What else could she do? Rivkah knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate for hours in the kitchen working beside her mother. The woman would surely notice her hands shaking, and then what? Rivkah locked the bedroom door. Naked, she settled down on her great-grandmother’s bed. Rivkah spread her legs, as she was certain her dusty ancestor never did, and if so, certainly not alone.
Rivkah parted her cunt, lightly, delicately, as if not wanting to disturb anyone. But still, the wet petals of her flesh made an insolent sound, like famished lips smacking. This aroused Rivkah’s lust even more. From the nightstand, she retrieved the mother-of-pearl handled mirror that had belonged to her mother-in-law, ha Shem rest her soul. Rivkah wedged it between her knees to examine the portion of her body Adam found so intriguing. And in the process, she caught a glimpse of her own face: flushed, wild-eyed, full of desperate desire.
Her cunt was really quite curious. Not unappealing, but odd. Parts of it were bright pink and others were like red roses at sunset. Furrowed, wrinkled, yet tight and round. The hairs were silky, long. The hole itself seemed at once daunting and welcoming. And endless. Rivkah traced it with her finger. It gulped. Out of hunger? Embarrassment? She placed one hand around her mound. She squeezed the lips together, then stretched them apart. Her palm was soaked. She sniffed it—musky, deep, like a forest—and then she licked it. Flat, sharp, clean, not unlike charcoal. She could see why Adam liked tasting it.
With the mirror propped beside her on the bed, Rivkah sought the tiny button at the top of her sex. She withdrew the hood and touched her sensitive clitoris. She thought of the time in the garden a week earlier when no one was home except Adam and herself, harvesting their bursting crop of tomatoes. She recalled how he had fed her one of the plumpest fruits. When the juice dripped down her chin, he’d licked it off, kissing her deeply. And she thought of the roses.
As Rivkah touched herself, she remembered how Adam cut her hair with the same scissors she used to cut his. He didn’t insist she shave her head beneath the wig Orthodox women traditionally wore. Since no one but her husband was allowed to see her with her head uncovered, how would anyone know? Adam himself gave Rivkah a pretty, cropped haircut with his own hands. She recalled how sure and sensual his fingers felt wandering through her tingling scalp. During her most recent shearing, he nibbled at her throat and whispered, “Our women cut their hair so they will only be attractive to their husbands, nu?” His hands moved to her breasts. “But I ask you,” he breathed, “how could any man not find you beautiful?”
At that point in her reverie, Rivkah climaxed violently, rolling from side to side on the big, old bed. Although she bit her lip to keep herself quiet, she still whimpered until the throbbing ceased and the tremors subsided.
On weak legs, Rivkah dressed in a simple cotton shift, which covered her knees and elbows. She took special care washing her hands and waited until her eyes lost that savage look. She said nothing when she joined her mother at the kitchen table and began shelling almonds for the mandelbrot Rivkah’s mother looked at her and smiled, fantasizing about babies-to-be.
Soon, the house was filled with people. After temple and just before the sun set, they ate. Adam watched Rivkah with a blinding pride as she—now dressed in luxurious blue velvet—carried in a platter of fruit, nuts, and sweets. Not only was she lovely, and able to earn a living and argue the Talmud with the best of them, but she could prepare such intricate delicacies. His wife gave him pleasure in countless ways. And that was a mitzvah, was it not? Of course it was.
After the guests had gone and the last plates had been washed and put away in the cupboards, Adam and Rivkah went outside into the backyard. It was late, but the next day there was no work for either of them. They just stood there silently under the indigo sky with pinpricked stars and a moon so full and ripe that it looked as though you could reach out and squeeze it into a cup. They said nothing, yet expressed everything. Rivkah and Adam stood there long after Mr. Nazerman from across the street put away his violin and closed his kitchen door. They stood there after Mr. and Mrs. Radner turned off their bedroom light and after the soft snoring sounds of Mr. Radner could be heard.
Adam slipped both arms around Rivkah’s waist and held her close. Her hair smelled of almonds and her skin of butter. She was a fine dish indeed, fit to be eaten, to be savored, to never be forgotten.
