The Saturday Wife (14 page)

With this in mind, she slowly relinquished the cherished visions of the successful diamond importer, the high-paid lawyer, and the brain surgeon, destined to put her charming blond daughter into a mansion in Short Hills, New Jersey. She had made the engagement and wedding plans with joy, borrowing freely and expansively to usher her child into the long-awaited, triumphant future.

Her first visit to her daughter’s first home, a few weeks after the wedding, sent her into a tailspin. Her vision of the Bronx had been upscale Riverdale with the million-dollar mansions. Her vision of her daughter’s first home had been a three-bedroom condo. For several moments, she stood stock-still, staring at the recently whitewashed graffiti on the front of the building in the crumbling neighborhood. In shock, she labored up the dark stairwell to the second story, a slow fury building inside her as she entered and took in the tiny rooms, the small kitchen with its old appliances. She sat down on the couch and wondered how she could have been so misled.

“Isn’t it nice?” Delilah said, smiling, waving her hand as if to introduce
her mother to her new luxuries: the silver and porcelain, the Cuisinart, the Castro convertible with the new curtains to match.

“When,” her mother said, taking huge gulps of air, “are you going to be able to move?”

And thus began the relentless campaign of Marilyn Goldgrab to see that her daughter got everything she deserved in life, the kind of things that her snooty classmates and their snooty parents took for granted. Her daughter was as good as any of them and twice as beautiful, she thought. She had had the same expensive education, the same clothes, albeit cleverly obtained at a fraction of the price, but whose business was that? And she therefore had every right to claim the same good life that was the deserved consequence of such faithful adherence to the rules. And Chaim, by hook or by crook, was going to give it to her.

Several times a week, her mother called Delilah, conversations that were full of unsolicited advice, hurtful and insulting admonitions, and dire prophecies. In short, Mrs. Goldgrab was driving her daughter crazy.

“Just don’t talk to her,” Chaim would say. “Keep it short. Tell her you’re busy, that you’ll call her back.”

Delilah, who could really never stand her mother’s pushy, demanding nature, wanted to do much more. And so, inevitably, there was a blowup. Hurtful, unforgivable truths were revealed in great, screaming arguments, and a soothing but troubled silence followed that lasted several weeks, until holidays and family celebrations intruded, necessitating a quick reconciliation. Marilyn called again, less frequently and more cautiously, nevertheless managing to preserve the needling subtext that was clear from everything she said.

“Your friend Adina is moving to Teaneck. I hear the houses are really beautiful there. I think her mother said it was a two-story colonial with a finished basement… . And your cousin Myra’s husband—the one who went to work for your uncle Sam in his import business?—well, he just bought some license from Diesel to make watches, and now he’s designing watches and selling them by the thousands, and soon they are moving to Great Neck… a house with a swimming pool!”

Like the centipede that enters the ears of people in horror movies, slowly taking over their brains and driving them insane, she felt her mother’s words seep into her thoughts.

And then Chaim’s mother began to visit her new daughter-in-law on
a regular basis. She brought cookies and fattening but delicious kreplach and
knaidlach
and
rogelach
in large plastic containers meant for catering halls. And she never left before leaving behind a piece of her mind as well.

Like Emma Bovary, Delilah “accepted her wisdom; her mother-in-law was extravagant with it.” They spoke to each other like people in a documentary about family life: with exaggerated consideration. But when Chaim’s mother began a sentence with “I have to be honest with you,” Delilah cringed, knowing that something disagreeable and insulting was on its way like a projectile, a Kassam rocket catapulted with reckless abandon into the soft flesh of populated areas.

The woman was relentless. Her criticism ranged from the kind of floor wax Delilah bought (too expensive) to the way she washed her dishes. “That set I bought you is porcelain, it should be hand-washed or the gold trim will turn dull.”

Chaim, caught in the middle, tried to mediate and wound up getting himself exiled to his own bed even during the precious days when he could finally move into hers. Finally, there was the inevitable explosion, and his mother stopped bringing her plastic-covered caloric masterpieces. Instead, they went less frequently to her house to eat them.

Delilah, kept busy with classes and synagogue functions, didn’t have too much time to brood. But eventually, she got bored. This was no fun, she thought. She tried doing more. She began preparing elaborate Friday night meals, inviting the synagogue president, the cantor, and his wife. But they were both in their seventies, on strict diets that precluded salt, sugar, fats, red meat, and just about anything else worth eating. Besides, she realized, what was the point of buttering them up? Her husband would be rabbi of this synagogue anyway; it was his by inheritance. And this life was going to be her life, until further notice.

She looked out her windows at the treeless streets and old brick buildings. She examined her apartment, whose novelty had already worn off and whose deficiencies showed through with devastating clarity.

She brooded, suddenly hearing her mother’s voice without a phone.

And so the snake of discontent entered the garden of Delilah and Chaim’s newlywed bliss through gates as wide as barnyard doors. In fact, it was inevitable, even without Marilyn.

The summer of Delilah’s sophomore year in high school, the school’s Hebrew department had arranged a class trip to Israel. It was very expensive.
But even those parents who couldn’t really afford it felt ashamed not to let their kids participate. So, along with many others, Delilah’s parents took out loans, packed her suitcase, and sent her off.

Everyone had a great time wandering through the ancient ruins and the modern malls, riding up to Masada and standing teary-eyed by the Wailing Wall. On the flight back, sitting just two rows ahead of her, Delilah encountered her vision of the New York Orthodox Jewish couple who had it all.

