Jessica Hecht

Thank you.

The Shabbos Goy.

We were in Paris all of three weeks, my baby girl and me, when we saw our first bride.

Without my cat-eye glasses from afar, she appeared even farther away, the world's teeniest bride, like a miniature pony.

Upon approach, however, it quickly became clear that she was merely a child, probably only around four or five years old, a wafting meringue with legs.

The family that followed were obviously Orthodox Jews.

The father's black suit, a slim, elegant contrast to her pearly float, his wide-brimmed fedora girded by a satin band.

But even still, I thought, is she taking communion?

Because the little girls in my neighborhood back in Brooklyn often dressed this way in tears when receiving their initial sacrament.

Only when a pudgy older sister followed in an identical halo of tulle and the helium of her own high spirits did I realize that both girls were simply members of a wedding.

and that I now lived down the street from a synagogue from which the conventionally proportioned female newlywed was at that moment making her royal exit.

The next afternoon, it rained, but when I took my daughter out grocery shopping, me in my plastic yellow boots,

the human cupcake safe and dry in her snuggly.

I spied through the silvery murk, another sylph in white, exiting the sanctuary and entering a convertible parked outside the temple, glumly holding an umbrella over her veiled and golden head.

Soon, it was about a bride-a-day, a never-ending pageant of women eagerly entering the world of marriage, one I had painfully but most willingly left behind.

After the divorce, after I'd picked up the handsomest sperm donor I could find at a bar in Red Hook, after I'd...

Struggled with nursing the baby while navigating the IRT from Brooklyn College, where I eventually got fired for sleeping with a student, up to Columbia, where the same transgression inspired no response.

After teaching 11 courses a year as an itinerant adjunct professor, finally killed my love of literature and, well...

my love of people in general, my old camp friend Maggie asked me to come help her liquidate her English language bookstore.

She had married a Parisian, a cute jazz musician she met on her junior year abroad, given birth to four kids, now almost fully grown, and lived her girlish dreams.