Olive Days

An excerpt from the daring debut novel of Jessica Elisheva Emerson

Editor’s Note: I can’t describe Jessica Elisheva Emerson’s new book better than Counterpoint Press does: “A smoldering debut novel about a young mother in an Orthodox Jewish community of Los Angeles whose quest for authenticity erupts in a passionate affair following a night of wife swapping.” But I can promise you that after reading this excerpt, you’ll immediately want to read what precedes it. — David Michael Slater

October 2011

From sundown to sundown on Yom Kippur—a weak day from fasting—Rina was at war. The holy day began, as always, with the early evening absolving of all promises and obligations; “Our vows shall not be vows” repeated three times. She wrenched her wedding band around and around, unable to focus on the Hebrew letters in her machzor, and pulled her overlarge hat lower and lower over her face in the hopes that the others crowded into the women’s section of the temple would assume she was gripped by a spasm of righteous devotion.

Each time the congregation uttered Avinu malkeinu—our Father, our King—Rina thought not of god but of her husband, of their marriage, of what he might owe her for his conduct. They never argued about whether to swap again because, just as she suspected, David grew jealous immediately, jealous and full of regret that had nothing to do with Rina, or what he’d asked of her. Intellectually she knew he owed her amends, but she couldn’t dislodge the stone in her heart; it thudded that she had it backward. David had given her a choice. She had failed by saying yes. She needed to ask forgiveness if the marriage was to survive.

But the marriage felt unrecoverable to her. It wasn’t that she wanted to love another man, ever, it’s that she wanted to feel loved by another man; Brandon’s need for her had been so great that even though she loathed him and what they had done, she had remembered what it was to be needed for something other than the practical. Blot out our transgressions, the liturgy begged. But whose transgressions?

Sometimes she wished David would have an affair, an actual affair, just to free her of this partisan guilt. And sometimes she thought he was having an affair, with Brandon’s sister, Aliza. David had known Aliza through Brandon for years but had gotten to know her better through their yoga classes and a book club. Aliza was tall, with knobby features and a genuine face. Rina knew her through occasional proximity in the women’s section at shul and a handful of holiday meals. After David joined the book club, he’d asked Rina to set Aliza up on a number of blind dates; an unwed woman of Aliza’s age in the community began to take on a patina. That ended after the club read some sappy love story, and David spoke of Aliza increasingly and then, abruptly, not at all. Rina didn’t think they were having an affair, didn’t think he would ever have an affair, but god that would make her choices easier.

Rina couldn’t imagine David ever perceiving her as an eshet chayil again, a woman of valor, or how she could come to see herself as such, even though he kept giving her the blessing each Shabbos, kept saying she was adorned with strength and dignity, wisdom and righteousness. And even now, he looked unburdened in the men’s section; she could see him through the mechitzah, shuckling as always, nodding to friends. He hadn’t asked her for forgiveness in the lead-up to Yom Kippur. Had not, in fact, said anything about the swap other than express his jealousy, asking several times if she’d liked getting fucked. The swap hadn’t been her idea, but she was the one left with no path toward atonement.

*

The holy days—the apex of Jewish absolution—came and went and still she was consumed by the idea that it was her fault, that she’d brought it on herself. One autumn morning, with a tinge of woodsmoke in the air from the recent wildfires and Halloween decorations in the stores taunting those who didn’t celebrate, she dropped the kids at school, then went to David’s office to seduce him. Maybe a blow job against her husband’s leather books would provide some relief. Maybe it’s what he’d needed all these years while she was nursing babies. He was shocked and pleased, but he couldn’t get hard. Other than the rote Shabbos sex and sometimes in the morning when it was least convenient or appealing to her, David had little appetite since the swap. She liked to think his unexpressed guilt over the swap is what made him limp; it would have been almost a relief if the other wife was so good for David that he was daydreaming about her all this time later, no longer interested in Rina. But she suspected it was Aliza who was haunting his libido, because he woke up early to go to yoga every day and, Rina assumed, was rubbing one out in the shower.

