Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(7)

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.

“Excuse me,” I said, trying my best to seem pleasant. “Could you tell me where is the mikveh?”