Jesus Christ. Even looking at her feels sinful.
“Yeah, no, rules, et cetera; you’ve heard the lecture before. Good lord, I’ve got to get out of here. You just relapsed. I shouldn’t be doing this right now.” I let out a fragile laugh and wonder if I sound as terrified as I feel. “Are you going to be okay without me?”
Her brows lift and she says, “I mean, if I say no…?” But then she sighs and nods. “Yeah. Sorry. Not trying to play the woe-is-me, I’m-vulnerable card. You can go. I’ll be all right. I’ll just be lying here wishing you’d stayed.”
Probably thinking, What the hell happened to his boundaries? because that’s what I’m thinking right now. I still feel overheated, as if the radiator’s on even though it’s late June. I scrape both hands back through my hair and blow out hard. “You don’t make it easy, do you?”
“Would you like me any better if I did?” she says with a sly grin, and as always, I’m the one left on the back foot.
I don’t even have anything to say to that; I just shake my head and fumble around to find my phone and shove it in my back pocket as I stand. She still hasn’t moved. Because why would she? She’s got me right where she wants me. Right where I’d want to be too, if only I weren’t so infuriated with myself for losing control. Again.
I do finally make it out, but I text her from the bus and again from the train just to check that she’s still okay.
Looking, maybe, for an excuse to go back.
25
ELY
As with most things, the timing could not possibly be worse. I’m less than a week out from my mini-relapse when I get an email back from Nechama Rubenstein, the rebbetzin of the Chabad House in Astoria. I’m in desperate need of more content for my capstone, so I can’t exactly blow her off.
I scoped her and the rabbi out carefully before writing them and asking if I could photograph one of their events. Chabad is big but also, like, not really. I had to make sure they didn’t know my family. Which meant—with a young couple like Moshe and Nechama Rubenstein—I had to make sure their family didn’t know my family. Because otherwise I could imagine how things would go: me, the Cohen girl with drug problems, lurking around Chabad House events as if she didn’t run off and break her mother’s heart. It would have been a bad look.
But neither Moshe nor Nechama is from Crown Heights originally. They’re both children of shlichus families—that is, their parents led their own Chabad Houses in other cities, little outposts of Orthodoxy reaching out to Jews who didn’t know how to light a Shabbos candle or pronounce a Hebrew prayer.
So I’m pretty sure it’s safe.
“Is this a leech thing to do?” I ask Wyatt over the phone as I walk from Thirtieth toward Broadway. A part of me wanted to ask if he could come with me, but that felt childish, as if I were a little girl afraid to go to camp on her own. But that hadn’t stopped me from calling him as soon as I left my apartment. “Like…isn’t it a little parasitic of me to impose on them like this and use them for my project, and the whole time I’m just, like…masquerading as this random secular Jew who doesn’t know anything about being Orthodox?”
“You are a random secular Jew,” Wyatt says. “You aren’t practicing now, are you?”
I chew my lower lip and sidestep a pile of dog shit that someone considerately left right in the middle of the sidewalk. “I mean…I guess not. Not really. I don’t know that I’d say I’m secular, though.”
I still don’t know how I feel about G-d. I’m pretty sure he exists. But I thought I was done with all this. I was done with it before I went to Shabbos with Michal and felt that magic lighting up inside my chest.
I used to believe in Hashem the way everyone else did. Somewhere along the way I lost that. I wish I could have it back. I don’t want to be one of those people who say things like “G-d is chaos” or “G-d is a universal constant” or a “cultural legacy.” Those are all perfectly fine things to believe. A lot of Jews believe them. But those beliefs don’t fill my cup the way religion used to.
I want the feeling of arms wrapped around me, holding me tight. I want the structure of halacha and mitzvot, the rules and commandments all Jews are bound to follow as part of our covenant with Hashem—even the silly ones.
I want to believe in G-d, but I gave all that up. I threw it away.
I don’t know what I believe now.
“You’ll be fine,” Wyatt tells me. The sound of his voice is low and soft, and if I closed my eyes, I could imagine him murmuring those words in my ear, the two of us in a dark, quiet place. Alone.
In that universe, I imagine him saying that would immediately relax me. I’d uncoil to bask in the warmth of it. Instead I hover at the edge of the sidewalk, craning my neck to watch for oncoming traffic, waiting for a break between the cars long enough to let me dart across the street. Tension is a live wire strung down my back. And Wyatt’s words don’t do much.
“I hope you’re right,” I say. “Otherwise this is going to be really embarrassing.”
Maybe I should have just asked him to come. The asking would have sucked, but the having him here would have made it worth it. Oh well.
The Astoria Chabad House is located near Thirty-sixth Avenue. It’s brand-new; Astoria didn’t have much of a Jewish community until recently. I mean, you can’t even find a decent Jewish deli in this neighborhood to save your life. I once saw someone ask on the Astoria subreddit where to find good challah, and everyone told them to just suck it up and take the train into Manhattan.
But I guess enough new people have been moving in lately that the demographics have changed, or else someone in charge decided that if they had the money to fund Chabad Houses in Wyoming, then they had the money to fund one in northwestern Queens. I ring the bell and take a step back, my hands laced behind my back and fingers twisting together, sweaty and awkward as fuck. My camera bag suddenly seems too heavy, the straps digging into my shoulders. I feel a lot like a wayward middle school student waiting to be let in for her piano lesson.
The woman who opens the door is short, with a long brown sheitel and a modest navy-blue dress. She smiles the second she lays eyes on me, a bright smile that shows teeth and crinkles the corners of her eyes. I can hear the chaos of raucous children somewhere behind her, all screeching voices and thunderous footsteps.
“You must be Ely,” she says. “Please, come in!”
She steps aside to let me move into the entryway. I toe off my shoes next to the collection gathered by the door, my dusty floral Doc Martens taking their place amid the neat line of sensible flats and sneakers. The pair of men’s dress shoes is identical to the ones my father used to wear, to the point that I almost wonder if Moshe shops at the same shoe store.