In the shower I wash the hair spray out of my matted hair and let it stream for the last time just past my shoulders, water dripping off the edges and burning my sore back.
I stand in front of the fogged mirror for a few minutes and the air begins to feel icy around my body. After the mirror clears, I can see my reflection peering back at me with blank eyes and I turn away from it instinctively. I come out in my bathrobe.
“You can take a shower now,” I call into the dark of the apartment. Eli is in the kitchen, still dressed, uncorking a bottle of cheap kosher champagne. “Your favorite. Chaya told me,” he says. I smile quickly. I don’t really like any wine at all.
As he showers, I go to the bedroom with my champagne flute in hand and set it down on the nightstand. My mother-in-law has already laid out layers of cheap towels over one of the beds, and there is a bottle of K-Y jelly as well. I put on a long white nightgown.
I sit down on the bed next to the nightstand and pop open the bottle of K-Y, squeezing a pea-sized blob onto my fingers curiously. It’s surprisingly cold and viscous. Carefully, I lie down on the bed so that my hips are on the towels and reach down to anoint myself gingerly with the clear, cold jelly. I don’t want to get the new linen dirty. It’s very dark, until Eli opens the bathroom door and light pours faintly into the apartment. He comes into the bedroom wearing a towel wrapped around his waist, and the outlines of his body are strange and new. He smiles uncomfortably before squatting on top of me like his teacher said, letting the towel roll off. I still can’t see much. I ease my knees apart and he moves closer, adjusting his weight on his palms. I feel something hard nudge my inner thigh. It feels bigger than I expected it to. He looks at me anxiously in the darkness. He’s nudging everywhere, waiting for some sort of direction from me, I think, but what do I know? This is as much a mystery to me as to him.
Finally he pokes, I think, in the right area, and I lift up to meet him and wait for the obligatory thrust and the deposit. Nothing happens. He pushes and pushes, grunts with the effort, but nothing seems to give way. And in fact, I can’t see what should. What is expected to happen here?
After a while he gives up and rolls over to one side, his back to me. I lie there for a few moments peering up at the dark ceiling before I turn to nudge him slightly. “Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yes. I’m just very tired,” he murmurs.
Soon I can hear him snoring lightly. I crawl into the other bed and lie awake for a long time, wondering if it happened, or if it didn’t, and what the implications of either possibility might be.
When I open my eyes in the morning, the sun is shining weakly through the window blinds and the air conditioner is whirring sluggishly against the humid August air. I push the windowpane up a bit and lean out into the smoggy street, watching the trucks and city buses bounce up and down the series of metal plates covering the potholes and ditches on Wallabout Street. The garage doors in the warehouse across the street are open, laborers rushing back and forth across the loading docks.
Eli dresses quickly and grabs his tefillin just as his father knocks on the door, calling “Men geit davenen.” It’s time for morning prayers. I amble luxuriantly around the quiet, squeaky-clean apartment in my organza morning robe with poppies printed on the fabric. My hair has dried all stiff and crunchy. I open the linen closets and run my hands over the brand-new towels and tablecloths smelling brightly of the lavender sachets I have tucked snugly between them. I open the sideboard and look at my new silver cutlery and china dishes, intoxicated by the idea that I own all these things.
In a minute Chaya is here with the electric razor, and we set up a stool in front of the bathroom mirror. I’m surprised by how little I feel about losing all my hair. If anything, I feel like I’m about to become an adult, about to be initiated into a new life. It’s strange to watch my hair fall into the bucket, but there it goes, in fuzzy brown clumps. It’s over so quickly, it’s like I never had hair at all, and my scalp positively gleams under the bathroom lights. I never thought about the shape of my head before, but now that it’s out there in the open, I marvel at its perfect proportions and the sudden symmetry of my countenance. I feel light and unburdened, almost as if I might rise suddenly from weightlessness, and I feel a strange yearning to hold on to something stuck to the ground, as if to avoid floating away into space. Chaya brings me a terry-cloth turban in a beautiful magenta hue, and it smells like fresh towels and feels soft and gentle on my forehead, holding me down like a paperweight.
