by Ragen, Naomi
“Call the doula! Get my bag!”
In the midst of a maelstrom of horrible physical pain that filled her with panic, she heard Chaim’s calm voice. “Relax, darling. Everything is under control. Just take a shower if you feel up to it. Do you need help getting dressed? Remember to breathe. Do you want me to massage your back?”
She grabbed his cheeks like pincers, squeezing and shaking him back and forth.
“Get me to the hospital, you idiot!” she screamed.
The ride took forty minutes. Her contractions were coming sixty seconds apart, with peaks that lasted close to two minutes. The pain was intense, disabling, paralyzing. Chaim, his cheeks still stinging, was afraid to open his mouth. He was actually happy to see the doula, who arrived with a small bag and a large Zen smile.
“I know you are in pain, Delilah. But try to remember, your pain has a wonderful purpose. It’s actually a gift. It’s a blessing, this pain. It’s preparing your body. Just think, if your body wouldn’t be prepared, how would your baby be released into the world? Thank God for the pain, Delilah. Say a prayer, thanking God for it, for His kindness. Appreciate and give thanks for every contraction—”
“Get that woman out of here before I kill her!”
The doula’s smile faded. “Perhaps you’d like a Shiatzu massage?”
“If she lays a hand on me, she’s a dead woman!”
“Oh, dear.” The doula sighed. “This is a difficult situation. Let’s try some visualization techniques . . . or maybe you’d like me to sing? I’ve got a tambourine with me. Here, let’s try. Think of your womb opening, allowing the sacred passage of this blessed new soul into the world: Pisku li, shaare tzedek, avoh bam, Odey yah. Open for me the gates of mercy, I will enter and bless You,” the doula sang, shaking her tambourine.
“I want my doctor! I want an epidural!”
“Now, now, you know how we feel about epidurals. . . . Here, let me try some aromatherapy. Let me see.” She rummaged through her bag. “I’ve got some lovely lavender, some sage. . . .” She opened some bottles, spilling the liquid into her palms, rubbing her hands together to warm them. “Now, just a touch of this on your forehead and behind your ears—”
Delilah grabbed her hand and bit down on her fingers.
The doula screamed. “Oh, my God, oh, my God, there’s blood!”
“Say a prayer for that pain, you incompetent piece of garbage!! I should have known. I’m going to kill Rivkie!”
“Nurse!” The doula wept.
“Oooh, that looks nasty,” the nurse agreed. “You’d better get yourself down to emergency.” Weeping in pain, the woman fled.
“Please, Chaim, get me a doctor, get me an epidural. Please, I’m begging you!”
“Delilah, the doctor’s on his way. He’ll be here any minute,” he explained helplessly. “Maybe she wants me to adjust her pillows?” he asked the nurse, frightened.
“I’ll adjust your head, you imbecile!”
Finally the doctor arrived.
“Thank God! Please, doctor, give me an epidural, Demerol, anything!”
“Well, let’s just take a look, shall we?” the doctor said calmly, poking around familiarly in her private parts. “Oh, my.”
“What? Is something wrong, doctor?” Chaim asked, terrified.
“No, not at all. But she’s too far along for an epidural, I’m afraid.”
“What do you mean!” Delilah screamed.
“Well, you said on your form you were planning on bringing a doula, so we assumed you wanted a natural childbirth, which is why we didn’t offer you an epidural when you first came in. Also, either you waited too long to come in or the birth is going very fast. In either case, it’s impossible to give you one now. It’s much too close to the birth. It might injure the baby.”
“No. Please!”
“Delilah, be brave! Remember, God is with you! It can be a true spiritual exper—” Chaim tried.
“I’M GOING TO REDO YOUR CIRCUMCISION WHEN I GET OUT OF HERE, YOU MORON!”
