Hush (26 page)

My mother warned me not to wear any jewelry for the fateful meeting. “The less your in-laws see you have, the more they’ll buy you,” she advised me, so I removed the necklace, watch, three rings, and large pearl earrings my father had bought me, and left only the simple gold earrings my grandmother had given me for my
Bas Mitzvah
.

The house was tensely silent as we waited. My father swayed over a Talmud, my mother rearranging the crystal salad bowls for the fourth time. When the bell rang my parents jumped. They stared at each other in terror, and I burst out laughing. My mother reached the door first. My father, tossing the Talmud on the shelf, ran after her. My mother turned the lock. My father fumbled with the doorknob. Together they opened the door.

I stood near the dining room table as my parents politely welcomed in the Geldbart family. Mrs. Geldbart looked as she did in the pictures we received: a short, slender woman wearing an elegant shoulder-length wig framing a soft, pretty face. She wore a classy beige suit with intricate gold buttons and matching flat shoes. I liked her immediately.

“Hello.” She smiled widely, embracing me gently. “You look as pretty as you do in the pictures.”

I blushed. My parents, each pulling out a chair by the table, asked them how the flight was, how many hours they waited at the airport, was it too cold for them, they must be used to a warmer climate after all.… And of course, hiding behind his father, was Yankel, the
bachur
, the
tzaddik
, the
mensch
—a tall, thin
Chassid
, nervously twirling his
payos
and pulling at his small, dark blond beard as if trying to make it grow longer.

In the picture Yosef Yitzchak had brought us, Yankel had light green eyes. Now, as he stood close behind his father, concentrating intently on the strawberry shortcake at the corner of the table, I couldn’t see his eyes at all. He looked down, jutting his head up occasionally as our parents smiled, nodded, and chatted—and finally, smiling sweetly, motioned for us to meet alone.

Yankel followed me to the kitchen. My mother, with a small, apprehensive smile, closed the door behind us. We sat down at the table. He stared at the tablecloth with fascinated interest, his fingers nervously outlining the embroidered flowers, as I stared at his pale face, deeply relieved that I didn’t have to talk at all.

Yankel spoke quickly. He looked down, blinked his eyes, and mumbled something about the
Rebbe
and how he was told by him to speak to me about the sacredness of marriage. In the
Talmud
it speaks about a Torah scholar who, though he was one of the greatest of his generation, never married. After he died and went up to heaven, he was told that he could not enter Hashem’s presence because he had not completed his soul’s work. He must go back down to Earth and marry. Only then could he enter the gates of heaven.

I observed Yankel’s nose. It certainly wasn’t bad. It was narrow at the sides but rounded out nicely in the front. He had the looks of his mother with the same smooth skin and large eyes, and the beard of his father, short and scraggly, stubbornly refusing to grow a respectable length, though my brother-in-law’s was much worse. Having a nice beard was really all a matter of luck.
Chassidim
did not trim or touch facial hair in any way. In the Torah it said, “You shall not round off the corners of your heads, and you shall not destroy the corners of your beard,” and this has been the law for generations.

At the end of the short speech, while I was observing his ears, Yankel said that he and his father had gone to the
Rebbe
before leaving Israel and he had blessed the
shidduch
. He then sat at the table in silence, his eyes darting from one embroidered flower to the other as I thought of something appropriate to say. Perhaps I would ask him about the story of his great-aunt toiling at the carrot
kugel
. But I could not say a word. I had never met a strange boy before in my life and knew nothing about the Talmud, so what was there to discuss? And after five minutes of awkward silence, Yankel’s finger patterns growing more frenzied, I pitied the tablecloth my mother had so meticulously ironed, and stood up. He stood up quickly after me. We both breathed a sigh of relief and the meeting was over.

L’chaim
!

---

The flowers arrived from all over that night. Our dining room looked like a blooming garden had sprouted from the granite floors as the bell rang incessantly and bouquets of every size and shape and color came through the door.

I spoke with my new sisters-in-law, cousins, and aunts on the phone to Israel, stumbling over the Hebrew and English until we just settled for
Mazel tov
,
Mazel tov! Mazel tov!! MAZEL TOV!
I ran to the door when my friends arrived, struggling through the doorway with a mass of balloons, and we screeched and screamed unintelligibly over the occasion. They wanted to know exactly how many minutes I’d met with him and how he looked and what had I heard about him. Was he brilliant, compassionate, pious, smart, and was his beard shorter or longer than Rivky’s groom’s, whose beard was so long he tucked it under his chin and stuck in bobby pins? Did my motherin-law give me jewelry, did they have money, who was going to buy the
shaitel
, the wig, and oh, what was his name? Panting, I said that I have absolutely no idea, I can’t remember, I would have to ask my motherin-law.

That night I smiled, shook hands, hugged, screamed, giggled, was kissed with lipsticks of every brand and color, switched to shaking with my left hand, and grinned so brightly, I thought my hands and my jaw would fall off.

Half the Geldbart family lived in New York, so I met Bubba Yuskovitz from the mother’s side, Zaida Geldbart from the father’s side, Aunt Zisel from one of the sides, and Bubba Geldbart, who had come along from Israel especially for the occasion. Various relatives I did not know existed wandered in and out wearing elegant clothing and pretty smiles. My mother rattled off first names, last names, and long convoluted family connections to me as I nodded my head blankly and listened to every person I knew or didn’t who had heard from his uncle, brother-in-law, cousin, or whatever, what a genius,
tzaddik
, and
mensch
Yaakov Mier/Mier Yaakov Geldbart was.

