Part Three: Resolutions
Chapter Three: Reina, Summer, 1995
It was different for Reina than it was for her two older sisters, because Michelle was with her in Israel for the duration of that time. She watched the girl carefully from her favorite perch—in the kitchen, where she was behind her food and behind her instruments for preparing the food properly. Little Miki had not much changed since the days when Reina had lived in her sister, Donna’s apartment as a lost and orphaned teenager so very long ago. In the present, her hands did work methodically at the cutting of a cucumber. Michelle was wandering inquisitively around her uncle’s home in the Upper Galilee, with eyes that were opened wide and alert. She had been asking questions, tons upon tons of questions all morning in fact, from everything having to do with preparing a proper Shabbat meal to purification rites in the mikveh, or ritualistic bath that married women immersed themselves with before returning to sexual activity with their husbands after a length of time of 8 days after their menstruation periods. The questions—especially the delicate and sexually based questions—were hard for Reina to dance around, and she quite wished that the girl would seek out her uncle, Doran, more often, who was, after all, dragging the girl continuously around the Holy Land day in and day out. But no, Reina did realize to her dismay, it was she, herself, who commanded her niece’s utmost and full attention at most times. She would sneak into the kitchen, as quietly as a mouse would, and then simply watch her aunt as she prepared the day’s food. Reina was sure that she had almost cut off her own fingers once or twice under her niece’s constant and ambiguous scrutiny.
Women were not meant to be observed like this, Reina thought, employing a little bit of resentment towards Miki’s nosiness. Women were meant to do their work quietly and effectively in the background of their father’s or their husband’s homes. At these thoughts, she chuckled to herself sardonically, and she wondered if she could get her oldest sister, Deborah, all riled up at her quiet ponderings. Since arriving in Israel, after all, and taking her proper place as a Jewish wife within her husband’s household, she had been turning into what her sister would call “the anti feminist.”
Michelle, who did never miss a beat in her life, caught on to Reina’s sentiment. Her ears did perk and she did lean forward, in to her aunt’s space where she was still cutting food on the counter. “What are you laughing about?” she asked Reina curiously.
Reina flushed at the lashon hora of thinking such bitterly judgmental thoughts about her sister, Deborah. Lashon hora, or negative energy or talk or gossip, was strictly forbidden to religious Jews—and truly, to all Jews everywhere, regardless of personal comfort levels within the faith system at large. Reina could not count of the times that she had sat in the rebbetzin’s home—whether ot was the rebbetzin in Manhattan years ago, or her new rebbetzin in Israel now—and she did feel the stinging guilt every time the wise rabbi’s wife would mention those fateful words in conjunction with someone’s personal sin and pettiness. Lashon hora was Reina Hadar’s biggest downfall in life, and surely the biggest sin, which she would ever commit, may G-d spare her from all others. To hold on to such anger, as was the after taste to every memory of her older sisters, was a grievous and terrible sin. She knew this, and on every Yom Kippur, otherwise known as the Day of Atonement, which was the holiest and most self reflective and self editing day on the religious Jewish calendar, she did try to resolve herself of these stinging resentments, which she felt towards both Deborah and Donna, and had felt for the majority of the years of her life. But no far, it was not in Hashem’s will to take this bitterness from inside of her. Reina’s hands shook now, and she carefully did step away from her prized cutting knife. Or maybe… she shuddered to think of this… maybe it was not Hashem’s will, either way, in regards to her reactions to the memories of her sisters. Maybe she was simply and bluntly, just a weak person in general.
“I…” she addressed her niece, though she did turn her back on her in order to wash her hands. “I was thinking about—Doran.” The lie, though shakily admitted to, did its part to sooth Reina, as she so easily did backtrack into the saving grace who was her husband. She could turn and face the girl, and she could even smile warmly now. “Your uncle Doran is just so pleased to have you here with us in Israel, Miki,” she said genuinely. “Beyond the fact that you are our mishpacha, that means ‘family’ in Hebrew, dear, he just adores the prospect of showing the Holy Land to Diaspora—that would be non Israeli—Jews.” She chuckled, this time with mirth rather than sarcasm. “I think he should get a second job as a tour guide—well, if he ever has the time to engage in such an act.”
