The Saturday Wife (33 page)

The baby was screaming, so she picked him up and balanced him on her hip, as she creamed the confectioner’s sugar into the butter. The phone was ringing.

“Chaim, can you get that?
Chaim?”

It kept ringing.

“Hello?”

“Rebbitzin Levi?”

“Yes, who is this? Shhhh… . No I’m not shushing you, it’s my baby. How can I… ? Oh, Mrs. Stein. You really should discuss that with my husband… . I’m sorry he’s so hard to catch, but he’s… . Yes, I realize that it’s important… . Of course, I’ll remind the cleaning staff to wash off the plants in the synagogue lobby before your son’s Bar Mitzva… . No, I don’t think it’s petty, not at all. You have out-of-town guests; of course you should feel comfortable.
Ssssssssshhhhhh!
No, no, really, it’s the baby—”

Was that the damn doorbell ringing?

“CHAIM!” Where was he?

“Sorry, I’ve got to go. ‘Bye.”

She hung up the phone and ran to the door.

“Oh, Mrs. Cooperman. How are you?” She smiled as best she could at the young woman on her doorstep, who wordlessly handed her a white envelope, turned her back, and fled. Delilah held it in her fingertips gingerly, imagining the piece of cloth tinged with vaginal secretion inside, releasing it over the pile of mail on the dining room table meant for Chaim.

The baby was not going back to sleep, she realized, sitting down and pulling out her breast. She sat down on the couch and closed her eyes as the infant nursed, pulling on her nipple, which was sore and cracked. She put him over her shoulder to burp. He let loose a large wad of goo, which, as usual, managed to miss the diaper and run down her shoulder, thus destroying yet another blouse.

No, things were not going as she’d imagined. For starters, there she was sitting in the front pew in the synagogue, a sitting duck, listening to all the whispers as Chaim was speaking, wondering if they were laughing at him or angry at him or just ignoring him and discussing where to buy shoes, as he gave his weekly sermon. At first, she had concentrated on his every word, tense and defensive, cringing when she heard him say anything
the least bit controversial that might wind up with some incensed synagogue member accosting them at kiddush to bawl him out. But as hard as she listened, it was impossible to predict. Once, he told a touching story about the daughter of a friend who had celebrated her twenty-first birthday in Jerusalem by preparing a Sabbath dinner for friends. He compared that to the twenty-one-year-olds who celebrate by getting drunk in bars with friends. Who could have predicted that this would lead to a half-crazed congregant cornering him over the potato kugel, shouting, “Not every American kid gets plastered on his birthday! What are you trying to do, talk all of us into sending our kids to Israel where they’ll be blown up by suicide bombers?”

After that, she’d tune out his speeches completely. It was bad enough she had to show up at the synagogue every Saturday morning, baby or no baby, rain or shine. And it wasn’t enough just to come, she had to show up in the best possible outfit, with a matching hat or wig that covered all or most of her hair.

Never in her wildest dreams had Delilah ever imagined she’d wind up covering her hair. The custom, as far as she knew, had started with the biblical phrase in Leviticus that described the
sotah
ordeal that a woman had to undergo if her husband suspected her of committing adultery but didn’t have any actual proof. The poor floozy was taken to the temple where, the Bible says, “The priest shall present the woman… before God and uncover the head of the woman.” How that had morphed into every married woman being obliged to shave her head—or wear a wig, or tuck every last strand of her hair inside some dorky-looking snood—was beyond her. But there it was. Her own theory, adopted from a talkative and rebellious classmate who had wound up marrying a Gentile, was historical: Given the fact that only prostitutes had not worn a hat in the Middle Ages, medieval rabbis had found some way to update biblical Judaism to be in tune with the times. Unfortunately, Orthodoxy’s innovations sort of froze in the fourteen hundreds. So when women all over the world stopped covering their hair, Orthodox rabbis forgot to update. Now, women were stuck with two impossible-to-explain ideas: that a wig was more modest than your own hair and that being the only woman in the entire city to wear a hat—thus calling undue attention to yourself wherever you went—was a source of modesty.

