Sisters Weiss ~ A Novel

by Naomi Ragen

  Her plan, which had been so clear, now seemed muddled and ill-timed. It was barely 5:00 A.M. Would he even be up at this hour? she wondered, realizing how little she really knew about him. But it was too late now. She knocked softly, putting her chilled ear to the door to listen for sounds of life. But there was nothing. She rested her forehead heavily against the door, feeling stupid and desperate. “Please!” she cried, gripped by a sudden panic, banging on the door with both fists.

  “Okay, okay, keep your pants on…” She heard a voice shout from the other side of the door.

  She saw the peephole darken and then heard a hurried fumbling with locks until, finally, the door opened.

  “Rivka?”

  “Oh, Simon!” She rushed in, laying her cold, damp head on his bare chest and wrapping her arms around him in relief.

  “Whoa,” he said, instinctively trying to detach himself, then thought better of it. Her body was voluptuously soft as she lay limply against him, her luxuriant blond hair unbraided for the first time, shining with moisture, the long eyelashes dark and wet against her fair skin. He put his arms around her softly, astonished.

  For two weeks, he had been faithfully tutoring her in the mysteries of the SATs (and not getting very far), careful to keep his hands to himself.

  Not that the idea of seducing her hadn’t crossed his mind. It had, deliciously and often. But except for tentative and casual attempts entirely from his side that had been firmly rebuffed, this was the first time she had ever indicated any physical interest in him at all. He didn’t want to jinx it.

  “You’d better take off those wet things,” he said, trying to be avuncular. “Do you have some dry…?” It was then he saw the small valise. He stared at it.

  “Yes, thank you, Simon.” She moved out of his arms, picking up her things and retreating into his bedroom.

  He stretched out on the sofa, his arm flung over his eyes, calculating the myriad possibilities afforded by this current, interesting turn of events, as well as a few of the unfortunate pitfalls.

  “Simon?” Her hand shook him gently.

  “Oh.” He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “I must have dozed off again. Sorry.”

  She was dressed in her Sabbath best, looking like something out of Fiddler on the Roof. “Did you and Hannah have a falling out?”

  She shook her head. “No. Hannah’s been very kind. But I can’t live with her anymore.” She didn’t elaborate.

  “Oh.” Well, that explained the damsel in distress with a suitcase. He made no suggestions, waiting.

  She shifted uncomfortably, finally breaking the silence. “Simon, maybe … you wouldn’t mind … if for a little while I could … ah … maybe, stay with you?”

  What was a “little while” and what did “stay with you” mean, exactly, in addition to taking up room? He wondered. But he said only: “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  She nodded earnestly. “I wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “Um, Rivka, what about your family? All that stuff you told me about how they hunt people down and force them to do things—”

  “They don’t know I’m here!” She interrupted him hurriedly. “And neither does Hannah. I haven’t told her anything about the two of us.”

  He exhaled, relieved, making some rapid calculations. “I guess, in that case, sure, why not? For a couple of days at least … until we figure this out…”

  Her face fell. “A few days, yes. When will happen the job at your friend’s?”

  He looked at her blankly. “Job?”

  “Your very good friend with the art gallery? The one who might need a secretary/assistant or a salesperson?”

  “Oh, right, sure,” he said, vaguely remembering something he’d casually said on the spur of the moment. “But there’s no rush.”

  “But I want to pay. I don’t want charity.”

  “Yeah, sure. I understand completely.” He yawned again, at a loss, wondering when he was going to be able to go back to sleep.

  “Do you want I should make you breakfast?”

  “It’s kind of early for that…”

  She looked ready to cry.

  Oh, Jesus! “Sure, Rivka, that would be great!”

  She went into the kitchen, opening and closing closet doors. “Your frying pan, it’s new?”

  His mother had come in with a box of things she’d unpacked into his kitchen cupboards. Since he never cooked and hardly ate anything other than cold cereal at home, he had no idea what was in there, just that it had never been used.

  “Everything in there is new: the dishes, the utensils, the pots.”

  “Are you sure? Because if they’ve been used, even once, I have to know which is for meat and which is for milk…”

  “Yeah, sure. I get it…” He lay back, his eyes closing.

  “Your refrigerator. It’s empty.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “No eggs, milk, butter, bread, fruits, vegetables…”

  He groaned softly. “I wasn’t expecting company.… Look, I’ll pick up some stuff on the way home from school.”

  “Maybe I’ll go to that kosher store now.” The first morning she’d come to him, he’d taken her by bus to a glatt kosher minimarket.

  “Oh, that’s kind of far from here and they probably don’t open until eight. But there’s a twenty-four-hour supermarket right down the block. I don’t know how much kosher stuff they carry, though.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll find something.” She put on her coat, hesitating, embarrassed. “Simon, I have no money.”

  “Oh, right.” He found his wallet and took out a twenty. It felt strange giving her money. He could see she felt equally uncomfortable accepting it. It was as if some clear barrier had been breached. “Knock yourself out!”

  “What?” she asked him sharply.

  “It’s just an expression. It means ‘have fun.’”

