For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories

by Nathan Englander

  “Go, both of you get away.” The rabbi shoves his brother in the back, and Doe takes a baby step forward.

  “But you haven’t made peace yet,” Marty tells him. “Your job. My rabbi. The fate of the Jewish family. Look at how my wife hates me for no reason. She hasn’t agreed to come home.”

  “No more forgiveness,” she says. “Nothing left in me for anyone’s sake.”

  “I’m out of advice,” the rabbi says, such a pale little man, trying to sound as if he has some control. “Maybe it’s better if your family goes broken. Sometimes, in extreme cases, there is nothing more to be done.”

  “There’s always more,” Doe says. Turns back. “Even brothers beyond forgiveness surface looking for more. Even knowing what they’ve done.”

  “You’ll go!” The rabbi again tries to turn him, but this time Doe does not give. He takes his brother’s hands from his shoulders, pushes him back and away. Rabbi Baum catches a heel, hitches a foot on a piece of slate. He trips. He falls to the ground, bounces, and rocks his head.

  “You will be the same until the end of time,” Robin says. “You will torture us all and live long past when we’re dead. A sick man is not a devil. You, Marty, are both.” She spits at his feet and curses him.

  But it was Doe that knocked the rabbi down, not Marty. He feels that she should curse Doe. Spit at his feet. This would be more fair, after all.

  The rebbetsen runs down to her husband. Robin moves over to the rabbi but does not bend or ask if he’s hurt. Doe stands, red faced, his hands balled into fists. And Marty looks up at all the many faces of the children filling the windows and wonders, If forty days are accorded a Torah, how long must a child fast when his father is knocked to the ground?

  The Wig

  Colors and styles, she takes note of. Hemlines, accessories, heel width and height. Also, that the girls get taller every month, bonier and more sickly looking. Ruchama had quite a figure herself as a girl, kept it until the first three children were born. But never, from the age of twelve, was she without a chest and a bottom. She really can’t imagine how these fence posts manage to sit down.

  It’s hair that Ruchama is studying. She goes through the new Bazaar page by page. The magazines are contraband in Royal Hills, narishkeit, vain and immodest, practically pornographic. But she needs to keep up. Her customers will bring her pictures like these, folded up small and stuck into wallets, bra cups, pulled from under the wigs they wear. And they expect Ruchama to be familiar. They are relieved when she takes a wrinkled photo, nods with confidence, and says, “Yes, again they are highlighting bangs.”

  Ruchama has come into the city for the silk caps onto which she and Tzippy—best friend and right hand—knot the hair. The newsstand is at Twenty-third and Sixth, convenient to her supplier and far enough from Royal Hills, oddly enough located, that she will not see anyone she knows. She flips through the magazines between Jamal’s stand and the trash basket on the corner. She pays for her browsing rights, forces Jamal to accept the crumpled bill she drops on the counter when new issues arrive. She thinks this appropriate. For she would take them home if she could and knows that, if a familiar face appears in the crowd, she’ll drop the magazines in the basket and fall in with the flow of foot traffic, crossing whichever way the walk sign allows.

  She does not spot anyone. She finishes flipping through the magazines. She places them, one by one, back in their slots on the rack. Good as new.

  Tzippy carries a box of braids down the inside stairs to the workshop.

  “New hair,” she says, and drops the UPS package on the separating table.

  Ruchama spits three times to ward off the evil eye. Whenever a box of braids arrives from Eastern Europe there is always a shadow, a gloomy revenant. Tzippy drinks her tea. Ruchama pinches the flat of a double-edged razor blade between her fingers and with three quick passes sets the tape on the box whistling and folds open the cardboard flaps.

  Taking out a braid, Ruchama pulls her thumb across a blunt end, letting the tips fan back with natural spring. Like a paintbrush. Good and thick. She holds it up to the light, checking color. She and Tzippy never refer to colors by their useless names. They have learned from disappointments, stood united before a red, red wig they had spent two months creating while a client screamed at them, literally screamed, “Does that look red to you?” They had squinted, moved closer, adjusted lamps. What else was it but red? They have learned. There are over one million shades of auburn, two million meanings for “chestnut brown.” They now work in similes: “Darker or lighter than pumpernickel bread?” “Newsprint black? Or black like black beetles in black ink?”

