“A fire was necessary?” he mutters to himself angrily. “So that all the goyim have to see what we’re doing? It can’t be done quietly? Ah, these young people, they always need something to shout about.”
Chaya calls to invite me to lunch at her new house on Bedford Avenue. With Chaya, lunch is never just lunch. It’s a front for an uncomfortable conversation, so the invitation makes me nervous. I dress up for the occasion, tucking one of my new silk blouses into a navy blue pencil skirt.
Her new apartment is located on the first floor of one of those recently erected buildings popping up in the formerly industrial section of Williamsburg. It has an elegant brick facade and hard marble hallways, and it feels more appropriate to Chaya’s lifestyle than her old apartment on the top floor of the brownstone I grew up in. Her kitchen is lined with rows of dark mahogany cabinets, but the tiles on the floor and behind the counter are a cool slate blue. Her new home consists of large empty rooms, only minimally furnished. I sit down at the long glass table where Chaya has prepared an elegant lunch, made from scratch this morning, no doubt.
I shove the food around my plate while Chaya makes small talk. I just want her to get to the point so I can get rid of the sick feeling of anticipation in my stomach. Why does she always have to do this? Why must she drag everything out so that it becomes a dramatic situation instead of just leaving me in peace? It’s as if she knows she’s torturing me and enjoys it.
“So,” Chaya finally says, putting down her fork and reaching for her water glass. “Your mother called.”
Well, that’s not what I expected. I reach for my water, sipping daintily to fill the awkward silence. I’m not going to give her the satisfaction of seeing my reaction.
“She wants to come to the wedding.”
I shrug my shoulders. “Why does she all of a sudden want to show up at my wedding? That makes no sense. I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Well, she insists she has a right. You know, she probably thinks she can stop you from getting married, or something like that. She’s a loose cannon that way.”
“Well, if she shows up at the wedding, it will be a disaster. Everyone will be looking at her, talking about her. She’ll embarrass me, she’ll embarrass Eli’s family. I mean, she looks like a goy!”
Chaya puts her glass down and purses her lips. “The thing is, she’ll show up whether we like it or not. At least, if we say yes, we can set conditions. I can make sure she wears a wig and a long skirt, and I will stand next to her the entire time to make sure she behaves. If she does anything out of turn, I will see to it that she leaves.”
“Well, I guess I have no choice, then.” I wonder why Chaya called me here, if she’s already made up her mind. It’s not like she needs my opinion.
I visit the marriage teacher for the last time a week before the wedding. It’s time for the lesson, that special lesson shrouded in mystery, the moment the brides whisper about but never discuss in too much detail. I am both wary and curious. I wonder what she has to tell me that my family can’t bring themselves to reveal to me in person. I know it must be something big, something juicy but also embarrassing, something so secret that only she, the woman designated by the community to be the teacher of all things marriage-related, is allowed to talk about.
I perch nervously on the hard edge of my chair, looking around her dingy kitchen for a clue—to the secret but also to her personality, a hint perhaps to show me why her, why she is chosen to impart these shadowy wisdoms. Her kitchen table is littered with baffling sketches, like the designs of an engineer only less precise, eerie, somehow, with their repeated ringtoss patterns. It’s the middle of August and there is no air-conditioning in her apartment; the air is heavy and thick and old, rationed frugally between us. Her tablecloth is greasy and stained, and I am careful not to brush up against it.
When she finally sits down across from me and begins lecturing about the holiness of marriage, I grow increasingly impatient; I can’t wait for her to get to the good part so I can get out of here, this cramped kitchen with the smell of old sweat and sour pickles. Indeed, as I sit at her table, I begin to get a sense of who the teacher is, the life she has finished living, the way she covets my youth. I sense her loathing of my carefree existence, my bridal radiance, as clearly as I perceive her eagerness to squash it. My skin prickles beneath her stare as she begins to talk about a holy place inside each woman.