He also did yoga in the living room Shabbos afternoons. He called it his practice, which made it sound like a job. He’d been doing it for years and recently rededicated himself to yoga, but he didn’t seem to like it: after sessions he was always impatient, and whenever he talked about his practice it was to criticize Rina for not allowing him enough space for it.

After he gave up, zipped his pants, and slumped into his office chair, Rina—flailing—suggested she try yoga with him. Maybe it wasn’t a weekday blow job their marriage needed but vinyasa. He rebuffed her.

“Go back to painting,” he said. “Yoga is mine.”

He’d been bugging her about taking up a creative habit for months, and now he homed in on painting, although she hadn’t painted since college, not really. She gasped a little, dizzied by his meanness. She loathed herself for no longer painting, for ever allowing herself to have painted.

David would grant her a divorce if she asked. He’d have to. His involvement with a community campaign to fix the plight of agunot, women whose husbands wouldn’t grant them a Jewish divorce, would compel him. He had railed against their neighbor Seth Hartman for chaining his wife to a dead marriage, and even led the boycott against Seth’s plumbing business. But Rina would never ask. A divorce for what? The humiliation of having once been traded? She wasn’t raised to divorce; she didn’t know anyone who divorced. Besides, she could not imagine sending her children off every other Shabbos, Yoni still practically a baby. Whose soft heads would she brush in the last moments before candle lighting?

She thought, as she often did when overcome with guilt, about the weeks after Shosh came into the world. Glorious, sleepless weeks full of love and magic, the only time in her married life that she’d been afraid to be apart from David, days that faded into nights that faded back into days, eating French fries every afternoon for two weeks with an irrational fervor, nursing her baby as she sat on the toilet and tried and failed to take her first postpartum poop. Crying and crying. Kissing Shosh’s dry little lips. When she held her newborn, Rina would get hopeful flashes, intense bursts of feeling that perhaps her life could still be everything she’d dreamed while pressing down on her eyelids as a child: full of color and electricity and the unknown. Full of god, maybe. But she knew it was her body and not god that made Shosh’s immaculate ears and eyes and toes. Knew that women’s bodies were more divine than any starring character in the old stories. She stayed up late into the night gazing at her baby, holding her tiny hand, and thinking, If I made this, there is nothing I cannot conjure. She would be filled, for brief moments, with a godliness that brought a completely foreign thrill. Maybe that’s why people kept having babies, to chase the thrill. She would sit and nurse Shosh and be infinite. There must be other ways to manifest this feeling, she would think.

She kissed David goodbye on the cheek, lips numb, the same way she also kissed his secretary on her way to the elevator. Shabbos was coming and she had her weekly volunteer shift at a community center, then plenty to prepare.

Tomorrow would begin the eighteenth Shabbos since the swap, the eighteenth pummeling of her soul, or whatever it was that formed the nameless parts of her. The sweetest day of the week, the deepest joy of the Jews, a time for families to revel in each other for twenty-five hours, a respite from work, the day when she was doubly commanded to let her husband put his pulpy hands all over her. To procreate. To give him the third baby he wanted, and then the fourth. Rina did not feel commanded, but oh, she felt the weight of the commandments, the leaded burden of the doubling.

It was hard to remember what had been so charming about David. He’d always had a knack for fumbling certain social situations, a hint of meanness in his humor, an acidic edge. Had she found all that exotic after the soft, circumspect theology students and expressive, compulsive artists of college?

Whether because she was pretty or amenable when she chose to be or a little scary for the alacrity with which she spoke her mind, men in college put up with almost anything from her. It was a game she used to practice by playing devil’s advocate, being petulant, requiring high maintenance from a man, and telling white lies. Until she got tired of all the attention, the lack of being challenged no matter what ridiculous thing came out of her mouth.

