Sima's Undergarments for Women

by Ilana Stranger-Ross

  Curled against the costume jewelry was a worn envelope containing two thousand dollars cash.

  “I knew she put away what she could, now and then,” her father said, “but I never knew she’d saved much.” He lifted the bills, his hands as gentle as if it were his wife’s own weight he held, and, cradling them, looked at Sima. “You take the money,” he told her.

  Sima had never seen so much money in one place, could not believe that her mother, who saved the twine from bakery boxes for reuse, had accumulated it. She shook her head no. “We have to give Mac and Lou some.”

  “No, no, your mother wouldn’t want that. She always told me, my boys are wonderful, but Sima’s my joy, my comfort. She always said, ‘A mother needs a daughter.’ She was so proud of you, said you had such a head on your shoulders.” Her father took her hand, placed the money in her palm. “This money belonged to her; she’d want it to be yours.”

  Sima closed her hand around the soft bills.

  Sima could sense Lev’s relief when she clung to him, cried on his shoulder. He stroked her back, her head, murmured that it would be okay. This was something, she couldn’t help thinking, as, wiping her face with the back of her palm, she looked at Lev, saw the tears in his own eyes; this was something: to weep on her husband’s shoulder for the mother she lost. Her mother was right; it was good to have someone. She loved him; he loved her. Everything was right.

  They celebrated their first anniversary with champagne and dinner out. She mentioned, as they tipped their glasses together, how it’d been her mother who insisted on the champagne toast at their wedding, said it was worth the extra money. “How sad,” Sima said, “that not even a year later—”

  “Let’s try to put that to the side,” Lev told her, patting her hand. “Let’s focus on good things.”

  As Sima watched Lev take an awkward gulp, she recognized suddenly that her mother’s death had in a strange way been a good thing—had made her feel loved. She thought to explain this to Lev, began to speak, “The thing is,” and then, suddenly cold, stopped. Her father could be lying. He depended on her now—she brought him food every day, had him over a few times a week—he had his own reasons to give her that money. And what would it hurt, his wife dead, to assure his daughter of the love he knew she longed for?

  Lev looked at her. “What were you about to say?”

  Sima paused while the waiter placed two bowls of mushroom soup before them, asked if everything was all right. She nodded, her face pale. “Lev,” Sima said, her voice almost a whisper, though the waiter was at another table now, offering specials, “Do you think my father was right?”

  Lev stirred his soup with his spoon; reached for a roll. “Right about what? The money?”

  “No. Well, yes. What he said about the money, about her and me.”

  Lev blew gently on his raised spoon.

  Sima explained to him, her voice halting, this new fear; a rawness inside as she sewed shut the last month, the only time in her life she’d felt wanted by her mother.

  Her cheeks were hot with the shame of it, but Lev gave an easy smile. “Of course she loved you Sima,” he said, reaching for the salt, “you’re her child, after all; it’s only natural.” He sprinkled his soup with salt, bent his head to taste.

  Sima stared at him, willing him to look up. She wanted to shake him, remind him it was her mother, dead, and without saying goodbye and never having told Sima she loved her, never having said she was proud.

  Lev did not notice her gaze; Sima closed her eyes, pressed them clear. “I guess you’re right,” she said instead, ripping open a roll, dipping it into her bowl.

  “So at school,” Lev told her, “Mr. Cheswiks said—”

  She nodded as he spoke, smiled at the right moments, thinking, while not listening to anything he said, what an easy role it was to play after all.

  7

  SIMA WATCHED TIMNA UNBUTTON HER BLOUSE. THE delivery man had stopped in that morning, his eyes, Sima noticed as she signed the receipt slip, on Timna’s body as she bent over one of the boxes, pulled at the thick tape with both hands like a child eager for gifts. They’d had to wait for the lunch crowd to clear before Timna could try on the new merchandise—a tradition Sima would never have allowed with anyone else. “How can you recommend what you haven’t worn?” Timna had asked. “When I was a waitress I tried every dish in the house.” At two o’clock Sima locked the wood door, sat down, and nodded for Timna to begin.

