The Saturday Wife (19 page)

He saw she was furious and wished he could do something about it. But applying for the job in Swallow Lake was so beyond the pale, it never seriously entered his mind. His rabbinical life would be over; he’d be attacked by his fellow rabbis. People he respected and wanted to befriend, like Josh, would shrug their shoulders when his name was mentioned. No one would accept his rabbinical decisions. They wouldn’t allow him to officiate at weddings. He would never be able to join a rabbinical court and arrange divorces. His career path would be blocked forever.

“Please, Delilah, be reasonable,” he begged her helplessly. “Besides, even if I applied, there is no reason they should consider hiring me. Rabbi Metzenbaum was a respected rabbi for ten years. He’s published books. He was elected president of all kinds of organizations. I haven’t even been an assistant rabbi for one year! We would gain nothing and lose so much. Please, my love, try to understand.”

She wanted to smash him over the head for his mild reasonableness, as the fury of thwarted hopes rose up from her bowels. In her mind, she saw the lovely house on the lake in Connecticut fade from view, replaced by used-car lots, smokestacks, and graffiti-smeared brick buildings. In the background, far off but clearly discernible, she heard the lilt of her mother’s aggravated nagging, which would now follow her through eternity, reminding her how she could have done—oh, so much better.

Tears of misery tracked her face.

He stared at her, completely at a loss. When he tried to embrace her, she impatiently elbowed him out of her way.

Spring showed up. The bedraggled trees in the Bronx streets and alleyways sent forth a few anemic leaves. There was a drive-by shooting just down the block. And before they knew it, the season changed, transforming into the unbearably hot summer.

Delilah graduated in June with a license to practice dental hygiene. But instead of looking for a job, she did nothing. The idea of scrapping off bicuspids in the mouths of strangers suddenly nauseated her. She sat in her kitchen, swatting the flies, looking listlessly out the window into the street. She made no effort to get dressed, wearing her nightclothes into the late afternoon. Then she’d eat lunch and go back to sleep for the afternoon without washing the dishes from the morning or the previous evening.

One morning, her mother-in-law, who had the skill of a military cryp-tologist when it came to her son’s laconic phone calls, turned up unannounced. She rang and rang the doorbell until Delilah finally heaved herself out of bed. Half asleep, she carelessly threw a short robe over her babydoll pajamas and opened the door.

Mrs. Levi took one look at her daughter-in-law, and one look at the house, before her face turned beet red. “What is the matter with you, Delilah? Look at yourself. Look at this place. You are a rabbi’s wife! What if the president of the sisterhood should come to visit you?”

“She’s ninety years old and would have congestive heart failure by the time she reached the second landing,” Delilah murmured, groping for the coffeepot, which lay hidden under a mountain of unwashed dishes.

“Are you… you’re not… pregnant? Is that it?” Chaim’s mother offered hopefully, sending forth the only possible reason she could think of that might in any way excuse this behavior and allow her to feel charity or compassion for this girl, whom she had never liked and never wanted her son to marry.

“Absolutely not, thank God!”

Mrs. Levi turned purple, and began to choke. “Well, I never… had no idea… a religious woman, to feel that way… God just shouldn’t punish you!”

“Don’t worry. He already has. Look around you, Mama Levi.” Delilah swept her arms expansively around the room. “This is what I’ve got to look forward to for the next fifty years, if Chaim and his grandfather have anything to say about it.”

“You picked this apartment out! I distinctly remember the day you signed the lease! You said it had nice, big rooms.” The older woman clutched the wall, feeling faint and alarmed. She could never have imagined her daughter-in-law behaving this way. While there had never been much love lost between them, Delilah had always made an effort to keep up appearances, to act the part of the good, religious daughter-in-law, not
that she hadn’t seen right through it. Still, on those too rare occasions she and her husband had been invited over, Delilah had always been well dressed and made up—even if it was with that horrid red “Hey, sailor” lipstick. The house had always been neat, if not exactly clean, with all the wedding gifts displayed, a few of them even shined and dusted.

