What Dr. Ruth Gave Me

When my father first told us about Dr. Ruth Westheimer, she sounded larger than life. She was a Holocaust survivor, had been a sniper with the Israeli freedom fighters, and hosted a nighttime radio show called Sexually Speaking with Dr. Ruth. Yet, when she hired my father as a ghostwriter in 1979—he’d write her articles in Self, Mademoiselle, 16 Magazine, and Cosmopolitan, and her first book, Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex—and we spent time with her at her vacation home, she seemed much smaller, like a very tiny German Jewish lady with twinkling eyes who laughed a lot. On our visits over the next several years, she’d pass her hand-me-downs on to my sister and me until we could no longer fit into them; she was just 4-foot-7, and by the time I turned 9, I was already as tall as she was.

I wasn’t sure what a sex therapist was, but I knew a little bit about how babies were made. My father had answered all my questions, complete with pretty good sketches of a uterus and ovaries, one Saturday afternoon soon after we started living with him, following our parents’ divorce. That Monday at school I tested myself by drawing everything that I could remember in my second-grade composition notebook until my teacher beelined it to my desk to shut my notebook before my classmates saw the breasts and nipples I was working on. My sister knew less about what sex was but that didn’t stop her from practicing her Dr. Ruth impression whenever she could. She was probably one of the only 6-year-olds who could perfectly mimic “This is Sexually Speaking with Dr. Ruth. You’re on the air!” at the dinner table.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Dr. Ruth ever since she died on July 12, at age 96. She entered my life shortly after my father took custody of my sister and me, when my family felt like it was falling apart. Knowing her helped me trust and feel safe again—and it all began at her cabin in Lake Oscawana, New York, in 1981, when I was 9 years old.

We didn’t have a car in Flushing—and didn’t need one. My father took the 7 train into Manhattan for his PR and marketing job at a Jewish nonprofit and we walked to and from PS 20 in Queens on our own. So, my father had to rent a car to get to Dr. Ruth’s cabin in Putnam Valley. Trees along the Taconic Parkway whipped by, saturating my eyes in an endless ribbon of green that I didn’t realize I missed since I began living in apartments. Almost everything had changed in the last few years. My family had expanded and shrunk, we’d moved four times, and I went from having both parents and a kibbutz community raising me to subsequently losing all of that. I didn’t know what home meant anymore or where my family had gone.

My parents made aliyah in the late 1960s and settled on Kibbutz Lahav in Beersheba, where they had my sister and me. They’d planned on raising us in Israel but when I was about 4, they relocated to Seattle. Soon after, they divorced, and when I was 5 1/2,, my father left for the East Coast to pursue his dreams of being a writer. My mother, without any relatives or loved ones nearby and few resources, began following the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. She brought my sister and me along to group meditations at the Rajneeshee Center in our neighborhood in Capitol Hill, Seattle, or to the homes of new friends of hers we didn’t know. We met countless sannyasins draped in orange and tangerine fabric who didn’t seem to care that she had small children; they stared through me, a parade of disengaged faces I grew to resent.

By the next summer, she had sent my sister and me to be with our father on the East Coast so she could join Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on his ashram in Pune, India. At the time, I didn’t know people often referred to Bhagwan as the sex guru, or that I might not ever live with my mother again—only that she wasn’t ready, even when she returned from India a year later, to take us back. My father understood all of this and moved us out of the Newark apartment he’d been sharing with his girlfriend and her two teenage daughters to our own place in Flushing. He committed himself to raising us and hustled for as many freelance writing jobs as he could, which is how he began working with Dr. Ruth.

As we turned off the interstate and drove deeper into the woods surrounding Lake Oscawana, I rolled down my window and let the humid air blow through my hair and against my face. My father said we were almost there but I didn’t feel nervous the way I usually did when I had to go to new places. I was comfortable around Dr. Ruth, whom I’d already met briefly twice before. I could see she cared about my father; she’d even been playing matchmaker, and he’d been going on dates with women she introduced him to. Plus, my father had told us we’d go canoeing at the cabin, which I hadn’t gotten to do since he took me out on Lake Washington in Seattle before he’d left for the East Coast.

