by Naomi Ragen
She thought of the young man and woman in their wedding photo, the kind, devout couple who had given birth to these children. Such a tragedy! And yet, the vibrancy of these young lives were even now carving channels into the raging sea of chaos and despair that had engulfed them. Their needs were set and must be met, their very neediness creating order.
She touched Cheeky’s little face, pushing the hair out of his eyes. She pushed in Icy’s chair so that her ice pop would drip over the kitchen table rather than her nightgown. Every tiny act made her feel competent and useful. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, the little girl raised her arms to be held. Leah reached down to her, lifting the child into her lap. Chasya leaned back blissfully, sinking into the unfamiliar softness of the stranger’s womanly body, so different from her sister Shaindele’s impatient, angular, young limbs, sighing softly with pleasure.
Leah rested her chin gently on the child’s head, holding her close, flooded by an unexpected and overwhelming feeling of love. She wanted so much for only good things to happen to this family, for them to know no more sorrow. May God bless all of you, she prayed silently, hoping Shaindele wouldn’t rush home.
9
The moment Yaakov agreed to go out on shidduch dates, his phone rang nonstop, until finally he begged them to call his mother-in-law instead.
“How will I learn? How will I finish the work for my accounting classes if every two seconds the phone rings?” he begged Fruma Esther.
She agreed happily, delighted to take all the information and to share it with him at a time of his choosing. What she didn’t tell him was the number of suggestions she took it upon herself to reject on his behalf without discussing it with him at all.
“Too old,” she would complain about the forty-one-year-old widow with three children. “Not educated enough,” she would scold concerning the thirty-nine-year-old Bais Yaakov graduate working in a clothing store on Fourteenth Avenue. “Not enough yichus!” she’d shout when a thirty-five-year-old childless divorcée with her own graphic arts studio was suggested. “Her parents moved to Boro Park only five years ago. She’s from Cleveland. Cleveland!”
Only when the entire shadchan community rose up as one against her, refusing to give her even one more name, did she finally relent and agree to hand over some names to Yaakov. “We are doing our best, Yaakov.” She sighed. “But you shouldn’t expect another Zissele.”
Candidate number one was a widow with one child. “She is only thirty-one, very frum, with yichus, a very well-to-do family who own an import-export company. The matchmaker says she is a wonderful woman who has had a difficult time but is now ready to make a new start. The only problem is she lives in Monsey.”
Honestly, he didn’t hear a single thing that interested him about this woman. Rich, important family, frum … but was she spiritual? Did she love children? Did she love God? On top of that, Monsey—the haredi enclave near Spring Valley—was an hour and a half drive by car from Boro Park if you were lucky! He shared all these misgivings with his mother-in-law.
She straightened her back, offended. “We are all trying so hard to help you, Yaakov. But you have to help yourself. Take a chance. Nothing is perfect. You have to try.”
Chastened, he agreed to borrow a car from his chavrusa, Meir, and asked that the shadchan arrange a meeting for Saturday night so he wouldn’t have to take off time from kollel or miss his evening classes.
That Saturday night after making havdalah, Yaakov took a shower, drying himself vigorously and putting on deodorant he thought had an especially clean smell; never in his life had he owned a bottle of men’s cologne. He examined his face in the mirror, testing out a pleasant smile. It doesn’t look sincere, he scolded himself, giving up. She would see what was there, the truth: an older man, already the father of many children, no longer a full-time scholar, on his way to becoming a regular baal bayis. Nobody special. Despite the vigorous assurances of the schadchan conveyed by Fruma Esther that the woman and her family were thrilled, he couldn’t fathom why she’d agreed to meet him at all. He shrugged at the mysteries of matchmaking, running a comb carefully through his hair and beard. Resigned that it was the best he could do, he put on his dark Shabbos suit and Borsalino. Meir’s car was in the repair shop, so he had no choice but to rent a car for the evening.