I want to say something meaningful to Chaya, but I can’t think of anything sensible, so I only smile and say, “So that’s it. No big deal, huh?” feeling brave and grown-up to be speaking so calmly.
“What should be the big deal?” She shrugs, winding the cord around the razor and putting it away. “It’s natural.”
I reach up to feel my weightless head, stroking the knot of the turban briefly. No big deal, it’s natural.
I hear footsteps in the hall. I think it’s Eli, but it’s my mother-in-law, lips pursed, hands folded in front of her, glancing away from the peephole. Chaya puts the razor back into her oversized black pocketbook and exchanges a brief air kiss with my shviger before scooting down the hallway.
I offer Eli’s mother coffee, tea, any excuse to use my new dishes, and when she politely refuses, I insist on arranging chocolates prettily on a silver dish.
“So how’d it go?” she asks.
I smile politely but I’m confused. Not because I don’t know what she might mean, but because I can’t possibly believe she’d address it so directly. I murmur vaguely and indistinctly, “Oh, fine,” and wave away her question like an annoying fly. I think to myself, This is between Eli and me, we can take care of our own business; he wouldn’t want me to involve anyone.
My mother-in-law’s face draws tighter and she takes her hands off the tablecloth. “My husband tells me it wasn’t finished.”
I’m speechless. I don’t ask her anything. I just sit there, mortified, feeling that weightlessness again: if I don’t hold on to the table leg, I will release into the sky like a helium balloon.
The door opens before I can say anything, and Eli and his father are at the door. My mother-in-law stands up and reaches forward to air-kiss me good-bye. I don’t lean in toward her, and she leaves with her husband, shutting the door behind her. My eyes are on Eli, but his eyes are downcast. My body feels hard on the outside but mushy in the center. If the shell collapses, the filling will just spill out, I think, as I look down at the untouched chocolate bonbons on the table.
“What happened?” I ask Eli. “What did you tell your father?”
He cringes at the urgency in my tone. “I didn’t tell him anything; he asked me!” he protests quickly. “I was so taken by surprise, I just told him the truth. I didn’t think he would tell anyone!”
“You told your father? Your mother knows! She’ll tell everyone! Your whole family probably knows! My whole family probably knows by now too! What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking, I was taken by surprise!”
“Don’t you think this is our problem to take care of? Don’t you think this is something private that a couple should deal with on their own? Didn’t you think it would be embarrassing to me, to you, to have everyone know our private business?”
I’m panicking now, thinking of the possibilities, of one person whispering to another, of the way gossip travels like lightning in my world, and all I can see now is a future of walking down Lee Avenue and having people point and whisper about me, about the girl that couldn’t do it. Oh, the horror. I will never live this down.
Eli interjects, a pained look on his face. “It’ll be fine. My father says we’ll just have to do it tonight. We’ll get it done, and once it’s done, no one will be able to say anything. We’ll try to leave the minute the sheva berachos is over, so we won’t be too tired. Maybe that was the problem last night, maybe we were too tired!”
“Maybe,” I say
, but I know that’s not it. That wouldn’t explain my womb’s failure to open its doors at that very loud and persistent knock. My strange, rebellious womb, that doesn’t want guests.
In the afternoon, Eli suggests we take a nap so we can be rested for later, but I stay awake watching his blank sleeping face, his hand tucked restfully beneath the pillow. The doorbell rings and I pad out into the living room to press the intercom button. It’s Chaya, and I press the buzzer to let her in.
“I heard what happened,” she says, after she is seated at my new dining room table, stocking feet crossed neatly under her chair. I wait for her to come to my defense, to say something soothing.
Her face is hard when she continues. “If there’s one thing that makes a marriage work,” she says, “it’s that a man must be king in the bedroom. If he is king in the bedroom, then he feels like a king everywhere else, no matter what happens.”