As Adam took her in his arms, Rivkah admired the handiwork of their sukkah. While others erected flimsy cardboardlike hut walls, or even sheets of plastic, her husband was a stickler for detail. It wasn’t enough to simply throw a layer of straw or leafy boughs on a weak structure’s roof. Adam insisted that they use real wood for the walls, or else a light woven material if the weather was especially warm. Rivkah could tell that her family was amused at this behavior, but she was especially proud of him.
Neither could recall exactly how they had ended up on the cool earth beneath the shelter of the hut, but there they were, limbs draped around each other, mouths locked in a kiss, Rivkah’s blue velvet dress pushed up around her waist, revealing thick, dark stockings rolled just past the knee. Although the night was black as pitch, Adam’s cock found his wife’s small slit by memory. He entered her with an almost inaudible popping noise. Some might say there was no detectable foreplay, yet the entire evening had been foreplay, the entire feast of the harvest, the autumn season, the coming seven days of Sukkoth and Simhat Torah soon to follow. The rejoicing of the law. Yes, they were rejoicing of the law and the harvest, and reveling in the very essence of life itself.
Adam rocked inside Rivkah, feeling her rise and fall with a surge stronger than that of the ocean. Beneath the thatched roof of the makeshift sukkah. In the shadow of the el train. Beneath the shelter of the stars and the cowl of the night. Across the asphalt from Mr. Nazerman’s lyrical violin. Beneath her parents’ bedroom window, Rivkah and Adam celebrated the harvest in their own special way. It had probably been done in this manner many times before them, in deserts and in meadows, in cities and in concentration camps. But for them, it was new.
Exactly like Onan, Adam literally spilled his seed onto the ground. For a few moments, it glowed iridescent in the moonlight. Then it disappeared, drawn into the depths of the earth.
Rivkah and Adam tried to brush the dirt from their clothing. They thought they had done a good job of it until they awoke the next morning. A rosy-pink carpet of alyssum and impatiens had sprouted on Rivkah’s dress. On the knees of Adam’s trousers were dwarf marigolds and creeping phlox. And when they went downstairs to breakfast beneath the sukkah, they found that a patch of baby’s breath had begun to grow where Adam had inadvertently planted his seed.
There it continues to grow to this very day.
From Any Woman’s Blues
Erica Jong
I see him lying on a beach somewhere along the Dalmation coast (between Dubrovnik and Split, I suppose). Above us is a corniche road cut into the limestone. It crumbles and falls away in places, like the odyssey of our lives. Below us, lapping, is the Adriatic. The beach is rocky, and we have spread blankets and towels, which are littered with snorkel gear and the remains of our peasant picnic of grapes, plums, cheese, bread, and homemade wine in a wavy green glass bottle innocent of any label. The beach is deserted and we are both naked (not nude—that more polite cousin of nakedness) in the blinding sunlight. We are greasing each other’s bodies in tandem: first he does my back with infinite tenderness; then I do his. Then he does my lips, my nipples, my thighs, my knees—and then he has plunged his sweet, tousled boyish head between my knees and he is slowly licking up one side of my clitoris and down the other, darting his tongue in and out of that cavity he would like to climb back into, making me come resoundingly again and again before he will deign to pull me to my knees and fuck me brutally, almost painfully, from behind, the heat of his cock corresponding to the heat of the sun that bakes us. When we are spent, we lie in each other’s arms on that rocky beach, my head in his armpit, where I smell the odor that links
my menstrual cycles to the moon, his sweet sweat clinging in trembling drops to the honey-blonde ringlets in the curve of his armpit.
I can remember the curl of each hair in the sunlight, the tendency his armpit hair had to tangle in little knots—which later I would tenderly cut away with a nail scissors—the faint whorls of ashen-blonde hair around his nipples, the curve of his warm belly (not as flat as he wished it, dammit—his dammit, not mine), and his battering ram of a cock deceptively sweet in repose, a little rosebud listing to the left and weeping one glistening dewdrop tear.
I remember the shape of his loins, the blue vein that pulsed where his leg joined his groin, the golden hair on his calves, the shape of those calves, the length of the tendons. And then I remember a slightly funny, moth-eaten odor his mouth had—not unpleasant but hinting faintly of corruption—“the moth-eaten odor of old money,” he called it (for he could also be funny in a self-mocking sort of way). I noticed that odor in the beginning and then I stopped noticing it—only to notice it again right at the end.
