“Take these as gifts for Elkanah’s first wife,” my first mother said.
“The men can worry about bride price and dowry,” said the second. “She is the one with whom you will share your life.”
“You will find a husband and a sister at once, as we did so long ago,” said the third. “She will become closer to you than your own heart.”
I believed them. They were my mothers and had seen all manner of men and women, and had the wisdom of generations of mothers before them to pass along.
What they couldn’t prepare me for was Elkanah’s first wife’s beauty. She was everything I was not. Her skin glowed like sand under the sun. Her hair was as dark and thick as the deep recesses of a cave. Her neck rose long and straight above delicately plump shoulders. She was a delight to behold. I thought maybe that was why she didn’t open her arms to me, but my mothers had warned me of that. “First wives often don’t welcome the second wife at first. After all, you are younger, and she has not had to share her husband with anyone until now.
“But wait. Things will work out. Who knows a woman better than another who shares the same man’s bed?”
I believed them about that, too. They ran my father’s household as one. All their children found refuge in any of their laps. The three of them spun around my father, the stars to his moon, but it was to each other that they were devoted. They shared the work of their lives, and loved one another for it.
It wasn’t to be that way for me. Childbearing came easily. Milk poured from my nipples and stained my dresses. My children quickly grew fat and content on it. Even before I weaned the first, I grew large with the second, and before I weaned the second, my womb was filled with the third.
And so it went. I grew round with the seasons. At each birth, I held the warm flesh of my newborn against my skin and felt a newfound pride in what I was capable of doing.
Still, Elkanah remained devoted to Hannah and did not come to love me.
I took solace in my children. I gathered them around me, inhaled their smells, the dirt, milk, and traces of rosemary they trailed behind them. I told myself they were enough. That they were ample compensation for what was missing. But my closeness with them was never going to last. Already my oldest were pulling away from my embraces. The boys turned their heads when I tried to kiss their cheeks, the girls walked with their heads together. I was left out of their childish confidences.
It is as it should be. It is the way of the world. A mother brings her children into life and then sets them on their way. They never could have been mine forever. My job, as Elkanah reminded me, was to push out children. “My little breeder,” he called me, and then took the flesh of my hips into his hands, squeezed lightly, although there never was much to grab, even after so many pregnancies.
At those moments, my body bared to him, each fold of muscle and dimpled skin a mark of how much I had given him, I could almost pretend he spoke out of affection. But then he’d smack my rounded haunch and send me away. “Let’s see how efficient we’ve been this time,” he’d laugh, then wait until I told him I was with child again.
And they came, girl after boy after girl after boy. Every time the midwife came to cradle me as I screamed a new child into the world, I knew the only power I would ever have. My only saving grace. After it was over, I would hold the baby to my chest, peer into its unseeing eyes and whisper, “He may not love me, but I will do better for you.”
So let the others snicker as I pass. Let them call me a cow, my udders always swollen and full to bursting, a new infant strapped to my chest, another to my back, and little ones tugging at my sides. Even here, where women walk sway-backed and big-bellied for most of their adult lives, I outshine the rest. But while the women laugh, the men commend me. They call me a credit to my husband.
They don’t know what I do. They have never watched Elkanah take Hannah’s hand in his, or kiss her palm. They have never seen him slide his fingers across her cheek or the way his eyes brighten when he catches sight of her. They have never heard the laughter that comes from his room when she spends the night with him.
I have lain awake, my children’s breaths a warm cocoon, listening, not for the quickened breaths, the gasps, or moans, but to the hum of their voices in the dark. It is then I wonder what it would be like to have a man love me enough to talk to me, to open his mind to me, but I was not brought into his home for conversation. I was brought to give him what Hannah could not, and nothing else.
