Part Two: Change
Chapter Three: Kathleen: Autumn, 1985
Kathleen Davidson took her first definitive steps into becoming Reina Hadar after the fall of 1985, when her mother died. Orphaned at 15, she was cast adrift as her sisters efficiently closed up their parents’ mistake. In comparison, that was the easy part.
Deciding the fate of their little sister was immeasurably harder. They had no living relations of whom they knew. Gerdie’s parents, Fred and Elsie Schreiber, had been dead these past several decades. As for Jack, the girls knew little of his familial history, with the exception of his peripheral connection to Judaism. Deborah did most of the speculative guessing—that he was a drifter, living a male empowered fantasy, or perhaps attempting for the American Dream, starting with nothing, forging your own way, and ending up on the top.
“He probably thought that living as a corporate suburbanite was being individual,” she said disdainfully as she and Donna herded Kathleen through the sliding doors of a law office downtown. Kathleen looked around her warily, the men and women in their business suits, walking determinedly, set in their ways. The marble floor soaked up all of the cold from outside, and she shivered as Deborah’s hand guided her down the hall.
“Oh please,” Donna snapped, balancing Michelle on her hip. At three years old, she was getting a bit too big for such actions, but she refused to be let down, burying her face in her mother’s shoulder. Kathleen felt a chill go through her, which had nothing to do with the weather. She longed for her own mother’s shoulder.
“The man is dead; can’t you let it go already?” Donna was saying, as she opened the final, wooden door. Her sisters stared at her back. Although they had come to expect this behavior from her, they remembered that time, long ago, when Donna contented herself to be the observer, and not the observed. But that was before she gave birth to her daughter, and before her boyfriend had left her. Donna threw the door open, allowing Deborah and Kathleen to enter inside first. The office, dark and disheveled, was also empty.
Donna sighed, straining her wrist to check her watch. “Where is that lawyer anyway,” she muttered. “I am losing half of my day here.”
Kathleen sat down heavily, and kicked the hind leg of her chair. Unlike her sister, this overdue appointment with their mother’s lawyer was more important to her than was the rest of the day. It was, after all, a choice between one day, and her whole life.
Deborah and Donna sat down on either side of her, glancing at the messy desk directly in front of them. The door creaked open again, and they turned in their seats. Mr. Lewistein mumbled his greetings as he shuffled by; he was a stout looking man, likely in his late fifties. His suit, stiffly ironed, creaked as he walked around them to his seat, and his hair was just beginning to look wispy. Kathleen bit her lip, eyeing her sisters so as to gauge their reactions. On her own, she simply did not know if she could trust this man.
“Misses Davidson,” he started solemnly enough, addressing all three of them. “I was so sorry to hear of the passing of your mother.”
The girls smiled thinly; Donna’s was the thinnest of all. “Well,” she said. “Deborah and I have taken care of most of her affairs. Our main concern is—what is to become of our sister, Kathleen?” She indicated towards her, as if the man could not see for himself who the youngest of Gerdie’s daughters was.
Mr. Lewistein sighed, opening the topmost file on his desk, as if to check something. A moment later, he looked back up, solely addressing Donna this time. “It seems that—your mother made no stipulations in her will in regards to the care of her youngest child.”
Kathleen felt her stomach drop, and she gripped onto the sides of the plastic chair until her knuckles turned white.
“I do not understand,” she heard her sister, Donna, say, as though she were speaking through a fog.
Mr. Lewistein, however, looked distinctly uncomfortable. His jowls quivered, and he looked back down at the report, as if he was hoping it might give him some answers. “I cannot pretend to know your mother’s reasoning,” he admitted at last.
“Perhaps she had not changed the will since the death of your father; perhaps she thought he would outlive her.”
Deborah snorted derisively, and Donna glared at her before glancing at Kathleen. Sighing, she rose, heading for the water container in the corner, and continued talking as she poured some into a Styrofoam cup. Kathleen heard the water trickle down, wondering if it was perhaps easier for her sister to face this while she was able to multitask.
