But her thoughts were a mess. “I don’t know!” she’d wailed. “Do I have to object if my father’s making the process easier for me? I mean, he’s only trying to help. And, like, I’m not committing to the job. I’m only going for an interview. There’s nothing wrong with that, right?”

Sruly found everything wrong with that, but he told her to do as she saw fit, and given that nothing fit in this puzzle, that was everything but encouraging.

Now, her finger wavered over the doorbell keypad. She forced all thoughts out of her mind — Mrs. Eisen and the closing assembly, her teaching contract, her father, Sruly. She needed to channel her focus on the interview ahead, and oh my, surely someone was watching her every move on camera, this was so embarrassing.

She straightened up to her full height, took a deep breath, and punched in the extension for Union Funding.

There was no reason to be nervous, right?

The girl was nervous.

That was the first and most obvious observation that struck Raizy as she stood up to direct the interviewee to Mrs. Heimfeld’s office. Had she been this nervous when she’d come for her interview? Excited, definitely, and maybe a bit apprehensive, but mainly, she remembered feeling a certain thrill, a pride at entering the professional world. And then, when Mrs. Heimfeld had hired her on the spot, her parents’ pride had been… the nicest feeling ever.

A second thing that struck her about this girl; she would never have guessed that this was the daughter of the man who’d grilled her about the job. Forgive me for the accusation, she almost wished to tell the quaking young lady.

Raizy also noted how impeccably the girl was dressed, how perfectly her sheitel was set and her makeup applied, compared to her own comfortably casual sweatshirt. Not that she cared. She wasn’t here for an interview, and to be honest, she liked looking comfortably casual at work. Formal attire was, well, stuffy.

“Mrs. Heimfeld will be with you shortly,” she told the girl after a light tap on her boss’s door. Then she added thoughtfully, “I’m sure you’ll be great.”

The girl could barely nod in response. Raizy offered one last reassuring smile before returning to her desk.

The interview lasted about 20 minutes. When Mrs. Heimfeld’s door opened, Raizy curiously observed her boss escort the girl out and approach the cubicles where the staff worked. She stopped at the first cubicle, where the receptionist, Rochel Epstein, sat.

“Rochel, this is Yehudis Mann. If everything works out, she’ll hopefully be joining our staff soon.”

Rochel greeted her politely, and then Mrs. Heimfeld moved on to Shulamis Hirsch, Chaya Sima Froiman, Penina Gold, and at last, to Raizy.

“And this is Raizy Jacob, our very talented loan officer. Raizy’s been with our company for many years, and she deals with the most complicated files. If there’s anything you need to know about mortgages, Raizy knows that and more, so I’m sure she’ll do a great job training you in.”

Okay, flattery was bad enough one-on-one. In the presence of a third party it was downright mortifying.

Desperately, she tried escaping the gazes of both her boss and this Yehudis Mann, but as her eyes briefly swept over the hire-hopeful, Raizy was struck by one last observation:

They’d barely met, but this girl already hated her.

“SO?”

Hurrying back to school, phone pressed to her ear, Yehudis tried reading Sruly’s voice. She knew how to read her friends’ voices, knew when they were being serious, when they were being sarcastic, or when they were telling her what they knew she wanted to hear rather than what they really wanted to say. She chose to read the “so” as just that — interest — and briefly recounted the conversation she’d had with Mrs. Heimfeld, the big boss. “Basically, it sounded like she was ready to hire me. She introduced me to the staff.”

“That’s nice. And?”

She could read the “and” without any effort. He was asking, “And how do you feel about that? Are you going to accept the offer?”

“And I think it only makes sense to go ahead,” Yehudis supplied. “It’s a nice, heimish place, she’s offering a low starting rate, with the agreement to go up after two months. There’s a lot of opportunity, like my father said, because you earn a commission on every loan you close. I mean, I don’t know the first thing about mortgages, but I’ll get training, and I guess, I mean, hopefully it’ll work out….”

If she couldn’t read Sruly’s voice, she definitely could read her own, and she knew exactly how she sounded. I’m terrified out of my wits, I wish I could go back to kindergarten and make art projects all day, and please, can someone tell me if this is normal, do all shanah rishonah wives go through all this upheaval?

Yehudis arrived in front of the school building. “I’m going in to tutor now,” she told Sruly. “I guess we’ll talk later.”

“Yes, okay. I just wanted to ask you… Brunner’s not coming to night seder tonight, his sister-in-law is getting married. I was thinking — did you make supper already?”

“No, not yet.”

“’Kay, great. So how about we buy takeout and then go somewhere? The boardwalk, maybe, so we rank among all those honest-to-goodness shanah rishonah couples?”

