The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  “Yeah,” Audrey said. She smiled despondently. “It’s been a laugh riot, hasn’t it?”

  CHAPTER

  14

  On the second Tuesday in July, Carol conducted the first of her much-anticipated “Jewish Way of Life” field trips: a tour of a mikvah. Rosa was running late that afternoon and when she arrived at the brownstone on West Seventy-eighth Street where the tour was to take place, the rest of the group had already gone in. After pressing the button on the video entry phone and identifying herself to the fuzzy, suspicious voice on the other end, she was admitted into the basement of the building. She found Carol and fifteen other women from the Learning Center milling about in a small, windowless lounge. The room was decorated in the morbidly feminine style of a gynecologist’s office, with peach-colored sofas and floral throw cushions and Impressionist prints. On one of the walls, somebody had posted a handwritten sign: COME JOIN A GROUP OF WOMEN WHO RECITE TEHILIM FOR THE SICK AND THE SOLDIERS IN ISRAEL. WE MEET EVERY TUESDAY P.M. Next to this was a larger, printed placard. BE PROUD, it said, YOU ARE A DAUGHTER OF ISRAEL.

  Rosa was still puzzling over this obscure imperative when Carol brought everyone to attention with a polite cough. “Welcome, ladies. I believe everyone is here now. The mikvah attendant will be with us shortly, but while we are waiting, I thought it would be useful if I gave you just a little basic information about the mikvah and the role that it plays in Jewish life.” She looked down and began to read nervously from a sheaf of notes.

  “The mikvah is the Hebrew word for ritual bath. It has several purposes. It is used in Jewish conversion ceremonies; Orthodox men sometimes use it to prepare themselves for Sabbath or important holidays. Also, many traditional Jews immerse their new utensils in the mikvah before using them. But the primary function of the mikvah is related to taharat hamishpachah—the Jewish laws of family purity that dictate that during a woman’s menses and for seven clean days thereafter, a woman is niddah, or sexually unavailable. For a minimum of twelve days, a husband and wife are prohibited from intercourse and all other forms of intimate contact. This period of abstinence is officially concluded each month with ritual immersion in the mikvah.”

  Rosa was puzzled. She had always liked the sound of a mikvah. She had pictured it as a sort of religiously sanctioned spa: a women-only Turkish bath. This sounded more like mandatory, once-a-month self-mortification.

  “Although the Reform and Conservative denominations have largely ceased to observe the laws of mikvah and niddah, the Orthodox regard them as gufei ha-torah—that is, the essential laws of the Torah. We read in Leviticus, ‘And unto a woman while she is impure by her uncleanness you shall not approach to uncover her nakedness.’ The Torah gives the law of taharat hamishpachah not once, but three times. It also specifies that those couples who disobey the law shall suffer the awesome punishment of karet. Their souls shall be cut off from their people—”

  Rosa raised her hand.

  “Yes, Rosa?”

  “I don’t understand. Why is a woman considered unclean when she is menstruating?”

  “Good question!” Carol said gamely. “I’m really glad you brought that up. The Hebrew word tum’ah, or impure, is left over from Temple times. It only means ritually impure—unfit for Temple access. No one regards a menstruating woman as literally dirty.”

  “Okay, but why should she be considered even ritually impure? Doesn’t that suggest a fundamentally negative attitude toward the female body?” Rosa was aware of some sighing and eye-rolling from the other women. Already, it seemed, she had identified herself as the obstreperous class bore.

  “I can assure you,” Carol said, smiling, “that is not how generations of Jewish women have seen it. If you ask around among Orthodox women, I think you’ll find that they have many, very positive things to say about mikvah.”

  An old woman dressed in floral housecoat and slippers entered the room now. “Ladies,” Carol said, “this is Mrs. Levine, who will be giving us our tour today. Mrs. Levine has been an attendant at this mikvah for seventeen years!” There was a smattering of applause for the longevity of Mrs. Levine’s service. But Mrs. Levine made no acknowledgment of the tribute. Her manner—stiff and proprietorial, bristling with anticipatory insultedness—suggested no great enthusiasm for having her inner sanctum gawped at by outsiders.