A man and a woman’s bodies were created like two interlocking puzzle pieces, she says. I hear her describe a hallway with walls, leading to a little door, which opens to a womb, the mekor, she calls it, “the source.” I can’t imagine where an entire system like that could be positioned. She tries to tell me about the passageway that leads to “the source,” how this passageway is entered, demonstrating with her forefinger inserted into the ring of the thumb and forefinger of her other hand, and making ridiculous thrusting motions. I’m guessing that that motion is referring to the part where they click into place. Still, I can’t see where that spot, that entryway, can exist on my own body. As far as I know, the place where the pee comes out isn’t that stretchy. I finally stop her.
“Um, I don’t have that,” I say, giggling nervously. I’m sure I don’t have an opening, and if I did, it definitely wouldn’t be big enough to accommodate something the size of that pudgy index finger, or whatever it might represent.
She looks at me, nonplussed. “Of course you do. Everyone does.”
“No, seriously, I don’t have that.” At this point I’m becoming increasingly nervous. I start to question myself. Could I possibly have missed this passageway she was talking about? How could I not notice a hole in my body? I start to panic. What if they have to cancel the wedding because the bride was born without “the source”? Tears of frustration form in my eyes as I insist once again that I do not have this mysterious body part she is so industriously illustrating for me. I want her to stop making those motions, they seem so obscene and offensive.
“I don’t have that thing you’re talking about. I think I was born without it. How could I have something like that and not know about it? I think I would know if I had a hole down there!”
“Okay, look.” The kallah teacher sighs. “Maybe you think you don’t have it, but you do. I promise that you weren’t born with some strange birth defect. You may never have noticed it before, but if you look for it, you’ll find it.”
I don’t want to look for anything, not in that house, not with her in the next room, but she intimidates me, or rather that insinuated threat of my horrible deficiency becoming a public scandal hangs over my head like an ax and I do what I’m told. I go to the bathroom and tear off a piece of toilet paper from the roll, folding it around my right index finger. Hesitantly I explore down there, making sure to start all the way at the back and work my way slowly toward the front, searching for some indentation along the way. Nothing. I go again. Besides the natural valley my finger delicately traces, nothing gives way further. Perhaps that is as deep as it goes, I think, this puzzle piece on the man that has to click into me, that has to make a deposit at the altar of my womb.
I come out of the bathroom nodding sheepishly. Maybe I really did find it. If I did, I feel betrayed by my discovery. How could something supposedly so important have hid from me all these years? Why was I now being forced abruptly to acknowledge it? Did that mean that up until now it had not been okay to have a mekor, but now that I was getting married, it could make its grand entrance, suddenly “holy”? I stand in front of her, angry and confused.
I feel a little twinge when I remember that day. I want to be the woman who knows herself, her body, her power, but that moment divided my life in two. Before I visited the marriage teacher, I was just a girl, and then I was a girl with a mekor. I had made the sudden and shocking discovery that my body had been designed for sex. Someone had fashioned a place in my body specifically for sexual activity. Growing up in Williamsburg, I had been effectively sheltered from anything in any way associa
ted with sex. We were spiritual beings, bodies carrying souls. The idea that I would now have to confront an area of my body I had never even thought about, let alone wanted to think about, on a constant basis for the rest of my life was in stark contrast to the chaste lifestyle I had been living until now. It was a lifestyle I had grown comfortably accustomed to, and my body rebelled against this change. That rebellion would soon cost me my happiness and would sow the first seeds of destruction that eventually tore my marriage apart.
Five days before the wedding, it’s time for the mikvah. Chaya is taking me. I’ve caught a strange summer cold that has my throat feeling raw, and I spend the day loading up on strong, copper-colored glasses of Lipton tea that has the Flemish writing on it because Bubby thinks buying it from Belgium makes it more authentic.
Chaya tells me what to pack; the mikvah provides almost everything, but it’s better to have your own bathrobe (theirs are skimpy, she says) and your own soap and shampoo. She hands me a Walgreens shopping bag with a loofah stick in it. “So you can reach the tough spots. Otherwise they will do it for you. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.”
I shudder in revulsion. I’ve heard that some pious women let the attendants wash them, but there’s no way I’m going to let some strange old woman lay a finger on me.
