There he was, dressed in the traditional Hasidic Sabbath outfit: the satin waistcoat with its braided string belt that separated his holy upper body from his profane lower half, the dark, wide-brimmed hat. He wore a magnificent prayer shawl over his shoulders. His father, the old man with the white beard who stood at the center at the bimah, seemed to be running the place, the way everyone was falling all over themselves to be respectful to him.
Well, well, she thought. A real saint.
She waited for him in the room where they served the kiddush—the traditional after-prayer refreshments—but the synagogue was so over-the-top
frum,
it had separate rooms for men and women. So she waited outside. He came out, a few paces behind his father, surrounded by men. But when he saw her, he lifted his head and a secret look passed between them.
She called him that night. She was the blonde who had been standing outside his father’s synagogue, she told him, and she had something she needed to talk to him about. They agreed to meet in the Village. When he showed up, he was again dressed in his leather jacket.
“I’m just here to tell you what a bum you are” was her opening line.
“You’re fast. Usually, it takes women at least one date to find that out.” He smiled.
“That girl you dumped last Saturday night? Well, she happens to be a friend of mine.”
“She was pretty anxious to get rid of me. So I helped her out.”
“You stuck her with the check and left her stranded.”
“What happened to women’s lib? Don’t you girls carry cabfare?”
“She only had enough left for the subway, you creep.” She laughed.
He took a step closer. “And you came here to tell me off, is that right?”
“Well, what other reason could I have?” she asked demurely, lowering her eyes.
He took her arm and tucked it between his bended elbow, patting her hand. The forbidden feel of his male skin against hers was exciting, as well as the fact that he’d done it on his own, without asking permission. Some of her other dates had actually asked straight out, “How religious are you?” Idiots. What did they expect a girl to do, give them a road map and a list of directions? To tell them, Not religious at all, just do anything you
want? Her answer was always the same: “Very.” The date ahead never failed to be a disaster.
Yitzie thrilled her. They met in places she had never been. Top of the Sixes, where she ordered her first daiquiri, which made her feel all warm and happy. Avant-garde movie theaters showing films by Godard that were so shocking and lewd she’d once actually run from the theater. To make it up to her, he’d bought her tickets to the opera at Lincoln Center. Orchestra seats. She’d worn a very form-fitting dress covered with silver glitter with a high collar of white silk and matching white cuffs, which she’d sneaked past the dorm mother under her prim black winter coat. She’d piled her hair on top of her head. Later, while she was in the lobby waiting for him to get her a Coke, two obviously tipsy middle-aged men had approached her with lewd smiles, about to say something when Yitzie showed up and they steered abruptly in the opposite direction. She looked at herself in the glass windows of the lobby. She looked ravishing and a bit slutty, she thought, wavering between embarrassment and delight.
She was in Yitzie’s spell, or maybe he was in hers, she couldn’t decide. He graduated slowly from slinging his hand across her shoulders in the secluded booths of dark little bars, to twining his fingers through her hair, to grasping her waist as they walked, slightly tipsy, down the streets of Manhattan. And then he began to pick her up in a car.
They drove out to the Rockaways and parked by the deserted summer bungalows. When he’d first suggested it, she’d told herself he was being romantic. She envisioned holding hands and watching the waves roll in while he whispered compliments into her pink little ears. The first time he kissed her, his tongue pressing between her teeth, she was so busy gagging she didn’t feel his hand wander under her skirt. She was wearing a girdle and stockings, more solid than a chastity belt. But his hands moved so quickly. She couldn’t believe someone could actually unhook a bra without having to put his hands under her blouse—which she would
never
have allowed, of course—but there she was, unhooked.
All the while, he kept telling her how beautiful she was—how irresistible, how much he loved her—in this slow, worshipful, sweet voice. She was deeply conflicted, part of her giving in immediately, the other part shocked and outraged and threatened.
Then something happened, physically, she hadn’t expected. She felt all her juices begin to flow, inexorable and unstoppable. She felt light-headed and strange. Not herself. And the space they were in felt safe and private.
Who was to know? She let her arms fall to her sides, letting him use his hands on her as one lets a musician play an instrument: She watched, thrilling to the chords that resonated within her, absolutely new. She throbbed with a deep, resounding bass.
