The Saturday Wife

by Ragen, Naomi

  Unlike most of his coreligionists, who only knew what was allowed and what was forbidden, he possessed the knowledge to make fine distinctions between Divine and rabbinic law: what was really a sin, and what was a rabbinic attempt to prevent sin. Now, more than ever, he was painfully aware of the discrepancies. There was nothing wrong with touching her, according to Divine law. It was the rabbis who had come up with this particular prohibition, one of those they considered “building a fence around the law.” These were laws meant to create a moat into which men might fall should they even move in the wrong direction. They were a barrier to help men from falling prey to urges that might push them to actually—God forbid!—transgress the Divine will as understood from the Five Books of Moses.

  In the eyes of the rabbis who’d created this particular fence, the progression from handing a woman a dish to undressing her and taking her to bed was immediate, inevitable, and forgone. A done deed.

  The stringency kings had, as usual, added their own outlandish roadblocks a few hundred miles forward of the rabbinic fence, even forbidding a father and daughter over the age of three from being alone in the house together. But instead of creating a society of saints, their overzealousness and suspicion of human nature was creating a society of perverts, Chaim thought, people who defended and praised such prohibitions, who claimed to understand and agree with such thinking. Ironically, it was these people who were constantly popping up in the headlines for being caught indulging in every perversion known to man. But that was true in all religions. Safe in the privacy of their own homes and secure in the knowledge that their victims will be gagged by the strongly enforced communal code of silence that holds the washing of dirty laundry in public to be a worse sin than actually soiling it in the first place, religious zealots of all stripes find the border between strict religious morality and absolute depravity unguarded and easily crossed.

  Chaim was not a stringency king. He believed in moderation in all things, but he was also deeply committed to Jewish law. The avoidance of physical contact was nerve-racking for them both, Chaim assumed. Surely, she must hate it as much as he did. “I’m sorry, my love,” he kept whispering to her. “I wish I could . . .” and there he interjected a long series of predicates over which even Delilah found herself blushing.

  My, my, she thought. Who would have suspected? She looked at him with a growing fondness.

  The successful hurdle of her bridal night complications left Delilah sweet-tempered and unusually congenial. While she was not particularly thrilled to be living in an apartment in the Bronx, she was grateful Chaim would have an immediate income until a suitable position with a lovely home in some leafy, pine-scented suburb came their way.

  For the first week, she wandered around the rooms of her little home, touching all her new things. Everything thrilled her: the flatware with their colorful enamel handles, the dinnerware set for twelve with all the matching serving pieces, glasses of all sizes in sets of six, stain-resistant white tablecloths, brand-new no-iron polyester/cotton sheet sets, and dozens of towels. She looked proudly over her new china closet filled with wedding silver and lovely crystal bowls and porcelain. In fact, when they delivered her formal dining room set—something her mother had never been able to afford—she waited for the delivery men to leave and then sat down by the table, rubbing her hand across the sweet-smelling polished wood. She found tears of joy streaming down her cheeks as she contemplated her good fortune and the beautiful life that surely lay ahead of her.

  Carefully, she dusted the shelves of their new wooden bookcases, filled with her husband’s library: the tricycle-sized volumes of the Talmud and dozens and dozens of other Hebrew tomes: the Pentateuch, books on Jewish law, Jewish history, philosophy, and custom. There were also more popular works, the sound-bite Judaism books that gave you a mitzva a day to do, a Jewish ethic a day to explore, a Jewish value a day to review, and 1001 Jewish jokes for speechmakers. Joining them were Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Norman Vincent Peak’s The Power of Positive Thinking, and even some novels left over from various periods in his youth and from various college courses: Marjorie Mornings tar; Inside, Outside; The Winds of War; The Chosen; Moby Dick; Bleak House; The Iliad; The Macmillan Handbook of English; Eichmann in Jerusalem.

  She brought few belongings of her own: clothes, music disks, her computer, photographs, her high school yearbook, which showed her in a short booster outfit (she never made cheerleader). There were also some of her own favorite books: Valley of the Dolls, Gone with the Wind, Jepthe’s Daughter, Little Women, and The Rainbow—which, along with a few other books by D. H. Lawrence, actually belonged to the public library out in Rockaway.

