By morning the blizzard had passed but the icy winds continued to blowout of the distant steppes, swirling the freshly fallen snow into great clouds that obstructed almost all vision. Since there was no reason to get up, the men slept on while the women went about their chores—preparing the breakfast, attending to the children, kindling the fires. Eve lit the samovar. It was the kind of day that called for endless glasses of tea, and she was already planning on much conversation and discussion.
When Chaim awoke, he never came into the kitchen at all. Watching him leave the house, the women assumed he was headed for the Inn where he’d find all the food, companionship and vodka he desired. Or maybe he was headed for Olga Shakov’s house. Olga, aided by a pretty friend, was known to keep a room or two available for a special boarder. The two ladies were said to provide whatever it was a man needed that the Inn didn’t.
When the brothers awoke they ate their breakfast and discussed what chores there were to be done and which chore had priority. A fence needed mending but obviously it was a bad day to tackle that, with the winds howling like a pack of wolves. The barn wall had to be repaired but for that they would need materials and it was clearly a very bad week to be asking Chaim for money for lumber. They could start the addition of the new room since David and Eve had supplanted four of the children, but that necessitated a foundation and it was definitely a bad month to lay foundations, an impossible month to lay foundations. That would have to be done late into spring. Slowly their list dwindled. Then they decided it was already too late in the day to do anything since before they knew it the Sabbath would be upon them. Accordingly they put on their heavy jackets and boots and went off to those places where the workless men of the town congregated on a cold, bleak short winter day—the Inn, the butcher shop, or maybe at Ilya the blacksmith’s.
Miriam and Ruth set about straightening the chaotic dining hall—picking up the broken dishes and glasses, scrubbing the floor and even the walls, even attempting to fix a couple of broken chairs themselves, while Dora with a couple of the older children was dispatched to the bam and chicken house to search out any hidden eggs. Hannah and Eve began the preparation of the Sabbath loaves. Hannah sighed. “It will be a poor Sabbath dinner we’ll have tonight.”
“It doesn’t have to be—”
“Well, since we’ll have no more money until the month is up, we have to conserve whatever food we do have. And the men will be complaining about you know what not being on the table.”
“Maybe we can make it so pleasant they won’t notice the missing vodka. We’ll set a pretty table and light the candles and—”
Hannah snorted. “You’re dreaming. Like Chaim was going to pay wages that’s how they won’t notice we don’t have any vodka . . .”
Hannah seemed so downcast Eve wondered what she could possibly say or do that would cheer her up. “You know, Hannah, after I went to bed last night I couldn’t sleep. And you know how it is when you can’t sleep—the thoughts whirl around and around. I thought of what you said to Chaim about us buying the books. You said that we bought the books for our minds because our minds have to be fed as well as our mouths. That was wonderful, Hannah. But then I thought how it wasn’t true. I bought those books for myself and not to feed yours or the others’ minds at all. I remembered how you told me that you had started lessons when you were a girl but that you had to give them up. And Miriam said she has already forgotten the little she had learned. And Ruth and Dora—why, no one ever taught them anything. And here I was, lucky enough to have been taught to read, reading for almost my entire life—reading and learning. Then it occurred to me that I could be teaching you, all of you, to read, sharing with you the things I’ve learned. So I was thinking that since there’s no time like the present we should have daily lessons starting today.”
At first Hannah seemed interested, but then she scoffed, “Where would we get the time? And even if we found the time it would take forever for us to learn to read. Better you should just tell us your stories about the world. You know, how once in a while you give us a little lesson in history.”
“No,” Eve said decisively. “I mean, I’ll teach you history and anything else you want to know that I know, but I insist you all have to learn to read for yourselves. No one can think for herself if she can’t read for herself. And not just Hebrew either. I’m going to teach you to read Yiddish since that’s what we speak.”
“They speak Hebrew in Palestine, don’t they?”
“Yes, but what of it?”
