Sotah (6 page)

She finished her prayers, bowing with deep reverence and an even greater sense of guilt than usual. She knew G-d had read her mind. The sense of nothing being hidden was part of her faith. And yet she had somehow constructed a small, private trunk that could be firmly locked where she hid all she was ashamed of feeling and imagining. She did this even though she felt G-d was kinder than her teachers, more open than her parents. If someone had to read her thoughts, she would prefer it was He rather than anyone else she could think of. He would realize that it was just dreams that brought her inside the hot, heavy metal of tanks in a green khaki uniform; just dreams that put her in tight jeans inside the campus of the university. Reality was
Ima
and
Aba
. And being inside this classroom. And Dvorah’s being married to fat Yaakov Klein. She looked around the classroom.

Of the thirty-five young women in Dina’s senior class, two were married and eight already engaged. It was only October. By June another ten would also have announced dates for weddings. In this they bore no resemblance to any other group of girls their age in the entire city or country. Except for other branches of Beit Yaakov, and schools run by Hasidic groups like Lubavitch, Belz, or Satmar, there were no other high school classes in the city or country where this was considered normal, or even acceptable.

When she stopped dreaming and looked at reality, she saw that this too was what she wanted, longed for. To be one of the first to be married. It was prestigious. To come to the graduation ceremony with a married woman’s wig in maternity clothes was like being valedictorian elsewhere. It meant that you came from a fine family, that you were pretty and good and most desirable. It was like winning a beauty pageant or being chosen Miss Universe.

Dvorah’s words often came back to her as a small, tingling chill that rose up her spine. It had taken Dvorah so long to be chosen! There was no money. There was a taint on the family name.

The modesty of her outlook, the high ridicule in which vanity was held, the near contempt in which the physical, material world was viewed, kept her from gaining any comfort from her lovely face, her exquisite body. Had she been a girl in jeans and a sweatshirt across the street, the knowledge of being a beautiful, desirable woman would have come to her as a fact, like the inevitable rise of the moon in the starry sky. It would have filled her with subtle female understanding and that deep confidence that makes a beautiful woman carefree and careless and happy.

She did not know that she was beautiful. So she worried and ached and despaired about who would ever be willing to marry her. She thought of the years passing, of having to go out to work as a teacher of small children and everyone looking at her, as they had begun to look at Dvorah, with that sly, pitying curiosity.
Im yirtza Hashem by dir,
“G-d willing, it will happen to you”—hated phrase!—would rain down upon her head like little pelting stones every time she went to a wedding or engagement party or circumcision ceremony.

Yet, marriage! She felt it was so big, so important! It was for grown-ups, like
Ima
and
Aba
, or those women in the grocery with their long, unkempt bathrobes and tightly wound head scarves. She was still a girl, a young, innocent girl, her conscious mind reiterated countless times. You want to go on the way you are, being home with your family, that same sane, calm voice told her. You want to keep on learning, it insisted. To keep on blowing and blowing into the dreams and watching how they grow and shape themselves into new patterns not yet tried or conceived.

But there was another voice, hoarse, rude, and dangerous. A voice like the earth—soiling, yet rich and basic and shamelessly fertile. It was like having your period or going to the bathroom or watching your naked body in a mirror. Shameful and yet with the undeniable excitement of dangerous realities coming too close to ignore. She tried desperately to keep it away from her. She pressed it down in her trunk, which she bolted with a heavy steel lock. On the trunk she piled the soft cushions of her proper ideas, her parents’ and teachers’ clear, untainted vision of Dina Reich, soft, pious daughter and dutiful little student. The higher the cushions were piled, the more distant and muffled the voice became, so that she could often convince herself it had gone away for good or had never existed at all.

And then something totally unexpected would happen, scattering the cushions wildly, springing open the lock, and flinging the trunk lid open with a crash. And then the voice would thrust itself in her face like an angry, violent escapee from prison, a mocking cruel stranger.

The first time it had happened, she’d been fourteen years old.

