An Observant Wife

by Naomi Ragen

  He trusted her completely: trusted her heart, her deep religious feeling, her commitment to him and to their children and to the life they were building together. The last thing he considered was that the man’s words might actually have some basis in fact.

  As his stop neared, he felt himself growing lighter, envisioning Leah’s smiling face, his children bright-eyed and bubbly jumping into his arms, and the tasty, hot dinner awaiting him on the table. By the time he got home, he had almost forgotten the stranger from across the street.

  Just seeing her brought comfort to his heart, he thought, wishing he could reach out to her as usual as soon as the children stopped climbing all over him, and that she could respond by kissing his cheek, something Zissele had never done in front of the children, something he loved. But she was in her impure days, and no physical contact was permitted between them.

  “How was your day, my love?”

  The children tugged at his pants, wanting to be picked up again.

  “Let your tateh breathe, Chasya, Mordechai Shalom!”

  “I want to show him my new dance!” Chasya insisted.

  At that word, Yaakov saw Leah’s face suddenly cloud with sadness and something else. Guilt? A tremor of cold fear gripped him. He fell into a chair.

  “Leah-le, please tell me what is going on here.”

  “What have you heard?” Her voice was higher pitched than usual, defensive, he noted fearfully.

  “Some neighbor I don’t even know, from across the street, was draying my kup with some story on the subway—”

  “Not now!” she whispered fiercely, with a significant glance over at the children. “Have your dinner. Then I’ll give them both a bath and put them to bed. We need to talk. No, no, don’t look like that! It’s nothing, I promise you, bli neder.”

  He believed her. Why shouldn’t he?

  They had always been honest with each other, almost brutally so, holding nothing back. And it had been in that brightly lit space of truth, devoid of shade, that their love had been able to blossom, overcoming so many obstacles: the shame over past mistakes and tragedies that had for so long been hidden from others and even from themselves.

  Oh, the joy of being loved for who you are, despite all your failures, mistakes, and deficiencies! The joy of being comforted, admired, and accepted! This defined the bond between them.

  Besides, to hide what you are ashamed of from the person you love is such a Sisyphean task. In the end, you wind up so exhausted, it is almost a relief not to have to love or be loved anymore, not to care enough to hide.

  They had never allowed that to happen. Right from the start, she had admitted to him being an unwitting part of a fraud that sold worthless medical tests that had endangered the well-being of countless people all over the world. He had expressed his sense of responsibility for giving into the entreaties of his young wife—in the throes of severe postnatal depression—not to be committed to a mental hospital because of the shame involved, resulting in her suicide. All this was known between them. And it had only brought them closer. There were no festering lies, only forgiveness and compassion. That was the basis of their relationship.

  Leah placed a skillfully prepared meal down on the table in front of him, careful not to hand him the plate (another intimacy forbidden during her impure days). It smelled divine, he thought: thyme and lemon chicken breast, wild rice, and sweet potatoes. There was even a dessert, Yaakov noticed, an apple oatmeal muffin. It had all been made from scratch from fresh ingredients. He rejoiced with every bite. How did she manage it all? Such a wife, such a treasure! When he finished, he carried his dishes and utensils into the kitchen, adding soap to the sponge and washing them off before placing them in the drainer. Then he walked into the children’s bedrooms.

  They were both wrapped in towels, warm and fragrant from their baths. He helped Leah get their little struggling limbs into the pants and sleeves of their clean pajamas, all the while pretending to have lost an elephant in their room, which he insisted on searching for in their armpits and belly buttons, while they screamed in high hilarity. “Oh, you probably put it in the closet so you can play with it in the middle of the night. Is that what happened?” He tickled them.

  “No, Tateh!” Chasya screamed. “It’s not an elephant. It’s a monkey! And it’s up there, hanging from the ceiling, waiting for you to leave!” She screamed, overjoyed, while little Mordechai Shalom repeated, “Monkey, monkey!” until Leah finally told Yaakov his “help” was no longer needed, and she’d meet him in the living room.