  The class arranged itself in a crocodile formation and followed Mrs. Levine down the hall to a small warren of tiled shower rooms and bathrooms. In this area, she explained, women made themselves ready for the mikvah by removing anything—dirt, jewelry, makeup, nail polish, Band-Aids, dentures—that might conceivably come between their skin and the sanctified water. They also checked themselves internally for any residual traces of menstrual blood, using special white cotton cloths that were provided. After one such cloth had been passed around so that everyone could sample its exemplary softness, the tour continued on into the mikvah room.

  The stark, white-tiled chamber, which contained nothing but a small, square pool, a stool for Mrs. Levine to sit on, and a vaguely sinister contraption for lowering disabled women into the water, was something of an anticlimax. Mrs. Levine described how she went about inspecting naked women prior to their immersion. “Mostly, what I am looking for at this stage is a stray hair, or perhaps a little particle of dirt somewhere,” she said. “You’d be amazed,” she added, lapsing briefly into chummy confidentiality, “at how many little bits and pieces I find hanging about in the belly button and in the pubic hair.”

  Back in the lounge, Carol asked if there were any questions. Rosa looked around. Most of the women were placidly writing notes on their information sheets. Presently a hand went up. Rosa recognized the young woman from her parsha class. She was a Christian from Tennessee who had recently become engaged to a Jewish man and was preparing to convert. “You know when you were talking before, about intimate contact?” she said. “I’m a bit confused about what that means. I’ve heard people say different things.”

  Carol nodded. “It is true, there is a range of opinion within the Orthodox community as to how strictly the prohibition is to be observed. In some households, a husband will refrain even from passing things to his wife while she is niddah. If he wishes to give her car keys, for example, he will place them on a table and let her pick them up. In other households, husbands and wives do touch each other and even express mild forms of physical affection, such as holding hands.”

  The young woman’s eyes grew very wide. “Just holding hands?”

  Carol laughed. “I will not pretend that these restrictions are always easy to observe. For loving couples with healthy sex drives, taharat hamishpachah requires enormous discipline. We live in a society that bombards us daily with pornographic images, that is constantly encouraging us to ‘let it all hang out’ and do what feels good. But, I promise you, there are many benefits to be had from submitting to these rules. For one thing they help to keep the spiritual dimension of a marriage alive. Every month, for two weeks, a husband and wife are required to find nonsexual ways to communicate their love for one another. Conversely, the observance keeps the sexual component of a marriage strong. How often do we hear of men in the secular world who seek excitement outside the home because they have become sexually indifferent to their wives?” (Several women nodded in rueful assent: Ah, yes, such things were heard of all too often.) “This, I can assure you,” Carol went on, “is much less likely to occur in an Orthodox household where a husband has severe limitations on when he may take sexual pleasure in his wife.”

  A young girl wearing a kipah tentatively raised her hand. “I worry because I often have spotting between periods. How would the law apply in such cases?”

  Carol smiled sympathetically “Good point. Many women have irregular cycles. Many women experience ‘spotting,’ as you say, and it is not always easy to ascertain exactly when their bleeding has finished. In most cases, these things can be worked out. My rabbi has sometimes written me a note in such circumstances.”
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br />   Rosa stared at a reproduction of Monet’s water lilies on the wall. Was this, she wondered, what the millennia of Jewish wisdom came down to? A group of women sitting in a bathhouse parsing Iron Age blood taboos and fretting over stains in their panties? This was not about God at all: it was the expression of some schoolgirlish masochism, some hysterical need for rules and restrictions, the pettier and more arduous, the better.

  After the class was over, she and Carol walked up Columbus together. It had grown windy while they were in the mikvah. Candy wrappers and plastic bags and other bits of urban tumbleweed skittered and swirled around their ankles as they pressed their way along the sidewalk.

  “I could tell you were uncomfortable about what you heard this evening,” Carol said.

  “Not uncomfortable,” Rosa objected. “Upset. I find the whole idea of these laws incredibly degrading.”