  Timna undressed behind the curtain, but pulled it aside to model the wares. “Ta da!” she cried, stepping out in a peach bra-panty combo. After performing an exaggerated catwalk circle, she evaluated the fit: the bra, she told Sima, made her a little too pointy, no? “But the underwear,” she traced a finger along the elastic rim, “fits nice.”

  Sima kept her hands on the arm rests, her legs crossed demurely. It was beautiful, the young body before her. Like art, she reminded herself, though she knew that the heat on the back of her neck—she reached back, fixed her bun—was from want rather than appreciation. If only she’d known, she thought to herself as Timna retreated to the dressing room, to love her body when she was young. Why hadn’t someone told her? How had Timna known?

  “You’re very lucky, you know that?”

  Timna pulled aside the curtain. She’d changed into a blue satin nightgown with ribbon shoulder straps.

  “Why? You’re giving me this nightgown?”

  Sima smiled. “No. But you’re young,” she paused, “and beautiful, and you have such confidence.”

  Timna smoothed the satin across her belly, pouted at her reflection in the mirror. “I don’t feel so young. I’m twenty-one, and I haven’t even been to university yet.”

  “What’s the rush? When Lev and I married, we were so sheltered, we knew nothing. Here you are traveling the world—when I was married, I’d never been farther than the Catskills.”

  “It’s not too late for you,” Timna said, turning before the mirror. “Lev’s retired, and your business does well. You can close for a month, go anywhere you want.”

  “Maybe someday. We’ll see.”

  Timna looked at her but did not respond, returned to the dressing room to change.

  “So speaking of travel,” Sima said, speaking to the closed curtain, “Have you explored the city more? Before you see the world, you have to see some of New York’s neighborhoods. Talk about foreign—”

  Timna mock-sashayed out of the dressing room, modeling a purple silk bathrobe tied loose around the waist. Sima admired her while Timna described a trip down the west side of Manhattan—jogging with a friend along the water, sunning in the grass at Battery Park City, drinking cocktails in Tribeca. “It’s really amazing down there,” Timna said as she untied the bathrobe, went to change, “so beautiful.”

  “Oh? I’ve hardly been since they did that area up,” Sima told her, though the truth was she’d never been at all. “So what friend is this? Someone your cousin knows?”

  Timna answered through the curtain—a guy she’d met at a café, Israeli, some friends in common back home. She walked out of the dressing room in her own faded blue jeans and a fitted black short-sleeved sweater; sat at the seamstress table, half-suppressed a yawn.

  “And this guy, what’s his story?”

  Timna smiled. “His name is Shai, and he’s been here two years already, working security for a Jewish organization.” Timna opened her purse and took out lip gloss, dotted it across her lips. “It was just like you said, Sima: I went to a café in the East Village and suddenly I was surrounded by Israelis.”

  “Terrific,” Sima told her, though she couldn’t help but wish it had taken Timna just a little longer to make friends. She walked over to the UPS box, open before the dressing-room curtain, picked it up. “And Alon,” she asked, pausing, “how is he doing?”

  “Oh, he keeps changing the travel plans. Now he says he wants to go to Yellowstone, see a bear. I want to see Hollywood, and he’s talking bears.”

  Si
ma smiled. She knew Timna loved this: the easy frustration with Alon, the chiding. Most women did at first, when they strived to know everything about their beloved, delighting in his bright-edged outline even as they sighed over differences, faults, thinking that, after all, the weaknesses just pointed to the ways they were needed, like a new mother who, complaining that the baby screams every time she gives it to someone else, thrills nonetheless to those cries that signal her worth.

  But of course it all changed, the small faults that teased the love growing into gaps, missing pieces that left you one day looking at a face, searching for what you’d loved and finding it empty.

  “Let’s get back to the good part of the trip,” Sima said, lifting the package onto the counter. “I can’t even handle how many places you’re going; I picture you two like the heroes of an old film, riding off into the sunset.”

  “You want to come along?”

