The Saturday Wife (13 page)

In bed, she had noticed, his passion rose quickly and tanked accordingly. He had a self-congratulatory way of smiling afterward that she found irritating. He always rose fastidiously and returned to his own bed, leaving her behind to deal with sticky sheets and rumpled blankets. At first, she
had been annoyed about the two-bed thing. “Why can’t we just lie side by side on either side of a big bed when I’m a
niddah
?” she’d grumbled. But his response had mollified her. “If I could lie next to you and not sin, I wouldn’t be a man.”

But later, as time went by, with about half of each month with no physical contact at all between them, she began to feel peeved and insulted and abandoned. She would long for the ritual immersion that would have them resume their physical intimacy, no matter how flawed. In between, she saw him sneaking glances at her naked body like a guilty schoolboy. His yeshiva upbringing had created in him the perennial adolescent where anything concerning sex was involved, a permafrost that would last through all the stages of his life, never ripening into maturity.

She was compartmentalized in his life. Like most religious men, he managed to adore and ignore her simultaneously with breathtaking ease. He congratulated himself on marrying such a pretty, agreeable woman. But it was the idea of her he admired. She was decorative as well as practical, like a good appliance, able to perform many separate functions. He believed in separate “spheres.” He believed it was noble and right for him to let her run hers and not to interfere. And vice versa.

He believed in all the old chichés—that women were superior beings, that they were more sensitive than men, on a higher level, blah, blah, blah. But of course, in their own “kingdom,” he thought, adopting the language of patriarchal apologists who enthusiastically rationalized why women were entrusted with the tedium of housework and child care and men were fashioned for sitting on their backsides in study halls. Text after text, scholars never tired of trying to compensate for sentencing women to eternal drudgery, which they themselves abhorred, by dreaming up fancy ways of labeling it, easing their consciences and allowing them to view their self-serving little world of men-gods as a fair, nay noble, thing.

Countless rabbis, through hundreds of generations stretching back through time to the Temple itself, had been involved in the conspiracy. The separate-but-equal theory divided man and woman into the masters of their own universes, carefully delineating the realm of his kingdom to include anything but cooking, cleaning, and wiping up the various discharges and sticky liquids of children. As the wonderful German Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch put it, “A wife takes over obligations which comprise the great task of mankind, making it possible for her husband to accomplish more perfectly the part that is left to him. That’s why it is written:
a helpmate, opposite him. If the helpmate were another man, that wouldn’t help.”

Delilah wasn’t philosophical, but she was a realist. Jewish men—particularly Orthodox Jewish men-—had fashioned the perfect little universe for themselves, and they were not about to give it up no matter how reactionary or unfair it was in this day and age.

To those who met her in the hallways at Bernstein about this time, she seemed reconciled to her new role. In fact, for the first time since they’d known her, she seemed really happy.

It’s amazing how fast things change.

SEVEN

D
elilah’s mother, Marilyn Meyers Goldgrab, was the middle daughter of American Jews whose Russian grandparents had come over on big immigrant ships during the czars’ pogroms. Despite the attempts of the German Jewish immigrants who preceded them to ship them off to Jewless hinterlands where their faithful adherence to the rituals of the Jewish religion would be less embarrassingly visible, and might, hopefully, soon shrivel and die without Jewish communal life, they had stubbornly stayed put in the great Jewish city of New York. They had also stayed strictly Orthodox in practice, raising their sons and daughters to value Jewish custom and Jewish scholarship.

Marilyn’s parents—a housewife and an insurance agent—were limited in their means, but nevertheless had high aspirations for their children, for whom they wanted the best of everything. Her mother sewed her clothes and carefully braided her hair. Although they couldn’t afford a private parochial school education, and Marilyn had been sent to public school,
they made sure she faithfully attended Sunday and after-school Hebrew programs at her Brooklyn Orthodox synagogue.

This was fine with Marilyn. But as she started high school and began to attend Orthodox Jewish youth programs, she became acutely aware of the social disadvantages of her background. Those who had attended the expensive Hebrew day schools and summer camps tended to date each other and to look down on the public school kids, however observant.

For years she tried her best at the Thursday night midtown Manhattan indoor ice skating rink, where young Orthodox singles mingled. But she brought home only sore ankles and bruised pride—not to mention cold sores—for her trouble. Then, when high school had come and gone and she found herself dateless at Brooklyn College, one of her friends suggested investing in a weekend at Grossinger’s up in the Catskills, the great, kosher watering hole of mateless Jewish singles on the cusp of morphing from youthful attractiveness into carefully made-up desperation. Marilyn’s panic-stricken parents hurriedly laid out the money.

And it was there, on her first try, that she met Joe Goldgrab.

He was her waiter.

Joe had a past that Marilyn liked to call “colorful,” at least in front of her family. The child of Jewish parents from Tyler, Texas, he had wanted to be a dress designer, then a sailor, and then a movie producer, and in the middle he had been drafted to Vietnam. After four horrendous years in the military, he had gone back home, only to find he was a piece of a jigsaw but the puzzle had changed. He wound up in New York, where he lived in dives and washed dishes until one of the more sympathetic waiters tipped him off about the big money and big knockers available to him in the Catskills during Jewish holidays.

He had been disappointed on the first count, but not the second.

