The Book of Separation

by Tova Mirvis

  Part 3

  Other People, Other Worlds

  “Can we bake hamantaschen?” Layla asks me on the morning of Purim, a holiday that falls at the beginning of March and that she has been learning about in nursery school. Though a minor holiday, it’s one of the kids’ favorites, a boisterous celebration of the deliverance of the ancient Jews in Persia from the evil Haman. It comes complete with costumes and baskets of treats, including this triangular, filled cookie reminiscent of the three-cornered hat worn by the villain of the story.

  At her question, I pause, threatened for a moment by hamantaschen. For all my leaving, I worry I could still be swept back inside.

  Even so, I stand on a chair to reach my selection of kosher cookbooks, which have remained all year on the highest shelf in the kitchen. I flip through the pages of the one I’d used the most, the spiral binding coming apart, the pages stiff and sticky. At the back, in the section labeled Traditional Food, is my one-time favorite hamantaschen recipe.

  As I’d done with each of the boys, Layla and I make the dough. After it has chilled, we roll the dough out on the table and use mugs to cut circles, as my mother taught me. Inside each circle, we drop a spoonful of apricot jelly or chocolate chips, as Layla prefers. I call the boys in to join us, and Noam and Josh oblige, filling a few circles and folding them into triangles.

  With the four of us together in the kitchen, I remember how much I once enjoyed doing this—baking these cookies as I had as a child, assembling them into small packages that we decorated, then delivering them around the neighborhood to family and friends, coming home to find an accumulation of these packages on our doorstep as well. In this moment, it feels clear to me: I still want to participate in this tradition with my children. Surely freeing yourself means being able to choose what to let go of as well as what to keep. By leaving, I don’t have to leave it all.

  “Should we go?” I ask the kids when the hamantaschen are almost done baking. I’d tentatively made a reservation for the Purim party at our former synagogue. As wary as I am about going, I don’t want the kids to feel entirely cut off from the way it used to be. I wonder if I can ignore the discomfort of being around those who don’t speak to me so we can be occasional visitors to our former world.

  With the kids, I drive to the synagogue that once was the epicenter of our family life. I try to gauge their moods as we walk in—for Josh and Layla, I suspect that this is just a place we used to go to, but I wonder if Noam looks longingly at where we used to go, if he feels, as I do, that in some alternate existence, this is where we still could belong.

  The mood inside is festive; scores of kids are dressed in costumes, as are many of the adults. There is a clown twisting balloon animals and a makeup artist applying face paint to a long line of kids. Milling around are all the people I’d once known—time travel does indeed exist, and on this day when life is supposed to be topsy-turvy, I’ve found my way back to my former life.

  Making hamantaschen was one thing, but as soon as we walk in, I realize it was a mistake to have come. My body instantly knows where it is—I instinctively cross my arms in front of my chest, my fingers tightly grasping my arms. I feel uncomfortable inside my own body, as though nothing of me is correctly attached. There is no way for me to return in this partial way. In a tight-knit community, you’re either inside or out. I can partake of some of the customs and rituals, but not those that require me to be wholly inside.

  Some people are friendly and I’m grateful for this—I feel as though they’re purposely reaching across the barrier that surrounds me, and I return their greeting, genuinely glad to see them. But all too often, I turn and face the shunners and snubbers, the ladies and gentlemen of the awkward withheld hellos. The man who once lived near us and who now seems to regard my presence here as impossible, as though I have returned from the dead; a woman who says with narrowed eyes and clenched teeth, “Nice to see you,” in a voice that lets me know she means it is anything but nice.

  Behind these responses, I know, there are many reasons. Getting divorced, leaving Orthodoxy—there was plenty of fodder in that alone. And it was easy too, I assume, for gossips to claim that William’s appearance in my life led to the demise of my marriage, when in fact it was the opposite. I don’t know what has been said by whom, what people have presumed to know and share. All I can do now is let go of thinking about how my story is viewed by others.