“Yes,” Delilah agreed. “I really know how to pick ‘em, don’t I?” she drawled, lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke rings at the ceiling.

“When did you start smoking? It’s a filthy habit.” Mrs. Levi coughed, waving the smoke away frantically. She opened a window.

“That’s right, Mama. The fresh air of the Bronx. So much better than Lucky Strikes,” Delilah said, inhaling deeply as she sat down. The truth was, she’d bought her first pack just the day before. Although she thought the look was right for her present state of mind, she hated what smoking did to her well-cared-for teeth and pristine breath. But at the moment, the sacrifice was worth it. She crossed her legs and rested the side of her head on her hand, passively observing her mother-in-law’s meltdown.

“So the real you has finally come out!” Mrs. Levi shouted. “I want you to know you never fooled me! I had your number from day one. I gave you a prince and you turned him into a
shmattel
” she screamed.

“Excuse me, but that was the condition I got him in!” Delilah shouted back. “A
shmatte.
That’s Chaim. A real, bona fide
shmattel
Now get out of my house. I’ve had all I’m going to take from you and your precious son! Leave!”

Chaim’s mother felt suddenly ill. She sat down heavily in the nearest chair.

Delilah got up. “Are you… all right, Mama?” she asked nervously, envisioning the call to 911, the paramedics, the flashing lights, the neighbors on the stoops, a frantic Chaim asking her all kinds of difficult questions, and—if they managed to revive the old crow—getting all kinds of contradictory answers. “Look. Don’t get upset. I’m sorry. I’m just not myself.”

The older woman stared at her coldly. “You’ve never, ever, been more yourself, Delilah, You are just like your mother. A pushy, materialistic, social climber. Except you have a better complexion, and haven’t gained all that weight. Yet.”

Delilah took two steps toward her, her fists clenched.

Mrs. Levi got up stiffly. She went over to the china closet and took out the lovely silver candlesticks that had been her wedding gift to her son’s bride. She found a plastic bag on the floor—there were plenty to choose
from—and put them inside. And then, wrapping her wounded dignity around her like a pashmina, she walked stiffly out the door, slamming it behind her.

Chaim, who had taken a teaching position in a local yeshiva to supplement their income, came home at five. He found his wife asleep. He also found they had new neighbors: a family of roaches had moved into one of the soup pots that had been lying around since the previous Sabbath. There was nothing to eat. No one had done the shopping. The refrigerator was empty.

He had gotten a frantic, completely incoherent phone call from his mother, calling him a
shmatte
and claiming his wife was a floozy, Even for his mother, it was a bit much. He had tried to calm her.

He loved his mother and respected her, as the Torah required. But from the beginning she had had a problem with his wife. She complained about her blond hair, calling her a “bottle blonde.” But she had also told him, many times, that he didn’t have what it took to be a rabbi. Now that he had incontrovertible proof that neither of these statements was true, he felt fully justified in ignoring her. Besides, an aging mother is never a match for a luscious new bride, a truth that mothers-in-law all over the world would do well to remember before they commence firing, even in self-defense.

He sat down in the living room and wondered, for the first time, if his marriage, upon which he had placed so many hopes, was falling apart. How had he failed this woman, whom he loved so much? he wondered. And what could he do to make her happy?

He cleaned up the kitchen, then went out and bought some take-out food and a bunch of yellow roses. He set the table, took the food out of the boxes, and warmed it up. Then he tiptoed into the bedroom and sat by her side at the edge of the bed, even though she was in the unclean part of the month. He felt reckless and a bit desperate. He smoothed back her lovely golden hair, breathing in the intoxicating scent of her warm, womanly body.

“Delilah,” he whispered.

She opened her eyes, saw him sitting there, and felt a sense of alarm. “Get off, you know you’re not allowed!”

He didn’t budge. She stared at him.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I’d do anything for you. I just want you to be happy.”

