Onion River

If I had been honest with myself, Onion River didn’t deserve a name. But I wasn’t honest, not then, not about the things that made me feel small. It was a tiny stream that dried up in summer and only ever had tadpoles swimming in it, bugs skimming the surface. We could hop across it with one foot. We would play explorers and follow it down to the storm drain that cut it off. We named it Onion River because we once found wild onions growing near the bank. But only once.

            Down the porch steps, through the backyard, over the wired fence all twisted up and standing wrong, past the haunted house, through the neighbor’s backyard, into the patch of trees, and there it was. That thin thing of water littered with plastic bottles and beer cans. Me and my brothers, we’d stay there till it got dusky and then dark, when the fireflies appeared and set about flashing, our hands darting out to catch them on the mouth of a Bud Light. Raffy liked to cup them and then clap his palms together. The first time he did it, I kicked him in the shins. He only laughed at me, showed me the streak of dead bug, and then I had to give it up, because no matter how furious it made me, I didn’t want to prove anyone right, I didn’t want to be the girl. I was always trying to prove myself then, as I am now, as if wild is a thing you could learn. I didn’t clean the dirt from my fingernails or brush my hair like that would make my skirt any less obvious. The boys are grown now, we all are, but they have wives and kids and shul memberships, and I’m a twenty-eight-year-old still trying to capture the freedom they once had.

            It wasn’t all trying. I could roller-skate like no one else in the neighborhood and I picked up earthworms after rain. Ma hated it. She was no adventurer, no dreamer. I told her all my plans and was haughty about it. I’d be a mountain climber, and then a pilot, and then a scuba diver, and then a mountain climber again. She’d say, “Now, be reasonable, Alta. The world doesn’t go the way you want.” She’d say, “You get what life gives you and that’s it. It’s worthless asking for more.” I didn’t care about any of that. Beggars can’t be choosers be damned; I was going to choose the hell out of my life.

—

I don’t know why it was me who got the house. Probably because Ma thought it would be funny. She was always like that. She liked irony. Raffy said it was because she ended up somewhere she never thought she’d be and now she had to make it everyone else’s problem. Shua said she was just bored. I said she was a sad, cruel, lonely old woman and that was all there was to it, and then Shua told me to shut up because that was plain disrespectful. I used to hear that a lot: disrespectful. I wanted to tell her, “I gave a lovely speech at your funeral” but she probably wouldn’t be happy with it. I rewrote it ten times too. I thought it was pretty damn good.

It was weird coming back to the house, the same way it’s weird to come back to anything old. Ma moved into an apartment a couple years before the end, because it was getting too hard for her to get up and down the steps, but the mortgage was paid off and Ma was sentimental, at least in that way. I thought she’d left it to Shua, because he was the oldest, but then Shua called me up, a week after the funeral and said, “It’s yours,” and I said, “Like hell it is,” and he said, “Can’t you go one sentence without swearing?” and I said, “Hell is not a swear word, do you want to hear a swear word?” and he said, “I’m not kidding, Alta, it’s yours, she wanted you to have it,” and I said, “No way I’m going back there.”

And yet I did. Blame it on my four-hundred square foot, moldy-walled Chinatown apartment, or maybe on the fact that I was getting ready to quit my office job, because I hated calling up people who hated getting my calls, seeing how far I could get through my script before they took mercy on me. I was nearing thirty and had little to show for it, and I figured why not? Maybe I could get religious again. Or maybe I could spend a few months reminiscing before I sold the place, if I can.

“What are you going to do in Monsey?” asked Shua when I came by for a Shabbos meal. “You hate Monsey.”

I shrugged.

“You can’t keep reinventing your life every few years,” he said.

“I can do whatever I want,” I said. “I own a house.”

—

            I moved back to Monsey in the winter. The roads were wet and gray with snow and I had to drive carefully. My car was a silver 1996 Chrysler minivan I bought off of Shua for $1,000 when his family upgraded, and I thought the trip might kill it, but it didn’t. When I started recognizing streets, that’s when it hit me what I was doing. The GPS told me to go one way, but I knew better—and that decision, the left turn on Oak Hill Road, jolted the child out of me. I had this dread, like I was coming home to Ma and would have to explain what I was doing, why I looked the way I did. Then I shook my head and shook it out. I moved in like an adult but couldn’t bring myself to sleep in her room. I made my bed in my old room in the basement. I checked my savings and the property tax and figured I could wait to find a job till March.

