The Saturday Wife Read Online Free PDF

narrowing. “Are you sure?”
    “Yes, I’m sure!” she told him hotly, as her heart sank.
    He shrugged. “It’s been fun, but you’ve gotten the wrong impression.”
    Her face paled. “What impression is that, Yitzie?”
    “That we’re a nice Orthodox Jewish couple from Brooklyn who’s just blowing off a little steam until we fall back into the fold.”
    That’s exactly what she’d thought, except for the Brooklyn part. She was, after all, from Queens, a major difference as far as she was concerned. “I know that! Who said I want that?”
    He touched her face; his eyes held a sardonic gleam. “Don’t you? Aren’t you just dying to pick out your colors and move into my family’s two-family in Crown Heights where we can live until we have the down payment for our own house in some swanky Jewish neighborhood, walking distance to the local shul?” He sneered.
    She shrugged off his hand. “So what if I am? Who do you think you are, Mick Jagger? You’re Rabbi Polinsky’s son, the one who wears a streimel and kapota every Saturday, like some Polish nobleman from the Middle Ages. Sooner or later, if you wait around, they’ll fix you up with some short rabbi’s daughter with thick stockings from Beit Yaakov. She’ll make you turn off the lights and put a hole in a sheet.”
    His hands fumbled around, looking for a cigarette. He lit it and lay down on the bed, exhaling large smoke rings that rose and broke against the dirty white ceiling. The smell of smoke was suffocating. “You know, Delilah, that hole-in-the-sheet thing? It’s a myth.”
    She began to cough. He ran one finger up her arm from wrist to elbow. “I’m going to miss you,” he said.
    She thought perhaps she hadn’t heard him right.

    A few weeks later, she missed.
    Well, that was putting it pessimistically, she told herself. After all, she didn’t always get it on the day it was supposed to come. There were a million reasons. I mean, she wasn’t a clock the way some girls were.
    But then four more days passed. And a fifth.
    She called Yitzie, but all she got was an answering machine. She left ten messages, one every half hour. Then she went knocking on Sharona Gottleib’s door.
    Sharona opened it. She looked annoyed. “Well, well.”
    What had she ever done to her? But there was no time for game playing.
    “Listen, I’ve got to get in touch with Yitzie. He doesn’t answer the phone—”
    Sharona pulled her in and shut the door behind her, her fingers painfully tight around her wrist. “Not so loud, you idiot!”
    “You don’t understand.”
    She arched her brow. “No, huh? Late, are we?”
    Delilah sank down on the bed. “Well, maybe. But I’m not even sure we had… that we did… What am I going to do, Sharona?”
    “I tried to warn you. But you wouldn’t listen.”
    Was that true? Delilah searched her memory and came up with a few snooty remarks thrown in her direction by Sharona when she’d asked for Yitzie’s phone number. Something like, “You are making a huge mistake.He’s poison.” She’d chalked it up to jealousy. Or to Sharona feeling she wasn’t as good as Penina, not worthy of the great Yitzie Polinsky.
    “But you were the one who fixed him up with Penina! If you felt that way, why did you do it?”
    Sharona’s face went rigid. “I had no choice. He’s got some photos of me.”
    This information sank in with horror. “Oh, no! Sharona, what am I going to do?”
    Sharona went to the door and opened it. “You’ll figure it out.”
    Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.
    She lay back on her bed, the blinds drawn, the sounds of New York City street traffic rolling over her as if she were lying spread-eagled on 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. Instinctively, she stretched her fingers over her stomach, as she tried to imagine the future. Was it her imagination, or was it already rounder, fuller?
    She saw herself waddling through the halls, her sweaters stretched over a basketball-sized lump. She imagined the shocked and