Delilah closed her eyes. The pain was worse than anything she had ever in her life imagined possible, except when she fantasized about what they did to you in Auschwitz. This was Auschwitz! Why hadn’t anyone told her it was going to be this bad? That Rivkie, that doula—they had all had children, they knew! Liars. And God? Where was God? And then it dawned on her: The curse of Eve! “In horrible pain will you deliver children” or something like that. This was God’s will. His plan. But what about the curse of Adam? “In the sweat of your brow you’ll bring forth bread.” When was the last time she saw her husband—any man—sweat? Men had gotten a reprieve. But the curse against women went on and on and on and on. . . .
From the corner of her eye she saw Chaim sitting, small and exhausted, in the corner of the room with his face in his hands. A rabbi. God’s little helper, she thought malevolently. They were all in it together. A conspiracy. God and her husband and that doctor and brainwashed religious women! And she had fallen for it like a dope. As she figured it, in the sin department, whatever she had done was nowhere near what had been done to her. If anyone had to repent for doing horrible things, she wasn’t at the top of the list. From now on, all bets were off.
As she looked at her husband, he seemed to grow smaller and smaller, until finally she had the sensation that he wasn’t a man at all, not even a person, just an insect, a fly on the wall, whom she hoped someone would swat away.
She started to scream and wouldn’t stop until they finally wheeled her into the delivery room. Her son was delivered, with shocking speed, after only three pushes, the strength of which made her experienced obstetrician open his eyes in wonder. Never had a child been expelled faster or with more determination from a mother’s womb.
“It’s a boy!”
“Figures,” she muttered.
“Do you want to hold him?” the nurse asked her.
“I’ll catch him later.” Delilah grunted, turning over and falling into a dead sleep.
SIXTEEN
Deli, where should I put the flowers?” Mrs. Goldgrab asked her daughter.
“Don’t touch them, and don’t call me Deli. I’m not a pastrami sandwich,” Delilah growled.
It was bad enough she had roped herself into this sit-down dinner a week after giving birth, but to have her mother not only in the house but trying to rearrange things according to her taste was quickly sending Delilah over the edge. Now, awaiting her guests, the baby all washed and dressed in a lovely baby sailor suit, blessedly asleep in his beautiful new carriage, she tried to take a deep breath and remember why, over Chaim’s objections, she was overtaxing herself, insisting on doing it this way.
“Look, Chaim, I’ve never had the whole board over. Now I’ve got household help, which I won’t have in a few weeks. And everyone will ooh and aah over the baby, and even if I screw up they’ll say, ‘Oh, she just gave birth.’ So, let me do it now.”
She’d also decided to invite some friends, feeling she not only needed some allies but some messengers who would spread the news of her triumph to all her old schoolmates. Who knew that the only person who would accept would be Tzippy, a school friend she was never overly fond of, whose greatest asset was that she always seemed to accept Delilah’s invitations and actually show up? She was not only coming but bringing a friend, someone Delilah had never met. The Malins had agreed to host the two for the weekend after Delilah explained that Tzippy was her “best and closest friend.” That way, they could attend the Saturday-morning circumcision ceremony in the synagogue,
“So, how can I help you, darling?” Mrs. Goldgrab said, peeved.
“Just stay out of my way! Don’t rearrange anything, and don’t talk to anyone!”
The older woman, insulted but not surprised, took a large brownie off a plate and went out to sit on the back porch to feed herself chocolate comfort and nurse her grievances.
Having her mother and father in the house was just about the last straw. She had readily come up with a nu
mber of imaginative and convincing reasons to explain their absence, but Chaim had been scandalized. “We can’t very well hold a bris without inviting our parents. It’s wrong to deny that respect to them. Besides, what will people think, that we’re orphans? Or black sheep?”
The thought of her mother sitting down next to Solange Malin and striking up a conversation about any subject of interest to her mother was breathtaking in its possibilities for disaster. Oddly, while she disliked her mother-in-law intensely, she was less concerned about Mrs. Levi proving an embarrassment. Like it or not, she had grudging respect for Chaim’s mother, who could certainly hold her own in any company.
