Sima closed her eyes, wishing to give in to their bodies. She touched her stomach, fingers trembling, for just a moment before, blinking hard, she forced her hand to the banister, pulled herself up the stairs and into her life.
SEPTEMBER
5
“YOU’LL COME, THEN?” SIMA ASKED, MIDWAY UP THE ladder. She concentrated on looking through the boxes—Mrs. Adams wanted something black, without too much trim—not wanting to see Timna’s face in case she looked flustered, desperate for an excuse.
“Of course, I’d love to.” Timna glanced at the drawn dressing-room curtain, creased her brow a moment. “Will you bring down one of the wireless bras too? Ellen might find them more comfortable.”
Sima had just lowered one foot but now raised it again, opened another box. “Because I thought your cousins might mind, so if it’s any trouble—”
“No. They only do the first night of Rosh Hashanah, so there’s nothing I’m missing anyway.”
The doorbell chimed, and Sima turned to see a middle-aged woman with enormous breasts enter the shop, encumbered by shopping bags. “Rochelle,” Sima called, for once amused rather than annoyed to note that though she’d been fitting Rochelle for years, still she always showed up hanging out of some demi-cup. And though Rochelle established herself in the dressing room for over an hour, trying on everything in her size while complaining of various medical ailments, Sima did not try to hurry her, even found herself laughing at the e-mailed jokes Rochelle produced from a canvas bag.
Timna was coming for Rosh Hashanah.
Sima had not felt so excited for the new year’s holiday since, as a young child, she would sit on the counter to peer into the soup pot, try to count the carrots and potatoes, chicken necks and celery stalks, that bobbed in the yellow broth. The holiday then had truly signaled new beginnings; the bowls of nuts and raisins, the honey in its glass dish, and the round braided challah all gathered up with a fresh school year, the leather smell of new shoes and shirts still crisp to the touch.
Those early holidays had been followed by others less hopeful—the worry of her first years of marriage; how she’d hurried to the shops, waved her hands for attention at the butcher, grocer, baker and, rushing home with plastic bags cutting red lines into the skin of both hands, filled her kitchen with food. All four burners crowded and the inside of the oven too, and in the sink more dishes to be done and butter, melting, staining the edge of a clipped recipe. But then the tentative pride when, the food shifted into her new Corning Ware—the blue flower on each side not yet faded, the white ceramic still bright—and rounded on top with a wooden spoon like the magazine said, she served it carefully to guests gathered round her table, watched as they ate.
“Is it all right?” she’d ask. “More salt? I think maybe the brisket is a touch too dry—”
But her guests dismissed her worries, and every year she was pleased to see that though she’d doubled, sometimes tripled, each recipe, the leftovers would last for little more than one dinner for her and Lev.
Their parents were guests at the first few holidays, when Sima’s father was still alive and Lev’s not yet living in Florida. One year her two older brothers visited, and then she and Lev took trips to see them in Dallas and Los Angeles, but they’d always been too much older than her. For several years they’d had friends—someone from Lev’s school, a few of the women she’d known—but at some point they’d just stopped inviting, settled for being guests at someone else’s celebration.
But now Timna was coming, and Connie and Art had said sure, they’d be there, and her old Cousin Millie and Lev’s Uncle Abe. Sima reduced the hours of the shop the week before the holiday, and her hands stiffened from cutting vegetables, and she shifted her feet standing in line at the butcher—willing to fight like any of the women, proud of their families and wanting only the best cuts.
Sima raised the lid of the soup pot and, breathing deep, felt the fragrant steam seep through her, the rolling boil carry her back to an earlier time when there was excitement in the changing of seasons, when the sweetness of honey signaled hope.
