It sounds ridiculous to say it now, but I did not consider the possibility that I might get pregnant once your father and I began having sex. I assumed you had to do something special-something only married people knew to do-to actually make a baby. I didn’t associate the domestic burden of a child with the physical pleasure of our sweaty afternoons in Coney Island. But when I told your father, he felt differently. He said we should have been more careful.
The first weeks I didn’t feel much. Your father immediately took the burden of preparing for your arrival onto himself, and I let myself be pulled along. First to the doctor to get a test, and then to his parents. He had told me his family was close. Brian and his older brother, Charles. The Roberts boys and Mom and Dad. Mom a school nurse and church choirmaster; Dad working in an office for Walt Disney. I was prepared to face them as if they were my parents. But their anger lasted what seemed like mere seconds, and then there was joy: a baby! And all was forgiven when your father said we were getting married.
But I did not want to get married. Men in Brooklyn change when they marry. My cousin Pesach’s husband was a nice boy when they got engaged. He took her out to restaurants and they talked about traveling together. But when they got married she said he became nervous and strict with her. She said he was consumed by the fear that she might shame him in some way, by dressing inappropriately or saying something that would offend someone. And when a year passed and she wasn’t pregnant, he grew even more frantic, and the fear turned him cold. Pesach told me they had problems having sex. She said it hurt when he tried to put his penis in her.
“Did you go to the doctor?” I asked her. I was seventeen then.
“I did, but he said there is nothing wrong.” She lowered her voice. “He said the problem is in my head.”
I could not see your father becoming like Pesach’s husband, but I also could not see running a thousand miles from home just to end up in exactly the same life-married with a baby by twenty-as if I’d stayed. It was just too crushing. I’m sorry, Rebekah, but that is the way it felt. I managed to postpone the wedding until after you were born, and then your father postponed it because he started to see what was happening.
Your grandparents moved us into the bedroom in their basement once I began showing. Brian went to classes during the day and I took walks and cleaned the house. It was easy, wiping and washing and vacuuming. I had done it for my mother most of my life, and it made your grandmother very happy. We did not get along well, she and I. I was not the good Christian girl she imagined her oldest boy would marry, and I did not know how to talk to her about where I came from. When we talked, it was about you. She told me she had been hormonal through both her pregnancies and that she understood it must be difficult for me to be so far away from my family. They invited me to church every Sunday but I did not go.
Once you came, my mind began to turn against me. You were beautiful, with milky blue eyes and tiny ears that curled at the top just like your father’s. But I knew I could not take care of you. I knew it the moment I first saw you, all swaddled tight by the nurses, your eyes barely open. I knew there was no way I could be trusted to keep you alive. I fell backward into that feeling of helplessness and your father basically kept us both alive for the first few weeks. He changed your diapers and woke me when you needed to feed. My breasts were enormous. I had half-waking nightmares that they would smother you to death. My mother gave birth to five more after me, but I never saw her breast-feed. I believe she did, but in private. Exposing her breasts to the family-even the girls-would have been considered unacceptably immodest in our home. I heard your father whisper to his brother that I hadn’t smiled since giving birth. I suppose he thought I should be joyful, but to smile felt as impossible as to fly. Sadness pulled at the corners of my mouth, and exhaustion coated my skin like a liquid iron cape.
After a month, he introduced the idea of a baptism.
“I will not have my child marked by your God!” I screamed at him.
I was sitting up in bed and he was standing across the room we shared, holding you. He turned you away from my voice.
“Aviva,” he said, patiently, always patiently, “please, be reasonable. She is my daughter, too. You know this is important to me.”
I should have known. From the very beginning I’d pretended that your father’s support for my rejection of my religious upbringing meant that he was also moving away from his faith. But I hadn’t really been listening to him. He had supported my rejection of the suffocating, sexist daily rituals that my community insisted were the only path to God. He had not, I realized, supported rejecting God. He was not Jewish-which is part of what drew me to him-but that did not mean he did not live his life according to how he believed God wanted him to. It was just a different God and a different way. I cried and cried and he asked me to please tell him what he could do. But what could he do? He was a religious man and religious men are all the same: they turn to God for answers they cannot come up with themselves. They trust God, but the only thing I trusted was me.
He relented for a while, and one day, when we were driving back from one of your doctor’s appointments, he made a detour past a building. A shul.
“It’s Reform,” he said. “I thought maybe you could see what it was like. Maybe it’s just different enough to feel… okay?”
When we got home I went to bed and dreamt I was in the shul in Roseville, where we buried Rivka. I held you out to my mother but she did not extend her arms.
“Her name is Rebekah,” I said.
“No,” she said. She shook her head. There were other women all around her. My aunts and sisters and cousins. They all shook their heads. “No.”
“Yes, Mommy,” I said. I pushed your little body into her chest, but her hands were clasped tightly at her waist. I let go and you fell. Your screams shook the shul. I looked up and all the men were above, in the women’s balcony, reciting the mourner’s kaddish.
Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba
I waved my arms and tried to cry out; I felt the scream coming up strong from my stomach, then turning to dust in my mouth. Nothing but a whistle against the howl of their prayers, growing louder and louder. The women joining in.
b’al’ma di v’ra khir’utei
“Niddah,” said my mother, her face ugly with disgust. “You have not been to the mikveh.”
It’s true, I thought. I have not been to the mikveh.
I looked down and you were no longer on the ground. I was not wearing shoes. I looked up and there was Rivka. Eleven years old forever. Puffy red hair, perpetually chapped lips, the thin scar on the underside of her chin from when she tumbled down the steps in front of our apartment building as a toddler. Her eyes swollen shut.
“Rebekah is dead,” said my mother.
I woke up sweating, the sheets around me damp. Sunlight everywhere. Always sunlight. I had to find a mikveh.
The next day was Friday and I put on a long skirt and borrowed your grandmother’s bicycle to ride to the shul. I rode a circle around the parking lot. One entire wall was glass windows. When the sun went down, I went inside. Fewer than half the seats were occupied. Men and women sat together. Some of the men’s heads were uncovered. A woman wearing coral-colored lipstick and a sleeveless dress handed me a paper program. It was all in English. It was all wrong. I sat in the back, soaked in the sadness I still could not shake. I wanted to ask about the mikveh. I wondered if the matron would allow me to bathe. The service began with music coming from somewhere I could not see. The rabbi was clean-shaven and wore a white satin kippah on his head. He was very tan, and he spoke about something that had appeared in TIME magazine. Everyone sang together. It was over in less than an hour. People walked up the plush carpeted center aisle, some wearing flip-flops, and out into the hall where there were tables set with food and wine. There were happy moments in my childhood, and many of them involved eating. But I felt nothing when I looked at the bountiful Shabbos meal that evening. I had come for one reason. I saw the woman with the lipstick and approached her.