Disobedience Page 10

  She said, “This is wonderful, Fruma. Wonderful. You must give me the recipe.”

  Fruma’s mouth drooped.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, but not on Shabbos, of course.”

  She was sallow. I smirked. I wanted to lean over and whisper, “You didn’t make this at all, did you, Fruma?” but Rebbetzin Goldfarb was already posing another question, so sweetly it felt impossible not to respond.

  She said, “So, Ronit, any young men in your life?”

  She asked with that tender smile on her face, the one that older people always use when they want to let you know it’s time to get married.

  Now, here’s the thing. I wanted to tell her what she wanted to hear. I really did. At that moment, after such a pleasant evening’s conversation, I wanted to be able to say: Oh yes, a doctor. Is he Jewish? Why, certainly. We’re getting married next year. We’ll live in Manhattan. I could see how delightfully the conversation would proceed from that point, how we’d talk about wedding plans and about the future. I found myself longing for that conversation with all my heart.

  I wanted to say that, and I saw myself wanting it and I hated the part of myself that wanted that to be true. I heard a screaming creak from far away and I found myself thinking of a lock and an old rusted key resting heavy in my palm. This is all the explanation I can offer because, honestly, which of us really understands why we do the things we do?

  I said, “Actually, Rebbetzin Goldfarb, I’m a lesbian. I live with my partner in New York. Her name is Miriam. She’s an architect.”

  It’s not true. It’s never been true. There was a Miriam, a long time ago, but we never lived together. And the architect was another woman entirely. And, let’s face it, currently I’m sleeping with a married man, so I could have said that and shocked them just as much. Or maybe not.

  I looked at Fruma. Her skin had a grayish cast. She was staring, not at me but at the Goldfarbs, unblinking and terrified. Onward, I thought. Onward and through is the only way.

  “Yes, we’re having a commitment ceremony next year. And then we’re talking about kids, maybe a sperm bank, but a gay couple we know say they might want to be fathers but you know how it is.” I leaned forward, conspiratorial. I noticed that no one else leaned with me. “They say they want children but they still want to be out every night. Still, four incomes are better than two and it’d save a lot of paperwork.” I smiled, as though I were telling an amusing anecdote at a friend’s party. “After all, the turkey baster only gets used at Thanksgiving anyway, right?”

  I folded my hands in my lap and sat back to survey the damage.

  The Hartogs were the best. Very satisfying to observe. Her mouth was hanging open and she was looking from Dayan Goldfarb to the Rebbetzin and back, glassily fish-eyed. He was staring down at the table, fingers at his temples, shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  Dovid was smiling. He was looking up at the ceiling, with his hand half covering his mouth, silently smirking. Sitting next to me, Esti looked as though she might start crying, which made me want to shout at her because for God’s sake did she expect me not to say what she already knew? Or did she expect to have been the only one for me, that I should have been as paralyzed as she’s obviously been all these years?

  And the Goldfarbs. I should have known. I could have known, but I didn’t think of how they’d feel. Or maybe I did but I didn’t care. Just a moment before I did care very much indeed. Dayan Goldfarb was looking at his hands, quiet, impassive. His lips were moving, but there was no sound. And the Rebbetzin. She wasn’t looking away, or trying to gauge someone else’s reaction. She was just looking at me, full of sadness.

  I thought I had come to all sorts of decisions about what I believe. That it is better for things to be said than remain unsaid. That I have nothing to be ashamed about. That those who live narrow lives have only themselves to blame when they find themselves shocked. As it turns out, I don’t seem to have got what Scott would call “total buy-in” from all levels of my brain on those principles. I thought I should phone Dr. Feingold, just to let her know that nothing had been resolved even after all this time.

  Because I did feel it. Shame. They’re not bad people. None of them are. Well, maybe the Hartogs. But the Goldfarbs aren’t bad people. They’re not cruel or unpleasant or malicious. They didn’t deserve to have their peaceful Friday night dinner overturned. They didn’t deserve me smashing my life straight into theirs. It can’t have been right that I did. And if I hadn’t? Yeah, that wouldn’t have been right either.

  Chapter Six

  God instructed the moon to make itself new each month. It is a crown of splendor for those who are borne from the womb, because they are also destined to be renewed like her.

  From the Kiddush Levana, recited every month after the third day of the lunar cycle and before the full moon

  What is the shape of time?

  On occasion, we may feel that time is circular. The seasons approach and retreat, the same every year. Night follows day follows night follows day. The festivals arrive in their time, cycling one after the other. And each month, the womb and the moon together grow fat and fertile, then bleed away, and begin to grow once more. It may seem that time leads us on a circling path, returning us to where we began.

  In other moods, we may view time as a straight and infinite line, dizzying in its endlessness. We travel from birth to death, from past to future, and each second that ticks by is gone forever. We talk of managing time, but time manages us, hurrying us along where we might have wished to linger. We can no more halt time than the moon can halt her nightly journey across the sky.

  As is so often the case, these two seemingly irreconcilable observations combine to form the truth. Time is spiral.