  “Very funny. Just what Lev and I need, four months on three continents—”

  “Six months.”

  “Six months.” Sima removed the inventory list from its plastic pocket. “So first you travel the world. Then you earn big money in Tel Aviv’s best bra shop, go to university for fashion—”

  “Sounds good.” Timna gathered her hair into a ponytail, walked over to the dressing-room mirror.

  “And then after university,” Sima said, pleased with how well she knew her, not even two months together and Timna’s future an easy road open before them both, “you’ll get married and have children—”

  “Sima, don’t be so quick to marry me off. After university I’ll just be starting a real career for the first time. I’ll need five, ten years to work my way up—”

  “But children?” Sima asked, taking hold of a lilac nightgown. Timna had to have babies: that soft stomach, those full breasts. “Aren’t they on the timeline?”

  “Children? With children I can’t go to Asia, Australia. When I’m in my late thirties,” she said, checking her face in the mirror, “maybe then—”

  “Your late thirties?” Sima placed the nightgown on the counter. “No, it’s too long to wait, Timna. Women aren’t like men, you need to start early.”

  Timna pulled some strands of hair loose, arranged them to frame her face. “So why didn’t you have children, Sima? Lev didn’t want?”

  Sima felt a stillness inside, a blank feeling like her own breath stopping on its smooth backwards-forwards path and instead gathering inside her stomach, stirring for rebellion like a tornado turning slowly on those empty, windswept pieces of America she’d only seen in movies. “We tried. I couldn’t—we tried and tried but I couldn’t have any.”

  Timna turned away from the mirror, attempted a smile. “Well, but the trying is the best part, no?”

  Sima looked down, studied her own hands: the strange sketch of blue veins, the large curl of her knuckles, the pale, pink-rimmed pull of her skin. “Sure,” she told Timna, seeing already the liver spots that would colonize, the transformation of her skin from oil-flesh to whisper-parchment—the bone becoming sharper beneath, readying—“the best part.”

  During the early years of their marriage, Sima and Lev lived in a cramped one-bedroom apartment. “We’ll move,” they would say, “when the time is right.” In the darkness of their bedroom he’d reach for her and she’d gather him close: her arms around his body, his heat against her skin, his lips just touching her ear as his breath quickened along with her own, both their bodies damp with sweat and their mouths open, their wedding night left long behind as they learned to stroke each other awake and then again to fall together into sleep. And their savings grew, and there were small houses they could buy in the right area, but though his body thickened above her, the children never came.

  Each month there was the terrible excitement of hope. She’d try not to think about the possibility, put it out of her mind until she knew for sure, but inevitably she’d press her breasts in the shower, thinking maybe there was some tenderness, or pause when she was hungry or tired to wonder if the sensation wasn’t stronger than usual, if there wasn’t something else behind it. She sat with her legs crossed, a hope to keep something inside from leaving, and with each trip to the bathroom searched for, and dreaded to find, the blood that would signal the end to that month’s hope, that month’s child.

  Always the moment came, the blood escaping her body an affront like the slap that her mother had given her when, mumbling, Sima first admitted her period. “May that be the most pain you feel in childbirth,” her mother had said afterwards, while Sima, cheek-stinging, turned her face away in shame. She was thirteen, no longer a child and indeed older than all her friends had been, the only one among them who could not whisper proudly and, with cupped hands, pass a sanitary napkin beneath the bathroom door. And yet, and still, she’d wanted to bury herself under the covers, hide until the bleeding went away.

  At twenty-two Sima sat on the toilet, saw the brown stain on her underwear, taunting. She slapped herself once. Twice. Tried for three but doubled over instead, and wept into her own body.

  8

  SHE’S NEVER BEEN FITTED FOR A BRA BEFORE,” CONNIE said, pushing Suzanne toward Sima. “Come on, Sima, do that trick—tell her what her size is.”

  “You make me sound like some kind of circus freak,” Sima waved Suzanne forward. “Come, we’ll see what we can do for you.”

