by Ragen, Naomi
Many of the girls were out-of-towners from tiny Jewish communities where available religious Jewish men were either under ten or over forty. Enrolling at Bernstein rescued them from horrible Young Israel weekends in Catskill hotels and being relentlessly pursued by the proverbial kosher butcher from Milwaukee: over thirty, overweight, and oversexed. Here, in a relaxed and respectable atmosphere, every Ruchie could find her Moishe. And vice versa.
The out-of-towners were usually the sheltered daughters of rabbis, pretty and sweet and innocent, with very little dating experience. Most of them had endured at least a year of long-distance courtships in which relatives and friends and professionals had found matches for them in places like Monsey, Brooklyn, or Baltimore. The dates arranged necessitated expensive cross-country plane trips, a situation that understandably left most of them languishing in solitary gloom on Saturday nights. When they moved into the dorms at Bernstein, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven.
In contrast, the native New Yorkers, used to a plethora of possibilities, found the fix-ups from Bernstein and Yeshiva University left much to be desired. Most of the guys were short and pale and wore glasses. They showed up dressed like they were on their way to a Rabbinical Council of America convention. Moreover, most were victims of severe rabbinical brainwashing on the subject of physical contact with the opposite sex outside of marriage. The negiah, or “touching” laws, were basically one loud NO! NOT ANYPLACE, ANY TIME, ANY BODY PART, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! This left some of the young men severely challenged on this subject, making Delilah feel as if she had a rare communicable disease. Even the most adventurous managed little more than casually stretching an arm out onto the back of her subway seat.
Gee, that was a thrill.
Some, at least, had looked normal enough: a crocheted skullcap, a nice sweater over an open-collared shirt. There was one universal problem, though. Anyone willing to be fixed up was almost always someone who couldn’t find a date on his own. And for good reason.
Delilah kept on going, though, always allowing herself to be persuaded by the hard or soft sell of the people who were setting her up, that this one “was different.” And why shouldn’t she trust them? After all, they had nothing to gain from making her miserable. In fact, most of them were involved in matchmaking because they considered it a good deed. Indeed, there is a widely held belief among religious Jews that achieving three successful matches earns one a free entry pass to the best neighborhoods in the World to Come.
The system in Bernstein worked this way: The guys would come into the dorm lobby and give their name and the name of the girl they were taking out to the housemother, who would then call up to the girl’s room, announcing him. The girl would then come down to the lobby and tell the housemother the name of the boy. Sometimes, seeing the girl who spoke his name, the boy would sit perfectly still until he could quietly slip out the front door.
It was quite a show. When she had nothing better to do on a Saturday night, Delilah delighted in hanging around the lobby to watch. Which is how she got involved with Yitzie Polinsky.
The boy was striking: tall and very slim, with broad shoulders and thick rock-star hair that fell adorably over his eyes. He wore a dark skullcap that melted right in and was hardly noticeable at all. His jeans were faded in all the right places, and to top it off he had on a black turtleneck and a kind of bomber jacket of brown leather.
You could tell the housemother didn’t approve at all. But when he gave her his name, her eyes lit up: the son of the very famous Rabbi Menachem Polinsky of Crown Heights. The housemother pushed her reading glasses to the top of her gray wig, looked him over again, lips pursed, and then shrugged. Allowances had to be made. She called up to the girl.
Delilah recognized her name: Penina Gwertzman, a cute little out-of-towner from Kansas or some other impossibly goyish place. Petite, with long dark hair and an ample figure, she was from a very religious family and had been carefully brought up. Yitzie wasn’t her type at all. He was Delilah’s type.
She watched as Yitzie’s eyes took in Penina’s body in long, slow strokes. Satisfied, he smiled and got up, sauntering over to her, his hands in his pockets. The nearer he got, the more Penina tugged nervously at her long pleated skirt, as if willing it to grow a few more inches.
What a waste, Delilah thought, watching them walk out together into the night, already making plans.
TWO
In the morning, Delilah made inquiries. “I heard Penina went out last night with Yitzie Polinsky,” she mentioned casually to her roommate, Rivkie. “How did it go?”
