Short Story: The Ugly Sister
Women of the OT: Story 4, Leah
Hello gentle friends. I’m still strapped to the medieval torture rack known as agent querying. Nine months, two revisions, countless form rejections and a few confidence-building rejections (what?), six manuscripts still on agent desks, and no better at being patient. This week an agent who passed on my manuscript called it funny and insightful, so I’m getting that tattooed on my thigh as I type.
Now to the story. The Ugly One is about a pair of famous sisters, revered by three world religions for the men they were married to and the children they bore. And for the way they…no wait, that’s all. That’s what they were. Vessels of holy seed.
Okay, sure, 1500 BCE and all, but this story is taught in modern churches as if it’s all fine. So-and-so begat so-and-so, and baddaboom baddabing, Jesus. The sisters were great-x50ish-grandma/aunt to the Messiah. So what if things were a little messy? They played the role they were destined to play.
So when I was writing my novel I got to thinking, what was it like to be the ugly sister?
The Ugly One
Around 1500 BCE.
She didn’t know about the betrayal beforehand. Her father wasn’t in the habit of running his schemes by her, was he. The raw calculations of a man bending fortune to his will, squeezing trickles of wealth from a wooly empire, those were locked inside his great smiling head. On the roster of meddlers who didn’t enjoy his confidence were uncles, friends, traders, guards, and herdsmen. And then maybe sheep and daughters. He trusted no one, in that order.
It was on the night of Leah’s little sister’s wedding that her father unveiled his plan by way of telling the girls, with a clever twinkle, to put on each other’s dresses. Who knows how long he’d been plotting the sister swap, maybe since the day the groom wandered into their village seven years earlier.
The swap was a business move and nothing more. Laban carried on his shoulders the survival of the whole clan, the perpetuity of the line, and there was no asset too precious to wager. Not even his lovely Rachel.
Rachel was the pretty daughter, wasn’t she. It was like any obvious and indisputable curio that makes people shrug: fire is hot, sheep eat everything, Rachel is a bodacious, brown-eyed wonder.
Rachel happened to be leading her herd to the well at the very moment a young man named Jacob arrived in their village. He was baked, calloused, too skinny, and beaded with desert sand. At the age of twenty-two he was already a fugitive due to his own poor choices. He’d stolen the birthright of his twin brother, Esau, a red, muscle-faced genius who’d recently turned somewhat homicidal.
Just like Leah’s little sister, Jacob was a second child, if by only a few minutes, and by all rights both of them should’ve gotten the leftovers: he the piddly inheritance, and she the second-string husband. But they were both born radiant and pleasing in a way that made everyone forget the rules.
It wasn’t by accident that Jacob stumbled into town. His mother had packed him off by the light of a swollen moon with only a pouch of flat breads and instructions to run north, all the way to Paddan Aram, her brother’s village. So Jacob had come Leah’s town looking for his uncle Laban, who was also Leah’s father.
It was an accident, however, that Jacob saw Leah’s little sister before he even found Laban’s camp. The thirst that drove him to the town well that morning was instantly displaced by a different, soul-ravaging thirst when he saw the Bedouin jewel coming toward him.
Jacob’s arrival turned out to be a boon for Laban. Laban took the dusty fugitive in and gave him a job. He was thrilled to have a youthful second, loyal by blood, running his herds. Of course, it wasn’t lost on Laban that a desperate employee is a cheap one. The fact that Jacob was a potential husband for Laban’s firstborn daughter was just honey on the date cake.
But Jacob knew what he wanted, and it wasn’t Leah. The two men haggled their way to a pact—which is to say Laban proposed an absurd price and his nephew, instead of countering, grinned like a halfwit. They agreed that Jacob would labor a week of years for Rachel instead of Leah.
For the expectant groom, those seven years lasted only minutes. His daily wages were a glance, a giggle, a pout. For Leah, the years lasted years. No other mysterious young relatives fell divinely off a caravan, and the other clans in Paddan Aram weren’t in a hurry to make Laban a regular feature at their holiday dinners. Especially not for the price of a bony, cross-eyed daughter.
It was quite a twist then, when Laban called the girls aside at the end of Rachel’s big night—her bathed and bangled and expectant, and Leah less bathed and less enthusiastic—to set his business plan in motion.
Laban’s herds had never been so fat and lusty as they were under his nephew’s care. Every spring there were shaggy newlings tumbling out of his ewes like grain out of a sack, and Laban wanted to keep Jacob right where he was, which is to say, the profit margin right where it was. He knew Jacob was so gravely lovesick he’d work another seven years for Rachel without question.
So it was that Leah found herself unexpectedly in the bridal tent that night, waiting naked in a nest of skins for a drunken husband that wasn’t really hers. But should have been.
She knew, more or less, what their bodies were meant to do. She’d seen enough ovine coupling to guess at the mechanics. But what she didn’t expect was the gale, the plundering, the famished kisses on her neck and palms and breasts. She hadn’t expected to feel impaled by the sound of her sister’s name whispered in her ear, and then again by the distaste on Jacob’s face when he rolled toward her in the gray dawn.
She didn’t choose to ruin his wedding night, did she. She hadn’t chosen much of anything in her life. But Jacob wouldn’t look at her. And he wouldn’t touch her for the second week of years he labored to earn his true bride.
Somehow those few stolen hours of affection opened a craving in Leah that she couldn’t seal off. She tried. The craving only yawned larger, large enough to swallow her whole. So she set out to rouse Jacob with all her means. She could grow his love a little at a time, maybe.
As the new couple drifted into a side-by-side life, she wooed him with kindness and embroidered tunics and piquant stew and wit—she did make him laugh—but none of it could penetrate his vaulted loins. Not even the planned accident of bathing just as he pulled the tent flap aside at the end of a hot day could tempt her new husband.
Everyone knows that there are two things that make a girl worthwhile. The first is beauty, which is a magic she never possessed. The second is the bearing of sons. And she did that, didn’t she.
After an animated, shoulder-slapping exhortation from Leah’s father, Jacob came to visit her tent. It took the length of two sentences, punctuated with a gasp, for him to perform his task. And that’s how the nights went until her moon blood stopped.
When she handed him their firstborn, with a pair of brown pebbles and the rod of kings between his folded legs, Jacob patted the top of her head.
Leah went on to give him three more sons from a scattering of dutiful drop-ins while her sister gave him none, for all of the braying passion that shook and excited nearby tents until every blessed small hour of the morning.
Five years after their wedding, Rachel finally did conceive, and then the race between sisters was off. But she would never catch Leah. Leah kept winning. Five sons, six sons.
The envy ate at Rachel and turned to madness. Rachel scraped furrows into her temples with curling fingernails and pleaded for Jacob to give her more children.
“What do you want from me?” He shouted.
Eleven years have passed and Leah clings violently to the hope that one more son will wake him. That he will see how worthy she is of his love. She’s six times the woman her sister is. She should be winning. Her. Seven sons, eight.
She groans, she screams, she pants, she toils. Then she holds another wet son out to Jacob. And he pats her on the head.
Genesis 29:32
All Stories from Women of the OT
Disturbing, forgotten, or misused stories of women in the Bible
Coming soon: The Prostitute for a Day, The Spy, The Assassin