Her classes at Bernstein became a vague hum. She’d finally enrolled in the associate program to become a dental hygienist, enjoying the idea of leaning over strange men and telling them to open wide, but the classes were a bore. She could barely keep her eyes open through Dental Hygiene Theory I, Dental Materials, Infection and Immunity, Ezekiel and Gaonic Literature II. All she wanted to do was close them and dream of the night to come.
Things progressed rapidly. Yitzie was like a drug. He was everything she really wanted. Exciting and unconventional, but from a good family who had
yichus
and money. She daydreamed of how this was all going to end with a marriage proposal. They were, after all, so “good together.” They had so much in common. She knew she could keep him happy.
But whenever he wanted to take it up the final notch, explore the last frontier, she kept pushing him away, adamantly refusing to go that extra step that would mark her forever as an uncapped bottle of Coke, as a rebbitzin once told them in high school. A girl who had lost all her fizz before her wedding night.
The laws of the Torah about maintaining virginity—as taught in yeshiva—were uncompromising. A girl who willingly bedded a man was a whore. And even if she was forced into it, she still had to marry the creep and he wasn’t allowed to divorce her, ever. That was a punishment for the rapist, her rabbis had explained, never really getting into why a girl would want to be tied to such a man the rest of her life. If you pushed them on it, they’d get all excited, and finally shout at you that a woman’s position during biblical times made it imperative for her to have a husband, and who would marry a deflowered, single girl?
Where it all got really sticky, as far as she could see, was when you decided to marry someone other than your lover. If the husband was clueless, expecting you to be a virgin and found out otherwise, he was within his legal right to throw you out without a dime. Which is why in biblical times the girl’s parents saved the sheet from the marriage bed to display to town elders should just such a problem arise. Nowadays, though, DNA testing made presenting the bloody sheet as proof of virginity a bit more tricky. So Delilah knew she had to be cautious.
But she was in love with him. And he—he was… ? She couldn’t make up her mind.
Sometimes he seemed totally enthusiastic, like a rabid sports fan fanatically immersed in witnessing the achievement of that last winning goal. And sometimes he seemed distracted, even bored. Sometimes he said hurtful things, like, “Another blintz, another inch,” pinching her flesh in various places. His moodiness confused and depressed her. It took quite a bit of self-coaching for her to talk herself out of her bouts of pessimism and fright. She was, however, successful. She planned their future. He had no interest in taking over his father’s congregation, which was fine with her, because she had no interest at all in being a rabbi’s wife.
The mere sound of the Yiddish term
rebbitzin
filled her with distaste and dread, conjuring up images of overweight Jewesses in bad wigs wearing dowdy calf-length skirts and long-sleeved polyester blouses. She remembered the rabbis’ wives who had been her teachers in yeshiva high school, those mirthless paragons of virtue dedicated to squeezing out and discarding the last ounce of joy from living, the way you squeezed a sweet orange, leaving behind only the empty bitter shell. God, God, God, and more God, combined with a life of doing
chesed
—good deeds—i.e., distasteful and inconvenient favors for ungrateful people you hardly knew and who would never reciprocate. That was the ideal of Jewish life according to her pious teachers, who, if they had had a magic wand, would have waved it over all twenty of them as they sat in class, turning their clothes navy blue, their hair into long braids, and their thoughts to bearded rabbinical students who would touch them only two weeks out of the month until they got pregnant, and then it was anybody’s guess.
Only Rebbitzin Hamesh, her teacher for Jewish thought, filled her with admiration. While she viewed with pity her excess weight, her stiffly sprayed, formally coiffed wigs, and her matronly clothes and thick ankles, she nevertheless found her witty and charming in a pale-lipped pious way. Delilah was certain Rebbitzin Hamesh would wind up in heaven with a rich reward.
Once, Rebbitzin Hamesh invited the girls over on a Friday night. She’d worn a blue-velvet ankle-length housecoat and an elaborate head scarf. The house had been well swept with colorful touches, surprisingly beautiful rugs in bright greens and reds on the floors and walls. The house had smelled of roast chicken and warm sweet apple kugel. There had been a large lovely china closet filled with beautiful silver ritual objects. And
Rebbitzin Hamesh had not looked miserable or tasteless as she sat there with her ankles crossed, her clean cheeks shining like ripe apples as she read her prayer book and waited for her husband to return from synagogue with her well-scrubbed children.
