Free The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler

than that. Relief filled me like a blast of heat.
    “Which isn’t to say that you won’t be sad to leave your house and street.”
    It suddenly didn’t seem quite so sad to me any more. The relief pushed the sadness away, and Ida must have sensed that, because she smiled that same smile again and poured two more cups of tea, added the same raspberry jam to mine, and the same amber fluid to hers, which was whisky, I realized, from the smell that drifted my way. She lifted her cup to me as she had for our previous l’chaim .
    “Life is change, my dear, so we might as well enjoy it, don’t you think?”

CHAPTER 5
    E lka was waiting outside for Sol when he went to pick her up for their first date. An odd behaviour, he thought when he saw her standing there on the street. She lived just west of Decarie, in N.D.G., in a brick duplex that looked small but well kept, with a bit of lawn in the front. So what inside could be so shameful, Sol wondered, that she wouldn’t even let him in the door?
    “It’s hot inside,” she said at once, as if reading the question in his mind.
    “Outside’s not much better.”
    “It’s better. Shall we go?”
    The August heat had raised a thin sheen of sweat on her skin, a look, he noted, that not every girl could carry off quite so sweetly.
    “Don’t you think I should say hello to your mother? Let her know I’ll bring you home in one piece?”
    “My mother doesn’t like you. She’s forbidden me to go out with you, to even talk with you on the phone.”
    “I see,” said Sol, more surprised at that point than insulted, half pleased, in fact, to imagine Ida Pearl taking his measure and recognizing that he was a man to contend with.
    “She’s like that.” Elka shrugged. “She thinks no one’s up to our standard, and hasn’t noticed, of course, that we’re not up to it either. Our standard, I mean. That our situation in life, the circumstances in which we find ourselves are not exactly—”
    “Wait a minute. Slow down. You mean … she thinks I’m not good enough?”
    “ Not our type , is how she’d put it.”
    “And that’s what you came out to tell me? That your mother doesn’t like me? That I’m not up to your family’s standard?”
    “I came out to take a walk. It’s stifling in our house. And you can walk beside me if you choose.”
    “Big of you.”
    A faint smile now. The dimples. “You can walk wherever you want. My mother doesn’t own the sidewalk, after all.”
    He was angry, insulted, but to turn and leave without another word would be a hollow victory, he felt, more her mother’s victory than his own.
    “I could use the exercise, I suppose,” he said as he fell into step beside her on the sidewalk her mother didn’t own.
    IDA PEARL WAS LOOKING OUT her living room window when Elka walked away with Sol. She had known as soon as she had prohibited the meeting that Elka would go against her wishes—and why? Ida wondered. Why this man and not another? Why this mediocrity instead of a nicer or wealthierone? Why not a mediocrity who was not already in love with his brother’s wife? Was she so starved for attention? Ida wondered. Have I so starved her that she follows the first man whose eyes actually linger for a moment on her face?
    It had been a mistake to suggest Sol take Elka out onto the dance floor, Ida thought. A mistake to ever show up at that wedding, which had not been quite the mission of dashed hope that Elka imagined.
    Ida and Elka were at the wedding because of a letter Ida Pearl had received from Sonya, her sister who lived in Palestine. Letters from Sonya came regularly and Ida usually skimmed them with impatience. They were litanies of complaint, nothing more, about the humid heat in Tel Aviv in the summer, the damp in the winter, and the ailments those conditions produced in Sonya, her husband, Leo, and their ever-growing brood of children; about the lack of culture in Palestine—she’d been a poet back in Poland and had belonged to