Bill’s Pizza has oversize windows that open out to Beacon Street in the middle of Newton Centre. It is a few weeks after my return from Israel and the roads are covered with snow—outside, passersby peer in at this cozy restaurant scene. Josh is far too excited about this long-awaited outing to notice my trepidation at being here with him. I can’t help but think about who might walk past and see us. I’m glad there’s a long line—still time to ponder the theological implications of a cheese slice, still time to grab Josh and run.
As we wait, Josh eyes the toppings through the glass case. Every vegetable combination seems exotic, as do the speckled rounds of pepperoni. On the drive here, I’d told Josh there was one condition: we could order only vegetarian. In the codex of sins, plain cheese pizza is a misdemeanor, not a felony.
“One slice, please,” Josh tells the man behind the counter.
“Actually, two slices,” I add.
As we wait, I detect no signs of guilt on his face. My son is too young to know that food is as fraught as any other kind of pleasure; he has not experienced the kosher-induced anxiety that in a new place, there might be nothing you could eat. For our honeymoon trip to Italy, Aaron and I had packed two kosher salamis, one in each of our knapsacks, and in every city we visited, we sliced them thinly with a plastic knife, afraid we’d run out of food before we made it to Venice, where we’d heard rumors of a kosher pasta restaurant. For us, there was nothing to eat in Rome, where, during August, the one kosher restaurant was closed; nothing in Florence, where we finished off the last of the salamis and, still hungry, drained jars of gefilte fish into the bidet of a pensione. The discovery of a kosher Häagen-Dazs in the Piazza della Signoria was as miraculous as the sight of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the Uffizi nearby.
When Josh sees me watching him, a serious look comes over his face.
“I need to talk to you,” he tells me, his voice hushed, his expression earnest and intent. “Bend down,” he says, and he whispers into my ear: “If one day I decide to eat pizza with meat on it, will you still like who I am?” he asks.
His face is unbearably solemn, his eyes trained on me as he awaits my reaction.
“Oh, Josh,” I say, and as I look into his eyes, I feel my heart breaking open. Even at his young age, he knows the price to be paid for not following the rules.
This, more than anything, was the iron bar across the exit door—love was what tied you and kept you inside. Love was what you risked losing if you wanted to choose for yourself.
“Do you mind if I take off my hat?” I whispered to Aaron. We had been married for a little over a year and we were sitting at a reading at the KGB Bar in downtown Manhattan, a dimly lit room decorated with Russian memorabilia.
Every morning before I walked the six blocks to my graduate writing class, I stood in the bathroom of the apartment we’d moved into after our wedding, on 110th Street in Manhattan. I brushed, scrunched, and moussed the fake hair of my fall the same way I’d once played with my brush-hair doll, as I called it, a mounted plastic head of long blond hair that I’d braided and curled until, in a rash moment, I cut her bald.
I pulled some of my hair forward, clipped on the fall, then used my curls to cover the place where wig met hair.
“Can you come tell me if you see the line?” I called to Aaron from my spot in front of the mirror.
“I can barely see it,” he told me when he joined me in the bathroom. “And only because I know it’s there.”
Wanting to be reassured, I looked in the mirror more closely. The fall might not have been a perfect match but there was a lot of hair, some dark brown, some reddish, some curly, some mere waves. How many people in my writing workshop would be looking for a nearly imperceptible seam along my head or would notice that the fake hair wasn’t nearly as curly as the real hair? But no matter how hard I tried to convince myself that it was fine, I noticed how the outer layer of fake hair slowly separated from the underlayer of real hair. No assortment of bobby pins, no amount of spray or mousse could prevent this—despite all the coaxing and styling, my own hair would have nothing to do with this outside entity, my body rejecting this foreign object. Even worse, when I studied it carefully, I noticed the bump where the fall was attached to my head, a subtle glimpse of something rising from inside.
“It’s too obvious,” I said, and I ripped the fall off my head, then scrunched, curled, and attached it once again. Nearly a whole bottle of mousse, all in the name of God.
I started to say, “I hate this,” but stopped myself. I didn’t want to alarm Aaron with such an expression of discontent. I was supposed to feel that, with each bobby pin, I was securing our relationship. It was the early years of marriage, a sanctified time. If we’d lived in biblical days, Aaron wouldn’t have been drafted to war during the first year to allow him to spend time rejoicing in me, his bride. For us now, it meant that we were supposed to think of this period as an extended honeymoon.