He doesn’t treat me badly. Anyone watching would call him an exemplary husband. My children are cared for, even the girls and younger boys who will eventually leave to make their own way. He even shows me respect, of a kind. When we are not alone in his room, where his body shows its desire even if his heart does not, he makes sure I have grain to eat and wine to drink. “You must stay strong,” he tells me. “Do not tire yourself out.” It is all in the service of his growing family, but I take every sentence as a sign that he values me. If that doesn’t add up to love, it is some small comfort.
I held out hope that that my mothers’ words would bear fruit, that I would gain a sister in my marriage. I waited, quietly giving way to everything Hannah demanded, but after my third pregnancy, after the midwife had come and gone, and a baby’s squealing cry filled the rooms and yards of our home again, she picked up Elkanah’s name for me. “Breeder,” she said, “your child has fallen. Go see to him.” She was careful never to say it in our husband’s hearing, so he never saw how it pained me, and because he never probed my mind, he didn’t know how she had twisted the only bit of affection between my husband and me into a slur.
I was just a second wife. I couldn’t even tell him not to share what happened between us—sparse as it was—with her. I couldn’t tell him that I wanted something between us to be ours alone. Does a cow ask for privacy? Does it demand the secrecy of the bedroom?
And so the years passed. I ballooned with life, leaked it, fed it, my womb never empty for long, and grew used to my own silences. Even my mothers didn’t listen.
“Do not tell us of the difficulties in your marriage,” they said when I cried in those early years. “Do not invite anyone into your home life, not even us. You are a wife now. Your task does not begin and end in the bedroom. You must protect the boundaries of your household. In everything you do, you must remember your husband’s good name. You must guard it as your own. It is yours now.”
After that, if anyone asked why my cheeks were wet, I said that I had held a crying child to my face. At night, their gentle snores covered the sound of my sobs. I loved each of them. I relished the tangling of my limbs with theirs, the way they fit themselves into my shoulder or curled against the curve of my hip. I gave thanks for their untroubled sleep, their trust in my presence. But each night, I counted the days I had left with them, the nights they would lie with me. I dreaded the day that would surely come when my bed would be empty, and I would lie alone, night after night, while whispers came through the wall from my husband’s bed.
Is it any wonder, then, that my sadness curdled into bitterness? Here I was, my body inhabited over and over again, each time a gift to Elkanah, and yet he still loved Hannah more. I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t stop the tumor of resentment from growing inside me, another fetus I carried alongside the others. This one never left. It had no nine-months gestation, no birth or growth outside the confines of my body. It stayed there, mutating until it filled so much of me that it became me. I felt my lips grow even thinner into the grimace of the aggrieved. Only my children brought laughter out of me. Only they saw whatever was left of the girl I’d been when I entered Elkanah’s house.
And still, it was Hannah’s complaints I heard. “Give me a child,” she cried to Elkanah. “I am half a woman.” She glared at me. “Even Penina has surpassed me.” And always he smoothed her hair, shushed her as if she were a child herself. “Don’t cry,” he said. “You are all I need. I love you more than any child ever could.”
He
didn’t understand, but I did. What was the use of being born a woman, of the blood and cramps, the monthly cycle of expectation, if it ended with nothing? Within the depths of my heart, I agreed with her. She was not a whole woman. No one ever asked me, so I never shared my thoughts, and maybe I was the only one to see it, but I came to know that together we made a complete woman. I made the babies. She got his love.
She got the better part of the deal. My babies would grow and leave me. My body would stop making them, and I’d be left with nothing, just the memory of a time when I was needed. She would be treasured forever.
The worst of it came when Elkanah packed us all up—Hannah, me, the children—and took us off to Shiloh to give his yearly sacrifice. The babies cried, the children complained of boredom and aching feet, the donkeys brayed out their protests. Their tails swatted back and forth over their haunches in search of flies to scatter. And all the way, Elkanah raised his hands to heaven, sang his prayers, and tried to get the rest of us to show some enthusiasm for our godly pilgrimage.
I was always too busy to sing. It fell to me to pack our food for the trip, to ration it out over the two days’ walk, to rein the older boys back in when they ran off the road in search of lizards to poke or the carcasses of animals long or newly dead.