  The reminder of the serious talk ahead wiped the smile off his face as he kissed his children good night. He sat down on the living room sofa, taking out a volume of the Talmud as he waited for Leah to join him. But he couldn’t concentrate, waiting impatiently for the moment they would face each other in the quiet room to renew their bond of trust and put this obvious misunderstanding behind them. He could not imagine any other outcome. He loved her, his children, this home, and for all its difficulties, his life.

  He listened to the voices of the little ones as they said their bedtime prayers. And just then, the front door opened. It was Shaindele.

  It was almost eight and already dark outside. He tried to remember where she could have been until this hour but could think of nothing.

  “How was it, Tateh? The new job?” she asked him breathlessly, in a move he sensed was a deliberate attempt to forestall any interrogation.

  “It was all right. New beginnings are always hard, child.”

  She nodded. “I know it will go well with you, Tateh. May God bless you.”

  “Thank you. You ate?” he asked her.

  She hesitated. “I … I got a pizza. On my way home from studying with Shulamis.”

  “A new friend?”

  Shaindele nodded. “From Gateshead. We are good friends.”

  “A fine institution, Gateshead. Best seminary in the world for Jewish girls. What is she doing in Boro Park?”

  “Her father got a job as a rosh yeshiva.”

  “Really? How wonderful for him.” His heart ached. “You go over there to study a lot? Did you tell Leah you’d be late?”

  “I … I think so, but sometimes we just stay after school without planning it.”

  “Ah, finally, asleep.” Leah sighed, walking into the living room. “Oh, Shaindele. I was wondering when you’d be getting home. Why so late?”

  “She says she was studying with her friend from Gateshead, Shulamis.”

  “So much work for seniors, right? I remember my last year of high school. It was a killer.”

  Shaindele’s whole body seemed to exhale a sigh of relief.

  “But the next time, you should let me know. I was beginning to worry,” Leah said.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll try to remember.”

  “Sit down, eat something,” Leah said generously, overcoming her disappointment over their lost privacy. It would just have to be put off.

  “She ate already. A pizza,” Yaakov said mildly but pointedly. “Your stepmother and I need a little privacy, Shaindele.”

  Shaindele looked from one to the other, surprised. Her father had never before even used that word! “I’m going to my room.”

  “Thank you,” Leah called after her.

  * * *

  Shaindele closed the door behind her, leaning her back against it and exhaling like a mountain climber who has just navigated a treacherous rock wall. Such luck! They were busy with each other. Otherwise, she might have been facing questions that were difficult, if not impossible, to answer. Questions she hadn’t even asked herself.

  What am I doing? she thought, looking into her eyes in the mirror that hung over her desk. Her cheeks were flushed, even more so than usual, the high color deepening into a blush of red. Her pupils were dilated, and her lips seemed soft and vulnerable. After two weeks of sitting by the counter, Duvie Halpern had finally noticed her. He smiled! He didn’t do that often. She should know. She only saw that smile twice in the
two weeks she’d become a daily visitor to Moishy’s: once when his boss had dropped a few boxes of pizzas ready for delivery, splattering tomato sauce and hot cheese everywhere, and another when a friend from his yeshiva days had told him his former rebbe had broken his arm on the way to shul.

  While the other smiles had had something mean in them, the smile he had given to her was perfect, she told herself, all flashing white teeth and warm brown eyes. It made her tingle all over.

  “I guess you must really like our pizza,” he’d said jokingly.

  She’d sat there stupidly, tongue-tied.

  Moishy had given Duvie a dirty look. “Don’t talk. Work.”

  But just before he’d reluctantly turned away, Duvie had whispered, “Or maybe there is another reason?” And then he winked.

  She’d looked down at her trembling hands, gripping the counter. When her pizza arrived, she’d fled.

