Chapter 11

11

Hanging out with Wyatt has clicked something into place in my mind. A determination, maybe, to finally pull my shit together. Or perhaps it’s inspiration—like he’s just that good at planting himself in my mind and growing there.

I’m still suffering from the paralysis of not knowing how to start, though. You should take Michal up on her invitation, a voice repeats in the back of my head every time I see her on Monday. The idea of going to Shabbos still makes me want to slam my head into an anvil. Only I don’t have to go to Shabbos dinner to hang out with her. Right?

I sit on the idea the rest of the day, paralyzed by my own indecisiveness. Or maybe it’s not indecisiveness. Maybe it’s something much more insidious. Something like fear.

But the whole thing turns out to be much more bloodless than I imagined.

We decide to meet for coffee at this place down in the East Village between classes. It’s half bookshop, half café, with full-size windows that swing open so that the place feels like an extension of the sidewalk. I’ve never been to Europe, but this is what I’ve always imagined being in Paris might feel like: sitting at a table with a breeze in your hair and a demitasse cup of espresso at your fingertips.

Michal gives a dramatic shudder. “Speak no evil. I really need to read all the books I already have before I go off and buy more.”

I have to fight not to show a reaction. I didn’t expect a visibly frum woman to casually disclose that she’s in a lesbian relationship. It’s so far from how I grew up. Sure, there were queer people in my community, but they kept their mouths shut about it. Chaya was a lesbian, but I was the only one she ever told; she knew damn well she was going to end up matched to a nice boy from good yichus just like the rest of us.

I suppose Michal could be a super-progressive form of Modern Orthodox? I honestly feel a little creepy trying so hard to figure her out, but she fascinates me.

She has everything I always wished I had growing up.

She laughs. “I didn’t say I was good at it. But yeah, I started with that before getting into photography.”

Another surprise. I’d just assumed that Michal—like me—grew up in a religious family. That she went to private school and studied Torah and Hebrew as I did. But she chose to become observant. She wasn’t FFB, or frum from birth; she walked into that life with her eyes wide open.

I’ve only met one ba’al teshuva—an observant Jew who was raised more secular—in my life. But my father said that according to the Talmud, a ba’al teshuva stands higher in heaven than even the most righteous scholar because their passion for Torah is greater.

Michal crumbles the corner of her scone between her fingers. “It’s cool that you always knew you wanted to do photography, though. I feel like most young artists aren’t nearly that focused.”

I smile slightly; I can’t help myself. “That was because of my father. He got me a camera when I was ten, and then it was basically over for me. I couldn’t stop taking pictures of absolutely everything. My dad had to literally hide my camera on Shabbos so I wouldn’t be tempted.”

I wish. But I left them behind along with all the other artifacts of my old life. No doubt they’re rotting away in my parents’ storage space now—if my parents didn’t just throw them out. “No. I have no idea where they ended up. Probably for the best, though; I’m sure they’re embarrassingly bad. It’s cringeworthy enough to look at the stuff I created when I first moved to LA.”

I feel like Michal is being nice by asking a lot of questions about me and my life, but I would honestly rather hear more about hers. My time in LA is split into two halves: the four years I spent in a haze of drugs and liquor, and the four years since I got clean. I’d just as soon pretend the first four never existed.

And to a certain extent, the way it was in LA was necessary. You had to make a living somehow. I got a job as a barista after I got clean—lots of long days and nights headed home smelling of burnt milk—but I supplemented my income with freelance gigs on the side. Truly, if I never shoot a wedding or maternity session again, it’ll be too soon.

The self-consciousness that comes with talking about myself nonstop is too much. I wave a hand and say, “Anyway, I’m boring. What about you? You’ve always lived in the city?”

Michal’s life seems so far away from mine. She has a wife and a stepkid and clearly has some kind of Orthodox Jewish community that loves and accepts her for who she is. I hate myself a little for envying her. It just seems like it was so easy: She must have had the support of her parents from the start. She never went off the rails. Never blew up her entire life.

I would give anything for just a fraction of what she has.

I would give anything to go back.

TEN YEARS AGO

The party was somewhere in Williamsburg.

I used to know Williamsburg as home of the Satmar Chassidim, a path of Judaism that felt as far from mine as Chabad probably felt to secular people. But in this Williamsburg, people wore wigs that were hot pink and made of polyester; the men’s hats looked more like hipster rip-offs of a Satmar flat biber than anything else. I felt like Alice falling into Wonderland there—or maybe that was just the drugs.

I didn’t know how long it’d been since I took the pills. I could tell they were Oxy, though, because as soon as I’d snorted them I’d felt my ears pop and heat flood my chest, my cheeks. And then I was drifting in a seamless dreamland, slipping between the bodies, navigating the furniture like I weighed nothing—like I had no mass but was just a shadow passing through time and space.