In fact, Chaim’s mother had so far proved extremely helpful. After dressing the baby, she had skillfully set the table and helped arrange the catered food on the platters. Since Delilah’s pregnancy, there had been an undeclared truce between them. As in so many cases of this kind, once a daughter-in-law becomes a grandchild factory, all bets are off and grandmothers eat crow, a fact it would do well for mothers of the groom to bear in mind before beginning any sentence to the bride with “I’ll tell you very frankly.”
You might be able to live without your daughter-in-law. You might even be able to manage without your precious son. But no one in her right mind is going to forgo a relationship with that soft little last-chance package of big eyes and baby fat you’ve waited so long to cuddle to your milkless breasts.
All this, Delilah knew well. But being shrewd if not wise, she discerned that good behavior on her part at this moment in time would yield rewards far richer than simply seeing Chaim’s mother grovel. And as she looked at her little boy, so beautifully groomed and ready for inspection, she saw that she’d been right.
Delilah wandered around her home, inspecting.
During the months that had gone by, she’d developed a different set of eyes. After her first visit to the Malins, she had thrown out her globe lamp and the collection of ceramic cats with pink fur. After the Grodins, the little glass vases filled with plastic flowers and the plastic refrigerator magnets had gone. And after the Rollands and Borenbergs, Chaim had had to argue with the truck driver from Goodwill, who had knocked on the door ready to move out their entire bedroom set, his parents’ wedding gift. The problem with it, she tried to explain to him, and with their Mikasa china pattern (which she was secretly and deliberately breaking piece by piece), was that everything matched. Matched sets—furniture, china, silverware—were embarrassingly middle class, she had learned from her visits to Felice Borenberg and Mariette Rolland. She wanted to start over, mixing patterns, filling her bedroom and living room with antiques, no two pieces the same, but all polished to a high shine.
Her taste was changing. Unfortunately, her finances were not keeping up.
Now—as Delilah was well aware—no one wants a rabbi or his wife to live better than the average congregant. A rabbi is supposed to represent contempt for material things. He is supposed, by his very being, to point the way toward a happiness that is not measured by what you have, but who you are. On the other hand, a congregant does not want to feel like Scrooge visiting Bob Cratchit.
What Delilah was planning to do—and really it was the right and commendable thing for her to do—was to convince the board that the rabbi’s wife was hardworking and had excellent taste, and that the only thing standing between her and the exploitation of her potential as premiere hostess to the Swallow Lake community was cold, hard cash.
She looked forward to plunging back into the role suspended by her pregnancy of wonderful rabbi’s wife. It would be nothing like it was in the Bronx, she convinced herself, because the needs of the rich were altogether different.
First of all, they didn’t treat you like slaves, because they actually had slaves, people they paid to insult and order about; people who had to pick up their groceries and tend to them when they broke an ankle or simply felt bored. And you weren’t constantly in hospitals, because if there was one thing rich people knew how to do, it was take care of themselves.
They exercised and ate blueberries and strawberries and oatmeal and brown rice and fresh salmon and green tea. They went to spas, slathered themselves with expensive mud from the Dead Sea, had Norwegian gods who massaged away their tensions and cellulite, and yoga teachers who kept them supple. They avoided pneumonia by wintering in Hawaii and avoided assorted melanomas by applying extremely expensive sunblocks that left them looking like pale toast rather than pumpernickel. They used hypnotists to convince their subconscious they didn’t like smoking, so lung cancer was out. They remembered flu shots and vitamin supplements and practiced meditation. And most of all, they didn’t have infusions of industrial sewage to pollute their water or belching factories to destroy their air quality.
It was easy to stay out of hospitals if you were rich and cautious.
Since they had their physical well-being pretty much under control, Delilah imagined she’d try to win her place in the community by showing them how to develop their spiritual side. She asked Chaim for his advice. As usual, he had been no help at all.
“Just be yourself. You’re fine. You do plenty.” He tried to comfort her. “You don’t have to please anyone but yourself.”
Right.
What she needed was a chesed project, she decided. Some series of good deeds that would occupy her time and prove to the community that she deserved their respect for being their proxy in all kinds of worthwhile and unpleasant tasks that needed doing. Soup kitchens would have been perfect, if only there was anyone in Connecticut who was hungry.
