by Ragen, Naomi
She began to imagine herself as a pious rabbi’s wife. It’s what she had been praying for, the opportunity to reform herself, to wash the slate clean. Besides, she was acutely aware that her shares on the shidduch market were in a highly volatile state right now. All that was needed was for some busybody to start a little rumor about her unhappy romance. It was like when people began to question whether butchers were really selling glatt kosher meat. Once there was doubt, prime ribs became chopped meat and it was all you could do to give them away.
She smiled at him. He smiled back, his kind open face guileless, his eyes almost childish in their innocent, unfeigned delight. He hid nothing, she thought, surprised and a bit contemptuous. He was hers. He would be easy to manage, not the touchy type who took offense or held a grudge or got angry—unless you banged him over the head with a hammer. And even then. The hair was too short, and that outfit . . . Still, she had seen much worse.
He watched as her sparkling blue eyes slowly took him in with approval. His sweater, he realized, had been the right choice. She wouldn’t have liked a suit.
“Chaim?” she asked, and her white teeth, perfect and small and straight under cushiony lips, peeked out at him in a tiny secret smile. Oh, how he wished he could widen that smile, see those teeth in all their porcelain glory!
Is it necessary to expound upon the process of falling in love? The butterflies that wander through the digestive tract? The sweaty palms, the tickle below the belly button? The eyes that light up the object of desire like car headlights falling into a fog, all smoke and mirrors and nothing quite real? Let’s just say it: From that moment on Chaim Levi was smitten. As such, he didn’t understand anything that was happening.
They walked out into the New York night of twinkling lights and crowded streets, cars zooming, and couples walking arm in arm, their feet clicking against the pavement. He took her to a kosher delicatessen where religious couples on first dates often came. It was noisy and full of teenagers, and he regretted his choice immediately. He ordered pastrami on rye. She demurely ordered a salad, which she poked at tentatively, saying she had eaten so much all day, she wasn’t really hungry. His sandwich smelled really good, she said appreciatively. With a great show of reluctance, she finally agreed to take half, feeding it to herself in greedy little bites. Pressed, she also agreed to order dessert, a gooey pecan pie that disappeared from her plate with surprising swiftness.
“I have a sweet tooth,” she murmured, blushing a little with embarrassment.
She was so shy, he thought, entranced. So delicate, he thought in wonder, watching the color deepen on her pale golden skin as he spoke to her of his dreams and plans. She seemed immensely interested in everything he had to say, hanging on his every word as if it resonated with some hidden, kabbalistic meaning.
Basking later in the afterglow of the evening, he realized she hadn’t spoken about herself at all. She remained as much a mystery to him as when he’d set out that evening to meet her.
“So, nu?” Josh asked. When Chaim smiled but didn’t answer, Josh tilted his head and nodded. “Oh, I see. But I should warn you—”
Chaim’s ears pricked up.
“She’s got a bit of a reputation.”
“Delilah?”
“Well, just a few things, nothing serious—” Josh squirmed, aware that he should have had this information long before proposing this match.
Chaim interrupted him rather sharply. “Doesn’t this fall under the category of evil gossip? Isn’t it sinful?”
“When it comes to information about a shidduch, we are allowed to tell all. It falls under the category of Before a blind man, place no obstacle.”
Chaim, who wished to remain a blind man where Delilah was concerned, tried another tack. “Not all information is reliable.”
“Oh, this is. It’s from Rivkie.”
The paragon of virtue herself. Now his curiosity was piqued. This was no idle gossipmonger, no catty, loose-lipped female out to destroy for the sheer joy of feeling her own power. No. If it came from Rivkie, and if she thought it important enough to send on to Josh, who thought it important enough to share, it would be stupid of him not to listen. And yet . . . the girl’s body, her face, her golden hair, her mesmerizing eyes. If the information was compelling enough, it could paralyze him, making it impossible for him to reach out and take her, like the brass ring. And he had been on so many merry-go-rounds, ridden so many painted horses with their short dark sensible hair, bright eyes, and housewifely bodies that would no doubt balloon into a perfectly round balaboosta’s after the first child was born. He wanted her.