But from the beginning, David argued back. About politics. About science. About books she read, the movies they saw on dates, the way she balanced her checkbook, which brand of toilet paper she bought. And especially religion.

He was already ba’al teshuvah when she met him in a friend’s backyard sukkah the October of her senior year. He was keeping Shabbos and holidays but not yet wearing a kippah and tzitzit daily. She was years away from her first spark of atheism, but her views had started a shift toward believing things were unknowable. He was only a year older than her, in his first year of law school. 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.

Back then he was fascinating in his straightforward zeal for all he’d never experienced, which was plenty. They’d gone to Paris together for a wedding of one of David’s distant cousins. His relatives put them up in separate cheap hotel rooms in the Marais, grumbling over the cost of two rooms. They were sleeping together already, but David, on his journey toward a Juris Doctor degree and piety, was adamant. She’d been to Paris twice—once with her family as a stopover on the way to Israel and once on a college trip with friends—and wanted to show him all her favorites: the Orangerie, the Kandinsky Library at the Pompidou Centre just down the way from their hotel, Bar Hemingway at the Ritz, Angelina, Shakespeare and Company. Though he’d never been to any of these, he was more entranced by the small things. The café au lait in the hotel atrium at breakfast. The way the hot and cold water came out separate spigots in the tub. The morning after they arrived, he walked to a soap shop to buy bubble bath and blue, moon-shaped bath beads and then drew her a bath in the freestanding tub in her room each night, making a science out of balancing the hot and cold. She didn’t like baths, and the oil-filled beads made her feel like a little girl, but it was impossible to say no to his washing and shampooing, to the unexpected revelation of tenderness. On the last night, he climbed in the tub with her, produced a razor, shaved her clean, then carried her to the humble bed to service the fruits of his efforts before going to sleep in his own hotel room. She remembered thinking then that he was a generous lover, benevolent, even if she hated a shaved cunt, hadn’t given her consent to the grooming.

Still, the days of that trip were some of the best they ever had, and she was nostalgic for it before it ended. She sketched the visual intricacies of the shoulder-high rows of flowers in Monet’s garden on their excursion to Giverny, the mesmerizing taffy-pulling machines at the Bastille Day festival, and the line of men pissing into the gutters on a rainy day. David read American newspapers at the museums and marveled at the sheer quantity of pigeons and the metal tubes of mayonnaise at the kosher café near the Arc de Triomphe. She met his extended family and ignored his goofy Francophilia—after the first night out he encouraged her to pronounce champagne “correctly” even though they couldn’t afford the kosher Laurent-Perrier and drank only beer—and the long silences that tended to happen at lunch after their orders were taken. Her family cautiously ate dairy food at non-kosher establishments while traveling, but he wouldn’t even buy a pain aux raisins from a street stand, so they took their meals at the handful of kosher restaurants in the Pletzl and dotted throughout the Right Bank.

When they boarded their homebound flight, she had a raging urinary tract infection from all the sudsy baths, and the also frequent and somewhat prickly feeling that David would someday be her husband. Less than a year later he was, but by then the David who washed and dried her in Paris had reduced to an amalgam of quirks she guessed she could live with, including the burden of personal grooming. He paid for the waxing sessions. After all, he paid for everything.

She, too, was reduced. To the creature that she was bred to be, the creature she’d aspired to as a child. Her life was altogether linear. It would be twenty-two years of becoming followed by maybe seventy years of being. Nothing ever happened that didn’t fit into the template; her life in no way resembled art. This happened, then that happened, then the other thing happened. A child who delighted in her family and the divine, a teenager who performed without flaw in school, a young woman who went to college for a degree she knew she’d barely use, a bride who got married at the same wedding hall as all her friends, a hall that turned over every six hours, a hall that recycled flowers between weddings and served pats of margarine wrapped in golden squares of foil and had a chicken soup–stained satin chaise in the bridal suite but still charged four hundred dollars per person. She packed her novels into plastic bins beneath her bed, produced children, collected recipes, vacuumed the baseboards. And

then, and then, and then. No wonder she was a champion list maker. Her life was a tally that only came into focus in the semicolons, the only mystery—and it wasn’t much of one—what happened in the brief betweens.