“Palestine is the land of Israel, isn’t it? And we’re all Israelites, aren’t we?”
“Yes, but we live here and it’s Yiddish that Jews speak here, so though we pray in Hebrew, it’s important that we read Yiddish.”
Hannah smiled with irony. “We live in Russia and while we speak a little Russian and a little Polish, mostly we only speak Yiddish. Mostly we don’t speak Russian at all except for the few words we exchange with the gentiles. I know you can read Russian and I suspect that you speak it well, but how often do you really use it? So here we are—Israelites who live in Russia, pray in Hebrew but speak Yiddish. It’s funny.” She had fixed two glasses of tea and they sat down at the table. “So what do you think, Eve? Do you think maybe we Jews will all speak Hebrew someday in the Promised Land?”
“I don’t know if it will happen in our lifetime, Hannah. I don’t know if any of us will ever see the Promised Land . . .” She looked down into her glass of tea as if there might be an answer there.
“So tell me, Eve. Are there any countries where the Jew speaks the language of the land and not Hebrew and not Yiddish?”
“Well, I think they do in Germany. But Yiddish and German are very similar. Yiddish comes from the German. They say that in America the Jew is really starting to speak the language of the country. The old Jews still cling to their Yiddish, but their children are learning—”
“Tell me. If you could leave Russia tomorrow, would you? Or do you think that someday even Russia will be free, a good place to live?”
“In order to answer that question I’d have to ask another. Even if Russia was free, would the Jew ever be? Even if we weren’t despised by the authorities, wouldn’t we always be the Jews, always apart from the others? Could it ever truly be our land?”
“So I take it you would leave? But where would you go? To Palestine? At least it was once our land. At least a Jewish person could feel a little at home there. The people wouldn’t all be such strangers. There, at least, we’d all pray in the same language.”
“Yes. It would be better than here. It’s warm and they can’t send you to Siberia. But I don’t think Palestine would be my first choice. Here in Russia, even if we were free of the authorities we’d still have the peasant to spit on us and the gentry to accuse us of all kinds of unspeakable things. And we’d still have our own men who would say that as women we’re their inferiors and they still wouldn’t let us sit with them in the synagogue. So then I’d have to consider if it would be much better for me in Palestine even if it were Israel again. There we’d still have the Palestinians who, while they might be no more powerful than the Jews, would still despise us. We’d still have our own men who would still think of us as inferior, not worthy even to be called up to the Torah. All we could hope for would be a slight improvement in our position. There we might even rank on a par with a goat.”
“Ah, so it is America you’d choose. Where they don’t speak American but English and where they say the streets are paved with gold.”
“You know better than that,” Eve laughed. “But yes, I would definitely choose America.”
“And what about the gentiles there? They don’t despise the Jews there?”
“I guess some do. But not as much as they do in other places because they themselves aren’t oppressed. They’re just people who went there to make a better life for themselves just as the Jew would.”
“And our own men? Do you think in America they let the women go up to the Torah?”
“I don’t think they do . . . yet. But in a country where you live free you grow as a person and your ideas change. I think that someday in America they will call women up to the Torah. They will let them speak . . .”
“You’re dreaming,” Hannah laughed. “The men would as soon allow that as they’d let you take away their penises.”
Eve laughed heartily. “You may have hit the nail on the head, Hannah. Maybe that’s exactly how Jewish men regard the Torah. Like their penises. Look at it this way. All through the centuries the Jews have been oppressed, driven from country to country. As a result they became a fearful people, living in the shadows. It was hard for the Jewish male not to lose belief in himself as a man. Yet no matter how they were persecuted, they held on to their Torah. So, like their penises, the Torah became a symbol of their manhood, and they won’t let us come near it. They keep it for themselves. They want to make sure that they come first, at least with God.” Eve smiled impishly at Hannah. “But in America, things will be different. They’ll see. In America, our men will find out that they’ll have to allow us our place in the sun or we’ll turn our backs on them. In America all people can have an education—even if they’re poor, even if they’re Jews, even if they’re women. And an educated woman can pick and choose. Once she’s choosing, would she choose to be a second-rate person? No! She’ll demand to stand beside the man even when God is looking.”