Her hands went to her belly then, and they cupped the bulge that was her son. He was active today, but Reina had learned to block him out of her mind during many of the daylight hours, when she was busy with the ritualistic performance of her daily tasks. There was a time, however, that she spent alone with her son, those rare moments when she could hide herself away from the cooking and cleaning, and the entertainment of her husband, and other such domestic duties, which she ascribed to and yet did not compare to pressing her hands around her extending belly and feeling the throb of his life inside, beating only inside of her, where only she could experience it so completely, as he did grow inside of her and partook in the nourishment that her body did provide. One of her deep and dark secrets, in fact, was how much she feared to let him go—and how much she feared to give birth to him, but not so much because she feared the process of labor—as she knew, after all, that Hashem would guide her through the process as He had done for women these past thousands of years—but she feared giving him up to the world of Hashem, and to the world where Doran would take him away from her, and install him in the men’s section of the shul as he prepared for his Bar Mitzvah, and take him to the yeshiva, or religious learning school, where he would involve himself in the lessons of Talmud, which were strictly forbidden to women, and he would take him to Israel, where he would live as a sabra, ir a native Israeli, rather than a displaced and formerly assimilated American girl like his mother. So Reina did sit heavily down upon a stool by the counter in her kitchen, and she pressed her fingers into the covered skin of the belly, which for now, was the only world, which her son did inhabit.
Michelle bit her lip, as she was obviously not believing in her aunt’s earlier answer to her query. She made a decision, however, and she scooted closer to Reina and extended her hands. “May I feel the baby?” She asked softly, “and can I get you any thing?”
Reina sighed deeply as she tried to make room for her niece in these ponderings about her son; this was why she was supposed to only engage in such activity while alone, after all. But what was done was done now, and Michelle had her hands extended hopefully, so Reina decided, of course, to be a gracious hostess. “No thank you, Miki, I am perfectly fine,” she said, and smiled at the girl. “But yes, you can certainly feel him.”
Miki’s face lit up, and Reina almost had to laugh—at the utter innocence that was shining out of her niece’s eyes, or the light that was filtering through her thick curls, which reminded her of herself, of course, even as she was now 25 years old. Barring the fact that her full locks were covered by a head scarf for modesty, now that she was a married and Orthodox woman, of course. She shivered as her niece’s fingers touched her body, and tried not to think of any impure thoughts at the contact. She was a woman in every conceivable way, and yet she bit her lip—as part of her was simply not ready to give birth yet, or even to carry her son to term. She knew that she desperately needed a female companion—a mother, really—to talk to. She felt a cold acceptance line her stomach. She had been out of touch with her old friends—Rivka, Leah and Dinah—for quite some time now. It was as if they had served their single purpose by bringing Kathleen Davidson turned Reina Hadar back to the Jewish people. Her mother in law, to put it bluntly, frightened her to death with her brusque and survivor’s mode manner. And her own mother—she closed her eyes in order to allow herself to shudder, her own mother, Gerdie, was dead. So therefore, out of all the women who had received the mitzvah or blessing of giving birth… there was only one person left to turn to—and that would be her sister, Donna.
But this time, her niece, Michelle, did not let her behaviors go unchecked. “What is it, Aunt Reina?” she persisted. “What is it that you are really thinking about?”
And Reina finally opened her eyes in order to regard the girl, little Miki, who was always more like a sister to her than she ever was a niece. Slowly, she brought her hand up to stroke through the girl’s thick hair, and remembered again back to those days spent in Donna’s apartment, when she used to stay up late and read to the little girl that her niece once embodied. Reina’s stomach lurched suddenly, and she dropped her hand. Miki’s father, after all, would surely be appreciative of the literary pursuits that his would have been sister in law bestowed upon his abandoned daughter, after all.
“I was thinking about your mother,’ Reina finally admitted softly and tentatively, “and about your aunt, Deborah. And about… our mother.” She sighed shakily. “It will be the tenth anniversary of her yahrzeit or death, as you would say; it is coming up this very fall, in the month of Tishri.”
