Olive Days: A Novel

by Jessica Elisheva Emerson

It was a wonder that someone who was questioning could have fallen in love with someone who was deciding, but it was that they were both in flux, both enraptured by motion and change. They adored each other for what they were not yet, and it was beyond their early-twenties imaginations that they would feel differently when it came to pass.

His hair wasn’t long, not like the boys from the art department, but it was shaggy around his ears, unkempt like his fingernails. He was a person who didn’t have enough time to braid and bun and style. His vanity was tied to his braininess. To be that free, Rina thought.

There was a thing people said: Do the Jews keep Shabbos or does Shabbos keep the Jews? A foolish expression. It was she who kept Shabbos, kept it for all the Jews, kept it despite the bait and switch that happened once she was in charge of keeping it. The wives kept Shabbos and the wives kept the Jews. The doughy, tradable wives up to their elbows in cold, gray sink basins, the waxed and stretch-marked wives. In this way, it was said, this way of keeping the Jews, women earned a holiness men could never possess. So instead the men possessed the women themselves, kept them. Let them, like lumps, smolder into ash.

If one resents a mitzvah, has one still fulfilled it?

For the first time since before her marriage, maybe since ever, she had a peculiar sense that life could be different, larger. It wasn’t ambition blooming in her empty gut as she struck at her own heart alongside the other women in shul, but it was related.

It’s just, now that we’re here, I don’t know what’s real. I worry . . . I worry I’m just a person who wants to want. Sometimes it feels so good to want.”

Even though it wasn’t even her memory, she was taken with that warm-bath, turkey-sandwich, almost-but-not-quite-melancholy feeling. That unnamable something bobbing in her stomach, her chest, her solar plexus. As if she had actually been there, next to the little grapefruit tree, dipping her turkey into mustard. He couldn’t name the feeling, but she knew it exactly. It was the feeling of being known.

She immersed fully three times, holding her breath as long as she could, at peace in the warm, natal waters that demanded nothing of her, no price of her body. The waters buoyed her up and held her in her oneness, her aloneness. In the waters of the mikveh women tried to bring themselves closer to a godly purity, but for Rina, alone in the water, it was when she felt most fully realized, almost redeemed. She displaced the water and the weight of her mattered; the water knew the curves of her body and the depths of her mind and held her without reproach: la’da’at, to know.

If it had been misery keeping her down, she’d have started a revolution. But it was loveliness that pinned her to the bed. It was not the misery of the world crushing her but the overwhelming beauty. She could not get up from under the weight of the hope and joy that flowed off people, even when everything—everything—was broken. She was undone by the shocking yellows and greens of the young lemon tree beyond the window of the bedroom, heavy with the last season’s fruit and the next season’s flowers; the thin lip of milky light where the ocean met the horizon on an otherwise black night on the bluffs overlooking Santa Monica; the tiny, perfect proportions of a child, the conch spiral of a baby’s ear;

For five thousand years, Jews had been wrestling with god. Will recognized in himself a wrestler.

Our life together hasn’t even started yet, and already it’s mired in barf.” “Our life together has started,” she said. “You’re in my hospital room at a quarter to six in the morning. And this is nothing compared to the shitstorm to come. And then it will be over. And there will still be sickness and hospitals and there will be death. It’s literally written into goyishe wedding vows.”

“Some people live their whole lives, their kid never breaks a bone, their parents never have malignant moles, they never get . . . what do I have?” “Listeriosis,” he said, and he picked up her left hand, stroked it with his thumb. “And their parents die one of old age, the other of heartbreak, and they never lose all their hair to radiation in their thirties, never have a double mastectomy in their forties, never have a baby with violent asthma or a toddler get run over by a car or a kid who steps on a rusty nail or a teenager who takes pills one night at a party and then wastes away because he can’t stop. And some people have all those things, and they didn’t bring it on themselves.”

“I’ve been reading some of the prophets and at the core of their message is something I didn’t get in church but is like what my brother, Frank, preached with his politics: ‘Learn to do good.’ ‘Devote yourselves to justice.’ ‘Aid the wronged.’ That’s a higher power. And I need one. I cannot believe in god, but I can believe that the world has a higher power and that power is justice. And I can choose to be part of a people who have kept that idea alive for five thousand years.

She tested Will’s idea, transposing his words over the text on the page. Justice spoke and the world came to be. Justice speaks, does, decrees, and fulfills. Justice is merciful. Justice rescues and redeems. Blessed is justice. Baruch she-amar.

The first day we were together, I lost my faith. I realized, alone with you, trembling, that I went my whole life thinking god had mandated that I was forbidden to be alone with you. When I kissed you, then I knew. There was no god who made such a mandate. A person decided it and I let myself believe—we all let ourselves believe—that it was god. Your husband let himself believe that above all god wants marriages that last, and so he devised complicated justifications for desire. He let it destroy your self-worth. No, I do not believe. As I comply with the laws, except my one major falter, I do it with the perfect understanding that people have mandated it and I am choosing to submit. Being at large in the world, being untethered, that is what I cannot face.”

“You think you opened my eyes to things I can’t name. But those things I always knew, those angry longings of a boy. What I never knew before is what your life is, what Nechama’s life is. I assumed happiness. And maybe she is happy. Maybe, Rina, you’re the only frum woman in the world who is miserable and invisible. But even for one soul, even for one . . . I can barely face the burden of what it is to be a wife, what it means to make everything just so. It’s not for the affair that I can’t look my wife in the eyes anymore; it’s for shame over what our life requires of her while I sit here drinking Scotch and studying. To think you could become like me, resigned and hopeless, but without the option of becoming lost in a job and in study. Always with a kitchen and a baby and a patriarchal law to uphold. I don’t want you to become like me.”