Rebekah: Women of Genesis (19 page)

Or was that just an excuse? Maybe she’s right, and this is who I really am.

“My dear sweet daughter,” said Mother, “I can see that you’re offended and I didn’t mean to. I admire your strength. You’ve had responsibilities at your age that I never had—for one thing, Bethuel’s mother was still alive and inclined to run things until shortly before you were born. So even as a wife I didn’t do as much as you do. You’re strong and you’re smart and even when you’re lecturing me, you’re clever about it and funny and—I
do
love you and I’m
not
disappointed in you. I just wish you weren’t disappointed in me.”

“I’m not!” cried Rebekah, feeling all the more upset because she knew that Mother had hit right on the peg: Rebekah was, in fact, disappointed.

“Don’t fib to your mother,” said Mother.

“I’m not fibbing,” said Rebekah. “And anyway, you haven’t known me long enough to tell when I’m lying and when I’m not.”

“On the contrary,” said Mother, “you get the same faraway look in your eyes that
I
always get when I’m covering something up. It’s a dead giveaway. You look too much like me, child. You have too many of my mannerisms.”

“I’m not disappointed in
you,
” said Rebekah, trying to be truthful. “I didn’t expect you, so how can I be disappointed? I just don’t know how to be a daughter, so I suppose I’m disappointed in me.”

“Then let’s just be patient with each other’s way of doing things. I’m not as methodical as you are. You’re not as chatty as I am. So I’ll try to be a little more hard-working, and you try to make room for a few of my digressions.”

And that’s what they did, clumsily at first but gradually with more skill as time went on. It was the first time in Rebekah’s life that she had to get used to somebody new, and it occurred to her that when she married somebody and went away, she’d have to go through this whole process, and not just with one woman, but with a whole household, not to mention a husband and all his kin.

If I can’t learn to get along well with my own long-lost mother, I have no hope of getting along with a mother-in-law.

Over the days and weeks they
did
get along better and better, until everything between them became quite smooth. Mother did learn to read and write, and not all that slowly. And she and Rebekah did tell each other all kinds of stories. Rebekah learned to listen to Mother’s stories the way Mother listened to hers—constantly thinking of some experience or story of her own to come back with. And now that she thought about it, this
was
the way other women gossiped, trading stories—and sometimes competing with them. Oh, you think
that
story of a miserable childbirth is bad? Well, let me tell you the awful things that happened to
me.
Rebekah had never been part of such conversations and so she didn’t understand the skill it took to come up with a story that seemed appropriate to the conversation. But with Mother it was an art, and Rebekah at first admired, then envied, and finally emulated her.

As a result, Rebekah found herself using the same techniques with the servant women in the camp, and to her surprise they accepted her completely as part of their gossip circles while they weeded or kneaded or wove or spun. They hadn’t shut her out of their conversations. She simply hadn’t known how to join in.

Now it seemed like the easiest thing in the world, to talk like a woman. But up to now, she realized, she had only known how to talk like a man. Not that men didn’t gossip. But in all those years of going everywhere with Father, Rebekah had learned how to explain things clearly, how to give orders that felt like requests and requests that could easily be carried out. She had learned how to get right to the important matters and lay them out in perfect order. Which had nothing at all to do with actual adult conversation—but in the old days, whenever Father had settled down to converse with grown men, that was when she got sent out of the tent or away from the fire, because they wanted to be able to tell stories they didn’t want a little girl to hear. No wonder she had never learned how to gossip!

Still, it had not been a simple matter of Rebekah’s lack of skill or her misunderstanding of her mother’s motives. As the months wore on, Rebekah realized that when it came to leading the women of the household, she was very good at the ceremonial things and superb at giving encouragement and making everyone feel that she knew and cared about them. But Mother had no skill or, more to the point, no interest at all in the day-to-day workings of the camp. What Rebekah noticed by second nature—you can’t let this woman season the beans, you can’t trust that woman to stitch a seam that doesn’t unravel, you have to let this other woman keep her children close at hand because she gets too fretful when she can’t see just where they are and what they’re doing—Mother didn’t notice and didn’t care when Rebekah pointed it out.

In fact, Rebekah found that she was still doing most of the work she had done before Mother came, and gradually the women learned that while they loved talking with Mother, if there was serious work to take care of, it was Rebekah they needed to talk to. The only exception to this was if the serious matter was trying to find a way to persuade Father to change his mind about some decision he’d made. Rebekah had always answered such attempts by reinforcing Father’s decision and helping the women to reconcile themselves to obeying him. But Mother listened with great sympathy and then promised to “see what I can do.”

Whether she actually discussed the matter with Father or not, the damage was the same. The women came to see Mother as their ally against Father. Sometimes she could get him to change his mind—all well and good. And when Father didn’t change his mind, well, they could hardly blame
her.
She was still looking out for their interests.

What made this particularly bad was that it made it so the women of the camp now defined their interests as being different from the men’s. Instead of everyone feeling that they played a part in the overall work of keeping the household running smoothly, with everyone’s needs provided for, they began to think and talk as if the men were off doing meaningless tasks—“What do they do, anyway? They just watch a bunch of sheep”—while the women were working harder than the men would ever understand.

It was a division in the camp.

Maybe it wasn’t terribly harmful—after all, the men and women still did their work. But there was less respect than there used to be, less of a sense of everyone being part of something larger than themselves. People who used to be proud of their own work were now resentful that they had to do it.

And it all came back to Mother.

