by Tova Mirvis
With all the kids gathered on the floor, the teachers and parents sitting among them or standing in the back, the principal speaks, new teachers are introduced, a song is taught. It’s getting close to the time to say goodbye. Layla’s hand had firmly clasped mine as we walked into the building, and she has turned around a few times to make sure I’m still here. Before the kids go off to their classes, and the parents to work, we sing the same blessing sung every year on this day and that always brings tears to my eyes but no year more so than this one: the Shehecheyanu blessing, recited on the occasion of anything new, but really it’s a celebration of arrival, of having been able to reach this moment.
The teachers stand up. It’s time. Layla looks at me and an expression of fear crosses her face. She takes my arms and wraps them around her. Then a look of resoluteness comes over her. She gives me one last kiss and off she goes.
And then, just after Labor Day, Josh has his first day at the public school that’s a few blocks from our house.
“I hope I like it,” he says to me as we walk toward the building, where scores of parents and kids are waiting outside. “I hope it feels different.”
When each of the kids went off to nursery school or kindergarten, I was surprisingly dry-eyed. But this first day is unlike any other. I’m all too aware of how much Josh’s dislike of school has come to define him. Ready to make a fresh start, he’s walking into not just a new building but a new version of himself.
And he knows no one. There is no set community, no established group of friends. I feel lonely and lost on his behalf. As we wait for the doors to open, I’m on the verge of bursting into tears, though Josh has warned me not to embarrass him.
“Josh,” I hear someone call. A kid hurries up to him—someone he knew briefly from a local sports camp—and gives him a crushing hug, and I’m so relieved I want to hug the kid myself. Josh starts talking to him and to some other kids he is with and then the doors open and he is swept along into the building.
“Today was good,” Josh says when I pick him up.
The next day, he wants to walk to school by himself—it’s only a few blocks, he argues, and though a parade of kids passes by our house on the way to school, I’m reluctant to let him walk on his own. I draw him a map. I make him tell me each direction he’ll turn, and drill him on the rules about strangers and candy and looking both ways.
Eventually I agree, but on the first morning that he walks alone, I tail him in my car, pretending to be invisible as I drive slowly down the street.
“I see you, Mom,” he calls, then he hurries off, pretending not to know me. But before he strides past, I see the look of pride on his face.
The kids have had just a few days of school when it’s time to halt the start of one new year to celebrate another. Rosh Hashanah falls earlier than usual this year, a week after Labor Day, and at first I’d had the same spool of worry about what I would do. Again, as last year, there is the thought of doing nothing—pretending these were simply odd days without the kids. I know I don’t want to be inside a synagogue. I know I won’t do something obligatory just so I can say that I have marked the day. But the holiday still matters to me—I still want to celebrate this day as the start of something new. I want to be filled with awe, mystery, and majesty—to stand not in prayer but outside in nature.
In bookstores, over the past few weeks I’ve browsed the travel section. The world, neatly alphabetized, giddily called to me, Let’s go here! I could go to Ireland, to India, to Morocco, to Mexico. At night, while the kids slept, I Googled the Grand Canyon and Iceland, imagining gaping holes in the earth and blue lagoons inside a white frozen landscape. Both are too far and too expensive, so I searched for closer options. When I read of craggy ocean vistas, of jutting rocks and sprawling mountain views, I decided to go to Acadia National Park, in Maine, a six-hour drive from Boston.
On the day before the holiday, I pack the kids’ dress clothes into one bag. In another bag, I pack my hiking boots, which still look new but are slowly starting to be broken in, coated now with dust. Along with them, I pack my jeans, a handful of granola bars, a water bottle, and a map. I talk to Dahlia on the phone as I pack; she is at her in-laws’ house, preparing food for the holiday, setting a table, happy to be where she is.
A sweet year, I wish my parents, who are in Memphis, and my brother, who is already on his yearly spiritual pilgrimage to Uman, the birthplace of the rabbi whom he follows.