  “I see how they might appear that way to you, Rosa. But I promise you—”

  “How can it not be degrading to be put into quarantine and treated like Typhoid Mary every time you have your period?” Rosa demanded. “To have to get a note from your rabbi before you can sleep with your husband? How does the rabbi make his decision anyway? Does he inspect your underwear?”

  Carol looked pained. “I believe there are some rabbis who require physical evidence. But my rabbi has always trusted me to be honest.”

  “Oh, the honor system! How liberal-minded of him!”

  “The aim is not liberal-mindedness, Rosa. The aim is to obey God’s commandments. In Judaism, a distinction is made between the chomer, the act, and the tzuvah, the essence of the act. You have to go beyond the limited physical reality of these duties and appreciate the dignity, the holiness, of the ritual. Once you do that, you find you can achieve a kind of sanctity through the humblest of actions.”

  An empty cardboard box was bumping toward them down the street. Rosa stepped to one side to get out of its path. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “It’s hard for me to believe that God cares if a husband hands his menstruating wife the car keys or not. It’s hard for me to believe that He’s such a pedant.”

  They stopped at a cross street to wait for the light.

  “You don’t call it pedantic,” Carol said, “when your surgeon is concerned about giving you exactly the right dose of anesthetic, or when a scientist concerns himself with minute differences in the measurement of a chemical reaction. Why should small actions not have large consequences in matters of spirituality?”

  Rosa gazed at a homeless man who was standing next to her on the sidewalk, humming companionably to himself as he delved through a trashcan. There was some logical flaw in Carol’s analogy, she was sure; she just could not figure out what it was.

  “The thing is,” Carol said, “you’re looking at all this from a secular, feminist perspective. And you can’t make Orthodoxy fit with that. They are two completely different modes of thought. Feminists say that the mikvah denigrates women. But do I look like a denigrated woman to you? Do you think I feel angry and oppressed when I go to the mikvah? Not at all! The truth is, mikvah is one of the highlights of my month. I love being a woman…”

  “Well, yeah, so do I,” Rosa said.

  “Do you?” Carol turned to her. “Forgive me for saying so, but I get the feeling sometimes that you feel you have to hide your femaleness in order to be taken seriously.”

  Rosa raised an eyebrow. This had the ring of some long-hoarded aperçu. “What do you mean?”

  “The way you dress, the way you do your hair…it’s like you’re trying to ignore the fact that you’re a woman.”

  “Excuse me—”

  “Please, I’m not trying to be rude. It just occurs to me that one of the reasons you’re so uncomfortable with these laws is that you’re not really at ease with your own sexuality.”

  Rosa gave an icy laugh. “I can assure you, I have no problems whatsoever in that department.”

  Carol looked at her dolefully. “I am sorry, Rosa. I don’t mean to offend you.”

  The homeless man had retrieved a chicken wing from an abandoned KFC Bonus Meal and was plodding away now, pushing his rattling cart of soda cans across the street.

  “Come.” Carol pointed to the traffic light. “We can walk.”

  “No, thanks,” Rosa said curtly. “I think I’ll turn off here.”

  “Oh, please don’t.” Carol gripped her arm. “I don’t want us to part on bad terms.”

  Rosa studied Carol’s hand a moment and then gently removed it. “Good-bye, Carol.”

  On arriving home, Rosa went straight to her bedroom, knelt down before her dresser, and began rummaging through the bottom drawer. At length, she unearthed an ancient pack of Marlboro Lights. She laid the cigarettes on the bed and considered them. The mere act of smoking was not yet sufficiently evil for her purpose. She stood up suddenly and went down the hall to run a bath. Now this was decadence: she would smoke in the tub.

  Lying, with her knees protruding from the water like two pale islands, she inhaled wincingly on her stale cigarette and considered the cityscape of shampoos and conditioners that Jane had arranged around the edge of the bath. There was a wavering area of darkness hovering at the edge of her consciousness: a familiar despair, waiting to move in like a weather system. If only she had not gone to that stupid place, she thought. If only she had not had that awful conversation with Carol!

