Someone jiggled the door handle. Noa stood and turned on the tap. “One minute,” she called, quickly drying her hands on the soft terry cloth towel and opening the door. It was the girl in the photos, standing with her bridal dress gathered around her torso. She was older, but still young, with a face that was somehow monkeylike and yet not unpretty. She didn’t look much older than twenty-two or -three.

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “Who are you?”

“I’m with the caterer,” Noa lied.

The bride hesitated a moment, but as everyone in the house was under her command, she gave it no further thought and turned around, lifting the wavy tendrils curled that morning by an iron.

“Can you zip this?”

Noa wiped her hands again on her shorts and took up the tiny zipper. The fabric strained at the seams as she tried to zip it up. She thought it might rip, but finally the zipper pull passed the widest point of the bride’s broad back and slid smoothly to the top.

“I was a swimmer,” she explained, turning to face Noa. To prove the point, her lashes were wet, as if the swimmer-bride had just surfaced from underwater. Or maybe it had been crying Noa had heard through the wall after all.

“Come here, I need help with something else.”

Noa didn’t liked being ordered around, but she couldn’t resist her curiosity. She followed the bride into the bedroom. It was decorated with her first- and second-prize ribbons, for not only swim competitions but equestrian ones as well. Pictures of horses were framed on the wall like beloved relatives. Above the desk, a collection of Hello Kitty erasers and pencil sharpeners were displayed on the glass shelves. Noa had once had some like that; she’d forgotten all about them, and seeing them brought back the strong sensation of her childhood. Impulsively, just as she had sometimes done as a child, she stuck out her hand and picked up an eraser, and just before the bride turned back to her, she slipped it into her pocket.

“I can’t walk in these,” the bride said, gesturing to her high-heeled silver shoes.

It was true that she looked ungainly, stomping down hard on her toes. Noa wondered where her bridesmaids had gone, or whoever was supposed to be guiding her on the last, risky stretch of a path that might still be abandoned, where doubt and bewilderment lay in wait to ambush her. In Jewish weddings, the kalla, the bride, was meant to be treated like a queen, tended to like royalty, an approach that, however ancient, was filled with wisdom of human psychology, of the frailty of the heart. The frailty of the heart, and the shame of the body, because the Orthodox brides had never been with a man, nor their grooms with a woman, a circumstance they were obligated to reverse directly after the ceremonies. And so perhaps the royal treatment was designed to distract from any lurking terror, too.