“My question still stands then; what is to become of Kathleen?” She walked back to her seat, placing the cup on Mr. Lewistein’s desk, and nudging it in Kathleen’s direction.
Mr. Lewistein cleared his throat. “Well, normally speaking, custody of a minor goes to the closest living relative.” He regarded his folded hands on his mess of papers, leaving the sisters to their own devices. “What that means, in this case, is of course…”
He did not have to finish. Deborah and Donna were already looking at each other warily. Kathleen, similarly, felt in no way liberated by this visit. If anything, she could feel the binding on her wrists, the condemnation in Mr. Lewistein’s tone. After living in that house with her mother, alone with her mother and the slow dying ghost of Jack Davidson… after standing by her as they were visited by Deborah’s decade of passionate angst with the Women’s Movement, and Donna’s baby born out of wedlock, after all of that… she had been abandoned. When she thought that death would be the only, the worst, abandonment she would face. Instead, she was cast aside, no, not even being given the thought of being cast aside; her personal future did not seem to matter at all. It was completely up to her sisters now, her selfish, squabbling sisters, who were too embroiled in their own, adult lives to cast about in the ruins of Kathleen’s childhood, and see her safely through.
In the silence, Kathleen sipped at her water, and it was cold.
Her chance for being guided through life came in a roundabout way when the Jewish group, Hillel, met for the first time during her freshman year of college. Later, of course, both Deborah and Donna would treat both her choice—and their far reaching consequences—with complete skepticism. Religion was not, to them—as meaningful as was the Women’s Movement, or as factual as lab work. To Kathleen, however, religion was both more meaningful and factual than her sisters’ pursuits combined. It was, after all, a connection to her own, late mother. A small connection, to be sure, as Gerdie did not count herself as being remotely religious or even as being particularly Jewish. But then again, she also could not call herself a Holocaust survivor, as she and her parents had escaped Germany in the 30s. And as there was no such club on campus for housewifery (to say nothing of Deborah, in response, coming to kill her in the night,) religion was simply the best way for Kathleen to go.
The Hillel meeting, however, did nothing for her. That same mob, that same jousting, mindless mob (even if slightly smaller and less diverse in nature,) was present, and they all either seemed to be extreme extroverts or upperclassmen or both. Kathleen shied away as they happily dipped their paper cups in punch, chattering about last summer past. She took slow and backwards steps, as she was almost trying to convince herself to stay when suddenly, she felt something smack into her back.
She gasped in surprise, and someone else gasped too. She spun around—and came face to face with a mousy looking girl in long and shapeless clothing. Her companions, two girls and three boys who were wearing Jewish skullcaps, looked at Kathleen in alarm.
“I am so sorry!” she exclaimed; she was mortified. Somehow, she sensed that something was off—that these people were modest, perhaps and conservative—and therefore were untouchable. “I did not see you there; I was no paying enough attention. I am so sorry,” she repeated.
The look on her victim’s face slowly softened. Her eyes were traveling over Kathleen—her simple, white blouse, her floral skirt—she was going for respectability at this juncture. The girl smiled.
“These things happen sometimes,” she said charitably, and put out her hand. “I am Rivka.”
Kathleen smiled shyly as she introduced herself. Rivka was such a lovely name.
“My friends, David, Shmuel, Dinah, Leah and Aaron,” Rivka nodded behind her towards each of her companions in turn. “We were looking forward to the Hillel event, but this…” her expression slipped into mild distaste.
Kathleen turned back to the Hillel-ians and their punch, and she bit her tongue. So she was not the only person to be thrown off by this display. “They seem… familiar,” she offered tentatively.
David snorted. “They seem completely secular.”
Kathleen’s face flushed, and she did not turn around. “Yes, I suppose so,” she said, thinking about her own utterly secular family.
“Well, we should have expected it,” Rivkah sighed in defeat. “Though this is certainly nothing like our experience back home.” She paused. “Where are you from, Kathleen?”
