The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  She turned serious as well. “I think you’re already doing it. I know you still feel stuck but from the outside, it looks like you’re starting to move.”

  I nodded. I felt it too. I knew that the slow accumulation had finally reached its tipping point. All those air holes I had punched had finally made an opening so wide that I could climb through.

  “It’s possible,” she said, “that the next half of your life might look very different from the first.”

  I startled at her bold pronouncement, but it shocked me to realize that she was right. More important, I wanted her to be right.

  I met William again at the Athenaeum, where we both worked on our books. The first time I’d come here, I’d realized this could be a place where I might finish my book. The prospect of leaving Newton every once in a while felt liberating. The quiet in this library felt startling. In this transcendent space, I felt myself shed some of the years of accumulated worry and I wrote a little more freely.

  After a few hours of writing, we left the library. I’d been so immersed in my novel that I felt like I had to blink myself back to reality.

  As we walked out onto Beacon Street, we talked and he told me that his son going to Utah was only one of the changes taking place in his life. He said that he was getting divorced.

  “How did you know you needed to do it?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  “It’s very painful, but it’s been years in coming. I’m just trying to do the best I can for everyone now,” he told me.

  I felt like I couldn’t talk about the precarious state of my own marriage but marveled at anyone who knew how to act, even when it was painful or hard.

  Weeks later, after another writing session at the Athenaeum in which I was thrilled with the progress I’d begun to make on my book, William and I walked out together. He was turning toward his car when he asked me where I’d parked.

  “I took the T,” I told him.

  “I can give you a ride home,” he said.

  In his car, I decided to confide in him. “I’m afraid to drive downtown,” I said and told him how, when I was a teenager, I’d driven easily everywhere, how the summer I graduated from high school, two friends and I took a six-hour road trip from Memphis to New Orleans. Blasting Bryan Adams on the tape deck, guzzling Diet Coke, and eating Twizzlers, we took turns at the wheel, driving south through Mississippi and into Louisiana. We had a map in the glove compartment and instructions handwritten on a light blue index card. We went over the bridge that crossed Lake Pontchartrain, twenty-three miles long, and felt like we were traversing not a lake but the entire ocean.

  But ever since we’d moved to Boston, I said, almost seven years before, I’d been afraid of driving in many parts of the city, but the highway most of all. I told him about my terrible sense of direction and my fear of getting lost. I told him what happened one time when I’d had to drive to Cambridge to pick up Aaron from a meeting. This was an area I usually avoided, and before setting out with the kids in the back seat, I’d studied the map, looking for the easiest way. But despite the directions I wrote out for myself, a street I’d planned to drive down was one-way in the wrong direction. I turned sharply and the next street was unfamiliar. Up ahead, it looked like Memorial Drive or maybe Storrow Drive, but it didn’t matter which, because both were highways, or close enough. There was no way off this road, no turn I could see in the dark. NO STOPPING, NO STANDING, read the signs along the road. I might have been a novelist and a mother who could make dinner while folding the laundry while nursing a baby, but I was lost. The cars behind me honked mercilessly. The kids grew silent, aware that something was wrong. I clutched the steering wheel, my face prickling and hot. We were only a few blocks from where I was supposed to get Aaron, but all I could do was pull over, call him, and ask him to walk over to us.

  It was hard to admit all of this—it felt shameful to be afraid of something so mundane. I often thought of the promise I’d made to myself, that I would overcome this fear by the time I turned forty, but the milestone that had once seemed like centuries in the future was now a year away and I was no closer. To be forty and not be able to drive on the highway—it brought to mind stories of veiled women forbidden to drive or stunted shut-ins. To be forty, it seemed to me, was the last chance to finally become an adult.

  “I can go with you on the highway,” William offered.

  “Maybe one day,” I said.

  “You don’t just have to write the things that scare you. Sometimes you have to do the things that scare you too.”

  It was a sentence as shocking, as radical, as any I’d ever heard.