She pauses, looking intently at me, her hands clutching the handles of her black bucket purse. “You understand me?” she asks, waiting for confirmation.
I nod, too flabbergasted to say anything.
“Good,” she says, firmly, standing up and smoothing her skirt. “Then everything will be taken care of. I’m not even going to tell Bubby and Zeidy about this; why give them more bad news in their old age and fragile condition?” I hear the implications of that statement and feel immediately guilty.
Still, as the door shuts behind her, I wait for it to hit me. How exactly will everything be taken care of? I wonder. Does she have a plan? Because I don’t.
The best part of the seven days of blessings after the wedding is getting to wear the clothes. The bride is always the best-dressed person attending the seven nights of festivity and good wishes, a custom designed to bestow luck on the new couple. I wear a different outfit every night, each of which was carefully shopped for and altered by a seamstress so that it fits my figure like a glove. My wigs are all freshly set and sprayed.
Throughout the parties, my new sister-in-law Shprintza, herself newly married as of two months ago because she didn’t want to wait for us, as is the custom, glowers darkly in the corner, quivering with some sort of sad bitterness I can’t quite understand. But I ignore her, because I am, sadly, so focused on the task we haven’t managed to complete all week.
The days after my wedding, which should be the happiest of my life, become consumed by the effort to consummate my marriage. But as each effort results in failure, Eli becomes more and more anxious, and as a result, his family exerts more and more pressure on us to be finished with it. By the third try, Eli can no longer muster any eagerness from his own body, and I cannot submit to something that isn’t there. He explains to me the process of his arousal, and we stay up until five a.m. trying to calm his nerves and relax him enough so that he can try, but by the end of the week we are both driven near mad with desperation.
In yeshiva, Eli says, the boys would jerk each other off. Because there were only men around and no girls, the sight of a boy could get him aroused. After many years, he explains with a sigh, to switch suddenly is weird. “I don’t even know if I should be attracted to you. I didn’t even have an idea of what a girl looked like before I saw you.”
I’m suddenly horribly self-conscious. I took for granted that he would be excited at the mere glimpse of me. But now I see my body through his eyes—foreign, mysterious, and confusing.
At the end of the week the rabbis say to call it quits because I am bleeding from all the irritation, and technically speaking there’s no way to tell if that blood is coming from the splitting of the hymen, therefore rendering me impure. They rule that I am now niddah and must proceed like any other married woman to count seven clean days, or fourteen cloths, before immersing myself in the mikvah.
The process of cleaning up so I can try again takes two weeks, but a week before I have to go to the mikvah, I wake up with a terrible itch on my left arm. I think it’s a bite from a mosquito, and I scratch furiously all night in between brief dozing periods, but when I wake up in the morning, I can see a litany of angry red pustules all along my arm and shoulder. I have never seen anything like this bizarre rash, and I make an emergency appointment with the local health clinic on Heyward Street. Normally I don’t use the doctors at ODA medical center, since the clinic, which is run by the Hasidic community but funded by the government, is open to all patients and is always crowded and dirty. However, I can’t get an immediate appointment anywhere else.
Dr. Katz looks me up and down and squints carefully at the rash but can’t seem to come to a clear diagnosis for quite some time. Eventually he says he’s eighty percent sure it’s some form of chicken pox but can’t be absolutely sure, and he prescribes an antiviral medication just in case it is.
“This only works if you take it within forty-eight hours of an outbreak,” he says, “but I’m pretty sure this is still early on. It won’t get rid of the virus but it will reduce its severity and length.”
I really can’t quite believe I have chicken pox. I was vaccinated as a child, and I’ve been exposed to it since then, so why now? I feel ridiculous even telling Eli. But now I can’t go to the mikvah, which I was dreading anyway, and I can take a little vacation from all the stress I was under. No one can argue with chicken pox.
