Lying to her husband gets Brurya out of the house. Asking him for a get, a divorce, gets her beaten. Three months into her marriage and twenty-year-old Brurya is nothing more than a glorified maid who opens her legs to him for two weeks a month. Everything about sex is abhorrent, the way he holds her, the way he forces himself on her—even his scent is repulsive. Akiva is thirty-nine with a graying black chest-length beard that Brurya has never seen without crumbs. He’s always disheveled, always awkward, always wearing his wrinkled black suit and white shirt with the fringes of his tzitzis hanging limply onto his pants. His wire-framed glasses are always foggy with fingerprints and she’s sure that if she didn’t wash his clothing, he wouldn’t either.
After the first nightmarish month of her marriage, she learned the truth. Familial pressure and two dates in the Times Square Marriott Marquis lounge with a man who was old enough to be her father, landed Brurya in the midst of a tumultuous and short-lived month and a half of choosing dishes, linens and furniture for a future she didn’t want. Had she realized that she was coerced into the arrangement so that her eighteen-year old sister could get married, she might have fought back harder, but her protests went unheard in the joyous sea of mazel tovs. At their wedding, Akiva’s eighty-year-old father and Brurya’s father, thirty-five years his junior, made l’chaims over Slivovitz and then danced arm-in-arm together with the yeshiva students who came to watch Akiva remove his bride-to-be’s opaque veil. Brurya cried. Within the hour, she was wed to Akiva, who leered at her hungrily in the bridal room. She had become a wife, a possession.
Brurya clutches the straps of a black tote bag, while Akiva pulls over to the side of the street and flips the locks. She leaps out of the back seat and scurries...
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