“What the fuck is a neshama?” I ask.
“It’s the essence of your soul,” she says. This from the girl who, in the ninth grade, using a peeled cucumber, taught me how to give a proper blow job.
“Oh,” I say.
We’re here to cut off all her hair. Specifically we’re here to cut off all her hair so that she can cover her head with a wig made out of someone else’s hair. It’s like a bad Twilight Zone.
On the plus side of having your best friend get swept up into religious extremity are the following: nonmodest wardrobe inheritance (“It’s not tzniut,” Ra-chel says, holding her favorite black tank top out to me. “What the fuck is tzniut?” I say, taking it happily) and the runoff of all her newfound information (“Modesty,” she says. “Women’s bodies are sacred”). This from the girl who, in the tenth grade, flashed a tit at the hot math teacher and got suspended.
She’s getting married in a few days.
“Mazel tov,” I said brightly when she told me the news. Limited as my knowledge of Judaism might be, I knew, at least, that “Mazel tov” is what you say in such situations. I grew up way more observant than our sweet born-again. She didn’t even have a bat mitzvah. At mine she skipped out on the Torah service to sneak a cigarette with Ethan Zacharias in the parking lot. So you’ll forgive me if this zero-to-sixty religiosity of hers is a bit hard to swallow (so to speak — we’re talking about a girl who, in the eleventh grade, told a department store makeup lady that semen was the secret to her luminous complexion).
Her intended’s name is Dov. He’s ba’al tshuva, like her. It means “returned.” (Don’t kid yourself: born again). There’s, like, a whole world of these people. You wouldn’t know it, they don’t tend to host telethons or anything, but they’re out there. Dov used to be Doug, for fuck’s sake. He’s from San Diego.
“Rach, you’re twenty-four,” I told her.
“So?” she said.
“So you’re too young to get married,” I said. Dov is thirty-one. He has a beard. He used to be a professional surfer. They met two years ago at Burning Man and bonded over Phish bootlegs.
“Miri,” she said. “Try and be happy for me.”
“I am,” I said, meaning I was trying. “I am happy for you.”
I’m to be Ra-chel’s maid of honor. I still have the half-a-heart charm split with her when we were nine that proclaims us “Best Friends 4ever!” (my half says “ends” and “ver!”). But even so the bride-to-be has new friends. Chava, Leora, Batya. Rachel met them on a religious weekend retreat with Doug/Dov, on her way to becoming Ra-chel.
It’s a week before doomsday, and we’re all sitting in a booth at a theme bar. The theme is a little muddled, but seems to have something to do with the tropics. This is made clear by the papier-mâché palm trees strung with lights and the waitresses in grass skirts and coconut shell bras.
The girls are drinking kosher champagne, which they smuggled in here themselves; I’m doing shots. Ra-chel is sporting a ridiculous tuft of white lace, meant to approximate a veil, tucked, via a comb, into the crown of her head.
I hold up a Black and Gold. “L’chaim,” I say, trying and failing not to sound sarcastic. When I toss it back, Chava and Leora exchange looks and Batya ptu-ptu-ptus over her shoulder. These women know how to party.
This is my first ever bachelorette celebration, but to the best of my knowledge, they’re supposed to consist of drunken frolicking, the sort ostensibly verboten after marriage, aren’t they? Hairless, body-glittered men gyrating in your face, that sort of thing? So it’s something of a disappointment to be sitting here instead, watching Chava trying not to stare at the shell-titted waitresses, discussing the head covering Ra-chel will have to don as a married lady. Hat, cloth, or wig? These are her options. After she’s married, only Dov is supposed to see her hair.
Batya is holding forth on wigs made from human hair. “They’re beautiful,” she says dreamily. “My cousin Malka got one from France. It cost like two thousand dollars.” As an unmarried woman, Batya herself is still allowed to walk around uncovered. Hair, see, is erotic. Unmodest. Not tzniut.
“So you can cover your own hair with someone else’s, and that’s okay?” I ask. “That makes zero sense.” The axis of observance glares at me.
“It’s a loophole, sorta,” Ra-chel tells me apologetically. How on earth can she buy into this shit? Here she sits, daintily sipping her kosher champagne, the girl who was hospitalized freshman year of college after doing her own weight in Jell-o shots at a frat party.
“Well, it’s pretty fucking dumb.”
We sit in silence for a moment, shaking our heads, defining ourselves by what we’re not, the simplest thing to do. So definitive, so satisfying.
Batya changes the subject. “How’s the dress?”
Christ, the dress is huge. A real puff pastry. Up to her neck, down to the floor, hugging both wrists. Very modest indeed. Not quite what I’d pictured for her when we went through our Bride’s magazine phase the summer after sixth grade. I down another shot, dramatically tossing my head back and slamming the glass onto the table when I’ve emptied it.
“Good,” says Ra-chel. “Had my last fitting yesterday.” She winks at me, conciliatory. We’d spent the day together. First lunch at a kosher restaurant, then the fitting, then a matinee. I’d almost forgotten all about her transformation and impending marital imprisonment, I was so happy to be alone with her in that secular milieu. Though it was kind of uncomfortable when the movie, a supernatural romantic comedy, turned out to have a lot of sex in it. Rachel, back when she was still Rachel, was quite the whore. And I mean that as a compliment. Anyway, I kept glancing over at her out of the corner of my eye, wondering if it made her uncomfortable now, to have done all the stuff she did. And I would have asked her about it, but shit: There’s this opaque curtain that seems to have gone up between us, this unspeakable chasm between me and her, and I’m not at all entitled to her like I used to be.
The shots, meanwhile, are taking full effect. “Is this the little girl I carried?” I sling an arm around Ra-chel’s shoulder and force her to sway with me as I sing. “Is this the little girl at play?” She hates it when I reference Fiddler on the Roof, but honestly, it’s the closest I can get these days to understanding what the fuck is happening with her.
“Miri,” she says, wriggling out from under my arm and giggling despite herself, despite the curtain, then rolling her eyes for the benefit of the girls. But I’m still thinking about the wig thing, about Ra-chel covering up Rachel’s famous, gorgeous mane.
“Are you really going to wear a wig?” I ask softly.
“Miri.” She says my name with pity in her voice, like I’m so in the dark, so far behind. “My hair is only for my husband to see.” This stings, somehow. Another kind of club of which I am not a member.
“The thing is, okay, if your hair is so, like, dangerously enticing to the world, what’s different about a human hair wig that probably looks better than your own hair?” This must hit its mark with Leora, especially, whose scalp is visible beneath the lankest, mousiest excuse for a head of hair I’ve ever seen. “Hair that looks better than your own would be, like, even more erotic.” Do I imagine the girls squirming at the e word? Do I want them to squirm? I give my own hair a toss, feeling it fall across my neck, against the side of my face. I make bedroom eyes at Batya.