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of intellect and aesthetics. She had learned it all in Ohel Sara. She was of Shem, he of Ham.
    It mattered.
    Whose child? She felt the room go dark and seemed to lose consciousness a moment.
    “Tamar… ?” Jenny’s voice, far away, sputtered through the phone.
    Tamar opened her eyes and cursed the unforgiving clarity of morning light. The world was bathed in that strange ugliness, like an amateurish photograph of an aging woman taken in the harsh sunlight… a strange, hostile clarity. She might have to do things, terrible things involving blood and death, things she did not want her best friend to know about or talk her out of. It was one thing to go to the synagogue, to bake lovely cakes for the Sabbath—but quite another when religion asked you to do something that you believed would damage you forever. She did not want Jenny’s preaching. She did not want a rabbi’s opinion. She did not want her husband’s straight and narrow goodness and adherence. This was her life, her body. She wanted to do her own will, not G-d’s.
    She was shocked at her bitter determination. Disappointed and thrilled beyond words. Her love of G-d, of the Torah, was it so shallow, then? Such a thin veneer? And was she really able to cast off this way, alone and determined, with no lifeboat? Was she really more like Hadassah than Jenny? A feeling of unpleasant excitement flashed through her.
    “Tamar?”
    “I will… I think… my own doctor would be better. I’d just feel more comfortable. You’ll be the first to know, though.” Her hands caressed her bloated stomach. It might still just be water. It might still be a delayed period… Please, G-d! Not this month, please don’t answer my prayers this way… not this way…
    She put on her new wig and clean underwear and called a taxi, unable to bear the thought of being on public transportation where strangers might rub up against her or look into her eyes. Besides,she wanted to minimize the time when she would be far from a bathroom if she needed to throw up.
    The waiting room was painted in gentle nursery pastels that calmed her brittle nerves like a lullaby. How she had longed to be in an obstetrician’s waiting room feeling nauseated! And now…
    “Mrs Kahanov?”
    She did not look up until the voice repeated the name impatiently. Only then did she remember it was the name she’d made up and given the receptionist over the phone.
    She lay down on the examining table, closing her eyes against the burning light, her hands gripping the sheet as the cold metal speculum slid inside her. Her feet strained against the stirrups. The horror of opening yourself so wide, of revealing the hidden, the private… His gloved fingers probed her gently, professionally. She was so grateful to hear those blessed words: “You can get dressed now.”
    She sat across from him, her legs crossed, her skirt lowered.
    “How old are you, Mrs…”
    “Kahanov,” she lied, but not easily. She was not used to lying. Not yet, she told herself grimly, thinking of a future where—depending on what he was about to say—lie might be piled upon lie, a growing mound without end. She had gotten his name from the phone book. A gynecologist at a big, anonymous hospital clinic. “I’m twenty-one.”
    “And have you been using any kind of birth control?”
    “No. It’s against our beliefs… That is, we wanted children.”
    “Wanted?” he questioned
    “Want,” she stammered in confusion.
    “Well, then let me congratulate you!”
    It’s true, true! The nightmare leaping into the light, staying there! Everything suddenly went black.
    She awoke, lying on the examining table covered with a blanket.
    The doctor smiled down at her. “You aren’t the first woman to take it this way.”
    “It?”
    “A pregnancy.”
    The nightmare.
    “Doctor, I can’t be pregnant. I mustn’t be…”
    “Musn’t? Can’t?” He raised a gray eyebrow quizzically. “Young married religious girls are always thrilled about