  Before I had a chance to protest, he pulled over by the side of the road.

  “Now?” I asked.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not afraid to let me drive your car?” I asked.

  “You know how to drive. There’s no reason why you can’t do this.”

  I had a storehouse of reasons for why I couldn’t drive on the highway, but he was so calm, so sure I could do this, that I got behind the wheel. I drove through the Back Bay, with its labyrinth of one-way streets, down Beacon, and through Kenmore Square, where lanes merged into one another and streets crossed at will. I clutched the steering wheel and drove far too slowly, annoying those behind me, who loudly honked their displeasure. I kept driving toward Newton, and we reached an entry ramp for the Mass. Pike.

  “I can’t do this,” I said even as I was starting up the ramp.

  “You can, you already know how,” he reminded me.

  “No, really.” My mouth had grown so dry that I could barely get out the words.

  Until now, he hadn’t realized just how afraid I was. He took hold of the wheel, and together we merged onto the highway, my hands shaking, my eyes tearing, my ears prickling with heat.

  “I’m afraid the person behind me minds that I’m going so slowly,” I said.

  “Don’t look in the rearview mirror. Don’t think about the person behind you,” he said.

  Cars whizzed by me, but I kept going, driving past one exit, then another. All the parts of the city that had seemed closed off, yet here were the signs for them. Nothing could change, yet I was driving on the highway, driving next to this man, this not-my-husband man. Nothing can change, yet I was behind the wheel picking up speed, traveling sixty-five miles an hour, which the day before would have seemed as likely as traveling at the speed of light. My head contained its own highway and I was hurtling faster now toward an endpoint that I knew lay somewhere in the distance but that I hadn’t known how to reach.

  For so many years, I had been afraid of my own feelings, afraid of my unhappiness, afraid of change, but also afraid of traveling to new places, afraid of riding a bike, afraid of anything in which I would move too fast, in which I might careen and fall. It had never occurred to me that when the time came, I might actually welcome the sensation of falling—the rush of air, the feeling that my unencumbered body was awake and alert. I’d never imagined a falling in which I stopped wanting to remain safe at all cost, when I didn’t want to grab hold of any last secure spot or didn’t worry about where and how I would land.

  When I got off the Mass. Pike, I was crying with exhilaration and relief. Having become accustomed to the feeling of speed, I had to force myself to slow down on the city streets.

  “I’m tired of being so afraid,” I said.

  Every time I sat down in front of my computer, the words escaped as they never had before, sentences unfurling. I wrote at the Athenaeum, wrote in the small alcove off the living room, wrote in the middle of the night when the kids were asleep. I felt like the lights inside me, which had previously been dimmed in order to preserve power, were being switched back on. I continued to go to readings, eager to shake myself from my quiet pose. In prior drafts of my novel, I’d been afraid to have characters who acted on what they felt. I tried to have characters believe it was enough to be free inside their minds while in the rest of their lives they agreed to remai
n discontent and enclosed. It was a lie, and I knew it now.

  I finished a new draft of the novel, which I printed out and left on my desk. I didn’t know what time it was when I awoke that night and realized Aaron was standing over me holding the manuscript in his hand. I startled when I saw him there, afraid of any potential conversation we might have. By this point, we barely exchanged more than a sentence unless it was to fight. I felt as sealed off, as tightly pressed, as I ever had, though some days I wondered if all this compression might create a fierce dense spot inside me that would not yield. Again that morning, I’d told him that I was done, yet the word done seemed to exist in a cordoned-off section of the dictionary, detached and inaccessible to all else. We still went to couples therapy, though pointlessly, it seemed to me—I was desperate to move toward some kind of separation and sometimes I was sure I detected in the therapist’s pained expression a similar desperate wish to escape from us and our furious fights about who was good, who was bad, who was innocent, and who was to blame.

  “The couples in this novel all seem so disconnected from each other,” Aaron said to me in the dark of our bedroom. For the first time in a while, his voice didn’t sound angry, just unbearably sad, as if he were finally seeing what I saw.

