Authors: Cami Ostman
Beyond Belief (23 page)
Five years earlier the rabbi’s wife had handed me a slim hard-cover book and a black velvet pouch with a stack of small white cloths inside it. For months I studied the details of mikveh immersion, memorizing the minutiae of
taharas mishpacha,
or “family purity.” Weekly meetings with the rebbetzin were filled with the dos and don’ts of mikveh preparation and practice. At the end of each lesson, the rebbetzin always recited a few magical tales about the rekindled romances and marital harmony this ancient practice had spun for our ancestors.
I learned the laws. While bleeding, I was
tumeh
, “unclean,” “closed,” and not permitted to pass the ketchup at the dinner table or remove a stray hair from Geoffrey’s shirt. Until bleeding ceased and an additional seven “clean” days passed, there were to be no words of endearment, no compliments, no goodnight kisses or hugs.
Which was much like the rest of the month. At first, mikveh was my hope of reigniting the physical and emotional passion of a cooling marriage I no longer knew how to warm. This ancient set of rules promised to hold my family together as it had held the Jewish people together for centuries. It seemed worth a try. However, it didn’t take much studying to realize that the whole practice was
mainly orchestrated to maximize the possibility of conception. My days of bleeding plus seven clean days conveniently added up to ovulation. At the moment when Geoffrey and I could reunite, I would be at my most fertile. And if, like a good Orthodox Jew, I used little or no birth control, the possibility of our union falling into the “be fruitful and multiply” category was not left to chance. Those crafty rabbis promised marital bliss and a “honeymoon every month.” What they were really after was double-digit offspring.
I
PULL DOWN MY
skirt until it lies in a ring around my feet, lift up my shirt and bra, and toss them away from the water. Stepping out of my skirt, I roll my underwear down my legs and add them to the pile. In an ordinary mikveh, there is a set of stairs or a small ladder, not to mention a matronly mikveh lady who interrogates you before you are allowed to enter the water. Her job is to look you over for loose skin and recite the final checklist of tasks to make sure you’ve prepared your body properly. I walk to the pond and once again step lightly onto the sharp gravel that quickly gives way to soft mud laced with fish debris. There’s no one there but me. I wade out up to my calves.
The pond is bathwater warm, and I can see steam rising up from the surface. I move deeper, shivering. The water, now past my knees, feels inviting as it envelops my legs. This plunge will change my spiritual status and purify me. I will become
tahor
, opened and cleaned and once again available to my husband’s touch. A touch I can no longer feel. Even though it’s July, the thin air of this massive basin, trapped on all sides by the Rocky Mountains, feels unwelcoming. There are no clouds to keep in the heat of a full day’s blazing sun. No fresh-cut hay, honeybee, or flowering clover lingers
in this thin air. The only sign of the season is the constellations, magnificent Leo at its zenith and Cancer arching forward. A zillion more stars make the sky a solid dome cupping the sunken valley. The mountains circle, their snowcapped peaks reach toward the incomprehensible, toward those twinkling lights, the whole world wrapped in the ribbon of the Milky Way. I see only three lights, the shining faces of my children: Ben and Joel and my baby daughter, Tova. Stretching my arms over my head, I hold my breath and dive farther out until the water reaches my shoulders.
I immerse myself three times, as is the custom. Between each dunk, I stand up and wipe the hair away from my face. After the first dunk, I pause for a moment and recite the proper blessing. I thank God for commanding me to immerse. I ask Him to purify me, to wash away all my sins and sorrows, all my transgressions. I ask this even as I question what these are.
Each time I sink down, holding my breath for as long as I can, I enter the silent and timeless world of the matriarchs, my mothers. In ponds halfway across the globe, in centuries long before I was born, Jewish women bared themselves in water much colder than this. These nameless, faceless women immersed, let themselves be surrounded, let themselves be opened up despite risks, poverty, bad marriages, too many children, famine, pogroms, persecution. Immersing with the strength of women to renew and repurpose again and again. The female body spins itself around in phases like the moon, sometimes full and giving like a ripened fruit, other times meager and hidden like a seed buried underground. I am a Jewish female body performing the commandment a Jewish female body is obligated to perform. This is the moment of purity. This is the moment in which I linger, floating in the darkness. The warm water lifts the weight of my body and the heaviness of my doubts off my bones.
After I finish the third immersion, I swim to where the water is shallow and walk out to the edge of the pond. The air is even colder now as I grab my towel, shuddering. I huddle inside it. Faint wafts of steam come off my body and float out into the night. I scrub my legs and torso with the towel. A fishy odor oils my skin.
In the starlight, I find my clothes lying in a heap on the dirt. My body feels warm and relaxed as I dress quickly and head toward the van. Inside, the air is stifling and thick with sweet pipe smoke. The Everly Brothers croon as I toss my towel onto the floor. “Ooh, la la . . . wake up . . . ” Before I climb inside, I take one last look at the water and the reflection of the stars, one last glimpse at the women watching over me.
Geoffrey turns to me and, coming closer than he has in weeks, gives me a peck on the cheek and squeezes my hand. “All clean?” he asks. And we rattle our way back down the lonely stretch of highway under stars that I hope will guide me, or at least illuminate the long road home.
S
o this is how it happens
, I thought. My brother is lying in my claw-foot tub, naked except for a washcloth over his penis. His olive skin is turning purple and his hands are starting to curl like the leaves of a plant wilting in a time-lapse video. “Dave,” I whisper, hoarse. It is early morning, the room a sea-green hue; light is just starting to bleed through the windows. I grab the plug near Dave’s feet to drain the water, then whip a towel down from the rack so I can cover the rest of his body.