My motherin-law, squeezing through the boisterous crowd, excitedly called my name. She held up a small blue velvet box and my mother squeezed my shoulder hard and said, “It better be big.”

And big it was. Aunt Sarah grabbed my hand, held it up closely to her eye, and declared it was at least one and a half karats. Zaida Geldbart, who hobbled over from the men’s side, nudging everyone out of the way, said it was more. My friends oohhed and aahhhd and said it was the most stunning ring they’d seen, and my mother, satisfied with the respectable size, said who cares, the marriage is what is important, not the diamond.

The crowd spread back out to the cakes and ice cream tables and Bubba Yuskovitz, giggling like a little girl, hobbled eagerly over to me, stretching out two trembling hands. She hugged me tightly, straightened my collar, and waggled a finger in my face. She stepped back, shook her short, curly wig, and observed me, her eyes widening and narrowing as she moved from the bottom of my shoes up to the top of my hair. “You are too skinny. How are you going to have all those babies?” She wiped her eyes and sniffed dramatically. “Oh, but you are beautiful. Perfect. Perfect for Yankel. He will be the best husband. I know, I know—let me tell you I took care of him when he was a tiny baby before they moved to Israel, and even when you are a baby you can tell a lot about you. Yankel, he was just a little
pisher
, but oh what a
pisher
. His little
pipikel
the size of a jelly bean it was. But I’m telling you—he used to
pish
so hard, it spritzed straight up and hit the ceiling like that. I still have a stain on my ceiling. Not one of my grandsons could do it like that.” And she put her hands on her cheeks, sighing. “
Oy,
my little
pisher
, all grown up and engaged.… I just can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. In my days girls weren’t so skinny.” And she hobbled away toward my mother, who was holding a tray of ice cream.

More flowers arrived; more people came and left. My father snuck in from the men’s side to see my ring. There was no room for the plants inside, so my mother began lining them up on the porch. It was well past midnight when the house finally emptied and Yankel and I posed for pictures, I, on one side of the room, he on the other, as it wasn’t appropriate for an unmarried couple to stand closely together. But my mother complained that she couldn’t get us both into the lenses, would we move in a little more; my motherin-law hastily placed three large flower arrangements on the floor between us so we were only eight feet apart. Two limp smiles, a flash, and now I had pictures to show off to my friends. Pictures were an important part of one’s engagement and my friend and I, using a ruler, measured precisely how many feet stood between each couple in their engagement pictures. The really
Chassidish
ones stood so far apart you could see only half of each person; the normal
Chassidish
, like me, only several feet; the modern
Chassidish
left barely a few inches between them. But none of this was really important of course. Flowers, pictures, jewelry.… The crucial thing was that I had my groom tucked safely away in
yeshiva
for the next ten months, as my father tenderly said, “Ah, marriage.… Only Hashem could come up with that idea.… You have ten months to pray, Gittel, ten months to pray.…”

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

And pray I did. I prayed I would have a happy marriage, I prayed that I would recognize him in ten months, three hundred and ten days, seven thousand, four hundred and forty or so hours when I would see him for the second time under the canopy. I also prayed that we would have something to talk about. What
would
we talk about now that I was thinking about it? But when I asked my mother she said it would all come, and she spread twenty-one pictures of me on the table as we worked on the
kallah
album, the customary gift to the motherin-law, showing pictures of the new daughter-in-law from babyhood to bridehood.

I sifted through the pictures, laying them out in order of age. There was only one picture of me as a toddler. The rest were of me as an adolescent.

“Mommy, where are all my baby pictures?” I asked.

“Oh, here.” My mother thrust a picture of one-year-old me, smiling, my right arm cut right down the middle where it reached out to someone else.

“Wasn’t that Dev—”

“We could blow it up, make it bigger, you can’t tell,” my mother said brightly, scribbling some ideas on a paper.

I held up the strange-looking picture. “Don’t I have any pictures of myself, I mean—”

“We should go shopping in Amazing Savings,” my mother interrupted. “They have some adorable scrap paper and pretty knickknacks you could play around with. This is your first gift to your motherin-law, so it has to be impressive.”

“But it looks weird,” I said. “I need baby pictures. I can’t start from fifth—”

“Oh, I know!” my mother exclaimed. “Rivkah has pictures of you! Remember when you were in second grade our two families went on a trip to the safari park together?”

Rivkah was my father’s
litvish
sister from Lakewood, New Jersey. We used to go on outings with her that I did not remember, when she still lived nearby in Borough Park with my then-small cousins.

My mother snapped her fingers. “That’s it! Call her up and ask her to send over the pictures. She had the camera then and kept promising to send over the photos. Of course, I never saw a single picture and then totally forgot about it. There should be some really nice ones.”

So I called up Aunt Rivkah, and she said, sure, of course, she would send over the pictures right away. She also said it was ridiculous,
Chassidish
boys getting married so young. Before twenty-one, she declared, she would never let her son as much as think of dating.

“What’s an eighteen-year-old boy?” she proclaimed. “He’s just a little
shnuck
who doesn’t know his right from his left!”

But my mother, sitting on the chair near mine, overheard the statement and grabbed the phone. She told her that boys sitting and learning all day in their cloistered
yeshivos
didn’t know their right from their left any more than when they were twenty-five than when they were eighteen, and the only way for one to learn one’s right from one’s left was to get married. That was when real life started, and would she just mail over the pictures, we needed to send the album.