We take a goyische taxi to the mikvah. We can’t ask Tovyeh to drive us, because men are never supposed to know when women go to the mikvah, and we can’t walk there holding our bags because it could look conspicuous. I wonder if the Puerto Rican man driving us knows the significance of the place where he is dropping us off and if he gets a lot of calls for this reason.
The building is yellow brick and built at an odd angle because it’s a triangle block. We enter from a side alleyway, ringing a bell and watching a small camera whirring above us, until the buzzer sounds and a heavy metal door swings open into a well-lit hallway. There is a desk, with an aging receptionist behind it, looking bored. She brightens when I walk in.
“A kallah!” she says, noticing my uncovered hair. “Mazel tov! Such a special day. Let me call you our best attendant; she’ll take care of you.” Her face quivers with excitement, and she doesn’t take her eyes off me the entire time she speaks.
She pushes a large tray toward me, filled with various nail clippers and manicure tools. “Pick,” she says. “Whichever you like.” As if she is offering me the choice between gold and silver, pearls and diamonds. She’s still looking at me hungrily, without blinking, her sparse eyebrows lifted into gray arches above her pale blue eyes.
I don’t really care. I grab a small clipper and notice the metal is chipped and scratched. I wonder how many women have used it. I put it back in the tray. “Oh, I brought my own.”
I hear a door open behind me and turn. A dark-skinned woman stands in the doorway, the sleeves of her flowered housedress rolled up to reveal sinewy arms. She wears a shpitzel just like my mother-in-law. Only very pious women get to work here.
“Mamaleh,” she says sweetly, ingratiatingly, and I can see instantly that her wide smile is fake, that her way of lolling her head to the side when she looks at me is condescending, and that she thinks she is better than I am, because my family doesn’t wear shpitzels, only wigs. All this I see in that tiny empty moment before she puts her arm around my shoulder, still smiling that oily smile, and waves Chaya away with her other hand. “You can wait here, Mrs. Mendlowitz. I will take such good care of your daughter, don’t worry.” Chaya doesn’t correct her mistake, doesn’t say I’m her niece; it would be too long a story to tell her, in the anteroom, a stranger who doesn’t need to know.
Mrs. Mendelson (she tells me her name right away as we walk through the set of double doors into the vast main lobby lined with velvet chaises and humongous bouquets of silk flowers) leads me down a long marble corridor, softly lit by delicate chandeliers and sconces. The corridor branches off into many small hallways, but we pass all of them because, as she says, I am going to the special room they save for brides. When we get there, I can’t quite remember the route we took or how to get back, and that scares me a little, because the room is as small as a closet (I wonder what they give to the regular people) and it’s frightening to think that I will be this one dot on a map, this one small person getting ready in a tiny room, surrounded by hundreds of other women in other tiny rooms, lost in the motion of things.
“You know what to do, mamaleh?” she asks condescendingly, standing in front of me with her hands on her hips, feet spread apart slightly as if to emphasize her authority. She’s implying I might not remember everything I was taught about the mikvah, but I do—I studied before I came here and I’ve always had an excellent memory—so I smile big and fake right back at her like I know her game and I’m not going to let her belittle me.
“Of course I remember. I had a great kallah teacher. Thanks, though!” My voice is bright and thin, reedy with nervousness.
“Very good, mamaleh,” she concedes. “Just press the button on the wall if you need me.” The call panel flashes red next to the bathtub. One button says Help, the other says Ready. There is a small intercom as well. I nod my head.
When she leaves through the door on the other side of the room, I unpack my bag quickly and take out all the equipment I brought. I turn the taps and let the bath fill, and start at the top of my checklist. Lenses off first, and in the case. Wipe off any makeup, clean my ears, floss my teeth, and cut my nails short. In the bath I wash my hair twice and comb it, and make sure I wash the creased areas of my body very well, like the teacher said, to make sure nothing is stuck between my toes, or in my belly button, or behind my ears. The creases are very important. “Nothing can come between you and the water,” she had said to me warningly. “If you find something later and there is a possibility it was on you when you were in the mikvah, you have to go back and do it all over again.” I don’t want that, so I make sure I’m clean according to the law.