            The haunted house was gone: a perfectly normal two-story stood in its place. The house once seemed like the most terrifying thing in the world: the overgrown moss on the wooden steps, peeled paint around the windows. It had only ever been an empty lot. We had all been too cowardly to get close: Shua claimed we could be arrested for trespassing, Raffy suffered from a recurring nightmare where he’d wake up chained in the attic, and I thought my father’s ghost would greet me there. The tangle of decay didn’t fit right in our world. Our adventures had to be manufactured from innocuous creeks. We thought we were forging our own way—in truth, we were in a playground.

Our habit had been to draw the curtains at night or else Raffy would wake up sweating through his sheets. Now, there was no looming figure in the dark—I could see into the lit upstairs bedroom. Once I watched the father tuck his son into bed. He kissed him on the forehead and switched the overheads for a moon-shaped nightlight. I thought I might cry from the tenderness of his protection. Then the father left, closing the door slowly, and I was shaking, the radiator was humming and the kitchen was so hot. I wanted to keep watch, stand over the kid’s bed with straight posture and a sword and protect him from whatever might come. I slept a little, woke up damp. Returned to the routine. There was something about it that I still could not bear.

            It snowed through February. The cold wore me out and holed me in. I removed my piercings and wondered if the skin would close, bought maxiskirts from a tznius boutique and stared at my modest shape in the mirror. I stuffed Ma’s things in the attic without looking at them. I walked to shul on Fridays and made small talk with the women. I waited for the thaw.

—

            Baila Levinson was desperate for friendship in a way that first made me uncomfortable: I wasn’t used to such familiarity. But soon I realized it was a blessing. I had an off-putting nature and besides, most women my age in Monsey were married, had four kids. There was nothing they wanted to talk to me about, and nothing I could think to say to them. Baila was an older single like me. She lived with her parents a few blocks over and worked at a daycare. I was convinced she was a lesbian when we met, and I thought once we got close she’d confess to me, and we’d make out or something, but instead Baila talked about marriage and men with a fervor not unlike the Rabbi’s speeches. And she was uncomfortable with the idea of queerness. I’d had sex with both boys and girls. I knew that bringing up half of my experience would jeopardize my position in the community, and I wondered, then, why I bothered coming home, trying to fit in, when I thought what they thought was wrong, when I felt like a crude facsimile of myself in the long skirts. But I wasn’t ready to leave yet.

            “The problem is,” she said on our second get-together, “that I’m picky. Me.” She jabbed her finger into her chest. It was the bris of her high school classmate’s third baby. I barely knew anyone, and she didn’t want to simper at such an obvious representation of her inadequacy, so we were in the corner eating tuna bagels. “I don’t want to get married to any schlub that gives me the light of day. I’m waiting for Hashem to provide me my soulmate. It’s not my time, he’s decided, and yet everyone looks at me like it’s my fault.” A few moments later, the little boy was named and wailing, and she turned to me crying, saying, “I’d do anything, Alta, anything, to have a husband right now.”

            I liked how girlish, emotional she was, how every sentence sounded like a whine. Next to her, I was stoic and composed, I had the prestige I used to see my brothers carry. Intelligent, mature. Goodhearted. I’d befriended the lonely spinster and yet did not succumb to her degradation. I invited Baila to move in with me after three weeks, like a hero who takes the oldest dog from the kennel. It was only after she had saddled the bed with her bedsheets, placed her Lactaid in the fridge, and told me to get out of my pajamas in the morning that I realized how much she reminded me of my mother. Maybe I missed her grievances, or maybe I needed to be shamed to function.

            Ma used to buy me nice bras and check that I was wearing them to school. Every outing was a chance, she figured, and I had to be ready. She’d sit me down at the table and dab at my face with cheap drugstore makeup. “Only a little bit,” she’d say, patting concealer beneath my eyes, “so you’ll get all the boys.” There were no boys at my school, but any man walking down the street could be a prospect. I imagined she’d try to be present for the consummation of my marriage if she could. She took it personally that I had never married in her lifetime.

