“What’s there to know?” my father answered. “She’s a girl. She’s eighteen. Erlich and tzniyusdig. I know her father. A good shidduch”

The first I heard about a pair of pants and a skirt being the only criteria for a match was the summer before I turned eighteen.

“Nu?” my father said quietly on my seventeenth birthday. “It’s time to rebuild, and to bring us nachas.”

My life was a pile of bricks I needed to build into something, the quicker the better.

If he could, my father would’ve made me a bar mitzvah when I was eight, just to get things moving. Another brick added to the edifice of Yiddishkeit slowly blossoming in Williamsburg. He would’ve plopped a yarmulke on my head before I let out my first wail and put me straight into yeshivah gedolah at my bar mitzvah.

I lucked out with the clear guidelines for upsheren, cheder, bar mitzvah, and yeshivah.

My luck ran out when I turned eighteen.

Shemoneh esreh l’chuppah, my father wrote in each of his letters to me. Our yeshivah went to camp in the summer. There was only one phone in the main office. Even after painstakingly sticking my fingers into the correct holes and being connected to the operator, I needed a miracle for the cord not to fly out of the jack.

My father reminded me about my birthday in every letter, broadly hinting, and then writing straight out that the day of camp homecoming would coincide with my meeting a girl. He also wrote about my responsibility to rebuild, to perform, to outshine. Not in those words exactly, but clear enough for me to be glad that I was a two-hour drive away from his belt and my mother’s pots.

I wondered if he’d let me shower and change before the meeting, or if the girl would meet us at the bus stop and help me with my suitcases.

My mother’s letters were all about questions. Is there enough food? Are you sleeping enough? Are you staying safe?

I was too well-bred to throw the letters away, but I wanted to.

As we headed to the frog-infested lake for our daily swim, I kvetched to Cheskel, my bunkmate, about my imminent engagement. He laughed and said, “Nu, nu, my father always says, ‘Vus darf men mehr vee ah shessel uhn ah puhr hoizen? What do you need more than a skirt and a pair of pants for a successful marriage?’”