Anyway, I love my wife. With me it goes beyond orthodoxy, duty, the slavish fear of hell. Constance is a fine daughter, none better, and I love her very much. But there’s this glue in the glands for the Mrs. You have my word on it, I’d feel this way even if it weren’t my religious obligation.
So you see the dilemma. On the one hand my Connie’s everyday diminished fingernails bitten down to their bloody quicks while my nervous, heartsore child grazes beneath their gritty, jagged overhangs, waned moons and torn cuticles, settles in her anxiety and daily seeks fresh purchase, expert as some kid mouth-mountaineer contemplating the angles, all the flat, polished facets, approaches and billiard reckonings of face and, on the other, nutty Shelley, front-runner Poster Lady to the Loonies. I have to wonder. If she can do what she does for all dogleg kink, quirk and aberration just in little Lud, who knows what she might not yet get into, what marvels and wonders of the psy-chopathological she could work were she ever to come up to bat in the great world? There were my holy obligations and there was my good, old-fashioned romantic love, but there is also, I admit it, my heat-seeking curiosity, my blockbuster temptations. Because Eden ain’t over, you know. We weren’t thrown out of the Garden. We’re still in it. All He ever really did was lock the gate. Eden ain’t over. Beset we are by temptation, up to our fig leaves in it. So I have to wonder. And fear and tremble for the kid. But all I’m doing is speculating, talking momentary diversion, juggling the bright what-ifs. In the end it would be as it was in the beginning — no deal. The kid stays. The rabbi stands pat. The wife don’t make a move.
Well, a move. It isn’t as if she’s under lock and key. She comes and goes as she pleases, in winter and throughout the school year chasing up and down the back roads and side streets of northern Jersey in her one-woman car pool the thirty-some-odd miles she puts on the car every day, rain, snow or shine, even on days when Connie is poorly, or some other child either, and has to stay home, and Shelley, operating under her screwy, self-imposed rebbitzin’s rules of order, not only picks up the other kids anyway, but actually phones around, absorbing the city-to-city, intrastate tolls, to find an alternate, “so the seat-e-le shouldn’t go wasted,” every year trading in one big brand-new Buick station wagon for an even newer, even bigger one, some huge, gleaming Conestoga you wouldn’t be afraid to cross the plains in (a station-wagon nuch, for an intimate little nuclear family of three!) because she doesn’t want it on her conscience that a kid came to grief in any eensy, flimsy jalopy. So move. It’s just New Jersey she can’t leave, just, for more than her errands, Lud. Otherwise, she’s all over the map, not only free to move but positively running with the pack.
I’m just getting comfortable again. (Now my erection is silenced, my meat withdrawn and chemicals subsided like clarity returned to cloudy tap water. In less time than it takes to speak, or speak to, the problems, my rabbinical conundrums not only unresolved but forgotten, my sins, and all, now my wife and I have had congress, and Connie’s outside again, my cheese-it-there’s-the-kid! misgivings forgiven.) When the doorbell rings like a cue in a play.
It’s for Shelley. (And how, not being that kind of rabbi, not ever on call I mean, pulled to deathbeds or awakened and hustled into an emergency presentable enough to join the eloped religious in midnight matrimony or even, for that matter, hit up by salesmen in the Torah trade, how could it be for me?)
It was for Shelley and it was the girls, her sisters in an eight-lady group of musical Jews who entertained at various affairs in northern Jersey — showers, weddings, brisses, bar and bat mitzvahs, golden and other special anniversaries and do’s. Shelley was one of the singers, though she sometimes accompanies herself on the tambourine. Only two of the women, Sylvia Simon and Elaine Iglauer, were trained musicians, checked out on guitar, mandolin and balalaika. The charter membership — Shelley is a charter member — was still intact after seven years but the group experienced odd cycles of popularity. They could be booked months in advance, then go through most of an entire season when, as Miriam Perloff, their manager and first soprano, put it, they “couldn’t get arrested.” Their bookings constituted a sort of sociological shorthand, which I supposed — I had a lot of spare time — put them on the cutting edge of Jewish culture in New Jersey. They were this really bellwether chorus and combo, absolute musts for this season’s showers and anniversaries, le dernier cri for that season’s bat mitzvahs and brisses. In a sort of idle rabbi mode — I have spare time to spare — I figured it had something to do with the baby boom.
They used their spare time for intensive, additional rehearsals and to experiment with the name of the group, thinking perhaps that by adding to their repertoire or changing their name they might goose up their popularity. They’d been “The Sabras,” they’d been “The Balebostes.” Briefly they were “The Mamas and the Mamas” but dropped that when they started getting asked to kosher stag parties. Now, and for some time past, they were “The Chaverot,” Hebrew for members of a kibbutz, or fellowship, and, in addition to Yiddish and Israeli folk songs, standards like “Tzena, Tzena,” “Havah Nagilah” and “Ha Tikva,” they specialized in vaguely Jewish songs—“Those Were the Days,” the theme from Exodus, “Sunrise, Sunset,” and other vaguely Hebrew-sounding show tunes.
Shelley had volunteered our house in Lud for rehearsals and, in accordance with her special theories of good-natured martyrdom, frequently arranged to pick these women up at their homes and deliver them back again afterwards — two hundred sixty, two hundred seventy-five miles round trip, door to door — but I didn’t object because, well, frankly, I enjoyed having them in the house. They were Lud’s only visitors not there for death. They were crisp and affluent and gave off a snug illusion of company, a suggestion of the rich, cursive icing on coffee cake. They were all quite handsome and reminded me of women shopping in department stores, elegantly stalking fashion like beasts doing prey, professional as pigeons pecking dirt. In addition to Shelley, Sylvia Simon, Miriam Perloff and Elaine Iglauer, the other members of the group were Fanny Tupperman, Naomi Shore, Rose Pickler and Joan Cohen and, to be perfectly frank, that’s what I thought they ought to call themselves—“Miriam Perloff, Sylvia Simon, Elaine Iglauer, Shelley Goldkorn, Rose Pickler, Naomi Shore, Fanny Tupperman and Joan Cohen!” That’d fetch ’em. It’d have fetched me, but then I’m my own lost tribe, this exile, this standoffish, renunciated Jew. This, I mean, time-on-his-hands outcast-in-waiting. Whatever it was I had for Shelley spilled over and I had it for these women too. (I’m in my macho mode now, speaking out of the sweet lull in my glazed-over blood, the drugged hypnotics of my engaged attentions, handled as a guy in a barber’s chair.)
Meanwhile the women bustled about me, setting up music stands, rearranging chairs, turning our rec room into a sort of studio, and I was struck by the power implicit in their team-work. Women were not like this in my day. Then they were weak sisters, wimps, the beautiful nerds of time. Then they were without gyms, home fitness apparatus. Sometimes I think Shelley and Constance are throwbacks, designed to set a Sabbath table, bensch a little licht and, in the dark of their blindman’s-buff-shielded eyes, make solemn, mysterious passes over the candles like thieves palming light.