            “I gave you a shadchan’s number,” said Baila one day. “Her name is Mrs. Springer and she’s incredible. She could find a match for anyone.”

            “Except for you, apparently,” I wanted to say. My mother had done the same when I turned eighteen, but I was out of the house then and refused to pick up. Every time we spoke on the phone, she mentioned a boy she thought would be perfect for me, and I’d get so angry. “I really think you’d like him,” she’d say, but it was a meaningless sentiment, she didn’t know what I liked. “I’m not frum,” I’d reply, “and I’m never going to be frum, so leave me alone already or I’m going to block your number.” They were empty threats.

            Here I was, frum. I was keeping Shabbos, eating kosher, and I knew marriage came next. All of it was hollow—it was like I was playing a part until the ice melted. I’d find onions at the creek, then pack my shit and go sin in some new nowhere. The house seemed so familiar all of the sudden, and I thought of the funeral. I spent hours trying to figure out which words described my mother, and came up with persevering, because it sounded nicer than wheedling. Maybe she knew I’d come back—maybe that’s why I got the house. I wasn’t nearly as unpredictable as I liked to believe.

            I missed her, in that keen bitter way, so I made an appointment. Only when she couldn’t see me could I behave.

—

            It was the coldest winter in twenty years, the weatherman said, and I was getting impatient. I ran the heat high in the house like it would change the weather outside. I took up smoking cigarettes again, a habit Baila hated. She complained about the smell, the way it clung to my fingers. She told me it made me seem like a boy. Something about that thrilled me; one time I went through an entire pack because she was watching, and then threw up off the porch. The bile stained the snow yellow.

            Mrs. Springer lived only a few blocks away and I decided to walk there. I had been chain-smoking all day, trying to shake off an anxiety I couldn’t understand. Then Baila came home and told me I stunk, so I showered and scrubbed my hands till they were red. Tied my wet hair back and refused the ride Baila offered me. My boots made big prints in the snow: a fresh layer had fallen the night before and hadn’t yet been packed hard into itself, and each time I stepped down a lightness would greet me, like it was the ground before the ground. I hated the sound of snow. The crunch put my teeth on edge.

            “Welcome, welcome,” Mrs. Springer said, swinging the door open as soon as I knocked. The instant I stepped over the threshold she gave me a hug as if she knew me, and I realized immediately there was nothing she could do to change my life. I wanted some excuse to leave but I had become meek in my time with Baila. She overpowered me in a strange way: I didn’t respect her, and she often irritated me, but I wanted her near, if only to tell me I was doing everything wrong. I followed Mrs. Springer into her office and sat down on the brown leather chair. She opened a notebook and wrote my name at the top of a page. Alta Lanfeld, big letters, upside down from my point of view.

            “So,” she said. I wondered if I was supposed to make small talk, field the transition from introduction to consultation. But I kept quiet, fidgeting a bit, and Mrs. Springer didn’t look uncomfortable at all. “I like to start with a question that everybody hates: tell me about yourself.”

            “Why start with it if everyone hates it?” I asked.

            “Hm,” she said, like she hadn’t thought about it.

            “I grew up here. I’m the youngest, two brothers, twenty-eight. I moved to the city when I was eighteen, bounced around a bit, and came back here a few weeks ago. Worked in sales.” Maybe I’d always been this meager—a thought that hit me in middle of this fact-regurgitation. I paused. “What else do you want to know?”

            “What else do you want people to know about you?”

            “I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to tell her that I had nothing: no religious fervor, no interesting hobbies, no warmth, no stories, just flitting place to place, molding myself into the most banal environments, absorbing none of the life around me. There was a funny thing I encountered when I left the frum world, how Jews without a religious upbringing used the word chutzpah. To them it was a compliment, synonymizing confidence. But here, in the Orthodox world, chutzpah meant disrespect. Speaking out of turn. A child spitting ugly words. I read de Beauvoir and theorized that I was referred to with that word because of misogyny, that it was a way to shut up loud girls. I was so proud of the idea, until I realized that I had nothing to say beyond it, that it was just something I wanted to believe. I was chutzpadik and now I am crass, and everyone who had ever been patient with me had wasted their time.

            Mrs. Springer had waited, like if she was silent I’d continue, but that was all I had. I blinked and smiled a bit and finally she broke, asking me what kind of guy I was looking for. “And don’t say someone nice,” she said. “Everyone says someone nice.”

