He took her hand in his and slid the ring onto her finger. It was the first time, besides that slam of her head against the wall and crawling fingers like worms along her legs, that a man outside her family had ever touched her.

“Congratulations!” Abe shouted across the alley, echoed by Mordy. “May you live a hundred and twenty years together!”

“SHUT UP!” a woman’s voice yelled from across the alley, in English. “What the hell are you trying to do, wake up the whole goddamn neighborhood?”

Leah laughed out loud as Aaron pulled the window closed and then suddenly hurried toward the door of the factory. For a moment she thought he wanted to take her somewhere, but then she stopped laughing when she heard him gently close the door, making the factory a private room. The door clicked closed behind him. Stepping toward the place where she was standing, he reached over to the wall and put out the light.

In the darkness he leaned toward her. His hands, soft from six months of working at a desk, reached for her face and then the top of her head, where he pulled off the kerchief covering her hair and began caressing her hair and the back of her head, the place where David had slammed her against the wall. But Leah wasn’t one for waiting. She grabbed his whole delicious body in her arms and swallowed it whole, sinking down below the sewing machines to the factory floor, where pools of darkness seeped up through the floorboards like the gentle moisture of the earth.

LEAH HATED her synagogue’s women’s section. In the men’s section, where the people who led the services stood and where the Torah scrolls were read, they prayed with devotion, swaying back and forth furiously in movements that made her think of Aaron. Just looking at them made her lips tremble, burning with their secret, which was more than two months old by now. But in the little balcony where the women had to sit, people barely prayed. Instead the women sat around and gossiped, leafing through the prayer book now and then when the gossip got too vindictive. Worst of all were the children who came with their mothers, little children, some of whom hadn’t yet mastered the concept of the outhouse. Leah had been feeling vaguely sick for the past weeks, and sitting in the women’s section surrounded by foul-smelling little children only made her feel sicker. But this was what everyone in her family had taken a pay cut for, resigning themselves to jobs in shops that paid lower wages in exchange for letting workers leave for the sabbath. Economically it was foolish, but her parents had insisted. Many people didn’t insist, choosing sacrilege over starvation, which was why fewer and fewer people came to the synagogue every Saturday morning.