  This too has become part of what it has meant to leave, and it has changed me, making me feel preemptively sealed off when I run into someone I used to know. To protect myself, I know I can close ranks inside myself, craft a smaller circle in which to hold tightly to my own story. But I don’t want to have left only to feel clenched once again. The other possibility, hard as it is to act on, is to know that just as I have my own story, so too do each of these people who walk past—even the denial of a story is a story. All these other people, all with their own myriad forms of sadness and fear, their marriages with their thwarted desires and wishful hopes, their children with their own hidden questions and private struggles. No way to know how our stories brush up against the rawest parts of someone else’s. No way to gauge how little we know of the insides of other people’s lives.

  I still feel the loss of some of these friendships—but my earlier anger has softened and now it’s mostly just sadness that there exists this additional stark line between then and now. But if these small moments of shunning are the price for being myself, I’m willing to pay it.

  I get food for the kids but I don’t feel like eating. I stand off to the side, watching the festivities. Until now, I’ve seen these community members as oversize figures who populate the entire known world. But this is one small land, and the people inside it occupy a smaller sliver.

  “It’s good to see you,” says one man with whom I used to be friendly and he looks me warmly in the eye. “I mean it. Don’t be a stranger.”

  I smile back, appreciative of his gesture and happy to see him as well, but despite his kindness, I know that a stranger is exactly what I am. The word comes as a relief. One more reminder. This is no longer my world.

  We leave early. I don’t belong here. It’s a sentence that once would have filled me with fear, but now it’s simply a statement of fact. It turns out that there is no cliff at the edge of the earth, no never-ending black hole in which you would endlessly float. There are other people, other worlds.

  When we get back to our house, a package is waiting for us in the breezeway—a shopping bag filled with Hershey’s Kisses and chocolate chip cookies and also a hot-pink hula hoop, which is hardly a typical Purim item but is a welcome addition.

  “It’s from William,” I tell the kids when I look at the card that is tucked inside.

  “You have a boyfriend,” Layla teases.

  William has started to come over when the kids are here. He first came on a Sunday night a few weeks ago, with ice cream. The kids were excited when I told them he was stopping by, but even so, I played detective to every expression that passed across their faces. To my relief, they were surprisingly at ease with him. The boys discussed sports with him, while Layla climbed on his shoulders and asked for a ride. For all of my worry, the kids seem better able to accommodate what is new and changing.

  Come over for hamantaschen, I text William and he does. We all sit on the couch and eat.

  “I still like Halloween better,” Josh decides.

  Layla considers the issues before nodding. “You get more candy,” she agrees.

  “Does this count as celebrating a Jewish holiday with you?” William whispers in my ear.

  “I’ll give you partial credit,” I say.

  “I’ll take it,” he says and we laugh. As our lives become increasingly intertwined, we will continue to wrestle with the ways we are different. When it comes to religion, he will join me sometimes, remain separate other times. But I know that there is room for this, between us and around us. He doesn’t have to be who I am. I don’t have to
be who he is. To be free, I’m learning, is to allow others to be free as well.

  We finish off the hamantaschen, then eat the chocolate too. The kids and William play hallway basketball on the net that hangs from the pantry door. William lifts Layla so she can dunk the ball. Noam gives William a high-five when he makes a shot. The kids are comfortable with him, energized by his exuberance. There is something almost childlike about William—playing with the kids is not an act but something that comes naturally to him. He pays careful attention to everything they say, not just pretending to be engaged but handing over all of himself.

  I cheer them on, then take a shot from the kitchen, and the kids laugh as I miss badly and the ball ends up in the bathroom. The game is wild and festive and fun, and when I look at them, my three children and William, I know that I belong to this.

  “Do I have to go to school?” Josh asks me the next morning and every morning when I wake him. Fourth grade feels like an impossibility for him. I console him by telling him that it’s springtime, he has to make it just a few more months. But no matter what I say, he doesn’t want to go.

