The Little Bride (17 page)

She made her face fall flat. Even as she trembled with anger, she brought her teeth together, lips together; she willed her cheeks and nose and chin into one plane: tongueless, intractable. She didn’t shrug Ruth’s hands off her shoulders; she would not give her that satisfaction. She sat in the chair to which she was led, and took the fork which was handed to her. In her brief era of sight, she hadn’t seen Max, but he was next to her now; she could feel the particular distance he liked to keep. Ruth’s laughter circled the table as she served. Someone called for a toast, but Minna didn’t dare grope for her glass for fear she’d knock it over; she had seen Ruth’s crystal, and knew that it was real.
L’chaim!
Glasses clinked. She sat. She waited for the conversation to begin before cutting into her food. There was the harvest. There was a new style of plow, better for this particular soil. There was the question of official statehood, and whether anyone cared. There was news of a man traveling Dakota Territory, selling fraudulent medicines, and of workers striking in Chicago, and of a strange tower being erected in Paris. There was a story, told by Leo, about a Norwegian woman who’d been stolen away by an Indian tribe and taken back to live in their tepees. When the woman’s people found her, he said, she didn’t want them anymore. She’d been brainwashed. She was wearing skins and living with an Indian man and her hair was plaited down her back.

It wasn’t a true story, Minna guessed. There were likely a hundred versions—a Finnish woman stolen by outlaws; a German woman by snakes; in Beltsy, it had been a good Jewish girl living happily with the wolves. Here it was Indians. Always Indians. She remembered her father telling her,
Always know where the people are who are more despised than you
, and she supposed this was why everyone talked so much about the Indians, though no one but Jacob—if he was to be believed—had ever met one; it was a comfort to know they were out there hiding, living, being hunted. Everyone loved Leo’s story. The table shook. Minna picked out different laughs: Leo’s rolling, Jacob’s high and staccato, Otto’s as clean and even as his clapping. The only voice she knew and didn’t hear was Samuel’s, which made her self-conscious, for she couldn’t help feeling that he must be watching her not laughing, too. She began to eat more quickly, stabbing fish, meat, a dried sweet fruit she couldn’t identify. The carrots were even better than the sun, better than a Messina orange, better than anything food could be if it was only food and not deliverance—

“Minna. Love. We have all evening.”

She stopped chewing. In Max’s voice was an unusual confidence, even a command. Minna forgot, for long stretches, that Max had been married before. He’d sat at a feast like this. He’d blindfolded a bride. Or maybe the blindfolding was new, an amendment, so as to possess Minna more securely. She felt gravy dribble onto her chin. She felt a shadow rise up, a tall gloom of a gone wife. Was this their intention, she wondered, these women like Lina and her mother who left without permission or blessing? To leave themselves behind like unfinished smudges, dark enough to change the view yet faint enough to make you think you might be mad?

At Minna’s neck was a pinching: the collar Ruth had made, held up by wire. Because without it, she’d said, the dress, well—how to say it—the dress was just a little bit—wanton.

 

 

 

B
Y the time Ruth untied Minna’s blindfold, the guests were saying their good-byes. The windows were black, swimming with flickers of lamplight and faces, which Minna couldn’t look at directly. She felt as if she’d been somewhere shameful. Her mouth, she feared, was spattered with flecks of food. She was tired, tired as if she’d been looking into the sky for days straight, so tired that when Ruth handed her back her sash she didn’t tie it around her waist but crushed it in her fist. As Max tugged her away from the window, she stared at the floor, and as Ruth began to lead them up to their room, she focused on the children’s slippers, and Leo’s polished boots, and Jacob and Samuel’s unpolished boots, bandaged so thickly in cloth they had become more cloth than leather, though for the special occasion her what, yes, her stepsons had used fresh white rags: there were Jacob’s, haphazardly wound into shapeless blocks; and Samuel’s, so neatly wrapped she couldn’t help but imagine him wrapping them, with utter and delicate attention, like a woman might wrap a fine scarf around her neck.