We drove through Yugoslavia in a tiny cheap Yugoslavian car called a Zastava—the only car we could rent. The engine must have been made of plastic, and somewhere in the mountains of Macedonia it gave up the ghost. The car puttered to a halt on a mountain road in a region of infernal factories and mines, where leathery-faced peasants in sweaty bandannas seemed to be mining lead. Of course it wasn’t lead, but it hung in the sky like a grayish haze, making one think of gnomes in the lands of Oz and Ev, underground factories, and regions of infernal gloom.
Not a soul spoke English in that infernal land, and there were no garages.
“Do you have a wire coat hanger, baby?” Dart asked, looking under the hood of the car, then strutting over to me as if he wanted to be awarded the Legion d’honneur.
I knew better than to ask why. In fact, I didn’t really want to know why. From my expensive leather-trimmed tapestry suitcase I produced the hanger as if I were the nurse at one of those kitchen-table abortions of my youth. I was full of admiration for his WASP knack of fixing things…I who had grown up poor in Washington Heights with Jewish men who thought that when something broke, you “called the guy”—inevitably a Polack, Irishman, or Latino, or some other member of that underclass that exists for the sole purpose of sparing Jewish men manual labor. Something about Dart’s ability to fix things like throttle linkages got me hot. It seemed to have a sexual dimension.
And fix the Zastava he did. As we puttered off into the Yugoslavian sunset, I thought I had found my fixer at last: my mate, my addictive substance, my pusher, my love.
Love is the sweetest addiction. Who would not sell her soul for the dream of the two made one, for the sweetness of making love in the sunlight on an Adriatic beach with a young god whose armpits are lined with gold? I thought we were pals, partners, lovers, friends. I, who had always—even in my marriages—maintained my obsessive separateness, now let myself relax into the sweetness of coupling, the sweetness of partnership, the two who are united against a world of hostile strangers.
It must be admitted: famous women attract con men and carpetbaggers. The sweeter men, the normal men, are shyer and hesitate to come close. So one looks around and sees a world filled with Claus Von Bulows, Chéris, and Morris Townsends, in short, a world of heiress-hunters, gigolos, and grifters. The nice men, being nice, hesitate—and in love, as in war, he who hesitates is lost.
About the Authors
Judith Arcana’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the United States, England, Canada and Denmark, including in Prairie Hearts, Calyx, Motherwork, BRIDGES, Passager, and 13th Moon. Her most recent book is Grace Paley’s Life Stories, A Literary Biography (Univeristy of Illinois Press). She is currently working on a poetry collection.
Robin Bernstein is the author of Terrible, Terrible!, a Jewish feminist children’s book, and the co-editor of Generation Q, a finalist for a Lambda Literary award. She is also an editor of Bridges, a journal of Jewish feminist culture and politics. Her work appears in Tristan Taormino and Jewelle Gomez’s Best Lesbian Erotica 1997 and many other anthologies. This story is excerpted from a novel in progress entitled Tammy Wexler Needs Your Help!
Gayle Brandeis is a writer and dancer living in Riverside, California, with her husband, Matt McGunigle, and their two children, Arin and Hannah. She is currently working on her fourth novel, and she recently completed Fruitflesh: Living and Writing in a Woman’s Body, a body awareness and creativity guide for women writers. Her favorite bagel is Jalapeno Cheese.
Cara Bruce lives in San Francisco and is the editor of the e-zine Venus or Vixen? She believes in leaving some things to the imagination.
Harvest Garfinkel is an Ashkenazi/Buddhist/pagan who lives in an unhip part of the San Francisco Bay Area. She had her bat mitzvah in 1960. There were no Catholic boys at the party.
Ariel Hart is the pseudonym of a freelance writer who was born and bred and still lives in Brooklyn. Her various works have appeared in everything from Seventeen magazine to Screw.
Susanna J. Herbert is the pen name of a Nice Jewish Girl (who sometimes writes as Anaiis Juishgrrl). A TV writer/producer, her erotic fiction can be seen in Herotica 4 and Herotica 6. She is dedicated to the laughter and love handed down by a matriarchy of noble Jewish foremothers.