This is how it happens,
my mind repeats.
The moment when everything gets fucked, when a life-altering event changes a family.
All these years we had been spared, my parents and us four kids: all of us relatively healthy, no horrible accidents, my siblings all married now and having meaty, ripe babies. But this was it, I assumed, the moment so many people face, when something goes terribly wrong.
Dave’s eyes, ink-jet blue, piercing, are both the eyes of the person I know today—the quiet, stubborn, creative man who focuses on new hobbies, obsessively, until he masters them—and the eyes of the kid I knew so well, my companion, my little brother, two years younger, who would eat only hot dogs and kicked at the front door, inconsolable, when our parents left us with sitters.
I am the oldest of four. David was number two, and when he arrived I was ready for an ally. At night, when the house was still, I would talk to him through the bars of his crib, telling him we would always be best friends or crying to him if I had been scolded. “At least you still love me,” I would say. In the mornings, I stood in front of a long skinny kitchen cupboard that held the cereal boxes. Dave watched me with curiosity from his windup swing. Before I sat down to eat I always kissed his head, pushed the orange vinyl seat that cupped his warm diaper, and asked, “What should I have, Davey?” He could not talk back, but always looked at me with trusting eyes.
D
AVE’S FACE STARTS TO
lose form; his lip veers down on the left side. He looks at me like he did as a child from that swing, with eyes asking about life, trying to make meaning of the world. “I cawn’t tawlk. Loowk awt my hawnds. Wha is wrong wif me? I cawn’t strwaiten my hawnds,” he says.
“Oh God,” I whisper to myself. My heart is pounding, creating a dull thud I can feel in my ears; blood is surging through my body, like it would at the first deadfall of a roller coaster. “Dave, I’m going to get help.” I grab his tangled hands, hold them in mine, and try to reassure him. “Just breathe.” I run to my bedroom, find my phone, dial 911, run back to Dave. I tell the dispatcher to send someone, quickly, something is wrong with my brother—he might be having a
stroke, or something, I don’t know. I hang up. Dave is slumped over the side of the tub now, still changing color, turning a darker purple, and trying to uncurl his hands. He can’t. He tries to talk again, now with a pause between each word. “Tell. The. Kids—” My chest aches as he starts to relay a message for my precious niece and nephew, one a baby and the other two years old.
He thinks he’s dying.
“Dave,” I look into his eyes. “Dave,” I say, calling whatever part of him that can hear me to absorb my words—to believe what I am about to say. “Dave,” I say, again, cupping his face and stroking his head, “You are going to be okay. Do you hear me?” I feel these words rush through me from a primordial source within my cells. I know, with conviction, what I’m saying is true: “Dave, I promise, you are absolutely going to be okay.”
I am not referring to his body—I have no idea what is happening or what is to come. I am talking about his soul. And this is important because, thirty minutes before, he told me he doesn’t think there is a God.
I
WAS TAUGHT TO
be a witness in tenth grade, when the repetitive, sleepy church my family attended in our hometown of five hundred could no longer feed my growing spiritual hunger.
As a child I felt particularly close to God when I played in the trees that framed our farm. There, with sticks breaking under my feet and the moody prairie sky overhead, I knew God could hear me. Evidence abounded. When I was eight I found a wounded robin. Terrified our dog would eat her, I put on yellow rubber gloves, scooped the bird into my hands, and gently lobbed it into the air. Instead of taking flight she tumbled to the ground. I tried again and again, desperate to save her. Finally, not knowing what else to do, I
knelt in the soft grass and prayed. When I opened my eyes the robin took a few steady steps and flew away.
In the church I attended as a child, though, God felt far away. Every Sunday I repeated prayers out of the green Lutheran Book of Worship, listened to the sermon, and then feasted from a spread of potluck dishes that glistened like an acre of bubbling, volcanic earth at Yellowstone. Afterward my family returned to our farm, where we shed our church clothes and napped like a pride of lions on our parents’ waterbed until our next feeding. For most of my early life this was how I understood religion: as a routine, and separate from the God I felt in nature.
As a teenager, influenced by my best friend, Jessica, I started to listen to Christian music—swoony, dreamy, enchanting music. The voices stirred a yearning in me for the sweet feeling of God that eluded me in church but that I felt in the trees. The voices in this music called to me from the world beyond my small Lutheran church. Jessica and I started to exchange Bible verses in notes too. Looking up the verse she handed me each day was like finding a secret code, leading me deeper into a relationship with God. Within months of our transformation we decided to attend a Christian youth gathering in a larger town.
The gathering was unlike anything I had ever experienced. At first I thought people acted rather strangely, walking around in an otherworldly coma, asking if I had been saved. But then I started to get into the flow of the event. Christian rock bands performed, we danced and sang, speakers preached to us about turning our lives over to God, and at breaks we gathered in small groups to talk. In these groups people wept, moved by the Holy Spirit.
This new way of experiencing God, with riveting emotion—led by leaders who identified as “saved” or “born-again” and not by a
denomination—appealed to my spiritually disposed young mind. At the retreat I was awash in a love so palpable I felt as if I was being drenched in holy oil. The air I breathed was electrified, perfumed by lilacs, budding apple trees, and ripe cherries—even though I was inside. The universe seemed charged, alive, and connected to the divine. So when one of the speakers asked us to raise our hands if we were ready to recommit our lives to God, I stretched mine into the air.
