The Saturday Wife Read online

  THE SATURDAY WIFE

  ALSO BY NAOMI RAGEN

  The Covenant

  Chains Around the Grass

  The Ghost of Hannah Mendes

  The Sacrifice of Tamar

  Sotah

  Jepthe’s Daughter

  Women’s Minyan (a play)

  The

  Saturday

  Wife

  NAOMI RAGEN

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  THE SATURDAY WIFE. Copyright © 2007 by Naomi Ragen.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Book design by Mary A. Wirth

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Ragen, Naomi.

  The Saturday wife / Naomi Ragen.—1st ed.

  p. cm

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35238-7

  ISBN-10: 0-312-35238-7

  1. Jewish women—Fiction. 2. Rabbis’spouses—Fiction. 3. Marriage—Fiction. 4. Jewish fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.A4118S28 2007

  813'.54—dc22

  2007016179

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Dedicated, with love, to

  Hallel, Hillel, Ariella, Manny, Yotam, Elon, Aviyah, Matan, and Eliora

  for bringing more joy and laughter into my life

  than I ever imagined possible

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The genesis of any book is a strange and mysterious process. I would like to thank, equally and profoundly, the blonde in the miniskirt and tank top who got up onstage to dance with the toddlers during a Kosher Club week in the Dominican Republic, and Gustave Flaubert for writing Madame Bovary, which I took along with me on vacation. The confluence of these two is truly responsible for this book.

  I would also like to thank the approximately ten thousand members of my e-mail list (www.naomiragen.com) for responding so generously to my request for help with my research. The hundreds of e-mails I received describing actual Bar and Bat Mitzvas and weddings, as well as shul wars and stories of rabbis, their wives, and their congregations, were wonderful, and I’ve used them all (well, almost). Without this input, the book you read wouldn’t have been the same. I especially thank the wonderful rabbis and rabbis’ wives who wrote me, as well as the intrepid and talented bloggers, the incomparable Renegade Rebbitzen and Ezer K’negdo, and others for information and inspiration.

  As for those few on my e-mail list who wrote me nasty letters declining to participate until they knew more about how I was planning to use this material, I hope you are now feeling satisfied that you cannot be held responsible.

  I thank my agent, Lisa Bankoff, for her unending support and encouragement through this and many other projects.

  I thank my talented and very patient editor, Jennifer Weis of St. Martin’s Press, for her enormous help and editorial guidance, as well as for suggesting in the back of a New York taxi that I make my main character a rabbi’s wife. It has made all the difference.

  I thank my son Asher for taking time off from finishing his doctorate at Harvard (I had to get that in) to read and comment on this book.

  I thank my dear husband, Alex, for telling me jokes for the last thirty-six years. I finally got to use a few. If you don’t think they’re funny, his e-mail address is available.

  Naomi Ragen

  JERUSALEM, 2007

  If we disregard due proportion by giving anything what is too much for it . . . the consequence is always shipwreck.

  —PLATO

  THE SATURDAY WIFE

  PROLOGUE

  It is not an easy thing for an Orthodox Jewish girl to be saddled with the name of a Gentile temptress responsible for destroying a famous Jewish hero. When Delilah’s father filled in her name on the Hebrew Academy day school application form, the rabbi/administrator assumed it was a mistake, a feeble attempt on the part of some clueless, nonreligious Jew to find a Hebrew equivalent for Delia or Dorothy:

  “You are aware, Mr. Goldgrab, that, in the Bible, Delilah seduced Samson and is considered a wicked whore by our sages?” he pointed out, as gently as he could.

  “Well, now, you don’t say?” Delilah’s father drawled, his six-foot-two-inch frame towering over the little man, who nervously clutched his skullcap. “Just so happens it was my mother’s name.”

  Our first meeting with Delilah was in second grade out on the punch-ball fields of the Hebrew Academy of Cedar Heights on Long Island. Punchball was a Jewish girl’s baseball without the bat. You just made the hardest fist you could and wham!—started to run. When you hit that rubber ball, you took out all your anger, all your angst, all your frustration. You ran and ran and ran and ran, hoping you’d hit it hard enough so that no one could catch it or you and send you back to first base—or, worse, throw you out of the game altogether.

  The privilege of hitting the punchball was not to be taken for granted. Each recess, teams were picked anew by captains, who were, by mutual agreement, the prettiest and richest girls in the class. Everyone who wanted to play lined up and just waited for the magic summons. And as in life, some girls—like rich, snobby Hadassah Mittelman—were always the captains, and some girls, like me, were never asked to play. Never.

  We knew who we were and finally slipped away. But there were others—like Delilah—who sometimes made it in. Girls like her always had it the hardest. To almost make it was a far crueler fate that to be permanently relieved of hope.

  The world was a simple place back then, neatly divided between those of us who got the little blue admission cards in the mail at the start of each new term because our parents had paid the full tuition and those who got them at the last minute, only after much parental groveling and pleading had pried them from the tightfisted grip of the merciless rabbi/administrator in charge. It was a world divided between those who had cashmere sweaters and indulgent fathers who dropped them off at school in their big cars because they lived in even more upscale neighborhoods farther out on the island and those who shivered in scratchy wool on public buses coming from the opposite direction.

