Sotah (30 page)
Only Dina sat silently, unmoved. So many good deeds, so many mitzvot, and yet still the cold, yawning earth, the windswept hill. And she had never had a moment’s rest or taken an ounce of material pleasure. It was always work and duty. Work and duty. Why, her mother had never in her life gone to a hotel and been served a meal! Or sat in a concert hall! Or flown in an airplane! Dina cried until her eyes were red and swollen, mourning for the flinty hardness of her mother’s short life. What had she enjoyed, what had given her pleasure? In her anguish she began to imagine or project secret unfulfillment and imperfection on her mother’s life, ignoring the serenity, the quiet pleasure, the inner satisfaction, that had lined the coarse, practical material of that life with silk.
For weeks after the funeral she felt as if some dark, suffocating fallout billowed around her, poisoning the very air, dimming her vision. Judah thought he understood her. His heart ached with helplessness at her pain. His pretty, sensitive little bride. He brought her little carvings. He did the shopping and brought home ready-made food. He sat by her bedside silently (words could only hurt, he thought, could only belittle the enormity of her pain, which in time G-d would give her the strength to overcome), holding her hand as she wept. When she shrugged him off, or turned her back to him, he took the rebuff with equanimity, walking quietly out of the room. All pregnant women were especially sensitive. Insisting would only make things worse. Words would only make things worse. These things just had to be gotten over gradually, he thought.
So dim was her vision, so numb her feelings, that even the pain of childbirth did nothing more than ripple through them, a dark, battering wave slapping against her in the pale gray twilight. And there was the child, a boy. Joseph—Yossele—a firstborn son.
“This will bring her comfort,” Judah’s mother assured her worried son. “Treat her like a queen now. Let her rest, leave her be,” she exhorted him.
Judah went slightly mad with happiness about the baby, and no one could blame him: he was such a happy, beautiful child. He looked just like his mother. His hair was so blond and so thick that even the overworked baby nurses couldn’t resist fiddling with it, so that each time Dina went painfully down the corridor to fetch his little crib on wheels at nursing time, she found his hair had been combed differently, curled around his forehead or behind his ears. Yet the birth, the child, never seemed quite real to her. Only his mouth sucking at her swollen breast finally brought her some sense of vitality.
The pattern of existence that had been so mauled and tattered by her mother’s sudden death evolved slowly into a tentative new design that centered around the baby’s waking and sleeping. It was good to be so tired you couldn’t think, good to know each moment what was expected of you and to go through the motions.
She was in despair, and yet it was easy for Judah to mistake her mechanical motions for a return to normalcy, a healing plunge back into life. She loved the baby, yet he didn’t seem quite real. Often she took him with her on long rides that wound up in Har Hamenuchot. There, by the simple white carved headstone, she felt the ice around her heart melt for a few moments. She pulled out the weeds and wiped the white dust from the carved letters. “A woman of valor, who will find? Her value is far above pearls,” was written above her mother’s name. It was the beginning verse of a song her father had sung to her mother every Friday night, a song praising the virtuous housewife who knits so that her family might wear warm wool in winter; who gives generously to the stranger; who has won by her good deeds her husband’s implicit trust. Yet, reading the words, she felt her heart break anew. A woman of valor. And yet the earth and the windswept hill! Despite the spring heat, the stone was always cold. Only the living could feel warm, must feel warm, for there was nothing afterward but this icy earth.
I want to live, she told herself with shocking urgency, walking swiftly down the long stone-strewn path that led out of the cemetery. I want to feel warm. She hugged the baby with a new urgency. And yet it did not warm her. Her heart froze again as soon as she walked into her home.
She put the baby down to sleep and walked to the window, searching for some hope in the sky, the hills, the forests. In the window across the way, she saw the curtain pull back. The dark blue eyes met hers. She dropped her eyes, confused; then slowly, almost against her will, her eyes lifted. Abraham! But no. The beard was much darker, the eyes blue, slanted, and more intense.
Still, she felt a small thrill of connection before letting the curtain fall back into place.