  She had another few months of school to go before she graduated and earned her dental hygienist’s license. Her plan was to get a job in some very affluent dental practice and work there for clothes money until she got pregnant. She looked forward to working, trying out her skills, earning her own money. Being married didn’t make her feel like an adult. The opposite. She felt as if she’d gone straight from her parents’ home to her husband’s home, despite the three years of dorming, which never really counted because she’d been obliged to go back home for weekends.

  Each morning before leaving for school, she’d prepare Chaim’s breakfast, which she’d leave on the table in a covered plate awaiting his return from morning prayers. Chaim would sit down by the table in the empty house, missing her, as he ate his lonely cornflakes and drank his black coffee, before settling himself into the work of assistant rabbi, which consisted of spending long hours in front of open volumes with tiny Hebrew lettering as he laboriously prepared his maiden speech before his grandfather’s congregation.

  He felt the sweat curl the tiny hairs on his forehead as he delved into the weekly Torah portion, searching for a sentence on which to build a twenty-five-minute talk that would display his erudition, wisdom, and wit. He wanted to enlighten, but also to entertain. When he finished, to his dismay, he found he had twenty minutes of erudition, five of wisdom, and none of entertainment. He closed the books, kissing them and putting them away.

  Maybe it wouldn’t matter, he told himself. After all, most of these people were used to his grandfather’s rambling sermons on the finer points of Talmudic exegesis delivered in an accent that was hard to decipher if you weren’t familiar with the speech patterns of American immigrants from that particular corner of the Sudetenland. Besides, most of them didn’t hear very well and tended to use speech time to nap, girding themselves for the mussaf prayers that were to follow, most of which had to be done on their feet, exhausting for people of that age.

  His plan was to win over the congregation not with speeches but with good deeds. By visiting the sick, bringing succor to the bereaved, being friendly and interested in the lives of his grandfather’s flock, he knew he could bring them a caring energy that only youth could provide. His grandfather never got around much anymore, his weekly visit to a nearby chiropractor the only outing he continued to make on a regular basis.

  Their first Sabbath, Delilah agonized over what to wear to the synagogue. Should she wear a wig, the only one she owned, a long, blond number purchased for exactly such an occasion, or a stylish hat in which most of her own hair would show? Or should she wear one of those horrid hair snoods so popular in Boro Park among the women who took the Woman of Valor song literally (Charm is a lie, and beauty is worthless; a God-fearing woman brings praise upon herself). She had one in her closet, purchased to wear to the ritual baths if she wanted to shampoo her hair before she got there, saving time. It was black with little silver sparkles, hugging her head like those towel turbans in the shampoo ads, making her look like an Italian film star in the forties. The wig, on the other hand, made her look like Farah Fawcett when she was plastered on the bedroom walls and lockers of every horny teenage boy in America. She finally chose the hat, which, though it showed most of her long hair, still looked the most respectable, with its cool white str
aw, band of apricot silk, and large apricot bow.

  Choosing the clothes had been less problematic. She took out a lovely apricot silk suit, purchased as part of her trousseau, with a pretty scarf. It was an outfit that covered up everything without looking dowdy.

  The women’s section was one flight up, a few pews tucked into an alcove like an afterthought. Its front row—the only one from which a glimpse of the men’s section and the actual service itself was visible—had a mechitzah of wooden shutters and lace curtains so thick it was almost impossible to see anything. Generations of frustrated women, however, had done their best to open it up. Many of the slats were broken, and numerous holes had been poked in the lace.

  As she walked down the narrow aisle toward the front, Delilah saw the aged faces turn toward her and toward one another, nodding and smiling with pleasure. She was everybody’s just-married granddaughter, she realized. She felt a wave of approval and happiness and love beamed at her from every corner as she heard the whispered word for bride, kallah, echo off the walls in all directions.