  Our journey through time may be compared to an ascent around the outside of a round tower. We travel, it is true, and can never return to the places we have left. However, as each revolution brings us higher and farther, it also brings us around to encounter the same vistas we have seen before.

  Every Shabbat is different from the Shabbat before; nonetheless every Shabbat is Shabbat. Each day brings evening and morning, yet no day will ever be repeated. The moon, waxing and waning in accordance with the wishes of her Creator, is our example: always changing, always the same.

  We should remember this. Often it may seem that time has taken us very far from our origin. But if we take only a few more steps, we will round the corner and see a familiar place. And sometimes it may seem that in all our traveling we have returned to the place where we began. But although the view may be similar, it will never be identical; we should remember that there is no return.

  Esti closed her eyes. Her breaths were soft and regular. She listened to the sounds of the synagogue around her. A low murmur of chatter, of pages being turned and children quieted, buzzed in the ladies’ gallery. Below, in the men’s section, a man was reading the Torah portion at an unhurried pace, speaking each word with its proper intonation and note. Dovid had shown her how each word in the Torah is written with ta’amim, small dots and lines that indicate whether its note should ascend or descend, which syllable should be stressed. The symbols, he had said, allow the reader to bring an individuality to his reading while ensuring a uniformity of tone. Because of this, a Torah reading is always the same, but always different. This reader’s voice was rich and fluid. She allowed her mind to catch on one or two of the Hebrew words as they passed by, translating them, savoring them, and then releasing them. The subdued activity murmured on around her. Somewhere nearby in the ladies’ gallery, someone was whispering, a child was speaking a little too loudly, a door was opened and allowed to swing shut. Let it go, let it all go.

  Esti spread her mind wider and wider around the synagogue until she inhabited every space of it in her slow breathing. She was in the puckered ceiling plaster and the tired blue carpet, in the grilles that covered the windows, in the red plastic of the chairs, in the electric wires within the walls, and in the throat
-pulse of every man and woman. She breathed and felt the synagogue inhale and exhale with her.

  Dwelling within the congregation, she noted the familiar soup of thought and emotion. There were angers here, bitter hatreds, fear and boredom and resentment and guilt and sorrow. She saw herself from outside herself. Am I really? she thought. Can that be me, that person who appears so strange to all these others? She saw herself through a dozen pairs of eyes, each one registering her oddness with fear or disgust or confusion. She smiled at the people as she passed through them, saying, ah yes, you think I’m strange. But I know something you don’t know.

  She swept herself around the synagogue in a lazy arc from the men’s section below, up, slowly, into the ladies’ gallery, which is always, doubtless, reserved for ladies and not for women. She moved around the rims of the gallery, resting near the corners of the ceiling, where the three rows of chairs jostled together and the net curtain bunched and gathered, screening them from view. She investigated slowly. She knew what she was looking for. She allowed herself time to find it, among the sincere prayer and the insincere, among the worries and regrets and dedication and boredom and confusion and disapproval of the women. She imagined that she was surprised. Why, what is this? A new thought? A new mind? So unexpected. Who on earth could it be?

  She took her time answering. She let the question hang, enjoying the suspense. She smiled. To herself, only to herself. It is Ronit, she said. I am sitting next to Ronit and her warm body is beside me as it always used to be. Time, which is a circle, which will always return us to our starting points, has returned her to me.

  Esti thought, I am happy. This is happiness. I have remembered it.

  When she was twelve or thirteen—young, but no longer a child—Esti once heard a snatch of conversation pass between two women standing outside the synagogue. She was good at remaining unobserved; people often failed to notice her, allowing her to hear things that were not meant for her. Her own parents sometimes passed by her in the synagogue hall, even while attempting to look for her; Esti considered this ability a gift.

  “Did you see the Rav’s daughter in shul today?” one of the women said.

  The second woman nodded.

  The first raised her eyebrows and inhaled loudly. “I didn’t know where to look. Do you think the Rav knows she behaves like that?”

  The second woman, older and kinder, said, “She’ll settle down. She’s only young and living in that motherless house, poor thing.”

  Esti would have heard more, but Ronit bounded over and it became impossible to remain unnoticed. The two women swiftly began to discuss an upcoming wedding.

  For a while, Esti wondered whether to tell Ronit to behave better or differently. She wondered if Ronit would even know what the women had meant. Esti knew—she had an acute sense, always, of rectitude. She tried to imagine how Ronit might react to such a conversation and found it impossible. In her mind, she couldn’t even get beyond the first line of discussion. She had already begun to love her. Not as she would do later, but in a fashion that made this conversation, the possibility of breach and separateness impossible. Loving Ronit seemed, already, to demand some denial of herself. Or perhaps, she reflected later, all love demands that.

