The rebbetzin Mindy with her brood was equipped to provide a matching personal playmate for children of all ages, but you chose to spend your face time at Chabad with Malkie, Manika informed me, who accepted you even though she was five years your senior, in her bridal season. Malkie possessed an enviable collection of paper dolls, which she stored in labeled shoeboxes on the top shelves of her wardrobe, with a specialization in weddings, Jewish weddings. She seized the opportunity of your eager presence, a younger girl with whom she could play with these dolls for hours in an orgy of delicious uninhibited regression. She altered the dolls’ costumes—raising necklines, lowering hemlines, lengthening sleeves, rendering the transparent opaque, the form-fitting draped—and she also designed fashions of her own private label for the bride and groom and the entire wedding party along with the ritual accessories, emphasizing modesty, what she called zni’us. As you sat with Malkie on her girlhood bed, Manika reported, dressing and undressing the dolls, she instructed you as your elder and mentor on the importance of zni’us. Bottom line: no part of the body may be uncovered in the presence of men and boys other than your two essential woman-of-valor hands below the wrist to plunge into the suds and crud. Your absorption of these strictures was a new fact on the ground I was beginning to glom on to after you began your playdates at Chabad, when the Cathedral office called to inform me that you were refusing to put on shorts for physical education class. I do apologize, Maya, but I thought at first it had something to do with body image issues related to your thighs.

Manika went on to report how the two of you would sit there on that bed enacting with the paper dolls the series of events leading up to a wedding as Malkie ticked them off, from the first matchmaker-arranged meeting of the couple possibly destined for one another in a public space such as a hotel lobby, to the engagement, the formal introduction of the parents in order to hammer out financial and other essential arrangements, and the betrothal party just a few weeks later. “For verification purposes,” Manika intoned, this was as far as Malkie herself had personally experienced. Nevertheless, Malkie strode boldly into the future using the paper dolls in the outfits she had created for them as visual aids to walk you through frame after frame of the fantasy wedding itself, an event every young Jewish maiden could look forward to as the high point of her life, one Malkie knew intimately from having danced at so many, including even a hazy description of the bride’s prenuptial immersion in the ritual bath for which the two of you stripped a paper doll down to her bra and panties, as far as you could decently go, dunking her until she was limp and useless in a cyst of stagnant rainwater speckled with dead flies that had collected on the windowsill. But beyond the wedding itself Malkie never went, she just didn’t go there, that was where the story always ended, in the mist of happily ever after. She had been put on hold while her brother Shmuly checked with his supervisor, Manika said, in search of perfect wife material.