Only once the wig was close to undetectable would I leave for school, trying not to think about my hair and to focus instead on the novel I had started writing, about a woman who converts to Judaism and moves to the Orthodox community in Memphis. I knew that I was supposed to portray Orthodoxy in largely positive terms—any critical sentence could make people angry. Sometimes I read a few pages of what I’d written to my mother, and she’d laugh in appreciation, then worry what the communal fallout might be if it were ever published. I worried as well. Anything that did not uphold or affirm—could you think it? Could you say it? Even worse, did you dare write it?
Yet being a writer, I was learning, required a willingness to cast aside these restrictions. To write was to enter an underground that was rich and teeming—the world wasn’t a single fluorescent-lit room but a house with corners and hallways and passageways to explore. I lived in a small, small box in which I could barely breathe read the opening to a classmate’s novel in progress that we’d discussed that week. I’d put a check mark next to this sentence, then read it again, surprised by the power it had over me. I didn’t think I felt that way, not really, but something stirred inside me. I love this, I scribbled in the margin, but what I wanted to write was I’m afraid I am this.
Walking six blocks up Broadway to the Columbia campus, I was distracted by the word wig. The sound of the wind: Wig, wig. The metal clips were supposed to be fail-proof but what would happen if my hair fell off in the middle of class? If someone were to ask why I covered my hair, I could explain why this ritual felt meaningful to other people, but the truth was that I did it because I wanted to be seen by my community as the type of woman who covered her hair. I’d once heard a story about an Orthodox woman who was taking a chemistry lab and her wig caught on fire. Rather than rip the wig from her head, she’d tried to put the fire out, allowing the wig to singe. A few days later, so this story went, she got a new wig and came to class with hair that showed no sign of having been burned, claiming to have found a magic serum that restored burned hair. When I first heard the story, before I was married, I thought she was crazy for not ripping the wig off her head—it was on fire, after all—but now I suspected I would have done the same.
In the small crowded bar where many of my classmates sat in groups, Aaron and I sat by ourselves. Constantly aware of how I wasn’t like the rest of them—married and Orthodox and trying to hide a secret I wore in plain sight on my head—I was painfully shy. We had each ordered a Coke; the food wasn’t kosher, and drinking was foreign to us. Even though I was twenty-five and living in New York City, this—a crowded bar—was a place to which I was a young and uncertain visitor. Tired of worrying about whether I’d secured the fall exactly right, I was wearing a black baseball hat, so unobtrusive that I hoped it could pass for some kind of halfhearted fashion statement. Aaron was wearing a baseball hat too, over his yarmulke, a socially acceptable method of disguise, though his hat was emblazoned with the logo for the Boston Red Sox, the team and the city for which he pined.
After our wedding, Aaron’s parents had wanted us to move to Boston, even though I still had another two years of graduate school in New York. I didn’t want to move; since our engagement, the relationship with them had been fraught, and I worried that if we lived close, conflicts with them would overwhelm our new independence. Marriage was supposed to confer adulthood, yet our life together often felt like an elaborate version of playing house, the hats I wore little different from the ones in the bag of dress-up clothes I’d had as a child.
“Is it normal to fight a lot?” I asked a friend who’d gotten married a year before I did, viewing her as wise older counsel. I tried not to think about how quickly Aaron and I had gotten engaged so I wouldn’t feel the awful worry that I had married before I was ready.
“It’s normal,” she said and assured me that by the second year, when we really knew each other, everything would be much easier.
I tried to listen to the reading but the hat was pressing tightly against my forehead, the brim cutting across my view. I loosened the buckle and pulled it farther back on my head but the line of the hat still felt too constricting, as though my entire body were being compressed.
“Do you mind if I take off my hat?” I whispered again to Aaron, hoping no one nearby would hear me.
He looked at me in surprise. Though I’d complained about covering my hair, it never seemed possible that I would actually stop. He was sympathetic, but I knew that, unlike me, he didn’t feel as if the edges of Orthodoxy could close in on him. My question felt dangerous, as though I were asking about lifting off the marriage itself for a few hours.
“If you want to,” Aaron said nervously.
I took off the hat and lay it on the table, next to our refills of Coke. Viewed from this vantage point, the hat looked innocuous enough, hardly the vise I’d come to see it as.
“Do you think it’s bad?” I asked him as I shook out my hair and felt like I could not only see more clearly, but breathe more easily as well.
“I’m fine with it,” he said.
“Are you really?” I asked.
“I can see the difference in you,” Aaron acknowledged.
