I don’t remember when Tzipporah started to run out of the room each time I sat down at the computer, maybe sometime in February or March, after that one time when I tried to bring her to my zoom Hebrew class and she knocked my juice onto the keyboard in her desperate attempt to flee. She’d already made it clear by then that she didn’t want to come to Bible study sessions on zoom either (Ellie used to love to sit on my lap and watch the rabbi make faces on the screen), so any sign of the computer moving, or me moving towards the computer, made Tzippy very nervous.
But, more recently, I realized that Tzippy was also leaving the room when I wasn’t sitting at the computer. I’d be on the couch, minding my own business (staring at my phone), and suddenly she had somewhere else to be, often running straight to my bedroom to pee on the exercise mat. Or, apropos of nothing at all, she would leave the living room just to get a drink of water or to sniff something in the hallway or even to pee on the actual wee wee pad. For most of the year and a half that she’d been living with us, she’d refused to leave her bed as long as I was in the living room with her, often waiting hours and hours before daring to pee or to look for her dinner, but suddenly, she was free.
I can’t find any reliable patterns in her new behaviors, though. Sometimes she still sits in her bed and stares at me like I’m a bomb about to explode, and sometimes she casually walks into the hallway for a snack in the middle of Murder, She Wrote. Sometimes she steps out of her bed at random to take a long stretch, before starting her next nap, and sometimes if I even look in her direction she runs for her life. And I really don’t love that she’s going to my room to pee (though at least she’s peeing on the rubber mat instead of on the rug, so it’s easier to clean), but there’s something about this new wandering version of Tzippy that’s fun to watch. It feels like we’re on season two of a really good TV show and even though I’m not sure where the story is going, I’m already fascinated by the plot twists. And, honestly, I can’t wait to see what happens in season three!
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 