She remembered the famous story of the rabbi of the Reform temple in the next town, who decided that on Thanksgiving the community should prepare turkeys and pies and all the trimmings “for less fortunate members of the community.” He and his wife and several members of the congregation loaded the food into a van and started looking for the poor. Problem was, they turned the car in the wrong direction. The houses just kept getting more and more palatial, with not a poor person—Jewish or otherwise—anywhere in sight. So, finally, they made some phone calls, turned the car around and drove three hours until they finally, wearily, unloaded the feast on a bunch of startled Baptists, who were pretty much full from their own meal.
Then she thought: fund-raising.
That had all kinds of fun possibilities. Dressing up in fabulous new clothes and having your hair professionally colored and styled in order to hit the malls for free “favors,” getting jewelry and nice clothes and vacations donated for raffle tickets. There was only one main problem. You had to have something to raise money for.
Well, Israel, of course. There was always someone over there who was recovering from some horrible outrage, physical or emotional. Poor kids. Better: poor Black Jewish kids. Hospitals. Terror victims. Better: poor terror victims just out of hospitals who were unemployed, divorced, or widowed with children (two terror victims!) with empty refrigerators. Victims of left-wing government atrocities who’d had their homes bulldozed, the same homes that previous left-wing governments had built with other charity money.
Whatever. Israel was a gold mine.
But then, like any gold mine, you had many miners: The six-figure salaried professionals in expensive suits from United Jewish Communities and Israel Bonds, people whose expense accounts and cushy business-class trips and overnight stays at fancy hotels were on the line. People with motivation. Or the powerhouse women volunteers from Hadassah. People who knew what they were doing, who had experience and connections.
A rank amateur couldn’t very well compete with them and win. Besides, when she dropped the idea casually on Solange Malin, her reaction had been pointed and hostile: Perhaps if the rebbitzin had time on her hands, she might consider fund-raising for the shul. Yeah, to raise the rabbi’s salary. Talk about worthy causes! But you couldn’t very well consider that a chesed project, now could you?
“Too tacky, even for us.” Chaim shook his head.
So, there she was, with no acceptabl
e chesed project. And she the rabbi’s wife, the community role model for sainthood.
It bore down on her, the weight of unmet expectations, of disappointed desires, of unearned admiration. She wanted desperately to make a good impression.
She knew that Chaim had not been their first choice. That they’d wanted the grandson of the legendary European rabbi who had founded the famous Yeshiva. As it turned out, the community who’d won him, had gotten much more—or much less—than they’d bargained for. He’d wound up embroiling them in a major scandal involving after-hours rabbinical “counseling” to widows, divorcees, and, yes, married women in good standing. He would have gone on his merry way if one hadn’t become obsessed, stalking him wherever he went, so that even his wife, Rebbitzin Clueless, finally had to wake up and say, Whoa. Now lawyers and lawsuits were pelting them like hail.
So, as she saw it, Chaim had been quite a bargain. For aside from not being particularly bright, and not really having all that much to contribute to his congregation’s spiritual life, he was basically harmless. He told some good jokes and didn’t make enemies by pushing unpleasant agendas, like forcefully denouncing intermarriages or scolding people for not sending their kids to Israeli summer programs. He was happy to give eulogies and make short speeches at Bar and Bat Mitzvas—in which he invented Nobel Prize-winning accomplishments and character traits for twelve-and thirteen-year-olds. As far as she could tell, he was well liked by most everyone except the chronic complainers, who exist in every shul filled with unreasonable expectations, who wanted a rabbi who is a mentor, a leader, blah, blah.
As if. Congregations didn’t want leaders; they wanted shleppers, rabbis who were always scurrying to catch up with their fickle needs. Today, they wanted the women called up to the Torah. Tomorrow, they’d want sushi at shul events. The next day they’d want armed guards with Uzis to roam the shul complex . . . and the rabbi was expected to fall in and support the powers that be. Except that those powers were always shifting.