As a girl, she’d only seen the most pious rabbis’ wives and her Torah teachers wear wigs. Other religious women teachers had worn hats, although
with visible reluctance, and the hats kept getting smaller and smaller as time went by.

Strangely, although her mother’s generation and even her grandmother’s had neatly done away with the hair-covering custom altogether, it was her generation that had set themselves the reactionary goal of bringing it back, something like Iranian girls making a revolution to put themselves into veils and under the thumb of the mullahs and imams.

How many discussions had she had with her Bernstein Seminary classmates on whether or not they would cover their hair when they got married? How many hours had been wasted describing the merits, exploring the major moral significance, and plumbing the religious joy of buying either a hat to match every outfit or a fantastically expensive custom-made wig usually reserved for chemo patients who had lost all their hair? Whatever the conclusion they came to, most agreed that—outdated custom or no—it was a religious obligation you simply couldn’t wiggle out of. Some girls even claimed it had nothing to do with modesty; that it was one of those unfathomable Divine decrees, like the red heifer, whose sprinkled ashes somehow had the mystical power to cleanse the nation of sins and impurities.

But as far as Delilah could see, forcing women to cover their hair was no red heifer; it was simply a gimmick—one of many—that rabbis had dreamed up just to make married women uglier than unmarried women, so that men could easily tell them apart, ostensibly for the purpose of encouraging them to keep their hands off the married ones.

Wig wearing wasn’t helpful in the least to this endeavor, which is why the stringency kings wanted to outlaw wigs. For many years they had waged a guerrilla war against the wig stores and
shaitel
makers, coming up with ever more imaginative ways of doing battle. Their ultimate coup was achieved by spreading the rumor that wigs contained hair donated by women as part of the idolatrous worship of Hindu deities. The resulting wig burnings that took place all over the religious world—reducing many a panicked matron to ugly head scarves and wig store owners to bankruptcy—filled them with rapturous satisfaction, But the rumor was eventually quashed, and the sale of wigs shot back up to normal. This time, though, wigs had to carry a rabbinical stamp of approval ascertaining no Hindu deities had been deprived of their due

Many of Delilah’s friends viewed the prewedding wig-and-hat-buying
spree as just one more lovely, religiously sanctioned prénuptial extravagance. They would no more have dreamed of forgoing it than they would have given up the sterling silver candelabra they had coming to them from their mothers-in-law.

But as married life rolled on and all that wig wearing gave them headaches, ruining their natural hair; and the effort to find a hat that would match every single outfit began to drain their ingenuity—not to mention their cash—they began to realize what a fine mess they’d gotten themselves into. By then, of course, it was much too late. If a bride never covered her hair, that was one thing. But if she covered it and then decided as a married woman to uncover it, that was a major religious statement that needed to be accounted for among friends, family, and community, a monumental showdown that most religious women didn’t have the stomach for, even when their husbands backed them up.

Not that many husbands did. Given that their own religious status would be vulnerable to a staggering blow should their wives suddenly feel the joy of having the wind blow through their hair, such a man was rare. Except for the singular man of moral courage who sympathized with his wife’s frustration or had the intellectual honesty to admit the silliness of the prohibition, most men were perfectly thrilled to maintain religiously sanctioned control over their wives’ femininity.

Delilah had also bought into the hats and the wigs but had become disillusioned rather sooner than most. She immediately discarded her head covering while in the privacy of her home, ignoring the example quoted in the Talmud of the sanctimonious and insufferable matron who declared the secret to her success in mothering some outrageous number of priests in the Holy Temple had been entirely due to the fact that “the walls of her house had never seen a strand of her hair.” But that was just an opinion, not Jewish law. All rabbis agreed that you only had to cover your hair outside the house. If any man came over, she threw on a scarf, of course.

However much she longed to go back to wearing her hair the way she had as a single girl, she was painfully reconciled to the fact that it would be tricky if not impossible now that she was the wife of a congregational rabbi and all eyes were upon her, grading her saintliness. How could people rely on a rabbi who couldn’t maintain strict adherence to Jewish law even in his own home?