“What?” he asked impatiently, because he had to.
“Well, she has been around the block, if you know what I mean. She had a boyfriend, and I understand the breakup wasn’t fun. She was pretty hysterical about it.”
“A boyfriend?”
This was unusual. Religious girls didn’t have boyfriends. They had dates with prospective marriage partners. After a certain number of such dates—two or three for the extremely pious, maybe a dozen or so for lesser souls—a decision had to be made, a proposal offered that needed either to be accepted or refused.
“Breakup? You mean, she refused his proposal?”
Josh winced. “Not exactly. He never asked her. And they went out for quite some time.”
Chaim studied him. This was not good. Protocol demanded that a relationship between a man and a woman be based on investigating the possibility of marriage, getting engaged, arranging the wedding details, then getting married. Anything else was pritzus, in other words, screwing around. A girl involved in a longtime relationship that had not resulted in marriage was one of two things: an unfortunate victim of an unscrupulous and non-Godfearing boy who had led her on; or a willing participant in a very unsavory and unacceptable liaison that marked her as nonkosher marriage material.
Chaim nodded, disturbed but not defeated. As he saw it, he now had two choices. Like a rabbi asked to judge whether a chicken was kosher, he could probe and probe its insides, examine its viscera, turning it over and over until he found some reason to call it treife. Or he could look at the chicken’s owner to see if he was a rich man or a poor man, deciding how much he needed the chicken. Thinking of her, Chaim decided on the latter tack. Under no circumstances was he willing to call this chicken treife. That being the case, he thanked Josh for his honesty and his help, broadly hinting that he needed no more information.
“I appreciate what you are trying to do, Josh, really. But I know you and Rivkie would never have arranged for me to meet Delilah in the first place if you’d thought there was something wrong with her behavior.”
That, of course, put Josh into a serious bind. What could he say? That he had not been aware of any of this until his Talmud study partner, who knew Yitzie from the neighborhood, had mentioned it in passing? And that only then had he squeezed the information out of Rivkie, who was on close terms with both Penina Gwertzman and Sharona Gottleib and had reluctantly sought the source of her roommate’s heartbreak—with the best of intentions, of course. Josh of course forgave her for not being worldly enough to understand the implications of such behavior. But to admit his error, he realized, would be to jeopardize his own infallible reputation, as well as that of his future wife, who had set this whole tsimmes boiling in the first place. Besides, all things considered, Chaim’s other marriage prospects were not brilliant, and Delilah Levi seemed to be his heart’s desire. Was it not written that Forty days before conception a heavenly voice cries out, “This man for this woman?” Who was Josh to argue?
He didn’t, nodding in silent acquiescence and hoping for the best.
Two weeks before the wedding, Rivkie bumped into Delilah and Chaim on a street in Manhattan. Delilah, Rivkie thought, looked great. She was wearing a blue cashmere sweater and a slim skirt of supple black leather that ended just above her knees. She had on blue eyeshadow and liner, and fabulous red lipstick that Rivkie admired but would never, ever, have h
ad the guts to wear. Rivkie noticed how Chaim looked at her. His yearning was almost palpable, like that invisible energy field around the body Chinese doctors are always fiddling with.
Delilah, who hardly ever went to class anymore and who hadn’t been in the dorm room for weeks, was all smiles and hugs and kisses on the cheek.
“I’m having a beautiful dress made, in that building over there, on the sixth floor,” Delilah said, looking up and pointing toward a factory loft on Seventh Avenue. “We got it wholesale. First I tried it on in Saks, and then my mother got our neighbor to get it from the factory. He’s a button salesman, so he knows the wholesaler. And all I had to do was invite him to my wedding. It cost me a fraction!”
The skin of her throat was smooth and white as she arched her neck, pointing upward at the factory loft where, even as they spoke, her Queen for a Day dress was being hand-stitched by Guatemalan seamstresses in daily danger of INS raids. Rivkie watched Chaim watching her. And when Delilah turned around and spoke to him, she saw how he bent low and leaned in close with his ear toward her, looking into the distance and smiling vaguely, as if he were listening to music.