Hannah stood up reluctantly. Interesting as the conversation was, they couldn’t very well sit there the whole morning. “All right. So we’ll learn to read and then we’ll be educated women. And then we’ll pick and choose,” she laughed. “Tell me, Eve. Do you think all men are afraid we’ll steal their Torah, their penises?”
“Come now, Hannah. I might be better educated but I’m sure you’re far wiser. I’m sure you know as well as I do that there are all kinds of men. Some are too weak to give anything to anyone and others are strong enough to share everything—the world, their place in the sun, even their standing before God.”
“Ah! If only all of us could find a man like that!”
“I would think,” Eve smiled, “that a wise woman would look first in her own bed. Maybe if she searches hard enough—”
Hannah nodded. “Is that what you’ve done, Evele?”
“I’ve been lucky. And at first I didn’t even know my own luck.”
Hannah laughed, a half-sigh. “I wonder if Chaim’s wife, may the poor soul rest in peace, ever searched her bed. Come to think of it, Eve, maybe that’s Chaim’s problem. Maybe he’s worried we’ll steal his penis!”
They both laughed and then they heard Dora giggle. “Are you two really talking about penises?”
Dora had just come in the kitchen door with the basket of eggs she had been to search for, and she was breathless, her cheeks red from the cold. “I know a rhyme about penises—’If you take four times the nose, then you’ve got a good-sized hose!’ ”
The three of them giggled.
It wasn’t until later that Hannah suddenly asked Eve, “If you think America’s so wonderful why don’t you and David go? It’s not impossible, after all. People go all the time. And you’re both young and strong . . .”
“Oh, I want to go. Some day I will. Actually I yearn for it. I want to see it with my own eyes, smell it, live it with every breath in my body. But I don’t think it’s time yet. There’s my father who’s old. And there are all of you whom I look on now as my very own sisters. And still, even as I hate so many things about it—there’s this damn land. I know it sounds silly but there’s something inside me, deep inside, that wants to leave this murky, muddy, frozen place better than I found it, even if it’s better for only a few people. Oh Hannah, I’m going to have a baby and wouldn’t it be wonderful if he or she could be born into a Russia that’s even a tiny bit better than it is today?”
“For the baby, mazel tov. For the other—” she shook her head. “Empty Russian dreams. Even I, who haven’t read anything, know that Russian dreams never, never come true. All they do is break your heart.”
“No, Hannah. For me America is the dream, and Russia—Russia is my dark reality.”
After the women had struggled with their first reading and writing lesson—recognition of the letters, the pronunciation and, especially hard for them, the copying, they stopped for tea and cookies, and they asked Eve to tell them some stories. Eve searched her mind for some historical tale that would relate in some way to the message she was eager to get across to them—that since Chaim had refused to pay the wages they asked for, the next step was for their husbands to refuse to work, and it was up to them to talk them into it.
So while the women were expecting to hear perhaps a biblical story, Eve told them about the Americans’ fight for independence against the British. She related how they chafed under the rule of England, and how, ultimately, they moved on to their Declaration of Independence and to the ensuing Revolution.
“What was so remarkable was that this pitifully small band of men were able to defeat all the king’s men although they weren’t trained and had very little in the way of supplies. They were starving and in tatters. Why, they marched through the heaviest snows of winter with only rags covering their bloodied feet—”
“So? Nu?” Miriam shrugged. “What’s so special about that? That’s just like here—”
Eve ignored her and went on. “Why did they do this? Because man’s need to be free is perhaps his strongest need of all. And how were they able to defeat the English? Because they were unified. In unity there’s strength.”
“Tell me one thing,” Hannah said reasonably. “If man’s need to be free is so strong how come all the peasants of Russia don’t rise up and fight?”