Kathleen drew in a breath, now wanting more than ever to escape from these people. “I love with my sister in Manhattan,” she said nervously.
“You live with your sister?” Rivka’s eyes shot up into the bushy hair on her forehead. “Why do you not live with your parents?”
Coldness gripped Kathleen now. She did not address the group directly but rather, looked at her own shoes, the Mary Janes she had opted to wear, which were shiny and new. “My parents are dead,” she said quietly.
The group murmured, and Kathleen heard them rustle. “May G-d keep them, then,” Dinah finally spoke.
Kathleen swallowed past a lump in her throat. “Thank you,” she said, though in reality, she actually felt quite more inclined to ask G-d to give them back.
Rivka flattened the front of her skirt down, as if trying to smooth things over. “I think that we are also on our way out,” she said. “Hillel does not seem to be the right sort of environment for us.” She smiled sadly. “But you are more than welcome to join us as we take lunch at the deli down the street.”
Kathleen’s more mellow mood vanished, and she looked at them, this group of them, mild and similar, and reaching out to her with their nods. “You’ll do… are you sure that I am not imposing?” she asked tentatively.
Rivka smiled before turning with the others towards the door. “Oh no, not at all.”
And as simply as that, Kathleen’s lifelong relationship with Orthodox Judaism had begun. She took a certain amount of satisfaction in being the first of her sisters—or, indeed, the first of her entire family, to achieve a degree of comfort and belonging within a group setting. She was learning, slowly with the passing of her freshman year, to conform herself to her new friends’ rules of proper behavior, allowing their guidance to act as a steadying hand against her back. No longer did she have to fear the massive and the terrifying world, which resided right outside of her door. When she was with Rivka and her friends, she felt as though she had arrived home. When she kahered her diet, in the keeping with traditional Jewish law, she felt that she had a purpose. When she bought longer skirts, covered her arms in sweaters, and threw away all of her pants, she then felt safe.
Her older sisters were, of course, shocked by this change in Kathleen. It was the first time, after all, that she had chosen a path for herself. They banded together over Thanksgiving that year, in order to discuss all of the ramifications.
“A cult, Deborah,” Donna exclaimed over her turkey, “our sister has joined a cult!”
“Judaism is one of the oldest and richest religions in the world,” Kathleen shot back, emboldened by her indignation of being mocked. She took a bite of stuffing, trying to recall Rivka’s words to her; they had discussed the certainty of this confrontation at length before leaving school for the holiday.
“What does that matter?” Donna shot back at her sister. “They still proselytized to you, and converted you!”
“It was my choice,” Kathleen said firmly, setting down her fork, “as well as our collective heritage. There is no need for any of us to convert—we are all Jews through our mother’s blood.”
“Do not be silly,” Donna scoffed, and she glared at Deborah, who, after all, was being unnaturally quiet. Was this not the time when her older sister should be speaking out against patriarchal and authoritarian religions? But no, Deborah sat quietly, as if pouring all of her effort into helping Michelle spoon some green beans onto her plate.
“You are a young American adult in the 80s,” Deborah continued, focusing all of her attention back on to Kathleen. “You are not some wandering desert nomad!”
“Mom was Jewish,” Kathleen said quietly, looking determinedly at her glinting silverware. Something strange and foreign—something much larger than herself—was smoldering underneath of her calm surface, and it was beginning to choke her with its smoke. She spoke, not fully intending to say what moved past her lips. “Mom would have been killed for staying in Germany, because she was Jewish.”
The following silence was thick, even from Michelle. It was like the first moment after a head on collision; the three sisters simply stared at each other over the Thanksgiving table, shocked at having finally opened that door, which all three of them had studiously ignored up until this very point in their lives.