  I couldn’t back away from what I’d written. I wanted to console him and apologize to him and also flee from him. Impossible as it was, I wished there was some way to end this peacefully, to say that this was as far as we had been able to go together. I wished, also impossibly, that I could protect what had once been sweet and innocent between us, then slip quietly away.

  “I can’t be married to you,” I said.

  I cried as I said it, but inside this sentence, there was nowhere to hide.

  One night, after a terrible fight when I continued to insist that I meant what I said and Aaron continued to believe that I didn’t, I left the house and got into the car. After years of always being at home, now all I wanted was to be outside. I drove slowly down the quiet street, all our neighbors securely inside their houses—no sign of disarray, but the safety seemed threatened, as though intruders had been set loose. At home, every word was sharp-edged and slivered, as though all the glass there had broken and now we walked across the dangerous shards.

  I was trying not to call or text William, aware that his life was in its own state of painful upheaval. I knew no one could serve as my guide out, but I was thinking about him more than I should have been. I knew that my feelings for him were growing, that he was no longer someone I thought of as just a friend. I tried to push this away as I did with every thought that scared me. But there was no more hiding from myself. I took care of the kids, cooked dinner, did the laundry as always. My body remained at home, but my mind had taken flight. Before this, I hadn’t been able to summon another vision of how my life might look. But now I was starting to imagine another possibility.

  I drove past the Newton library, past our synagogue, past friends’ houses. I circled the center of town, two intersecting streets with a church on one side, a Starbucks on the other. By ten o’clock, the stores were all closed. I circled back to Crystal Lake and drove down Beacon, toward the entrance ramp for I-95.

  I merged onto the highway with the same shaking hands and red prickling ears. If there was ever a time my body spoke to me louder than the ruminations of my mind, it was now. Do it. Go. The cars were coming up quickly behind me, a barrage of lights. I felt the old startle of panic. Pick your spot, make a decision, and start moving, I heard in my head, some more confident version of myself. You confuse other drivers when you’re tentative. They can’t tell what you intend to do.

  I merged, as afraid as I’d ever been. Even though Newton had appeared quiet and asleep, the highway was crowded with cars—there were always people who needed to get away. I opened the windows; the air rushed in and my hair blew wildly. I didn’t know what would come next, but at least I was on the highway, driving, driving. I changed lanes, I got off the highway, I merged back on. Something was going to change only because I had decided to change it.

  William and I arrive in the North End now on this Friday night. The kids are at Aaron’s house celebrating Shabbat as we once did all together, but for me now, a new day has sprung into existence, like those dreams I used to have in which I opened a door in our house and discovered, to my great surprise, a vast extra room. So this is what Friday night looks like. William and I wander along streets that are windy and narrow, paved in cobblestone, lit with gas lamps. The brick buildings twinkle with lights.

  We wait in the long line outside Regina’s Pizzeria. Over the past few months, we’ve eaten our way through Boston. I want to sample everything, hungry not only for the food but for the choices.

  At a Thai restaurant in Coolidge Corner that was both cheap and delicious, in sight of the kosher Chinese place and the Jewish bookstores, William held out a forkful of pad thai.

  “It’s delicious,” I said.

  “Soon I’ll stop eating like this. It’s only because it’s still new,” I said at an Indian buffet where I tried to limit myself to just two vegetable pakoras and seconds of only the sag paneer. William held out a forkful of chicken tikka masala but here I did say no.

  “I’m a vegetarian,” I reminded him.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to look at a menu and eat whatever you want?” he asked me.

  “Just to be here feels radical enough,” I said.

  “Do you think you’re just used to being restricted?”

  I’d thought about it. I’d been a vegetarian for five years, since seeing one too many videos about slaughterhouses and too often feeling the need to tell myself that the burger or piece of chicken I was eating wasn’t what it actually was. It was the same time as I was starting to recognize how deadened the rest of my beliefs were, how I didn’t find the rules of keeping kosher meaningful, though I complied with their every detail.

