The Saturday Wife (5 page)

So she didn’t object when Yitzie suggested another “party” at the same friend’s house. But this time, when they got there, he took out a camera.

She stared at it. He kissed her and then started to unbutton her blouse. It was just that she was so beautiful, he explained rapidly. He wanted a picture of her like this, to always remember, for when they got old.

The idea that he was thinking so far ahead into the future thrilled her. “You know, Yitzie,” she cooed, “we really should do something about this if we love each other so much. Why don’t we just get married?”

She saw his eyes twitch as he continued to smile and fiddle with her buttons.

Had he not heard her? she wondered, as she suddenly leaned out of his reach.

He sat back. “What’s wrong?”

“I asked you a question.”

He made a sound like
mmmmhummyeehmm.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re interrupting me.”

She snatched the camera and threw it against the wall.

“What the… ?” Yitzie jumped up. “That’s a Canon!”

“I want an answer.”

He was on his knees, gathering up the pieces, appalled. He looked at her, his eyes narrowing. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure!” she told him hotly, as her heart sank.

He shrugged. “It’s been fun, but you’ve gotten the wrong impression.”

Her face paled. “What impression is that, Yitzie?”

“That we’re a nice Orthodox Jewish couple from Brooklyn who’s just blowing off a little steam until we fall back into the fold.”

That’s exactly what she’d thought, except for the Brooklyn part. She was, after all, from Queens, a major difference as far as she was concerned. “I know that! Who said I want that?”

He touched her face; his eyes held a sardonic gleam. “Don’t you? Aren’t you just dying to pick out your colors and move into my family’s two-family in Crown Heights where we can live until we have the down payment for our own house in some swanky Jewish neighborhood, walking distance to the local shul?” He sneered.

She shrugged off his hand. “So what if I am? Who do you think you are, Mick Jagger? You’re Rabbi Polinsky’s son, the one who wears a
streimel
and
kapota
every Saturday, like some Polish nobleman from the Middle Ages. Sooner or later, if you wait around, they’ll fix you up with some short rabbi’s daughter with thick stockings from Beit Yaakov. She’ll make you turn off the lights and put a hole in a sheet.”

His hands fumbled around, looking for a cigarette. He lit it and lay down on the bed, exhaling large smoke rings that rose and broke against the dirty white ceiling. The smell of smoke was suffocating. “You know, Delilah, that hole-in-the-sheet thing? It’s a myth.”

She began to cough. He ran one finger up her arm from wrist to elbow. “I’m going to miss you,” he said.

She thought perhaps she hadn’t heard him right.

A few weeks later, she missed.

Well, that was putting it pessimistically, she told herself. After all, she didn’t always get it on the day it was supposed to come. There were a million reasons. I mean, she wasn’t a clock the way some girls were.

But then four more days passed. And a fifth.

She called Yitzie, but all she got was an answering machine. She left ten messages, one every half hour. Then she went knocking on Sharona Gottleib’s door.

Sharona opened it. She looked annoyed. “Well, well.”

What had she ever done to her? But there was no time for game playing.

“Listen, I’ve got to get in touch with Yitzie. He doesn’t answer the phone—”

Sharona pulled her in and shut the door behind her, her fingers painfully tight around her wrist. “Not so loud, you idiot!”

“You don’t understand.”

She arched her brow. “No, huh? Late, are we?”

Delilah sank down on the bed. “Well, maybe. But I’m not even sure we had… that we did… What am I going to do, Sharona?”

“I tried to warn you. But you wouldn’t listen.”

Was that true? Delilah searched her memory and came up with a few snooty remarks thrown in her direction by Sharona when she’d asked for Yitzie’s phone number. Something like, “You are making a huge mistake.
He’s poison.” She’d chalked it up to jealousy. Or to Sharona feeling she wasn’t as good as Penina, not worthy of the great Yitzie Polinsky.

“But you were the one who fixed him up with Penina! If you felt that way, why did you do it?”

Sharona’s face went rigid. “I had no choice. He’s got some photos of me.”

This information sank in with horror. “Oh, no! Sharona, what am I going to do?”

Sharona went to the door and opened it. “You’ll figure it out.”

Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

She lay back on her bed, the blinds drawn, the sounds of New York City street traffic rolling over her as if she were lying spread-eagled on 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. Instinctively, she stretched her fingers over her stomach, as she tried to imagine the future. Was it her imagination, or was it already rounder, fuller?

She saw herself waddling through the halls, her sweaters stretched over a basketball-sized lump. She imagined the shocked and horrified stares of her classmates, the good yeshiva girls, the out-of-town rabbis’ daughters, as they whispered just behind her. She saw herself summoned into Rebbitzin Craimer’s office, the way she would ease her bulky pregnant body into the narrow chair as the old yenta lectured her about being a bad influence, a disgrace to the good name of the institution. What could she answer? She’d even have to agree!

And then they would throw her out of school with no degree, all that tuition and studying about plaque down the toilet, and all her student loans coming due with no way to pay them off! Her father (her mother, she was sure, would not be around, having died of a heart attack the moment she’d heard the news) would grudgingly take her in, and she’d have to listen to his snoring and watch him sit around in those sleeveless undershirts he liked, his skinny chest and hairy arms flailing as he tried to comfort her. She’d have to listen to his advice: Go back to Dallas or Houston. You’ll be better off. Sorry I ever came to this city. They’ve got plenty of rabbis down in Texas. Don’t worry. You’ll find rabbis.

Or perhaps she’d throw herself on the mercies of the city’s welfare system and rent a little apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up where she’d sit terrified behind thrice-bolted doors, hoping crackheads and dope fiends wouldn’t break it down and kidnap her and her baby, selling them both
into white slavery. A place where for recreation, she’d watch the roaches race each other across the kitchen counter. None of her friends would visit her. She’d be an outcast.