When Rebekah tried to talk to Laban about it, though, he didn’t understand. “It’s always been that way,” he said. “The men have always joked about how the women get to sit around and gossip while they have to go out in all kinds of horrible weather and live with the stink and the manure and the bugs and the bad food, and then when they get home they have to do all the really hard jobs that the women have saved up for them.”

“It may have been that way among the men,” said Rebekah, “but it was never that way among the women.”

Laban only shrugged.

So Rebekah had no choice but to watch, doing what she could to encourage people to understand and even agree with Father’s decisions, while Mother went about inadvertently giving them reasons to grumble and feel put upon.

The one time she tried to discuss it with Mother, the whole conversation got turned around and Mother ended up trying to teach Rebekah the wisdom of the way she did things. “You see, Rebekah, the wife—especially the first wife, which is what you will definitely be—has the responsibility to be her husband’s softer side. He lays down the law—‘It will be thus and so!’—and then she helps people live with the rules by listening to them and trying to help them feel that someone cares about their feelings. Of course I don’t actually tell most of these things to your father. He isn’t going to change his mind because the decision is actually necessary. But I provide a way for them to let off steam, you see?”

And for about a day, Rebekah did see. Mother had been so convincing that Rebekah believed that she must have been wrong all along, and what Mother was doing was actually better.

But by the end of the next day, having seen the griping and discontent that Mother left in her wake—never directed at her, of course, but only at Father—Rebekah knew Mother was hopelessly wrong.

Knowing it was one thing; doing something about it was another. Mother
was
the wife, and Rebekah merely the daughter, and that was that. All she could do was the same thing she had done when she learned that she had grown up within a huge monstrous lie: She vowed that when she had a household and family of her own, it would
never
be that way. She would never set herself up as the “nice one” while painting her husband as heartless and unloving. Just as she would never lie to her family.

You don’t have to repeat the mistakes of your parents, that’s what Rebekah decided. That’s why you
have
parents, so you can avoid their errors when you start your own family.

Rebekah liked Mother, and loved her too. Admired her, enjoyed her company, learned from her, laughed with her—it was a very good friendship.

But within a few weeks she found herself spending more time with Deborah. Even though Deborah was a little hurt and huffy about how Rebekah had been ignoring her since Mother arrived, it still felt good to be with somebody who she actually knew and who knew her. Even though Deborah was a little slow-witted, all her habits had long since been adapted to accommodate Rebekah’s, and Rebekah had long since learned how to respond to Deborah. Conversations with Deborah were never scintillating—but they were always comfortable and familiar.

Gradually, though, life settled into its new pattern, and all in all, it was a good one. Everything went smoothly, more or less, and if there was more grumbling among the women, there was also more laughter and singing, so perhaps it all evened out.

The one thing that seemed to have changed for good was the matter of suitors showing up to try to bargain for Rebekah’s hand in marriage. Prior to Mother’s arrival, there had been someone every week or so. Since Ezbaal came and went, there was not a one. If Father noticed it, he said nothing, and of course Mother did not know how it had been before.

Laban, as always, said exactly what was on his mind. “What do you think, silly girl? If you turned down Ezbaal, who else is going to think they could succeed where he failed? And if he rejected you, then who is going to quarrel with his judgment?”

“
I
think it’s just because I stopped wearing that veil. Once they could see my face, all the mystery was over and I’m just not as pretty as people thought I was.”

“
That’s
not it,” said Laban. “I mean, if they aren’t coming here in the first place, the problem can hardly be the way you
look.
Though I’d get rid of that goiter if I were you.”

“I wanted to, but Father said you’re the only son he’s got, so you have to stay.”

“Listen, Rebekah, they’ll start coming back. And even if they don’t, I’ll get one of my friends in the town really drunk and then tell him when he sobers up that he promised to marry you and I’m going to hold him to it.”

“Oh, that’s an excellent plan. And as soon as I’m married, the first thing I’ll do is make sure he
never
spends time with a horrible friend like you.”

Still, for about a year the visitors to the camp were all there to meet Mother and be charmed by her and congratulate Father and Mother on the wedding. The only time Rebekah was noticed was when somebody had to ooh-and-ah over how much she looked like her mother. And since Mother spent so long every day tending to her hair and clothing, and because she moved so gracefully and spoke so charmingly, by contrast Rebekah no doubt looked like something dragged into camp by a dog. You look so much alike, and yet your daughter seems to have been living in a thicket, that’s what they probably
meant.

And that’s why nobody wanted to marry her now. They all met Mother and realized that Rebekah had been raised, not by ladies, but by men. What good is beauty if the possessor of it doesn’t know how to behave beautifully?

Rebekah tried, of course. It’s not that she didn’t know how to be courteous, and she was naturally shy with strangers, so it wasn’t that she was too boisterous. She just . . . didn’t know how to be charming. And even as she watched Mother do it, she didn’t understand how it was that Mother made grown men get tongue-tied and stupid in her presence, and then laughed and made them feel as though she liked tongue-tied, stupid men.

Maybe it’s a gift of Asherah.

A thought that Rebekah knew was absurd—how can something be a gift of Asherah if there
is
no Asherah?

But it looked like magic to Rebekah. And when she tried to imitate her mother, she only looked ridiculous. Not that anyone saw her. Whom would she practice on? Servant boys? Servant
men?
Oh, by all means, let’s go down
that
road again and see if we can have another fellow thrown out of camp because he thought he had a chance with the master’s daughter.