The Saturday Wife (34 page)

“Listen, Delilah,” Chaim had answerered reasonably, “most rabbis’ wives are happy to do it. It’s a woman’s thing. And women feel more comfortable talking to another woman. But if you can’t, you can’t. Just give them to me.”

She was only too happy to do so. But she was still stuck with being the
go-between, giving them back to the women, telling them the results, and explaining the consequences. In the worst case, it could mean another two weeks of sexual abstinence and dealing with a frustrated husband—girl, you don’t want to know… While Delilah sympathized, no way was she interested in becoming privy to whether or not each one of them would or would not be having sex with their husbands, thus becoming a living repository of the entire community’s sex life. Nor did she particularly want the entire community to keep tabs on hers.

This was not as easy as it sounds in a community with only one
mikva.
Although efforts were made to hide the entrance to the ritual bath from the street, still, once inside, everyone she met there knew exactly when she’d be having sex with her husband, the rabbi. In addition to that, they had the opportunity to inspect how short her nails were (the very pious cut them to the quick on
mikva
night, making long nails and manicures impossible) and how she looked without her hair and absolutely no makeup of any kind.

Moreover, the “
mikva
lady,” that stalwart institution of religious life, chosen from the ranks of the needy and overly pious but not overly bright, made privy to information of the most personal nature, could not always be relied upon to be discreet. “Hello, Mrs. Goldberg, I haven’t seen you in months,” said at full volume in the supermarket, for example, announced a pregnancy to the community like an engraved invitation to participate in the most intimate details of someone’s private life.

Then, of course, there was the monthly sisterhood meeting. During the intensive Metzenbaum era, it had been moved from the synagogue to the rabbi’s house, because Shira Metzenbaum didn’t have enough to do, and now no one saw fit to move it back. And it was not just a meeting, she was led to understand; it was an event.

The food that she had to prepare had to be as imaginative as the way she served it. Each meeting had to have a “theme,” to help keep the women interested in coming back, she was advised. Last month it had been a Ladies Who Lunch theme, with flower-filled shopping bags from Nordstrom’s and Lord & Taylor, and wigs and hats on Styrofoam heads, elaborately decorated to look like some of the synagogue members. She’d prepared white carrot and sweet potato soup, persimmon tuna salad, and little chocolates she had to make in special plastic molds that turned out dreidels and menorahs and other symbols of the season. Often, Delilah cursed her hyper Martha-Stewart-in-a-wig-on-uppers predecessor, feeling
schadenfreude
for the woman’s present life in Canarsie.

It wasn’t just the preparations that were driving her crazy. During one sisterhood meeting, she’d found two women in her bathroom discussing the hair dye and prescription medication they’d found in her medicine cabinet. At another, a woman she hardly knew told her that her baby was looking “much better” than when he was born, when he’d been “like the puppy in the litter you throw away.” After another, she’d found a silver cake server missing, and then a whole Wedgwood plate. And then there was the woman who had asked all kinds of personal questions about Chaim, finally admitting that her first rabbi had been touchy-feely Moishe from New Jersey, who had had his wife killed by a hit man, and her second, a rabbi in Florida, who had been arrested as a pedophile, so she was just trying to make sure it wasn’t her fault the third time around.

And in between, day and night, there were the phone calls—
brring, brrring, brrrring!
—day in and day out. The woman who called them at 1
A.M.
to complain that her little Lenny had been traumatized by getting a doughnut with pink icing at the
Oneg Shabbat
party. The man who was incensed that the Lion of Judah giving category in the latest United Jewish fund-raising campaign was between twenty and forty thousand dollars, leaving “those who are just as pious but not as rich” out in the embarrassing cold. Could the rabbi deal with that? Can you give the rabbi a message? Can you remind him? Can you talk to him about it? Could you possibly mention that in his last sermon he spoke too long, too short, about a topic we don’t care about, do care about, but not to that extent, in that way? Can he talk about twelve-year-old girls getting nose jobs in time for their Bat Mitzvas? Can he talk less about Israel; more about Israel? Can he stop supporting the right-wing fanatics, who won’t compromise, and who will get the Jewish people wiped off the planet? Can he stop supporting left-wing fanatics, Israeli peace nuts, who are giving in to our enemies and are going to get us wiped off the planet? Can he stop putting so much pressure on our young people, who are going to wind up with black hats and beards, unemployed and with ten kids? Can he put more pressure on our young people, who are going to be drug addicts and get lost in rave parties in India?

Blah, blah, blah,
like she actually had nothing better to do than to consult with Chaim on his boring sermons.

And then there were the phone calls that were actually for her. A cousin of a synagogue member, a very nice thirty-two-year-old girl with a good job as an editor at a big New York publishing firm, was looking for a
very attractive lawyer or doctor who was also Orthodox but open-minded. Would she know of somebody suitable? Could she set it up?

Gee, honey, if I knew anybody suitable who matched that description, why would I give him to you? I’d take him myself, she thought. “Not right now, but let me write down the information,” she’d answer sweetly, making no effort to get a pencil. Why bother? Go find a modern Orthodox man in his thirties who wasn’t holding out for a girl who would think as highly of him as his mother, looked like Kate Winslet, was as saintly as the matriarch Sarah, and had the domestic skills of Martha Stewart. Listen, she wanted to shout at these men, the girls are all five-foot-two dark-haired teachers or social workers who will never cook you a kreplach or kiss your feet the way your mother did. Get over it!

