submitted by Rachel Ament, Washington, DC

It was the first day of my third year of Yeshiva High and I was trying to be good, sweet, wifely.  I sat up straight, with every step of my vertebrate lined up against my chair like so.   My hair-bob bounced exactly one inch up and down on my head like so. I was the girl whose insides were difficult to envisage: did I truly have the same whoosh and whirl of brown digestion inside me as all of the other human beings?

I did.

And it made me feel doomed. That very day, my morning oatmeal was digesting acid-first into my stomach and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It made gurgling sounds, zigzag radio static sounds. I was coughing to try to cover it all up but this did not prevent the other student from curving their heads back to try to catch a glimpse. I thought it was unfair because what is inside your body, under your skin, is supposed to be kept private.

“Maybe you’re pregnant,” Tamar laughed, clapping my stomach, “Maybe you had sex with a boy!”  I wanted to smile at her, of course.  I wanted to let her know that hey man, I’m a good sport, I’m a jokester too, but I couldn’t.  The acid bubbles had shot past the ladder of my ribcage by then, smack into my chest.  It burned like hell. And it wasn’t just gas and fluids in all the wrong places, like usual, but shards of glass seemed to be stuck in there too.  “Holy fuckin God.  Holy Jesus shit!” I yelled out loud. Whatever the correct phrasing for cursing was, I knew I was mangling it. “Holy God.  Holy fuckin’ God. Mother of Jesus! Mother of pearl! Mother of death!”

Ms. Rivkin and the class waited in silence for me to complete the monologue.  “Mother of death!” I yelled again. The pain finished off and my body enjoyed that cool, sinking, after-pain feeling; the grand reward.  “I’m really sorry,” I said.  “I think it was food poisoning.  I’ve never been in so much pain before.”

Ms. Rivkin just stared at me in silence.   She let her eyes, which were a pleasant navy color, orbit around their rims for a bit, and then ordered me to walk to the front of the class.  She gestured me to get down on the ground, on all fours. “Vands in front! Palms facing the floor!”

I did as I was told.  I felt a tail wagging out of my hindquarters and bunny rabbit ears rooting upright. I looked at my reflection in the window, just to make sure I wasn’t really an animal.  I wasn’t.  I then looked past my reflection, through the glass square, and watched all the wobbly autumn greens and oranges in the sky.  The world was still a special place every now and then, I reminded myself.

Ms. Rivkin stepped onto my hands, arranged her heel exactly where my wrists snap. The heels weren’t stilettos but they were some kind of stony material, sharp enough, I figured, to carve a good bruise.  Ms. Rivkin then jumped on my hands, without a word or sound.  When she landed, I could almost feel my hand bones splitting out away from her heels, making room for them.  I didn’t cry though, didn’t want Ms. Rivkin to believe she had the power—and it really did seem a Godly power—of extracting salty tears out of the human body and down my entire length of cheeks.

“Masha will never be assaulting God’s name again.  No one in the class will ever be assaulting God’s name again.  Is that clear?”

“Yes, Ms. Rivkin,” the class chorused.

“Masha?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go vack to your seat and don’t look up for from the floor for the rest of the day, understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t vant to see that delinquent face of yours for the rest of the day, understand?”

“Yes.”

When the bell rang, I didn’t wait for Tamar and Aviva like usual; I wanted to walk home by myself.  The sun was a hard, sulphuric yellow that day and for just a minute I mistook it for a surveillance flashlight tagging me a criminal.  O the humiliating thrill of being a criminal!  On the train, I used to pretend I was a prisoner in a movie scene.  Young and beautiful with hands pinned behind me in cast-iron rings.  My body taking the shape of a deformed, armless prisoner of war, the shape of an ostrich!  My entire family and Jewish community of Boro Park ashamed of me, mourning for my soul, but still, the sweet thrill of it all!— blood rising to the top of every vein producing that hot, full-body choreutic explosion: I. Am. A. Criminal.