A sweet year, I wish William as I kiss him goodbye. I’ll miss him but I want to take this trip on my own. We are best together when we both have the capacity to be independent.
There is no getting used to being away from the kids for a holiday, but I have become accustomed to being alone. The thought of not being with them doesn’t fill me with the same terrible dread; one more painful separation I have learned to endure. I will miss them—I always do—but I know that we will soon return to one another. One day, perhaps, when they are older, one of them, or all of them, will come with me on my new year’s excursion, but for now, in what is starting to feel like a ritual all its own, I hug them goodbye, then set off.
Jordan Pond, inside Acadia National Park, is ringed by a path with mountains in the distance. As I’m walking around it in search of a quiet spot, a deer wanders in front of me, seemingly unaware of any human presence. Before I set off on the hike I’d planned, I decide to do tashlich—one of the rituals of Rosh Hashanah I intend to keep. By a body of water, we gather to symbolically cast away our sins; we throw in bread as physical embodiments of the sins, which are nullified by the abundant water.
I have no bread to throw in—the popovers dipped in butter and blueberry jam, a Maine specialty that I’d eaten for my Rosh Hashanah lunch, were far too delicious to waste. Instead, I pick up a stone and throw it into the water, wishing to cast off the pieces of myself that still feel hardened and closed up and stale. Wishing to let go of the remaining voices of recrimination in my head.
Into Jordan Pond they go.
It’s the kind of day with a glare so bright it’s almost blinding, and it feels both warm and cool at the same time, as though I’m standing on the exact dividing line between seasons. Some of the trees are already dusted in gold, a harbinger of what is to come. Until now, fall was merely a backdrop to the holidays. This year, the season steps to the forefront. Fall itself feels like the holiday.
From the guidebook I’ve been studying, my version of a Rosh Hashanah prayer book, I’ve selected what sounds like an easy hike. I’m still only aspiring to be a serious hiker, and I like the description of a steep ascent to a vista of sky and sea, and then the Deer Path, which offers a gentle slow-rolling descent. I have the look of someone who has inadvertently wandered too far into the forest; I’m still trying to figure out how to work the hiking app I downloaded on my phone.
I decide to just go—as long as I’m ascending, I’ll assume I’m on the right path. The hike starts out as easy as described, just an upward climb among rocks and trees. It’s warmer now and I take off my sweatshirt so I’m wearing just my tank top; my shoulders prickle with sensation. The fact that it’s Rosh Hashanah once again settles over me, another year gone by. I still feel a longing for holiday tables with family gathered around, the smell of dinner, the sweetness of apples and honey. I can still summon the tunes of the prayers in my head, background music as I make this climb, but mostly what I hear is just the gentle rustle of the wind and the sound of my own footsteps.
I ascend higher, until I reach the top—or at least what appears to be the top, because it’s hard to tell exactly where I am on the map. But I’m not going to worry about that, not yet, because I am surrounded by stripes of ocean blue and sandy brown and forest green, and a majestic sky all around. There is no need to cede words like wonder and mystery and awe. No group can lay sole claim to these words; no religion owns this rising, expansive feeling.
If from the top of that mountain I could have seen forward in time as well, past the oceans and a
ll these trees, to the year ahead, I would see a day a year from now, just before another Rosh Hashanah, when I will go back to Crystal Lake. I will carry with me the gold wedding ring I once wore, which bore the inscription Love Always, words that turned out not to be true after all. Since the day I removed it from my finger, it has been stored in a small box inside a larger box in my closet. By the shore of the lake, I will bring the ring to my lips, a final goodbye, then toss it into the water. The ring won’t go as far as I imagined it would—in my mind, it soared like a small golden sparrow to the middle of the lake before skimming low and dipping beneath. Instead, a few feet from me, it will fall with an almost unnoticeable splash. The water will know what to do with it. The band will sink to the bottom of the lake, where it will remain, the words eventually rubbed out by the water.