There was a new boy in the grocery. She noticed him immediately. He was crouching on the floor, piling cans on the shelves. She stood just above him, reaching up for the warm, fragrant loaves. And as she stretched, she felt her whole body arch in a graceful taut curve that somehow pleased her, and she knew, just knew, his eyes had also seen it, and the voice all at once shouted at her that it had pleased him, too.

Instinctively she looked at him and found him looking back, boldly and questioningly. Then he relaxed, his eyes calming into a smile that crinkled the corners of his eyelids and the sides of his nose. A smile not involving his mouth at all. He was very dark, with gleaming coal black hair cut like a good child’s, very short and neat with a well-loved child’s delicate, even part. His eyes were small and slanted, almost hidden under dark, overhanging brows; his skin was olive dark and stretched smooth over high cheek-bones and a square, cleft chin. There was a handsome delicacy about his face that made her heart leap. His eyes caught hers and held them.

She fumbled with the loaves, almost dropping them. Then dark, shameful voice shouted all manner of terrible things in her ears with the roar of a wild, dangerous beast got loose.

From then on her heart always tripped a little before entering the store. Sometimes she saw him right away and jerked her eyes down, but never soon enough to avoid his ironic, cool, bold eyes, which were at once insolent and yet flattering. And sometimes he would not be immediately apparent, and she would find herself lingering by the loaves, her head turning furtively in all directions, searching, until very soon she glimpsed the soft, burnished gleam of dark hair behind the shelves, and she felt her stomach ache with excitement and strange foreboding.

He never spoke to her, nor she to him. Nor did she ever hear him speak. It was as if he had no voice, no actual presence, except in her secretive, fertile imaginings where her own loud voice roared and crashed all around her like high, threatening waves.

She tried to think of him as a husband. To imagine him sitting down at the table to eat, next to her father and mother. But he wore no skullcap. He had no beard. He did not fit, even in her wildest dreams. And, interestingly and frighteningly, this made him even more attractive and exciting. She dreamed of teaching him the Torah, of buying him his first
kipah
and
tsitzis
, the four-cornered, fringed undergarment needed for prayer. She could almost feel her palm lifting back with the springy resilience of his thick dark hair as she pressed a skullcap to his head, affixing it with bobby pins.

Then one day she went to the store and saw him standing outside by a delivery truck. He stood sideways in clean, slim jeans and scuffed shoes and a short-sleeved cotton shirt. His arms were slim and long and corded with muscles. His white teeth shone. He was helping unload a delivery of flour, and as she neared she heard his voice. “
Inshalah
,” he said in Arabic. “If Allah is willing.”

She remembered that moment, like the moment of a bomb hitting and mushrooming with poisonous accuracy over a selfmade cataclysm. An Arab! A goy! She had not known. She had thought him merely a secular Jew, which was bad enough. But an Arab! She remembered the horror and the shame and the birth of a deep self-distrust that never left her.

She never went back to the store.

The sane voice spoke to her now. The other one was gone, she told herself. The trunk was deep, the lock strong. The cushions as insulating, as suffocating and vast, as the clouds in heaven itself. She could not hear it anymore, she told herself, no matter how loud its siren’s call, how frightening its blood-stopping roar. She was safe from it. She missed it.

Chapter four

“
Y
aakov,” Dvorah said softly with guilt. He was sitting at the dining room table with an open book. She hated to interrupt his learning. But he was hardly ever home. They both left early every morning, he to the
kollel
and she to her job teaching third-graders in a Hasidic girls’ school. They spent time together each evening from eight until they retired at ten. Twice a week he had a study group in Mishna that lasted until nine-thirty; and once a week he tutored students to bring in a little extra money.

Only on Friday evenings and Shabbat did time stretch before them with luxurious slowness, allowing them to talk and get to know each other. Despite their physical intimacy, in many ways they were still strangers. They had spent only five or six evenings together before meeting under the wedding canopy and had been married only about six months.