  Delilah took the bus, but she also had a cashmere sweater, the most glorious color pink, that seemed to float around her shoulders like angel hair. Rumor had it that her mother had actually knitted it for her from scratch, a rumor that cruelly denied her the status conferred by ownership.

  This was no doubt true. Mrs. Goldgrab was a woman of scary heaviness, with bad skin and glasses with rhinestone frames that made her eyes contract into hard river stones. She worked a forty-hour week in some low-level office job that computers have permanently wiped off the employment map, and in her spare time, was a seething cauldron of unfulfilled social ambitions, thwarted at every turn by impassable roadblocks. One of the largest was her husband: a tall, lanky man with a shocking Texas accent who worked as a mechanic in a local car repair shop. If anyone ever ran into him in his uniform and mentioned it, Delilah was mortified. Over the years, she adopted the same attitude toward him as her mother: he was something she had to put up with, but he wasn’t an asset.

  From the beginning, Mrs. Goldgrab had plans for Delilah. Big plans. She wanted her to be popular with the right girls. To be invited to their birthday parties. She hoped to be able to drop her off at Tudor mansions in Woodmere and be casually invited in for coffee, where she would chitcha
t with the mothers who wore pearls and Ann Taylor suits even on weekends, women who existed—along with the longed-for invitations—only in her lower-middle-class imagination. Even Hadassah’s mother wore jeans on weekends. And no one wanted to chitchat with Mrs. Goldgrab, not even her husband.

  We always envied Delilah that sweater—to this day. Except that now we understand it had meant nothing to her. What she had wanted was a store-bought sweater, the kind Hadassah Mittelman wore. In fact, she wanted to be Hadassah Mittelman, the rabbi’s beautiful daughter, who lived in a house with a full suit of armor standing in her hallway, guarding the grand staircase upstairs to her designer bedroom, with its ruffled canopy bed. Delilah didn’t want to visit that house. She wanted to move in. Maybe we all did in those days. The difference was that Delilah never got over it.

  So before you judge her for the horrible things she did, please try to remember this: All Delilah Goldgrab Levi ever really wanted was to be included when they called out the names of those who were allowed to play.

  ONE

  The thing people never understood about Delilah was that she always considered herself the victim of a painfully disadvantaged childhood, something that mystified her hardworking, upwardly mobile parents. There were few who knew how deeply she mourned her endless humiliations: winter clothes chosen from picked-over reduced racks in January sales instead of shiny new in autumn; a sweet sixteen celebrated in a bowling alley instead of in a hotel with a live band; Passover seders at home prepared by her sweating mother instead of in the dining room of exclusive resorts; summers lying on the public beach instead of trips to Israel and Europe. A childhood of last year’s Nikes, drugstore sunglasses, fifteen-dollar haircuts, and do-it-yourself French manicures whose white line was always crooked. . . .

  On the rare occasions that she sat in self-judgment, such as before the Yom Kippur fast, she never felt these longings marked her as selfish, materialistic, or shallow. On the contrary, she considered herself an idealist, someone focused on the really important things in life: true happiness, true love. As she saw it, she was simply being honest with herself. And someone who “really loved her” would be the kind of person who would stop at nothing to help her overcome the trauma of her youth, her mother’s cheap fashion accessories—those fake pearls, those nine-karat gold amethyst rings. Someone who “really loved her” would understand and appreciate how profoundly she needed a house, not an apartment, preferably with a swimming pool, in addition to business-class jaunts to five-star resorts in the Caribbean and Hawaii.

  She felt this way despite all the best efforts of our synagogue and schooling to convince us of the fleeting worth of material things, as opposed to the eternal reward—in this life and the next—of spiritual attainments.

  In general, Delilah’s relationship to religion was somewhat complex. She wasn’t a natural rebel. She actually loved the elaborate meals, the dressing up for the synagogue, the socializing afterward. On the other hand, she absolutely refused to accept the fact that bearded rabbis had the right to decide for her how long her skirts and sleeves would be, what she could and couldn’t read, or watch on TV or in the movies, or what kind of dates she could have (i.e., serious ones, leading to early marriages, as opposed to frivolous recreational ones like riding roller coasters in Playland).

  Like most people, she snipped and tugged and restitched her religion to make it a more comfortable fit. She didn’t feel guilty about this. Why should she, she told herself, when the rabbis themselves had done a good deal of tailoring? Take the relationship between the sexes. On the one hand, the Bible taught that men and women were both created in God’s image as equals, but on the other, Jewish law was male chauvinist in the extreme, notwithstanding millennia of rabbinical apologetics to disprove the obvious.