When the sophomore year of Kathleen and her friends began, she moved out of her sister, Donna’s, apartment, and in to one which was closer to campus, (to say nothing of more comfortable and nurturing, emotionally and spiritually,) with Rivka, Dinah and Leah. As the girls started to unpack their belongings, Kathleen caught sight of a particular worn looking pocket sized book among mostly newer texts. Intrigued, she craned her neck in order to catch a glimpse of the title; it read thus: “Yiddish Names for your Baby.”
“What exact purpose does that book serve?” Kathleen asked Leah curiously, as it was from among her possessions. Leah paused in beginning to pick it up so as to place it on a shelf in the sitting room, and smiled softly at her friend. “It is for when the time comes,” she explained, glancing down with modesty with which to gently couch the intimate nature of the topic, “and I will want to look through this book with my husband. Our child will need a traditional name, after all.”
Kathleen twisted her hands, feeling the sharp sense of shame creep up in to her face. Realization had hit her suddenly—how she had known these good friends for nearly a year now, and yet even as her life was forever altered rather drastically, even, as she was rediscovering her religious inheritance, yet she had not yet taken a Hebrew name. Nothing was even mentioned amongst her friends about the WASPy Americanized name which her parents had picked out for her so long ago, in that other lifetime. She swallowed hard, feeling so suddenly ashamed of this one remaining remnant of the outcast, secularized girl that she once was, still straining at the consciousness of her existence. Her shame could be erased by four simple words. “Can I borrow that?”
She went in to her room, and shut the door quietly behind her before going to sit upon her bed. She set the worn text between her Indian styled legs before opening it. As she flipped through the pages, not yet seeing the words that were imprinted upon them, she recalled a certain childhood assignment—in the 2nd grade when her teacher, Mrs. Smith, in an effort to teach some sort of mixing between vocabulary and genealogy, perhaps, give she and her classmates the assignment of researching their own names.
Trusting Kathleen had come home with a simple plan in mind—she went straight to the source, that is, her mother. She explained her assignment curiously, twisting her hands behind her back. Gerdie had smiled, and took her daughter up on to her lap. “I named you after purity,” she said, rather lovingly as she stroked her daughter’s hair. “I named you as such because you are my pure and oh so very perfect little angel, darling.” She hugged her daughter close and Kathleen had beamed herself, feeling the honor of distinction in her mother’s loving eye. She had been imbued with a sense of purpose that day; she was both special, as well as she was pure.
She had reached the index of the book by this point, and thumbed to look up the word “purity.” Her pinky brushed past the Yiddish name—it was Reina. Reina. She repeated it to herself in her head, and then whispered it aloud for posterity. “Reina Davidson.” She tasted the words, the name, the essence or all three on her lips, as she tried to embody the spirit of this person—this Jewish woman, beholden to the covenant of G-d and the history of the Hebrew people. “Reina. Purity.” She reminded herself.
“I am no longer Kathleen Davidson,” she announced that night at dinner. “I am now… Reina Davidson. I have chosen for myself an official Hebrew—or Yiddish, at least—name.”
Silence reigned at the table for just a moment as her friends took in her words. She bit her lip, nervousness suddenly overtaking her as she recalled that this was the first decision of religious significance that she truly did take upon herself. Would her friends think she was silly? Or perhaps disrespectful? She twisted her sweaty hands under the lace tablecloth as she waited for their collective answer.
And finally, it did come, when Rivka’s face broke out into a grin. “Reina…” she tried the new name on her tongue. “Reina… well, mazel tov!” She stood, crossing to the girl, and hugged her tightly. Reina, feeling a shocked burst of emotion pass through her, pressed tightly into her best friend’s skin. She sighed, the relief almost decompressing her body were it not for the elation she felt from Rivka’s enthusiasm.