Sometimes the softness returned to David’s voice, or tenderness to his gestures, but it was not often directed at her. These days, it was often directed at Aliza. Rina was never self-conscious until the wife swap, until she sat waiting for a man and sweating and wondering about the stubble on her legs, the stretch marks like snail trails down her thighs. Now she hated passing the full-length mirror. The shape made by her stomach and ass in profile reminded her of a grandmother’s body, of her grandmother’s body. Made up of curves, sure, but stodgy, flattened in strange places, full in others. Utterly tradable.

The eighteenth Shabbos.

Like every Friday, she woke well before the family to do the dusting and wash the hard floors. Yoni always woke by five, a leftover habit from nursing until he was nearly three. Shosh liked to sleep later, but on Fridays Rina woke her at six and together they made the challah dough. This is why Rina did the shopping on Thursday—most of the women in the community shopped on Friday morning—so she would have fresh eggs for the children to crack open for the dough early Friday morning. Shosh was already an expert at fishing bits of eggshell out with other, larger pieces of shell. She sat Yoni on the counter, held him with one hand, and let him crack an egg and smash the yolk in his little hand, which she then promptly washed and sanitized. Rina loved to watch them together like that, Shosh on a step stool and Yoni wobbling on the counter. Shosh broke the eggs one at a time into a small bowl used only for that purpose, checked for any spots of blood, then slid each clean egg into the large wooden mixing bowl, the only treasure Rina had claimed when her grandmother died.

“Here you go, mummi,” Rina said, using her favorite nickname, the one she used for both children when no one else could hear.

She handed them each a piece of dough. Yoni squished and poked his, but Shosh—not yet five—slapped it down expertly and started folding it over itself.

Preschool ended early on Fridays for Shabbos, and Rina always waited to braid and bake the challot until Shosh got home. Weeks that she made large batches for company—most weeks—she let Shosh take the small piece of dough for the burnt offering and place it carefully in the back of the toaster oven to smolder. While the loaves baked, she let them mash old bananas to make quick bread for Shabbos breakfast, let them eat more chocolate chips than they stirred into the batter, mopped the floor again after Shosh sprayed the pans with nonstick spray and inevitably missed. These were her favorite moments of Shabbos, her only true moments of peace, the moments before Shabbos even started and she had her children and their smiles all to herself.

The rest was shrill and strenuous. From the frenzy to be ready in the moments before sunset—David rushing home and foul, the children bathed and dressed, being ready for company to arrive or ready to walk to someone’s house, leaving time for the men to daven at shul, being sure the food was done and tomorrow’s lunch put up to warm overnight, carefully choosing which soda bottles to open so that you didn’t break a commandment by twisting off a top that had been stamped in such a way that opening it would break letters apart in an act that could, who knew?, be like writing, thus forbidden on Shabbos—to the spilled juice, piles of dishes, and crumbs in every corner of the house that she’d just spent the day emptying so it could be filled again with the detritus of a day of rest.

The sweeter Shabboses of her childhood had been a pretense, all intense fondness from her parents during the blessing of the children, the best food of the week, games, books, napping next to her grandfather on the old couch in the den. Oh, the unscheduled hours—while the adults were at prayer—when her unfettered mind could burst free, free and full of electric colors and unnamable cracklings, like when she would press down hard on her eyelids, let them go, and then watch her nerves firing like it was a show. When they were guests in other homes, it was a wild freedom, reckless almost, to explore foreign rooms and foreign yards, marveling at the bookshelves and toys of others, pirating through the citrus trees that lined the tiny backyards, hiding behind pleated paper window coverings with a crayon and daring herself to break Shabbos by making a mark.