Emma Holly writes for Black Lace in London and has also sold a romanterotic novella to Red Sage Publishing in the United States. She loves all sorts of erotica, especially the sort with a heart.
Erica Jong is author of over twenty-two novels and collections of poetry. The excerpt in this volume is from Any Woman’s Blues and appears courtesy of HarperCollins.
Sarah Leder is a serious Jewish scholar and a scholarly slut. She was happy to discover that her name, Sarah, means princess in Hebrew. She envisions herself as the comedic lesbian S/M branch of Chabad. It is her fervent hope that her efforts might help ignite Jewish souls to burn with the fire of Torah.
Joyce Moye graduated with honors from Cornell University, and then sold furniture, worked for a food corporation, started her own interior design firm, godmothered a National Historic District into existence, and served on two local zoning hearing boards. Married, she has two children and always intended to be a writer when she grew up. At present, she is a sysop on CompuServe’s Erotic Literature Forum. Her agent is shopping her two-book saga of a menage a trois. “The Nanny of Ravenscroft” is from a work in progress.
Joan Nestle’s most recent book is A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writing (Cleis Press, 1998). She is co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. “The Gift of Taking” is from A Restricted Country and appears courtesy of Firebrand Books.
Lesléa Newman is the author of many books that explore themes of being a Jew and being a lesbian, including the novel In Every Laugh a Tear and the short story collection A Letter to Harvey Milk. She is also the editor of several books of erotica, including Pillow Talk: Lesbian Stories Between the Covers, The Femme Mystique, and My Lover Is a Woman: Contemporary Lesbian Love Poems. Other recent titles include two books of humor: Out of the Closet and Nothing to Wear and The Little Butch Book.
Marge Piercy is the author of over twenty-four novels and collections of poetry. The piece that appears in this volume is from He, She and It, a futuristic novel set in a Jewish community, and is reprinted courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf.
Carol Queen credits her first Jewish lover with her present comfort with sex; “L’Chaim” is a gift to her, these many years later. Queen is the author of Exhibitionism for the Shy, Real Live Nude Girl, and the erotic novel The Leather Daddy and the Femme.
Stacy Reed is a writer attending graduate school at the University of Houston. She was a full-time journalist and editor for over four years, and holds an honors degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Reed’s erotic fiction has been published in First Person Sexual as well as in Herotica 3, 4, and 5. Her essay “All Stripped Off appears in Whores and Other Feminists.
Elaine Starkman is co-editor
with Marsha Lee Berkman of Here I Am: Contemporary Jewish Stories from Around the World (Jewish Publication Society, 1998) and author of Learning to Sit in the Silence: A Journal of Caretaking (Papier-Mache, 1993). She lives in Northern California with her reliable partner of thirty-six years. She is the mother of four adult children and three small grandsons. She teaches at Diablo Valley College part-time and writes poetry.
Claudine Taupin is the pseudonym of a Jewish writer whose work has appeared on the Web and in print publications nationwide. Claudine enjoys spending time with her husband and subverting the status quo whenever possible.
About the Editor
Marcy Sheiner is editor of Herotica 4, 5, and 6 (Plume; Down There Press). Her stories and essays have appeared in many anthologies and publications. She is currently working on a book called Sex for the Clueless (Citadel, 1999). Visit her web site at www.sexsense.com.
Glossary of Terms
Afikomen—piece of matzo hidden by the adults before Passover seder begins.
aliyah—ascent
Asarah B’Teves—tenth day of the month of Teves, a fast day
babka—Russian/Polish coffee cake
balabusta—an immaculate housewife
bashert—fate
bentsch licht—a blessing for light, said when lighting candles
blech—yuck!
bochur—young man
bris—circumcision ceremony
chai—life
challah—a braided egg bread
Chanukah—Festival of lights
cholent—a simmering stew of meat, beans and/or vegetables
chuppah—wedding canopy
dayenu—literally “it would have been enough.” said in gratitude, from a Passover song
dybbuk—a spirit that possesses a living person
eppes—eat
The Oy of Sex Page 17