The newly minted Reina Davidson was about to find out just how inscribed he would become in G-d’s “good book.” Her sophomore year with Rivka, Dinah, Leah, Shmuel, Aaron and David began, and the group of them made a pact to become more social—if only by default from Reina’s perspective, anyway. Knowing as they did now that Hillel was incredibly too secular minded for them, they decided to try their luck with the local Chabad House—a residential home, staffed by a Hassidic rabbi and his wife. Hassidism, Reina would learn, was about the most traditional a Jew could get in terms of observance, and she reveled in the piety behind their traditions—with the men and the women kept almost entirely seperated, Hebrew supplications to G-d slipped in before, during and after almost any act, and the almost complete denial of—the mundane, of the unimportant, and of the secular.
At school, it was a little more difficult, her friends reaching out to other such students who went to the Chabad services. Though Reina admired them all so very much—for their chastity and for their intelligence—she could not help but retreat into the shyness of being uncertain over her new life, and over the gnawing desperation she sometimes felt to prove herself to these people. Reina knew, however, that G-d was testing her. And it was the ultimate test that He could give—which dared the question of whether Reina would ever be an insider (for, being Jewish was in part belonging to the People and connecting to them,) or if part of her would always remain aloof and passionless Kathleen Davidson. So Reina bit her lip, prayed to G-d, and acted the part of the gracious single Orthodox girl, making her way back into the Jewish community with grace. And that is exactly what happened; for her sufferings and for her drive, G-d then rewarded her with the greatest gift for which she could ever asked—He gave her a husband.
Her sisters’ reactions, of course, were much as she would have anticipated. When Reina came to Donna’s apartment in order to celebrate her 18th birthday with her family, her middle sister threw her hands up into the air.
“First you move in with those religious zealots,” she said, pacing “and then you start attending their—sabbath ceremonies or whatever they are, and now, you plan to date one of them?”
“Doran is a good man,” Reina said defiantly, standing up to first glare at her one sister, and then spin around to glare at the other. “And he is not a chauvinist monster either,” she snarked to Deborah though her eldest sister, sitting removed from the rest of them in the living room, had not yet said a word. Reina turned back to face forward and slightly more bashfully, she looked at her feet and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Besides,” she said softly. “He likes me as well.”
Donna scoffed distastefully. “He sounds like some sort of secular girl who made this miraculous foray into ‘finding G-d’ or some such nonsense,” she sniffed.
Reina glared. “Well, so am I.” She said. “That sounds an awful lot like me.” She then folded her arms across her chest in defiance.
“Oh, do not spew nonsense,” Donna began angrily clearing the crumb laden paper plates and stained napkins from the dining room table. “This is just some—silly phase that you are going through, just for the moment.”
Anger boiled through Reina’s skin. Through the hazy, throbbing mass in front of her, her sister, Donna, was so arrogantly, and so defiantly stomping around her own house. Her daughter, Michelle, was sitting right beside frame, looking both utterly small and utterly quiet. Reina’s fists clenched as she took the entire scene in to herself.
“A phase, you say,” she said in a low, dark voice, “like the one you went through with her fath-“ she was pointing directly at her neice when Deborah, arriving late as always to break up the impending fight, intervened.
“That is enough, Kathleen!” she said severely as Donna went red.
“How dare you,” she was able to gargle as she trembled heavily, glaring, wide eyed at her sister. Michelle, mean while, looked so small and white in comparison, her eyes trained straight to her aunt’s. “How dare you!” Donna repeated again.
“My name is Reina!” the girl screamed at her eldest sister. Her heart was beating very loudly by this point, and yet she knew that, despite what she might like to convince herself to the contrary, Deborah’s petty mistake concerning her new name was not what was setting her nerves on fire. Yet “my name is Reina!” she repated, much like her sister, Donna, had repeated herself just the moment before.
“Get out,” Donna was now screaming, her hand clattering down dangerously to the dining room table. “Get out of my house!”
“Let go of me!” Reina shrieked, as Deborah hooked her unrelenting fingers into her sister’s arm. “Let go of me!”
“We are going for a walk!” Deborah declared as she dragged her youngest sister down the hallway, her shoes squeaking indignantly against the hard wood floor. “Come on, Kath, Reina, who ever!”