At sleepaway camp, her friends thought Shabbos afternoon was boring. They played cards and ate cold cuts and complained, but Rina exalted in the unstructured hours, often spent in the orchard. A counselor had shown her both how to reach up through the bird netting to pluck the ripe apricots that had already detached, and how to smash the downy green husks of the fallen almonds so that the drupes could be peeled out whole. You couldn’t pick fruit on Shabbos, but the orchard offered its gifts to her just the same. Mostly she gathered olives. There were only two olive trees, but they were old and fruited madly in the early summer, and the campers were all taught how to cure olives as part of a Torah study on purity. On Shabbos afternoons, alone in the grove, she would gather the fallen ones, rolling them onto a flat path between tree furrows, and then lay on them in her Shabbos whites. She napped on the yielding olives and hot earth, with mulch in her hair, the small brown ants and garden spiders crawling over her apricot-sticky hands, waking to drowsily consider the light filtering through the trees, the ripeness. She rolled around a bit before she stood, the olives like beads in a massage chair, and then went back to her tent to strip off her shirt and examine the patterns of their purple juice. She always wanted her mother to ask how it happened, those landscapes of stains, but her mother never did. They would head straight to the laundromat when she and her brother returned from camp—her mother didn’t want that much dirt in the machine at home— and her mother would cluck her tongue and say, “Well, they wouldn’t fit next year anyway,” wash her Shabbos whites with the color load, and fold them neatly. Later they would be torn into rags. Six summers Rina created masterpieces on her Shabbos whites—in the later years, she was worried her mother would be able to perceive the lust in the striations—until their rag bag was only strips of purplish white cotton. Her last summer in the orchard, the summer she thought her body might actually implode and shrivel to a pit if someone else didn’t get inside it, she was so taken with her olive bed that she pressed a large, round one into her mouth and bit through it. A lasting bitterness.

At college, out in the California high desert, there was a large grove of olive trees that gnarled along the paths of the original quad. They were never smashed along the pathways because the landscape crew gathered them as quickly as they fell. Sophomore year she worked up the nerve to ask a gardener what they did with the olives and had to translate her question into her academically perfect but clunkily spoken Spanish. “¿Las usan?” she tried, after the gardener said they weren’t for him to keep. No, he told her, they went to the county green waste facility. So she started a sort of club—although they had no charter or official designation—and Thursday evenings in April and October she and a growing number of students would harvest the olives. Eventually she had textile wonks from the art department weave baskets that they could leave fastened to the trees, and the landscaping department was so fond of her that they donated two old wooden ladders. She painted aceitunas down one side of each ladder and zeteem—the Hebrew word—down the other, and they left them in the grove year-round, like a shrine.

The club members weren’t her friends, exactly, because she didn’t exactly have friends in college. No one who understood her actual life, how it was constructed around ancient laws, how it was predetermined even though Jews believe in free will, how who she married would decide who she would be. They thought her skirts were bohemian and her Yiddishisms—despite her masterful code-switching, certain speech constructions just broke through—some sort of an East Coast accent.

Rina trained them in how to cure the olives. Late on harvest evenings they would sort the olives by size and color, tossing aside any shriveled fruit, any with beige olive fly scabs. Without washing, the olives went into a salt-and-vinegar brine, and wouldn’t come back out again until it was almost time for the next harvest. The brine needed to be changed as the olives fermented. She often charmed some boy into doing it for her, dangling her legs off the edge of a kiln while he dumped the old brine into the paint drains behind the visual arts building.

At the beginning of her senior year, an engineering student named Peter suggested they try making oil. The whole club gathered to blend and press the harvest, but Peter only took Rina into the lab where they ran it, bit by bit, through a centrifuge.

“How did you think of it, gathering the olives?” Peter asked. 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.