  “I hold on to it because it’s something I actually believe in,” I said.

  When there’s a free table at Regina’s, we squeeze our way into the crowded dark space that is decorated with framed pictures of local celebrities who have eaten here.

  “Are you hungry?” William asks me.

  “Starving,” I say.

  The pizza is thin-crusted and gooey, and in order to eat it without it falling apart, I hold it with both of my hands and hurry it into my mouth. I devour one slice after another. Still hungry, we go into Mike’s Pastry, which is famous, though I hadn’t heard of it until recently. People crowd the street outside. A line stretches out the door—shopping-bag-laden tourists wearing newly purchased Boston gear, eager to declare their allegiance, noisy college students bustling in large groups, old Italian women with ink-black-dyed hair and their dark-eyed husbands. Inside, in glass-fronted display cases, there are containers of tiramisu and peaked white meringues; rows of small pink-and-green-layered cakes; cream puffs; and cannolis, plain and covered in chocolate, dipped in powdered sugar, their ends dotted with chocolate chips, their insides filled with sweet ricotta cheese or mousse or raspberry cream. The women behind the counter speak to one another in Italian as they package pastries into white bakery boxes that they expertly tie up with the red-and-white string that hangs from rolls attached to the ceiling.

  William holds up a chocolate chip cannoli for me, and I bite into the crunch of shell, then the sweet surprise of ricotta. It’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. I motion for William to try some too, but instead he feeds me another bite. That Chasidic story, it turned out, was wrong. You can partake, and you can enjoy.

  We dodge patches of ice along the sidewalk, which in the summer, William tells me, will be filled with people attending the weekly Italian festivals, the image of the Madonna paraded high, the porcelain figure covered with the dollar-bill offerings of the devout in search of healing and salvation. As we walk, my leg brushes against William’s; his arm is around me, pulling me toward him. He stops, takes my face in his hands, and kisses me. We start
walking again and it feels possible to stay out all night long, explore every neighborhood in this city.

  In the small bench-lined park, underneath the statue honoring Paul Revere and his midnight ride, we sit. Behind us is the Old North Church, where the famous one-if-by-land, two-if-by-sea lanterns hung. The white spire is bathed in golden light and from where we’re sitting, it looks as though Paul Revere is leaving behind the brightly illuminated world and setting out into the dark unknown of his midnight ride.

  Snow is falling lightly as we walk along the famed Freedom Trail, past Paul Revere’s house and Faneuil Hall and the Old State House. Surrounded by this blend of old and new buildings and by these bodies of water and these bridges and, everywhere, the twinkling of so many lights, I relent in my conviction that this city isn’t mine.

  Jump

  “White-water rafting on the Pacuare River!” William says when I meet him for dinner.

  I hear his excitement, but even so, I can’t help myself: “Is it safe?” I ask.

  “No!” he says with a smile.

  William and I are going to Costa Rica in February, a dream vacation. It’s an odd-number year, so according to the finalized separation agreement, December vacation is my time with the kids, the February school break is Aaron’s. He is taking them on vacation and I’m thrilled, of course, to be able to go to Costa Rica with William, but the prospect of being away from the kids for a week feels scary. I concoct torturous stories of all the ways they won’t return, or I won’t. Before the divorce, I would have marveled at this amount of time to myself, but now I feel only the fear, entirely unfounded as it is, that Aaron will take them and never return; they will cease to be mine.

  It’s not only my fears about the kids. The list of all that I’m afraid of follows me still. As much as I want to believe that I’ve banished my fear, I know that it needs to be conquered not once, but again and again. Travel has always been one of the things that scared me—I like browsing the travel guides in the bookstore and constructing an itinerary, but fear overtakes me as soon as I start to pack for a trip. When Dahlia told me stories of backpacking or parasailing or kayaking, I reminded myself that she was the adventurous sister. I didn’t see the point of traveling only in order to be scared.