But it had been so quiet, so very, very quiet. Like being in paradise already. Or like being dead. Rebbitzin Hamesh, Delilah thought, was too young for this kind of life. Anyone under eighty was too young. And that, Delilah decided, was the problem with worrying about earning your heavenly reward too early. It was then she made up her mind to live until she died. Rewards in the Afterlife, Heaven or Hell, were hard to imagine, let alone sacrifice the here and now for. It was like that television show,
Let’s Make a Deal.
Do you trade the perfectly fine refrigerator you have in your hand for curtain number three, which might or might not have a new car, thereby risking getting stuck with a broken-down wagon filled with straw? Ah, the eternal question.
One night, Yitzie took her to a friend’s apartment “for a Chanukah party.” It was in an apartment house in Kew Gardens. No one answered the door when they knocked. Surprisingly, she saw he had a key. When he opened the door, there was no menorah. No latkes. No dreidels. No friends. They were alone together.
By the light of the menorah he dug up somewhere in a closet (“Otherwise, I’m leaving!”) he sat down beside her on the very worn but comfortable old sofa, where he piously reminded her of the Jewish custom of relaxing while the candles still burned. He apologized for upsetting her. And then, almost more quickly than she could have imagined, things got completely out of hand. She didn’t even recognize herself, the feelings streaming through her like a tsunami breaking through, washing out her brain like some flimsy beach structure that just floated out to sea, unpinned from its moorings. His clothes were everywhere. His hands were everywhere. And then, suddenly, her clothes were everywhere too. It was all happening so fast, she wasn’t even sure she knew, exactly, what was going on. At least, that is what she told herself then, and later. She felt stunned, enthralled, humiliated, embarrassed, curious. When it was over, she stood up, looking down at the couch pillows. She touched them. Were they damp, dry? Were the stains old, new?
Frantically, she pulled on her clothes.
Afterward, Yitzie was very romantic, very concerned. On the way back to Bernstein, he stopped a block away. There, in the shadowed alleyway of
an office tower, he held her close and kissed her just the way she’d always imagined in her fantasies. Yet, alone, sitting on her dorm-room bed, she felt a sense of deep shock and horror.
She undressed and took a shower, fingering her body tenderly, as if it belonged to someone else, someone childish and vulnerable. She examined herself, her clothing, the dark blue skirt, the white lamb’s-wool sweater. She was not in any pain; still, the idea of what might have happened was profoundly terrifying to her.
Was it a sin? she wondered. And if so, which one?
She was free and single. And sex without marriage wasn’t actually forbidden anywhere, as far as she could tell, whatever blather they’d thrown at her in high school. True, she hadn’t gone to the ritual baths, but that was more Yitzie’s problem than hers, sin-wise. She began to calm down, soaping herself and standing in the downpour of lovely hot water until all her bad thoughts just washed away. It was just nature taking its course. She shrugged, a secret little smile curling her lips as she allowed herself to think, How lovely! How lovely! And now that they had
done it
(she began to convince herself of that fact, although she was by no means sure; it had all happened so fast, and she was so totally inexperienced), she was now certain, beyond a doubt, that chuppah and
kedushin
—a marriage canopy and a sacred wedding ceremony—were on the horizon, the next step for the two of them.
She would be Mrs. Yitzie Polinsky, daughter-in-law of the renowned Torah sage Rebbe Menachem Polinsky of Crown Heights. And Yitzie? He would find his place in law or accounting or be taken in by one of his father’s wealthy Hasidim as a trainee and later a partner in some lucrative import-export business. There would be a lovely home in Jamaica Estates, one of those mock Tudors that Donald Trump’s father had put up and that were going for a million or more these days. They’d put in a swimming pool—she had to have a swimming pool—and beautiful Henredon French country-style furniture. She already had a scrapbook filled with ads for exactly the pieces she wanted. She’d have a large china closet filled with wonderful silver ritual objects, and all those creamy, gold-edged porcelain pieces made especially for Jews by Lenox: the seder plate, the kiddush cup, all
of
which would never be used and would pass untouched to her children, who would also never use them. She’d have a charge account in Lord & Taylor and Macy’s. And they’d have great sex and a house filled
with little yeshiva boys and pretty yeshiva girls. And everyone who’d been unkind to her in high school would eat their hearts out.