When we left the reading, I put the hat back on and took his hand as we walked. The hat felt tighter, as though my head had grown larger, my hair thicker. It’s a slippery slope, the rabbi still present in my mind warned. It would be only this one time, I decided. I would try harder to keep covering my hair, just as I prayed every morning before I left for class, cooked Shabbat meals every week, immersed myself in the mikvah each month. Doubt would be stamped out, like a small fire. More than anything, I wanted to be the person Aaron had married—still the girl he’d seen when he lifted the veil at our wedding.
“Is everything okay?” I asked as we got ready for bed. Our apartment was a prewar building set back from the street with a wide courtyard and peeling green shutters, the façade arrayed with stone gargoyles set up like sentries to watch over the building’s inhabitants.
“It’s fine,” he said, but even so, I wanted to apologize. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had endangered us—as though I’d tarnished the wedding photo that was displayed by our bedside. Any sin, I knew, wasn’t mine alone—now that we were married, we represented each other. If I didn’t cover my hair, Aaron was less religious just by being married to me. We had signed the ketubah, the official marriage contract, at our wedding, but I knew that another contract existed between us as well. In this unwritten document that was equally binding and unchangeable, we agreed that we would stay the same as we were now. We would always be Orthodox, not just observing the rules but living within the communal expectations. When we had kids, we would move to one of the nearby Modern Orthodox communities in Riverdale or Teaneck, as our married friends were starting to do. We would send our kids to the Modern Orthodox schools where our friends sent their kids. We were young, but the years ahead were already scripted.
A few months after I’d briefly removed my baseball hat, I was walking home from school, and, amid the crowds of pedestrians, I caught a reflection in the storefront mirror of a Love’s drugstore. A girl in a T-shirt and long beige skirt. On her head, a matching beige hat with a floral decoration, her dark curls barely visible under the brim. She looked strikingly familiar but my mind did a double take.
For one moment, I didn’t recognize this religious woman as myself.
People bustled around me, in a Manhattan hurry, but I stopped walking. I stared at my reflection. It was hard not to rip off the hat right there, not to strip down on Broadway to the person I sensed waiting below. A voice, stronger than I knew I had, whispered in my head: This is not who you are.
I continued to cover my hair but started wearing pants again. I reveled in the long-lost pleasure of jeans—they hugged my legs and made me feel powerful, capable of confidently striding anywhere. Was it this feeling, I wondered, that was actually the most forbidden part? When I was in college, wearing pants had seemed like a grave sin, but now at least I didn’t have to worry that the Orthodox boys I liked wouldn’t date me. I still worried about being judged by my community, but being married bestowed a level of immunity.
“It’s just this one thing,” I assured Aaron, who seemed to be okay with it, though I didn’t know for sure.
One day, I came home to a message on the answering machine. I’d shown a finished draft of my novel to the literary agent for whom I’d interned one summer and had spent the past three weeks in a state of nervous anticipation waiting to hear from her. Every time the phone rang, I jumped.
“I’m calling to say that I read your book and I loved it,” the agent said in the message.
Thrilled, I went to meet the agent without my hat or fall. I felt as though I’d never before walked outside so bare, as though I’d gone out without pants or a shirt, but I couldn’t imagine talking to her about my novel while feeling so false and covered. I was still afraid of any negative reaction to my portrayal of Orthodoxy, yet in the three years that I’d been working on the book, I’d fallen in love with the feeling—rare, but there sometimes—that I could find a way past the erected barriers; the words were not in my mind but actually in my hands, my fingers sprinting freely toward the fences.
After I met with the agent, Aaron and I went out to dinner to celebrate, my hair still uncovered.
“I’m going to stop covering my hair,” I told him and looked into his eyes, wanting him to see all of me. I tried to tell myself that this was just one more slight adjustment so that I could better stay inside, but I understood that when you began listening to that quiet internal voice, it might grow louder.
“I guess it’s okay,” he said.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” I asked, as though I were squeezing him for some darker truth. He was trying to be comfortable with what I had decided, but I recognized the anxiety in his smile.
“Do you think you’re going to change any more?” he asked.
“I won’t,” I assured him, but I too was uneasy. It was too late to change. Once you were married, you were supposed to know who you were. Unsaid, but present between us, was the story we both knew—not about anyone specific but a general threat that the good girl could inexplicably morph into something unrecognizable, a Medusa-like creature whom the laws could not tame.