Rivkie, who had not a suspicious bone in her body and who considered any kind of gossip a mortal sin and so never listened to or repeated anything of value, said she thought she’d heard something not so good about it. Coming from such a source, Delilah knew it was going to be major, major breaking news.
She knocked on a few doors of reliable yentas and got the goods: a disastrous date that had ended scandalously, with tears and angry phone calls and possible repercussions for Yitzie, who was slated to follow in his father’s footsteps, if only he could shed his yeshiva-bum reputation.
Yes! Delilah thought, thrilled.
She settled her face into the right lines of worry and concern and knocked on Penina’s door. “I just heard. Are you all right?”
The girl’s big, obviously cried-out eyes, welled. “Does everybody know?”
Delilah took a step back. “No! It’s just that I happened to be waiting down in the lobby and saw him come in. I mean, that leather jacket. . . . He looked a little dangerous to me, so I asked to make sure you were OK.”
Penina’s face was stiff.
“It’s just . . . I’ve had some bad experiences myself.”
The girl suddenly melted into an angry puddle of damp emotions.
“It wasn’t my fault!!” she cried passionately. “They told me he was a brilliant Torah scholar from a very important family, who was going to take over his father’s congregation one day soon.” She blinked and two large tears rolled down her fresh pink cheeks.
Delilah caught her breath in joy. “What . . . did something . . . happen?
“He said he was taking me to the Village. I didn’t know what village! I thought he meant Boro Park. But it wasn’t. . . . I didn’t see a single Jew. Then he took me inside some restaurant. But it wasn’t a kosher deli or anything. It was really dark. And I didn’t see anybody eating, or smell pickles—you know. It smelled like . . . liquor. There was a stage, and some girl with very uncombed frizzy hair was singing! Imagine, Yitzie Polinsky—the son of Rebbe Polinsky, who everyone calls a saint, who is known to be so stringently pious people are terrified of him and they worship him—imagine his son listening to a woman’s voice, which everybody knows is forbidden! Anyway, we sat down at this little table. I couldn’t see a thing. So”—she wiped her eyes, taking a deep breath—”at first I thought I was imagining it, but then I realized he had his hand on my knee. And then he put his other hand on my shoulder, and his fingers started playing with my hair and then moved underneath my collar. . . .”
Delilah bit the inside of her cheek, handing the girl a tissue. “Oh!” She shook her head in outraged sympathy. “The creep.” She waited impatiently what she hoped was a suitable moment of commiseration. “And then what happened?” she asked eagerly.
Penina’s eyes looked up over the tissue with sudden suspicion. “What do you mean? Of course I told him to take me back immediately!”
“Oh, yes. Of course, of course! That’s exactly what I . . . thought. Meant. I mean, what else could you do? Did he?”
Penina stared down at the tissue, then blew her nose again miserably. “He said he had to make a phone call first. I waited and waited, but he never came back. I wound up paying the check, and I didn’t even have enough money left to take a taxi! I had to use the subway. I was petrified!” She sobbed.
Delilah made an O with her lips and held it. “I have a good mind to call him up and te
ll him off. You wouldn’t happen to have his phone number, would you?”
“You would do that? For me? But we hardly even know each other!”
“Doesn’t our holy Torah tell us, ‘Before a blind man put no obstacle’? It’s my sacred religious duty. We wouldn’t want another innocent young girl to go out and have such an experience, would we? I mean, he has to be stopped!”
Penina blinked. “Sharona Gottleib fixed me up. She said her grandmother was friends with his grandmother. . . . I’ll never speak to her again!”
Delilah sighed heavily. “I understand.” She patted the girl’s soft white hand with its little fourteen-carat birthstone ring from Mommy and Daddy. “I will talk to Sharona. Trust me, I know exactly how to handle this.”
Penina stared at her, her eyes welling once again. “You would do that? For me? Meet with him and tell him off?”
Delilah patted the little hand. “Kol Yisrael aravim zeh le zeh.” All Israel is responsible one for the other.
