For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories (11 page)

“I’ve an appointment a week from Thursday with Kendo of Kendo Keller’s,” Nava says. “He is going to advise me. And
then, of course, he’ll style the wig. It’s not you, Tzippy. You’re a natural. A brilliant stylist. The best of the sheitel machers. But this isn’t exactly Madison Avenue. It’s only that I want a more contemporary look this year. So vain.”

In the mirror that night, Ruchama takes her face off, rubbing hard, removing makeup, working at the base that catches like grit in the folds of her skin.

She used to be the prettiest, prettier than Tzippy and Nava. They all three used to play together in Tzippy’s room. They tried on clothes and dreamed of marriages—to brilliant scholars flown in from Jerusalem, handsome princes who would sit in the back of deep studies while Jews the world over came to their doors begging wisdom, advice, a blessing in exchange for a kiss on the hand.

They do come from around the world. But not for Shlomi, not for her husband. They circle the globe to see Ruchama, because they are trapped in their modesty and want to feel, even as illusion, the simple pleasure of wind in their hair.

Menucha, the littlest, is splashing in the tub next to Ruchama. Ruchama begs quiet when Menucha squeals. She quizzes the child on body parts while taking off her makeup, testing to see where the girl has and has not scrubbed. “Ears?” she says. “Elbows? Belly button. Toes.”

Shlomi is home from the study hall making noise in the kitchen. Cabinets slam. A pot hits a countertop, a pan strikes a burner. The new rules of her home. Six children, and for the first time all are out of the house during the day. Menucha in first grade and Shira, the oldest, in tenth. For once Ruchama can work uninterrupted, and her taste for independence has spread. She has instituted small chores for Shlomi. She asks now that he heat his own dinner and wash his own dishes, as well as the stray glasses and spoons that accumulate
between the children’s dinner and bed. Over this he makes a production.

To take off her makeup slowly, to look in the mirror and be sad, that’s all she wants. Shlomi calls out questions, makes comments to reiterate his helplessness. “Where is the dairy sponge?” “This soap is no good!” Ruchama doesn’t respond, does not care where the soap falls short in his eyes. He trayfs up her kitchen to spite her. He is forever putting meat silverware in the dairy sink.

He calls up: “Are there any dry dish towels?”

She screams so that Menucha stops splashing, her little arms frozen in the air. Ruchama screams with murder in her voice, her own hand checked in midmotion, a dollop of face cream on the pads of her fingers. “Reach down,” she yells, “pull open the towel drawer, and look.” She spreads the cream under her eyes. It is nice and cool. “When the drawer is open,” she screams, “bend over and open your eyes.”

She waits for him to ask where, in their house of sixteen years, is the dry-dish-towel drawer.

When Louise arrives there are kisses and hugs. She peels off her gloves, undoes a silk scarf with a pull. Tzippy and Ruchama have a crush on her. She is their only secular client, the only one to traipse down the stairs in plunging necklines and smart man-tailored slacks. She reminds Ruchama of the pretty ladies who stand in department stores spraying perfume.

Louise has a daughter their age, yet, Ruchama thinks, she looks younger than Nava. It is only the thick, tired veins on the backs of her hands and the carefully organized hairline that give her away. Louise takes Ruchama’s arm and kisses her again.

“I’ve done it,” Louise says. “You’ll both be furious, but don’t feel bad. I couldn’t tell my husband—not about the wig and not about the money.” Louise unzips her pocketbook.
“Our thirtieth anniversary. My present from Harold. A stunning necklace he picked out himself. Pawned. I sold it away.”

“You didn’t,” Tzippy says. Her expression is embarrassingly happy. She is a fan of intrigue.

“I did,” Louise says. “A purchase must be paid for.”

“Credit,” Ruchama says dryly. “I offered you credit.”

“I know, dear. But it’s not right. I went and pawned it and told Harold that the clasp broke and that I had put the floater on my to-do list but hadn’t let the insurance man know. ‘Off premises’ doesn’t cover it, and Harold would never fake a claim.” She takes an envelope from her purse and extends her arm with impelling force. “Here,” she says, passing off the envelope, thick with fifties, to Ruchama.