  Judging the braid she holds, Ruchama places it in one corner of the vast separating table. From there they will build outward, creating a map of color and length and curl.

  Tzippy puts down her tea and reaches into the box. “Wet wood spoons,” she says, displaying her choice. That is exactly the color. Ruchama is always amazed by her accuracy.

  Tzippy begins unraveling the braid, brushing through the hair with her fingers and burying her face in it. She is smelling for a past, sniffing out the woman’s shampoo and sweat, the staleness of cigarettes or the smoke that drifts down from some factory nearby. She breathes deep. She is onto a scent, a wind from a village, a mist of perfume.

  “They are paid top dollar,” Ruchama tells her.

  “Women with choices leave their hair to be swept off salon floors,” Tzippy says.

  “Maybe these women are more prudent.”

  “With such hair?” Tzippy waves the braid’s open end at Ruchama. “These are women who have to sell some part of themselves and this is where they begin. This one,” she says, sniffing again, “is on break at a bottling plant thinking of her lover. She sold her hair to pay his gambling debts and she wonders now where her hair is and where that bum has gone.”

  “My own life is depressing enough, Tzippy. Why must you make it like we’re scalping orphans?”

  “A teenage girl,” Tzippy says, “a girl with everything she needs. Only, there is a used scooter her parents won’t buy her and a boyfriend she lusts after who lives all the way on the other side of the lake.”

  “You’ve been reading novels again, Tzippy. Don’t tell me there isn’t a romance hidden under your bed.”

  The front room gets natural light from the windows that open onto the cellar well. The room is carpeted and painted and, in front of the long windows, there is a pair of comfortable chairs. There are stools and a counter, and on the counter mirrors—one standing on a silverplate base and an assortment of hand mirrors that Ruchama has no real attachment to, though it is intended to appear to customers that she does.

  Ruchama finds it difficult to live up to the expectations of the room. She is more comfortable in the back with Tzippy on the cement, hair-strewn floor of the work space.

  Nava Klein is sitting on an overstuffed chair in front of the window. Tzippy sits on a stool, her feet resting on the crossbar. Ruchama stands; she looks better standing, her dress hanging loose off her chest, concealing. She has not sat down in front of Nava Klein in at least half-a-dozen years.

  The whole back wall is covered with framed photographs of wigs on Styrofoam heads. Nava is pointing to one. “Third in,” she says. “That’s got to be Aviva Sussman.” Ruchama’s work is so distinct, you can pick out half the neighborhood.

  “You can’t tell me that’s not Aviva’s hair.”

  “Please,” Tzippy says.

  Nava grimaces, turns her attention to Ruchama.

  “I saw your oldest,” she says. “A real beauty and such a rail. She reminds me of you when you were that age. You were striking, striking as a girl.” Nava sighs, signals with her head to Tzippy, as if she were not part of the adult conversation. “Only Tzippy stays the same, her hipbones pushing at the front of her skirt. The rest of us ragged old women have to hide behind our daughters’ good looks.”

  Nava shakes her head. “How do you do it, Tzippy? Where in Brookl
yn is your fountain of youth?”

  Tzippy blushes. Ruchama wants to scream. Every compliment the woman gives releases a dandelion’s worth of barbed spores. Tzippy looks great because she is barren. Her figure has been spared because her womb has walls of stone. And Ruchama, she is a proud mother. Of course she is, with six wonderful children and a chin to show for each one.

  “I’ve an appointment a week from Thursday with Kendo of Kendo Keller’s,” Nava says. “He is going to advise me. And then, of course, he’ll style the wig. It’s not you, Tzippy. You’re a natural. A brilliant stylist. The best of the sheitel machers. But this isn’t exactly Madison Avenue. It’s only that I want a more contemporary look this year. So vain.”

  In the mirror that night, Ruchama takes her face off, rubbing hard, removing makeup, working at the base that catches like grit in the folds of her skin.

  She used to be the prettiest, prettier than Tzippy and Nava. They all three used to play together in Tzippy’s room. They tried on clothes and dreamed of marriages—to brilliant scholars flown in from Jerusalem, handsome princes who would sit in the back of deep studies while Jews the world over came to their doors begging wisdom, advice, a blessing in exchange for a kiss on the hand.

