I’m only nineteen, two months pregnant and about to commit what is considered in Talmud law, the most unforgivable of all sins. I am about to marry a blonde haired, Irish Catholic, whose mother was raised in a convent. Yes, a genuine convent—with black-cloaked nuns, white wooden crosses swinging around their collars as they walk arm in arm through overgrown gardens, rosary beads entwined like vines through their fingers. And me, an orthodox girl from Brooklyn, raised in a home with two sets of dishes, a grandfather who dovans every Friday and a family who almost faints from fasting on Yom Kippur.
My parents refuse to attend since the ceremony is held at a Roman Catholic church. I have to get special permission from the head archbishop in New York, have all my future children baptized, and stand a precise amount of metric feet from the altar.
Well, it is the ‘60’s—too early for Roe vs. Wade. I think I am in love. My mother never stops screaming about how I will give her a heart attack one day for sure. We live in a four room housing project apartment. She worries about what the neighbors will think. Her floors (which she cleans on her hands and knees twice a week) always shines from Johnson’s wax, so I sort of figure a baby just wouldn’t fit into this picture.
My future husband, whose real name is Cornelius and, (understandably) changes it to Bud, says his mother would never consider us married unless the pope personally gives us his blessing and Jesus forgives us all our mortal sins (being mortal counted as the number 1) so I shrug and do what seems the only possible thing. I sign all the necessary papers and sadly give my firstborn to the Church.
And that’s how I came to be at Holy Family Church in Canarsie, Brooklyn that October Sunday, 1963. My best friend Judi has to get special permission to stand at my side and my husband’s eldest brother, Joey, is elected to give me away.
My very orthodox friend, Frieda, is crying so hard she almost swallows her retainer and no one from my family is there so, all in all, it seems a pretty somber time. For a moment, a very long moment, I want to run home, put my head under the covers, even with my little sister who is annoying as hell in the next bed, and pretend it is all a nightmare and I will wake up at any moment, , but then I let my hand move slowly over the small mound under my dress and know there is no waking up.
The small reception afterwards is being held in the large living room of my new sister-in-law’s Queens Apartment. I feel like some sort of orphan, not having any family there and all. Most of the men get drunk, my mother-in-law wears black, the cake is big enough to feed 100 people, (and we only have twenty) the neighbors complain we are making too much noise and I get blisters from the shoes that are too small.
Later, when I open my suitcase to change, I find I have taken Judi’s grandmother’s bag by mistake since I got dressed in her house because of all the screaming and carrying on in mine. The final words my mother said to me still resonates in my head: “If you leave the whole family will sit Shiva for you!”
Inside the suitcase is a plastic bag of spongy pink rollers, three flowered housedresses, shabby pink slippers and a corset large enough for two of me. I borrow two blouses and jeans from my sister-in-law and that late afternoon we head upstate in my new husband yellow and black Chevy Belair.
It is almost 80 degrees, a rare Indian summer day. The windows are open when a yellow jacket flies in, lands on my arm. Its sting makes me almost jump out the window. He wants to know why I’m screaming and when I tell him he’s not terribly impressed. “We’ll stop at a pharmacy and get something for it, Bud says.” I whimper, “Okay.” and keep rubbing the spot that has now become a raised red welt. When we stop at the only pharmacy in town, the almost eighty year old pharmacist who spits when he speaks (I caught some of it) assures us the stinger is out and gives me some sticky brown salve to apply, which I do at least every half hour, though I think the instructions were 3 to 4 times a day.
I also keep thinking about my mother, how she is probably sitting Shiva for me right now and how I hope she wouldn’t suffer that heart attack she keeps promising to have and also about the baby who is slowly growing, undisturbed, inside me even with all this chaos going on around us.
Bud gets annoyed that night because I won’t let him sleep, constantly reminding him I might go into anaphylactic shock from being allergic to the sting. Finally, he falls asleep while I stay awake, trying to swallow little sips of water while waiting for my throat to close.
Well, we finally get back to our rented basement apartment in Bellerose, Queens, where we have no furniture, except for an ironing board that functions as a kitchen table and a bedroom set we charged with our first credit card from J.C. Penney. Never having cooked before, I attempt a steak by baking it instead of broiling and I think we actually left tooth marks in the pieces we spit out. We don’t know we have roaches and mice yet until one morning when we find the cake I made from a Betty Crocker mix the night before, half eaten, and neither of us consumed it.
The Italian landlady upstairs doesn’t speak English so we have a hell of a time trying to explain to her about the mice and the roaches. She finally gets the point when we put the traps out on the garbage pails with little gray bodies squished between them.
And, just to set the record straight, my mother sort of forgives me. One Sunday she and my father come to make a peace offering with a black and white TV. Bud spends the whole time trying not to speak to them and I am so nervous I keep spilling the tea water and saying all sorts of stupid things to break the ice. The only thing that breaks is one of the coffee cups we got with those supermarket green stamps.
Then my mother sees a roach that is making a mad rush for a crumb that has fallen from the ironing board and with a small gasp nudges my father who is stuffing a mouthful of pound cake into his mouth. She stands up, says it’s time to leave, wishes us well and gives me that look that clearly says, “‘See what happens when you don’t listen to your mother!”
As the door slams behind them, I can hear the snap of a mouse trap in the bedroom and at the same time a small but definite kick in my stomach.
We argue for a while about how unsocial he was to my parents, his case being that, after all, they rejected us, and mine being that, after all, they are my parents, and if it were the other way around his mother wouldn’t let a rabbi come within ten feet of her. Exhausted, with no one really winning, we fall asleep and that night I have a dream:
I’m in the hospital, a rabbi and a priest are standing over me. They are both waiting for the baby to be born. As soon as my son is placed in my arms, they begin arguing as to whose baby it is. Then they get in a fist fight. The rabbi grabs the priest by the throat and begins choking him with his silver cross. The priest takes the rabbi’s long beard and tries to stuff it down his throat. The nurses try to break it up and one gets punched in the face, the other in the nose which start to bleed all over her white shirt.. Another one wheels the baby and me into a room where my husband is waiting with a fishing pole in his hand and a bucket of mice and his mother who is twirling rosary beads and mumbling. My mother is there too and hits my mother-in-law over the head with a whitefish while my father tries to restrain her. I start to cry and before I know it, the nurse is shoving an IV into my arm. The last thing I hear is cooing, then the baby says mama and I think how precocious before I drift off.
I don’t even want to analyze it when I awake. It has left me in a shaken state, my legs trembling. Bud husband remains snoring away. Quietly, I step over one of the mousetraps which, fortunately, is empty and go into the kitchen where the roaches, sensing me, run off under the stove.
You lucky bastards, I think, no one can tell you guys apart! At that point, I began to seriously wonder about my sanity. Then I notice an envelope on the table. It’s addressed to me in my mother’s handwriting, which by the way, no handwriting analyst could ever decipher and a twenty dollar bill that falls out when I open it. I begin to read: ‘Now remember, a mother knows best. And you must always be sure and buy kosher meat. No ‘trayf’ in the house.’
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry so I take the emergency Valium I saved for an occasion such as this. I plan to buy some burger meat for supper that night but wonder where I can find kosher meat that wouldn’t require a trip back to Brooklyn, so I shrug and remember an Italian butcher down the road and think what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.
Gloria g. Murray’s work has appeared in The Paterson Review, Poet Lore, Third Wednesday, Flapperhouse, Florida Poetry Review, and others. She is the recipient of the 2026 1st prize poetry award from Poetica magazine for her poem, The Taste of Challeh, and A 1st place national poetry award for the Joe Gouveia Outermost contest, 2026.