She went about her work. The early morning nursing. The morning prayers. Breakfast for Judah, since she was up anyway and he was always so grateful. Laundry. The baby’s walk in the park and shopping. More nursing. Lunch. Then a short nap before nursing again and beginning dinner. Nursing, then watching Judah play with the baby, laughing at his shameless antics to make the child squeal with delight. The final nursing, the cleanup in the kitchen as Judah and his learning partner filled the living room with their quiet Talmudical debates. Then bed.
They slept apart now. She would not be able to go to the mikveh until the bleeding stopped completely. It was going to take a while. She didn’t mind not being able to sleep with him, as much as she minded his not being able to touch her. She needed warmth, a hug, a tender kiss. And Judah was distant. He had no choice, according to the law. She felt the irrational resentment towards him grow. He was never there when she needed him. Always some other excuse.
She began to look forward with a guilty thrill to passing by the window, almost holding her breath. Once or twice a day she noticed the eyes, the intense face and studied them. His brows were low and intelligent over eyes that were narrow, lifting at the corners in amusement. Yet they were not cheerful eyes, but rather demanding and knowledgeable with a guarded intensity. His nose was thin and fine, his upper lip narrow and definite over the sensuous fullness of his lower lip. The bones of his jaw and cheekbone were delicate and firm, giving the face a handsomeness and youth that made her wince at the shameful depth of her interest.
And then one day, their eyes met. And lingered. It was just a fraction too long, perhaps no longer than fifteen seconds. But it was long enough to belie the casualness, the accidentalness, of seeing him. Those fifteen seconds betrayed her. He could have no doubt she had been looking at him.
Afterward she felt shaken, as if she had leapt over some vast abyss and landed in a strange country. She would not look again, she told herself. It was indecent. Besides, she had revealed herself shamelessly.
She held out a week, and then, as if pushed by unseen hands, she found herself by the porch, helplessly staring at the house across the way. She stared a long time before turning her back dejectedly and closing the door behind her.
All the while, well hidden behind the curtains, blue eyes laughed with triumph and renewed determination. Not yet, he told himself with the relentless patience of an old, successful campaigner who senses the enemy’s helpless restlessness to get the battle moving. He was too experienced for that. She wasn’t ready. Not yet. But the progress was unmistakable.
A
nd then, suddenly, events took place that changed the flow of Dina’s life. Her sisters wanted her to help out at the store. At first she resisted.
“But how can I? Who will take care of the baby? Who will serve Judah his dinner?”
“Dina, Judah’s mother would like nothing better than to watch Yossele—you know how she dotes on him. As for dinner, I’m sure she’ll put it in a clean plate for Judah if he can’t manage himself,” Dvorah went on sarcastically. “Besides”—her voice was suddenly wheedling—“it would do you good to get out. Having a baby doesn’t mean the world stops. Anyhow, he’s already six months old, not exactly a newborn! Everybody is worried sick about you,” she scolded. “Especially Judah.”
“What has he said to you?” Dina immediately went on the defensive, which surprised and slightly alarmed her sister.
“Why, nothing. He doesn’t criticize you, you understand, so there’s no use your making a
ganzeh megillah
out of it. He simply asked me if I thought it was normal for a new mother to stay at home so much, to be so pale … Of course, I told him he was just being a typical new father. But I’m telling you that it isn’t normal, it isn’t right. You can’t just lock yourself up away from the world …” Her tone dropped into gentleness. “I know how hard it is. It’s like being in a foreign country and not knowing how to go home again. There’s not a day that I don’t think of
Ima
.” Dina looked at her sister with a flash of hope. “But we’ve got our own homes now …”
Dina’s eyes took on the cold, glassy look of dejection that had been bothering Judah, alarming him, since Rebbetzin Reich’s funeral. It was like some old dimming lens falling over her bright green eyes, clouding their beauty. “It doesn’t feel like it to me. I feel … lost.”
“Doesn’t Judah treat you well?”
She nodded. “Too well. He treats me like I’m made of crystal and will shatter any minute. He works so hard, and he tries to make things easier for me. But I don’t want things to be easier. I want to feel something …” She stopped herself, afraid to say more.