Timna had brought yellow daisies and Connie red roses and Sima placed each in crystal vases at either end of the table, just slightly blocking Art and Millie, Connie and Abe, but leaving Timna, at the center, beautifully framed. Sima felt flushed with the evening. Though Lev teased, as he sat down, that she’d cooked for an army, and for a moment she felt ridiculous—pressed her nail into her hand to try to check her eagerness and hoped that, with the table so covered in food, it did not look bizarre, desperate—Timna had said, “To me it looks wonderful—I can’t wait to try it all,” and Sima had opened her hand under the table and smiled.
Connie talked about Nate over matzoh ball soup. “You know,” she said, looking at Timna, her eyes moving up and down, inspecting, “he also loves to travel. But it’s so difficult, being a scientist, to find the time. He was in school forever, not that he didn’t do it as quickly as you can, but there was college and then the doctorate and now he’s ten years with this lab and hardly a vacation.”
While Connie bragged—“You know what it means, Timna, epidemiology?”—Sima looked on, nervous. She hadn’t anticipated this: Connie capturing Timna for Nate, making Timna her own. Sima had no way to compete, no smart, appealing man she could set as her own bait.
“He studies diseases,” Art explained. “To find a cure.” He draped an arm around Connie and ran his hand along her shoulder.
Sima noticed the gesture: a thoughtless, casual touch, yet one entirely absent from her own marriage.
“And it doesn’t put him at risk?” Sima asked, knowing it was something Connie worried about though Nate had assured her, no. “How can it be?” Connie had lamented more than once, “that handling viruses all day is safe? It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to realize you could end up sick.” Sima always attempted to reassure her: “In this day and age everything gets sterilized,” “In this day and age they know enough not to expose anyone to anything harmful.” Of course, she knew nothing about what happened in this day and age, or in any day or any age, in laboratories—and the truth was that the word itself, laboratory, seemed sinister to her; she half-expected to hear Nate only worked at night, or when it was stormy.
Connie glanced at Sima, raised an eyebrow. Sima shrugged. She knew it was wrong to feed off Connie’s own fears, but she could almost hear Alon clapping at her quick jab, smiling to see the image of Nate—Harvard degree in one hand, microscope in another—falling backwards toward the floor.
“It’s not exactly a high-risk job,” Connie said. “Your boyfriend is in what,” Connie asked, turning to Timna, “the army?”
Sima cringed. Of all the unfair—
“Yes,” Timna said, “thank God, only eight months to go.” She looked down at her fingers, eight outstretched and two folded down, smiled. Sima looked too. Eight fingers above the table cloth, each one a month she’d have Timna; Sima imagined the calendar images of the seasons on each nail, the gold of early autumn turning to falling leaves, pumpkins, holly and red berries, skaters on a frozen river beside a painted Dutch village, and then birds, yellow flowers pushing through dark soil—spring.
The punching-bag image of Nate still grinned up from the floor; Sima could fight all she wanted, but she’d still lose Timna in the end.
Sima watched Timna cut the slices of gravied meat and stab the spiced carrots with her fork. Her mouth opened and closed, her lips moved with the chewing, she smiled slightly. Sima observed her closely, proud each time Timna lowered her fork to the plate for more. When Timna put down her wineglass some residue remained, a dappled redness along the glass rim, the press of her lower lip opening to a kiss.
* * *
“Did you see how Timna jumped to take some brisket home?” Sima bragged to Lev, loading the dinner plates in the dishwasher. “I didn’t have to offer twice.”
“What was she supposed to say?” he asked, placing four wineglasses beside the sink. “You pay her, a
fter all.”
Sima frowned. “Thanks.”
“What? I’m just saying.”
Sima added detergent to the dishwasher and closed the door. “You didn’t like the food?”
“I liked it, I liked it. Just the brisket was a little dry.” “There was gravy.”
Lev shrugged.
Sima turned around. Behind her hot water rushed into the dishwasher, the sound humming through the room and filling her too. “It’s a lot of work, you know,” she said. “I was in the kitchen practically all week, not that you so much as volunteered to help—”
“You said how good it was to be cooking again—”
“Yeah, for a day or so. But after that you really could have helped out too. Not that watching baseball on TV all the time isn’t important, I’m sure, but—”
Lev closed his eyes, rubbed them with his hand. “Forget it, Sima. Forget I said anything. I’ll help clean up tomorrow, but for now I’m going to lie down.”