  Now what will I do? She could never go back now that he’d noticed her coming so often! But when she did (how could she pretend otherwise even to herself, even in the privacy of her own bedroom?), the next time, she’d have to think of something to say to him, something clever, so he wouldn’t think she was just some silly Bais Yaakov girl who fainted if a boy ever looked at her.

  She couldn’t even imagine such a conversation. She had absolutely no experience in talking to boys. The only young men she knew were family members, like her brothers, who although the same age as Duvie, were totally different: devout, studious young men who would never talk to girls, and—of this she was positive—didn’t even know how to wink!

  What did a young woman say to a young man? What could you talk about? Torah, of course, the way the family did around the Shabbos table, picking apart all the little inconsistencies in the text of the Torah portion of the week and putting them back together with learned rabbinical commentaries. For example, what did Pharaoh’s magicians mean when they called the plague of lice “the finger of God”? And how do we know that Moses was a preemie? But somehow she didn’t think that such things would interest Duvie Halpern, yeshiva dropout.

  Don’t plan anything, she decided. She would just go and sit and wait. Whatever happened between them would be God’s will, of this she was certain. You could never know what plan was in the Ruler of the Universe’s mind. If He wanted something to develop, it would. And if He didn’t, it wouldn’t. So what was the point of planning and scheming?

  But somehow this wasn’t as satisfying as imagining all the possibilities in which she could become the catalyst in this process, bringing it to a boil. She lay down restlessly on her bed, letting her tense, young body relax while her mind chased around in circles. What was happening to her? Even when she’d run away from home before the wedding, telling herself she should get married before her father’s wedding ruined her shidduch possibilities; even when she’d sat next to a strange man on the train to Baltimore, these kinds of thoughts had never gone through her mind. The opposite! All she’d felt was revulsion and fear. In fact, the journey had convinced her she never wanted to get into bed with a man.

  But with Duvie … her fingers played with the buttons of her blue shirt, digging beneath to find the taut, tender flesh of her abdomen. What would it be like to be touched, to touch someone so different from herself, such a strange, foreign body? A man’s? The very idea brought a riot of feeling to her heart, an ache to her stomach, and a tingling lower down. What was that, that tingling, that ache? What did it mean? And what was she going to do about Duvie Halpern?

  9

  A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION

  “Finally, quiet,” Leah whispered as she joined Yaakov on the sofa.

  He looked up at her. Kissing his Talmud, he got up to place it carefully upright next to the other massive volumes weighing down the bookcase that dominated the room.

  He turned to her. “Maybe we should sit by the table?” he suggested delicately.

  She nodded, her jaw tightening. She’d been about to suggest they retire to their bedroom to talk. But if even sitting near each other on the sofa was too intimate during her “impure” days …

  “Let me first go check if Shaindele’s door is closed.”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “Is there something you don’t think she should hear?”

  She felt sweat blossom beneath the head covering that was squeezing her forehead and temples, crushing her ears. “I don’t want her to hear any of it, Yaakov. This is just between us.”

  She disappeared for a moment, then returned. “It’s all right. Her door is closed. We’ll speak quietly.”

  They took their places, facing each other across the large dining room table.

  “So what is going on, Leah-le?”

  “I…” Where to begin? The conversation with Chasya about her dead mother? Her own sudden desire to dance to the music of her youth? Or perhaps the neighbors banging down the door?

  Seeing her hesitation, his face took on a new concern. He didn’t care what had happened, whatever it was! But this reluctance to speak to him, to open her heart, to be honest, was terrifyingly new, with echoes of past tragedies he just wanted to forget. “You know you can tell me anything, Leah-le. Don’t you know that?”

  Did she? Could she? She couldn’t even sit next to him on the sofa because she’d had her period eleven days ago! What did she really know about this man or his world?

  He had grown up so differently from her in this strange, closed-off place she hadn’t even known existed for most of her life; this little enclave, like some Krishna cult, whose members were born into it and had it in their DNA. How could she ever hope to understand, let alone to fit in and become one of them?

