The Little Bride (18 page)

“Minna. My bride.”

She wanted to vomit, then sleep.

“Did you feel pleasure, Minna? It must not be only obligation, Minna. Did you feel desire?”

A buzzing, a confusion, rooted in her head. Was it not enough to do it? Did she have to answer? Had Lina answered, and what had she said? What time was it in Beltsy? What shapes did new children see in the ceilings of her father’s house? If Beltsy still existed. There had been a smell there, those nights after the weddings, a smell in the stones of something forbidden and old. She smelled it now. She heard the laughter she’d hated. She remembered how when the people were done laughing, they looked up at the sky and gasped. And Minna had always thought of that gasp as an after-shudder of their laughter, but now she wondered if it was a gasp of recognition—if they realized, in that moment, that they’d forgotten the girl who’d actually been married that night, the real bride who was in a real room in a real bed with a real groom. And had they forgotten because they were envious? Because they were prudish? Or pitying? Or had they forgotten simply because people forget? It was possible, right now, that no one in the world was thinking of Minna. Except perhaps for Max, who was behind her—who was, she realized, rubbing her back. No one had ever rubbed her back. Not her mother, unless Minna was too young to remember, in which case it might as well not have happened. Not her father. Her father, except to punish her, only ever touched her head or her hands. To be touched like this, in a place she herself could not reach, made her feel soft, and frightened. It didn’t matter that Max’s nails needed trimming; they grazed her through the gown with unmistakable tenderness. She wondered what happened if one grew used to such a thing. Max had asked a question. She recalled this. But she felt no need to answer it. A shudder rode up the length of her. She cried.

M
INNA woke into whiteness: the billowing feather bed beneath her, the light slipping around the curtains, the curtains themselves, her gown. A light breeze stirred. She felt weightless, luxuriant. She felt as though she might call out and someone would come to see what she wanted. A girl like she had been, perhaps.

She rolled over. There was Max, on his back. There was, coming from Max’s nose, the high, whistling snore she’d mistaken for the breeze.

She sat up.

This was the first morning, then. She knew better than to be disappointed. Yet her throat was as tight as if she’d swallowed a brick. Last night’s tears threatened to flow again; they’d left a crust at her nostrils. She wished, at least, that there had been music, that Ruth hadn’t cut the evening off with her clucking.
Weddings aren’t meant for harvesttime, not a moment’s sleep to spare!
She walked to the window. There was Leo’s masterful windbreak, six trees in a perfect, silent row, and beyond it his fields in their perfect rows, and beyond them the family’s hay, already cut and stacked, golden piles of their labor. Minna’s wish turned suddenly desperate. What wedding was ever as sober? Not a single person had danced the
kamensky
; there was no pageantry, no drunkenness, no wrestling. No noise and no stars. Not even a
chuppah
tall enough to stand under. More than cheated, she felt doomed. Even when the guests lined up to kiss her as they departed, the mood was more funereal than celebratory. Even Otto, who with his pretty blond wife looked the very picture of joy, had not looked joyous.

Or maybe Minna was exaggerating? Maybe this was only selfpity. What bride woke up hating the world? There was, as her aunts used to say, something spoiled in her. And now she was spoiled, too, in the corporeal sense.

And yet—she realized—there’d been no blood.

She twisted around, pulled up a fistful of white gown, to be certain.

What would Max make of that?

She had heard of girls pricking their fingers, drawing red smears down the sheets. But if he woke, and caught her, it would seem she had something to hide. He would question her, and what would she say? She couldn’t tell him about the Look, no more than she could tell him what she’d done to make herself itch, her touching and seeking. If there was something wrong inside her, any explanation she gave would make him angry. At Rosenfeld’s, perhaps—at her, certainly. In the basement, she’d felt she had no choice, but now she didn’t see it that way, now it seemed she’d made a terribly wrong choice—many wrong choices—now she could not imagine Max had meant for her to submit to that. He couldn’t have known. He could not know now.

