Exodus: A memoir Read Online Free Page B

first year of marriage. Chaya didn’t say anything as to their content, but she didn’t have to. Eli and I had not received an invitation to Jacob’s eldest daughter’s wedding. It was clear that my entire family knew, or would know soon enough, that Eli had crossed the line.
    Chaya expected me to be enraged, I could tell. She reacted with discomfited surprise when I responded calmly to her news. This was her problem, not mine, I thought. She had so forcefully arranged my marriage to Eli. She had chosen him for whatever qualities she had seen. If he had failed her, that was a reflection on her judgment, not mine.
    All this I thought about before I said anything to her. I knew I already had one foot out the door of my marriage, and my world. She had always wanted to control everything, and I realized how angry she must be that she hadn’t been able to control this particular event. Surely, she would want to control it now.
    “Well, what would you like to do?” I asked her. There was no rage, only matter-of-factness, in my tone. Her will would be done regardless. I heard a pause at the other end of the line, barely a beat, but Chaya was not one to pause before she expressed her opinion or intent. I had rattled her.
    “I’ll make sure you get invited to the wedding,” she assured me. “And I’ll have my husband talk with Eli, make sure he knows he can’t ever do this again. That we’ll have our eye on him.”
    “Whatever you say, Chaya,” I replied. “I have to finish folding the laundry right now, but I’ll talk to you later.”
    I showed up at the wedding with straight shoulders and a firm jaw, but spoke to no one. It wasn’t that I was ashamed. No, I felt only a vague sense of triumph. It seemed to me that they had all failed, that the circumstances were a product of their mistakes. Finally the tables were turned. I was no longer the one at fault; instead, I was the blameless white sheep in a sea of black ones.
    I watched them approach me delicately, not knowing how to act. I saw only mortification on their faces, and a particular squirming guilt on the face of the cousin who had been the seductress. Her eyes could not meet mine. But I bore no resentment toward her.
    It was only after I had been separated from my husband for three weeks that I received another call from Chaya. Eli had asked her to entreat me to return to his house. Ironically, back when I had been unable to perform sexually for a year, he had also askedher to tell me he wanted a divorce. How she had yelled and abused me then. I listened to her voicemail. Her voice was coated, practically dripping, in false kindness.
    “Whatever happens,” she said, “blood is thicker than water. We’re your family and we will always support you.”
    I took the message for what it was: an effort to play to my vulnerabilities and engage me in conversation. She was saying the words she thought would melt me, remembering me as the child who above all wanted nothing more than to be accepted. She dangled the promise of a newly loving family in order to manipulate me into conversation, where surely, she must have reasoned, I could be bribed and threatened into my rightful place.
    I didn’t call back. I changed my number. And when her condemnations of me were published in the newspaper a few years later, I remembered her message with a sense of bittersweet satisfaction. “Whatever happens . . . we will always support you.”
    The
New York Post
printed an interview with my family after I had suddenly attained notoriety in my community, and my uncle, the same one who regularly sent me poorly spelled death threats and insults, often in emails cc’d to my entire extended family, said to the reporter that, in essence, all of this had always been
my
problem, because I had simply “lacked happiness.” This, despite all my family had done for me, he said. They had arranged a marriage to a good man, he said, spent thousands on a wedding—clearly I was abnormal