  Yet she loved a great deal about her new life, especially this man, her husband. She loved him so much, so much! A love based on real respect, compassion, and shared values. What if she opened her heart to him and he stopped looking at her the same way? What if she disappointed him? Worse, what if he suddenly came to the realization that the many opponents of the match between them had been right all along?

  “I … I’ve … done something wrong, a mistake, Yaakov.”

  He wanted to no end to reach out to her, to caress her and comfort her, but it was forbidden. In frustration, he clenched his hands into fists and thrust them deep inside his pockets. “Please, just tell me. What could be so bad you’re afraid to just tell me?”

  In a rush, she suddenly told him everything, from the encounter with little Chasya sitting by the window searching for her mother, to the moment she’d reached for her music, to the nasty faces of the neighbors standing by the door. She didn’t leave out the children’s state of undress, or her own dishevelment. She even gave him an account of his mother-in-law’s recent visit.

  What she failed to mention, however, was the most important thing of all, that elephant in the room that, unlike the imaginary creature he conjured to tease the children, really did exist—something so big, so important, she simply did not have the courage to raise it.

  He exhaled, actually relieved. While his heart ached for his little girl’s grief, what business was it of the neighbors to butt into how Leah played with the children in their own home? He shook his head, annoyed. Another yenta parade. More troublemakers. What else was new?

  “You did nothing wrong, Leah-le. Nothing at all.”

  She was a bit astonished to hear this. “Yaakov, I’ve brought disgrace down on this family, your family!”

  “My neighbors and ‘friends’ don’t need your help. They bring it down on this community all by themselves with their wicked talebearing.”

  But that was not all. She took a deep breath. “They’ve stopped sending their children for playdates. Chasya sits alone, playing with her dolls. They won’t let their children into our house anymore.”

  His heart contracted. He could bear the idiot from across the street with his slimy smile and innuendoes slithering up to him on the subway. But his children! He felt rage bubbling up from his stomach, choking him. With great effort
, he cleared his throat. “I’ll talk to them. Bubbee Fruma will talk to them. Don’t worry!”

  “I’m so sorry, Yaakov. It’s all my fault! I’m still so new to all this.”

  “Nothing to apologize for. But, Leah-le…” He hesitated. “How long has this been going on?”

  She looked up at him uneasily. It was not in her nature to lie, and she had never lied to Yaakov. She tightened her lips, her heart contracting. “It started two weeks ago.”

  “Two weeks?” He jumped up, pacing the floor. Two whole weeks. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you! You have so much on your mind, leaving kollel, the new job … I thought it would all blow over, that it was just some little thing with the neighbors. I didn’t understand.”

  Two weeks. Day after day. Night after night. And her looking at him across the kitchen table every morning and turning to face him in bed every night. And the children playing alone, all by themselves like outcasts. And nothing. Not a word. He felt the fury explode in his brain, at his neighbors, at the community, and, yes, at her. He was devastated. He wanted to smash something. But more than that, he was gripped by a cold fear. In this state, he was afraid to say or do anything.

  The minutes ticked by as he composed himself. And in that interval, Leah saw her new life dissolving, all she had achieved becoming flotsam, wreckage floating out on the edge of complete devastation.

  He sat down again. “You’ve never been afraid to tell me anything before. So what is happening now, my love?” he asked as gently as he could.

  Hope flashed through her. But still, she did not have the courage to tell him the whole truth, finding it hard to face it herself. So she took the easy, convenient way out. “I don’t know, Yaakov. I think … I think I’m just tired.”

  He was immediately sympathetic. Of course! How had he not realized that? The house, the children, the business. And no money for a cleaning girl or babysitters! But that was going to end. He was going to be bringing in a salary, a paycheck that would make her life easier. He suddenly forgot the dreariness of his day, his longing for his old life. If he could make her life easier, it was all worth it!