An Observant Wife

by Naomi Ragen

  “But why?” the child protested.

  “Don’t bother your mameh,” Fruma Esther admonished her.

  The little girl turned around to look at her, astonished. “My mameh?”

  Leah looked down at her, her face radiant. “Yes, I’m your mameh now, my lovely girl.” Now and forever and forever.

  The child laughed and jumped up and down, suddenly full of energy. “But can I still call you Mommy?”

  “Yes, my darling.” Leah smiled, a sweet bud of happiness opening inside her.

  “Come, we have presents for you at Bubbee’s house. Say good night to your parents,” Fruma Esther said firmly, her eyes blinded by tears.

  Leah kneeled next to the child, taking her little body in her arms, breathing in the childish warmth that mingled joyously with the honeyed drips and spills of the celebration. “Good night, my sweet little Icy,” she murmured into her hair, which badly needed a shampoo, kissing her stained cheek. She got up and looked at the little boy cradled in an exhausted sleep of oblivion in his older sister’s arms, gently smoothing his tousled blond curls out of his eyes. She put an affectionate arm around Shaindele, kissing her flushed cheek. “Thank you so much! We’ll come to pick them up tomorrow before you have to leave for school.”

  “I can take the day off,” the girl offered, a little too eagerly, Leah thought. She studied her a moment, troubled. Shaindele was very committed to her schoolwork. “No, you have exams soon.”

  The girl shrugged, a bit sullenly.

  But then Yaakov was moving past her, hugging his children and talking to Fruma Esther, saying his final good nights and making it clear it was time for all of them to leave.

  And then, it was just the two of them.

  “Come,” he whispered thrillingly.

  3

  A VIRGIN WEDDING NIGHT

  Lugging their wedding presents, Yaakov and Leah stepped over the threshold of the apartment. Its worn, familiar furniture, vigorously polished, winked dully from the shadows as the overhead fixture with its yellowish bulb came to life. On the walls of the old Boro Park apartment, newly plastered and painted a too-bright white in honor of its new occupant, hung the laminated jigsaw puzzles his first wife had patiently assembled with their children during long Sabbath afternoons, lovingly rehung by his daughter and his first wife’s mother. The family portraits, including the photographs of Zissele, also remained where they were. He saw Leah glance around, her eyes stopping to stare at them.

  “Maybe I should have…,” he began uncertainly. What is the etiquette in such matters? he thought, lost. But she moved close to him, putting two fingers over his mouth.

  “I love these photos. They’re the first time I laid eyes on you. And the jigsaw puzzles. Zissele will always be here in this house, because her children are here.”

  “Do you mind? Does it hurt you?”

  “What?”

  “Does it hurt you that you have to share them with her? Take care of another woman’s children?”

  She could have given him a quick, reassuring answer, she thought. Instead, she tried to tell the truth. “The older ones, the boys and Shaindele, will never be mine. I wouldn’t even want that. I just want to be there for them if they need me. But Icy and Cheeky”—she shook her head with a smile as she used her nicknames for the little ones, given when she was only a babysitter doing a good deed for a desperate and unhappy widower—“I don’t think of them as someone else’s. I fell in love with them long before I ever met you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?” She smiled.

  “For loving them and…” He stopped, taking off his big, black festive hat and laying it carefully on the dining room table. “For loving me,” he whispered.

  How is this going to work? she wondered, her body yearning for his but held back by invisible wires. How do you get into bed with a man when your entire relationship has been absolutely nonphysical, even the slightest touch forbidden? How do you release the lock on passions chained and jailed by religious law? And how am I supposed to know what is acceptable among religious people once we are in bed? No one ever talked about that! Her counseling by the bride teacher, a frum woman with a huge scarf over her blond rebbitzen’s wig, had done little more than elaborate the final points of the laws governing abstinence and separation during her menstrual period. As for the rest, the woman had summed it up thus: “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the things I tell young virgin brides.”

  She’d gone home devastated at the insult. But perhaps the woman had been right. She wasn’t, after all, a virgin, not technically. But the men she had known, the life she had lived as an American woman in the new millennium, bore no resemblance to the life she had now embarked upon among the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Boro Park. In that sense, she was like any other virgin bride going into the unknown, unsure of what she was allowed to do, to feel; unsure of what her new husband would permit himself to do in bed. What kind of behavior would he expect from her? Could she be herself, adventurous and unrestrained? Or would that offend his piety, his modesty? Would it, she thought with a heavy, frightened heart, disgust him, a man who had only ever known one woman—a timorous, eighteen-year-old virgin who had no doubt worn an ankle-length, long-sleeved nightgown to bed and shrunk from his touch?

  Yaakov stood motionless, studying her. What happens now? he thought, a bit terrified. What should I do? What is she used to men doing?