She found out where his father’s shul was and arranged to sleep over at a friend’s house nearby. She wore a demure outfit that covered everything. Still, she sensed the cold eyes of matronly disapproval pointed like lasers at the top of her blond head to the bottom of her spiked heels as she walked down the narrow aisle of the women’s section in Reb Menachem Polinsky’s synagogue. She took a seat near the high mechitzah—the religiously mandated barrier piously separating the men from the women. It ran the entire length of the synagogue, giving the men almost the entire room, and confining the women to a small, cramped space. As usual, the more Orthodox the synagogue, the more demeaning and uncomfortable the women’s section. Still, she was just grateful that at least she was in the same room with Yitzie, as some stringency kings had created synagogues where the women were shunted off to side rooms in completely different parts of the building, where only a handful could see or hear anything. Discreetly, she lifted the little curtain and peered inside at the men’s section.
There he was, dressed in the traditional Hasidic Sabbath outfit: the satin waistcoat with its braided string belt that separated his holy upper body from his profane lower half, the dark, wide-brimmed hat. He wore a magnificent prayer shawl over his shoulders. His father, the old man with the white beard who stood at the center at the bimah, seemed to be running the place, the way everyone was falling all over themselves to be respectful to him.
Well, well, she thought. A real saint.
She waited for him in the room where they served the kiddush—the traditional after-prayer refreshments—but the synagogue was so over-the-top frum, it had separate rooms for men and women. So she waited outside. He came out, a few paces behind his father, surrounded by men. But when he saw her, he lifted his head and a secret look passed between them.
She called him that night. She was the blonde who had been standing outside his father’s synagogue, she told him, and she had something she needed to talk to him about. They agreed to meet in the Village. When he showed up, he was again dressed in his leather jacket.
“I’m just here to tell you what a bum you are” was her opening line.
“You’re fast. Usually, it takes women at least one date to find that out.” He smiled.
“That girl you dumped last Saturday night? Well, she happens to be a friend of mine.”
“She was pretty anxious to get rid of me. So I helped her out.”
“You stuck her with the check and left her stranded.”
“What happened to women’s lib? Don’t you girls carry cabfare?”
“She only had enough left for the subway, you creep.” She laughed.
He took a step closer. “And you came here to tell me off, is that right?”
“Well, what other reason could I have?” she asked demurely, lowering her eyes.
He took her arm and tucked it between his bended elbow, patting her hand. The forbidden feel of his male skin against hers was exciting, as well as the fact that he’d done it on his own, without asking permission. Some of her other dates had actually asked straight out, “How religious are you?” Idiots. What did they expect a girl to do, give them a road map and a list of directions? To tell them, Not religious at all, just do anything you want? Her answer was always the same: “Very.” The date ahead never failed to be a disaster.
Yitzie thrilled her. They met in places she had never been. Top of the Sixes, where she ordered her first daiquiri, which made her feel all warm and happy. Avant-garde movie theaters showing films by Godard that were so shocking and lewd she’d once actually run from the theater. To make it up to her, he’d bought her tickets to the opera at Lincoln Center. Orchestra seats. She’d worn a very form-fitting dress covered with silver glitter with a high collar of white silk and matching white cuffs, which she’d sneaked past the dorm mother under her prim black winter coat. She’d piled her hair on top of her head. Later, while she was in the lobby waiting for him to get her a Coke, two obviously tipsy middle-aged men had approached her with lewd smiles, about to say something when Yitzie showed up and they steered abruptly in the opposite direction. She looked at herself in the glass windows of the lobby. She looked ravishing and a bit slutty, she thought, wavering between embarrassment and delight.
She was in Yitzie’s spell, or maybe he was in hers, she couldn’t decide. He graduated slowly from slinging his hand across her shoulders in the secluded booths of dark little bars, to twining his fingers through her hair, to grasping her waist as they walked, slightly tipsy, down the streets of Manhattan. And then he began to pick her up in a car.
They drove out to the Rockaways and parked by the deserted summer bungalows. When he’d first suggested it, she’d told herself he was being romantic. She envisioned holding hands and watching the waves roll in while he whispered compliments into her pink little ears. The first time he kissed her, his tongue pressing between her teeth, she was so busy gagging she didn’t feel his hand wander under her skirt. She was wearing a girdle and stockings, more solid than a chastity belt. But his hands moved so quickly. She couldn’t believe someone could actually unhook a bra without having to put his hands under her blouse—which she would never have allowed, of course—but there she was, unhooked.