“It broke my heart to see the trees but not the fruit,” she said.

“Do you go through all of life looking for what’s absent?” he asked and moved closer to her. He didn’t smell like cigarettes or weed. He smelled only of olives, acrid and thick.

“Negative space, sure,” she said. “But mostly I’m just a noticer.”

“And worth noticing,” Peter said, then leaned in to kiss her. Their fingers were slippery, and his hands left oil smudges on her cheek and in her hair as they kissed.

“At camp I used to make myself beds of overripe olives,” she said, with her hands wrapped around the back of his neck. “I would roll in them and watch the light change in the sky . . .”

“I don’t care,” Peter said, pressing into her. He said it in a gentle voice, a voice heavy with fondness, but to Rina it was like erasure. On the one hand, at least he said it, said what he meant, didn’t pretend he cared about what she thought or how she was formed. On the other hand, it was her fucking olive club. She didn’t go back to his apartment with him even though, figuring she’d never be as sovereign as in college, she almost always went back to their apartments. She never tasted the finished olive oil. And she never told anyone else about the camp orchard.

Even in childhood, Shabbos had been lonely. At home she trained in the kitchen alongside her mother, learning to shape gefilte fish loaves and braid bread and salt soup. Of course, her brother had no such training. All those hours in the orchard considering the sun, all those moments hiding behind the curtains at neighbors’ homes and the tangerine trees in their yards, all those hours pretending to be asleep in the den and wishing someone would notice she wasn’t. Once, at a nearby home for Shabbos lunch, the children had been playing hide-and-seek and no one could find her. The adults got involved with the search, then her parents became worried, then they began searching homes and yards up and down the street. Shabbos was nearly out by the time the host found her, found her because he heard Rina sobbing. She’d climbed up to the very top shelf in a utility closet and stayed up there four hours, with her arms wrapped around her knees, dedicated to the premise of the game and her sureness that if anyone really knew her, they’d know just where to look; if anyone really knew her, she’d deserve to be found.

She supposed being busy and exhausted was better than being lonesome and bitter. This is what she told herself as she swept crumbs on her hands and knees on the eighteenth Shabbos after her husband traded her.

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.

Excerpted from OLIVE DAYS: A NOVEL by Jessica Elisheva Emerson. Published with permission of Counterpoint Press. Copyright © 2024 by Jessica Olisheva Emerson.

JESSICA ELISHEVA EMERSON is obsessed with cooking beans, growing food, eating pie, sleeping in on Shabbat, and working toward a better world. A Tucson native, Jessica spent twenty-two years in Los Angeles before returning to the Sonoran Desert, where she lives with her husband and children. Her stories and poems have been published in numerous journals, and she's a produced playwright.

✡️

Five tiny delights:

• Being rewarded by the Luxardo cherry at the bottom of my evening Old Fashioned.

• When my seven-year-old wakes up early on Shabbat morning just so he can climb into our bed and sleep and snuggle for another hour.

• The way creosote bushes in Arizona carry the magical smell of the monsoons all year long, and you only need crush a few tiny jade leaves in your hand to remember the summer rains.

• The moment of delicious waiting, just before my husband arrives to join me somewhere: an airport, a movie theatre, a bar, a restaurant, or anywhere.

• The sounds of my house settling late at night.

Five tiny Jewish delights:

• Standing up and stretching after a full body prostration at the Yom Kippur Aleinu.

• The mingled smell of cinnamon and horseradish that permeates everything while I prep for Pesach.

• The way my children like to turn off every light in the house before Havdalah, plunging us into complete darkness (and sometimes a bit of confusion!).

• Picking up my kids early from school on a weekday to take them apple picking before Rosh Hashanah.

• Before Sukkot even begins, the night before, stepping into our Sukkot after dark to hand the last decoration and sit and enjoy the breeze before the sukkah fills with people.

✡️

Jessica’s website is here and Olive Days is available wherever books are sold.