this concession, and maybe years ago, before my feelings had been eroded by all the unresolved issues, this small change would have worked, but now the problem was so much larger. I knew that fundamentally we believed, and wanted, different things. I knew, more importantly, that there wasn’t sufficient space within our marriage, or within Orthodoxy, to accommodate this.

  Orthodoxy was the life he wanted and the truth in which he believed. If you believed in those rules, you had a life built of tradition and ritual, richly populated with family and community. But if you didn’t believe, then those same structures could be a prison. You could stay by carving out private spaces for yourself, but even then, you always had to be aware of the gap between who you were and who you were supposed to be. I didn’t want to live any longer in this tucked, crouched position. More than anything, I wanted to write bravely. I wanted to speak openly. I wanted to live freely.

  “You don’t have to feel that way,” Aaron would say repeatedly in the weeks that followed
as the fighting that had been so long compressed became fiercer. We fought terribly, with the door to our bedroom closed, hoping the kids, who were supposed to be asleep, couldn’t hear us. All those years of avoidance had led us here; the problems between us had not disappeared, as I’d wished they would. They had simply been lying in wait, growing darker and more dangerous.

  “But I do feel that way,” I said.

  “You won’t try,” he said.

  I breathed in this word, try. It tore through my body, exploded inside me.

  “All these years, I’ve done nothing but try,” I said.

  “You’ve changed,” he accused me.

  I fell silent. I couldn’t argue with this. I had changed.

  In search of a way to ease the constriction I felt in every part of my body, I went back to my book. I still felt lost inside it and was still afraid of the storyline’s resolution, but I started to remember what I had most loved about writing: the feeling that my hands contained the words, that my fingers could sprint across the keys like runners who didn’t look behind them, who didn’t slow down when others called to them.

  Before the Orthodox Forum, I’d been haunted by a fear that every sentence might earn me condemnation. Now the naysaying rabbinical figures in my mind were gone. I reminded myself of what I knew but had shied away from, that in writing, and in life, there came those moments when you had to allow everything to break open.

  On the nights that Aaron came home early, I tried to get the kids settled so I could go out to readings and hear other writers talk about their books. The tension at home was unbearable. I said I was done more forcefully now, but it still meant nothing, just a word to utter when you couldn’t say anything else. My life might have felt unbearably restrained but the bookstores were portals to something larger—all these stories, all these subjects you could learn about, all the places you could go. Even just being out at night felt like a respite, the streets seemingly different from the ones I drove through on my carpool loops.

  At one of these readings at a bookstore that I loved in Newton, I recognized someone I knew sitting a few rows in front of me. It was William, a physician I’d seen a few years before. After the reading, I went up to him and reintroduced myself. We talked and I told him I was a writer and he told me that he’d started to work on a novel. Medicine was his love, he said, but writing was something he’d always wanted to try. He asked me if I’d be willing to talk with him about how to write a novel, and I said I’d be happy to help him.

  Every week, Ariel and I got together for coffee. We lived a mile away from each other and had become friends soon after I moved to Boston. Our kids were in the same Jewish nursery school, but what we shared, more than the mommy routines, was the fact of being writers. Like me, she had written two novels and was working on a third. Every day, we both dropped our kids off at school and tried to enter our fictional universes, then sealed them off when it was time to pick up the children.

  In the café, we bent toward each other. We had the same long dark curly hair, so similar that we were sometimes mistaken for sisters. She offered me some of the muffin she was eating but I said no—I was hungry but though I had broken Shabbat, I wasn’t ready to openly break the rules about keeping kosher, at least not while sitting in the window of this coffee shop. I told her about couples therapy and how I felt, increasingly, that the goal was for me to be talked out of what I felt. A successful session would be one in which I agreed to try not to be myself.

  As we talked, I watched her eat—an act that for her was innocuous and for me would have been a sin. For her, Jewishness had nothing to do with whether she ate this muffin. Unlike me, with my family’s six generations in Memphis and my all-Orthodox world, she was from a family of mostly secular Holocaust survivors. For her, Judaism was about history and memory and trying to sort out what it all added up to. It made me sad to realize that my experience of Judaism had become reduced to whether or not I followed the rules.

  With each bite she took, my feeling grew larger. Not everywhere in the Jewish world did you have to live according to ideas you didn’t agree with, offer explanations for observances you didn’t believe in.

  Until I got to know Ariel, most of my closest friends had been Orthodox, and I’d worried that she might not be able to understand the particulars of my world. I’d worried, too, that she would understand—that if I said too much, and if she understood the meaning of what I was saying, there would be no turning back. But now, sitting over my coffee at our small café table, I started speaking and didn’t stop.