I. Am. A. Criminal. The four words were chanting up and down my auditory lobe and it continued bobedeebeebopping as I approached Tamar Weisenthal’s apartment on my right.  I was very aware her brother Menachem was studying the Talmud inside, hoped to see the dim shape of him through the window.  Tamar, Menachem and I had grown up together but often Tamar would scurry off to piano lessons and Menachem and I were left to fend by ourselves.  When we were seven, I remember blowing out all of my nose slime onto my hands and then toweling them onto Menachem’s head, dyeing his hair an ill yellowish green.  He would then hug me, tell me he loved me, and run inside and cock his head under the faucet before his mother would come home and discover what we’d done.  We would make marriage pacts, the two of us, design all the charming details of our kids faces.  My eyes, your eyebrows, I’d tell him.  No your eyebrows, he’d say. But a few years later, we weren’t even talking, no gut Shabbas, nothing.  In the religious world, just when the romance hormones begin cross-multiplying themselves in the boys’ brains, just when the boys feel the gentle urge to skin the hide right off their neighboring females, they are expected to keep their distance.

Tamar opened the door to her apartment, pulled me inside with a hug.

“Baruch Hashem! Baruch Hashem!” she cheered. She led me to the dining room table where we played Gin-Rummy with Chinese playing cards.  She held her fan of seven cards real close to her face.  “Masha, stop looking” she kept saying. Her mother soon entered with a casserole dish in hand, steam waving from its crust and her six or seven kids took their seats at the table.  I took a seat diagonally across from Menachem, looked at him every now and then using only the corner of my eyes.  He had grown into an attractive man, that Menachem.  His face was quite youthful, all rounded edges, nice copper eyes that turned green in bad lighting.  The only problem was his mouth which was rowed with these huge splint-sharp teeth. Teeth for a rodent, my mamma once whispered to me with a laugh.

I didn’t want to stare at him so I tried to find something else to do with my eyes.  I looked at my arm hair. I looked at the dog.  I looked at Tamar, who was cutting her potato kugel into the shape of a star, swinging at the crust with these grand, seesawing motions.  No doubt about it she was soliciting for attention.

“Tamar,” I finally gave in, “What are you doing?”

“Its just, well you know… kugel,” Tamar’s face grew serious.  “Its just so ugly.  It’s like…like orphan mush.  I’m just trying to make it more attractive.”

“You are so mental,” I said.

“She really is,” Menachem said, staring at his plate, already regretful.  As he should have been.  Menachem was a frum boy, mind you, and was weeding his way into conversation between two girls, one of whom was not related to him!—surely this meant our great solar system had kicked out of orbit.  Surely this meant the planets were suddenly rotating the sun in the broken-wheeled motions of the hora instead of in its usual clean circuit.  I mean surely.

My father once said that sins happen in clumps.  You bee-bee-gun a bird for pleasure, enjoy the thuggish feeling of watching feathers blasting with blood and you begin killing animals higher up the kingdom.  Shoot to the top, so to speak.  I guess the same phenomenon was happening with Menachem.  He began talking to me with longer and longer sentence and it was not long before he had curled his upper lip behind his gumline and smiled at me.  It wasn’t some shy smile either but a giant comedian performance smile toppling over with all sorts of chemicals and romantic implications.  I even spotted a matching wink in his left eye.

I didn’t really know what to think of this whole ordeal but I did know that it had done something completely weird and probably damaging to my body.  Minutes after Menachem smiled at me, I felt this strange exotic movement in my vagina, like an ant farm. Lots of pieces of something small: ants, needles, sunflower seeds, all detonating off.  I think there was some pasty juices whooshing around in there too and I don’t know if I enjoyed it per se but I did want it to happen again and again. That night, I made sure my sister Rivky was asleep and I mean rock-dead asleep, and then I wriggled my fingers over the veil of my underwear, tried to recreate it.  What’s even stranger is the minute my hand scooted down there, there was an image of Menachem in my head looking and acting like a Mexican pop singer.  He was wearing a slinky jewel-encrusted button-down and he was talking so fast there wasn’t even room for breaths or pauses. Y es que yo quiero darle la mano al caido kdenyo quiero sanar todas tus heridas denyo quiero secar y tus lagrimas!

The next day the phone rang and I knew it would be Menachem.  E.S.P. has been a genetic claim in my family for a short-stack of generations now.  Legend has it my grandmother had water-coloured Marilyn Monroe’s face the very morning the starlet killed herself but I’m sure there are stories life this in every family.