Minna’s blood ran so loud she was sure everyone in the room could hear it, and she was ashamed of this, too. She didn’t want Max and she didn’t fear Max, not in the way wives were meant to want and fear husbands, as if he were God reduced to man. She was barely thinking of Max; she feared nothing but more shame; she wanted nothing but sleep. On the stairs, she couldn’t see her own shoes—or rather Ruth’s shoes, borrowed—beneath the giant dress. Lifting her legs was like lifting buckets of water from the creek. She gripped Max’s hand for support. She thought how long it had been since she’d walked up stairs, gone from one realm to another yet still under one roof, that wooden, again, perhaps, metamorphosis, she thought she should be grateful and yet she wasn’t, Ruth’s “gift” of her bedroom felt like mockery, pity, she and Leo and the children all stuffed into a bed in the next one, pretending to hear nothing.

She was not grateful. And as the door to the room opened, she was no longer afraid. It was only a room, only a square space built to separate here from there. She had been in rooms before. She was so tired, and there was a bed high off the floor, an iron frame painted white with a white feather blanket and white feather pillows, too. It was just like in the story, which Minna had forgotten, the story the women always told in the square after a wedding. Minna and her father were always there, listening, even if they hadn’t attended the ceremony or watched the parade, they always went to stand among the stragglers, he with the men, Minna peering through the spaces between the women’s waists. A reluctant bride, went the story . . . though the reasons for her reluctance were always changing: sometimes it was a repulsive groom who tripped over his caftan and licked his lips; or the bride’s sense of duty had been damaged in the womb by her mother’s infidelities; or maybe the bride had neglected to attend her
mikvah
bath and was afraid, either of soiling the groom or, less nobly, of being found out. Whatever the reasons, whatever woman was doing the telling, the story always involved the groom entering a room with a large white feather bed. He took off his clothes, all except for his
tallis
and his
yarmulke
, but when he reached the bed, he found no bride. He patted the sheets. He lifted them up. He patted again. Finally, he looked into a corner and there, sitting on a high chest of drawers, was his bride. She wore her dress still, and her veil, so that he couldn’t see her eyes. The groom began to sweat. Finally, he spoke.
Well?
Or sometimes,
And?
Or,
Have you taken ill?
Once, Minna heard it:
Will you come down from there in my lifetime?

The woman telling the story would pause here for effect. She looked around slowly, delightedly. Then, at last, she delivered the final line, which was always exactly the same:
The white bride on the dresser was nothing but a dress stuffed with pillows.

The square would fill with laughter. Everyone laughed except for Minna, who found the story terrifying. Where had the real bride gone? But now the door closed and Max turned to face her and Minna thought, I was a little girl. She’d pitied the stuffed bride as much as she had the real one, like she’d pitied cats stuck up trees, fish stuck in grass, the village dwarf with the egg stuck in his neck. Poor bride, poor bride, poor bride. Only later did she realize that sad things were warnings: not to grow up, not to be a bride at all, not a stuffed one on a dresser or a live one who wanted to run away. But by then it was too late—she was far away and alone and knew only fools refused to be brides. And now here she was on her wedding night, and she had not wept and she didn’t believe anymore that this was the end of one life and the beginning of another, or that what happened tonight would truly change her. It would mark her, for others, and her names would be lost—Losk, girl—but she wouldn’t be any different until she was different and it wasn’t going places or doing things that changed a person, it was something she hadn’t been shown or taught and she was so tired and there was the tall white bed and she thought: the brides weren’t pitiable, they were stupid. There was the cool, soft feather bed. Why not climb in?