  Men were the leaders, high priests, rabbis, judges. While rabbis claimed that they were simply expounding on eternal laws derived from God-given sacred texts, the laws always seemed to come out to the men’s advantage. For example, sitting shiva. During the seven days of mourning for a parent, wife, or child, rabbinical law said a man wasn’t permitted to do anything; he had to be served and taken care of. But if a woman was sitting shiva—surprise!—the same law said she was allowed to get up and wash the floor and cook dinner.

  Despite these feelings, Delilah never considered herself a feminist, refusing to join those of us who railed against being banned from donning a prayer shawl and phylacteries or from learning Talmud. She’d just roll her eyes and yawn. “That’s all I need. More religious obligations.”

  The biblical heroines she admired were not the tough, powerful matriarchs, but Esther, who’d soaked in precious bath oils for six months, mesmerizing the king and becoming queen of Persia; and Abigail, who sent war-weary King David camel-loads of food and drink, thereby giving her tightfisted husband, Nabal, a fatal heart attack, thus leaving herself rich and free to marry David, which she was only too happy to do. To Delilah’s thinking, these were stories with a deeply spiritual message for women.

  Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir bored her. Equal wages were all right, but it was better if your husband earned enough so that you never, ever had to work if you didn’t want to. Truth be told, her vision of the perfect world would have been a party in Gone with the Wind where women wore ball gowns to barbecues and men brought them plates of delicious food; a place where all women had to do was smile and be pretty and men fell all over themselves to please and amuse them.

  All through high school, Delilah was in training for this role. If only you could have seen her then: those manicured toenails with the red polish so carefully applied, those tanned slim thighs, the blond hair braided in cornrows with turquoise beads, the tiny bathing suit like two slashes of color, the eyes that flashed at you like tanzanite, deep blue flecked with gold. She was so deliciously slim, so adorably sexy, it made you stop and stare, the way one stares at a flashy lightning storm or a gaudy tropical sunset. And she knew it.

  How could she not? Men and boys flocked around her, and she giggled and flirted indiscriminately with all of them, even the young Puerto Rican janitors hired to clean the floors and bathrooms of the Hebrew Academy of Cedar Heights.

  “Everyone does exactly as they please,” she’d say cryptically, tossing her head. “Even the ones who parade around showing off their holiness with all those head coverings and fringed garments, yarmulkes and wigs. Secretly, they also do exactly what they want and find excuses afterward.” When we protested mildly, she told us to grow up.

  While we had all more or less decided by the end of high school what we wanted to be, Delilah remained vague. Her mother wanted her to take some education courses and become a teacher. But something as small and unimaginative as that wouldn’t suit her at all, she said. Besides, she didn’t like the outfits or the hair and makeup that went with it. You couldn’t get away with much in front of a class full of yeshiva kids with a rabbi/principal peeking in on you every few hours. And what if the kids asked you questions, let’s say, about the Resurrection of the Dead? Or if the Messiah was coming? She knew she was supposed to believe with perfect faith, but honestly, she had never been able to get her head around such ideas. What, would they come out of their graves, like in The Night of the Living Dead? Or like that mangled factory-worker who comes knocking on his parents’ door in The Monkey’s Curse?

  And this Messiah. Did he know he was the Messiah? A person is born, gets toilet trained, eats hamburgers, and then—what, finds out he’s going to bring peace to the world and change all human life as we know it? Would it be like Moses and the burning bush, where you are just minding your own business trying to keep the sheep from falling off a cliff when God suddenly calls your name and gives you your assignment? But then, how could you tell it was true and you weren’t just another candidate for lithium?

  She could always be a public school teacher, she supposed. But everyone knew the Teachers’ Union stuck new teachers in hellholes in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, places where a whi
te Jewish blonde getting into a new car was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. She tried to envision herself like Michelle Pfeiffer in that movie where she gets all the drug-addicted Puerto Ricans to become honor students because she’s so tough, but kind and she really, really believes in them. But she couldn’t imagine working in a public school and not wearing pants, which the rabbis absolutely forbade and which she still hadn’t figured a way around. Michelle could never have worked those miracles in a skirt with all that sitting up on the desk with her legs crossed.

  The decision to enroll at Bernstein Women’s College, affiliated with the well-known Bernstein Rabbinical College, had been made after long discussions with friends and counselors. Although the tuition was thousands of dollars a year and she could have gone to any city college for free, she was advised by all that she wouldn’t like city colleges. They were too big, too impersonal, full of public high school riffraff. There was no social life. The bottom line was she was afraid to venture out, despite her bravado, from the sheltered yeshiva day school environment she had known, to face the real world, where her new sophistication would be laughed at by hip young New Yorkers who slept together and indulged in drugs and all kinds of other perversions she could only just imagine with equal parts loathing and envy.

  But there was one thing you had to give Bernstein, the one true incontrovertible fact which made all those student loans a worthwhile investment: it was turning out to be one, long shidduch date.

  Everyone was a matchmaker: the girls, the teachers, the teacher’s cousins, the girls’ cousins. It was the official bride pool for Bernstein Rabbinical College as well as Yeshiva University, with its well-regarded medical and law school, a fact well-known to all the parents shouldering the burden of their daughters’ unjustified and outlandish tuition.