A hand closed around my wrist and tugged me down. I went easy, and the sofa opened up to catch me, a patient mother with warm arms. Chaya’s nose nuzzled my cheek and her breath was hot, her kneecaps butting up against my thigh.

She wasn’t, according to most people. Her face was too pinched. Her mouth was too thin. She was so skinny you could see her spine jutting through her shirt. But other people are stupid and bad at art.

Chaya Mushka Levy was art.

I closed my eyes, obedient. I tried to feel Chaya’s heartbeat through her thighs, tried to merge us into one beast. Her hand had its own rhythm, sliding against my skin.

Someone came up. I could hear them talking to Chaya, a low rumble of a voice. She answered and there was the click of a lighter, the buzz of something boiling in a pipe bowl. I felt Chaya’s stomach shifting when she inhaled, then blew out. The smell of fresh-cut grass was thick like smoke.

Chaya shifted, extracting herself from under my weight. I protested, briefly, but then she was back, her head tilted against mine on the sofa cushion, our bodies reaching away from each other like the two hands of a clock. Her skin was slightly damp where it touched mine. I twisted enough to catch a glimpse of her, the edge of the silhouette of her face, her cinnamon-brown curls stuck to her temples.

I hummed. My head felt like it was stuffed full of cotton balls. I had a song stuck in my brain on a loop: “Lecha Dodi,” the song we would sing on Erev Shabbos—the night the Sabbath begins—to welcome the Shabbos Queen.

Let us go, my beloved, to greet the bride.

When I pictured her, the Shabbos bride, that sweet evening queen, I pictured Chaya Mushka in white.

I had to pee.

The bathroom was down the hall to the left. I stood outside of it for forever, leaning against the wall, trying not to stare at the girl in front of me, who was on her phone playing Candy Crush. Her score was, like…super high. She probably got to play in class. I suspected her school didn’t confiscate phones at the start of day.

I pulled the door shut behind me and dropped down onto the toilet, legs stretching out until the toes of my shoes hit the wall. My legs looked awkward without tights. Not like the legs of these other girls with their curves and polished, exfoliated skin. All I could see when I looked at my legs was the gooseflesh pocks where hairs used to be.

Fuck, okay. Focus.

I managed to pee a little.

When I saw my reflection in the mirror as I was washing up, I decided I didn’t look like myself. I looked way cooler than my actual self. The makeup Chaya and I had bought at Duane Reade the week before had clearly worked. My hair was as messy as ever, but it looked intentional, like I probably played bass guitar and smoked clove cigarettes and had a boyfriend named Axel. Pretending to be goyish looked good on me.

Perish the thought.

Okay, fine, not goyish. That night I was just a different kind of Jewish girl. The kind that went to parties with really good drugs.

I left the restroom, but I didn’t go back to Chaya. I figured, Let her enjoy herself, find some goyish girl to make out with in a corner somewhere. I went into the bedroom instead, to find the guy who had given me the Oxy. I asked him if he had more.

He shrugged. “Venmo me.”

I almost told him I didn’t have Venmo either, but that would have been a lie. It was just tied to my parents’ bank account. They didn’t mind me using it to pay back friends for lunch or an Uber ride. Maybe they wouldn’t notice this charge. For all they knew, “gregnaut” was somebody’s cousin or something.

I nodded and he let me scan his Venmo code and waited as I picked an emoji. I settled on the cheeseburger one because snorting pills off this guy’s iPad probably wasn’t kosher either. But once they were up my nose I was leaning back, I was falling, I was hitting the pillows with a happy sigh, and I didn’t care what my parents might say.

Inject it directly into my veins, I thought, then laughed because that was, in fact, something people actually did with these pills.

I was too heavy to think much past that. I became a filter through which the rest of the world passed—voices, sensations, the throb of the music. I was a bee trapped in its own honey. Everything tasted golden and sweet.

The bedroom door opened again. Gregnaut’s voice was a low rumble. “She’s good,” he said. “She’s just sleeping it off.”

But then someone was shaking my shoulder—too rough. I groaned and scrunched my face and tried to roll away. The shaking became more persistent.

Chaya yanked at my arm. “Did I ask, dickwad? Ely, come on.” She kept pulling and I wanted her to stop, I wanted to yell in her face to let me go, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate. I couldn’t even get my eyes open properly.

A sharp heat burst on my cheek, the lance of pain cutting through my honey trap. Chaya Mushka had just bitch-slapped me.