Once I stopped covering my hair, I felt like I could see more clearly, as though I’d started wearing glasses I badly needed. I made a pile of my everyday hats and gave them to a friend who was getting married, saving only the dressy ones I would still wear to synagogue on Shabbat, where there was no choice. I wasn’t sure what to do with the fall. It seemed like some sort of body appendage that should be buried with ritual and ceremony or else an unwanted item set on the windowsill so that the city birds could carry it off and make, somewhere in Central Park, a nest crafted from genuine human hair.
My own hair was matted from being covered and had thinned at the front of my scalp. Since getting married, I’d paid little attention to my actual curls. In need of restoration, I went to a Manhattan salon that specialized in curly hair. Here, curls were treated as exotic, endangered creatures. Rather than straightened, curls were sculpted, gathered, cherished. Before I’d covered my hair, I might have been frustrated with the unruliness of my curls, but now they were an indispensable part of who I was.
That week, I invited a tableful of Shabbat guests, as I always did, baked challah, made chicken and vegetables and kugels and desserts. Before Shabbat started, I set up my silver candlesticks, and when it was time, I lit the candles, waving my hands three times in front of me as though ushering the light toward me. Placing my hands over my eyes, I whispered the blessing, adding a prayer for our families, as my mother did each week, as my grandmothers had done as well. In doing so, I was linking myself even more with them, as though I were lighting my candles not from a match but from their still-burning flames.
Together, Aaron and I went to the synagogue across the street from our apartment. In recent years, the congregation had dwindled to a few old members, but friends of ours had started a Friday-night service there that was spirited and soulful—part of a small transformation under way in Modern Orthodoxy to create more participatory services. Instead of the women being relegated to the balcony, a divider was placed down the middle of the mostly empty sanctuary, and the women were invited to sit downstairs, separate but at least a little more equal. From my spot in the newly made women’s side, I watched as the people in the wooden pews around me began to sing, melodically, joyfully. There was no perfunctory performance of obligation, no hurrying through to get home quickly. Sing unto God a new song. Sing unto the Lord all the earth, we sang in Hebrew. Columbia students and professors and neighborhood families, retired men who had come here since they were young, elderly women who looked askance at these changes but eventually relented and sang as well. Let the heavens be glad. Let the earth rejoice. Let the sea roar. I sang along with the others. All these contradictions and places of constriction—they weren’t all that mattered. There was this too. The words of the prayers, old and new, above me and inside me.
Then, with our friends assembled around the folding table we’d set up in the living room of our apartment, I brought out the food I’d spent all day making, using the platters we had received as wedding gifts, feeling as though I were serving a piece of myself. When I cooked and served Shabbat dinner, I was like all the other Orthodox women I knew.
One week, we were invited to Shabbat dinner by friends of ours who’d recently had a new baby. Their silver candlesticks were lined up on the white tablecloth, three candles burning, one for each member of their small family. This was a scene I’d imagined whenever I envisioned how my life was supposed to look.
“I think we’re ready to have a family,” I said to Aaron.
Josh’s question hangs over me. Will you love me if I’m not like you? Will you love me if I choose something else?
“Oh, Josh,” I say again. As we get our slices of pizza—oversize triangles with sturdy crusts and thick layers of cheese—I begin a series of proclamations. “I will love you whoever you are. I will respect the choices you make. I will not be happy if you harm yourself or others, but the decisions will be yours.”
He’s looking at me with eyes wide open, wondering if he can believe me. He wants to give himself over to my reassurance, yet already, at the age of nine, he understands that, given the world to which he was born, it’s a complicated proposition. All I can do is assure him that, in my love for him, there aren’t edges past which he can’t venture. My love for him is capacious enough for him to grow and change; it has ample space for whoever he wants to become.
“You’re only at the start of figuring out who you’re going to be. You don’t have to be held back by what others think of you. You have the right, the need, to decide what you believe,” I say, trusting that he will understand at least part of what I’m saying.
I’m in high gear, speechmaking mode, talking too fast, with far more passion and honesty than he expected. His eyes are open wide as he listens intently to me. Any moment he will change the subject, to the Patriots or the Red Sox. His eyes will drift to the ESPN-blaring TV attached to the wall behind us, but until then, I’m saying words that I’m starting to trust, offering sentences that are becoming truer in my own mind as I say them.
“This is the most delicious pizza in the world,” he exclaims, though I’ve privately decided that I prefer the thin slices at Regina’s in Boston’s North End.
“Life,” I continue on, wanting to impart this not just to Josh but to my younger self, “is about exploring and grappling and growing. You’re allowed to change, even when it’s painful. You’re allowed to decide who you want to be.”
Josh has sauce dotted at the corners of his mouth. He is savoring the slice.