I picked up the phone with my right fist, the lower half of the hand still scabbed and maroon-colored from Ms. Rivkin’s heel.  I. Am. A. Criminal, I thought.

“Hello, Masha’s phone.” I said, coldly, carefully.

“Its Menachem.”

“I know.” I said.

There was a long pause.

“Masha do me a favor and meet me at the creek behind Meisner’s Deli.  No big thing,” he assured me.  “I just want to talk to you.”

“Okay,” I said.  I looked at my legs, naked and bone-pale on my bedsheets.  I stretched them out until they were longer, skinnier and the loose jiggling parts had gone completely still.  I felt weird unclothed while Menachem was on the phone, felt that reflex-fear that he could see me, touch me, smell me right at the sweat gland. Technology has a way of teasing your brain like that, the way it allows some senses to be there and others not.

“Oh, well great.  Good.”  Menachem said, nervously. He had been expecting a different answer.  “I’ll see you there at 9:00, okay?”

“I’ll see you there.”

“Okay well you know that I—”

“Yes?” I cut in.

“Nevermind.  I’ll see you there tonight.”

I imagined Menachem greeting me. He’d be standing where we agreed to meet, in front of that wimpy fungal creak with tree branches elbowing in and out of it.  He’d be holding hands with himself to keep from touching me, whisper in my ear, “Hey sweetheart.”  I tested out other versions of this in my head, “Hey sugar plum.”  “Hello, my dear princess.” “Well, shalom darling.”  “Oh, why hello, my beautiful Queen Esther.” “Hey hot stuff.”  The more I imagined his voice the more sticky milk poured from the spout of my vagina, down my thighs.  Perhaps this is normal but it had never happened to me before and certainly made me feel like the starred attraction of some interplanetary freak show.  I prayed to God: I’m so sorry God, it’s my body acting out, not me. I had nothing to do with this! But I wondered if humans are in fact responsible for their reflexes.  I wondered if free will stretches that far.

The subject of boys can rove around your head for a day or so but it will eventually hit a cranium wall, slide down it.  Eventually you have to consult a second party. I clicked through my phone, searching for someone, anyone who would understand.  I soon found the number for Chana and inhaled a huge gulp of breath—such relief!  Chana was my twenty two year old cousin who had followed her secular Israeli boyfriend all the way to Texas, a place I didn’t know much about, just knew it looked like it was about to drip right off the map of the United States any minute now. It seemed like the place you go if you want to escape.

“Chana, hi, its Masha,” I said. I spoke low into the phone.  A confidential voice.

“Hey girl!”

“Hey!” I said, trying to match her pizzazz.

“Whats up?”

“Nothing really I—”

“You don’t call your favorite cousin in two years and now you’re saying nothing really.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not really supposed to be talking to you.  I mean, you know how everyone is but you see—”

“What, tell me? You want to piss all over God? You had sex with a boy?” Chana had a gift for beginning conversations in the middle of them.

“Well, I got in trouble in school the other day,” I said.

“Heh,”

“Its not funny.  Well, it is in a way, I guess.  But ever since the um…incident… I’ve wanted to do more and more bad things… there’s this chanting going on in my head about being a criminal…”

“So now you want to have sex with a boy,” Chana snorted.  I could hear the Great Outdoors of Texas in the background.

“No, no its not like that at all its—”

“Listen, if it’s God or that infinity-year-old Torah that’s stopping you.  Well, that’s completely wack.  God is wack.

“Chana c’mon.” I said.

“Listen, whenever you find yourself believing in the ol’ geezer, just repeat in your head, ‘Holocaust.  Holocaust.  Holocaust.’ Sing it with me now, ‘Holocaust.  Holocaust.  Holocaust.”

My chest collapsed into a sigh.  Chana didn’t understand—I believed in God but I didn’t just let some rabbi stick the belief in my brain, let it stay there in place, unexamind.  I found God outside the synagogue, felt him with my own senses.  If you want to know the story, I was on a nature hike with father a few years back and had picked a chameleon off of a rock.  I was cupping him in my hand, wiping the day-old rain off of him with my fingers.

“Whats with all this white stuff?” I had asked my father, holding up a rind of dried skin.

