She couldn’t even imagine such a conversation. She had absolutely no experience in talking to boys. The only young men she knew were family members, like her brothers, who although the same age as Duvie, were totally different: devout, studious young men who would never talk to girls, and—of this she was positive—didn’t even know how to wink!

What did a young woman say to a young man? What could you talk about? Torah, of course, the way the family did around the Shabbos table, picking apart all the little inconsistencies in the text of the Torah portion of the week and putting them back together with learned rabbinical commentaries. For example, what did Pharaoh’s magicians mean when they called the plague of lice “the finger of God”? And how do we know that Moses was a preemie? But somehow she didn’t think that such things would interest Duvie Halpern, yeshiva dropout.

Don’t plan anything, she decided. She would just go and sit and wait. Whatever happened between them would be God’s will, of this she was certain. You could never know what plan was in the Ruler of the Universe’s mind. If He wanted something to develop, it would. And if He didn’t, it wouldn’t. So what was the point of planning and scheming?

But somehow this wasn’t as satisfying as imagining all the possibilities in which she could become the catalyst in this process, bringing it to a boil. She lay down restlessly on her bed, letting her tense, young body relax while her mind chased around in circles. What was happening to her? Even when she’d run away from home before the wedding, telling herself she should get married before her father’s wedding ruined her shidduch possibilities; even when she’d sat next to a strange man on the train to Baltimore, these kinds of thoughts had never gone through her mind. The opposite! All she’d felt was revulsion and fear. In fact, the journey had convinced her she never wanted to get into bed with a man.

But with Duvie … her fingers played with the buttons of her blue shirt, digging beneath to find the taut, tender flesh of her abdomen. What would it be like to be touched, to touch someone so different from herself, such a strange, foreign body? A man’s? The very idea brought a riot of feeling to her heart, an ache to her stomach, and a tingling lower down. What was that, that tingling, that ache? What did it mean? And what was she going to do about Duvie Halpern?

9

A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION

“Finally, quiet,” Leah whispered as she joined Yaakov on the sofa.

He looked up at her. Kissing his Talmud, he got up to place it carefully upright next to the other massive volumes weighing down the bookcase that dominated the room.