Yehudis giggled. “Definitely. We totally should. And I’ll make sure to fuss over my sheitel that’s getting all ruined in the wind because I can’t chas v’shalom go in a tichel.”

“Exactly,” he said, laughing. “Great, so the food’s on me tonight, ahem.” Then his voice — which she was going to learn to read fluently one day — turned soft. “I really want to talk to you.”

The lightness of the moment vanished. His words sounded ominous. Was he going to try to dissuade her from taking the job? Didn’t he realize how hard this was for her, and that she needed all his encouragement and none of this doubt? Gosh, he was making this whole change so much harder than it already was!

But to her surprise, after they’d eaten their sesame chicken and egg rolls and parked their car in the grassy enclave in front of the boardwalk, Sruly did not mention her job at all.

“What do you think, Yehudis? Should we make bein hazmanim plans?”

“Bein hazmanim! Oh, I didn’t think about that.”

“It’s in a few weeks. If we want to travel anywhere, we need to start doing our research and making reservations.”

“Yes, of course. I just wasn’t up to there in my mind yet. Do you have any ideas? My brother Dovid went to Rhode Island with Baila the first year they were married. He said it was really nice.”

She remembered how her father had spent hours on finding the couple the perfect lodging and writing up a detailed itinerary, factoring in minyan schedules. Maybe they could simply use the same itinerary, it would make the planning so easy.

“Uh, I’m sure,” Sruly said. “But really, I was thinking of maybe doing something a little more major. You never know where we’ll be up to next year. This might be our only chance to travel for a long time.”

“Sruly!”

“What? What did I say wrong?”

“Nothing, it’s just like, hello, you’re thinking about us being parents soon, and it’s just… so much at once.” She exhaled a whole bunch of air and finished the breath with a nervous laugh.

“Sure is,” he mused. “And from what I’m told, life gets really busy really quickly.”

They were walking at a leisurely pace, inhaling the smell of the sea. It was a clear night, the sky speckled with stars, and at that moment, Yehudis really did feel like that clichéd shanah rishonah couple.

“So let’s hear your grand plans,” she said.

“No plans yet. I’m only asking you. What do you think of Eretz Yisrael? I know you didn’t go for seminary, but I spent three years in yeshivah in Yerushalayim, and well… I miss it.”

No, she hadn’t gone to seminary in Eretz Yisrael, and not because she hadn’t wished to. It had simply been out of the question. “Local seminaries are just as good,” her father insisted, “and sending a girl off to Eretz Yisrael is not worth the incredible risks involved.”

Unlike Rikki, who was spending her seminary year in mourning, Yehudis had tried to make the best of it. It hadn’t been terrible. She’d made some new friends, and it was nice not to have to worry about laundry and Shabbos plans all the time.

A wind swept over them, and Yehudis’s hands automatically flew up to her sheitel. And suddenly, the reality of what Sruly was saying hit her. To travel overseas, on their own, to a country she’d never been to in her life. Booking tickets, finding an apartment, shopping and packing and making plans. Taking buses that terrorists were known to blow up. And wait, I don’t even own a passport.

And what about… Union Funding.

She’d told Mrs. Heimfeld that she was finishing all her school jobs in a week, and after that, she was available to start working. Now what? How could she take a two- or three-week vacation one month into her new job?

Her thoughts continued racing, from mortgages to the Kosel to closing assembly to pita and falafel to that very talented loan officer — what was her name again? Right, Raizy Jacob. Why did that face give her the creeps? — to one sharp, sobering thought:

Tatty will never let.

Sruly was waiting for her reaction. He was waiting for her to jump for joy, to squeal with delight, to tell him all about how she couldn’t wait for this incredibly exciting honeymoon.

But she couldn’t bring herself to even pretend. “We should probably talk to my father,” was all she managed to say, in a hoarse voice. “He does mileage points for people, he always gets the best airfare deals.”

She wanted to say more. That if everything worked out, it would be such an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience. That she really wanted to go, they should go, absolutely.

She also wanted to ask him about this new job. What he thought — of the job in general, and about how to work things out so that she could go on vacation so soon. Maybe she should find out if she could push off starting to work until September, maybe only go in for training before their trip?

“Can I tell you something, Yehudis?”

“What?”

Sruly slowed his step, and Yehudis hesitantly looked at his face.

“I don’t want your father taking care of our tickets for us,” he said. “If we end up paying a little more, so be it.”

He stopped walking completely and narrowed his eyes at Yehudis. “I refuse to get your father involved in our plans. This will be our first trip as a couple. And we need to do this on our own.”

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 928)