When she made her first appearance she had, in the same businesslike fashion, pulled a different envelope from her purse. “You must be Ruchama,” she had said. “These are pictures of me when my hair was as it should be. I want my wig like that, but better.” Ruchama had fallen in love with her right then. A woman who can present an envelope with such confidence can get anything done in this world. “My daughter says you are the best and the most expensive. That’s what I want. No bargains. I want it to feel so horribly overpriced that I’ll be convinced it’s good.” Then Louise struck a pose in those smart slacks—one knee locked, the other bent, one foot straight, the other pointing out—exactly as Ruchama would have liked to if she were permitted such a thing. “If my daughter hasn’t told you, I’m being attacked by menopause and it’s taking my hair, and both my doctors admit I am, in reality, going bald. Give me whatever you’ve got, I told them. If it kills me, that’s fine. I’ll take six gorgeous months over one hundred years of what’s in store.” She had then presented a locket. Pried it open. There was a curl pressed inside. “My baby hair. Russet. Virginal and fine. Match it. That is the color of my wig.”

And now, months later, Ruchama locks the money in the
strongbox and locks the strongbox in her desk. She takes out the pictures and the locket and goes over to the cubbies. She takes down Louise’s wig on its Styrofoam base. It is majestic. She brings it out and Louise presses her hands to her head.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “That is me.” She messes up her own hair, so carefully sprayed in place. “This is not me, that is. You’ve got it there. Now give it up.”

They seat Louise on a stool and fit the wig on her head. She leans in to the standing mirror. Ruchama and Tzippy hover behind, hand mirrors poised. Louise does, truly, they all agree, look spectacular. She spreads the old photos out on the counter. She goes back and forth between the mirror and the pictures. She opens the locket. “Russet,” she says. She puts it around her neck and turns to face the women.

“Goddesses,” she says. “Miracle workers. I feel like I have my life back, my youth. I’m nineteen years old again,” she says. “And I am beautiful.”

The new issues are at least two weeks away, but there are things Ruchama wants to double-check, an idea or two that she has. She takes the magazines off the rack with a nod.

“Sold your copies,” Jamal says. He is on the same side of the stand, stocking mints and chocolate bars where they are low. “Same issue, different copies.”

“I’ll pay again, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

She reaches for her purse.

“Teasing,” he says. “Help yourself. No camp for the kids this summer, is all.”

They used to dream of being fashion models, Tzippy and Nava and Ruchama. They had plans. They would take only modest jobs, stroll down the runways with floor-length skirts and high-collared shirts, sleeves that buttoned at the wrists. They would be sensations. They walked the length of Tzippy’s
room, spinning in front of her full-length mirror, spotting their heads to catch themselves in the turn.

She finds the advertisement, the one she was thinking of, a woman turning in a New York street, her hair in an arc, banana curls, full and light.

She presses the magazine down on the counter. She presses a finger to the page. Jamal looks.

“That’s what my hair was like,” she says, “when I was a girl.”

“Hmmm,” he says, “nice.” He folds an empty carton. Stops to rub his hands together, blows into them against the cold. “Looks nice now,” he says, “plenty nice.”

Ruchama goes red. This is what familiarity breeds.

“A wig,” she says to Jamal. “I’m wearing a wig.”

“I’ll tell you,” he says, “looks for real. I wondered, too. You dress Jewish and I wondered. All the other Hasid ladies wear wigs and scarves and such. And I’d wondered what’s with you.”

“Human hair,” she says. She is proud. “A good-quality wig and you should never be able to tell. They wear poor quality, the others. Acrylic fibers. Junk stuff. Wigs made from recycled cola bottles and used plastic bags.”

The advertisement stays with Ruchama: this young woman spinning in a New York street. It’s an ad for shampoo. The woman has caused a traffic jam by half raising her finger for a taxi. Everyone is watching her from the sidewalk. She is smiling and so is all of New York. Even the cabdrivers—white and handsome, all with a slight scruff—are smiling. They laugh as they lock fenders trying to give this woman with the long, lovely hair a ride.

Ruchama wants to feel sexy like that, to chuckle at the bedlam her beauty causes. How nice it would be to arrive at shul looking trim and with the long, beautiful hair of her youth, to see Nava’s eyes widen and for the men to stand on tiptoes trying
to peek into the women’s section and for the rabbi to stamp a foot and the gabbai to slap the bimah, for people to hiss for quiet as she takes her seat. She’d have her oldest save one right in front of Nava. All would whisper. Is that mother or sister? they would want to know.