  “Oh.” She relaxed. “And maybe you have a bag and an umbrella?”

  “Ahhh … wait.” He reluctantly hauled himself upright once again and went searching for them. When he came back, she was standing by the window, looking out. She looked so adorable, so young, so lost, he thought, his grouchiness mellowing. He handed her the items silently, twining his fingers through her hair, running his thumb down the side of her soft cheek until it rested on her lips. Then, he drew it slowly over her chin and neck, until it rested just at the place where the buttons of her blouse began.

  She felt a chill run down her spine that had nothing at all to do with the weather.

  *

  What have I done? she thought, as she rounded the corner and found the store. The words throbbed through her like a mantra, opening up a new consciousness of dangers and thrills, new forms of good and evil, all sifted together like ingredients for a recipe she’d never tried. And what will be the result? she wondered. Would it be good, tasty, worthwhile? Or brutish and nasty and possibly harmful to her health? In either case, who was she to judge? She knew nothing.

  She was a lost soul, she mourned, unlinked to her past and moving rapidly toward an uncertain future, like a child on one of those giant slides in water parks, both dreading and loving the velocity and the eventual drop into something that was definitely going to be—as Hannah had warned—above her head. Was it still possible to stop herself? she wondered. Or had she cut her ties? Could she go back now if she wanted to?

  Her parents would be thrilled. But they would still only agree to take her back on their own terms. They might even decide to punish her, restricting her movements even more and keeping a greater watch over her for a while. The thought of that, in itself, didn’t really bother her. After all, it wouldn’t be that different from the life she’d always known, where the whole community acted as watchdog, one’s slightest deviation reported with diligence to all the powers that be. Like an animal in the zoo, one’s cage was nominally open, but the portal led only to another cage, hemmed in by a thousand watchful eyes.

  Eventually—sooner ra
ther than later—the bridegroom parade would begin again. This time, if her wanderings had made it out to the gossipmongers, her stock would have fallen. The male merchandise available to her would be diminished in quality, if not in quantity. Like her mother (although in her mother’s case it had been through no fault of her own) she would get the misfits, boys who were the third or fourth choices of the heads of their yeshivas; the fussy cousins or male relatives of neighbors who had been on the market a bit too long for one reason or another, none of them good. She would find herself moving rapidly toward those girls who had been pushed out of the respectable bride pool and were now floundering in the rapids, hoping for a marriage proposal, any proposal, before they went over the falls.

  Rather than being in a position to accept or reject, she would be one of those unfortunate creatures who dressed carefully for each blind date, hoping to please, rather than to be pleased. From there, it would be only a few short steps down to desperation, where her parents would need to assure the groom that they would take out loans to buy him an apartment and furnish it and provide him with a living for the first five or six years of his marriage, bankrupting them.

  She couldn’t do that to them, knowing as she did that their sacrifice would be in vain. She could never stay happily married to a yeshiva boy, any yeshiva boy. From the small sampling she’d been exposed to, they all seemed like children. They’d never traveled or opened a novel or seen a movie. While they didn’t say it outright, they all believed a woman was inferior to them and was there to serve them, for why else would they thank God every morning for not making them one?

  In contrast, Simon seemed like the most exciting man in the world. He had been to India and had hiked up and down mountain trails in far-off places in America. He had strange ideas about music, art, religion, and politics, which she could not understand and which, in their very foreignness, were thrilling. In this place, alone with him, was the adventure she had dreamed of when she’d decided to run away, she told herself, fingering the buttons of her blouse nervously, reliving his touch and how her whole being had responded with a deep, sonorous vibration that made her shiver with delight.

  She was hungry for experience, wanting so much to feel all those things that until now she had only read or heard about. Once, years before, she’d accidentally overheard a conversation between her older, married sister and her sister’s newly married friend. The girl had confided that on her wedding night she’d locked herself into the bathroom, terrified of what her groom might ask of her. And in the end, she’d whispered, it had felt like rape.

  Never, she’d promised herself then, will I let that happen to me! I will choose the man who will transform me from a girl to a woman, a man for whom I will feel desire and love. But the older she was, the more she realized how impossible that would be. The whole system of her community and their religious stringencies worked against such feelings, making sure love could only come after marriage.

  But what if it never came? What if she was forced to live with a man she could never learn to love, who would have the use of her body, forcing himself on her whenever he pleased for as long as she lived? What if it always felt like rape?

  The more she thought about it, the more she convinced herself that there was no justification at all for anyone to be involved in so intimate a choice. The stakes were too high, and they involved only herself and no one else. Her mother and father, the rabbis, the matchmakers, what had they to do with her private, soft flesh and the intimate secret recesses of her heart? The public part of it, that which involved the community, with its rituals and its ceremonies, seemed like some monstrous intrusion, forcibly insinuating itself into her very womb. They had taken for themselves the power to justify and sanctify what was done to her body. But it did not belong to them! That power was hers and hers alone. But if she wrested it from them, claiming it as her own, she would never, ever be forgiven. She would lose the self she knew and everything that was right and familiar to her, winding up instead in some strange place that frightened as much as it fascinated.