“You don’t care about me at all, Chaim.” She shook her head, wondering what he could possibly be thinking if he was willing to sin. It was the first time she’d glimpsed an indication that he was capable of such a thing. The sight of it filled her with both a malicious satisfaction that she had gotten through to him, as well as a strange contempt. The lure of his religious piety during her short-lived repentance had been the bait that had hooked her, she realized. It was the one thing she’d really admired about him.

“Don’t you see, I care more about you than I care about all the rabbinical prohibitions, all the fences around the Torah. I’ve broken them down, trampled on them, for you.”

She failed to see what possible good this did her. “So your religion is a fake, the same way your love is?” she asked, annoyed, trying to move away from him.

He took a deep breath, keeping his temper in check. What good would it do to tell her off? She’d just be even angrier, if that was possible. “At least, come have something to eat. I’ve made dinner, cleaned up.”

She sniffed the air. Chinese. All that grease, and you felt twice as hungry when you finished. But so what? She relented, feeling famished. If she got hungry, she’d eat again. What difference did it make if she got fat and ugly? Considering the eyesight of the people she was being forced to spend her time with, no one would notice anyway. She sat opposite him, eating silently and hungrily, filling her plate with noodles and rice and sweet-and-sour tofu made to look like pork. She ate and ate.

“Please, tell me how I can make things better.”

She looked across at him. His face was the epitome of longing and misery and helpless yearning, the face of a dumb creature caught in a trap. She felt pity, but nothing else. He, after all, had willingly put his foot into the vice, while she had been lured there with decoys and false promises, she told herself.

The patent unfairness of this as a description of their courtship and marriage did not intrude upon her self-pity. Her equal responsibility for having chosen Chaim as a husband, and this apartment and neighborhood as a home, seemed to her less blameworthy than his having actually married her and dumped her in the Bronx with no hope in sight. Ever since the weekend at Josh and Rivkie’s, she’d scanned the horizon like a shipwrecked sailor, hoping for some glimpse of a seaworthy vessel that might land in port and carry her off to the land of her dreams. But there was nothing, nothing. For this, too, she blamed him.

Life was not supposed to be like this. The man you married was supposed to make you happy. He was supposed to know your needs, without being told, and to do everything he could to fulfill them. Like Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Like Tarzan and Jane. Like Superman and Lois Lane. Like Prince Charming and Cinderella. And it wasn’t just a fairy tale. All you had to do was go to any synagogue in Scarsdale, and you’d see pews and pews full of Orthodox women who lived in mansions, wore designer clothes, and had vacations in Acapulco, live-in maids, and jewelry straight out of the ads in
Town and Country.
Why couldn’t fate have arranged that for her? Found her a man who’d have whisked her off to Scarsdale, or Short Hills, or Beverly Hills? Why was she, who was so pretty, so blond, with such voluptuous curves, now stuck in three rooms, maidless, wearing rayon and polyester blends and tiny cubic-zirconium studs? All her treasures were wasted, thrown out, given away for pennies, to a man who took her to live in a Bronx apartment and fed her Chinese food out of boxes!

And then, she noticed the roses. A dozen of them. Such pretty flowers. Such a romantic gesture. She buried her nose in them, and the heavenly scent enveloped her like something out of a good dream. She looked at her husband, and then over his shoulder at the kitchen sink. All the dishes had been done, even the greasy pots with the burned-on fat that she had no intention of cleaning, ever. It was all sparkling. In a sudden impulse, she reached out to him. He clasped her hand to his heart, then brought it up to his lips, kissing her fingers one by one.

As their fingers intertwined, the wicked joy of transgressing a particularly annoying rabbinical precept made them feel young and bold and carefree and reckless. It wasn’t such a terrible sin, to touch a woman when she was unclean, he told himself, looking at her sparkling eyes, trying to quiet his growing sense of unease. It wasn’t like taking her to bed, God forbid! It was just a teeny, tiny step over the fence. He had absolutely no intention of wandering around in minefields.