And if I could see further forward, into the next year, William and I will get engaged, with a poem he writes and a purple-stoned ring we select together. We will get married in the house where we will all live together, under a chuppah painted by my mother, in a service presided over by my father and William’s mother, with promises to each other that I write and with a song that William arranges and sings, and with the Sheva Brachot, the traditional seven blessings, sung by Ariel. We will be surrounded by William’s brothers; my brother here from Israel; my sister, who is newly pregnant, and her husband; and all six of our children as we marry each other.
All these are in the future still as I look for the blue streaks of paint that were supposed to mark the path down. But all I see are rocks and scraggly green. I’m out of the range of my iPhone map, no comforting blue circle to find me and illuminate the way.
Finally I see, on a distant rock, a stripe of faded blue. It’s not where I expected it to be, but I’m completely turned around now, and seeing no other way to go, I follow it. After I climb down a few rocks, the path grows narrower and steeper, and metal railings are embedded in the stones—hardly the gentle slope promised by the book. The ground is slippery from the recent rain—it’s a slippery slope, indeed—and the rocks jut out, offering little clue which way to go. Having betrayed me once, the guidebook offers little help now, and the map I’d picked up at the rangers’ station seems unintelligible—I can’t retrace my steps because I don’t know where I’ve been.
Who was I to think I knew how to hike, and how did I think I could manage this alone? These voices of old, always able to find me. But there are other ones now that speak alongside them. Sometimes you need to think only about the step right in front of you. All you can do is trust your own footing and keep going even when you feel lost and afraid. I hear footsteps and see a couple coming around a tight bend; in their full hiking gear, they look rugged and confident, the sort of serious hikers I long to be.
“Is this the Deer Path?” I ask, hoping they will tell me that from his point onward, the path will be smooth, my descent easy and assured.
“It’s the Cliff Path,” one of them says, and they continue their ascent. Up the rocks, around a corner, and they are gone.
The path at least is true to its name. I grab onto the railing and make a tentative first step. I stay close to the wall of stone, grasping the metal bars drilled into the rock, and slowly descend. With each step, my foot feels for solid ground on the wet rocks. There may be a better way to do this, but I decide to go down the steepest of the slippery rocks on my butt, which is a good idea until my jeans catch on a rock and tear. I keep going this way until I feel more steady. Once the rocks become less jagged, and my feet are more secure, I stand and I walk toward the lush green below, and the light streaming through the trees. I’ve gotten myself up here, and however imperfectly, I can find my way back down.
Acknowledgments
I am thankful to the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for a grant early on, when I was just beginning to conceive of this memoir.
Joshua Halberstam, Rachel Mesch, Judith Rosenbaum, and Barry Wimpfheimer, gifted scholars and valued friends, read drafts and offered helpful feedback. I am very thankful for the friendship and sage writerly advice of Emily Franklin, Heidi Pitlor, Joanna Rakoff, and Jessica Shattuck. I am immensely grateful to Rachel Kadish, for always being my first reader, for offering smart insights at every stage of the writing process, and for being a cherished friend throughout. And I am lucky to have Sarah Crane as an honorary member of our family; her warm presence makes life run more smoothly and happily.
My family has been an enormous source of support, understanding, and encouragement. Many parents would be nervous to have a novelist in the family, and most would be even more nervous to have a memoirist. I am grateful to my parents for championing my writing and for giving me a love of creativity and remaining steadfast as I have used this in my own way. I am thankful to my brother and his family and to my sister and her family for their anchoring sense of connection and love.
My agent Julie Barer has been an enthusiastic supporter from the very beginning of this book, and I have benefited tremendously from her warmth and her ever-present wisdom and insight. I am also thankful for all that Nicole Cunningham does at The Book Group. Lauren Wein, my editor, has an uncanny ability to see what a book has the potential to be, and with her dazzling intelligence, she has guided and inspired me through every step. And to Pilar Garcia-Brown at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for her sure-handed support, and to Tracy Roe, for her truly exceptional copyediting, I am very grateful.
