Tsippi Krauthammer noticed things about her customers, but the American woman caught her interest more than the others for a simple reason: Tsippi made matches, arranged blind dates with all kinds of people, and here might be an opportunity to make a shidduch. She gravitated toward the difficult ones, the ones other matchmakers were reluctant to touch, those who had given up hope: a widow with seven young children, men missing parts of their bodies from the wars, a professor who had twenty-seven rabbits in his living room and wouldn't let a single one go. Between weighing the onions and making a clatter on the cash register, she had pulled off more than fifty marriages. And every marriage better than my own, she joked. A woman of forty-eight told her, "I thought I would marry one day, but never-ever-did I expect to feel this happiness, happy like a bride of eighteen." To bring together disparate souls gladdened her. She didn't get paid for her work, though often she received substantial presents: a rug, a ceiling fan for the store, a fancy juice maker. Others got paid a thousand dollars from each party, but she did it for the sake of the mitzvah and the pleasure it brought her.

What she had first noticed about the American woman was her hair. The hair itself was an anomaly in this street of yarmulka, scarf, wig, and black hat wearers. Either she was not religious, Tsippi surmised, or maybe not as pious as the block's Ashkenazi Orthodox residents, or else she was simply not married and had no reason for covering her hair. This American woman-she had to be an American: Who else would pay three times the price for StarKist Tuna instead of opting for the serviceable Israeli brands? And anyway her accent betrayed her-this American brought her moods to the grocery store. Sometimes she walked down the aisles, poking, turning a cereal box in her hands, groping, squinting, yearning for something Tsippi's shelves couldn't deliver; sometimes she seemed annoyed, scowling at an eggplant, shrugging at a tomato; and sometimes her hands moved with a happy efficiency, like the hands of a regular ba'alabusta whose years of list-making had already been absorbed into her very fingertips.

Tsippi tucked a strand of gray hair under her paisley scarf and busied herself ringing up the items of a customer, a young boy with blond-haired peyos wrapped delicately behind his ears. She cut him a hunk of pumpkin squash for his mother's chicken soup, threw in a free bag of chocolate dreidels (leftovers from her Hanukkah stock), and recorded the entire amount in a shiny green notebook. The boy's family paid at the end of the month, though only the Almighty knew how. They always rushed for the two-day-old bread on sale, the rotten bananas nobody else would buy. Lately, things had gotten worse with the recent cuts in food subsidies. Though when it came time for Mr. Weinshtock to pay the bill, he'd crisply lay out the shekels on the counter as if nothing was amiss. Other customers who had more were always wringing their hands and asking for extensions. Not him. She wondered about his wife and how scraping by had affected their marriage. Then she shook her head. What business did she have thinking about other people's marriages? Better to save her speculations for the unwed.

Now this American woman with her bare head of hair (possibly the only uncovered woman over twenty on the block) intrigued her with her dreamy way of walking and her forlorn, slightly aggrieved air. She looked about thirty-five, educated, attractive-well, attractive enough. Tsippi wondered which street she lived on and why she had only begun to come to the store in the last month. Maybe she had just moved to...