As her shoe made a particularly loud squeak of protest, Reina allowed herself to relax so very slightly and moved sluggishly against Deborah and towards the door. Her sister, Donna’s, presense was still a red hot pillar in her mind; she could not look directly at her, and yet, her gaze settled on her neice, continually beside her mother, even now, and sitting still and silent in her seat. Reina stared openly at the little six year old girl, a barrage of emotions sweeping through her that she could not completely understand, and then, suddenly, Deborah’s hand did swing into her line of vision and pushed the front door shut between them, and cleaving the family in half yet again, as seemed to be the Davidsons’ continual and unrelenting custom.
Once outside in the open and fresh hair, Deborah and Reina began to walk silently. The streets were bustling with their usual activity; the shouts echoeing back and forth across the firm pavement as pedestrians spent their weekend afternoons power walking, and vendors tried to sell the stragglers their wares. Reina felt the breeze buffeting her and she took a deep breath, trying to let it calm her somewhat. Her mind traveled back to remembering an event that took place a couple of days prior to this one, when Rivka, the most talented cook from among her friends, made her a kugel and baked her a lemon cake, again for her birthday. This was a real birthday celebration, after all, a celebration spent amongst those who did not dare to judge her, but instead guide her through life—those being the closest of her friends.
She looked at Deborah from the side; her sister appeared askance in her vision now as they continued to walk through the streets. As time elapsed, and Donna’s apartment grew further in the distance, boldness overtook her once again. She would not allow her overly feminist sister brood silently upon the misgivings of this (admittedly conservative) man that Reina had grown to admire over the course of the last few months; she would set Deborah straight on the subject, and ascertain her own identity as a young adult able to make her own set of mature decisions.
“DO you think that Doran is nothing more than a dirty, sexist pig, then?” she asked and used words that she had remembered Deborah once uttering in reference to their father once and long ago.
Her older sister paused, glancing over at the girl. She had stopped walking, and glanced at a near by store front as if inquisitively, and as if she needed that dissociation from the direct confrontation in order to collect all of her thoughts.
Finally, she turned back to her youngest sister, and she took a deep breath, and she began to speak.
“Well. I myself would be wary about putting my complete trust so easily in to whatever it is that he is telling you,” she admitted softly, as quite the contrast from how she might have stated her convictions at Reina’s age. “He, after all, sounds like an overly passionate person, and that his convictions, as you have described them, come off as overly strong to me.” She sighed, but continued to hold her sister’s gaze. “Personally, I would worry, and perhaps I should worry, that he might take advantage of the fact that you are still searching for the answers. That is how I see your struggle, anyhow. And given that you are still searching, you should not let anyone, be they male or female, decide that they have the right to speak for you, Kathleen.”
Reina had frozen for the briefest of moments while her sister delivered her answer. She felt the chill settle in to her curly hair, just like she felt the chill of Deborah’s very words. As if she actually cared, Reina thought angrily to herself. As if it had been someone else who, during Reina’s adolescence, had turned her life upside down in some ridiculous and petty battle of the wills with their sister, Donna. As if Deborah saw either of her younger sisters as anything more than an extension of her own desires. Doran speaking for her indeed. Reina felt her hands ball into fists, and yet kept them steadfast at her sides.
“I do thank you for your kind concern,” she responded, acting both cold and distant, “but I do believe that I myself possess the knowledge of knowing what is best for me.” She paused meaningfully, feeling somewhat satisfied with how she had handled this sticky situation. “And again,” she concluded, “my name is Reina now.” And with that, without sparing her sister even a final glance, Reina Davidson set herself forward on the sidewalk, and stalked off.
It was with their closest friends surrounding them, on June 3rd, 1989, with attendants booming over loudspeakers, luggage clacking hurriedly against the floor, and the foreboding sense of loss on wafting in from all around them that Doran got down on one knee. Reina, expecting nothing this dramatic from him simply stared at his hair in shock, her heart suddenly threatening to burst out of her chest. He looked at her with open and with vulnerable eyes, not with his usual detatched and kindly yet instructive gaze. The noise and loss around them muted, even if only to Reina’s senses, as her future husband began to speak.