“Look, Mama,” they said at least three times a day, and then brandished a bleached thigh bone or dead bird, its neck bent or twisted to the side. I was too tired to ask if they had found those small bodies or killed the birds themselves.
Hannah sat silently on her plodding ass. Always. Her head hung, her eyes cast down to the ground, she seemed to follow only the shadows as they told the story of our progress. What she didn’t do is offer to help.
And every year, my hair thinned after so many pregnancies and escaping in sweaty tendrils from the cloth I’d draped over my head to protect me from the sun, I came down off my donkey to build a fire in the evening, feed every one of us, prepare the beds for all my children.
All the while, Hannah sat morosely to the side, Elkanah holding her hand lightly between his, whispering in her ear.
The children saw it all. He never accounted for that, but they knew how things were arranged in our household and punished me for it. Half the time, the boys ignored me. The girls looked back and forth between Hannah and me, clutched my wrists or handfuls of my dress in their fists, unsure if they should shield or despise me. I dreaded the day they would find the words to ask what was obvious to anyone with eyes to see.
“Will I be like her, Mama, or will I be like you? Will I be loved?”
Every year I wondered at other people’s blindness. The priests saw Elkanah’s piety, the flawless ewe he led into Shiloh and up to their waiting altar. They heard his psalms to the Lord and joined their voices to his and ignored the pain of his careworn wife.
Each year, the sacrifice was given, the meat cut off the bone, a portion for the priests, the rest for us. Elkanah watched carefully as the pieces were cut—one each for my children and me, a double portion for his beloved, his Hannah.
It had been years of this. Even as my brood grew and I increased our household with fine sons and healthy daughters, she found favor with him. “Look at me,” I cried out, “a vineyard full to bursting, but you water that barren field even knowing it will give you nothing.”
I couldn’t help myself. I could no longer be silent. Here we were, in the most sacred of places, the Ark of the Lord as witness to our good fortune, to give thanks and pray for more. We brought the best we had to sacrifice, and in return we got so much, but not from Hannah. She had nothing to do with it. She couldn’t produce a thing.
Then I became the villain when she pushed away her meal—her double portion of sustenance and love—because I said what was only true. Elkanah shot me a look filled with more than disapproval, more than disdain. There was loathing in his eyes as he followed her away from the hearth, even as I knew he would plow my body that very night to reap the rewards of his holy devotion all over again.
It was that look. The disgust, as if I, mother to all his children, meant nothing to him, that clasped my heart and shut my mouth for another year, but a woman can only watch as if from the sidelines of her own life for so long before her silence becomes more than the lack of sound. It becomes a muzzle as on a dangerous beast. Do not be surprised, then, if the animal lunges in attack when it is removed.
So it repeated. I grew heavy and gave birth. I worked. We went up to Shiloh. Hannah sat pitying herself, drawing attention to her own misery. I spoke.
“Elkanah,” I said, more beseeching than in anger. “Have I not given you what every man desires? Look at all our children. Their faces are alight with life. See this one,” and then held up the baby, still swaddled, only his face emerging from the cloth. “See how perfect he is. Everyone comments on the way his face blends the two of us in his one form. Why then do you withhold even affection from me?”
But Hannah had to be the center of attention. Even as I showed the world the contents of my heart, how it bent toward my husband though he pushed it away, she went through her routine, the one I had seen so many times before. She sighed, pushed her dish away, and rose to return to her bed. As always, Elkanah turned on me. “Can you not keep your mouth shut? It is because of you that she suffers.”
I wanted to protest. “It is not my good fortune that closes her womb,” but he had already run to catch up with her. They stopped there, enclosed in an embrace for all to see, while my daughters coiled themselves around me, as if to protect me from life itself.
Perhaps something snapped in her as it had in me, because she didn’t lower her voice this time, didn’t depend on his pity to bend his head in closer to hers so that he could hear every shuddered word.