            “I’d hate a nice guy,” I said, and it was the truth but the wrong answer. Mrs. Springer laughed as if it was a joke, scribbled something down, and I wanted to explain to her that I was serious. The way men would trace my body after sex, how it made me cringe and kick them out. I hated the idea that they felt close to me. I preferred it when they choked me without asking if I liked that. “Someone who listens to me,” I told her. “Someone who’s got answers. Confident, knows what he needs.”

            I wanted a puppeteer.

            “I was off the derech for a while,” I said.

            “Oh,” said Mrs. Springer. “That’s alright. You found your way back.”

            “Baruch Hashem.” I looked around her office. Out the window, snow was falling again and it was getting dark.

            Mrs. Springer asked more questions and I answered them. Baila and Shua would serve as my references, no I didn’t want to move to Israel, divorced or widowed was fine, I understood I was old already. Are you okay with him already having kids? I hadn’t thought about that, but I said yes.

            “That should cover it,” she said when forty-five minutes had passed. I gathered my coat and put on my mittens as she walked me to the door. “I’ll call around and get back to you if I find a potential match.”

            I was planning on walking back but Baila was waiting for me outside, her car spitting out hot air. “Nu,” she said. “How’d it go?”

            “Should be married by the end of the week,” I said. I wanted her to laugh but she just got a dreamy look on her face.

            “It’s all going to work out,” she said. “We’re going to get engaged at the same time, married together, pregnant together.”

            I rolled down the window, let the cold air hit my face. Put a cigarette between my teeth. “Don’t you dare light that right now,” Baila said. I didn’t.

            Raffy and Shua used to come home late from yeshiva smelling like smoke and dried-down beer, arguing over the daf yomi in words I only half-understood. I would follow them into the kitchen as they shoved schnitzel in their mouths and kept talking with their mouths open. Sometimes I’d interject, trying to show off my knowledge of Rashi and halacha, but everything I said was so simple. It was like telling a physicist about gravity. They’d pause, look at me with the same look, and go right back to their conversation. Once I followed them down to Onion River and they were smoking, stubbing the buds out on wet rocks. “Hey, pass one over,” I said, trying to be casual, but they could always see my desperation.

            “Alta wants to smoke,” said Shua to Raffy, like they were sharing a joke.

            “Our little girl is growing up,” said Raffy. He leaned over and pinched my cheek and I slapped him away.

            My face was red but I shrugged. “I’ve done it before,” I lied.

            “Alright,” said Raffy, “but you have to roll it.” He passed the bag of tobacco and papers and filters, and of course I didn’t know how. I pinched the thin tobacco strings in my fingers and tried to lay them down, and rolled the paper all lumpy, but it wouldn’t stick, and the filter kept falling out.

            “Usually boys do this part for me,” I said. They were watching me so closely, nodding mockingly with each step of mine. But this stopped that. They drew away, looked at me with hard disgust.

            “You’re a zonah?” said Shua, and he spat into the stream. I knew what it meant for a girl to pall around with boys but it was the first time I’d been called a whore.

            Raffy reached out and took the tobacco. I was holding my deformed cigarette tightly and he yanked it from my hand and threw it in the water. And then they both left. I spent the rest of the night kicking rocks and telling myself I was never going home. When I finally got too tired and too cold, I found they had locked me out and I had to get in through the broken kitchen window.

            They surely knew it was a lie. I was fourteen, none of the boys in the community even looked at me and I certainly didn’t have the courage to talk to them. The suggestion itself was enough, the danger of having a sister. My boobs were growing and I was fussy about my hair. Every girl was a liability eventually.

            And Ma—on the wrong end of a divorce, begging her ex-husband to take her back until he died—was convinced, heretically, it was body, not soul, that kept men. I never wanted to look at mine, showering in the dark, turning away from compliments. No matter how much I hid from it, no matter the shame. If my body wouldn’t be seen, it would be imagined.