Yaakov looked up immediately, putting aside the sefer. He smiled at her and reached out for her hand. She smiled back, reaching out timidly toward him, trying not to notice that his hand was soft and heavy, the knuckles white and fleshy. But he was a kind man, she thought again, moving closer to him. She didn’t love him. Not yet. But that would come. He was so warm and affectionate. It was clear that he loved her.

“Yaakov, I hate to bother you, but I want to talk to you about something serious. Maybe it could wait for Shabbat, I don’t know”—she hesitated—“but I can’t. I keep thinking about it.”

He patted her hand and pulled out a chair for her, making that mock severe face he used when he was joking, the eyebrows lifting, the mouth turning down in a clown’s frown. “Do you have to apologize to talk to me? I should beg
your
forgiveness for never giving you enough time. After all, a man is supposed to spend the whole first year of his marriage making his bride happy. The Torah even gives you a draft deferment to do that.”

She wasn’t quite comfortable with him, not yet. He still seemed like a stranger, a visitor she had to be nice to in the courteous way of good hostesses. Yet now, encouraged, she took the plunge. “It’s my sister Dina.”

He couldn’t imagine what was coming next but waited patiently. Yeshiva boys,
kollel
men, had so little experience with women. Every day he was married was a new experience for him, a new world. The ideas women had, the way they looked at everything, was so far removed from the familiar men’s world he had moved in exclusively since beginning heder at age three. Her heart was soft. She was constantly telling him of tragedies and celebrations of people he did not know. She seemed connected to everyone. Their lives touched hers. She was always baking cakes or making chickens for neighbors who were ill or after childbirth. Or baby-sitting. Women were so full of
chesed
, kindness, he thought. Through her, his sterile world of learning about goodness was connected to the world of doing, of actually reaching out to help other people.

He looked at her face, her pretty dress with the frivolous bows, and touched her shoulder. Every time he did it, he felt a little guilty. Being permitted to touch a woman, after all those years of not being allowed to even look at one, still made him flinch with pleasure, like a little boy finally given permission to cross the street himself who crosses up and back simply for the sheer pleasure of doing it.

“I think it’s time we found Dina a
shiddach.
” She looked at him expectantly. He looked back in utter confusion.

“Well, yes. As it is written: ‘Eighteen to the marriage canopy.’”

She looked at him, nodding, clearly waiting for something more.

“I could show you some very interesting discussions of matchmaking in the Talmud. Perfectly fascinating
sugiot! …
”

She cleared her throat, puzzled. “Well, sometime, it would be interesting, I suppose, but first we have to settle this.” She smiled brightly.

He stared at her, his smile fading a little, his mind wandering back from the section on matchmaking in the Talmud he had been reviewing mentally. Only slowly did it begin to dawn on him that something more was expected of him. “My dear wife”—he finally gave up—“could you be a little more specific?”

She flushed. Wasn’t it self-explanatory? “Well, Yaakov. You must know some fine young men in the
kollel
. Or perhaps your family might.”

“What about the
shadchen
, Reb Garfinkel? Wouldn’t it be better—”

“
Shadchens
cost money. They get so much for the initial meeting and three times that if there’s a wedding. And if you don’t pay, they come to the wedding and curse the couple!”

“Not Reb Garfinkel!”

“I’m not talking specifically of him,” she hedged, although she
had
heard certain stories. “I’m sure he would never do such a thing. But my parents have taken out so many loans just to help with our wedding and to furnish this house. I would like to save them something if I could. Also, the professional
shadchens
are never as good as friends and relatives who really know the couple. It would be a mitzvah, and I’d be so grateful.”

He patted her hand, thinking. Almost all the men in the
kollel
were married. Almost all the men he knew were married. “Eighteen to the marriage canopy,” was an edict yeshiva boys tended to obey. After all, how long could normal human feelings be suppressed? They married them off quickly, so that frustration and weakness wouldn’t lead them down the back streets of Tel Aviv.

He looked at his wife’s expectant face and hated to disappoint her. He racked his brain again.