Michelle slowly removed her hand from Reina’s belly and stared at her aunt, and she suddenly looked older now, rather than younger, as she wore a serious expression on her thirteen-year-old face. “What were you thinking about,” she asked again, “specifically?”
And Reina sighed yet again as she lurched upwards in order to return to her kitchen and her cooking. “I…” she rounded the counter and drew the fruit basket to herself. “I was thinking about what a shande it is, or what a shame,” she shuddered, “that we are not close. Deborah, Donna and I. Even when Mother’s yahrzeit is… so important to all of us.” She sniffled once, and then reached for a napkin so that she could dab at her eyes.
Slowly, Michelle turned in her stool so that she could face her aunt who was now standing again at the opposite side of the counter. “And you think that you are alone in this?” she asked, and then she placed her hands flat across the dusty blue counter and extended them towards her aunt. And yet Reina could not tell whether her niece’s tanned brown hands looked like—autumn leaves from back in her childhood home of New York City, with Central Park just around the figurative corner from her, or maybe her niece’s hands were spiders, thick and black spiders that were crawling out from under the deep. She rattled her head hard, and tried to dispel such lurid fantasies from her imagination.
“What do you mean?” was all that she asked the girl, and she did ask it cautiously.
Perhaps sensing her aunt’s distress, Michelle did retract her hands and sat down properly on her stool. “I mean,” she said, and she was both quiet and purposeful with this, “that after eight years of not seeing you, my mother sent me here to be your guest.”
Reina stared at the girl, and the implications of what she was saying hit her both slowly and with a considerable amount of force. She dropped the plum from her hands and grasped hard on to the table, and was about to open her mouth to say—she was not even sure what she could say, but suddenly, the door behind her did creak open, and she whipped around as her husband entered the room.
“Ah, there you are,” the man said, and he smiled first at his wife, then at the bulge of his son in her womb, and finally at his niece in turn. Keeping his eyes trained to the girl’s, he asked “perhaps you would like to take a drive with me to Tel Aviv today, Mikele?”
And Reina was exhaling a shaky breath of gratitude as she turned to her husband with a growing fondness and admiration for bringing stability and normalcy back in to their lives. “Oh, Doran!” she was about to laugh, and then she would add in a conjecture about running their niece into the ground, and how much fun the two of them had been having in the kitchen (even though that was an utter lie, of course, but Reina, in this desperate state of trying to achieve equilibrium, could not acknowledge it as such.) She was about to say all of this, but then, suddenly, Michelle did beat her to speaking at anything at all.
“Actually, Uncle Doran, Aunt Reina and I were having a discussion about my mother,” Michelle did elect to say, and Reina’s stomach dropped through her body, all hopes of normalcy and stability were dashed from her yet again.
Doran, who had been busy with the shuffling through a newspaper since the moment that he himself had stopped speaking, stopped in his tracks. His body tensed and straightened and his brown eyes suddenly sought out his wife’s, carrying waves of shock and concern towards Reina, who was still leaning heavily against the counter, and merely stared back at him herself, utterly at a loss for all words. This was, of course, her usual reaction to her sister, Donna’s, mention, but Michelle speaking it was even worse, Michelle, sitting here in her own kitchen in Israel, and implying something that was suddenly very physical and very visceral, and yet something that had not existed between Reina and her two older sisters in several years past—if ever at all. Reina, simply put, was at a complete loss.
So Doran, alone, did turn to his niece. “Your mother, hmm?” he said, and some of the stiffness of his posture made its way into the tone of his voice. He had not met Donna Davidson but for a handful of times in his life—and not one of them was at his wedding to Reina, which was performed in Israel, after all. But he did know of the continuous abusive and anticlimactic effect that the women had had on his wife. He remembered being shocked when his sister in law so suddenly allowed her own precious daughter to visit him and Reina—and the Holy Land, of course. He even had questioned Donna’s reasoning very briefly, but had ultimately contented himself with simply chalking the decision up to Divine Justice—that is, Hashem intervening in order to make it so that Michelle Davidson, or his niece through the marriage to Reina, was an extended olive branch of sorts, and was meant to harbor a small degree of understanding between the two sisters, Reina and Donna, at least, if the eldest, Deborah, was not to be included along with them. He was not, however, expecting his niece to be aware of her role… unless, of course, her mother had put her up to something more elusive to him. And Doran Hadar’s sharp eyes did narrow. “And how is your mother?” he asked suspiciously.