Our rental car jostled over the dirt and gravel driveway and unruly branches and leaves sprung up on either side of us as we slowed to a stop a few feet away from a net hammock. The lake was directly in front of us, with a small dock, and I felt a lightness in my chest when I saw the promised canoe tethered to it. Long grass brushed my shins when I stepped out of the car and grabbed my small weekend bag from my father. He handed my sister the loaf of stale bread he’d brought along to feed whatever ducks or geese we discovered on the water, and we made our way to the cabin.

Dr. Ruth, who insisted we call her Ruth, greeted us at the door and introduced my sister and me to her husband, Fred, and the other guests who were sitting down to lunch. The smell of coffee and fire smoke hung in the room along with a tang of mildew; the table was crowded with chairs and voices in overlapping conversation. I sat next to my father and ate my sandwich listening and watching, knowing it was a privilege to be here, to have time away from our hot apartment and regular life because my father was friends with Dr. Ruth. Most of the guests at her table had survived so much already—had fled from Germany to Israel, lost parents and childhoods, dreams. My father’s own plans had morphed to make room for my sister and me, for this new life together none of us expected.

When we were done with our sandwiches, my sister and I checked out our room and then played in the hammock until our father was ready to take us out canoeing. We didn’t have to wait long. He made sure our life vests fit well and that we each got onto the canoe safely, settling my sister on a cushion in the middle. Just as we’d done back in Seattle, I sat in the stern and he let me be the captain. I got to direct us wherever I wanted to go but, a benevolent leader, I let my sister chime in once or twice.

Dipping my paddle in with as little splash as possible, I pulled us through the dark water, reveling in how I could decide where we went next, the three of us on an adventure of our own choosing. Being on the lake together was a balm, a break from our apartment life. I couldn’t get used to the safety bars on our windows, the fire engines that ripped through the neighborhood almost daily with their ear-splitting sirens, roaches that scattered when we turned on the lights. I ached for my old home on the kibbutz where even at age 3 I could wander where I wanted, for the days before I became a girl whose mother had left her.

Though it had been a few years since I’d canoed with my father, the calm and peace it had once given me returned. My father had made it clear that we were his priority now, that he loved us; though he had been the first to leave after the divorce, I began to believe he truly would stay. We went as far as the Goose rocks rising from the middle of the lake like a small, barren island, and then made our way back to the dock while my sister threw pieces of stale bread to the ducks that trailed us.

There were changes coming—women in my father’s life I’d have to maneuver around, and in a few years my mother would leave to follow Bhagwan again—but that weekend watching my father and Dr. Ruth banter, eating dinners Fred cooked for us, gliding across the quiet lake until I was ready to return, planted a seed of hope in me. I wouldn’t have been able to verbalize it then but I began to sense that I was more than where I’d come from or who I was missing.

Dr. Ruth gave us a gift with that visit and the visits afterward, too. Those trips helped me become less tentative, less anxious than I’d grown over the last few years worrying the other shoe was about to drop and I’d lose both my parents. She came into our world at a time my father needed the support, and she extended herself generously. She hired him to write for her, invited him into her social circle, and tried to set him up with nice Jewish women so he could remarry. In her care for us, her investment in my father, Dr. Ruth showed me that, though our family of three was small and new, we weren’t alone. She helped me believe we would find our way.

That first night after we canoed my father tucked me in next to my sister before grabbing his glass of Scotch and rejoining the conversation and laughter in the next room. I fell asleep to the sound of Dr. Ruth and the other adults, my adult, the one I knew wasn’t going anywhere, talking late into the night. I dreamed of what I’d discover the next day in this wilderness of the unexpected, knowing my father would do whatever he needed to take care of me, to be sure that we paddled back to safety.