Max was holding his own hands, smoothing one over the other, a nervous motion Minna stopped by taking them into hers. Still Max made no move, he only gazed at her as if at a small, foreign animal. But hadn’t he done this before? Hadn’t there been another woman, a
beautiful in the way no one disputes
woman, whose clothes he’d known how to remove? Minna’s knees were about to buckle with exhaustion. She pulled toward the bed, taking Max with her, along with his cooked, woolly scent—she would bear it, she would count, the way Galina had told her—but as she pushed herself up onto the feather bed, Max pulled back. She heard him scuffing across the floor, but her eyes were already closed. She lay back. Horizontal at last. She breathed.

“Minna?”

Had hours passed?

“This is for you. To change . . .”

Minna forced her eyes open. Max stood above her, holding what looked like a white sheet. She squinted. In the light of the room’s one lamp, she made out a ribbon of lace. Pearl buttons. She propped herself up to sitting. She hadn’t had a true, full length nightgown since she was a little girl. The weave was fine and soft and light across her fingers. She sat up straighter. Max had an oddly official look on his face.

“Please put it on,” he said, and nodded discreetly toward the room’s far corner. And somehow Minna managed to stand up and walk without laughing: women did so much changing, she thought, only to unchange, so much dressing only to undress. She thought of Galina struggling to squeeze into stockings and corsets and bones—Minna had helped her—only to be sucked out again as soon as possible by a suitor. She thought Galina must have been more ashamed of herself, in some way, than Minna had realized. She held her breath. How would she explain her giddiness? She couldn’t explain it to herself except to say that she was focused on the wrong thing again. But what else should she do? Look straight at Max and begin, at last, to weep? Tell him she would put on the gown but wouldn’t take it off? Tell him she suspected that it had belonged to Lina and refuse it altogether? But she wanted it. She wanted the gown and she wanted to think about Galina instead of Max and she wanted to follow Max’s instructions and find sleep at the end.

From the corner, she glanced back. He was sitting on the bed now, not looking at her, of course, he wouldn’t look without permission, he was a coward when it came down to it, a coward with tyranny in him, like any coward perhaps. He’d taken off his jacket. His shirt was creased as if from sweat, and though she knew he hadn’t worked—did he ever really work?—she decided to pretend that he’d just come in from a hard task because his back looked stronger and broader that way.
Transform what you can
, Galina said,
then count away the rest.

The wedding dress was big enough that after removing the wire collar, Minna shrugged the rest off her shoulders, spun the lacing around to the front, and stepped out. She wobbled slightly as she took off her drawers and undid her bodice, then she quickly pulled the nightgown over her head, buttoned the collar up to her chin—laughter again but now she felt sick, as if her stomach was filled with air—and before she could think she started to walk, and to count as she walked, one, two, three, four—and then she was standing in front of the man as his gaze ran up the white mass of her and settled on her eyes. Minna looked away. She counted one and reached for his top button, careful not to let the tops of her hands brush his beard. Two, and undid it, three, undid the next. Max didn’t look up at her now but stared straight ahead, as if through her gown and through her flesh and through the wall behind her and seven she pulled his shirt from his pants, eight she reached the last button. She was surprised, sliding the cloth over his shoulders, to find his chest nearly hairless. She had imagined a jungle to match his beard but here was skin, pale, so pale it was nearly blue but skin just the same. She forgot to count she was so relieved—then Max’s hands were on her waist, drawing her toward him, and she felt his beard through her gown, rough and spongy the way she’d feared, and his breath, moist, and a heat coming off the rest of him, she started to count again, one, maybe it was the same heat with all of them, a helpless fever, on the edge of deranged, nothing to do with what they wanted to be but only what they were, even the apologetic, red-bearded doctor had given off this heat, four, she ran her hands down his back, five, up, she was fully awake now though she didn’t want to be,
count until the numbers are all you see
, eight and Max slid his fingers down the gown to her hips and the heat at least made his hands feel bigger, they seemed each one to hold a whole thigh, to wrap around her calves, eleven, he was at the bottom of the gown, then under it—she glanced down. He looked like he might be tying his shoes. But then his hands were on her ankles, his skin on her skin, and then thirteen they’d moved up to her knees and fourteen to her thighs again, and she waited for him to duck his head under the gown, she held her breath, she thought she could bear anything if only he didn’t touch her with his beard, not there, she’d taken a bath in Ruth’s kitchen this morning, her first in weeks, her
mikvah
, Ruth declared it, she’d washed her insides so carefully and now the idea of that spongy moss . . .