  She smiled with real joy at the old faces shining with love, feeling like a princess graciously accepting the homage of her people. She wondered where to sit. Not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings by rejecting the places they patted hopefully beside them, she chose an empty pew in front. As she sat facing forward, she could feel the buzz moving all around the room, finally landing at a spot on the back of her neck, where dozens of old eyes rested with curiosity and unexpressed friendliness.

  When she took out her prayer book, she felt the room shift as the women leaned forward in anticipation, waiting to see if she would turn to the right page. And when she rose to pray, taking the obligatory three steps backward and three steps forward that usher in the Eighteen Benediction prayer—steps that separate Orthodox Jews from their well-meaning, but ignorant, Jewish born-again cousins or from curious secular visitors or Gentiles—she could hear the small hiss of relief.

  A shaine maidel. A beautiful girl.

  A frum girl. A religious girl.

  The rabbi’s granddaughter-in-law!

  A good match for his brilliant, pious grandson Chaim, their future leader. She could feel their happiness for the good fortune that had befallen their beloved rabbi and his family. It pricked the layers of her heart, making her feel that she didn’t want to disappoint them, the way Princess Diana hadn’t wanted to disappoint her cheering, devoted subjects, no matter how that Royal thing worked out.

  When Chaim got up to speak, she felt herself grip her prayer book as she watched him walk down the aisle and climb up to the podium. He wore a black Sabbath suit and a wide-brimmed hat. He looked like a generic yeshiva boy, she thought, a bit dismayed. The yeshiva day schools disgorged them in colorful crocheted skullcaps, sweatpants, and basketball jackets, and Bernstein got hold of them and turned them into dour, serious, prematurely aged men in dark suits and glasses. There were legions of them, all interchangeable, like those stuffed or plastic effigies mass-produced in the wake of some hit movie. At least he was clean-shaven, she comforted herself. A beard would have been the last straw.

  She was anxious for him to do well. She sat back, listening at first. It was about buttons, she realized. Should a button sewn onto a shirt as a spare—the extra button—be considered muktzeh, untouchable, on the Sabbath? She stuck with him for a while, listening as he detailed the problem. Muktzeh was a rabbinical category in which all things forbidden to use on the Sabbath by Divine decree also became forbidden to touch by rabbinic decree. And if one lived in an area in which one couldn’t carry on the Sabbath, because there was no eruv (a fictitious boundary which encircled an area making it one and thus permitting one to carry from one place to the next), could one wear a shirt with such a button?

  She looked around nervously, wondering if everyone was as excruciatingly bored as she. Discounting the nappers, she realized with relief that the men had their eyes fixed upon her husband with approval and pleasure. And while the women did shift nervously, their chatter rising above the volume and intensity generally to be expected in the women’s section of Orthodox synagogues during the rabbi’s speeches, it seemed all right. And when Chaim finished, closing his book and kissing it, wishing everyone “Good Shabbes,” and his grandfather got up to hug him, as if he were a Bar Mitzva boy, the synagogue erupted with interjections of goodwill and praise: “Yasher koach.” “God bless you.” “The apple doesn’t fall far.” The men’s voices rang out, and the women stopped fidgeting. A few came over to Delilah to shake her hand, and their wrinkled arthritic fingers—like old white parchment—were cool against her young warm skin. “You must be so proud!” they told her. “A wonderful job!”

  Delilah felt touched and filled with reciprocal warmth.

  And then the service was over, and the people filed out as fast as their canes and walkers would allow them, navigating the staircase to the first floor social hall where gray-haired ladies in old-fashioned hats had laid out paper plates with various types of herring and gefilte fish stabbed with toothpicks, plates of dull sponge cake, and stale-looking Stella d’Oro cookies that smelled of anise. No one touched the food until the old rabbi arrived, pouring the red sweet Malaga wine—so thick you could cut it with a knife—into a silver cup, making the kiddush benedictions over it. That taken care of, the ladies brought out steaming platters of brown potato kugel and cholent—a dark meat-and-bean stew cooked overnight—which had enough fat in it to clog the last open space in any artery still actually allowing blood to pass through.