He took Palisades International Parkway north. While he could no longer afford a car, he had been driving since he was sixteen. It was a pleasure to be behind the wheel again, he thought, feeling relaxed and hopeful as he sped along, wondering what God had in store for him.
When he pulled up to the address, he felt a moment of unease. It was a sprawling ranch house with a big backyard and a professionally landscaped front garden that even in the middle of the winter was free of fallen leaves. He had no experience with such wealth.
To his surprise, a man only a little older than himself opened the door. “I’m her brother,” he explained, smiling and welcoming him in. Yaakov, who had expected to pick up the woman and drive to the nearby Hilton Woodcliff Lake, a venue he had found on the religious internet dating site Soon By You (it was either that or a billiard hall or Sport-O-Rama ice-skating—Monsey was pretty far from Manhattan), where they would order drinks in the lobby and get to know one another. Instead, he was startled to find himself escorted to the middle of a living room crowded with relatives.
“Let me take your hat, your coat,” the brother offered. Yaakov thanked him, looking around the room in confusion as he tried to figure out who exactly was on offer. “This is my sister,” the brother finally said, putting an end to the confusion as he pushed a young woman forward. “Because of the terrible nightmare of her recent divorce—”
“I was told you were a widow,” he said, glancing shyly at the woman, who said nothing.
The brother took a step in front of her, nodding as he made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “That, too. Anyhow, her family is naturally concerned. Please, I’ll introduce you.”
Before he got a chance to exchange two words with the woman, he found himself dragged off into the living room to meet and be scrutinized by her mother and father, two brothers, a sister and sister-in-law, and various other vaguely related people, all of whom inspected him shamelessly, doing everything short of rubbing his lapel between their fingers to judge the worth of the cloth. “I know, I know, it’s a bit much,” whispered the older brother sheepishly. “But we are a very tight-knit family.”
Yaakov swallowed hard. “Of course, I … understand,” he stammered until he was red, all the while stealing surreptitious glances at the candidate herself.
She had a young face, but one unmistakably etched by years of sorrow, he thought. Her pretty brown eyes were half-lidded and wary, darting nervously. Every few moments, she tugged viciously at various parts of her outfit, including a long, dark wig that she pulled down by the bangs as if trying to cover her face.
“Why don’t the two of you go into the kitchen?” suggested the brother, who was obviously running the show and had apparently decided that whatever the others might think, including his widowed/divorced sister, Yaakov was just what he was looking for. “Offer him some coffee,” he ordered her curtly before disappearing on the other side of the kitchen door.
Yaakov sat down behind the counter of the expensively furnished room. “It’s a beautiful kitchen, a very nice house,” he offered.
“It’s my brother’s,” she said matter-of-factly. “I live over the garage with my son. My husband—my second husband, may God curse him to everlasting hell—walked out, left me with nothing. Until I finally got my divorce, my get, well, the whole family had to cough up the money to pay off that ganef.”
He sat there wordlessly, shocked. “They told me you were a widow.”
“That, too. I lost my first husband, my beloved Shlomi, when I was thirty. He was born with some kind of heart defect that was never diagnosed. One morning, he just didn’t wake up. It was horrible.”
He nodded sympathetically.
“He and I never had children. He couldn’t, something else the shadchan never mentioned,” she added bitterly, then shrugged. “But I guess that was for the best seeing how he wasn’t around for long. After he died, my family didn’t want me to waste any more time. I wasn’t getting any younger. So they pushed and pushed for me to remarry. I felt really pressured, which is how I wound up saying yes to the ganef, may he find Gehenna and move in there.”
He felt his face grow hot as he listened to her, but decided to be sympathetic. “You say the family had to pay him off before he would grant your get? That’s not right. That was never the intention of the halacha.”
She stared at him hostilely. “The rabbis were the worst.” She sniffed. “They were the ones who told us to pay him off. I’m sure he greased their palms, too, let me tell you. Criminals. Would you like sugar, a piece of cake?”
He tried to focus. “Yes, a teaspoon. Thank you.”