And then there were the men who couldn’t wait to get married, who would marry anyone: the divorced men. The stingy, over- or undersexed grouches with bad tempers, body odors, and hanging bellies full of brisket and donuts who had already made one woman miserable but were anxious to make it two. They too were on the phone, seeking her help.

Even the mothers and fathers of college students, who should, for Pete’s sake, have been able to fend for themselves, were calling her, demanding she find suitable matches for their offspring so they wouldn’t bring home a
sheygets
or a shiksa from their ivy-covered campuses, along with their 3.9 grade-point averages and wildly expensive degrees. Some of these callers were super-religious, people who insisted on knowing the color of the girl’s mother’s Sabbath tablecloth. Was it white—acceptable, conservative—or any other color? And did the family have two or three sit-down meals on the Sabbath? (The third meal—which no one could possibly fit into an average stomach—being considered a sign of extra piety.) And was the boy actually going to use his law, accounting, or computer degree or put it aside and let his wife support him forever while he twiddled his thumbs and spoke on his cell phone from Talmudic study halls?

And then there were those people who saw her as the representative of the entire Jewish religion, people who would read the newspaper and then call her up to ask indignantly how a rabbi could run off with a former Russian Orthodox nun who had once been a flamenco dancer, shack up with her in a Miami condo, and leave his wife and congregation behind? “He said it was because his wife sometimes ate shrimp, but I’m not buying it!” they’d shout.

And all this, mind you, she was supposed to deal with on top of her newborn.

The baby. Little Abe.

That was a whole other story in itself. She looked down at the infant in her arms, sucking away like a leech. It had taken Delilah only several weeks to realize that, among her many interests and talents, mothering was not among them. She was as surprised to learn this as the next one.

Like most of us, she had always assumed that the ability to mother was a raw, animal instinct, hormonally supplied by the same chemicals and brain synapses that came along with the birth of a child. The truth was that the insistent, desperate cry of a newborn, added to the insistent, desperate cries of members of her congregation, was just about driving her over the edge.

“He hates me!” she yelled at Chaim, bursting into his study when he was putting the final touches on his weekly sermon on how husbands should be compassionate and unselfishness and helpful. “Just look at his eyes. Look!”

“Delilah, I can’t concentrate with all that crying. Could you possibly take him outside for a while?” he’d say, not looking up until she shoved the baby into his arms and disappeared.

After these outbursts, she’d be overcome with guilt. She’d sit in her bedroom, listening to her albums and weeping until she had no more tears left. Then she’d go into the bathroom, wipe her eyes, and examine the sad state of her skin and the tire around her middle that simply refused to vanish. She’d return to Chaim, retrieve her son, and cuddle him tenderly in her arms, crooning lullabies and whispering to him.

She would never, ever, she told herself, do anything that would remotely harm the baby. Why, just the idea that a single hair on his little head might be pulled filled her with horror and pity. In fact, every time the child went to sleep, she remembered that she was deeply in love with him. She’d sit for hours, examining him, every minute detail. But she had to admit, he disappointed her. He had his grandfather’s little eyes, which seemed to stare at her accusingly, her mother’s big nose, her mother-in-law’s thin dissatisfied lips, and her husband’s dark hair. She would have preferred a girl with a beautiful little face, big blue eyes, and darling blond curls. A little doll she could buy adorable baby J-Lo dresses for with matching hair bows.

But she took some pride in having created a son. Little Abraham was a
credit to her. She had produced him, after all, when she could just as easily have produced a girl as first-born. Orthodox Jews, no matter their well-concealed disappointment and shocked denials, were no different than the members of most other religions and cultures on this point. Let’s face it, girls are not considered much to celebrate. There’s no ceremony. No gathering of rabbis and friends to welcome her into the tribe. And even though politically correct modern Orthodoxy has been embarrassed into sanctioning the
mesibat bat,
or girl party, and the Bat Mitzva, everyone is in on the fact that it is just a pale-flaccid little consolation prize.

He was her pride and joy, she reminded herself. If only he wasn’t so much work. If only she had more time… .

“Normal people look forward to weekends! What do I get on weekends? I get to be inspected, to serve armies of house guests, to visit cemeteries. I’m a prisoner here. Getting away for the weekend, or for holidays, is always impossible!”

Chaim, used to Delilah’s tantrums, had learned to tune them out.

However, later that evening, after she’d said goodbye to the last of the sisterhood members and loaded the dishwasher and vacuumed the carpet, she leaned against the doorpost of his office and said, very calmly, “Did you know that Andrea Yates was class valedictorian? Captain of the swim team? In the National Honor Society? A nurse in the cancer ward?”

He’d stared at her in horror. Then he picked up the phone and made immediate arrangements for a private meeting with Arthur Malin.

Soon after, the synagogue board voted to provide the rabbi and his wife with some weekly hours of child care and housekeeping and to give Delilah a free yearly membership in the Swallow Lake Country Club.

As with many kind gestures, this move also proved the wisdom of the saying that no good deed ever goes unpunished.

TWENTY