She couldn’t take her eyes off them.

She imagined they were coming back from a lovely vacation at five-star hotels, no doubt returning to Cedarhurst or Woodmere or another of those Long Island enclaves where mansions vie with each other on park-like lots nestled behind high stone fences, everything dappled by huge shady trees. New York’s Orthodox Beverly Hills. They were both tall and slim and were traveling with two children, surprisingly advanced in age, considering the parents still looked like recent yeshiva high school graduates. The daughter was about fourteen, the son maybe nine.

The mother was a smoky blonde with long hair. Even after ten hours of being squashed on El Al, her hair still framed her face in perfect ellipses. You could still detect in her the yeshiva girl cheerleader that the disgruntled rabbis kept exhorting—to no avail—to lengthen her skirt. Now she wore a white cashmere sweatshirt with a hood and a pleated gray tweed skirt and black textured stockings that only legs like Angelina Jolie’s could pull off. Her face was WASP princess: upturned nose, deep blue eyes. Delilah wondered if she’d had plastic surgery or if it was the same genetic magic that had Jews from Uzbekistan looking Mongolian and Jews from Great Britain like Margaret Thatcher.

Delilah drank her in like a free airline Diet Coke.

The husband, too, was gorgeous in his Banana Republic khakis and a blue striped shirt—Hugo Boss?—which had probably not been bought at discount at Century Twenty-One but at full price at Lord & Taylor’s or Barney’s during a busy lunch hour. He could no doubt well afford it. He was doing very well, thank you very much, Delilah thought, conjecturing if it was venture capital, heart surgery, or law, practiced from some office with ten-foot-high windows that looked over New York City like a personal backyard. Lie wore a discreet crocheted skullcap in no-nonsense black.

She imagined how they would gather their Louis Vuitton luggage and load it into their SUV. How they would drive and park in front of a wonderful
old house, a place that had been meticulously redecorated and enlarged with enough basement and attic space to house several more families their size without the least discomfort. It would be a house they’d bought from anti-Semitic WASPs who’d simply died out or frittered away their money or retired to an adults-only golf community in Phoenix or Florida, a place where guards kept out the grasping poor and sticky-fingered, noisy grandchildren had strictly enforced visiting hours.

They were in love, she imagined, or, at least, content with each other and the life they’d built: walking-distance-to-synagogue communities, Ivy-prep yeshiva day schools, holiday trips to Israel on the New Year and Succoth, and Kosher Club jaunts to Acapulco or Grand Cayman on Passover.

And they deserved it all because they were good people, generous people.

Oh, my, yes.

They gave and gave and gave and gave. To Israel. To the handicapped. To political parties that supported Israel. To their synagogue. They were the most hounded and solicited beings in America and their checkbooks always stayed open. And in due time, they would grace fund-raising dinners for this or that as the honorées. She would look fabulous in a custom-made dress that was deceptively simple yet beautifully made and cost a fortune.

But they were not adventurers. They would not risk some idealistic move to the barren, fractious, terror-filled Middle East, no matter how their hearts swelled and tear ducts worked overtime each time they sang Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” meaning the hope:

Deep in my heart a Jewish soul yearns.
Our eyes to Zion look forward.

Right.

They were like their parents before them, like her parents—sensible. America was a gift one held on to for dear life.

It was everything she wanted in life, Delilah realized, her eyes shining.

On that same plane, just behind her, was yet another Orthodox family. They too had been on vacation and had also enjoyed their trip, except they had most probably not slept in hotels with stars of any kind but on mattresses on the floors of various Israeli relatives.

The woman was about the same age as the woman who sat in front, except
that she looked it. She wore a pious hair covering of crocheted nylon that hung down her back, covering all her hair. Her husband wore a dark suit and a white open-collared shirt that seemed a bit yellowed from too many machine bleachings. He spent the flight pouring over religious texts with tiny Hebrew lettering. There were twice as many children, of all ages, who needed constant care. The husband helped, cheerfully and so ineffectually that the wife soon took over, sighing, freeing him to stroke his beard and read on.

Delilah imagined their many heavy, torn, unmatched suitcases, which relatives who came to take them home would manage to stuff into banged-up Fords. Some of the children would sit, unseat-belted, on top of them, until they drove to their cramped rented apartment in Kew Gardens or Boro Park, a place with many bookcases, bunk beds, a large dining room table, and convertible couches.

They would talk about this trip until their next one—perhaps a decade away. And their next vacation would be a ride to Hershey, Pennsylvania, and one night in a Comfort Inn.

Each time Delilah passed them in the aisle on the way to the lavatory, she cringed. Only if she were already dead and it was part of some afterlife punishment cooked up especially by God to make her pay for all her sins would she ever agree to be part of that scenario, she told herself.

She tried to anazlyze why. After all, they looked perfectly happy.

It was then she had her revelation: Heaven and Hell, she realized, were the same place. It was, for example, a room with a long table, and all people did all day was sit around and study. For the saints, it was Heaven. For the sinners, it was Hell.

She glanced over her shoulder as the poor woman in the polyester snood stood up, trying to rescue her baby from her two-year-old, who was poking the infant in the eye with his El Al-supplied crayons. This, she thought, was her vision of Hell.

And so, when Delilah woke up one morning, five months after her wedding, drenched in sweat from the realization that—without major intervention—this was exactly the life that loomed ahead of her, she must have been desperate. Which, of course, always explains many sins, but does not necessarily excuse them.

EIGHT