“Not to mention the Jews . . .” Ruth added.
“But they have tried. Many times. Right this very minute in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, right here in Lithuania, there are people talking, planning. If you take a look at history you’ll see that the time comes for everyone when they fight back simply because they can’t stand being pushed around anymore. As we ourselves did last night. As we fought back against Chaim . . .”
“You’re comparing Chaim to the Tsar?” Miriam asked, incredulous.
“Yes. Because the Tsar’s a tyrant and Chaim is one too. Chaim’s only a petty, Jewish tyrant but a tyrant is a tyrant. And last night we fought back!”
Ruth laughed. “Yes, we fought back using a piece of fish and a bottle of vodka as weapons. Some revolutionaries we are! Besides—Chaim!” she scoffed. “He’s nothing but a bully.”
“But that’s what every tyrant is! A bully that tries to get away with as much as he can, as the others will let him.”
“So we fought back against our bully,” Hannah said. “We fought back and we lost. And now we have to live with it.”
“No, we don’t! We can go on fighting!”
“And how do we do that?”
“We asked for wages for our husbands and Chaim refused. So now it’s our move. We say to him that if our husbands don’t get wages, they refuse. They refuse to work!”
The women looked at her as if she were truly meshuge. Their husbands refuse to work for their father? It would never happen in a thousand years.
“So this is what our history lesson was all about?” Hannah wiped her hands on her apron. “I should have known. You’re not one to talk without a point, after all. But there’s one thing—how do you propose that we get our husbands to refuse to work?”
“All of you have to talk all of them into it.”
“How do we do that?”
“One way or another . . .”
When the men returned late that afternoon Eve immediately asked David if he had said anything to his brothers about not going to work with Chaim once the time came.
“I mentioned it in passing, making a joke of it more than anything, just to see how’d they take it. Even as a joke it went flat. They looked at me as if I were some kind of a fool. And you—? Did you mention it to the wives?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I think it’s too soon to tell.”
It was a relief to all that Chaim, true to his word, didn’t come home for the Shabbes dinner. Still, it wasn’t the cheeriest of meals despite the fact that the women wore their holiday dresses and their wigs and used up the very last of their eau de cologne. After the men departed for the evening services and the children were bedded down, the women set about clearing away and cleaning up. Hannah said, “See Evele, I told you. All they know from is what’s not on the table.”
“They didn’t even notice that we were wearing the perfume,” Miriam added.
“Hershel did . . .” Ruth said, biting off her words. “He didn’t say it smelled like a whorehouse as Chaim did, he just said it stunk.”
Hannah clucked her tongue and Ruth said bitterly, “I should have told him what really stinks—male scum!”
The others stared at her, truly shocked.
“Well, don’t look at me like that! It’s true. Their stuff stinks to high heaven and they think it’s so precious, every stinking drop!”
“Stuff? What stuff?” Dora asked but no one paid any attention to her since Miriam was smirking slyly, asking, “Is that why you’d rather have your husband spill his juices into the snow instead of into you?”
Ruth gasped, for once speechless in the face of a verbal attack from Miriam. But Hannah said, “Shame on you! What kind of talk is that?”
Miriam spread her hands. “But everyone knows Hershel goes off into the woods to do for himself what she won’t.”
“Oh, you bitch! You obscenity!” Ruth rasped, finding her tongue.
Miriam turned to the others as if in innocence. “Am I wrong? Everyone knows the only reason she keeps nursing that overgrown horse of a son is because a nursing mother is impure and her husband can’t come near her. The way she’s going, she’ll still be giving that child a tit when he has a full set of teeth in his mouth already.
“When he’s already running off to heder, she’ll have to come running to the Hebrew school to make sure he takes the tit. When he’s ready to be called to the Torah for his bar mitzvah she’ll be right there giving him her breast rather than giving Hershel his rightful place between her thighs. And when he’s ready to stand under the chupah with his bride, he’ll have to come to her for a suck before he sticks it into the girl . . .”