I want to express my gratitude to my husband for his steadying strength, his open-ended love, and his boundless energy, which awakens me and inspires me. Now and always, there is nowhere I’d rather be. To my stepchildren whose presence in my life is a gift, my thanks and appreciation. And to my children, I offer my endless gratitude for every day of their love, good humor, and high spirits. I love them deeply and am so proud of who they are and who they are still becoming.
ONE DOWN AND two across, there she was again, a lone woman in the window, pressed close to the glass. For several days, she had been there on and off, standing in front of the window, on crutches, as if wanting to be seen.
Inside her own apartment, Nina stopped to watch. She was disturbed by the young woman’s presence, proprietary on behalf of the middle-aged couple whom she’d come to expect in that window, reading contentedly on their couch. The couple rarely talked to one another, but neither of them seemed bothered by the silence. Sometimes the husband disappeared from view, returning with two mugs in hand. Occasionally the wife stretched her legs toward her husband and he absent-mindedly grasped one of her feet. But once Nina had looked out as the wife started to walk away and the husband stood and pulled her closer. Caught off-guard by the gesture, the woman had nearly stumbled, and to steady her, he pulled her into an embrace. To everyone’s surprise, he twirled her, and for a few minutes before resuming their quiet routine, they had danced.
Nina’s living room window offered no sweeping city views, no glimpse of the river or the sky, only the ornate prewar building across the street. She and Jeremy had lived in this Upper West Side apartment for five years but still hadn’t gotten around to buying shades. Even though she looked into other people’s windows, she’d convinced herself that no one was, in turn, watching them. With two sleeping children, she couldn’t leave the apartment, but it was enough to look out at the varieties of other people’s lives. At nine in the evening the windows across the street were like the rows of televisions in an electronics store, all visible at once. Nina’s eyes flickered back and forth, but she inevitably returned to watching the same square, waiting for the couple to reappear, their quiet togetherness stirring her desire to ride out of her apartment into theirs. Hoping to find them there again, hoping that this might be the night in which they looked up from their books, she didn’t move, not until she was pulled away by a scream.
The interminable cycle of sleeping and waking had begun. In his bedroom, her three-year-old son, Max, was thrashing, yet asleep. His eyes were open but he saw no way out of his nightmare, no path to outrun whate
ver pursued him. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she whispered into Max’s ear, and his crying subsided. An hour later, it was Lily. From the bassinet that was squeezed into her and Jeremy’s bedroom, Nina picked her up to nurse. As soon as Lily latched on, her crying ceased. For the moment, there was nothing more her daughter needed.
Before either of the kids woke again, Nina went back to the window, hoping to see not just the outrageous or the extraordinary, but any truthful moment of small ordinary. During the day, every feeling came shellacked with protective plastic coating. The only language spoken was certainty. Outwardly, she was reciting the maxims along with everyone else: The kids were always delicious and she wouldn’t miss this for the world, and there was nowhere she’d rather be, and yes, it did go so fast. On the faces of other mothers, Nina sometimes caught the rumblings of discontent, but their inner lives were tucked away. Like theirs, her hands were always occupied, but while she was making dinner or bathing a child, while pushing one of them in a swing, rocking the other to sleep, her thoughts had begun to rove.
In the window across the way, there was still no sign of the couple reading. Once again, it was the young woman on crutches looking out, and Nina was tempted to wave. But that would end the illusion. Curtains would be pulled shut, lights switched off, the city’s windows suddenly empty and dark. Instead, Nina stayed hidden, and from the shadows, she watched as a young man dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt emerged from another room and joined the young woman. Wide awake for the first time all day, Nina craned her neck, watching as the couple began to argue, their gestures sharp, their bodies taut. The man tried to hug her but the woman wriggled from his grasp, put her hands over her face, shielding herself from what he was saying.