Hi!
I’m touched 🙂
I started something yesterday, actually (I just came back from a very long trip where I familiarized myself with many, many methods of the license plate game and have been unavailable for writing) but it didn’t really work out.
Trying again…
It took a while to cool off Mrs Norrisberg’s tirade of English, Hebrew, Yiddish and- wait, was that Arabic?- insults. Rivky held onto the phone, eyes closed and taking deeeep yoga breaths. She’d been nervous about the idea of calling Mrs Norrisberg- Rivky knew that she could only blame herself, and hadn’t wanted to hear all that blame come from someone else as well.
Especially not from someone with a quadrilingual command of invective…
Finally, when the noise from the earpiece seemed to be at a nominally healthy decibel level, she was able to give her plan, the plan she’d been working on for countless sleepless nights, to Mrs Norrisberg.
“So-“
“So you’re going to get your” (unintelligible Arabic word) “over here, get your job back at the NSA, and figure out some way to either clone some more girls or get these clones to stop reproducing! Right?”
“Um, no-” Rivky took another deep breath, but Mrs Norrisberg had relaunched. But this time Rivky was going to finally make herself heard, if it meant a couple more bags of those throat candies and a couple gallons of hot tea with honey at the end of it all.
“MRS NORRISBERG!”
A shocked silence on both ends- Rivky that she’d managed to scream loud enough to make her glass of water crack down the middle, and Mrs Norrisberg that someone had finally gotten her to shut up.
“Okay, Mrs Norrisberg, I know that you want Eli and I to go back to the US and for me to quit InShidduchim and go back to the NSA. But I can’t. His thinness radar would go completely off-kilter. Washington, and even New York, are right at one of the thickest parts of the whole United States. He’d go crazy. And I could obviously go back to work for the NSA, but I don’t think I should quit InShidduchim just yet. I’ve been working on a plan.”
“MMMmmmm.” Mrs Norrisberg sounded ticked, but there was maybe- well, POSSIBLY, if you imagined hard enough- a tiny smidge of curiosity in her tone.
“The plan involves the InShidduchim serial story.”