Sima watched him leave. She took out the Saran Wrap and began covering the leftovers—one lunch and half a dinner—while the hum of the television drifted in from the bedroom: the steady plod of the anchorman followed by a few dramatic notes signaling a commercial break. She tried, while she rinsed the serving spoons, to picture again how Timna had leaned in, pressed her finger to the hot wax that had dripped onto the old silver tray just as, Sima had remembered at the time, she had done as a child at holiday dinners. But the image was no longer clear; it was nothing, just an idle movement, nothing she should be repeating in her mind as she cleaned the kitchen, alone, all the guests gone and Lev too. Probably Timna was out now with friends, laughing about her dinner with the old people. The brisket really had been drier than usual; there was cork in the wine. Sima turned off the tap, suddenly heavy with sleep, and went to watch the news in the bedroom.
6
SIMA STOOD AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS ON A SUNDAY morning, looking down into the bra shop. Everything was clean and organized, ready for the week ahead: even the counter had been polished with wood oil the previous Friday. Never mind it wasn’t real wood; she liked all the same the clean, sharp smell of the oil.
Descending the steps, Sima walked over to what she’d begun to think of as Timna’s sewing table. She picked up a pale blue cardigan folded on Timna’s chair and brought it toward her face, losing herself in the sharp smell of inexpensive perfume. A creak upstairs brought her back; she dropped the cardigan onto the chair and walked quickly away.
“Tell me,” Sima asked when Timna arrived a half hour later, a cup of coffee in one hand and a Hebrew newspaper in the other, “what will you most want to show Alon when he gets here?”
She’d thought the question out the night before.
Timna sat down at the sewing table, casually tossing the cardigan Sima had doted on over the back of her chair. “I’m not sure,” she said. “By the time he comes, I’ll know this city so much better. I’m just a tourist now—”
“You work here, you have a job.” She didn’t want Timna to think of herself as a tourist—it was all more permanent than that.
Timna smiled. “I guess so.” She removed the lid of her coffee cup, took a long sip. “It’s funny you ask though,” she said, wrapping both hands around the cup, “because the truth is wherever I am I think about being there with Alon. I have imaginary conversations in my head where I’m showing him things or we’re commenting together—a woman will go by walking a dog or something, and suddenly I’m talking with Alon about that.” She paused, ran a finger around the rim of the cup. “Does that sound crazy?”
“Not crazy at all,” Sima said, remembering vaguely that she’d once dreamed up conversations with Lev.
“But then sometimes it only makes me feel more alone. Yesterday I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, and it was just a beautiful, perfect morning. The sky was bright blue and the bridge was filled with families and people jogging.” Timna lifted the cardigan from the back of her chair, folded it in her lap. “It was the sort of day, you know, when everybody seems to smile at you?”
Sima nodded, though she wasn’t sure—would she have remembered to smile on the bridge? Of course, she thought, she wouldn’t have been there.
“But then, to stand there looking into the water and feeling part of such a perfect day, and to feel so much—joy, just joy for the day and the place and the time in my life, you know? But to have no one to share it with, no one beside me who I could turn to and point and say, ‘Look.’” Timna placed the folded sweater on the counter, smoothed it with her hand. “It’s hard, that silence. It made it all less real somehow, because there was no one there to understand.”
“Yes,” Sima said, “Yes, I know what you mean.” And it seemed to her that she did, as she imagined Timna on the Brooklyn Bridge, looking into the river between the woven ropes, though she wasn’t sure, after all, if she’d walked across the bridge even once in the last three decades, and then again how long it’d been since she tried to share what was inside, parted her lips to say, “Look.”