Hot tears dripped into her pillow as she rolled over onto her side.

There was another way. A trip to a clinic—they were clean and efficient, and it wouldn’t be worse than going to a dentist—and before you could say Yitzie Polinsky, the little bugger would be an ingredient in some new antiaging cosmetic venture.

Her baby. They’d suck it out of her.

She’d seen that book with the pictures of fetuses inside the womb. Whatever those crazy women’s groups told you about freedom over your body, it was a baby. It had a head, and a little tush, and tiny fingers and those tiny closed eyes. And they’d just Hoover it out of her, like some mess that needed cleaning up.

It was then she’d felt the entire true weight of sin crash down on her. Whatever she’d done in her life so far, she hadn’t actually done anything hurtful to God. But killing a baby, even the froglike beginnings of a baby, because it was too inconvenient and embarrassing, would be a true sin. The God she seldom thought about, but always believed in, would not be able to forgive that. And for the rest of her life, she would have to live in a world in which she knew she had done this terrible thing, until the day she died, at which point her true punishment would only begin.

According to some woman who’d undergone a near-death experience—a bunch of bricks fell on her head while she was walking in the street—and had explained it all on
Oprah,
when you died you had this moment when you were forced to sit back and watch your life, like a movie. You couldn’t close your eyes, because you had no eyelids. God would be watching her watch herself as the film showed her walking to the clinic, filling out the forms, lying down on the table. It would show her letting them,
telling them,
to rid her of this God-given life. A child, hers and Yitzie Polinsky’s.

She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.

“Can I put on the light?”

It was her roommate, Rivkie.

Rivkie Lifschitz was blessed with all things. She was from a respected well-to-do family and already engaged to an acknowledged Torah scholar. Perhaps because life had treated her so gently, she had also become a kind and generous human being. She was the kind of girl who learned the Torah
portion of the week and managed to extract some beautiful moral lesson even from those difficult sections that dealt with body sores full of pus and the minutiae of the laws involved in animal sacrifices. “Blind or broken, or maimed, or having a wen or a dry or moist scab, ye shall not bring these near unto God and as an offering made by fire shall ye not bring aught of them unto the Altar.” Even in this, Rivkie Lifschitz would manage to find some redeeming little detail, something about the priest’s wife, and how the rabbis say that a man’s house is his wife. How a woman completely bears the character of the home, and how holy that is. And a woman who is the wife of a temple priest—or his daughter—has a higher degree of holiness… . Only Rivkie could ferret out these details.

Once, she’d even had a discussion with Rivkie about
bedikot,
those mandatory self-examinations pious women performed for a week following their menstrual period to check if their vaginal discharges were completely free of blood before immersing in the ritual baths and resuming relations with their husbands. If the inserted cloth came out white, no prob. If it came out red, big prob. But if it came out yellow or brown, a woman had to ask a rabbi to examine it and decide whether she could count it as a clean day, and go on toward the finish line and her husband’s arms, or if she had to return to Go, and start counting all over again.

“It really isn’t as bad as you think. You can FedEx it to any rabbi in the country. He doesn’t even have to know who you are. Or you can give it to the rebbitzin.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

Rivkie had looked at her, surprised. “Look, we’re all just trying to do God’s will because we love Him so much. If He is asking us to separate until we can count seven clean days, we have to do it in the best way possible, because He is so good to us, and asks so little… . It would be terrible to separate a couple more than is necessary, and terrible to allow them to be intimate when it’s against God’s will. It’s part of a rabbi’s job description to help couples keep their marriage holy in God’s eyes. And if I, as the rabbi’s helpmate, can help him, or help the women in my congregation feel more comfortable about asking, then it would be a tremendous good deed, no?”

That was Rivkie. The perfect future rabbi’s wife, whom no detail of ritual observance, no matter how gross, demeaning, or disgusting, could derail her from her earnest pursuit of true holiness.

No one could dislike Rivkie. It was impossible. She was so giving, so sincere. And even though you might smile behind your hand at her
earnestness and the way she bounced around the world with love and enthusiasm, there would be no way you could fault her. There wasn’t a mean or selfish bone in her body. Whatever she learned, she put into practice.

They’d been roommates for about six months. They hadn’t spoken much. This, Rivkie chalked up to the fact that Delilah was a little older than she was and perhaps from a family of lesser means, which forced her to be extra busy earning money to finance her studies. The few times they had had a conversation, Delilah had wound up borrowing clothes, which Rivkie was only too happy to lend her—overjoyed, in fact.

She felt guilty sometimes for coming from such a wealthy family, being engaged to such a wonderful young man, having her health and her whole future ahead of her. She wanted to thank God every waking minute, and any good deed she managed to do she felt gave God back some pleasure. She felt this way even when her clothes came back to her wrinkled and stained—or failed to come back at all, which she viewed as an even bigger mitzva, because Delilah obviously needed new clothes badly, enough to take someone else’s.

Rivkie sat down at her bedside, shocked. “Delilah, what’s wrong?”

Her voice, so sweet and kind, filled with true concern, demolished the floodgates. Delilah sat up and sobbed—loud wet sobs full of the breathless sucking up of phlegm.

Rivkie, horrified, put her arms around her and patted her back. “Can’t you tell me what’s the matter? Maybe I could help you?”

At this, Delilah sobbed even louder.

Rivkie hugged her. “You don’t have to tell me. But you should tell God. Talk to Him. Explain it to Him. Ask Him to help you.”

Delilah looked up with surprise. Taking the tissue from Rivkie’s hand, she considered it. Yes! Yes! This was the answer. Who was compassionate and kind and forgiving? Who, after all, caused new life to be created in the first place?