The Saturday Wife

by Ragen, Naomi

  Only Rebbitzin Hamesh, her teacher for Jewish thought, filled her with admiration. While she viewed with pity her excess weight, her stiffly sprayed, formally coiffed wigs, and her matronly clothes and thick ankles, she nevertheless found her witty and charming in a pale-lipped pious way. Delilah was certain Rebbitzin Hamesh would wind up in heaven with a rich reward.

  Once, Rebbitzin Hamesh invited the girls over on a Friday night. She’d worn a blue-velvet ankle-length housecoat and an elaborate head scarf. The house had been well swept with colorful touches, surprisingly beautiful rugs in bright greens and reds on the floors and walls. The house had smelled of roast chicken and warm sweet apple kugel. There had been a large lovely china closet filled with beautiful silver ritual objects. And Rebbitzin Hamesh had not looked miserable or tasteless as she sat there with her ankles crossed, her clean cheeks shining like ripe apples as she read her prayer book and waited for her husband to return from synagogue with her well-scrubbed children.

  But it had been so quiet, so very, very quiet. Like being in paradise already. Or like being dead. Rebbitzin Hamesh, Delilah thought, was too young for this kind of life. Anyone under eighty was too young. And that, Delilah decided, was the problem with worrying about earning your heavenly reward too early. It was then she made up her mind to live until she died. Rewards in the Afterlife, Heaven or Hell, were hard to imagine, let alone sacrifice the here and now for. It was like that television show, Let’s Make a Deal. Do you trade the perfectly fine refrigerator you have in your hand for curtain number three, which might or might not have a new car, thereby risking getting stuck with a broken-down wagon filled with straw? Ah, the eternal question.

  One night, Yitzie took her to a friend’s apartment “for a Chanukah party.” It was in an apartment house in Kew Gardens. No one answered the door when they knocked. Surprisingly, she saw he had a key. When he opened the door, there was no menorah. No latkes. No dreidels. No friends. They were alone together.

  By the light of the menorah he dug up somewhere in a closet (“Otherwise, I’m leaving!”) he sat down beside her on the very worn but comfortable old sofa, where he piously reminded her of the Jewish custom of relaxing while the candles still burned. He apologized for upsetting her. And then, almost more quickly than she could have imagined, things got completely out of hand. She didn’t even recognize herself, the feelings streaming through her like a tsunami breaking through, washing out her brain like some flimsy beach structure that just floated out to sea, unpinned from its moorings. His clothes were everywhere. His hands were everywhere. And then, suddenly, her clothes were everywhere too. It was all happening so fast, she wasn’t even sure she knew, exactly, what was going on. At least, that is what she told herself then, and later. She felt stunned, enthralled, humiliated, embarrassed, curious. When it was over, she stood up, looking down at the couch pillows. She touched them. Were they damp, dry? Were the stains old, new?

  Frantically, she pulled on her clothes.

  Afterward, Yitzie was very romantic, very concerned. On the way back to Bernstein, he stopped a block away. There, in the shadowed alleyway of an office tower, he held her close and kissed her just the way she’d always imagined in her fantasies. Yet, alone, sitting on her dorm-room bed, she felt a sense of deep shock and horror.

  She undressed and took a shower, fingering her body tenderly, as if it belonged to someone else, someone childish and vulnerable. She examined herself, her clothing, the dark blue skirt, the white lamb’s-wool sweater. She was not in any pain; still, the idea of what might have happened was profoundly terrifying to her.

  Was it a sin? she wondered. And if so, which one?

  She was free and single. And sex without marriage wasn’t actually forbidden anywhere, as far as she could tell, whatever blather they’d thrown at her in high school. True, she hadn’t gone to the ritual baths, but that was more Yitzie’s problem than hers, sin-wise. She began to calm down, soaping herself and standing in the downpour of lovely hot water until all her bad thoughts just washed away. It was just nature taking its course. She shrugged, a secret little smile curling her lips as she allowed herself to think, How lovely! How lovely! And now that they had done it (she began to convince herself of that fact, although she was by no means sure; it had all happened so fast, and she was so totally inexperienced), she was now certain, beyond a doubt, that chuppah and kedushin—a marriage canopy and a sacred wedding ceremony—were on the horizon, the next step for the two of them.

  She would be Mrs. Yitzie Polinsky, daughter-in-law of the renowned Torah sage Rebbe Menachem Polinsky of Crown Heights. And Yitzie? He would find his place in law or accounting or be taken in by one of his father’s wealthy Hasidim as a trainee and later a partner in some lucrative import-export business. There would be a lovely home in Jamaica Estates, one of those mock Tudors that Donald Trump’s father had put up and that were going for a million or more these days. They’d put in a swimming pool—she had to have a swimming pool—and beautiful Henredon French country-style furniture. She already had a scrapbook filled with ads for exactly the pieces she wanted. She’d have a large china closet filled with wonderful silver ritual objects, and all those creamy, gold-edged porcelain pieces made especially for Jews by Lenox: the seder plate, the kiddush cup, all of which would never be used and would pass untouched to her children, who would also never use them. She’d have a charge account in Lord & Taylor and Macy’s. And they’d have great sex and a house filled with little yeshiva boys and pretty yeshiva girls. And everyone who’d been unkind to her in high school would eat their hearts out.