When I’m done soaking and my fingers are dark and puckering like dates, I step out of the tub and wrap myself in my new blue bathrobe, made of thick plush terry, and press the Ready button on the panel. Mrs. Mendelson’s voice comes crackling through the intercom immediately, as if she has been waiting to pounce the moment I pressed it. “So fast, mamaleh?”
I don’t answer. She comes in a moment later, gliding on slippered feet. She sees me in my robe sitting daintily on the edge of the toilet and waves her hands in irritation.
“No, no, mamaleh, I can’t check you like this, in a robe, what were you thinking? You have to be in the bathtub; this isn’t the way to do it!”
My cheeks heat up and I uncross my legs. This is ridiculous. Why would she want me in the bathtub? My kallah teacher clearly told me that I would be checked while dressed. I try to speak but nothing comes out of my throat.
The attendant’s face is stern, but there is a faint whiff of triumph about her movements, and she ushers me into the tub impatiently, saying, “I don’t have time to wait, mamaleh. I have a lot of girls to take care of tonight. Don’t be scared, sweetie, didn’t your kallah teacher tell you what to do? You remember everything you learned, right?”
She’s baiting me, trying to show me she was right, that I wouldn’t remember, but I swear I do. I’m still going over it in my head, because I can’t believe I would forget something like this, but it was so hot in that apartment all the time, and maybe I dozed off at some point, I don’t know. It’s horrible, but I feel clearly like I have no other choice but to do as she says, so I slip quickly out of the robe and in a flash I’m in the water, knees bent and folded against my chest. My skin prickles and I can see goose bumps rise on my forearms. Mrs. Mendelson kneels by the tub, and she has such a satisfied look on her face that I can’t help feeling like she won, like she wanted to win, like this is her power. It makes me angry and helpless-feeling and I can feel tears pricking at the edge of my eyes, but I want more than anything to keep my face stony, just to show her I don’t care, that this doesn’t affect m
e, that I am as strong as iron and no one can shame me into anything.
The light is so white. My skin looks almost blue beneath the harsh white light of the bathroom, the shape of my body distorted by the water, fingers fat beneath the surface and disproportionately thin above it. I keep my muscles stiff and tense, knees straining against arms, arms grasping tightly around knees, using that physical exertion to keep from showing any emotion, as she inspects my hair for dandruff and my skin for scabs.
“All right, mamaleh, you’re ready. Put on your robe and your slippers and I will take you to the mikvah.” She doesn’t even turn around so I can get out. I don’t look at her at all now, and I keep my mouth hard and straight, nostrils flaring from the effort. My brain feels hot and swollen in my head, pressing against my eyes.
In the hallway I follow her blindly because my vision is blurry from holding back the tears. We end up in a small room with a little blue pool. This part I know, and I take off the robe and give it to her and walk down the series of steps into the water, trying not to go too fast even though I can feel her watching me, because I don’t want her to see that I’m even the least bit embarrassed. No one can hurt me. No matter what they do, they can never hurt me. I am iron.
The water is relief. I can see the Hebrew blessing printed on the tile wall to my left. “Thank you, Hashem, for sanctifying me with your commandment to immerse myself in water,” I mumble quietly. I dip once and come up so I can hear her say “kosher,” then twice more, making sure my feet don’t touch the ground for the split second of totally immersed suspension that is required. I make sure that my hair doesn’t stick out, and that my body is positioned so that the water reaches everywhere. After the third time, I cross my arms over my chest like I’m supposed to and say the blessing out loud. I’m finished now.
I walk up the steps facing her and she holds out the robe like my kallah teacher said, but I can see her inquisitive black eyes peering above the collar, and at that moment I hate her so much and the tears I’ve been tamping down burst out from behind my eyes. I put the robe on and feel my eyes fill and fill and fill, and I try to be quiet and walk behind her so she won’t see, but I forget about the customary kiss on the cheek, and as she turns to me to give me the blessing, she sees a tear burst out of my eye and fall down my cheek. Her eyes widen.
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