She looked back at him. She’d neglected to cover him when she rose, and now she saw that at some point in the night, he’d put his shirt back on, and buttoned up his trousers, so that he looked like a man who was simply taking a nap, in his own bedroom, in the middle of the day. And she looked, she realized, like a wife. A wife standing by the window in her stainless nightgown, the collar of which was still buttoned up to her chin.

She’d been transformed, despite herself.

And this, perhaps, was the way to proceed. As if she had been this woman her whole life: a wife, married to a man. A husband’s wife. Minna Getreuer. Maybe this was how Ruth had done it, once upon a time, how all women—the ones who stayed—did it: you woke up in a new place and decided to call it home. And then you had no right anymore to be homesick. Your life, suddenly, became a
wonderful
thing.

On the floor Minna spotted Max’s
yarmulke
upside down, a little black saucer. She picked it up, climbed back onto the bed, and shook him gently. “Max. Max,” she cooed. A deceitful cooing, perhaps—but the kind of deceit that could become honest, she guessed, if practiced long enough.

Max opened his eyes. He looked disoriented, then pleased. “Minna,” he said, and reached for her face. She stopped his hand before he could say
my bride
, or
my love.
Then she shook away her annoyance, squeezed the
yarmulke
into a ball, and held out both her fists, knuckles down. “I have a gift for you,” she trilled. “Guess which one.”

Max shook his head.

“Please?”

Reluctantly, he sat up. When he touched her right fist, Minna was glad: she didn’t like how pathetic he looked playing her silly game, or how she sounded begging him to. She turned her hand over, released the
yarmulke
, and smiled.

“You lost this,” she teased.

Max raised a hand to his bare head. Minna kept smiling. She felt silly for having worried about the blood—of course he would forget to notice, or he would remember too late, tomorrow, when they were miles from the sheets. She fluttered her lashes, the coyness spilling out of her like a song she didn’t know she knew. So this was how it began, she thought.

But Max wasn’t watching her. He took the
yarmulke
from her hand, laid it on his knee, and smoothed out the creases. He didn’t look angry exactly, and not quite ashamed, either. He looked like men looked just before they entered synagogue, arranging their collars and their shawls and their
yarmulkes
precisely so, as if they hoped, once inside, that they would all look the same.

 

 

 

R
UTH’S children had decorated the wagon with dandelion necklaces, long yellow tails that would trail along behind as Minna and the men rode off. They were meant to be cheerful, Minna knew, yet failed: they were already dusty and bedraggled and filled her with dismay. She was dismayed, too, by the abundance of food that had been given to them. Jars of beans and carrots, dried fruits, sacks of flour and corn. There, Ruth said, now you won’t have to make the trip to town, you can go straight home!, even though Ruth knew “home” was nothing but a cramped cave, and Minna couldn’t help feeling mocked, in the same way she now felt mocked when she thought of the man at the municipal building—
Run along!—
or of the inspectors at Castle Garden, promising so much with their officiousness and their stamps.

The day was already hot. A heat wave, Leo said, sometimes it came this late, the only thing to do was ride it out. His arm was through Ruth’s, his pipe between his teeth. A real American man he made, with his beard thin enough to show his cheeks and his cheeks satisfactorily ruddy and his forearms thick and his general air of forbearance. Jacob said his family had kept their land in Russia long after it was illegal, until they’d been run off. Yet there was something of Leo that Minna did not trust. His pipe, perhaps, the way he didn’t smoke it so much as he displayed it, like a handkerchief, or a watch, as if putting on airs now that he was in his element. He reminded her of Galina’s suitors, she supposed. She felt a fresh wave of pity for Ruth, who was allowed an eyelet-trimmed bonnet but only over a wig, who was saying to Minna now, “For a bit of cool, you might hang wet sheets!” It seemed suddenly possible that Ruth was in fact nothing as conniving as Minna’s aunts—that all she wanted was to fit in, like Leo. Yet Leo seemed to want to keep Ruth half the way she’d been before.

“Thank you for everything,” Minna said.