  So she didn’t object when Yitzie suggested another “party” at the same friend’s house. But this time, when they got there, he took out a camera.

  She stared at it. He kissed her and then started to unbutton her blouse. It was just that she was so beautiful, he explained rapidly. He wanted a picture of her like this, to always remember, for when they got old.

  The idea that he was thinking so far ahead into the future thrilled her. “You know, Yitzie,” she cooed, “we really should do something about this if we love each other so much. Why don’t we just get married?”

  She saw his eyes twitch as he continued to smile and fiddle with her buttons.

  Had he not heard her? she wondered, as she suddenly leaned out of his reach.

  He sat back. “What’s wrong?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  He made a sound like mmmmhummyeehmm.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re interrupting me.”

  She snatched the camera and threw it against the wall.

  “What the . . . ?” Yitzie jumped up. “That’s a Canon!”

  “I want an answer.”

  He was on his knees, gathering up the pieces, appalled. He looked at her, his eyes narrowing. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure!” she told him hotly, as her heart sank.

  He shrugged. “It’s been fun, but you’ve gotten the wrong impression.”

  Her face paled. “What impression is that, Yitzie?”

  “That we’re a nice Orthodox Jewish couple from Brooklyn who’s just blowing off a little steam until we fall back into the fold.”

  That’s exactly what she’d thought, except for the Brooklyn part. She was, after all, from Queens, a major difference as far as she was concerned. “I know that! Who said I want that?”

  He touched her face; his eyes held a sardonic gleam. “Don’t you? Aren’t you just dying to pick out your colors and move into my family’s two-family in Crown Heights where we can live until we have the down payment for our own house in some swanky Jewish neighborhood, walking distance to the local shul?” He sneered.

  She shrugged off his hand. “So what if I am? Who do you think you are, Mick Jagger? You’re Rabbi Polinsky’s son, the one who wears a streimel and kapota every Saturday, like some Polish nobleman from the Middle Ages. Sooner or later, if you wait around, they’ll fix you up with some short rabbi’s da
ughter with thick stockings from Beit Yaakov. She’ll make you turn off the lights and put a hole in a sheet.”

  His hands fumbled around, looking for a cigarette. He lit it and lay down on the bed, exhaling large smoke rings that rose and broke against the dirty white ceiling. The smell of smoke was suffocating. “You know, Delilah, that hole-in-the-sheet thing? It’s a myth.”

  She began to cough. He ran one finger up her arm from wrist to elbow. “I’m going to miss you,” he said.

  She thought perhaps she hadn’t heard him right.

  A few weeks later, she missed.

  Well, that was putting it pessimistically, she told herself. After all, she didn’t always get it on the day it was supposed to come. There were a million reasons. I mean, she wasn’t a clock the way some girls were.

  But then four more days passed. And a fifth.

  She called Yitzie, but all she got was an answering machine. She left ten messages, one every half hour. Then she went knocking on Sharona Gottleib’s door.

  Sharona opened it. She looked annoyed. “Well, well.”

  What had she ever done to her? But there was no time for game playing.

  “Listen, I’ve got to get in touch with Yitzie. He doesn’t answer the phone—”

  Sharona pulled her in and shut the door behind her, her fingers painfully tight around her wrist. “Not so loud, you idiot!”

  “You don’t understand.”

  She arched her brow. “No, huh? Late, are we?”

  Delilah sank down on the bed. “Well, maybe. But I’m not even sure we had . . . that we did . . . What am I going to do, Sharona?”

  “I tried to warn you. But you wouldn’t listen.”

  Was that true? Delilah searched her memory and came up with a few snooty remarks thrown in her direction by Sharona when she’d asked for Yitzie’s phone number. Something like, “You are making a huge mistake. He’s poison.” She’d chalked it up to jealousy. Or to Sharona feeling she wasn’t as good as Penina, not worthy of the great Yitzie Polinsky.

  “But you were the one who fixed him up with Penina! If you felt that way, why did you do it?”

  Sharona’s face went rigid. “I had no choice. He’s got some photos of me.”

  This information sank in with horror. “Oh, no! Sharona, what am I going to do?”

  Sharona went to the door and opened it. “You’ll figure it out.”

  Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

  She lay back on her bed, the blinds drawn, the sounds of New York City street traffic rolling over her as if she were lying spread-eagled on 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. Instinctively, she stretched her fingers over her stomach, as she tried to imagine the future. Was it her imagination, or was it already rounder, fuller?

  She saw herself waddling through the halls, her sweaters stretched over a basketball-sized lump. She imagined the shocked and horrified stares of her classmates, the good yeshiva girls, the out-of-town rabbis’ daughters, as they whispered just behind her. She saw herself summoned into Rebbitzin Craimer’s office, the way she would ease her bulky pregnant body into the narrow chair as the old yenta lectured her about being a bad influence, a disgrace to the good name of the institution. What could she answer? She’d even have to agree!