Delilah held out her engagement ring, a modest little thing but one that obviously thrilled her. “It’s a marquise,” she said, stroking it. “Isn’t that a nice shape? I mean, for the price of a marquise you can get a round stone twice the size.” She shook her head in delight. Only then did she remember Chaim. He didn’t seem to mind.
“Rivkie, meet Chaim. He’s going to be a rabbi,” she said, and Rivkie could see that Delilah expected her to be astonished, and that she herself was astonished no less.
FIVE
Ah, the wedding. Minor slights that had led to major family feuds and cutting decades-old silences had suddenly been forgiven. Animosities begun over Passover seder invitations and Rosh Hashanah cards and condolence calls withheld or insufficiently appreciated, were set aside. There was hope that all hard feelings would travel the labyrinthine road toward reconciliation, making their final exit via a white envelope containing a generous check. And so, forgotten relatives had been pursued in far away places like Hyattsville and Toronto. New cousins had been discovered. Old friends had been looked up. Addresses and phone numbers had been relentlessly tracked down with archival diligence through phone books and the Internet.
The guests came in alphabet subway trains from Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, in taxis from the Bronx, and in new Chevrolets from far-off Connecticut and Pennsylvania. They arrived early, or late, by Amtrak, Greyhound bus, and El Al flights from Tel Aviv. They poured into the hotel’s genteel lobby, gaping at the ceilings, marble floors, and vases of flowers, before crowding the elevators down to the banquet hall. They flooded through the open doors like salmon swimming against the current in a desperate effort to reach the breeding grounds.
The glatt kosher caterer, who’d recently split with his brother-in-law in a backstabbing family coup, obviously had something to prove. The room reeked of gobsmacking culinary art: pirate ships with gangplanks and flags sticking out of the red flesh of carved-out watermelons; little marzipan Swiss villages nestled between chocolate mountains covered with whipped-cream snow that jiggled precariously as overcome children butted their heads against the table for a better look. And that was just the smorgasbord.
The older women wore long, pious polyester skirts and matching jackets from Boro Park. They wore elaborate gowns shaken out of mothballs from a child’s Bar Mitzva or wedding or Loehmann’s back-room bargains with slashed-off designer labels. They wore hats with feathers and satin bows. The most religious wore human hair wigs, newly washed and set in festive big-hair styles.
Some of the younger married women also wore wigs, but they were long and smooth and sexy, in daring shades of blond and red, bouncing around their shoulders as they walked or danced. But mostly, unlike their mothers, they wore fashionable head scarves tied with exotic panache the way girls out on the settlements do in Israel. They wore flashing engagement rings and matching diamond wedding bands, and intricate gold necklaces with matching bracelets from H. Stern or Fortunoff.
The singles in their late teens and early twenties, cousins and friends of the bride and groom, milled around, shooting each other shy, searching looks. The young men’s hair had been cut, their beards trimmed or their cheeks newly shaved. They wore dark suits and ties like the groom—except for the Israelis, who came in inappropriate sweaters, or short-sleeved white shirts with no ties, and pants that didn’t really fit. On their heads they sported dark wide-brimmed hats, or crocheted skullcaps with geometric designs, or the silly white yarmulkes left in a basket by the door for those who had come in with nothing at all.
The girls they eyed so optimistically had just been to the beauty salons or had blow-dried their hair themselves until their arms ached. They’d had their nails done and their eyebrows tweezed and wore makeup that ranged from an artistic touch here and there to heavy coats of every conceivable goo and paste.
They wore long dresses from the post-Christmas reduced racks at Lord & Taylor, Macy’s, and Filene’s. Or well-cut suits from Ann Taylor or Talbot’s petite section, which are hardly ever on sale, and then only in size two or fourteen. They wore gold bangle bracelets and little shiny gold necklaces with five-cornered stars, or Chai or names like Sarah, Rivka, Chana, and Rachel spelled out in golden Hebrew letters made by Israeli jewelers.