  While Timna and Sima brought them bras, Connie and Suzanne laughed about Art. “Admit it,” Connie said, “you’ve never heard a man sneeze so loud. Tell me it doesn’t drive you crazy. Once he set off a car alarm, I’m not kidding.”

  Suzanne giggled. “I can believe it.”

  Sima ignored the conversation, watched instead as Suzanne ran her hands over lace cups.

  “Fits well, see?” Sima tugged at the straps, adjusting them.

  “I can’t believe I’ve been wearing the wrong size all this time.”

  Connie nodded. “That’s what everyone says. What did I tell you? She could be on Oprah.”

  “If only I had someone to show it off to,” Suzanne said, slipping a black camisole Timna had brought her over the bra. “You guys should provide that, too. One-stop shopping.”

  Timna snapped her fingers. “I think I’ve found my calling.”

  “With you recruiting I could retire in style,” Sima said, gathering Suzanne’s purchases (three bra-and-panty sets, in addition to what she’d wear out) into a pile. “Assuming you don’t get deported first.”

  “See how she threatens me with deportation?”

  “How else am I supposed to keep good help?”

  Sima turned to Suzanne. “Anyway, you don’t buy for a man. You buy for yourself. Trust me.”

  “Oh, now you really sound like Oprah.” Suzanne buttoned her blouse. “I think I’d still choose having someone to see a movie with over self-empowerment, but whatever.”

  “Did you notice how much they look alike?” Timna asked after they’d left.

  Sima nodded. Suzanne was ten or fifteen years younger, but they were both of average height and weight, and with the same auburn hair blown straight to the shoulders. “They must use the same bottle of hair dye.”

  “I guess that’s how Art likes them.”

  “Timna!” Sima said, but she laughed despite herself.

  The end of another week. Timna waved goodbye, pulled the door shut behind her; Sima turned away, folded a camisole above the counter. Where did Timna go, she wondered, smoothing the burgundy silk, what was her home like, the evenings she spent there? It frustrated Sima that Timna consumed her whole world when she was just a piece of Timna’s. The working week: the hours to get through.

  She imagined for a moment Timna moving along her block, what she might see. The end of September and gold light sifting through the streets; if Boro Park had a chance at beauty, this was it. Sima walked to the store entrance, opened the door, looked up the stairs to the sky above. It might not be enough for Timna, raised as she was under a deep gold sun, but S
ima hoped it was.

  Returning to the counter, she absently picked up her date book. Scrawled on the inside cover was Timna’s home address, just a five-minute walk away.

  A whisper of a question: Why not?

  The excuse was easy. She could use the walk, and it was practically on the way to the hardware store, and she’d been meaning to buy energy-saving lightbulbs, and didn’t she deserve to see Timna’s house, after all this time?

  She locked the store door and climbed the back staircase to the kitchen, calling, “Lev!” even as she moved through the living room to the front door.

  “Sima?”

  She could hear the television volume lowering.

  “I’m going out to the hardware store,” she yelled, pulling on a khaki overcoat. “You want anything?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, I’m going out, is all.”

  She didn’t bother waiting for a response.

  Up two long blocks and over three short ones and then rounding a corner, her body tense, looking for Timna’s house. A block like any other: houses crammed together, postage-stamp lawns too small for even the most enterprising children to play on, their sun-faded plastic toys confined instead to the cramped balconies above. It always amazed Sima that in a neighborhood filled with children there was not a single park or public playground, though each commercial block boasted at least one ride: the orange kangaroo or pink horse bucking not quite enough to truly thrill even the youngest child, but still they clamored for quarters, clenched their hands around the worn leather reins as they rode to the tinny beat of all-time Top-40 Jewish hits—“Hava Negilah”; “Moshiach, Moshiach, Moshiach.”

  Halfway down the block she forced herself to slow down. It’d be worse, she decided, if she were caught hurrying past; strolling, she could pretend she was out for a reason. Though Timna was nowhere in sight—she checked, half-turning every few feet— Sima practiced a surprised smile, ready to say, “Oh, is this your block, I just needed some lightbulbs from the hardware store on Sixteenth—”