She put the cup in front of him together with a bowl of sugar and a teaspoon, not bothering to measure it out for him. “Milk?”
“Do you have parve? I’m still fleishig.”
She opened the refrigerator and took out a nondairy creamer and handed it to him. He hesitated.
“Oh, too frum to take something from a woman’s hand?” she snarled contemptuously. “My ex was also very, very, very frum. And from such an important rabbinical family. Or so he said. Related to the Chofetz Chaim himself, but who knows? People say whatever they want. Who’s going to check it? My family, on the other hand, everyone knows are direct descendants of Akiva Eiger himself. My ex, the ganef—may the ten plagues of Egypt reach him and a few more besides—was so frum he wouldn’t drink water on Passover, in case someone dropped crumbs into the reservoir. He was so frum he made me shave my head before I covered it with a wig. He was so frum he once threw out all the matzo because he found a drop of moisture on the kitchen cabinet door. But that didn’t stop him from running off with his shiksa secretary when I was eight months pregnant or extorting my family before agreeing to a divorce.” She slammed the creamer down on the counter.
“Thank you,” Yaakov said fearfully, pouring some into the now cold coffee. He took a few half-hearted sips, mostly to delay the necessity of saying something. “I can hear the suffering in your voice, and it fills me with sorrow,” he said finally, with sincerity. “Too many stringencies and not enough human decency, that is sometimes the problem in our world.”
“Oh, so you think our world has problems?” There was no mistake. She was hostile.
He was surprised. “Don’t you?”
“That’s what the frei are always saying,” she murmured, suddenly not anti-rabbi at all but the frum-ist of the frum. He felt dizzy trying to keep up with her.
“If something is true, it is true no matter who says it,” he answered, finally annoyed, wondering how he could get his captive hat and coat back and escape.
“What happened to your first wife?” she demanded.
“She died.”
“They told me, but you know, I’ve been on so many shidduch dates, I can’t keep the stories straight half the time. What was wrong with her?”
His face went white. “I don’t like to talk about it,” he murmured. “Listen, it was nice to meet you, but this isn’t going to work out.”
“What? You sit here for two minutes and already you know?”
He stood up. “Yes, already I know.” Opening the kitchen door, he entered the lion’s den, where he painfully and uneasily extricated himself and his belongings from a quicksand of insistent and chagrined relatives. Once outside, he felt like benching gomel, the prayer said after safely navigating a stormy sea.
When the shadchan called Fruma Esther the next day, she was fuming. “Rude, they said. Ran away, they said. Insulting, they said. What did he tell you?”
“He said her next husband would be serving the jail time for the crimes of her last husband.” The shadchan was silent. Apparently, she had heard this before. “Well, let’s try again, shall we?”
“Do we have a choice?” Fruma Esther replied.
The next time, Yaakov was far less trusting, insisting on interrogating the matchmaker Suri Kimmeldorfer himself before agreeing. Really, he could find nothing wrong with candidate number two. She was a widow his own age with no extra husband hidden in her résumé, three older children, and an interior design company. Her late husband had died in the crash of a small, private plane on his way to a cousin’s wedding in Toronto. She lived in Flatbush.
When he arrived, she herself opened the door, with no lurking relatives anywhere to be found.
“My son is upstairs, so there is no problem with yichud,” she told him, referring to the religious prohibition of a man and woman being alone together in a private space.
She was a small woman, a bit on the heavy side, who looked closer to fifty than forty. But she had a warm smile, he thought. After all, he wasn’t looking for a beauty queen. Just a kind, heimish woman who would share his values and love his children.
A beautiful spread of dips and vegetables and quiches was already laid out on the table.
“I thought I would take you out. We could go to Café Venezia on Coney Island Avenue,” he suggested.
“What’s their hechsher?” she inquired.
“Uh, I was told it’s strictly kosher.”
“But who supervises?” she insisted.
“I think they said Rav Himmelstein.”