They were just shy of their first wedding anniversary when Lev took her hand, observing her so intently as she put down the grocery bags that she ceased her description of the traffic, waited, the beginnings of fear clawing her stomach, for what he might say. Was it Connie, did she have the baby, did something go wrong? She didn’t ask aloud; thinking it alone reassured her—it was the unimagined, the unanticipated, that could hurt you. And then Lev’s mouth quivered slightly, turned just a bit toward a smile, and Sima moved to release her hand, unpack the groceries—there was nothing to fear, after all, he was just teasing, and right off she’d assumed it was bad news—
“Sima,” Lev told her, gripping her hand, “Your mother is dead.”
She pulled away, put the milk in the refrigerator. It should not go bad. And then the eggs too, and the lettuce, and as she moved about the kitchen, emptying the bags, asked, “What? When? But we just saw her last Friday. Everything was fine.”
“Your father called this morning,” Lev told her, standing still as she moved around him. “She died in her sleep. Probably a stroke, they say. She didn’t feel a thing.”
So her mother was dead then, and she hadn’t told anyone she was planning anything of the sort. Why wouldn’t her mother have told her? Did her father know? Her brothers? She was always treated as a child, never informed, “Why didn’t I know this was going to happen?”
“Sima, what are you saying? No one knew. She died in her sleep. Really, it’s the best thing you can imagine for her.”
Sima couldn’t say no, she’d wished for her a long illness. A slow-gasping death filled with intimate moments between the two of them—her mother finally turning to her, focusing on her, telling her about all the years that had come before, the story of her life that Sima had never known, never felt part of. And she’d care for her and they’d be close, finally, and it wouldn’t just be her brothers, the original family, she tacked on only at the end when her mother was over forty and her youngest brother ten and no one, an aunt once told her, was expecting you, that’s for sure. A long illness was needed to narrow the space between them. Sima had been counting on it; as the daughter it was her role. And now she’d disappointed again.
“Do my brothers know?”
“Your father was waiting to call them, just for the time difference, though I guess by now it’s seven in Los Angeles so probably—”
Sima nodded. She’d call them too in a moment. They’d weep to her, they’d moan. How proud her mother would be to hear their cries.
Why wasn’t she crying? She seemed to think it at the same time as Lev; she saw him look at her suspiciously—hadn’t he seen tears in her eyes from magazine articles, the evening news? She closed the refrigerator door, lowered her head, concentrated. “My mother’s dead,” she thought. Nothing happened. She gathered her hand into a fist, pressed her nail into her palm, clenched her eyes shut. Feel something. A little wetness gathered in the corner of her eyes. Lifting her
head, she made sure Lev saw the tears’ slow descent.
Her brothers flew in with their wives and children. They spoke at the funeral, choked on their words, reminded the audience how she’d been the best of mothers, the most devoted, the most loving.
Sima leaned her head against Lev’s shoulder. It wasn’t loss she felt, but envy—she envied them even their grief.
Outside the funeral chapel she stood beside her father, one hand under his elbow, steadying. “She’s taken care of me since I was twenty,” her father said, staring at his wedding band like a young bride taken by the shine of it. Sima shushed him, promised, while she smiled at the old relatives who reached for her, thanking them for coming with the quiet voice of the bereaved, to care for him, cook for him.
“And to think,” an elderly cousin said, pausing to cradle Sima’s head between her hands, “that you should be so tested during your first year of marriage. Oh, your mother would be so sad to know.”
Sima nodded, remembered overhearing her mother on her wedding day—
“I’m the one discovered Lev”—while she and Lev stood hand in hand beside the dance floor like the imitation bride and groom atop the wedding cake.
After the guests left that evening, Sima settled her father at the kitchen table while she opened drawers and overturned sofa pillows, searching for her mother’s treasures. Her father wrung his hands, agitated, as he lamented that he’d never thought to ask where she hid her jewelry—the cheap gold, imitation diamond trinkets he’d bought her during their decades together. Sima found them finally in a tallis bag at the back of her mother’s closet, hidden behind a pair of violet heels.
Sima's Undergarments for Women Page 5