“Miriam!” Hannah cried, covering her ears. “Have you no decency?”
“Decency? You expect decency from her? From that fat cow who can’t give birth to anything except girls? At least I’ve produced sons!” Ruth beat her breast. “And she’s so anxious to get that hole of hers—which I might add is as big as a barn—filled, she’s willing to go on having girl children until she’s dried up like a prune!”
“Enough!” Hannah ordered. “The two of you are a disgrace!”
Eve, who was always upset at the spectacle of Ruth and Miriam fighting, was even more upset to hear Dora murmur, “I’d be more than willing to go on having even girls until I dried up like a prune. I’d gladly take anything.”
“Do you hear that, Ruth?” Eve cried out. “Now you have Dora saying even girls, as if having daughters was like having less than nothing, as if all of us were nothing.”
“First of all,” Ruth said in a voice strangely quiet now, “Miriam started up with me first. And second, it’s true. We are nothing. We’re dirt. We’re less than dirt.”
“No, Ruth! It’s not true.”
Ruth burst into tears. “Yes. It’s true. We’re nothing. We’re less than nothing!” she sobbed.
Hannah put an arm around Ruth consolingly as she threw Miriam a dirty look. “Do you see what you started?”
“Yes,” Eve agreed, “you did start this time, Miriam.” But even as she spoke she realized that what Miriam had said about Ruth continuing to nurse her baby Gershon in order to be impure, to stop Hershel from making love to her, might very well be the truth. Otherwise, why would she be reacting to Miriam’s taunt this way? She had been angry with Miriam before but she had never cried. She had never suggested before that she thought of herself, of all of them, as nothing.
Gradually Ruth’s sobs subsided but she went on in a drone, “All of you know it’s true even if you won’t admit it. The men just use us to empty themselves into. They stick it in and we lie there like dummies and receive it. They enjoy it and then because they’re hypocrites they attach a holy reason for doing it. They say it’s only to have children and not even at their own will. It’s God’s will, they say.
“God’s . . .” she sneered. “Does anyone ask us if we want to do it? Or if we like it? God forbid! It’s our duty! And we’re the ones who have to live with the results—the children. Child after child. We’re the ones who have to spend the rest of our lives wiping—wiping up, wiping away. First we have to wipe their stinking juices from our thighs and then we have to wipe the babies’ behinds, their dirty faces, the running noses, the fevered brows, the sick bodies. We wipe up the vomit and the shit, the tears from the cheeks and the pain from their hearts. Wiping and wiping . . . It never stops until we ourselves are worn rags only good enough to wipe the floors.”
Her voice wore down and the other women sat motionless and mute before their sister-in-law’s obvious torment. Eve wanted to say something, anything that could possibly assuage the pain Ruth was feeling, but what could she say that wouldn’t be taken as colossal conceit on her part? She herself had been married only a short time, had no children and was probably spoiled, just as her brothers had said so often. How could she presume to say anything?
The silence in the room was broken by Hannah who approached Ruth, towel in hand. “So? This one time let me do your wiping,” she said, half joking, half forlorn, as she dabbed at Ruth’s tear-stained cheeks.
Then Dora started to weep, a soft mournful sound, a low aching wail and Eve wondered whether Dora cried because of what Ruth had said or for herself . . . Or is it that she cries only because Ruth cries, not even understanding Ruth’s words, but feeling Ruth’s pain?
“So?” Hannah said, smiling a little, looking at Dora’s cheeks stained with tears too. “Ruthie is right. The wiping never stops.” And she mopped at Dora’s cheeks too.
Then the baby Gershon cried out from his cradle angrily as if to remind his mother of his presence. Miriam, most likely in atonement for making his mother cry, picked him up and placed him high on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, mameniu, a tit I can’t give you.” She patted him gently on the back, looking at Ruth, a half affectionate, half sheepish expression on her round, Slavic-featured face. “I’m sorry, Ruthie . . .” she said. “I guess it’s that I’m tired of the cracks about having only girls.”