All the while, he kept telling her how beautiful she was—how irresistible, how much he loved her—in this slow, worshipful, sweet voice. She was deeply conflicted, part of her giving in immediately, the other part shocked and outraged and threatened.
Then something happened, physically, she hadn’t expected. She felt all her juices begin to flow, inexorable and unstoppable. She felt light-headed and strange. Not herself. And the space they were in felt safe and private.
Who was to know? She let her arms fall to her sides, letting him use his hands on her as one lets a musician play an instrument: She watched, thrilling to the chords that resonated within her, absolutely new. She throbbed with a deep, resounding bass.
Her classes at Bernstein became a vague hum. She’d finally enrolled in the associate program to become a dental hygienist, enjoying the idea of leaning over strange men and telling them to open wide, but the classes were a bore. She could barely keep her eyes open through Dental Hygiene Theory I, Dental Materials, Infection and Immunity, Ezekiel and Gaonic Literature II. All she wanted to do was close them and dream of the night to come.
Things progressed rapidly. Yitzie was like a drug. He was everything she really wanted. Exciting and unconventional, but from a good family who had yichus and money. She daydreamed of how this was all going to end with a marriage proposal. They were, after all, so “good together.” They had so much in common. She knew she could keep him happy.
But whenever he wanted to take it up the final notch, explore the last frontier, she kept pushing him away, adamantly refusing to go that extra step that would mark her forever as an uncapped bottle of Coke, as a rebbitzin once told them in high school. A girl who had lost all her fizz before her wedding night.
The laws of the Torah about maintaining virginity—as
taught in yeshiva—were uncompromising. A girl who willingly bedded a man was a whore. And even if she was forced into it, she still had to marry the creep and he wasn’t allowed to divorce her, ever. That was a punishment for the rapist, her rabbis had explained, never really getting into why a girl would want to be tied to such a man the rest of her life. If you pushed them on it, they’d get all excited, and finally shout at you that a woman’s position during biblical times made it imperative for her to have a husband, and who would marry a deflowered, single girl?
Where it all got really sticky, as far as she could see, was when you decided to marry someone other than your lover. If the husband was clueless, expecting you to be a virgin and found out otherwise, he was within his legal right to throw you out without a dime. Which is why in biblical times the girl’s parents saved the sheet from the marriage bed to display to town elders should just such a problem arise. Nowadays, though, DNA testing made presenting the bloody sheet as proof of virginity a bit more tricky. So Delilah knew she had to be cautious.
But she was in love with him. And he—he was . . . ? She couldn’t make up her mind.
Sometimes he seemed totally enthusiastic, like a rabid sports fan fanatically immersed in witnessing the achievement of that last winning goal. And sometimes he seemed distracted, even bored. Sometimes he said hurtful things, like, “Another blintz, another inch,” pinching her flesh in various places. His moodiness confused and depressed her. It took quite a bit of self-coaching for her to talk herself out of her bouts of pessimism and fright. She was, however, successful. She planned their future. He had no interest in taking over his father’s congregation, which was fine with her, because she had no interest at all in being a rabbi’s wife.
The mere sound of the Yiddish term rebbitzin filled her with distaste and dread, conjuring up images of overweight Jewesses in bad wigs wearing dowdy calf-length skirts and long-sleeved polyester blouses. She remembered the rabbis’ wives who had been her teachers in yeshiva high school, those mirthless paragons of virtue dedicated to squeezing out and discarding the last ounce of joy from living, the way you squeezed a sweet orange, leaving behind only the empty bitter shell. God, God, God, and more God, combined with a life of doing chesed—good deeds—i.e., distasteful and inconvenient favors for ungrateful people you hardly knew and who would never reciprocate. That was the ideal of Jewish life according to her pious teachers, who, if they had had a magic wand, would have waved it over all twenty of them as they sat in class, turning their clothes navy blue, their hair into long braids, and their thoughts to bearded rabbinical students who would touch them only two weeks out of the month until they got pregnant, and then it was anybody’s guess.