  In any case, she could not tell Ronit what she had heard. They continued as they had before. Sometimes, they would hang over the rail of the ladies’ gallery together, desperate and comic, trying to attract Dovid’s attention. They would wait until he turned in roughly their direction and Ronit would start to wave, or puff out her cheeks, or stick out her tongue. Esti, laughing and embarrassed, would hold back and then join in, so that Ronit wouldn’t tug her arm or make a mocking face. And Dovid, who was sixteen or seventeen, would usually try to ignore them. His eyes would flick up to catch the unexpected motion, and when he saw the two gurning girls, they would flick down again. Generally his face would be grave, his eyes fixed on his prayer book. But sometimes he smiled. And sometimes he would look back up at them and, making sure he could not be observed, stick his tongue out, too. Those were the best moments, the ones they waited for, the ones for which Esti was willing to bear the risk that her mother would look up at the wrong moment and notice her behavior. Once or twice, Esti’s mother noticed and, after synagogue, spoke to her quietly about behavior appropriate to a girl, about the quiet calm that she expected from her. At these times, Esti would listen and nod, but in her heart she knew she would disobey again.

  Esti and Ronit would do other things, too. Before they were twelve, when they were still permitted to enter the men’s section, Ronit once persuaded Esti to help her tie the ends of all the tallits together, in one long row, so that they became confused and tangled when the men stood up for prayer. Ronit would pull Esti out during boring parts of the service, to take part in complicated running, jumping, hopping, skipping games she used to invent in the corridor outside the main synagogue. They grew to have the reputation of “naughty girls,” a matter that would occasionally cause Esti’s parents some concern, some tutting and sighing. Ronit used to say: “We have to do something. Shul’s so boring.” She would roll her eyes.

  Esti was always both shocked and impressed when Ronit spoke like this. A part of her wanted to remind Ronit of what they had learned together in school about God and prayer, about having the proper respect for synagogue and how wrong, how very wrong it was to call it boring. She wanted to mention to Ronit the words of her own father every week in synagogue, the reverence due to the prayers. But she found the words dried up and choked her before she could utter them.

  She wondered, sometimes, how Ronit grew all these ideas, if perhaps they sprouted in the darkness of her head like mushrooms, fostered by the “motherless atmosphere,” as certain plants need greenhouses and special soils. She wondered if she placed her head very close to Ronit’s some of the spores of them might travel into her. She imagined Ronit’s thoughts, light and downy, coming to rest in her brain, sending out first one exploratory root, then another, sinking themselves deep down into the spongy tissue, becoming matted and brain-logged. She would not know at first, as they grew, until the new thoughts began mushroom-popping inside her skull and she would find herself, without warning, different. She would belong to Ronit. Their ideas would be one. She did not know whether this idea pleased or frightened her.

  Esti was surprised, sitting next to Ronit in the synagogue, to find that the place was still the same. She had thought, somehow, over these years, that the building itself, the fixtures and fittings, must have become different. But here, with Ronit here, she could see that was not the case. The place was just the same now as it had been ten years before—so that Esti was almost surprised to find that Ronit was not leaping, running, making faces. She was behaving with perfect propriety, hands folded, following the reading in the Chumash before her. Esti found that she could not behave so correctly. She missed the page, dropped her book, and had to pick it up from the floor and kiss it. She found herself still standing when everyone around her had already sat down. She could not concentrate. She was waiting for something.

  She knew what was coming; she had realized it the previous day with finger-prickling delight. She thought perhaps Ronit might remember what the reading would be today, but had decided not. Esti did not remind her, did not say, “Do you know what day it is tomorrow?” She held the knowledge inside herself and waited for the moment.

  The Torah portion was over. The measured intonations ended. Now there was only the Haftarah to be read, an extract from the writings of the prophets. A soft paper-rustling susurrus whispered in the shul as the congregation turned the pages of their books. The men shuffled. One left the bimah, returned to his seat at the other side of the synagogue. His neighbors shook his hand. Hartog looked up and around, gimlet-eyed.

  “Tomorrow,” he announced, “as we all know is Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan, the first day of the month of Cheshvan. So instead of our usual Haftarah, we will be reading the section for Rosh Chodesh eve.” He announced the page
number in the various editions of the Chumash.

  Esti’s smile reached all the way from her inside to her outside. She felt it tug at the corners of her lips. She promised herself she would not look at Ronit until the reading began, until they had gone, say, ten lines.

  She waited. She wondered if Ronit was waiting, too, if she’d known all along. The reader began. A similar pattern of intonation, but not identical, to differentiate the words of the prophets from the words of Torah. The tones of the Haftarah, more melodic and more poignant than those of the Torah reading, speak so often of faithlessness and betrayal, of Israel’s failures of love toward God. But not today. Esti followed the English with her eyes.

  “Jonathan said to him: ‘Tomorrow is the New Moon, and you will be missed because your seat will be empty…’”

  That wasn’t the best part. Esti’s eyes skipped ahead, flicking through the familiar story. Jonathan was the son of King Saul. David was Jonathan’s closest friend, and King Saul’s favorite musician. King Saul was angry with David, but David had to be sure whether he really meant to harm him. So, together, Jonathan and David made a plan. David would hide in the countryside nearby. He would miss the feast to celebrate the start of the new month. Jonathan would wait to see what Saul did. If all was well, he would send word that David could return. But when Saul saw that David was missing, he was enraged. Jonathan tried to calm his father, but Saul knew that he was trying to protect David. His anger flared and he said: