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was the highest order of female, with her
credentials descending in the order of the condition of her husband's health. A
woman with a vigorous healthy husband was on the highest rung of yenta envy. At
next to the last rung of the ladder, lower than the women with the most sickly
and debilitated husbands, lower than the varying gradations of widowhood, was
the divorcée, further graded by the chronology of the divorce. A woman divorced
beyond twenty-five years, like Sarah Shankowitz, was just short of yenta
purgatory. Purgatory, the lowest rung, was the old maid, although woman's lib
had provided some measure of late respectability to the condition.
    If Sarah Shankowitz knew what was in store for her, she
might never have precipitated the action that sealed her fate. She knew she had
made a mistake in prompting the divorce from Nat, but she never confided that
to anybody.
    "You have your pride," her best friend Mildred
had advised. She lived in the apartment across the hall and every day, when the
husbands and the children had gone off to work and school, they spent the
morning over coffee, sharing the intimacies of their lives. Neither of them
were what might be called "liberated" women. They lived their lives
as their mothers did, housewives who manned the homefront while others in the
family went out into the world.
    "Maybe he's getting senile early. He doesn't seem
interested anymore," Sarah confided to Mildred one day. They had begun to
share little secrets and, on the days when self-pity emerged in Sarah's heart,
Mildred would rise to the occasion with energy and investigative zeal. Encased
in fat, her big unburdened breasts resting over a bloated belly, she had an air
of superior wisdom and self-satisfaction. Perhaps it was the flesh itself that
gave her the illusion of solidity, but the less assertive Sarah envied her
confidence and what she supposed then, her worldliness. Mildred tapped two fat
fingers into a dimpled palm.
    "Show me bed trouble and I'll show you marriage
trouble."
    "I'm not exactly Marilyn Monroe."
    "How long has it been?"
    "Maybe a month." Actually, she remembered, she
had lied by half. "But he works so hard," Sarah had added quickly.
"He comes home and sleeps in the chair." Nat was a cutter in the
garment district. "It's not easy."
    "That's no excuse."
    "Maybe he should see a doctor. He might have just lost
his pep."
    "They don't lose their pep so easily," Mildred
said cryptically.
    "To tell you the truth, I don't really care that much
about it."
    "What has that got to do with the price of fish in
Canarsie?"
    "But you noticed?"
    "Certainly I noticed." Despite her confidences,
she still maintained a delicacy when it came to sex. Perhaps, Sarah thought,
she had confided too much, but now that the floodgates were open, Mildred
persisted.
    "I make sure my Sam is always interested."
    "How do you do that?"
    Mildred smiled, her jowls tightening. Sarah found it
difficult to think of her in that context, especially since Mildred was such a
big woman and Sam so slight.
    "I don't give away trade secrets."
    But the matter became a constant inquiry and Sarah could
not bring herself to lie about it.
    "Not yet?"
    "No." She would twist and untwist her fingers.
Seeking something to do, she would pour more coffee, which only made her more
nervous than she was.
    "You know it could be another woman?" Mildred
said one day, lowering her voice as if the walls could eavesdrop. It was, of
course, a seed planted. That had been the farthest thought from Sarah's mind.
Other women were not in the range of her experience. She had been married at
eighteen, twenty years ago. Life was making a living, making ends meet, taking
care of her son, cleaning the house, going shopping every day for food, talking
to Mildred. And on Sundays, they would go to his mother's, Friday nights to her
parents'. Occasionally, they would go out to eat Chinese food or to the movies.
Other women? That was only on the soap operas.
    But despite her