“She is about the same,” Michelle said, employing both simplicity and honesty in her young answer. “She is dedicated to her work, first and foremost. But she did send me here, mere months before my grandmother’s 10 year death anniversary—or yahrzeit,” she conceded. She paused meaningfully, and looked over at her aunt Reina, in order to address her. “I think you should come back to New York in order to commemorate it.”
And Reina Hadar did gasp at the notion. She had never actually considered leaving Israel, leaving the Holy Land… ever again. Going back to New York City was pretty much synonymous with going back to another time in her life, an unmarried time, a time before she was a prospective mother—or had embodied the deep religion and traditions that was available to all Jewish women. She opened her mouth, although she had no idea what she might respond with to her niece, and of course, was saved from such painful awkwardness from her wise and well versed husband.
“Absolutely not,” was Doran’s firm and unwavering decree; and it was delivered as if he was addressing some one his own age—or at least was addressing Donna herself rather than Donna’s teenaged daughter. “Your aunt is pregnant—and almost completely to term. She can not be expected to endure a day long plane ride to and from the United States.” And he paused meaningfully. “To say nothing of the emotional trauma, which will await her once she does arrive there.”
The disdain in his tone was hardly concealed, but Michelle did not wince. Still sitting casually on her stool, and with her hair framing her tanned and golden face, she continued in a slightly softer and more innocent tone. “But I can take care of her, Uncle Doran, like I used to, back in the old days when she did live with Mom and me.”
Reina’s heart did flutter at those words—ridiculously so, perhaps, as if she was still a school girl and Miki was still in diapers. Take care of her indeed. But her niece was smiling indulgently at her, and flashing her perfectly straight and white teeth, that her mother, Donna, had likely paid a fortune in order to obtain.
Once again, however, her husband did find his voice before she did find hers. “Those are noble sentiments, Mikele,” he said kindly, his cynical tone falling in the face of his niece’s charm. “But I am afraid that such a trip for your aunt and cousin is simply out of the question.”
Without noticing it, Reina’s mouth was opening as her husband finished with what he had to say, and she was further surprised by using her voice to speak. “I want to go, Doran,” was what she said, and she slapped a hand over her mouth, her heart beating very loudly, expressing the horror she felt at countering her husband’s already stated decree.
And slowly, her husband turned to stare at her, his expression changing from kindly and empathetic to utterly shocked. Reina once again pressed her hands into the counter for balance, waiting for his metaphoric axe to fall. “You cannot possibly be serious,” was his counter argument, and he even chuckled in order to soften it. “What about the baby?”
“I am strong,” Reina found herself persisting in a squeaky voice and over the slight tremors of her body for disagreeing with him. “I can do this, Doran, I must…” her voice dropped to a whisper, as she was unable to open herself up to more vulnerability than that. “I must honor my mother’s death.”
Silence reigned in the Hadar home for a moment, with husband and wife staring incredulously at each other, and with niece still and observant on her stool—and even the baby did not shift so much in his mother’s womb. As Doran was the head of the household, all time revolved around him, waiting for him to make some sort of—final statement, some sort of executive decision, and to return them all to the normalcy and stability that they had lost so long ago.
The clock continued to tick, even in the absense of time, and perhaps understanding the contradiction of such an act, Doran opened his mouth, sucked in a breath, and then closed it again. The women, meanwhile, continued to wait.
Finally, that breath did turn into a sigh, and Doran straightened his shoulders even more, physically signifying that the time had come. “We will be discussing this later, Reina,” he said pointedly, making it obvious that this would be a private conversation between husband and wife. “In the meantime, I will be in the den if either of you,” he nodded to both his wife and niece in turn, “need me.”
Reina nodded once, feeling both nervous and relieved at this decree, and life finally slid back into a shaky resolve for her. Michelle, meanwhile, simply watched her uncle as he retreated back out of the room, grasping his newspaper in his hand.