  “I hate the Jewish stuff,” he says as we near the school.

  Not just at school but everywhere, he is chafing, refusing. There are those who are upset about his continued refusal to wear a yarmulke—this still feels like a change that cannot be accepted. If he doesn’t follow this path, then it’s someone’s fault—mine, obviously. If I don’t teach my children to be Orthodox, I have supposedly failed as a parent. If I don’t show them the one true way, I’m at fault when inevitably they end up lost.

  After Josh has a particularly bad day at school, I go into the garage and pump air into the tires of his bicycle, a hand-me-down from Noam that has sat unused for a few years. I’d taught Noam to ride a bike but hadn’t yet taught Josh because there never seemed to be enough time. Now that he’s turned ten, he’s embarrassed not to know how, but it’s harder because he’s become afraid.

  The week before, William and I went on a Saturday afternoon to Falmouth, on Cape Cod, where we rented bikes. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a bike,” I said nervously to the man at the rental shop and asked about the exact course of the path and how crowded it would be. Like driving, riding a bike was a fear that had snuck up on me when I let too many years pass without doing it. The last time I’d been on a bike was when I was in graduate school and Aaron and I had rented bikes on a weekend trip to Montauk, at the tip of Long Island. On that rented bike, which was a little too big for me, I’d no longer felt sure of myself. Unsteady, I shied away from biking up a huge hill, afraid I would careen out of control down the other side. After that, my fear had solidified and grown.

  “You’ll remember. It’s like riding a bike,” the man at the rental place joked as he selected a bike and helmet for me.

  He was right. I did remember. William and I biked through the main streets of Falmouth, past seafood restaurants and souvenir shops. Each time a car went by, I slowed down and my heart sped up. Just how close are they, can they hit us, will I fall into their path? My fear was riding alongside me, but I continued anyway. At first William led the way but he urged me to go ahead and I did, onto the Shining Sea Bikeway, past salt marshes that opened finally into an expansive view of the ocean.

  “You can do it,” I tell Josh now as I summon all my optimistic good cheer and say that William offered to meet us in the empty parking lot of the local public school and teach him.

  “I’m too tired,” he says.

  “It’ll be fun,” I coax him, trying to betray none of the urgency I feel. Suddenly, Josh learning how to ride a bike is more important than anything else.

  “I don’t want to learn. It’s boring,” he says with wilting bravado.

  “I was afraid to ride a bike,” I tell him.

  Josh looks at me intently as I tell him how I had always ridden a bike as a kid but became afraid when I was older and that recently I’d tried it, even though I was afraid, and now I no longer am.

  “Will you try?” I ask, and this time he agrees.

  I load his bike and Layla’s into the back of my car and we drive to the parking lot where William is waiting. As Layla makes circles around the lot with her training wheels, William teaches Josh to glide slowly down a slight incline so that he can see what it feels like to balance.

  “Don’t worry about the pedals, and don’t worry about going fast,” William tells Josh, whose forehead is furrowed in concentration.

  William is so confident that Josh can learn to ride that Josh begins to feel confident as well. As William calls out encouragement, his voice remains steady and unrushed—the days ahead are open spaces and we can stay here for as long as is needed. He has the patience of a man who has done this before; with his son and two daughters, he has stood watching a child who was unable to imagine that he or she would ever be able to do this, yet knowing that there will be a moment—it will seem like magic—when balancing became possible.

  Josh tries to glide and he falters; he gets frustrated and wobbles. But again and again, he positions his bike at the top of the incline and sets off, hoping this will be the time he gets it. His face is set in fierce determination. I’m glad he’s not looking at me, unsure what combination of fear and hopefulness he might detect in my expression. With each lap he’s slowly making, I want to yell to him about courage and liberation. I want to tell him that sometimes the things you come to late, after a struggle, are the ones you appreciate most. More than anything, I want him to feel the exhilaration that comes from taking yourself by surprise.