  They do come from around the world. But not for Shlomi, not for her husband. They circle the globe to see Ruchama, because they are trapped in their modesty and want to feel, even as illusion, the simple pleasure of wind in their hair.

  Menucha, the littlest, is splashing in the tub next to Ruchama. Ruchama begs quiet when Menucha squeals. She quizzes the child on body parts while taking off her makeup, testing to see where the girl has and has not scrubbed. “Ears?” she says. “Elbows? Belly button. Toes.”

  Shlomi is home from the study hall making noise in the kitchen. Cabinets slam. A pot hits a countertop, a pan strikes a burner. The new rules of her home. Six children, and for the first time all are out of the house during the day. Menucha in first grade and Shira, the oldest, in tenth. For once Ruchama can work uninterrupted, and her taste for independence has spread. She has instituted small chores for Shlomi. She asks now that he heat his own dinner and wash his own dishes, as well as the stray glasses and spoons that accumulate between the children’s dinner and bed. Over this he makes a production.

  To take off her makeup slowly, to look in the mirror and be sad, that’s all she wants. Shlomi calls out questions, makes comments to reiterate his helplessness. “Where is the dairy sponge?” “This soap is no good!” Ruchama doesn’t respond, does not care where the soap falls short in his eyes. He trayfs up her kitchen to spite her. He is forever putting meat silverware in the dairy sink.

  He calls up: “Are there any dry dish towels?”

  She screams so that Menucha stops splashing, her little arms frozen in the air. Ruchama screams with murder in her voice, her own hand checked in midmotion, a dollop of face cream on the pads of her fingers. “Reach down,” she yells, “pull open the towel drawer, and look.” She spreads the cream under her eyes. It is nice and cool. “When the drawer is open,” she screams, “bend over and open your eyes.”

  She waits for him to ask where, in their house of sixteen years, is the dry-dish-towel drawer.

  When Louise arrives there are kisses and hugs. She peels off her gloves, undoes a silk scarf with a pull. Tzippy and Ruchama have a crush on her. She is their only secular client, the only one to traipse down the stairs in plunging necklines and smart man-tailored slacks. She reminds Ruchama of the pretty ladies who stand in department stores spraying perfume.

  Louise has a daughter their age, yet, Ruchama thinks, she looks younger than Nava. It is only the thick, tired veins on the backs of her hands and the carefully organized hairline that give her away. Louise takes Ruchama’s arm and kisses her again.

  “I’ve done it,” Louise says. “You’ll both be furious, but don’t feel bad. I couldn’t tell my husband—not about the wig and not about the money.” Louise unzips her pocketbook. “Our thirtieth anniversary. My present from Harold. A stunning necklace he picked out himself. Pawned. I sold it away.”

  “You didn’t,” Tzippy says. Her expression is embarrassingly happy. She is a fan of intrigue.

  “I did,” Louise says. “A purchase must be paid for.”

  “Credit,” Ruchama says dryly. “I offered you credit.”

  “I know, dear. But it’s not right. I went and pawned it and told Harold that the clasp broke and that I had put the floater on my to-do list but hadn’t let the insurance man know. ‘Off premises’ doesn’t cover it, and Harold would never fake a claim.” She takes an envelope from her purse and extends her arm with impelling force. “Here,” she says, passing off the envelope, thick with fifties, to Ruchama.

  When she made her first appearance she had, in the same businesslike fashion, pulled a different envelope from her purse. “You must be Ruchama,” she had said. “These are pictures of me when my hair was as it should be. I want my wig like that, but better.” Ruchama had fallen in love with her right then. A woman who can present an envelope with such confidence can get anything done in this world. “My daughter says you are the best and the most expensive. That’s what I want. No bargains. I want it to feel so horribly overpriced that I’ll be convinced it’s good.” Then Louise struck a pose in those smart slacks—one knee locked, the other bent, one foot straight, the other pointing out—exactly as Ruchama would have liked to if she were permitted such a thing. “If my daughter hasn’t told you, I’m being attacked by menopause and it’s taking my hair, and both my doctors admit I am, in reality, going bald. Give me whatever you’ve got, I told them. If it kills me, that’s fine. I’ll take six gorgeous months over one hundred years of what’s in store.” She had then presented a locket. Pried it open. There was a curl pressed inside. “My baby hair. Russet. Virginal and fine. Match it. That is the color of my wig.”

