The Saturday Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

horrified stares of her classmates, the good yeshiva girls, the out-of-town rabbis’ daughters, as they whispered just behind her. She saw herself summoned into Rebbitzin Craimer’s office, the way she would ease her bulky pregnant body into the narrow chair as the old yenta lectured her about being a bad influence, a disgrace to the good name of the institution. What could she answer? She’d even have to agree!
    And then they would throw her out of school with no degree, all that tuition and studying about plaque down the toilet, and all her student loans coming due with no way to pay them off! Her father (her mother, she was sure, would not be around, having died of a heart attack the moment she’d heard the news) would grudgingly take her in, and she’d have to listen to his snoring and watch him sit around in those sleeveless undershirts he liked, his skinny chest and hairy arms flailing as he tried to comfort her. She’d have to listen to his advice: Go back to Dallas or Houston. You’ll be better off. Sorry I ever came to this city. They’ve got plenty of rabbis down in Texas. Don’t worry. You’ll find rabbis.
    Or perhaps she’d throw herself on the mercies of the city’s welfare system and rent a little apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up where she’d sit terrified behind thrice-bolted doors, hoping crackheads and dope fiends wouldn’t break it down and kidnap her and her baby, selling them bothinto white slavery. A place where for recreation, she’d watch the roaches race each other across the kitchen counter. None of her friends would visit her. She’d be an outcast.
    Hot tears dripped into her pillow as she rolled over onto her side.
    There was another way. A trip to a clinic—they were clean and efficient, and it wouldn’t be worse than going to a dentist—and before you could say Yitzie Polinsky, the little bugger would be an ingredient in some new antiaging cosmetic venture.
    Her baby. They’d suck it out of her.
    She’d seen that book with the pictures of fetuses inside the womb. Whatever those crazy women’s groups told you about freedom over your body, it was a baby. It had a head, and a little tush, and tiny fingers and those tiny closed eyes. And they’d just Hoover it out of her, like some mess that needed cleaning up.
    It was then she’d felt the entire true weight of sin crash down on her. Whatever she’d done in her life so far, she hadn’t actually done anything hurtful to God. But killing a baby, even the froglike beginnings of a baby, because it was too inconvenient and embarrassing, would be a true sin. The God she seldom thought about, but always believed in, would not be able to forgive that. And for the rest of her life, she would have to live in a world in which she knew she had done this terrible thing, until the day she died, at which point her true punishment would only begin.
    According to some woman who’d undergone a near-death experience—a bunch of bricks fell on her head while she was walking in the street—and had explained it all on Oprah, when you died you had this moment when you were forced to sit back and watch your life, like a movie. You couldn’t close your eyes, because you had no eyelids. God would be watching her watch herself as the film showed her walking to the clinic, filling out the forms, lying down on the table. It would show her letting them, telling them, to rid her of this God-given life. A child, hers and Yitzie Polinsky’s.
    She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.
    “Can I put on the light?”
    It was her roommate, Rivkie.
    Rivkie Lifschitz was blessed with all things. She was from a respected well-to-do family and already engaged to an acknowledged Torah scholar. Perhaps because life had treated her so gently, she had also become a kind and generous human being. She was the kind of girl who learned the Torahportion of the week and managed to extract some beautiful moral lesson even from those difficult sections