Ruth nodded. “I’m more to blame than you. Everyone says I’m sour and you’re pleasant. It must be so. And God knows I’ve twitted you enough about those girls of yours. It’s really their fault—the men. They say we’re good for nothing if we don’t produce sons and I play along. I make myself a big shot because at least I did one thing right—I had sons. You know what I was doing? I was making myself more than a nothing at your expense. And if you want to know the truth, I envy you. Your girls are sweet and they’ll be a comfort to you in your old age more than my sons will be to me. That’s how it is with daughters. With sons—who knows?”
The two women smiled at each other, and Eve watched them. And I think I’m so smart. I thought with all my words and education I was going to teach them about unity. I’m the fool and they can give me the lessons. I have yet to learn about real life. The real unity is their shared spiritual strength—their capacity for enduring a shared pain, a shared laughing through the tears.
“I think we should have a glass of tea and finish cleaning up later,” Hannah said. “Dora, get the glasses and the cookies.”
I’ve seen them as nice but essentially simpleminded. I’ve confused their being unread with ignorance. And it’s really I who am simpleminded with conceit. They’re wise enough to survive and endure with grace. . . .
Eve glanced up to see Hannah smiling at her over the rim of her glass. “So, Evele, what are you thinking about so hard? That we’re eating up all the cookies? And that in a few days we’ll be out of eggs too and unable to make any more?” Hannah’s eyes were crinkling around the edges, smiling like her mouth.
Endure with grace and with humor too. Eve smiled back at Hannah. “I was thinking very important thoughts. About these glasses of tea. Did you know that in the Tsar’s palace they don’t drink tea out of glasses at all? They drink out of teacups of French porcelain, the most beautifully painted teacups you can imagine. Delicate, thin as eggshells.”
“Thin as eggshells!” Dora repeated in amazement. “And French!” Her eyes went big and round as she mulled the idea of it over in her head.
“And why were you thinking about French teacups?” Hannah asked as if amused at the workings of Eve’s brain.
“I don’t know. Why not?”
“Why not indeed?” Hannah laughed.
“What a one you are, Evele!” Miriam shook her head.
Then, piteously, Ruth’s son cried out again, Miriam’s shoulder in the end being no substitute for his mother’s breast and Miriam handed him over to Ruth.
Ruth put the boy to her breast and said, “Yes, you’re one of a kind, Eve. Maybe if there is one woman that isn’t nothing, it’s you.”
“Oh yes!” Dora cried out. “Eve could never be nothing!”
Eve looked from face to face. They were gazing at her with admiration. With more than admiration, with love. She was filled with shame. She had come here so full of herself, so vain, with her long hair hanging, mocking their own poor cropped heads, flaunting her fancy dresses and showing off constantly. She was trying to force her own ideas on them because she was so conceited she insisted on thinking she was smarter than they. And how did they reward her arrogance? By offering her admiration, love and complete trust.
What did she give them in return? The very doubtful privilege of sitting down at the same table with a nasty, rude and vulgar bully. She sewed a few dresses—elegant, frivolous dresses—when they lived in a world that had no room for either frivolity or elegance. She filled their heads with her silly notions—French teacups and soap and perfume, when they lived in the dregs of Russia where life was hard and where they could barely exist as human beings, much less as Jews. Then instead of helping them in some concrete fashion, she ended up making their husbands mad at them. And she offered to teach them to read, not so much for themselves as for herself, to suit her purposes, partially because their inability to read and write offended her sensibilities.
Oh, if the eye offends, by all means, Eve, pluck it out! As long as it isn’t your own eye. Oh, I am selfish! Now I’m preaching revolution to them! A work strike! And what kind of a work strike? A work strike against one petty man, and for the gain of David and myself, and only incidentally for them. . . .
