This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir by Judy Brown

would’ve known about it before you!”
    “Nuh-uh,” she said. “Secrets don’t work that way. Everyone knows except you—’cause you’re a part of the curse.”
    She chewed loudly on her bubble gum.
    “See?” she said, pointing accusingly at my book. “That’s why your mother lets you buy things like goyishe fairy tales.” Then, as I stared at her, thinking of what to say next, she slowly blew a gigantic pink bubble, crossing her eyes to see it.
    I stuck my pinky finger in Blimi’s face. Pop.

Sixteen
    My father said that my mother was the most beautiful girl in Jerusalem. She had long, thick hair, red like fire.
    He turned the page of their worn red wedding album. I squeezed next to him on the couch. On the yellowed pages, I saw pictures of my aunts and cousins with their hair piled high like beehives, wearing funny patterned dresses and clumsy pump shoes. And I saw my mother in a tiara made of silk flowers, her eyes glowing with joy. There, next to her, was my grandmother Miriam in a silk, rippling gown, while nearby a circle of women danced, holding hands. Across the partition on the men’s side was a jumble of black hats. They crowded in front of the head table, where my father sat with my grandfather, my great-uncle, and the Holy Rebbe.
    My mother looked like a princess. She and my father smiled happily at each other in the pictures, her necklace and diamond ring glittering. My father pointed at the photo. “I buy it myself,” he said proudly. “Deh nicest jewelry your mother get.”
    “Where’d you have so much money from?”
    “I vork hard,” my father said. “I vork hard for a long time.”
    “But when?” I asked. “How old were you and Mommy when you got married?”
    “We vasn’t so young. I was tventy-four, your mother vas tventy-three.”
    I stared at my father in disbelief. “Twenty-three? Twenty-three? ”
    My father just smiled, turning the page. I shook my head.
    There are rules, you see—always have been—that one must be married after eighteen and before twenty. By twenty-one, every matchmaker is involved. By twenty-two, special prayers are uttered at holy graves. And by twenty-three—by twenty-three…Well, there was no such thing as twenty-three. By twenty-three, you are married. You just are.
    I pestered my father until he threw up his hands in mock despair. “Dat’s what God vanted!” And he was off to shul for evening prayers.
      
    I loved fairy tales because there was no such thing as breaking rules. The stepmother was always evil, the godmother was always kind, and the princess always slept for a hundred years without growing older by a day. She did not suddenly decide to sleep for only ten years because the curse was ninety years too long. And the prince, he always kissed the princess, no matter what. He never changed his mind, thinking that maybe he shouldn’t kiss a half-dead girl he’d never seen before.
    In real life, you could not give or take an extra month when it was time to marry. After nineteen, every year was like one hundred, and waiting too long messed things up entirely.
    Blimi’s cousin did not get engaged until she was twenty-one. This was not her fault. She had to wait for her diabetic older brother, who could not find a bride until he was twenty-two, after his mother forgot to lie to the matchmaker. Everyone said that Blimi’s aunt had made a dreadful mistake, telling the truth about his diabetes. But it was too late, and in the end he had to marry a girl who had diabetes too. And though they had children who did not have diabetes, everyone said that they were lying about it and that they really all did.
    But twenty-three?
    Twenty-three?
    I told my mother that I was to be married at exactly eighteen and not one second later.
    “Of course you will be,” she reassured me, twisting the kitchen knife in the keyhole of the bathroom door, which Nachum had locked from the inside. “Don’t you worry. Of course you will be. Nachum—open the