It was not until that night, when the two of them were alone in their room, that Doran brought up the subject again.
“I do not want you to go,” he said as a way of opening up the conversation.
Reina was standing by her mirror and slowly undressing herself. Although she was in the privacy of her closed bedroom at the time of night when it was appropriate to change into nightly apparel—or even to have relations with her husband—she still felt that sting of immodest shame, which was intensified, now, that her son did reside within her very skin. So she stood by the mirror, though not trying to give into the narcissism of watching herself as she slowly slipped out of more dress and more rapidly hurried into her nightgown.
“I have to do this.” She did look into the mirror now, but not towards herself; instead, she regarded her husband’s reflection behind her, from where he was seated on the bed. She sighed. “And not just for my mother, I know. But for my sisters too. I need to be the bigger woman here. I need to… make amends.”
Her hands slipped under her scarf and tugged it from her head, therefore allowing her hair, still rich and vibrant in its potency, to tumble down her flush, young face, making her feel more vulnerable and sinful than ever before.
Doran shifted on the bed, as he did not want to frighten her with angry pacing, she knew. “It is a long journey,” he said gravely, “and the results are uncertain.”
“But I must try,” Reina turned to face him, a shocking amount of certainty suddenly spreading through her veins. “It would be wrong not to try—and not to forgive.” She closed her eyes briefly and traveled back to that other time and that other place. “I was 15 when my mother died, and it felt like they took my very life from me. I need to face them—to prove that I am a person, and not a child any longer, and that I am now their equal, not subservient to them. Oh gracious.” Nausea hit her, and she stumbled in order to sit down, hard, in her rocking chair. “I am not right, I am self righteous.”
The floorboards creaked and shockingly, she felt her husband’s soothing hand in her unworthy hair. “You are not self righteous,” he said softly into her ear, as if he were speaking of forbidden secrets. “They hurt you when you were at your most vulnerable. It is natural to feel resentment as you do.”
“But it is not noble,” Reina countered him in a low voice. “It is not Hashem’s will. I know this.” And she sighed, trying to take comfort from her own convictions, as well as her husband’s warm presence beside her.
But Doran’s hand stilled in her hair and he spoke awkwardly. “You know—I would not be able to go with you on this trip,” he said. “I—I would have to work.”
Reina nodded, forcing herself to accept this simple truth. “I understand.”
She heard her husband breath in sharply through his nose. “And you are sure you want to go through with this?” he asked.
The rocking chair shuddered as Reina did consider this. She was not sure of anything. What she was sure of… she was sure that she did not want to face Deborah and Donna again. She was sure that she did not want to visibly set eyes on her mother’s grave again. And she was sure that if she let these fears consume her, that there might be nothing left—just vanity and jealousy and resentment coating her body once her son was to leave her.
She looked her husband straight in the eye, and tried to speak as firmly as she could. “I am sure,” she said.
And Doran sighed, conceding the point. “All right,” he said. Slowly, his hands traveled to her back and braced her as he helped her to stand. “I will start researching flights to New York City once Mikele leaves.”
Gratitude filled Reina, as if she were perspiring in the desert and her husband’s kindness was nothing less than life giving water. And she thanked Hashem for her good fortune—for this man, who had turned her into a woman, for the prospect of this family that they would create, and for the certainty that no matter what happened with her sisters, she had something godly to return to. She allowed herself to be propelled towards the bed, needing her rest after making such lofty and perpetually harmful decisions.
“You… are the most wonderful man,” she murmured admirably, and leaned into her husband in order to whisper the secret words. “I love you,” she said.
Doran’s gentle hands settled her into the bed, and fashioned the warm sheets around the form of her and their son. Slowly and tenderly, he pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I love you too, besheret,” he whispered back before leaving her side in order to change for bed himself.
Reina Hadar relaxed her body and closed her eyes, allowing herself to sink into the warmth of slumber. And in her mind’s eye, she whispered her final plea to the Almighty Creator—the plea which was once as silly as a secular birthday’s wish so long ago—the hope that she could find peace in her life at long last.