The spots spread and show up on my left leg, the left side of my abdomen, and, finally, the left side of my face. It’s as if someone drew a line in red marker down the middle of my body and told the spots to stay on one side. They itch terribly; I bathe in oatmeal and slather multiple anti-itch creams over everything. I’m embarrassed to be seen on the street with my face in such a state, so I am stuck at home until it clears up.
“It’s a good thing you are niddah now,” Eli says. “I can’t touch you anyway.”
Three weeks later the spots are still there, although they are starting to scab over. I wake up in the middle of the night with severe abdominal pain and vomit for hours before Eli calls his friend, an EMT, and asks him what to do.
Michoel is part of the local Hatzolah organization, which has its own ambulances and paramedics. He says that anytime a woman has abdominal pain, the policy is always to take her to the hospital in case it has anything to do with her uterus. We are dropped off at the NYU emergency room, which is largely populated by locals looking for painkillers. No one attends to me for a while except to give me something for my fever, but when a doctor finally sees me, he pages the specialist in infectious diseases to come down and examine me. The doctor, a diminutive Asian man with a creased forehead and oily skin, tells me I have orbital shingles, which he claims, looking at Eli’s religious garb, I probably caught in the ritual bath.
Thinking back to the pool of warm water I probably shared with hundreds of women, I shudder. It never entered my mind that I could contract a disease by fulfilling one of God’s commandments. I was always taught that one could never be hurt by way of a mitzvah, a commandment; its merit would protect us.
I feel like I’ve been cursed. Since Eli and I got married, everything that could possibly go wrong has. I inherited Bubby’s tendency to be superstitious, so is this a sign? If so, it’s a bit late in coming. I could have used the warning a little earlier. It’s not like I can do anything about my circumstances now.
There are eight floors in my apartment building, and about twenty apartments on each floor, most of them housing newlywed couples just like Eli and me. Still, what are the chances that Golda should end up living right down the hall from us?
My old friend, the one who got caught in the gan yehudah with me all those years ago, has grown up into the beautiful woman I always thought she would be. Her eyes are even shinier than they used to be, her body rounded out into pleasant curves but her waist as small as ever. Her manner has changed: she is shy, soft-spoken, nothing like I remember her. She invites me over for coffee after her husband leaves for shul in the morning. Like all newly married women, we fuss over her dishes and linens and pore through her wedding album. She take
s me into the bedroom to show me her gorgeous mahogany bedroom set, with its brooding armoire and stodgy dresser. The small room is dwarfed by all that furniture.
She sits down on one of the beds, smoothing the coverlet with a slim, graceful hand. She looks up at me, her face pained.
“You should have seen it the night of the wedding,” she whispers. “There was so—so much blood.” Her voice cracks on the second sentence.
I don’t know if I understand what she’s trying to tell me. If she’s talking about losing her virginity, I’m not sure I want to hear it. I can’t bear to hear yet another successful wedding night story, not when I still haven’t managed to shed a drop of blood.
“There was blood everywhere—on the bed, on the walls. I had to go to the hospital.” Her face creases suddenly and I think she is going to cry, but she takes a deep breath and smiles bravely. “He went into the wrong place. It ruptured my colon. Oh, Devoireh, you can’t imagine the pain. It was so bad!”
I’m flabbergasted. My mouth is probably hanging wide open. How exactly do you rupture a colon?
“You know,” she hurries to explain, “they tell them in marriage classes to go really fast, before they lose their nerve, before we get too scared. So he just pushed, you know? But in the wrong spot. How was he to know? Even I wasn’t really sure where the right spot was.”
“How are you feeling now?” I ask, deeply moved by her story.
“Oh, I’m fine now!” She smiles widely, but her eyes don’t crinkle the way they used to, and her dimple barely flashes. “My husband’s going to be back any minute, so you should probably go.” Suddenly she’s in a rush to ferry me out the door, as if she is afraid to be caught in conversation with a neighbor.
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