Rachel learns the facts of life in theory and in brutal practice

26 January 2025

In this free sample chapter from Tunnel of Mirrors by Ferne Arfin, married but still virginal Rachel learns a few home truths from the bawdy conversation of the older women at the communal baths. Later, she has a violent introduction to the reality of her marriage. The time is 1923 and the setting is the Lower East Side of Manhattan.©Ferne Arfin 2022

Married Love

“So then she saw it and she screamed, ‘My mother never told me it would look like that! It’s such an ugly little thing.’ And I’m telling you, the poor man, God bless him, he just wilted away. Just like that.

“Women’s laughter bounced and echoed off the tiled walls of the bathhouse pool. Now that Rachel was a married woman, she accompanied Tanta Rosa to the mikvah, the ritual bath every Friday after dark.
But before you could dip a toe into the living water, you had to be spotless. So first they joined Tanta Rosa’s friends in the Baruch baths at the river end of Rivington. There, a whole new world of bawdy female conversation opened up to her.

“Just like that? How do you know such a thing? You were there?”

“How do I know? Because she told me, that’s how. Six weeks they were married, she wouldn’t let him near her…’such an ugly little thing’…Gott in Himmel.”
“So what happened?”

“So what happened? So what always happens? One night, he drank a lot of whiskey and then he forced her. I’m telling you. And after that, I suppose, she must have learned to look the other way because now she’s carrying the eighth. So, schon. That was that. But you know what I think? It’s a good thing they’re stronger than us. Because what virgin would touch it if she never saw it before?”

“Oy, if they would only hear us,” the second woman laughed. “But it’s true. My husband, he should live and be well, a beauty contest he wouldn’t win with it. But God forbid he should know I said so.”

“It’s such an ugly little thing!…Oy, vey…” the first woman hiccupped.

“And so sensitive! Worse than children they are. One cross word and pfft, nothing.”

“Enough already,” Rosa laughed. “You’re embarrassing my niece. Look, you’re making her blush.”

“What’s to be embarrassed?” the first woman said. “She’s a married woman. She doesn’t know what I am talking about? I am embarrassing you, Rucheleh?”

Rachel drew her arms through the warm water. “No, it’s okay,” she said. In fact, after two months of married life, she had yet to see a naked man. The women’s conversation fascinated her. There were things she wished she could ask, but then they would know the truth about her marriage to Schmuel.

“Wait till you have babies. Then nothing will embarrass you.”

“Do you remember Chava Moscowitz?” the second woman asked.

“The one who moved to Chicago?”

“That’s the one. They used to run the hardware store on the corner of Clinton Street?”

“Yeah? So?”

“So every time she got pregnant, she cursed him for the whole nine months.”

“I remember…I remember…” the first woman chuckled. “Right in the store, in front of the customers.”

“And such curses, you shouldn’t know from it; that he should get a boil, right on the end; that it should itch with prickly heat for a hundred years and then maybe he would cut it off and leave her in peace.”

“Oy, I remember…I remember…And such a little one he had too.”

“Vey iss mir, is there nothing you don’t know? You saw it?”

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