“Reina Davidson,” his voice and his tone and his tumbre all sounded precarious on their request, and unsure of their intentions. She sucked in her breath, knowing and but not yet believing what it was that he was about to say.
“I would be honored,” he whispered now, “if you would allow me the blessing, the absolute G-d given blessing of taking you… as my wife.”
Reina could feel the breath crashing loudly in her ears. The bustling airport first slowed and then stopped entirely around her staring down at him, and around him on his knees, and around his declaration, and around their combined love.
Finally, she realized, as the tears began to spill over on to her cheeks, finally, here, in this airport, when she was 19 years old and among the closest friends she had ever had the privilege of knowing… finally. Here was someone who actually wanted her.
And Reina Davidson jolted abruptly out of her funk; the tears still being warm on her flushed cheeks, and she looked down, yet again, at Doran Hadar, and she felt benevolent, and she felt pure, like what her mother, Gerdie, named her for, and as if she was the sabbath bride, even, that the medieval kabbalists wrote about in the Israel where Doran, where her future husband, was headed back to. She knew, quite suddenly, then and there, that Doran Hadar could be her link to G-d, her like to Hashem, her link into fashioning herself into a pure and goodly life as his traditional wife. And she took a deep, shuddering breath.
“Yes,” she whispered, just as breathily as he had, and just as breathily as Rivka had. The words, so final, so life altering, caught in her throat for only a moment before she forced them outward. “Yes, I will marry you, Doran Hadar. And yes, I will be your wife.”
The day before she left the United States of America for her first and final time, she took her neice, Michelle, aside. She had already said a teary goodbye to her old friends, and she had already said a tense goodbye to her stoic sisters—the contrast in the sentimentality a jarring enough experience on it’s own, even if she ended up going nowhere. But Michelle, who was nearing 10 years old by this point, was yet the same, as quiet and reflective as she had been as a child. Reina felt an instant kinship to her neice—beyond their genetic bond, that is—sensing the ripening opportunity for Miki’s own victimization to begin, and she prayed that she, too, might one day get out from under Donna’s thumb. For the moment, however, she simply took the girl’s shoulders into her hands.
“In the bible, Miki,” she said gravely, while trying to hold onto her own resolve, “there is a passage, which states ‘to everything there is a season.’” She took a deep breath. “It is in the season now to let me go, tataleh.” She wiped tears from the girl’s cheeks while trying to suppress her own burning reaction.
Michelle sniffled to herself. “Will I ever see you again, Aunt Reina?” she asked in a very small voice, looking down at her feet.
Reina felt an immense wave of guilt hit her and suddenly, she was Kathleen again, 15 year old Kathleen, sitting alone by her mother’s bedside as she died. She shook herself violently in the present. How could she even imagine that this was in any way similar to that harrowing event in their familial history?
“Of course you will,” Reina said firmly, and her grip dug even further into Michelle’s shoulders. “We will be together again before you even know that we are apart, Miki.”
Little Michelle, still so delicate even at 10 years old, nodded succinctly and squared her own shoulders. Her skin was severe and purposeful, like Deborah’s long ago when she frequented her rallies, or Donna’s, not so long ago, when she chose secularism and science over her own family.
“Then I will be strong,” Michelle said, which seemed to Reina, heavy words for such a young girl. “Until I see you again.”
The tears did fall now from Reina’s eyes, and she stood quickly so her neice could not detect them. She gathered the girl close for one last time, pressing their frames together tightly, skin to skin, heart to heart, the only biological family Reina figured she had left. She closed her eyes and prayed to G-d that by leaving, that by severing these ties, she was doing the right thing.
Gaining no clear answer from the heavens, Reina Davidson, soon to be Reina Hadar turned from her niece and turned from her family and turned from her American roots and endeavored to begin anew.