  I told her I broke Shabbat secretly every week now while locked in the bathroom. I told her of the internal debate that ceaselessly raged, one part of me trying to bend and twist the other part into believing something. I said that even though it had been years since I had stopped wearing the fall, I felt like I was still covered.

  “I know that I can’t stay inside,” I said.

  “I’ve always wondered why the rules didn’t bother you more,” she admitted. “I told myself that there was must be something about Orthodoxy I didn’t understand,” she said. “Tova, I couldn’t live the way you do.”

  “The rules have bothered me terribly. I’ve always been afraid how much they bother me. But I don’t want to be afraid anymore and I don’t want to keep pretending.”

  “What will happen when you stop pretending?” Ariel asked.

  I knew without having to think about it. I had always known.

  “Everything will fall apart,” I said.

  I took the T to the Boston Athenaeum, a private library in downtown Boston, to meet William to talk about his book. The building was across from the monumental gold-domed State House, but the Athenaeum was a monument in itself. Even the impressive, imposing stone façade gave little hint of the wonders inside—past the security desk, a private domain of dark polished-wood floors, decorated, arched ceilings, gilt-framed portraits on the walls, and everywhere, floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves of books old and new. The rooms were completely silent—any cough or rustle was met with an indignant stare. I imagined losing myself in the stacks of books or camping out on the small balcony that overlooked a Colonial-era graveyard—anything to avoid going home.

  William showed me the pages he had written, a medical drama, and I gave him what advice I could. When we left the Athenaeum, we walked across the Boston Common. All this open space in the midst of the city, reminiscent of Central Park in New York, which I’d always loved. On the other side lay the Public Garden with its flowers and iron footbridge spanning a man-made lake where, in the spring, you could take rides on the famous swan boats; growing up, I’d seen pictures of them in books. Why, I wondered, did I so rarely come into Boston? Why had I forgotten that this beautiful city was so close by?

  “Aren’t you cold?” I asked William. He had short sleeves on, though it was chilly in Boston. Winter was long over by now, but the weather continued to be damp and cool—the lack of a real spring was one thing I still held against this city.

  “I didn’t wear a coat all winter,” he told me and his voice cracked. “My fifteen-year-old son spent this past winter in Utah, in the middle of nowhere, freezing. I didn’t want to be warm when I knew he was cold.” For years, he told me as we walked, his son had suffered from debilitating anxiety, and William had spent much of the past decade caring for him. When he didn’t know how to help his son, he said he would get in his car and drive, ending up in the parking lot of the grocery store near his house, where he would cry. He had tried everything, and not knowing what else to do, he had decided, a few months earlier, to send him to a wilderness-therapy program in Utah.

  “More than anything, I’ve wanted to heal my son. But I know that he needs to learn that he can survive on his own. The antidote for anxiety is independence. He needs to see his own strength,” he said. “Still, I miss him terribly. I think about him all day long.”

  I had no answer for this. We walked in silence.

  “So what about your bo
ok?” he asked me.

  “I’ll finish it one day,” I said lightly, because I didn’t like to talk about how ashamed I was that after all these years, it remained undone, how afraid I’d been of what I was writing.

  “What holds you back from finishing?” he asked me.

  “Oh, kids,” I said. “Not enough time.” Then, as though my conversation with Ariel had unlocked a gate I couldn’t close, I decided to say what I really felt. I told him how I’d always wanted to believe that my book was fiction—it was all just fiction—but I had become increasingly aware of how much of my own feelings I was writing.

  “You have to be willing to write what scares you,” I said, to him and to myself.

  At our favorite café, Ariel and I bent our heads together and whispered. This time I shared her almond croissant.

  “Welcome to the dark side,” she said and we both laughed. “Is this your first nonkosher food?” she asked me.

  “One of the first. It depends how strict you want to be.”

  “What was it?” she asked.

  “Sushi—but I’m not sure if that really counts.” I told her how the year before I’d bought sushi that was not officially kosher at the grocery store, though, because it was uncooked, a lot of Orthodox people ate it anyway.

  “It’s the gateway food,” I told her.

  With the avocado roll deftly tucked under some other groceries in my shopping cart at Whole Foods, I didn’t believe I was really doing something wrong, but even so, I had worried who might see me, as though I had bought contraband drugs. For so long, this was what I had worried about, I realized—who would see me, what they would think. A sin not against God but against community. Back then, still intent on remaining inside, I had eaten the sushi quickly in my car, hardly enjoying it, and threw the container away in a garbage can not my own.

  “I could bring you bacon cookies,” she joked.

  But suddenly I wasn’t laughing. “I don’t know how to leave,” I said.