Shlomi will be home late. It is his night to help clean at the yeshiva. There he can push a broom. She decides to put on her sexy skirt and wait up. It’s formfitting but not wholly immodest; it falls, just barely, on the permissible side of the line. She puts it on but cannot close the button—does not get the zipper high enough along to try. She throws it into the back of her closet. She tiptoes to the bathroom, all the children asleep. She touches up her makeup and puts on a nightgown; she gets under the covers and pretends to sleep. She leaves the lamp on next to Shlomi’s bed. Ruchama does not say her prayers.

Shlomi comes into the room and makes an attempt at quiet. At the first noise, the jiggling of keys being removed from a pocket, Ruchama sighs and throws down her blanket as if waking.

She tries hard to be enticing. Shlomi is not having it. When he gets into his bed she reaches over and strokes the inside of his arm. He takes her hand, squeezes it. “Good night,” he says, and switches off the light.

That he’s not interested is fine.

That she’s not interested is what she is burning to tell him. She’d rather pull the man who delivers groceries upstairs, all muscular and sweaty in his hard-work way. She’d rather have sex with him and scream out loud instead of worrying with every breath that she’ll wake the children along the hall.

She turns to her side. She puts a hand between her thighs and presses the one hand with the other, squeezing her thighs together and rocking herself. The half of her thoughts connected to Shlomi and anger and the skirt in her closet she forgets, focusing on the grocery-boy and the cabdriver models and fingers in her hair. She is alone with her thoughts, rocking.

Shlomi switches his light on. He shakes her shoulder, speeding up her rhythm, interrupting.

“Ruchie, you promised.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Either way, it must stop. It’s an abomination.”

“Where is it written? For a man, yes. For a woman—seedless as a supermarket grape—it’s fine. Go ask your rebbe. He’ll tell you. Tell him what your wife does and ask if it’s allowed.”

“Ask him? God forbid.”

“You should have been Christian,” she says. “An expert at avoiding earthly pleasures.”

“God forbid. How you talk!” She turns to see that he has clasped his hands to his ears like a child. She clasps her hands deeper into her crotch. All of his passion trapped between those ears, she thinks, and rocks and rocks and rocks herself to sleep.

“You have zero choice in the matter. She’s out there waiting. She’s talking about four wigs by Pesach. We’re talking about twenty thousand dollars.”

“I can’t do it, Tzippy.” Ruchama is sitting at her desk, going over some accounting. “I can’t face Nava now. I’m too weak for her compliments. She’ll praise me into the grave today. I’m telling you.”

“I told her you were on the phone to Israel.”

“Tell her I went to the city. I’ll go for real. I have errands.”

“You were just in the city yesterday.”

“So? It’s so out of the ordinary? People don’t go in every morning? The subway driver doesn’t cross the river ten times in a day?”

Nava is in the deep chair by the window. She is wearing an Armani suit tailored to the knee. Too short, by far. She has new
boots on and a new bag rests on the floor. Ruchama keeps her eyes moving, doesn’t lag over a single item to avoid giving Nava satisfaction.

“I was telling Tzippy—” Nava says, pauses. “Any news from Israel?”

“No,” Ruchama says. “Raining in Jerusalem,” she says.

Nava shifts, moves the new bag onto her lap. Ruchama looks out the window.

“I was telling Tzippy, Kendo is an absolute genius. Part hair designer, part philosopher. ‘Tell me about the best hair,’ he said. ‘Talk.’ And you know what I told him, Ruchama? I told him about your wedding day. I told him how you were the first to marry and how you had the most perfect hair, how it made you who you were, a girl and a woman, religious and wild. And then I told him how you cut it off for your wedding. I cried mixed tears at your bedekken. Here was the miracle of marriage and the sadness of your lost hair. You were so beautiful before. A perfect-looking thing.”

“Thank you,” Ruchama says. She moves to the chair next to Nava’s and drops deep into the seat.

“So we follow this trail,” Nava says, leaning forward. “We go off in search of the ideal me. And we find her. And she has long hair. That is where the true me lies. Of course, I can’t just appear with long hair. It’s immodest enough to start with. But to shock people on top of it is inconceivable. ‘Not a problem,’ he says. A genius. ‘Four wigs,’ he says. ‘The same hair, the same color. Only different lengths. We will mock the natural process of growth. Wig by wig.’ That’s his plan. ‘Slowly,’ he says, ‘naturally. Wig by wig, reclaiming freedom.’ ”