            Baila pulled into the driveway. I went to the master bathroom, Ma’s sanctuary, and stripped off my clothes. In the long mirror I shifted into an anatomy lesson. The hair over my pubis, the distance between my breasts, cut into segments. When I moved away, I pretended I was experienced, and soon I was, and so many strangers touched my body, moaned approval as I stared at the ceiling. “You’re like a sex doll,” a lesbian once told me. She was masculine and sexy and talked about queer history, and she kept stopping to ask me if I liked it. It was so kind it turned me off. She sat up and that was when she said that, and it made me finally want to fuck her more than anything, but she was leaving, she wanted to go home.

            I was good—I hadn’t slept with anyone since I moved, but I masturbated after Baila left for work and thought about it in shul, looking over the mechitzah. It made me sick, my own perversion. I thought everyone could see it on me. That’s why I agreed to go to the shadchan. If I were married, I’d be decent. I put my clothes back on.

            “I picked up sushi,” Baila said when I returned. It was the cheap plastic kind from the kosher market and it had been discounted because it was a day old. I ate it on the couch, spilling soy sauce on the cushion. Ma would’ve shouted at me for an hour but I could just watch it dry. Baila clicked her tongue when she saw it. I pretended not to notice.

            “I feel like you’re not really serious about getting married,” she said. She didn’t sit on the couch. She sat at the dining room table and dabbed wasabi on her salmon roll.

            My mouth was full so I shrugged. The fish had a strange texture and I had to force myself to swallow. I wasn’t going to eat the rest of it—I had dripped soy sauce on my mother’s couch for nothing. I wanted to say, I hate all of it, everything about desire. I wanted to say, I don’t know how to be this kind of woman.

            “It makes me feel like my body’s being ripped away,” I said.

            “You know what,” said Baila, and she had this contemplative tone, “I think you feel that way because of the time you weren’t religious. For the goyim everything is physical. But we know that dating is about souls. That’s why we don’t touch before marriage. The body isn’t the important part of the relationship.”

            I wished I was a predator, I wished I could grow spikes and spit venom, and that I could parade around bare and no one would approach me, that I would be dangerous and safe. What protection did a long skirt give? It was just a reminder that there was something to be guarded. That day my mother had sat the three of us down and told us our father had died, the office building he’d been inspecting had collapsed. A freak accident. I was on her lap and I could feel her body trembling, couldn’t see her face. I think I was the first to understand what it meant, though Raffy and Shua had two years on me, and it felt like every bone in my body had softened, but not from grief; it was relief, the thought, the weird way he’d touch me, he won’t do that anymore. I felt saved. And then the twins started to cry, and I became hard again, I was so stiff. I was five and could never be forgiven.

            “Your phone’s ringing,” Baila said.

            I flipped it open. It was Mrs. Springer. “I know we just spoke but I have a guy for you,” she said. “A great guy, divorced, a real yeshiva bochur. He’s—”

            I closed the phone and went to my room. From the back of the closet, I retrieved a pair of pants and a tank top, just sitting there these past few months, and changed into them. It was time to go. I hadn’t even made it to the thaw. I packed up so quickly. The skirts were left on their hangers and I didn’t bother emptying the fridge. Let it all rot. I left through the back door to put it in my car.

            When I returned, Baila looked me up and down and didn’t dignify my outfit with a response. I felt like a humiliated child. “I’m leaving Monsey,” I said. “You’re going to have to find somewhere else to live.”

            “Where are you going?” she asked, light-hearted-like. She didn’t think I was serious.

            “Vegas,” I said. “To fulfill my lifelong dream of being a stripper.”

            “There’s something wrong with you,” she said. She looked me right in the eyes and tried to put on an air of concern, but the disgust was so obvious. “I hope you can get help.”

Finally she’s seeing me, I thought. I am crazed.

            I left her there. I didn’t bother putting on a coat and sat freezing in the car until it warmed up. The shivering, and then the respite of hot air, made me feel less dead. She didn’t follow me outside. Shua had been the one to find the onions, and we had dug them up so eagerly. They had white green stems and we decided we’d make a soup, surprise Ma. But we never even brought them inside. We just looked at our bounty, our soil-stained hands, and left them in the grass.

Light flecks of snow hit the windshield. I was going to go somewhere with a big warm ocean. I thought I could be a teacher, but I had nothing to teach—what I really wanted was to hold a baby all day. She would sleep the whole time, and my arms would never tire, and I could just stand there holding her. I pulled onto the highway. My left arm formed a cradle.