  As a man who had been brought up with the idea that passion between a man and a woman was a dangerous thing that must always be contained and fought against outside the very clear parameters of marriage, he was used to closing down his feelings and burying them. There was no such thing as a private life in the haredi world. The society had an opinion and a rule about everything. Some liked to put a positive spin on this, lauding the interference of the community that butts in, succors, directs, lauds, excoriates, and teaches every one of its members concerning every situation they might possibly encounter in life, demanding they always choose the accepted norm. Sex was no exception. What, after all, was private about marital relations? It, no less than every other part of their lives, required complete submission to the unwavering strictures of their community no less than to the actual God-given rules outlined in the Torah, Talmud, and book of Jewish law. Without that, their little enclave—huddling together like emperor penguins against the fury of soul-chilling blasts from the dangerous, immoral, and alien modern world—would be weakened. Thus, no member could be allowed to defect and chart a new path in any area, not only for the good of the community but also for their own sake, lest they be lost to the howling furies of an inimical culture waiting to pick them off and destroy them one by one if they ever dared venture out on their own.

  He had never questioned this. He and his first wife had been innocent teenagers when they married. They had navigated the space between them like astronauts taking their first steps on the surface of the moon, unsure of the very ground beneath their feet. And for a long time, their relationship in bed had been as fragile as crystal they risked shattering with every hesitant touch.

  Zissele had come with a list of explicit instructions given to him by his rabbinical groom advisor a few days before their wedding night, as well as a detailed anatomical chart he was exhorted to memorize. He remembered some of the rules:

  The room must be in total darkness. Even the windows must be blocked by a cloth. Both of them had to wash their hands three times both before and after “doing the mitzvah.” Appropriate prayers must be recited: the prayer that one might fulfill one’s obligation “to be fruitful and multiply,” and the prayer which asked the Almighty to infuse one with courage and strength so that the body “not contain any weakness or any limpness or any confusion of thought that may negate me, so I may fulfill my desire with my wife, and may my desire be available to me at any time I wish without hesitation or any limpness of the member forever and ever. Amen.”

  He was exhorted to go to the bathroom, and when comi
ng out, to gently rap the bride on her knees seven times to get her attention “so that her mind not wander from the holiness of fulfilling the mitzvah.” Both of them had to remove all their clothes in total darkness, leaving on just a nightgown for her and some robe for him. He was even told precisely how many times before and during he was required to hug and kiss his bride! And the more resistant she was, the more times he had to hug and kiss! The act itself was described in detail, as if explaining it to a child or a blind man or a complete idiot.

  He knew that Zissele had also received instructions. She had been taught to examine this place in her body a week before, and familiarize herself with it so that “if the groom should call out to her in a loud voice to guide his member” she would be able to do so. And if he found himself in the right place, he was warned that the “opening was small and narrow and that he would have to enter with great force.”

  He had found all this material horrifying. Even the promptings of his groom advisor, who had exhorted him on the vital importance of fulfilling the physical act on the wedding night, had not gotten him through it. Every step of the way had been a struggle—to keep his mind pure, his actions in check as his new bride lay beneath him motionless.

  He had not followed any of the instructions, finding them instinctively wrong. Neither had Zissele. She was all confusion and fear of not fulfilling her religious duties. In the end, instead of rapping her knees or forcibly hugging and kissing her, he had simply sat on the edge of the bed, his hands folded between his knees, filled with pity for her and for himself. Sex never happened that first night. Instead, they had separated in fear and confusion, the failure devastating to them both. Nevertheless, looking back, this had been far better than forcing himself to do things he despised and forcing her to do something she wasn’t ready for.

  Eventually, of course, like every other devout couple, with time and patience and without knee-tapping and forced embraces, they had figured it out. But for both of them, their wedding night had remained forever a shameful secret, a failure, when it could have been a fond recollection filled with teasing, secret laughter, and joy, he thought. And even as the years passed and the walls between them had crumbled, children blessing their union, still, rules and obligations, duty and piety had intruded upon their intimacy like phantom eyes in the darkness for the rest of their marriage.

  He didn’t want that with Leah. He wanted—so much—to make her happy, and to be happy himself; to firmly close the door of their bedroom, locking out the niggling voices in his head of rabbis and teachers and pious texts. He wanted, once and for all, to banish the doubts, the self-hatred, the awful memories; to be free.

  Where to begin?

  She took a hesitant step toward him.

  “Yaakov, shut off the light.”

  His heart did a somersault. Of course, the light. He moved quickly.

  But the room was still bathed in pale shadows from the streetlamps of Brooklyn that washed through the newly polished windowpanes in their splintered wooden frames. He inhaled, wondering if she’d also demand they close the blind, or cover the windows with thick cloths, as they’d been instructed. To his relief, she didn’t.

  He stood there foolishly, he thought, not knowing what to do next. How he wished he could say something funny or witty or romantic! How he longed to behave in a worldly, confident way that would impress her! How he longed, in short, to be someone else. But he was stuck with himself, he thought dismally, looking at this young woman he had fallen in love with so deeply, afraid of making some fatal error that would reveal to her what a profound mistake she had made to connect her life to the shambles that was his own.

  They waited in silence, paralyzed by uncertainty. And then, for some reason he himself didn’t understand, he moved toward her, taking her hand in his and entwining his long fingers with hers. “Leah,” he whispered, kissing her fingertips. “My beautiful bride.”

  She leaned into him, kissing the space where the stiff white collar of his shirt met his neck. He felt a thrill that mesmerized him. Wordlessly, he led her to the bedroom.