She had to know that was a big ask. But it didn’t stop her from draping one of my arms over her shoulders and heaving me up, her scrawny frame staggering under my weight. I was useless. I couldn’t see straight. But I couldn’t fight her either; I could only let Chaya drag me bodily out of that party and try to prop me against the wall of the elevator. I promptly slid down into a heap on the floor.

Chaya, standing over me, had her arms hugged tight around her middle. Her face was more pinched than ever, staring straight ahead at the shut elevator doors as the floors dinged past.

She shook her head. “Not like you.”

And that was the last thing she said to me for a long time. Her next words were to the Uber driver when he picked us up. Then silence for the whole car ride back to Crown Heights. She kept jiggling her leg against the seat, and I wanted her to stop, but asking wasn’t worth the effort. So instead I tilted my face against the chilly window and watched the city lights flash past as we drove away, hipster Brooklyn receding behind us.

Chaya told the driver to drop us off a block away from my place. She let me lean on her for that short walk home, although she kept whispering orders under her breath, as if she thought the neighbors were watching us outside their windows even at three in the morning: “Stand straight…. Pay attention idiot, that’s a curb.”

My keys were in my coat pocket, but I was too useless to dig them out. Chaya had to do it for me, unlocking the door to my building. She paused there, holding the door open with her shoulder, and flipped through my keys till she found the right one.

Chaya shoved me gently in the direction of the stairs. I made it all the way to the bottom of them before I realized what the problem was going to be—but when I turned around, Chaya was already gone. I crawled up on my hands and knees, fingernails digging into the winter grime smeared from the soles of twenty people’s snow boots. I rested on the landing, leaning my head back against the wall—but it was too much, too easy to slip under the surface of the dark water that rose up all around me.

I couldn’t fall asleep there. I had to pull it together.

I squinted open heavy eyelids and lurched forward again, grabbing the banister this time to drag myself up the next flight.

My key fit into the lock. I turned the front-door knob as slowly as possible, free hand lifting to graze the mezuzah on the doorframe, then touch my dirty fingers to my lips. Even though Hashem probably wished I wouldn’t; what god wanted the devotion of someone like me?

The apartment was warm and quiet as I slipped inside, shucking off my coat. It puddled on the floor next to our shoe rack, joined shortly thereafter by my hat and boots. I was too numbed out to be scared my parents were still up or even to worry about waking them. Things like that didn’t matter when you were high. It was kind of beautiful.

I shuffled down the hall in my sock feet and let myself into the bedroom I shared with my younger sister Dvora. She was a huddled lump in the bed by the window, the streetlamp light casting silvery waves over her form. I tried to be quiet as I stripped off my dress, but it was no good. I staggered into the dresser, and one of Dvora’s little wooden horse figurines tipped off its shelf and clattered to the floor.

The night air weaved around me like silk—beautiful but a little hard to breathe. I thought if I went to sleep right then, I might not wake up. The thought didn’t terrify me. Nothing did when I was high. But I was generally aware that dying is something people usually try to avoid.

So I found myself climbing into Dvora’s bed instead of my own, slipping under the covers and burrowing in close to the warm knot of her body. She shifted to make room, her hands tucked together between us, fingers worrying each other.

I exhaled. My breath wisped through the hair at her forehead, thin dark threads fluttering in the dim light. “Maybe,” I said. I closed my eyes. “Yes.”

She didn’t say anything, but I could feel her breathing faster next to me. God, I wished I could feel guilty. I really did.

Behind my closed eyelids, little bursts of color swam around. “I think I took too much.”

I shook my head. “No. Just stay with me. Please?”

Dvora’s cold hands insinuated themselves between mine. She locked our fingers together and squeezed tight. “Okay.”

We stayed in silence, the exchange of our breaths the only communication. Outside, the recycling truck made its way down the street with the familiar sound of bottles clinking and stacks of folded-up cardboard slapping against each other. The pills leached out of my system slowly, venom draining from a snakebite. I cracked my eyes open enough to see Dvora’s face again, her dark lashes like coal smudges against her cheeks. If I were to take a photo of her right now, that’s what I’d do. I’d smear soot right there, blacking out a space beneath her eyes, scattering ash like freckles.

She didn’t look at me. She just nestled closer, pressing one hand flat against my chest. I wondered what my heart felt like against her palm, if it was beating too fast or too slow.

I did know. And it broke my fucking heart, because I also knew that, no, I couldn’t stop. I would never stop.

I didn’t want to stop.

Instead I ate my cold cereal and made myself sit there and watch her with her young face carefully poised in a mask of innocence that was no longer real, thanks to me. Now Dvora kept my secrets. I’d dragged her down into the muck with me.

And I’d keep dragging her, and everyone, down. I’d bury us, and I wouldn’t rest until I’d ruined both our lives.

The least I could do was look her in the eye while I did it.