My wedding night was a disaster. Though fourteen, Hodel had the mentality of a small child; her submission to my clumsy fingers seemed obscenely forced by the unseen hands of our parents and tradition. She whimpered and shrank away from my caresses. Her newly shorn hair, cut after the wedding, as was our tradition, made her look even younger, and confused me terribly. I persevered, mumbling encouragements that it would soon be over. All I could think of was the examination our sheets would be submitted to by Mme Mendel in the morning. With no blood, the marriage would not be real and I would not be a man. As it turned out, I had to prick my own finger and wipe it on the sheet in the morning, having given up my entreaties by dawn. My bride had a week of relief after that first night; the blood of my finger was accepted as Hodel’s, and so she was “unclean” for a week and we had to sleep in separate beds. But on the eighth day, my efforts continued. To be fair, Hodel wanted to become a woman and do her duty, but she was terrified. It took a full month to actually deflower her; her plump little body seemed to have no natural ingress. I felt I was trying to puncture a thigh, or a belly, so resiliently did her flesh resist my poor prick. Night after night I came to a crisis without actually entering my own wife, her rubbery body repelling me again and again. At last I convinced her to straddle me, and I impaled her, though my sense of triumph was dulled by her whimpering as I finally burst the dam.
I fluctuated between guilt and despair in our first months together as I realized that I had been saddled with a hysteric. Hodel spent most of her time in my presence crying for her mother.
The terrible Mme Mendel lived upstairs from us (as per our marriage contract we had been allotted one large, drafty room previously occupied by the recently deceased paternal grandparents of my Hodel), but she insisted from the first day that we live on our own as husband and wife, not as her children. A good head taller than her husband and all but one of her six sons, Mme Mendel had black eyes and swarthy, wind-lashed skin. She had an intimidating, predatory slowness about her; she never rushed, yet she was prone to sudden surges of dislike and irritation, and lashed out at her endless progeny with a whip of a tongue in the fastest Yiddish I had ever heard. Having come from a tiny town in Poland when her first few children were young, she still had the mind of a provincial woman. Her superstitions were elaborate and terrifying: a pregnant woman stepping on fingernail clippings meant certain miscarriage; a hair in the milk meant a demon had been in the house. She never entered a room without kissing the mezuzah. She had even gone so far as to avoid giving her children grand names, so as not to make the demons jealous. She chose Hodel, Leib, Sheindl—no Esthers or Abrahams for this canny lady! She never paid anyone a compliment, for the same reason. If anyone complimented her, she spat on the floor to ward off the evil eye. When her children were babies, she made tiny tears in their garments. Demons were of a lower order than humans, and they were always jealous of us, she explained. No one should be too beautiful or too lucky. She sensed countless evil spirits and sprites swirling around her, just waiting for her to slip up. Still, I was grateful that she allowed us to eat our evening meal upstairs with her and the rest of the family, as Hodel seemed to be genuinely afraid of boiling water or hot liquid of any kind.
Every evening at six o’clock I would report upstairs to the family apartment. My child-wife, having already been basking in her mother’s indifference for several hours, always looked up at me from the dreaded bubbling stew she’d been forced to stir, standing as far away as possible from the pot, lest the liquid boil over and scald her—with a frightened, surprised smile, her shiny cheeks the purplish color of turnips, a few cropped ginger hairs peeking out of her matron’s bonnet, as though she had forgotten all about me and our marriage and then, with my entrance, was compelled to remember.
Only eight people could sit at the Mendel table at a time, so there were three sittings a night. Mme Mendel stood until the last child was served, languorously scooping meat stew out of the enormous, dented, seemingly bottomless pot. Hodel and I were allowed to attend the first seating, because we were married. Also in attendance was Hodel’s badgerlike father, Moishe, her idolized oldest brother, Leib, who, at sixteen, was the only one of the other Mendel children to be married, and his cunning wife, Leah. Leib had already impregnated his wife twice in two years. I could tell from the way the hugely pregnant Leah asked Mme Mendel, lisping, how old she was when each of her babies was born, that she planned on outdoing her. Mme Mendel, however, was not out of the running yet. Her fourteenth child was only two; she could easily drop another litter. She answered Leah’s questions with deliberate vagueness, as if the age she was when she bore her eighth or twelfth child were a secret akin to Kabbalah. I was always seated next to the silent and shrunken mother of Mme Mendel, who had skin the texture of dried beef. She spent much of each meal glowering at me as I ate my stew, as if every mouthful I took were an affront to her finer manners.
Dinner inevitably began with Mme Mendel asking me in a sort of offhand way how much money I had made that day. I always told her, to the last sou. She then asked me exactly what I had sold. I had to describe each object in great detail: one painted enamel snuffbox, twenty sous; one pair of feather-lined men’s kid gloves, four livres; one collapsible walking stick with an engraved tin handle, five livres; one iron teapot, ten sous. After each description, Mme Mendel would squint her eyes, as if visualizing the object and matching it with the price. Then she would either nod, frowning appreciatively, her eyebrows up, or shake her head and smile derisively at my lack of business acumen. M. Mendel, with his two badger’s streaks of white down the center of his reddish hair, and his long, pointy nose, would chuckle and then suddenly gasp for air. The first time Mme Mendel asked me for my inventory, I tried padding my list with a couple of items I had not actually sold. But at the end of the meal she demanded to see the money; I was humiliated and had to confess I had made a mistake. She looked at me and smiled, as if to say, That’s just what I expected.
Mme Mendel’s disdain for me was conjugated throughout the family: male, female, plural and singular, from the wizened grannie to the petulant toddler, they all thought of me as beneath them. Only Hodel, the irregular one, did not judge me in this way. My low status was due in part to my family of peddlers being far humbler than the Mendels, and in part because I had been duped into a marriage with Hodel, a child they all knew was not right in the head. The main reason I had no status in the family, though, was that Mme Mendel had decided I was a nudnik with no head for business. If she had fallen in love with me, I would have been a demigod. Her power in the clan was absolute.