“Just dip them in the creek,” Ruth said, “and hang them across the door. Promise me you’ll try?”

“If we didn’t need them to sleep on.”

“You can borrow!”

“You’ve done enough. Thank you.”

“Oh. My pleasure.” Ruth smiled cheerfully, then regretfully, then cheerfully again, and clutched Minna’s hands. “The weather won’t last,” she said. “If the snow comes early, I may not see you for months.” Her blinking slowed, as if she might cry. And this was the problem, Minna thought—no matter how close she came to liking Ruth, she could always find something overly dramatic about her. Now, for instance, as she stared into Minna’s eyes and said, far more loudly than necessary, “You’ll be with child by then. God willing.”

Leo nodded. He set a hand on Max’s shoulder and winked. “A little girl, maybe, for this handsome groom to spoil?”

Minna’s hair burned against her scalp. Max hovered nervously beside her, aware, no doubt, of the jabs in Leo’s question. The idea of a child seemed as ludicrous this morning, as impossible as the idea of snow. Ruth believed it was the answer to her unhappiness and Minna guessed it could be so, she guessed there might be a reward that she could not now fathom, but she wondered, too, what she knew of mothering. She was not patient, or soft, or particularly gentle. She had deserted Rebeka. The round of Ruth’s stomach appeared to expand as she watched, and Minna felt nothing toward it but a quiet curiosity—something akin to what she’d felt as a girl when she’d once come upon a turtle laying eggs at the edge of the woods.

“God willing,” Minna said. But this must not have been convincing because Ruth and Leo were silent and in their silence it seemed that they doubted Minna’s suitability, too. To have them doubt her was worse.

“Well then, we’re off!” Minna cried, and clapped her hands the way she’d seen Ruth do—no palms, just the flats of her fingers, sharp and stiff. She felt how such clapping could work to one’s advantage, make one’s whole person feel more capable. Near the wagon, Jacob was running the children in dusty, barefoot circles, holding out his Indian warhead then snatching it back. “First they’ll kill you,” he panted, “then they’ll peel off your skin!”

“Jacob!” Minna’s mouth opened automatically. “Put your boots on. We’re going.”

Jacob skidded to a halt and spun toward her. His mouth curled into the edge of a grin, but just the edge—it was hard to tell if he was truly stunned, or if he imagined himself to be playing along with her. The latter, most likely; still, he walked over to his boots and sat in the dirt to tie them and Minna felt a quake in her chest—vanity, terror, a new territory entered. Then she saw Samuel, standing off to the side of the wagon, hands folded behind him, watching—as though he were merely a passerby who’d found their group curious enough to warrant a stop. Minna searched his face for admonishment and found nothing. His mouth was set in a sufficiently agreeable line. His eyes, as usual, seemed made to see but not to be seen. To do nothing before them felt like defeat, so she called: “Samuel!” But once the word was out, there was nothing to add. His boots were on, wrapped as tidily in their rags as they’d been last night. It was as if he’d never taken them off, as if he’d waited awake all night for Minna and Max to finish their rites—did he imagine Minna wanted to? Did he imagine her at all?—so that they could get on already, and go home.

Yet he didn’t even look impatient. He stood calm as a post, his face as neat as his rags.

 

 

 

T
HE horse and mule, hitched together, formed a maimed, listing beast. The wagon limped along behind. The whole outfit might have appeared in one of Samuel’s farming magazines, if they featured a “How Not to Travel” column. But soon enough they were out of sight of Ruth and Leo’s house, and there was no one else to witness their comic struggle. The land rolled ahead. The sky pulsed with sun. Sweat pooled at the corners of Minna’s mouth. She felt slightly drugged. She needed a hat. All the men had hats, and Ruth had her bonnet. Why had no one thought to give Minna a bonnet? She squinted, then heard Galina warning her,
your face will stick that way, you’ll grow old young
, and shrank lower on the bench, trying to find shade between Max and Samuel. Everywhere they brushed her seethed with heat. She shrank lower. She would rather have been in back, like Jacob, stretched out among the jars and sacks.