A/N: Just a note before you start reading - I'm not Jewish, but I've worked in an Orthodox Jewish school for two years, and I have really immersed myself in the community, so I feel like I have a unique perspective that gives me a certain amount of confidence when writing about this topic. However, I'm no expert and I'm only familiar with the nuances in this certain community so I apologize for any misrepresentations of Orthodox Judaism. My drive for writing this story was the fact that I felt like Disobedience lacked substantial character and backstory development so I'm here to fix that :)
Modeh ani lifanekha…
Esti presses her eyes shut against the pale beams of morning sunlight, trying to suppress the influx of words, but the morning prayer of gratitude still spills uselessly through her mind.
Melekh chai v'kayam shehechezarta bi nishmahti b'chemlah, rabah emunasekha.
The habit is ingrained, as though coded into her very being. It's the same way she can't look at a plate of food without categorizing each food on her plate by the bracha she'd have to say, or the way bread feels heavy and forbidden in her mouth when she doesn't wash for ha'motzi before eating a sandwich. She wants to live through just one day without remembering she is Jewish - just one day when her choices won't feel like they are influenced solely by the weight of her past.
The initial weeks after she left Dovid were the hardest. The world beyond her sheltered community was so vast and dizzying she nearly crawled straight back to immerse herself in the comfort of familiarity. She cannot imagine how Ronit did it so many years before her, the thought causing her stomach to clench in tangled sympathy. Perhaps it was Ronit's plucky youthfulness that gave her so much success. Esti often feels as though something essential in her has been all used up, that she is merely a shell of what she might have become.
Dovid had insisted that she stay, even if she wished to end their marriage, even it was just until the baby was born. He had shown her considerable compassion, perhaps even more than she deserved, but she had come to the sobering decision that she needed her distance. Ronit would not let her fade quietly into the background either.
"Come to New York," Ronit had desperately pleaded, her voice soft and strangled over the phone. Esti had nearly conceded. Even this garbled version of Ronit's voice made her stomach tumble with raw desire.
But Esti was insistent. To truly discover herself, to grapple with her newly granted freedom, she wanted (no needed) to do it on her own. She promised not to sever ties completely, but she needed her own space and independence.
There are still days where she feels so cripplingly lonely that she longs for Ronit's gentle touch, the way they have always fit together like perfectly matched puzzle pieces. She even wishes for Dovid, so sure and decisive, ready to love and protect even in her moments of uncertainty. Her strict and reclusive upbringing has left her with very little to cling to. She has no connections, no proper education, hardly any useful skills to aid in her survival in a world more vast than she ever imagined. Her progress often feels insubstantial, aggravatingly mundane, but she reminds herself to reflect on her small achievements. She has a small flat of her own, one she can properly pay for with money she has earned from her job teaching nursery school.
And of course she has Charlotte.
Her lovely, precious daughter is the greatest sum of all her parts, a blinding accomplishment in a world where she often has nothing more to offer. She cannot believe her body produced something so complex and perfect. She loves her daughter with an entirely new part of herself that burst open the moment she was born.
She properly opens her eyes now, adjusting to the slats of light that spill across her bed. Charlotte sleeps beside her, swaddled in a tangle of sheets. Her honey colored hair spills across the bare skin of her back. That beautiful creamy skin. She touches it gently now, her fingers pausing on each faint freckle. She never wants Charlotte to feel she needs to cover her beauty, to hide behind so many layers she can't quite discern who she is truly meant to be.
Charlotte is nearly three now. Her birthday is a date that looms ominously in Esti's mind, though she no longer has any reason to dread the arbitrary event. She cannot remember her own third birthday, but she remembers her younger brothers' and sisters', a day to mark that a child is not longer a passive recipient in his or her Jewish education; they are now capable of taking an active role in their upbringing. It is the day a child begins to grow up. The event - as many traditions are - is more significant for boys. They will have an upshernish - their first hair cut - and receive the outward garb of a yarmulke and tzitzits that distinguishes each Jewish man. The girls in turn begin to cover their bodies as women do.
Esti cannot imagine stuffing Charlotte into a knee-length, long-sleeved dress each morning, especially with the heat of summer upon them. It seems cruel to subdue her free little body, to burden her with the awareness of shame.
Esti's mother had visited just yesterday, and she had followed her mother's gaze to her own daughter, clad only in a pair of Moana panties as she banged loudly on her toy xylophone. Esti always unearths something frum from the back of her closet and covers her sun-kissed hair beneath the thin fabric of a tiechel when her mother comes to visit. It wouldn't be fair for her mother to see her any other way, not after how magnanimous her mother has been.
"I told your father I'm visiting Mushka," her mother had explained the first time she showed up on the doorstep of Esti's flat only days after Charlotte's birth. Her father had not taken kindly to Esti's abrupt rejection of her faith; her mother's heart is softer. "It was Mushka's idea at first. Chanale just had her first baby too, you know. Mushka told me it was unbearable for her to think of any woman missing out on the joy of holding her own grandchild," she concluded, and Esti had nearly collapsed into tears as she passed her small, gurgling baby into her mother's outstretched arms.
Her mother now visits almost once a week, an occasion muddled with a strange mixture of anxiety and affection. Esti is careful to serve her mother prepackaged pareve food on disposable plates to accommodate the strict kosher dietary laws. She turns off the radio and tucks away any items that hint too strongly at a secular life style. She knows her mother must know it's a charade, but she wants to make her mother's visits as comfortable as possible, more terrified than she'd like to admit if they were to ever stop.
The older Charlotte grows, the less like a baby she becomes, Esti finds she braces herself with each of her mother's visits for an influx of simmering judgement. She fears there will be a day when her mother announces quite suddenly, "That's quite enough, Esti. We've let you play out this childish game long enough. Now give me the baby, and I will take her back to where she belongs."
Of course her rational mind knows this will not happen. In the very least, she knows her mother has no jurisdiction to take away her child, but the sudden wave of inadequacy always catches her off guard. She held her breath for longer than necessary yesterday as she watched her mother watch her nearly-naked child delight in her xylophone banging. She found herself desperately wishing she had wrestled Charlotte into a tznius dress so that her mother would have something else to give her attention to.
She had been surprised to see her mother's face melt suddenly into a soft smile. "I remember when you, Dovid and Ronit were that age. You spent so many summer days running around half-naked while Chavi, Nechama and I watched you from the Kuperman's porch. You especially loved to muck about in the sprinkler." She had chuckled fondly before bending down to kiss her own granddaughter's head.
Esti recalls the memory now, and though she doesn't have her own recollection of that time in her life, she can easily imagine it. She can see the three mothers in the back garden, beads of sweat perspiring beneath the thick hair of their sheitels, stiffly sitting on their wicker chairs to avoid unnecessary movement beneath their layers of clothing. The memories of summer still make her squirm with a branded feeling of stifling heat. Years and years of covering her body in the muggy heat of the summer could never prepare her for just how unbearable it always was.
She can just as clearly picture herself, Ronit, and Dovid, the thought immediately lifting the suffocating heat from the memory. Dovid must have had long hair then, since it was before his upshernish. They must have looked nearly indistinguishable as they splashed water over their exposed bodies - plump rosy cheeks, smooth, featureless chests, wild curls spilling down their backs. Genderless children. Free.
She kisses her own daughter's bare shoulder now, breathing in the warmth of her skin. She wishes the memory were her own. She wishes she could remember before it mattered that Ronit was a girl and Dovid was a boy.
Before it mattered who she loved.