While she chafed under the prohibition, she made do by constantly wearing an exquisite blond wig, custom-made at enormous expense to fit
her perfectly. She looked so stunning in it, she left Chaim alone. Unfortunately, constant wear and many washings and blow dryings had taken their toll; the wig, alas, had lost its appeal. In fact, it was actually beginning to look like a wig, which is the last thing any religious woman wants. Equally unfortunately, the thousands of dollars necessary to replace it were simply not available. What she was left with was buying the kind of out-of-the-box human hair/polyester weave worn by Hasidic women, Halloween revelers, and call girls, styling and length being the key differences.

She tried turbans. She tried snoods. She tried berets. She tried baseball caps worn frontward and backward. While all these things were workable, if not beautiful, adequate to run errands and wash the floors, they simply would not do when she made her slow triumphant walk down the center aisle to the front of the women’s section to the seat marked with a brass plaque:
RESERVED FOR THE RABBI’S WIFE
.

Hats, at least the kind worn by the women in her congregation, cost a fortune. And clothes like theirs an even bigger fortune. But what could she do? Living among the very wealthy, being invited to another Bar and Bat Mitzva or wedding almost every month, she needed something respectable and festive to wear. And since everyone she knew in the community came to these affairs, she couldn’t very well wear the same outfit each time, now, could she? Besides, it would wear out eventually, unless it was made of iron. Couple that with the constant gifts that she and Chaim had to come up with, the extra quantity and quality of food she had to buy for the unending stream of guests, the high heat and electric bills for the large house, not to mention the babysitters needed when she had to accompany her husband to unveilings, evening events, shiva calls, and many other duties that necessitated leaving little Abraham behind, and they were effectively broke most of the time.

She considered going back to work, but when you took child care into account it wouldn’t have left her that much. And somehow the business of being the rabbi’s wife, while unpaid, was slowly encroaching on more and more of her time.

She once sat down and calculated where her week went. The weekends of course were shot. Not just Saturday, but all day Friday and much of Wednesday and Thursday had to be spent shopping for food and cleaning up the house and cooking for a steady stream of weekend guests who came expecting to be served three opulent sit-down dinners, beginning Friday night and ending late Saturday night when they all cleared out.

And even shopping for food was not a simple thing if you were a rabbi’s wife. There was that time, after a sleepless night with a colicky baby, she’d rolled out of bed and shlepped to the supermarket, only to be hailed from across the aisles by a “Yoo-hoo! Hello, Rebbitzin! My goodness, you look awful! Have you been showering?” Or the time she was accosted in the frozen food section by a woman who stared into her shopping cart, examining each item’s
hechsher
to see if it was kosher enough. “I’m surprised you are buying things marked with a star-K instead of an OU, not to mention the half circle-K,” She sniffed, scandalized. “My husband says the rabbis supervising aren’t reliable. He won’t touch a crumb, not a crumb, if it’s not stamped with an OU. Do your guests know what they’re eating?” Or the time she was a second away from her turn on the checkout line when a shul member grabbed her by the shoulders and insisted on regaling her with an half-hour’s worth of disgustingly graphic medical details, hinting broadly that she needed someone to drive her to her appointments and hold her hand during treatments. Or the stranger in a polyester jogging suit wearing a large cross, who—seeing her head covering—barred her from picking up nail polish remover, insisting on knowing if she was Jewish and, if so, why she didn’t believe in Jesus.

Sundays were spent going to unveilings or funerals or condolence calls. Mondays were when the week began again with obligations and other synagogue-related work that she had never had to worry about in the Bronx among the aged.

For example, women started showing up at her doorstep, demanding her attention and wordlessly handing her white unmarked envelopes. The first time it happened, Delilah opened the envelope, thinking it might be a donation to the synagogue, but all she found was a bit of stained white cloth. Slowly, it dawned on her where this material had been and where the stain had come from.

She confronted Chaim, fuming. “Read my lips. No-way-José am I going to examine some woman’s vaginal fluids and tell her if she can or can’t have sex with her husband. I am not touching these disgusting things. Tell them to leave me alone!”