He had smiled and brought her an extra dessert. She had smiled back. And later that weekend, when the men at her table were busy wooing the skinny straight-haired blondes, graduates of Ramaz and Flatbush Yeshiva, whose parents owned two-family homes and thriving businesses, Marilyn went walking on the grass with Joe. They sat by the pool in cold Adirondack chairs and looked up at the amazing stars. She found his Texas twang charming and his ambitions in fashion design and moviemaking thrilling. His military experience, which under normal circumstances would have anointed him with a huge black X as a marriage prospect, filled her with compassion. As he told it, he had been tricked into joining ROTC by slick
on-campus recruiters dangling scholarships and National Guard duty, people who had disappeared along with signed promises not to draft him, replacing his college career with the jungles of Southeast Asia. Sure, he’d been bitter at first, he told her. But there were worse things than serving a country that had taken in his ancestors and protected them from the bullies of the world.

His words touched her.

Soon, he was taking her out weekends, to the theater and to bars, places Orthodox men seldom went. And although he was not what she, or her ambitious mother, had had in mind, both mother and daughter recognized the budding tire that would slowly envelop the youthful slim hips of the younger as it had the elder, realizing it was going to be Joe, or nobody. With her mother’s encouragement, she told herself, “I can make him into whatever I want him to be.”

Joe, far from home, liked Marilyn’s parents, her warm house filled with the smells of chicken soup and
knaidlach,
and her warm, generous, yielding body, which gave a man something to hold on to instead of skin and bones. They got engaged. They got married. It was all a whirl of white—dresses, cake frosting, flowers. They rented a little apartment in Brooklyn near her parents. She dropped out of college, took a course in shorthand and typing, and got a job in an insurance office. He took a course in fashion design at FIT. The other students were a decade younger, savvy New Yorkers. Behind his back, they snickered at his hopelessly dowdy evening dresses, which could be envisioned only on aging, slightly overweight British royalty. He finished the course and got a job pushing around racks of dresses in Seventh Avenue knock-off shops, a job that had come with a nice title and many, many promises, none of which materialized.

She got pregnant. She gained and gained and gained. And with every pound, he lost more and more interest in their marriage and in their life. Big shouting matches ensued. Her parents got involved. The word
divorce
hung in the air like cold smoke from a recent cooking fire.

But when his first child was born, a boy, a new light came into his eyes. The baby was a little blond blue-eyed darling. Joe adored his son with an excess of love that spilled over onto the woman who had given birth to him. He had wanted to create something special in the world: a masterpiece of beauty and charm that was his own vision. With the child, his failures seemed to have been atoned for.

He reconciled with his wife, but insisted they move away from her parents.
And so they found a place out in the Rockaways, near the ocean. He had always been clever with his hands. He got a full-time job in a car repair shop and took up part-time alcoholism. He tried to be a good father to make up for being a disinterested husband.

By the time Delilah was born, her parents had settled into their private Cold War, their dreams exploded into rubble. Like the inhabitants of Dresden, they built a new life on top of the debris. Using their dead hopes as fertilizer to help raise a new generation, they would never cease to burden their children with the task of fulfilling their own unfulfilled desires and expectations from life, all the while insisting “they only wanted the best” for them.

Delilah’s brother, Arnie, was totally uncooperative, finding meaning in the dangerous, poverty-stricken idealism of kibbutz life. He left for Israel as soon as he was legally able, married a kibbutznik, and limited his connections to his parents to holiday phone calls and thank-you notes for care packages containing American coffee, tunafish, Entenmann’s donuts, and children’s clothes.

Delilah had been Marilyn’s last hope.

The engagement of her daughter to Chaim Levi, future rabbi, and the grandson of a distinguished, if little-known, leader of a synagogue, initially filled Delilah’s mother with a heady sense of victory. While she had never envisioned her future son-in-law as a religious leader, scion of a rabbinical family, she was nothing if not flexible, willing to unhitch her dreams from one wagon and hitch them to another, as long as there was a horse.

Marilyn’s rosy vision of her daughter’s future prospects were based on those rabbis she’d met who were the principals and administrators in her daughter’s school—dapper little men who wore suits and smelled of aftershave, who knew how to squeeze the last dime of tuition out of pretension-filled parents—and the fathers of some of her daughter’s classmates who lived in the Five Towns, one of the most affluent Orthodox areas in America.

In her mind, she conveniently edited out all the rabbis stuck teaching Bible and Prophets to fourth-graders—men struggling with mortgages on small frame houses in deteriorating neighborhoods—as well as her own rabbi, who worked in a tiny dwindling congregation in an expanding ghetto; a congregation that could barely afford to keep the synagogue in plastic cups, let alone pay their rabbi a decent wage. When these things intruded on her vision, like the pesky insects that ruin a lovely photograph
by landing on your nose, she swatted them away with a determined murderous hand.

No, with Chaim, all their dreams would come true. A beautiful house connected to a magnificent synagogue, where her son-in-law would stand in front of the Ark of the Torah, distinguished and revered. Her daughter would sit in the front pew, endlessly admired, envied, and imitated. And she, the rabbi’s mother-in-law, would sit next to her in a stunning hat. And when she got up, everyone would get up. And when she sat down, everyone would sit down. And the children—her grandchildren!—would be the sons and daughters of the rabbi and the rebbitzin. And her daughter, aside from giving a few parties at her lovely home, which would be catered by staff, would have the leisure to improve her mind and do countless good deeds, all the while shopping in Lord & Taylor for beautiful modest clothes, because, as the rabbi’s wife, she’d need to set an example. And her son-in-law would have plenty of time to spend with his family, not like men who work nine to five. A few sermons, some back-patting, shmoozing, nice words at funerals that could be endlessly recycled, a few blessings under marriage canopies for which he would receive a generous check (and a full free catered dinner to follow, not to mention the smorgasbord that preceded). Actual working days would be limited to Friday night and Saturdays, with the rest of the week practically a paid vacation.