And then there were the outcasts, the great unwashed, the children of cousins whom one simply cannot uninvite; who always show up at family celebrations in lesser or greater numbers, dressed in jeans and sneakers and uncombed hair or low-cut dresses with sequins missing; who look like they have just gotten up from the couch after watching a Sunday movie and who never seem to feel underdressed or out of place or even aware of the chagrin and pain their insulting carelessness is causing their hosts. They are the people everyone does their best to pretend aren’t there at all, particularly those who invited them.
Toward the back, away from the band, in the best seating area, sat the small cluster of Gentiles: the black woman in a sleeveless Donna Karan dress, looking fabulous; the long-haired programmers; the short red-haired accountant. They smiled with discomfort at one another and the people around them, wide-eyed in the fashion of tourists to Indian reservations, who are anxious to observe the folkways of the natives with stalwart respect.
Teeming hordes of children, looking well-combed and uncomfortable in their shiny, stiff shoes and elaborate outfits, chased one another around the hall, stealing cakes and nuts off plates like locusts, tugging at their parents’ legs. The little boys ran wild in white shirts and manly ties, while the little girls wore either miniature versions of whorish fad fashions or old-fashioned picture-book dresses that made them look like dolls.
Up and back they ran, holding sloshing glasses of Coca-Cola, which they refilled at an alarming rate, pushing aside the older men, who waited patiently and diffidently to ask for their glass of scotch and a glass of semidry white wine or rum Coke for their wives. The women would drink half a glass and put it down, already feeling themselves growing dizzy and drowsy from the unaccustomed experiment with alcohol that didn’t consist of one sip from a communal wineglass Friday night.
There was mixed seating—that is, men and women, husbands and wives and children, all seated at the same tables. But there was also a small section in the rear with a mechitzah, so that the more distinguished rabbis wouldn’t be forced to sit with their wives. The rebbitzins sat together with their marriageable daughters, all wishing to make a public display of adherence to the most pious stringencies in Jewish law, stringencies invented by the fortunate men who sat all day in study halls and thus had all the time in the world to rescue God from His horrible mistakes in neglecting to include such laws in His Torah and Talmud.
The men’s tables included the elderly rabbis and their sons and grandsons, and even some of the more farchnyokt friends of the groom, who looked over the elderly scholars the way some men ogle single girl
s, savoring the possibilities. The thrill of talking to the great Rabbi So-and-so! How they would astonish their friends (and perhaps some unlucky prospective bride on some far-off shidduch date) with this tale. How they had brought up some intricate point of law and how the great Rabbi So-and-so had cocked his head and nodded approval as he listened, spellbound, to an explication. Imagine!
Religious men are the worst name-droppers. They will spend half a date regaling you with their exploits in cornering some octogenarian who is—or one day might be—a member of the Council of Sages, whose photos or garish oil portraits appear on posters in Crown Heights, Williamsburg, Geulah, and Bnei Brak like rock stars.
But if a man isn’t interested in women before he has a wife, in all likelihood he is bound to be even less interested once he gets one. So any single guy at a wedding who prefers to sit next to bearded sages is not, generally speaking, a good marital prospect.
You see them sometimes, walking four paces in front of their wives and children in parks and zoos during the Intermediate Days of Festivals like Succoth and Passover, barely turning their heads to catch what their wives are saying. They are the ones who take the seat next to the cabdriver, leaving their wives to manage the task of stuffing themselves, a baby, a two-year-old, a carriage, and luggage into the back.
The single girls made their way around the hall, searching for someone who would give them a ride home. That is always the most urgent need when attending a Jewish wedding in Manhattan. You simply do not want to ride out to Brooklyn or Queens on the New York City subway system after 10 P.M. In fact, you do not want to ride anywhere on the New York City subway system at any time, period. The second reason, though, was always more important. You wanted to walk out with your pick from the most eligible single men, ensuring a good hour alone with him. It was considered a party favor, much more urgent and useful than catching the bride’s bouquet.