She remembered the girls in the women’s religious study program in Israel who’d ripped out their nose and belly button rings, lasered off their tattoos, and draped their bodies in the drabbest, most middle-aged, calf-length skirts and button-down cotton shirts available to mankind. How they’d vied with each other to adopt ever-more radical stringencies, as if a sincere belief in God and adherence to His actual commandments wasn’t good enough! They wouldn’t wear a jean skirt even if it went down to their ankles. They wouldn’t wear the color red, or a white blouse that might allow a hint of what lay beneath. They ate nothing that did not come straight off the shelves of tiny haredi grocery stores, even if supermarket shelves were groaning with products that were perfectly kosher, bearing the stamp of approval from the Orthodox Union. They even boycotted milk chocolate from Israel because the cows might have been milked by non-Sabbath observers! Who thought this stuff up? There was a whole playbook of piety-signaling signs that they hoarded and displayed with zealous delight to impress each other and their rabbinical mentors. She had always found this kind of behavior a bit sickening—childish, even—with a large, disgusting dollop of self-hate. She had always refused to participate, earning herself more than one pious lecture and dirty look.

But the time she had spent in Boro Park had altered this firm stance, she realized. There were some things to which you had no choice but to submit, like the length of your wig (not too long or too short!) or the height of your heels. Stilettos were considered whore-like, and flats too stylish. Even before she married Yaakov, especially in the throes of trying to convince skeptical and hostile matchmakers of her sincerity and worthiness to join the community, she had taken care to present the outward appearance of conformity to the dress codes around her. When in Rome … right? she’d told herself.

But as time went on, she’d found herself being forced more and more to conform to new (and often, in her eyes, irrational) demands that always took it a little bit further than the time before, until she felt almost crushed beneath their weight, and the self she had been close to disappearing altogether.

The latest was water. Water! Some rabbis were forbidding using tap water to wash dishes, or brush your teeth, or wash vegetables because they claimed there were bugs in Brooklyn water, particularly in Boro Park and Flatbush, which broke the biblical prohibition against “eating any crawling thing.” They demanded that you filter all the water you used.