  After a little more wobbling, Josh finds his balance. He puts his feet on the pedals and rides across the parking lot.

  Passover

  “Will it feel lonely?” my mother worries, referring to our small Passover seder in Memphis. It’s just my parents, the kids, and me—it’s an odd-number year so the kids are with me for the seders. My sister is in Israel with my brother and his family; her fiancé is with his family, the last Passover he and my sister will spend apart before they get married. The crowded, cousin-laden family seders of my childhood no longer exist, except in our minds—the vision of how this night is supposed to look.

  We are in the kitchen, of course. The turkey, with its matzo-meal stuffing, is in the oven. I’ve made the matzo balls, rolling them in my hands and boiling them in hot water seasoned with a few ladles of soup. My mother beats egg whites into a froth for sponge cake. This might be the festival of freedom, but the weeks before are a time of enslavement. The already strict rules for keeping kosher are made infinitely stricter. The rules have multiplied, spawned new categories and subsets. My parents’ kitchen is in a locked-down state, nothing admitted without first being screened at the door. In my kitchen at home, I’d made my own efforts—got rid of the prohibited food, covered the counters, cleaned the oven, pulled out the few dishes I had that were used only during this one week. I stockpiled matzo and jelly candies for when we return home so I can feed them to the kids in lieu of forbidden pasta and cereal. All of this not out of a sense of religious obligation but for the sake of people I love.

  Next on our list to make is my grandmother’s mayonnaise—not only a kosher-for-Passover recipe but a family heirloom that my grandmother learned from her own mother, who made it year-round. “It has how many eggs?” my father the cardiologist asked in an undertone when my grandmother unveiled the finished jar at the table and we spread it sparingly on matzo, knowing better than to waste any drop of this delicacy that we hoped would last all eight days. The mayonnaise was always discussed with great reverence at the seder table, as if it were a piece of herself my grandmother was passing around. For her, not having grown up Orthodox, I think that when she looked out at us, her all-Orthodox family, she felt like she fully belonged inside this world she had chosen.

  I pull out the eggs. In the scrubbed-clean refrigerator, three dozen are stacked in cartons, another dozen already gone into the matzo balls and sponge cakes, but on this
holiday of no leaven, you can’t risk running out of eggs. Earlier in the day I’d made a trip to the supermarket, where the kosher-for-Passover aisles are stocked with macaroons and jars of gefilte fish floating in jellied broth. A week before the holiday, the grocery store usually starts running low on certain items—this year it’s tomato sauce and pareve margarine, so we’ve rationed out the one precious stick my mother borrowed from a neighbor. On the way back to my parents’ house, I’d detoured through the neighborhoods I’d known since I was a child, past the Hebrew Academy that I attended, past the houses of former friends and relatives. It occurred to me how little of this city I actually knew—little of its music, none of its food. It wasn’t even Memphis I longed for, just the sense that there was a place I was rooted and held. Now, Memphis is no longer the place that feels like home—the sentence reassembles, and Memphis becomes a place that once felt like home. On the map that existed inside my head, its name was always marked in bold letters, my long-standing capital. Now, on the eve of this holiday of Exodus, it becomes a small city among many others.

  “Do you think we’re doing this right?” my mother asks as we crack and separate the eggs.

  I peer into the bowl, trying to envision how this liquid mixture will congeal into a substance that resembles mayonnaise.

  “I hope so,” I say.

  A few Passovers before, my grandmother, mother, and I gathered by the Mixmaster. “Watch first,” my grandmother said and demonstrated the proper way to pour in the lemon juice, sugar, salt, and paprika, and then—and only then—add the egg yolks. “You’re pouring in the oil way too fast. You have to do it just like I say or the eggs and oil will separate,” she chided my mother, who wasn’t as exacting as she was. In my family, all the best conversations and the most fraught interactions take place in the kitchen. Under the surface of how to fold and pour, they were debating who knows best, and am I still needed, and is there enough room to be myself, and am I the same or different from who you wanted me to be?