  Either way, whatever she decided, it would be irrevocable: once back home, she would never again have the courage to leave; and once she gave into her passion, they would never agree to take her back.

  She took a shopping cart and began to put things inside. Nothing here was available in her special brands. She fingered the milk, surprised to realize that she no longer believed it mattered if a cow was rabbinically supervised. A cow was a cow and milk was milk, yogurt was yogurt, and butter was butter. Cheese, which might have animal-based rennet in it, was another matter, so she avoided that. She piled the items into her cart before she could change her mind. As they touched the metal bottom, she felt something inside her that had been whole smash to smithereens. She had embarked upon a path that had led her so far from her old life that there was no way to redeem herself or find her way back. So she threw the minor sins to the wayside on her road toward the major ones.

  When she returned to the apartment, Simon was sleeping on the couch, still dressed only in pajama bottoms. But something was different, she realized. It was the scent. He had splashed on some men’s cologne. It smelled musky and dangerous.

  Slowly, she put down the groceries. Then, she took off her coat, hanging it carefully in the closet. “Do you want eggs?” she asked him, helpless with the knowledge that she had come to a turning point.

  He got up from the couch, walking toward her with slow, silent steps, as sinuous and dangerous as a panther, she thought. He put his arms around her. “My sweet angel,” he said, enfolding her, resting his cheek against her neck. His lips pushed aside her blouse, finding her bare shoulder.

  “Simon,” she whispered, breathless, trapped in her own confusion and desire. “It’s a sin.”

  “Are you married?” he murmured.

  “No.”

  “Engaged?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “We aren’t married.”

  “Where is it written that single people have to get married before they can have sex?”

  She could not think of an answer. It was like the Jewish milk, she thought. More things she’d been taught that made no sense, added on to her religion by people who wanted to make life difficult, not pure. But there was one thing she was certain of. “I have to go to the mikveh first.”

  “Those ritual purification baths?” He shook his head skeptically, smiling.

  “I must.” She shook her head adamantly.

  “Okay … if that’s what you need. I respect that,” he said, loosening his arms. “But I have to ask you something. Do you have some protection?”

  Now she was totally confused. “From what?”

  “Okay. I guess that means I’ll use something.”

  “Something?”

  “A condom.”

  She blushed scarlet. “No, no. You mustn’t use anything! It’s a sin. Like spilling your seed on the ground like Onan. But you don’t have to worry about it. I won’t get pregnant.”

  He didn’t probe. “So you are using something.”

  “I won’t get pregnant, Simon,” she repeated.

  “All right, then. I guess I’ll go get dressed and get to work.”

  She watched as he turned, his beautiful body moving away.

  27

  A week later, Rivka walked down the unmarked path toward the door of the mikveh. Opening her purse, she took out the shiny, five-dollar ring and slipped it on her finger; then, she tied a scarf around her head, tucking in all her abundant hair.

  She had traveled an hour and a half by subway to Far Rockaway in order to visit a ritual bath where hopefully no one would know her. Sick with apprehension that the mikveh attendants—who had a reputation for unrelenting piety and strict supervision of the area under their control—might somehow sniff out the scandalous truth, she shook as she rang the intercom, aware of the blinking video cameras recording her every move. Finally, she was buzzed in.

  The wa
iting room was full of women of all ages. Some, certainly past menopause, had no doubt decided to come simply for good luck, as was the custom. One or two looked like frightened young virgins clinging to their mothers. But the majority were overweight and harried young mothers who seemed pleased to have a reason to sit and do nothing. They looked up briefly and curiously as she took her place among them.

  From across the room, she looked into the open door of the “salon,” where women who had finished their ablutions were now using high-powered hair-dryers to style their hair, as well as availing themselves of the nail polish and makeup left on display for their use. While strict religious adherence usually looked askance at such displays of vanity, the opposite was true of those preparing for their rabbinically sanctioned postmikveh encounters with their husbands.

  From the time a woman’s period commenced until seven days after it ceased and she immersed in the mikveh, married couples were forbidden any physical contact. Nonobservant people, she realized, could never understand what kind of passion this abstinence evoked. She remembered the way her mother would come home with wet hair but fresh lipstick, something she hardly ever wore. The way her father would speak to her mother in an especially soft tone of voice. She squeezed her hands together nervously at the memory. The practice of attending mikveh was meant to encourage intimacy between married couples, who would produce the next generation of pure souls. What would they say of her, though, a single girl prettying herself up for an illicit romp with a boyfriend?

  Can I really immerse in the holy waters, say the blessing, and then desecrate myself? Was sex a desecration when it was between two consenting, unmarried people? According to the Torah, she knew, it was hardly a sin at all. Well, it was severely looked down upon by Jewish custom, but nowhere was it written that it was strictly forbidden. In fact, Jewish law even considered it a legal method of contracting a marriage. But having sex without immersing in the mikveh was unforgivable. The punishment for such a transgression was “karet,” meaning “being cut off,” a supernatural punishment brought down on you by heaven. Some said it was being cut off from your people forever—both here and in the World to Come, while others said it was to be cut off from life—dying young or without children.