  And now, months later, Ruchama locks the money in the strongbox and locks the strongbox in her desk. She takes out the pictures and the locket and goes over to the cubbies. She takes down Louise’s wig on its Styrofoam base. It is majestic. She brings it out and Louise presses her hands to her head.

  “Oh, yes,” she says. “That is me.” She messes up her own hair, so carefully sprayed in place. “This is not me, that is. You’ve got it there. Now give it up.”

  They seat Louise on a stool and fit the wig on her head. She leans in to the standing mirror. Ruchama and Tzippy hover behind, hand mirrors poised. Louise does, truly, they all agree, look spectacular. She spreads the old photos out on the counter. She goes back and forth between the mirror and the pictures. She opens the locket. “Russet,” she says. She puts it around her neck and turns to face the women.

  “Goddesses,” she says. “Miracle workers. I feel like I have my life back, my youth. I’m nineteen years old again,” she says. “And I am beautiful.”

  The new issues are at least two weeks away, but there are things Ruchama wants to double-check, an idea or two that she has. She takes the magazines off the rack with a nod.

  “Sold your copies,” Jamal says. He is on the same side of the stand, stocking mints and chocolate bars where they are low. “Same issue, different copies.”

  “I’ll pay again, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  She reaches for her purse.

  “Teasing,” he says. “Help yourself. No camp for the kids this summer, is all.”

  They used to dream of being fashion models, Tzippy and Nava and Ruchama. They had plans. They would take only modest jobs, stroll down the runways with floor-length skirts and high-collared shirts, sleeves that buttoned at the wrists. They would be sensations. They walked the length of Tzippy’s room, spinning in front of her full-length mirror, spotting their heads to catch themselves in the turn.

  She finds the advertisement, the one she was thinking of, a woman turning in a New York street, her hair in an arc, banana curls, full and light.

  She presses the magazine down on the counter. She presses a finger
to the page. Jamal looks.

  “That’s what my hair was like,” she says, “when I was a girl.”

  “Hmmm,” he says, “nice.” He folds an empty carton. Stops to rub his hands together, blows into them against the cold. “Looks nice now,” he says, “plenty nice.”

  Ruchama goes red. This is what familiarity breeds.

  “A wig,” she says to Jamal. “I’m wearing a wig.”

  “I’ll tell you,” he says, “looks for real. I wondered, too. You dress Jewish and I wondered. All the other Hasid ladies wear wigs and scarves and such. And I’d wondered what’s with you.”

  “Human hair,” she says. She is proud. “A good-quality wig and you should never be able to tell. They wear poor quality, the others. Acrylic fibers. Junk stuff. Wigs made from recycled cola bottles and used plastic bags.”

  The advertisement stays with Ruchama: this young woman spinning in a New York street. It’s an ad for shampoo. The woman has caused a traffic jam by half raising her finger for a taxi. Everyone is watching her from the sidewalk. She is smiling and so is all of New York. Even the cabdrivers—white and handsome, all with a slight scruff—are smiling. They laugh as they lock fenders trying to give this woman with the long, lovely hair a ride.

  Ruchama wants to feel sexy like that, to chuckle at the bedlam her beauty causes. How nice it would be to arrive at shul looking trim and with the long, beautiful hair of her youth, to see Nava’s eyes widen and for the men to stand on tiptoes trying to peek into the women’s section and for the rabbi to stamp a foot and the gabbai to slap the bimah, for people to hiss for quiet as she takes her seat. She’d have her oldest save one right in front of Nava. All would whisper. Is that mother or sister? they would want to know.

  Shlomi will be home late. It is his night to help clean at the yeshiva. There he can push a broom. She decides to put on her sexy skirt and wait up. It’s formfitting but not wholly immodest; it falls, just barely, on the permissible side of the line. She puts it on but cannot close the button—does not get the zipper high enough along to try. She throws it into the back of her closet. She tiptoes to the bathroom, all the children asleep. She touches up her makeup and puts on a nightgown; she gets under the covers and pretends to sleep. She leaves the lamp on next to Shlomi’s bed. Ruchama does not say her prayers.