  Perhaps Carol was right, though. Perhaps Rosa was hanging on too hard to the limited physical reality of things. Was it not possible that her objections to the mikvah sprang from a failure of imagination? An inability to appreciate metaphor? She was always accusing the Orthodox of being literal-minded about Torah; maybe it was she who was guilty of literal-mindedness. Poetry had been the one subject in which she had never excelled at school. Even when she brought the full weight of her intelligence to bear on certain poems, they had refused to give up their meaning. She remembered her English teacher telling her once, in exasperation, “You want to extract the idea of the poem like a nut from its shell—to find out whether it is ‘right’ or not—but if the poet had wanted to say something that could be summed up in a sentence like that, he wouldn’t have written a poem, he would have written a slogan.” Perhaps believing was like poetry in this regard. It required a delicacy or subtlety of mind that she had yet to attain.

  She looked down at herself. The long hairs on her ghostly white calves were swaying in the bathwater like sea plants. Her toenails badly needed clipping. What was it Carol had said? She was uncomfortable with her femaleness? The smug little fool! She had as good as accused Rosa of being frigid. And why? Because Rosa did not conform to her twee, antique notions of femininity? Because Rosa had not jumped at the chance to have Mrs. Levine forage through her pubic hair once a month? She leaned over the side of the bath to stub out her cigarette. No, Carol was crazy. And all that stuff about the chomer and tsuvah was a crock: a shabby attempt to justify treating women like crap. She sat up with a sudden, angry whoosh. It was actually a blessing that she had seen the mikvah today, before she had wasted any more time straining to defend the indefensible. Fuck Carol. Fuck them all. Let them spend their lives bowing and scraping before the cosmic class monitor they had invented for themselves. She, Rosa, would have to do without Him.

  CHAPTER

  15

  “Tanya’s all for sending him to some retreat in Arizona,” Audrey said, flicking a speck of something from Joel’s hospital blanket. “For a thousand bucks a week, apparently, you get to meditate in the desert and have your shakti cleansed.” She arched her brows at Jean and Karla, who were sitting on the other side of Joel’s bed. “Can you imagine? I said to her, I said, ‘That sounds lovely, Tanya, but will you really be able to afford it?’” She grinned at the memory of her own subtlety. “She shut up after that, didn’t she?”

  “What are you going to do, do you think?” Jean asked.

  Audrey’s smile faded. “Oh, I don’t know, there’s not much I can do
, really.”

  “Actually, Jean,” Karla said, “there’s a good outpatient program in Queens that we might be able to get him into. I was telling Mom about it yesterday.”

  Audrey smiled and cocked her head in Karla’s direction. “She thinks she’s going to get Lenny to schlep to Queens three times a week, bless her.”

  “Have you considered an intervention?” Jean asked.

  “Do me a favor, Jean! He’s had a hundred interventions. If I have to read out another letter telling him how much I bloody care about him, I’ll throw myself in a lake.”

  “Well, what does Rosa say?” Jean asked.

  “Pfft, you know Rosa. She wants me to throw him out of the house and not have him back until he’s cleaned up.”

  Jean considered this. “There might be something in that, mightn’t there?”

  Audrey’s jaw stiffened. She was about to retort when a nurse entered the room. “Hiya! How you ladies doing?”

  “We’re doing fantastic, love,” Audrey said. “What is it?”

  “I have to drain Mr. Litvinoff’s trachea. You may want to step outside for a few minutes.”

  To pass the time while they were waiting, the women strolled up and down the hallway, glancing through open doorways at the tableaux of other people’s miseries: an old man flashing a vast, elephant-hide scrotum as he clambered out of bed; a teenage boy in big, old-fashioned headphones like earmuffs, grimly watching cartoons; a hospital volunteer swaying with emotion as he serenaded a young woman on an electric organ.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Jean said after a while, “I’m going down to Bucks County next week, and I’ll be there for the whole of August. Maybe Lenny should come and stay.”

  “I don’t think so,” Audrey said.

  “Obviously, it isn’t the long-term answer,” Jean added. “But it’d be good for him to be away from the city. And at least he’d be out of your hair for a bit.”