  To his surprise and discomfort, the brand-new twin beds had been pushed together and covered with a colorful, king-size comforter.

  “Do you like it, the comforter? My mother bought it for us as a present,” she told him shyly. “All we had were twins.”

  Her mother. Of course, he thought. No religious person would make up the beds of a married couple this way. The very suggestion that their bed was a king and not twins that could be pushed apart during the many days when they would be forbidden to even touch, or pass each other a plate, let alone share a bed, would be considered by Boro Park standards shockingly inappropriate.

  “It’s wonderful,” he answered with a strange enthusiasm she found amusing. It was true. He loved it; loved the illusion it created of a space that would always unite them, brushing over the reality.

  “Should I use the bathroom to get undressed?” she asked uncertainly.

  Disappointment filled his heart. He had so looked forward to something banishing the old ghosts. “Of course.”

  He waited patiently. To his surprise, she soon returned, still fully dressed.

  “I can’t manage these buttons.”

  He smiled, pulling her close. His fingers fumbled in the darkness, missing the tiny lace hoops.

  “Wait.” She switched on the small night lamp, turning her back to him. “Can you see them now?”

  He nodded, the flicker of light forbidden and thrilling. Slowly, carefully, he pushed the little, slippery pearl buttons through the tiny hoops, his fingers tingling with desire. And when he had unfastened them all, she held the dress against her chest modestly.

  “The lamp, Yaakov?”

  “Please, Leah,” he begged her suddenly.

  She turned to him, startled. Then, looking into his pleading eyes, she deliberately withdrew her arms from her sleeves, stepping out of the dress and her half-slip, laying both carefully over a chair. Slowly, one by one, she pulled out the little pearl pins that had held back her hair, letting her reddish-gold curls cascade down her back.

  He reached out tentatively, running his fingers through her curls, something he had been longing to do from the moment they met. Lifting her hair in a bunch off her back, he was shocked at the smooth, pearly whiteness of her skin, the way it glowed with youth.

  She didn’t mind being in her bra and panties, but him being still fully clothed made her feel shamefully exposed. She reached over, moving his black suit jacket off his shoulder.

  A light seemed to go on in his head. He smiled a little mournfully. “How stupid! Of course,” he murmured, stepping back to undress.

  She crawled beneath the covers, pulling them modestly beneath her chin as she slipped out of the rest of her clothes. She thought about the chaste white cotton nightgown bought in a Boro Park lingerie store still packed in her small suitcase. Let it stay there, she thought, a shiver of happy anticipation going through her at the feel of the cool, crisp sheets against her naked body.

  She watched him undress. His body surprised her with its beauty, the broad shoulders, the firm jut of his collarbone, the tapering waist. There was not an ounce of fat on him, no paunch at all. Still, the naked male body topped by the pious, rabbinical beard … The contrast was almost too much. But that’s who he is, she understood. That was the package deal, the man, his beliefs, his lifestyle. She opened her arms, ready to embrace all of him.

  The gesture, the fullness of her acceptance, made him want to cry as he hurried to join her, slipping inside her arms. He, too, against all the rules, wore nothing.

  “Do you want to shut off the light now?” she murmured.

  Years of Talmud study made it impossible for him to escape the words whirling around in his head like bats escaping from a cave, slamming against his skull: Shulchan Aruch, 240–11: It is prohibited to have marital relations by day unless the house is dark. But it wasn’t day, it was night! And even if it wasn’t, according to some
authorities a Torah scholar who covers himself is also permitted to have marital relations by day! It was also written that since a scholar is modest in his ways, he won’t look (at his wife in the light). But this was only in the case of a great need or if his evil inclination overcame him.

  His chest contracted almost angrily. Another old ghost.

  “No, let’s leave it on,” he said defiantly. “Besides, the Rambam says a man and woman can do anything they want in their marriage bed.”

  “Let’s not bring rabbis into our bedroom tonight, my Yaakov, even the magnificent Maimonides.”

  His heart secretly filled with joy, but also misgivings. “But if you’re uncomfortable. If you want to turn it off … Do you?” he asked simply, ready to be disappointed by her reply.

  “Uh, well, not really … If you’re sure it’s all right…”

  In answer, he laughed, pulling her toward him, crushing her body to his with tenderness and gratitude. “Please, Leah, can we leave the past, everything we’ve experienced, outside this door? Can we leave all the rules about piety and modesty in the kitchen and living room? When we come here, can we just be ourselves?”

  A great weight lifted from her heart. She couldn’t believe he was saying everything she had wanted to say but was afraid to because it might make him doubt the sincerity of her transition from a girl who picked up men in bars and saw forbidden movies to a devout Boro Park wife and mother, a member in good standing in their community, the woman she thought he wanted her to be. It was as if someone had turned a key, opening the padlocks on both their hearts and bodies.

  What happened next was thrilling, astonishing, tender, exciting, and surprising to them both, leaving them exhausted, battered by wave after wave of emotion so deep and real it was almost destructive, changing them both in fundamental ways that only much later would they fully comprehend.

  Blessed are You, Eternal God, Source of Life, who has kept us in life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this joyous moment.