  And then they would throw her out of school with no degree, all that tuition and studying about plaque down the toilet, and all her student loans coming due with no way to pay them off! Her father (her mother, she was sure, would not be around, having died of a heart attack the moment she’d heard the news) would grudgingly take her in, and she’d have to listen to his snoring and watch him sit around in those sleeveless undershirts he liked, his skinny chest and hairy arms flailing as he tried to comfort her. She’d have to listen to his advice: Go back to Dallas or Houston. You’ll be better off. Sorry I ever came to this city. They’ve got plenty of rabbis down in Texas. Don’t worry. You’ll find rabbis.

  Or perhaps she’d throw herself on the mercies of the city’s welfare system and rent a little apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up where she’d sit terrified behind thrice-bolted doors, hoping crackheads and dope fiends wouldn’t break it down and kidnap her and her baby, selling them both into white slavery. A place where for recreation, she’d watch the roaches race each other across the kitchen counter. None of her friends would visit her. She’d be an outcast.

  Hot tears dripped into her pillow as she rolled over onto her side.

  There was another way. A trip to a clinic—they were clean and efficient, and it wouldn’t be worse than going to a dentist—and before you could say Yitzie Polinsky, the little bugger would be an ingredient in some new antiaging cosmetic venture.

  Her baby. They’d suck it out of her.

  She’d seen that book with the pictures of fetuses inside the womb. Whatever those crazy women’s groups told you about freedom over your body, it was a baby. It had a head, and a little tush, and tiny fingers and those tiny closed eyes. And they’d just Hoover it out of her, like some mess that needed cleaning up.

  It was then she’d felt the entire true weight of sin crash down on her. Whatever she’d done in her life so far, she hadn’t actually done anything hurtful to God. But killing a baby, even the froglike beginnings of a baby, because it was too inconvenient and embarrassing, would be a true sin. The God she seldom thought about, but always believed in, would not be able to forgive that. And for the rest of her life, she would have to live in a world in which she knew she had done this terrible thing, until the day she died, at which point her true punishment would only begin.

  According to some woman who’d undergone a near-death experience—a bunch of bricks fell on her head while she was walking in the street—and had explained it all on Oprah, when you died you had this moment when you were forced to sit back and watch your life, like a movie. You couldn’t close your eyes, because you had no eyelids. God would be watching her watch herself as the film showed her walking to the clinic, filling out the forms, lying down on the table. It would show her letting them, telling them, to rid her of this God-given life. A child, hers and Yitzie Polinsky’s.

  She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.

  “Can I put on the light?”

  It was her roommate, Rivkie.

  Rivkie Lifschitz was blessed with all things. She was from a respected well-to-do family and already engaged to an acknowledged Torah scholar. Perhaps because life had treated her so gently, she had also become a kind and generous human being. She was the kind of girl who learned the Torah portion of the week and managed to extract some beautiful moral lesson even from those difficult sections that dealt with body sores full of pus and the minutiae of the laws involved in animal sacrifices. “Blind or broken, or maimed, or having a wen or a dry or moist scab, ye shall not bring these near unto God and as an offering made by fire shall ye not bring aught of them unto the Altar.” Even in this, Rivkie Lifschitz would manage to find some redeeming little detail, something about the priest’s wife, and how the rabbis say that a man’s house is his wife. How a woman completely bears the character of the home, and how holy that is. And a woman who is the wife of a temple priest—or his daughter—has a higher degree of holiness. . . . Only Rivkie could ferret out these details.

  Once, she’d even had a discussion with Rivkie about bedikot, those mandatory self-examinations pious women performed for a week following their menstrual period to check if their vaginal discharges were completely free of blood before immersing in the ritual baths and resuming relations with their husbands. If the inserted cloth came out white, no prob. If it came out red, big prob. But if it came out yellow or brown, a woman had to ask a rabbi to examine it and decide whether she could count it as a clean day, and go on toward the finish line and her husband’s arms, or if she had to return to Go, and start counting all over again.

  “It really isn’t as bad as you think. You can FedEx it to any rabbi in the country. He doesn’t even have to know who you are. Or you can give it to the rebbitzin.”

>   “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  Rivkie had looked at her, surprised. “Look, we’re all just trying to do God’s will because we love Him so much. If He is asking us to separate until we can count seven clean days, we have to do it in the best way possible, because He is so good to us, and asks so little. . . . It would be terrible to separate a couple more than is necessary, and terrible to allow them to be intimate when it’s against God’s will. It’s part of a rabbi’s job description to help couples keep their marriage holy in God’s eyes. And if I, as the rabbi’s helpmate, can help him, or help the women in my congregation feel more comfortable about asking, then it would be a tremendous good deed, no?”

  That was Rivkie. The perfect future rabbi’s wife, whom no detail of ritual observance, no matter how gross, demeaning, or disgusting, could derail her from her earnest pursuit of true holiness.

  No one could dislike Rivkie. It was impossible. She was so giving, so sincere. And even though you might smile behind your hand at her earnestness and the way she bounced around the world with love and enthusiasm, there would be no way you could fault her. There wasn’t a mean or selfish bone in her body. Whatever she learned, she put into practice.