  Delilah stood by Chaim’s side as one by one the members of the congregation filed past, smiling at her and shaking Chaim’s hand as the venerable rabbi they adored looked on benevolently. It was lovely, she thought, to be the center of so much positive attention.

  She tried to tell herself she was lucky. That she had everything. That she’d been blessed. That it wasn’t so bad she hadn’t had a honeymoon, some tropical getaway where she could wear a bikini and lie near sparkling pools of turquoise water, lathered with suntan lotion, as sarong-clad men and women plied her with icy smoothies and fresh pineapple speared with festive paper umbrellas. That she could live with the two weeks of physical separation each month; that it would give her private time to read and watch TV in bed when he couldn’t lay his hands on her. In fact, secretly, she thought it might be a relief.

  In bed, she had noticed, his passion rose quickly and tanked accordingly. He had a self-congratulatory way of smiling afterward that she found irritating. He always rose fastidiously and returned to his own bed, leaving her behind to deal with sticky sheets and rumpled blankets. At first, she had been annoyed about the two-bed thing. “Why can’t we just lie side by side on either side of a big bed when I’m a niddah?” she’d grumbled. But his response had mollified her. “If I could lie next to you and not sin, I wouldn’t be a man.”

  But later, as time went by, with about half of each month with no physical contact at all between them, she began to feel peeved and insulted and abandoned. She would long for the ritual immersion that would have them resume their physical intimacy, no matter how flawed. In between, she saw him sneaking glances at her naked body like a guilty schoolboy. His yeshiva upbringing had created in him the perennial adolescent where anything concerning sex was involved, a permafrost that would last through all the stages of his life, never ripening into maturity.

  She was compartmentalized in his life. Like most religious men, he managed to adore and ignore her simultaneously with breathtaking ease. He congratulated himself on marrying such a pretty, agreeable woman. But it was the idea of her he admired. She was decorative as well as practical, like a good appliance, able to perform many separate functions. He believed in separate “spheres.” He believed it was noble and right for him to let her run hers and not to interfere. And vice versa.

  He believed in all the old chichés—that women were superior beings, that they were more sensitive than men, on a higher level, blah, blah, blah. But of course, in
their own “kingdom,” he thought, adopting the language of patriarchal apologists who enthusiastically rationalized why women were entrusted with the tedium of housework and child care and men were fashioned for sitting on their backsides in study halls. Text after text, scholars never tired of trying to compensate for sentencing women to eternal drudgery, which they themselves abhorred, by dreaming up fancy ways of labeling it, easing their consciences and allowing them to view their self-serving little world of men-gods as a fair, nay noble, thing.

  Countless rabbis, through hundreds of generations stretching back through time to the Temple itself, had been involved in the conspiracy. The separate-but-equal theory divided man and woman into the masters of their own universes, carefully delineating the realm of his kingdom to include anything but cooking, cleaning, and wiping up the various discharges and sticky liquids of children. As the wonderful German Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch put it, “A wife takes over obligations which comprise the great task of mankind, making it possible for her husband to accomplish more perfectly the part that is left to him. That’s why it is written: a helpmate, opposite him. If the helpmate were another man, that wouldn’t help.”

  Delilah wasn’t philosophical, but she was a realist. Jewish men—particularly Orthodox Jewish men-—had fashioned the perfect little universe for themselves, and they were not about to give it up no matter how reactionary or unfair it was in this day and age.

  To those who met her in the hallways at Bernstein about this time, she seemed reconciled to her new role. In fact, for the first time since they’d known her, she seemed really happy.

  It’s amazing how fast things change.

  SEVEN

  Delilah’s mother, Marilyn Meyers Goldgrab, was the middle daughter of American Jews whose Russian grandparents had come over on big immigrant ships during the czars’ pogroms. Despite the attempts of the German Jewish immigrants who preceded them to ship them off to Jewless hinterlands where their faithful adherence to the rituals of the Jewish religion would be less embarrassingly visible, and might, hopefully, soon shrivel and die without Jewish communal life, they had stubbornly stayed put in the great Jewish city of New York. They had also stayed strictly Orthodox in practice, raising their sons and daughters to value Jewish custom and Jewish scholarship.