“Don’t you see how I suffer,” she wailed. She flung her hand out in my direction, as if to mark and erase me in one gesture. “Even she is given children, but I remain childless.”
“Hush,” I heard Elkanah say. “My heart is bound up in yours. You know how I love you. Come now,” he held her face between his fingers. My own cheeks ached from never having felt that kind of touch. “My love is better than a son, better than ten sons. It is yours until the day I die.”
It was as if I had become invisible, as if I did not exist. As if the proof of all that I offered to my husband, a breathing, squalling mass of infant life, accounted for nothing. Even that wasn’t good enough for Hannah.
“I cannot call myself a woman if I never have a child of my own.”
She pulled away from him, saying “Let me be,” and went off in the direction of the temple. When Elkanah tried to follow, to stop her again, she pushed him away and kept walking. He turned back and saw us all—his wife and children—looking at him, snarled at us. “Go back to your meal,” and stomped away to his room.
Hannah stayed away for hours. I rocked the younger ones to sleep, then sat with the older children as they fought then drifted into sleep. By then, the moon hung bright in the sky. When I was a girl, I imagined it was a round-faced, smiling woman. The sky was her black hair, each star a flash of light escaping from behind her as her tresses waved around her head. I had forgotten that vision until I stood from my children’s bedside that night in Shiloh. The memory of it—looking up from outside my father’s door—filled me with serenity such as I hadn’t felt in years. I had never shared that image with anyone. I had never had anyone to share it with.
I went into my room, removed the cloth from my hair and brushed it out so that it lay against my back and waist. I washed my face, under my breasts and armpits. I waited for Elkanah to come in, as he always did the night after offering his sacrifice, but he never came.
Instead, I heard Hannah return. Even from behind my closed door, I sensed a difference in her, an unfamiliar lightness to her tread. Our husband must have known it, too. Only a few minutes later, I heard him go into her room. As I tied my hair back up into its cloth, I was thankful for the inn’s thick stone walls that kept the sounds of t
heir love from me, at least for one night.
The trip back home was much as it always was. Elkanah doted on Hannah. I tended the children. We three barely spoke to one another. My husband, I could see, had not forgiven me for upsetting his first wife.
By the time we arrived, I could barely stand from exhaustion. It was getting harder. Every day, going about my duties, and every moment holding in everything my mind thought, my mouth wanted to say. When I caught sight of myself in the water of the well, I saw an old woman staring back. She looked haggard and sad. I hadn’t even passed my twenty-fifth year.
That vision of myself stayed before my eyes. For weeks, I saw it when I rose. I caught sight of that crone reflected in my children’s eyes, though they jumped on me, hung from my arms, begged me to swing them around as they always had. Only I saw the change.
All the while, Hannah’s skin flushed with color. Her cheeks looked redder, her skin plumper. She laughed as I had never seen before, not saving it for her nights with Elkanah, but out in the open. Soon enough, I saw how her breasts swelled, and I knew, perhaps even before Elkanah. Maybe even before Hannah herself, who had never felt the changes that pregnancy brings to a woman’s body.
There was great celebration in the house of Elkanah during the months before Hannah’s baby came. He made sure she had cushions on which to sit, monitored her meals to ensure that she ate enough, placed his hand on her growing stomach. His eyes jumped in surprise when he felt movement there for the first time.
My own belly lay flat under my hand for the first time since I had entered his home. He didn’t come to my bed any more.
I despaired of the future, of watching husband and wife focus on their darling child, while my children and I were left to sweep up the ashes of Elkanah’s affection. During those long months of Hannah’s fullness, I lost even my bitterness. Sorrow, I learned, is the stronger emotion. My invisibility had become complete. And since I could not be seen, I stopped attending to myself. I didn’t bother washing my hair or clothes. I left my room only to cook and care for my children, then lay back down in my bed until evening, when I gathered them around me again for the night. No one took note of my absence.
After Abel and Other Stories Page 13