Devorah and Mindy’s friendship

Devorah and Mindy’s friendship joins the pleasures of recognition and shared rebellion to the pain of watching a friend’s possibilities narrow. First admired from a distance as a clever girl who reads and writes, Mindy becomes Devorah’s closest companion during a period when both can briefly imagine lives beyond the expectations surrounding them. Their bond makes that freedom tangible, but Mindy’s later marriage and withdrawal from reading leave Devorah with a lasting sense of loss.

First Seen Among the Books

Devorah first notices Mindy at a once-a-week Jewish lending library hosted in a Williamsburg apartment. The library offers two kosher, censored books at a time, a safer alternative to the books Devorah has hidden under her mattress and the anxious listening for sounds outside her room. In the apartment, Mindy stands out among the high-school girls browsing the shelves: Devorah recognizes her as a year older, a reputedly brilliant student, and a self-described writer who carries a journal everywhere. At school, Mindy writes while eating a sandwich in the cafeteria. Devorah wonders whether Mindy would recognize her if she spoke to her, and doubts that someone older would want to talk to her.

Mindy leaves the library with two thick books and a friend. Devorah does not describe a conversation between them there; instead, she leaves wishing she had someone like Mindy in her own class, someone who loved reading, even within the limits of approved books. That first encounter establishes the admiration and distance from which their later closeness will grow. Mindy is initially less a confidante than a compelling possibility: a peer whose intellectual appetite seems to answer Devorah’s own.

Friendship on Equal Footing

The friendship takes shape after Devorah, still barely seventeen, gets a job teaching sixth grade. At the school where she once feared the staff and the people who controlled access to the creaky elevator, she now has a key and earns $128 a week. Mindy and Devorah become instant friends. Devorah emphasizes that they are finally on equal footing, a change in status that allows admiration to become companionship rather than remain a private wish.

After teaching, they walk to Lee Avenue Pizza, sit at a small table behind the counter, and drink hot coffee while discussing their jobs and office politics. Their common ground deepens when Mindy reveals that she, too, used to sneak books wherever she could find them; they have read many of the same titles. She also listens to FM radio through headphones and shows Devorah how to tune her stereo. The exchange widens Devorah’s access to music as well as books: she becomes absorbed in unfamiliar pop, electronic, and trance music, while Mindy prefers teen pop. Their tastes are not identical, but their willingness to share private enthusiasms makes the friendship a place for discovery.

For Devorah, the attachment becomes unusually intense. She thinks she may be in love with Mindy, writes poems for her, and imagines giving her the world. They buy popcorn and slushies and linger on benches behind the housing projects, or huddle under scaffolding in the cold, unwilling to go home even as the night stretches toward four in the morning. These meetings make companionship feel like a refuge: time together matters more than comfort or convenience.

Shared Risk and a Wider World

A snowy Shabbos passes without Mindy’s usual visit, and Devorah spends the afternoon lonely. The next morning, she calls and proposes a day in the city: they will take the J train, get lost on Broadway, and see an IMAX, disguising themselves with scarves if someone recognizes them. Mindy’s impulsiveness matches Devorah’s, and they travel to Manhattan with their heads lowered, afraid of being recognized. The trip is not merely an outing but an act of shared defiance, made possible by the trust between them.

On the way to Lincoln Center they wade through blackened slush and snowbanks. At the Sony theater, their long skirts, thick beige stockings, and matching bob haircuts make them seem conspicuous to the woman at the desk. They enter a small theater with a balcony and red curtains, believing they have found the IMAX auditorium. When the film begins, they realize it is not an IMAX and that the characters are real people rather than animated figures. Mindy becomes frightened because seeing live actors feels to her like a greater transgression; Devorah is frightened by her own boldness too. Still, neither walks out. Their shared unease does not erase the adventure: the friendship lets each approach a boundary, even when neither is entirely sure she wants to cross it.

Marriage and Diverging Futures

As Devorah’s engagement approaches, she and Mindy continue meeting at Lee Avenue Pizza to look through the party photographs, stirring soft ice cream into hot coffee. Mindy tells her that a match has finally been suggested for her brother and expects him to become engaged soon. Once he is accounted for, Mindy herself may be set up. The prospect gives their conversations a new urgency. Mindy is wistful at the thought of losing Devorah to married life, while also admitting envy of what she sees as Devorah’s approaching independence.

Devorah asks whether Mindy will get to choose a husband or whether someone in the family might intervene for her. Mindy does not know and does not want to think about it before she has to. Devorah wonders whether marriage will offer Mindy any freedom at all, particularly if her future husband disapproves of reading or limits her choices. She contrasts her own hope of leaving her family’s close control with the possibility of entering an even more restrictive household. Mindy changes the subject with a mischievous smile, asking Devorah to tell her everything she learns in kallah classes. The moment preserves their ease together, but the question beneath it remains unresolved.

Separation and Memory

Devorah’s concern proves well founded. A year later, Mindy’s marriage is arranged, and she marries a deeply religious man. He disapproves of secular books, making them harder for Mindy to conceal than they had been from her family. She stops reading and devotes herself to having children. When Devorah next sees her before they drift apart, Mindy has three children and is pregnant with a fourth. She stands in her doorway, smiling and balancing a toddler on her hip, and says, “It’s what God wants.”

Devorah leaves with a sick feeling, convinced that the woman in the doorway is not the Mindy she knew—the independent-minded friend who had shared books, music, late-night conversations, and risky trips. She rejects the explanation that Mindy’s fate is divinely chosen, believing instead that the people around her have determined it. Yet Devorah does not press the argument or insist on continued visits: Mindy’s husband has decided she is a bad influence, and Devorah does not want to make Mindy’s life harder. The friendship ends not in a dramatic quarrel but in distance, formed under pressure from Mindy’s new household and Devorah’s decision to stay away. Devorah says she always remembered her. That remembrance preserves both the vivid friend she knew and the painful contrast between their shared aspirations and Mindy’s later constrained life.