Abruptly, Max dropped her gown and stood. He pulled the cover back off the bed, took her by the shoulders, turned her around, and sat her down. It was even worse having to sit and do nothing but watch Max unbutton his trousers. Was she meant to lie back, to give him privacy as he’d done with her—or would that be an insult? Did he want her to watch? His trousers fell to the floor. She longed for the blindfold. It looked like a mistake, a wobbly, digitless limb, as if it had been removed from its making before it was ready. Under her chin, a finger asked her to look up. Her cheeks blazed; she’d been staring. She focused on his forehead, that clean, blameless plain, one, and let him lay her back, two, found, three, that she was thankful for his hands on her shoulders, four, even if they were damp through the gown, five, even if she didn’t want them, six, they told her what to do. She lost count again and he was over her, his mouth on her stomach, but still he hadn’t undressed her, still she was a white gown he was kissing, and she felt a little irritated, a little insulted—then she raised up her head and saw, grazing its way up the whiteness, Max’s dark
yarmulke
flapping and flopping, and Minna couldn’t stop her stomach from convulsing with laughter. Max raised his head. His face was flushed. She waited for anger. But he gave her only a sheepish grin. And in her shock, Minna grinned back. Then Max stood up from the bed again and blew out the lamp and in the after-light of the dark she saw the memory of his shape in the room and it wasn’t young but it wasn’t stooped, either, and it wasn’t strong but it moved with a certain tiptoey grace and she thought of his grin again and saw it without his beard and as he lowered himself over her she discovered that he didn’t have to be exactly Max, and she didn’t have to be exactly Minna, at least not Minna encased in who knew whose nightgown. He stood onto his knees, over her, and her eyes were adjusting to the dark but not so much that she could make out details and his form up there looked impressive, a high distant object that might choose her or not. She felt him lean back and pull her gown up her calves and the air was cool and up her thighs and it was cooler and there it was again, the warm center she hadn’t felt or wanted to feel since the basement yet what flustered relief to find it still there. Max’s knees pushed outward and she didn’t move her legs exactly, but they gave, and opened wider, then his hand was there, in her hair, stroking, as if he wanted to brush it but only the hair so that all she felt was a damp tickle and she thought he might go on a long time like that, on and on just tickling—then with the suddenness of a slap Minna was taken up inside, with the suddenness her father used to pull bandages off, Minna was filled. Pain pulsed across her hips, not stabbing like she’d imagined but an aching, glowing sort of pain, not harsh enough you could be certain that it would ever have to stop. She dug her fingers into Max’s back and tried not to make a sound though in her throat her breath kept catching, a small, strangled hiccup, and she pulled him closer so they wouldn’t hear her in the next room, she listened for voices but heard nothing over her own breath, over the sheets muttering between Max’s thrusts, she pulled him down and buried her mouth in his skin which then hardened and rose against her lips and she realized it was his throat, swallowing, and this unintended intimacy somehow shocked her more than all the rest, she pushed him away again but he didn’t seem to notice, he kept taking her up, taking her up. Then, just as suddenly as he’d begun, he collapsed. And now he made his first noise, near Minna’s ear, like air being pressed out of a sack. His beard crept against her cheek. She turned her face away. His breath started to slow against her ear, then he cleared his throat and rose up slightly. His face was dimly visible. His features seemed to be nothing more than white accessories to his beard. He slid off her, pulled her gown back down, patted it into place over her legs. Minna closed her eyes and rolled away. A cool stickiness dribbled onto her thigh.