“You don’t love him. Not yet.” It wasn’t even a question, simply a statement of fact.
Dina felt her chest heave with relief. “When will I?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Dvorah answered honestly, troubled. “But if he is good to you, there will come some small moment when you see him for what he really is and begin to feel that connection to him that makes him family.”
“Family?” Dina thought the word oddly deflating. Did you want your husband to feel like family, so comfortable and familiar? Was that the most she had to hope for? “But when do I start wanting to be with him, to lie next to him in bed, to spend the mornings with him and the afternoons and the evenings? When do I start caring if I see him or I don’t?” Dina felt shocked at herself. This was a blatant exaggeration. Yet simplifying matters so drastically, so dishonestly, somehow made her feel better. The truth was far more complicated and harder to grasp.
The truth was that she felt abandoned and desolate, cut off not just from him, but from life itself. His silences, his fumbling, ignorant attempts to make her feel better, made her furious, made her want to feel to extremes. The truth was, she felt far more for him than she was willing, in her depression and anger, to admit.
“You’re just upset,” Dvorah said hurriedly, appalled. She’d had no idea. This was quicksand being spread all around her. She had no intention of stepping into it. She had her own problems. Another baby coming. The third in three years. There was no point in exploring the dark, evil smelling stuff that lay just beneath the bright calm exterior of existence. You kept the lid on sewer drains, didn’t you? Then why go exploring in such places? Another baby, another blessing, she told herself.
Baruch Hashem
, she told herself.
What right had Dina to be depressed? It showed a distressing lack of faith, a crumbling of the iron pillars that their mother had forged in all her girls. She had no right to collapse. She had no right to go whining after the moon like a spoiled child.
Dvorah, harried, hardworking, pregnant again, had learned not only to accept her husband, but to love that which was kind and generous in him. She had made her peace with the limitations of her life and in so doing had lost the ability to sympathize with those less fortunate. It was like being a paratrooper. Once you plunged into the open sky, once your parachute opened and you’d landed, your mind and heart were far from those still shaking with fear on the airplane. You hated those who wouldn’t jump, those who forgot how to pull the string and open the parachute. They’d all received the same, harsh, detailed training for the mission. No one deserved sympathy for cowardice or for screwing up. Dvorah didn’t want to remember how she’d felt at the beginning of her marriage now that she was truly happy with her husband—at least as happy as she was capable of imagining any woman could be with a man.
She changed the subject. “About the store, Dina. You can’t be selfish. Without the income from the store,
Aba
wouldn’t be able to keep paying Mrs Weinstein to take care of the house and the boys, not to mention the debts on my mortgage, which
Aba
promised Yaakov’s parents he’d pay when we married. You know that I’ve been working in the store every morning since
Ima
… and Chaya Leah’s been taking over each afternoon. But she has exams coming up and can’t manage. And I’ve got to be home in the afternoon for the children. Besides, I’ll be giving birth soon, so you can’t depend on me. Can you come every afternoon from four to seven?”
“I’ll do it,” Dina finally acquiesced, seeing no choice, a thick phlegm of shame and disappointment choking her. She felt cheapened and somehow tricked at having revealed so much about her marriage only to have been totally ignored. She felt as if all her feelings had somehow been invalidated. Worse, they seemed shocking, hideous. What had she been thinking of to have spoken so freely? She was angry at herself for having trusted Dvorah to understand, and even angrier at her sister for having somehow failed her. Most of all, her own openness was frightening. The hinges of the trunk were coming undone, she told herself. They would not hold much longer. “I’d be happy to help,” she said a little more loudly and emphatically than was necessary, drowning out the other thoughts.
That was good enough for Dvorah. “
Baruch Hashem!
” she said encouragingly. “Come to the store. It will keep you occupied. It’s not good to think too much.” The two sisters’ eyes met for a moment, then parted—accusing, guilty, and full of unwilling understanding.
“Judah, Dvorah wants me to help out at the store,” Dina told her husband later that evening, wondering, even hoping a bit, that he might object.