She shrugged. “I hope you don’t mind my asking. My late husband, may his memory be blessed, was a saint. He was very, very particular on what he ate outside the house, and so we hardly ever did. Besides, it’s so expensive. I’m very thrifty.”
He looked around at the expensive, custom-made gold coffee table, the pristine white sofa and matching chairs, his eyes widening.
“It’s a Sete Linen Sofa. I got it on sale. Oh, that’s Italian. Very in right now.”
“That color.” He smiled. “White. How do you keep it so clean?”
“Oh, do you have small children?”
He nodded, perplexed. “Surely the matchmaker mentioned—”
“Yes, certainly, but I guess I blocked that out. I’ll tell you very frankly, small children and beautiful furniture don’t mix,” she said, a small crease forming between her brows.
He nodded in total agreement.
“But my furniture is my life. It’s my work. I could never live in a house that wasn’t beautiful. Most women feel that way. Your late wife…?”
“Zissele and I were a kollel couple—salt and bread, as they say. We didn’t have any money for extras. And with five children—”
“Five,” she repeated, the crease deepening as her brows shot up in alarm. “And the youngest is…?”
“Fifteen months.”
She was silent for a moment. He could almost see the little wheels turning in her head as she processed this. “It’s not a problem,” she finally said. “I am a very spiritual person, and I can learn to adapt. Children can also learn to adapt. My own children know not to sit in the living room on the furniture.”
“So where do they sit?”
“Why should they sit? There are things to be done, places to go. My children are out of the house in after-school activities or away at yeshiva.”
“Now, but when they were babies?”
“I was a very efficient mother when I had small children. They always knew their place. I toilet trained them when they were eight months old, and I had special aprons sewn for them with long sleeves and ridges across the chest that caught the food splatters, so not a drop—not even soup—ever touched a tablecloth. Believe me, it’s for their own benefit to grow up that way, everything so clean and orderly. I think of my home as a Bais Hamigdash where everything is consecrated and everything I and the children do is like a ritual to please God. This is why I must have the walls painted every year, so that not even a spot of dirt spoils the purity. Would you like to sit down and eat something?”
; Honestly, he had long ago lost his appetite, thinking of what this woman would do when she moved into the little apartment he had shared with Zissele; how his children would be trained and disciplined like little robots; his walls painted, his old furniture dumped. From there, it would only be a matter of time before he himself got the full treatment. He wondered what part of the life he loved would pass her rigid inspection, remaining untouched, unimproved, and undecorated? No part, he realized. It would be a total renovation.
“Tell me, did your late husband, may his memory be blessed, approve of”—he looked around meaningfully—“this?”
Her small eyes narrowed. “My saintly husband—may he rest in peace—was so pious, so pure, he took no interest at all in material things,” she said haughtily. “Also, when he was alive, we never had the money. But after he died, the insurance money from the airline left me very comfortable. So I started living the way I always dreamed and started my business on the side. You wouldn’t believe how many saintly rabbis’ wives I have for clients and how much money they spend on furnishings.”
“I wasn’t criticizing, chas ve shalom. Everyone is entitled to their dreams.” He nodded, dreaming of getting up and telling her the truth: that sometimes one person’s dream is another person’s nightmare. She was his. But mindful of the shadchan’s complaints about his abrupt departure from the last date, he reluctantly took a plate and availed himself of the generous spread. He found it spicy and strange, food as fancy and unfamiliar to him as the furniture. When he judged a decent interval had elapsed, he bid her good night.
“You are a very fine man, Yaakov, and have come highly recommended to me,” she said. To his horror, she sidled closer, staring into his eyes long and hard with brazen intimacy. “I look forward to our next meeting,” she called after him as he adjusted his Borsalino and hurried out the door.
All night, he suffered from heartburn. When the shadchan called the next day, he merely said, “It’s not shayich. Not her, not her furniture, not her derech of educating children.” No, there wasn’t going to be a second date, he said firmly as the matchmaker did her best to pressure him into keeping an open mind.