The Little Bride by Anna Solomon

Author:Anna Solomon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-07-27T07:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

MINNA woke into whiteness: the billowing feather bed beneath her, the light slipping around the curtains, the curtains themselves, her gown. A light breeze stirred. She felt weightless, luxuriant. She felt as though she might call out and someone would come to see what she wanted. A girl like she had been, perhaps.

She rolled over. There was Max, on his back. There was, coming from Max’s nose, the high, whistling snore she’d mistaken for the breeze.

She sat up.

This was the first morning, then. She knew better than to be disappointed. Yet her throat was as tight as if she’d swallowed a brick. Last night’s tears threatened to flow again; they’d left a crust at her nostrils. She wished, at least, that there had been music, that Ruth hadn’t cut the evening off with her clucking. Weddings aren’t meant for harvesttime, not a moment’s sleep to spare! She walked to the window. There was Leo’s masterful windbreak, six trees in a perfect, silent row, and beyond it his fields in their perfect rows, and beyond them the family’s hay, already cut and stacked, golden piles of their labor. Minna’s wish turned suddenly desperate. What wedding was ever as sober? Not a single person had danced the kamensky; there was no pageantry, no drunkenness, no wrestling. No noise and no stars. Not even a chuppah tall enough to stand under. More than cheated, she felt doomed. Even when the guests lined up to kiss her as they departed, the mood was more funereal than celebratory. Even Otto, who with his pretty blond wife looked the very picture of joy, had not looked joyous.

Or maybe Minna was exaggerating? Maybe this was only selfpity. What bride woke up hating the world? There was, as her aunts used to say, something spoiled in her. And now she was spoiled, too, in the corporeal sense.

And yet—she realized—there’d been no blood.

She twisted around, pulled up a fistful of white gown, to be certain.

What would Max make of that?

She had heard of girls pricking their fingers, drawing red smears down the sheets. But if he woke, and caught her, it would seem she had something to hide. He would question her, and what would she say? She couldn’t tell him about the Look, no more than she could tell him what she’d done to make herself itch, her touching and seeking. If there was something wrong inside her, any explanation she gave would make him angry. At Rosenfeld’s, perhaps—at her, certainly. In the basement, she’d felt she had no choice, but now she didn’t see it that way, now it seemed she’d made a terribly wrong choice—many wrong choices—now she could not imagine Max had meant for her to submit to that. He couldn’t have known. He could not know now.

She looked back at him. She’d neglected to cover him when she rose, and now she saw that at some point in the night, he’d put his shirt back on, and buttoned up his trousers, so that he looked like a man who was simply taking a nap, in his own bedroom, in the middle of the day.

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