Free 1997 - The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

opened Bilhah’s womb, somehow my own passion finally matched Jacob’s and I understood my sisters’ willingness to lie with him. And then I was newly jealous for all the years that I had missed of the wild sweetness between lovers.”
    Rachel and Jacob spent many nights together exploring the new heat between them, and Rachel hoped again. Some midwives said that pleasure overheated the seed and killed it. But others claimed that babies only come when women smile. This was the tale she told Jacob to inspire his caresses.
    During the last months of Bilhah’s pregnancy, Zilpah went to Jacob’s bed for the first time. She did not offer herself as Bilhah had, though she was at least five years older, as old as Leah, who had borne five live sons by that time.
    Zilpah knew it would happen someday, and she was resigned to it. But unlike Bilhah, Zilpah would never ask. Leah would have to command it. Finally, she did.
    “One night, when I was walking in the light of a full moon, she appeared before me,” Zilpah said. “At first, I thought I was dreaming. My sister slept as heavily as Laban and never rose at night. Even her own babies had trouble rousing her. But there she was, in the stillness. We walked in the bright white light of the lady moon, hand in hand, for a long time. And again I wondered if this was really my sister or a ghost, because the woman beside me was silent, whereas Leah always had something to say.
    “Finally, she spoke with careful words about the moon. She told me how much she loved the white light, and how she spoke to the moon and called to her by name every month. Leah said the moon was the only face of the goddess that seemed open to her because of the way the moon called forth the filling and emptying of her body.
    “My sister was wise,” said Zilpah. “She stopped and faced me and took both my hands in hers and asked, ‘Are you ready to swallow the moon at last?’
    “What could I say? It was my time.”
    Indeed, it was possible that she had waited too long, and Zilpah half hoped she was too old, at five and twenty, to bear. Age alone was no good augury. Rachel had been barren from her youth, despite all her efforts. And Leah, fertile as a watered plain, showed no sign of giving off. The only way to discover what the mother of life had in store for Zilpah was for her to go in to Jacob and become the least of his wives.
    The next morning, Leah spoke to Jacob. Bilhah offered to put henna on Zilpah’s hands, but she set her mouth and refused. That night she walked slowly to Jacob’s tent, where he lay with her and knew her. Zilpah took no pleasure from Jacob’s touch. “I did what was required of me,” she said, with such a tone that no one dared ask her to say more.
    She never complained of Jacob’s attentions. He did his best to calm her fears, just as he had with his other wives. He called for her many times, trying to win her. He asked her to sing songs of the goddesses and brushed her hair. But nothing he did moved Zilpah. “I never understood my sisters’ eagerness to lie with Jacob,” she said, with a weary wave of her long hand. “It was a duty, like grinding grain—something that wears away at the body but is necessary so that life can go on.
    “Mind you, I was not disappointed,” she said. “It was nothing I expected to enjoy.”
    Zilpah conceived during Bilhah’s pregnancy. And soon after Bil-hah’s Dan was born, it truly did appear as though Zilpah had swallowed the moon. On her slender frame, the belly looked huge and perfectly round. Her sisters teased her, but Zilpah only smiled. She was glad to be free from Jacob’s attentions, for men did not lie with pregnant women. She gloried in her new body, and dreamed wonderful dreams of power and flight.
    She dreamed of giving birth to a daughter, not a human child but a changeling of some kind, a spirit woman. Full-grown, full-breasted. She wore nothing but a girdle of string, in front and in back. She strode the earth in