She was overcome with emotion. She was overwhelmed suddenly by her love for these women whom she had known for so short a time. She was filled with a yearning to give them something real, something truly fulfilling. Yes, she wanted to free them from Chaim’s oppressive thumb but she wanted to give them more. She wanted somehow to show them that they deserved to inherit the earth even while they still lived.
She turned to Ruth, “Who was it who said you’re nothing, Ruth?”
Startled, Ruth nearly dropped her glass of tea. “Are we back to that?”
“Who was it?”
“Everyone. My father said it when he didn’t think I was even worth teaching, didn’t he? And my husband thinks it even if he doesn’t say it because he lives by what his father thinks. And the men in the synagogue. Don’t they say it when they won’t even let us sit with them? They won’t even touch us when it’s that time of the month. Oh, they want to put their things into us and they want to plant their seeds inside us; they want us to grow babies and feed them at our breasts but at the same time they call us unclean, impure, because of it. And my mother—she loved me but she thought I was nothing too because I was a girl. Why not? She thought she herself was nothing.”
“Exactly,” Eve said excitedly. “And it won’t end until we ourselves think we’re something. Now, I don’t think you’re nothing, Ruth. And Hannah doesn’t and neither does Miriam nor Dora. Do you?” she challenged the three women and they shook their heads.
“There! None of us think you’re nothing!”
Ruth laughed scornfully. “But all of you are women. All of you are nothing. It doesn’t matter what you say. It’s only what they say that counts. The men! They’re in charge of the world.”
“But naturally they say it. Don’t you see? If they say we’re nothing, that makes them something. That makes them everything. But we ourselves let them get away with this lie. We mustn’t believe them!”
“Doesn’t the Talmud say they’re better than we are?”
“But who wrote the Talumd?” Eve demanded. “Men!”
“But it’s God’s word—” Miriam interjected.
“But who says it’s God’s word?” Eve countered. “The men. Even the Christians’ Testament says ‘give honor unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel.’ But where did they get that phrase? From our Testament. It’s one group of men repeating the words of another group of men, and between them they make it out as truth among all men. It becomes more of a truth as it’s repeated by one generation after the other through time.”
“But doesn’t it say in the Book that God made Eve from Adam’s rib?” Dora asked.
Eve laughed. “Do I look like a rib to you?”
Dora blushed. “I didn’t mean you . . .”
“That’s all right. You don’t look like any man’s rib to me either.”
“But God made man in His image. Therefore, it follows then that He must have thought men were better than women too,” Ruth said dolefully.
“Oh, I don’t know about that for sure. That’s the way men wrote it down. But just suppose, suppose the man who wrote that down lied, or just guessed. Or not knowing exactly if that was so, preferred to think that was the truth. Just suppose it wasn’t. What if the truth is God made us in Her image?”
“God forgive you, Eve!” Hannah gasped. “You’re talking heresy!”
“No, I’m not. I know there’s a God and I believe in the Almighty. All I’m saying is I personally couldn’t swear the Almighty wears a man’s face. As it is, we’re only taking a man’s word for it—”
Ruth laughed. “God a woman? That would be some joke on the men if that were really so . . .” But then the laugh stopped and the smile left her face as her tone changed. “No. It’s impossible. After all, we were the ones picked to carry the children and to deliver them in pain. We’re only the bearers, just as when we were slaves in Egypt.”
“Ah, the children. We were the ones chosen to bear the children and I think right there is the answer to our puzzle. But I don’t think we’re the bearers in the same way the Jews were when they were slaves in Egypt. I think we women are the creators, truly the chosen. All of creation lies within our bodies. We’re the special ones because we’re the creators of all mankind!”
Dora giggled. “No, not mankind, Eve. Don’t you mean we’re the creators of all womankind?”
The women stared at Dora dumbstruck. Then Eve laughed. “Oh, my! Womankind! Oh Dora, that’s wonderful!”
Ruth gazed at Dora in a bemused fashion. Then she smiled and then she laughed. “Womankind! That is kind of wonderful!”