My father explained how the animal takes on different colors in different habitats to avoid predators. “Now, that’s something the Big Bang would never have been smart enough to come up with!” He cried.  And it was true, I thought, relieved by this new simplicity and clarity inside me.  God did exist!

“So you are going to have sex with a boy!” Chana tried again.

“No,” I said, firmly, “No, not at all.”

“Hmmph,” went Chana’s nose and mouth.  “Then when?”

“I have to go now.  I’ll call you soon.” I folded my cellphone shut.  It was an hour before I was supposed to meet Menachem at the creek and I still needed to have a few words with God.  I did not want to apologize to Him or beg for mercy, but simply wanted to tell Him my side of the story.  I cast my head towards the sky and peeled my eyelids back so my eyes would go huge and mystical for Him, like a Disney character.  My voice in my head became a whisper.  My Dearest God, I began, then decided to switch to something more casual, Hey God…baruch hashem!…This felt more genuine. So listen God, I have something I’d like to talk to you about real quick…I am sure you have heard most of it already…that I’m meeting a boy tonight at 9:00 at the creak behind Meisner’s Deli.  I just wanted to make sure  you were not worrying yourself too hard…I mean, its not like I’m  going to have sex with him or do anything drastic like that.  We are just going to talk. Maybe kiss a little! But nothing more.  I have a feeling you won’t even care too much about any of this though because, well, I always figured my neighborhood and the Torah must have been a bit wrong about you…I’m not going to get too into it now but I really don’t believe you would create this huge world and then demand that one half of it not speak to the other half. That just seems so silly to me…so wasteful! So many wasted conversations!  Alright,, I have to go now, I’m so late but please do me this simple favor…please, I am begging you, do not watch us tonight.  Even if you aren’t judging us which I don’t think you are, it would just feel weird with your presence there, like my dad watching me or something.  Well, that’s about it, for now.  Have a pleasant evening.

Walking to the creek that night, I looked like a piece of night sky, sliced off to make a person—black velvet skirt, black cotton top, black lace trim cuffs, black headband.  I tottered on my heels for the entire half-mile to Meisners, then fit myself into the skinny alleyway beside it, walking horizontally.  I ducked under a couple of trees and looked out towards the creek.  A boy. about six feet tall was pitching a curveball of stone into the water.

“Strike, you’re out!” I yelled.  I could feel the joke flatten before it was even out of my mouth.  The boy swiveled quickly around.

“Hey there!” he said.

“Hey…” I tried to put his face together in the dark, “Menachem?”

“No, actually, its not—”

“Where’s Menachem?” I asked.

“Well, he’s actually—”

“Yes?” I crisscrossed my arms, waiting.

I had seen this kid before.  His name was Avi and I had met him a few times at Tamar and Menachem’s house.  He was always biting his fingers, not just the nails like normal people but would actually stick the entire three inches or so of finger meat inside his mouth.

“Well, its actually funny,” he said, “Menachem, well, you know how he gets scared real easily?”

“Scared,” I repeated slowly.

“Yeah, scared.  His mother has just been on his case lately and he had a feeling he’d get caught so he told me I could, you know, go in his place.” Avi, slowly parted my hair with his fingers, saying, “I would love to get to know you.”

Everything in my brain suddenly felt like it had turned into a cold shivery twitch.  Like how a death row inmate is supposed to feel when he is buckled into an electric chair about to breathe his final, conclusive last breath.  Funny how death and being with a boy can feel so similar, I thought.

“Are you okay?” Avi asked.  He sketched his finger down my scalp and into my neck cavity.

I didn’t answer him.  I just stared at his face which, in the 9:30 pm sky, was all shadow patches.  Cool blacks worn down to grays.

“Masha, are you okay?” Avi asked again, obligatorily.

“No,” I deadpanned, “No not entirely.” I moved his fingers from my neck to his sides and then did a strange, almost clinically insane thing.  Crouching to the ground, I gathered up a pile of leaves, crumbled the leaves in my fist and then slowly but urgently emptied them into Avi’s mouth. I laughed, loudly and chokingly. I let some tears out too. I then sprinted all the way back to Meisners, ducking my head under the low-slung trees.  I stepped my feet back onto the cold empty silent road, one foot at a time, and prayed to my dear friend God that no man could see the womanly shape of my body run through the dark of the night.

originally published with Emprise