Sima held her own hands, cold to her touch. “You think Lev and I are together from fear of being alone?”
“Why do you think you’re together?”
Sima shrugged, her lips a thin line. “What should I tell you?” She thought of Art and Connie. “Who would’ve predicted it’d be them?” she had asked Lev in the quiet of their bedroom, and he had nodded in agreement. She knew without asking that he shared her thought: it should have been us.
She walked behind the counter, bent to collect a bottle of oil soap and a red square of rag. “Art cheated on Connie. Suzanne—that bra we sold her. It was for him.”
Timna brought her hand to her mouth in surprise. It was the move that Sima had anticipated, but rather than excitement, she just felt exhausted. There was both too much and too little to explain; love ends, was all.
“How? When?”
Sima told her about the dinner, how she’d been the one to tell Connie.
“Oh, Sima, I’m so sorry—”
“Me too. The romance of a lifetime—they had it. Well, I thought they had it.”
“You did the right thing,” Timna said.
Sima bent her head as she poured a circle of oil onto the counter. She was surprised by the threat of tears, hadn’t realized how much she needed to hear those words. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” she said, concentrating on keeping her voice even. “Lev said I did what I had to do, but I think we both wish that I was the kind of person who wouldn’t. Anyway, what’s done is done.”
She dipped the rag in the oil, paused. “I’ll support you, you know,” Sima told her, “whatever you do, I’ll support you.”
“I know that,” Timna said. “You’re the only one who really does.”
She raised her eyes, caught Timna’s a moment before looking back down, spreading the oil thin across the false wood. It was more than she’d known she had to give, more than she thought she had left.
* * *
“The way this next test works,” the doctor told her, “is that we blow some carbon dioxide,” he pursed his lips, blew out some air, “like that, into the tubes. That’ll tell us if the tubes are patent, or if there isn’t some blockage there stopping things up.”
Sima nodded, resigned to this new image of her body: just a series of dull metal pipes in need of cleaning.
“Now, you may find the test uncomfortable. I always believe in warning my patients—”
“It’s okay,” Sima said, “it’s what I’m here for.”
The doctor smiled, mentioned how easy a patient she was—never rushed, never complaining. Sima accepted his compliments, did not explain that for her the pain was necessary to prove her worthiness.
Again she’d given the dime to the beggar: the coin ready in her hand as she approached, her eyes on the cigar box before him. She gave a quick nod when he looked up in thanks, her eyes just catching his own—the baby, bring the baby—before she stepped back into the flow of exiting passengers.
Again she’d rode the elevator to the office, listened for her name to be called, followed the receptionist—“Beautiful day, huh? Makes me want to play hooky and go to the beach”—to an examination room.
Sima folded her clothes on a stool, carefully hiding her hose, bra, and underwear underneath her shirt—a small attempt at modesty even as she once more drew her arms through the worn cotton gown and, leaning back against the metal table, clenched her feet along the stirrups. He nodded when he entered the room, and she smiled back, thinking, as he slid the cold speculum once more inside her, the closed beak opening within her, hungry, what an old hat she was at all this, what a pro. But then the door opened and two nurses came alongside her and a young doctor appeared at her head, and while the talk went on around her—the restaurant down the street, the police this morning—her doctor inserted a tube into her body and switched on a machine. And this time, as the young doctor moved to place a stethoscope against her abdomen and the nurses reached for her arms and her doctor flicked another switch and the carbon dioxide stabbed through her, she looked up at the water-stained ceiling and screamed.
We’ll repeat it, he told her afterwards, when she sat in his office in her hose, bra, and underwear, in her wool skirt and sweater set and navy pump shoes—as if it mattered, anymore, what she wore, as if she weren’t always naked on a metal table, all her failures exposed beneath the white orb of a standing lamp. “We’ll repeat it, and then if it still shows blockage we’ll take an x-ray, with colored dye to trace—”
Sima nodded, made the appointment, took the card. Waited.
One week after Art left, head bent, a suitcase in each hand like some sad stereotype of the fallen man, Sima knocked on Connie’s door, a bag of food at her feet. They’d been talking on the phone several times a day, but the last few times she’d called, Connie hadn’t picked up.
Sima knocked three times, counted to ten, and then reached for her key.
She’d had a key for decades, given so she could water the plants and take in the mail when Connie and Art went on vacation. She’d always resented it, wedging open the rusty back door to toss that day’s newspaper into the recycling bin (Connie always forgot to cancel; Sima inevitably missed, had to stoop to pick it up again), while Connie and Art splashed in green waters somewhere.
“Sorah’s teenaged daughter across the street,” she’d recently complained to Lev, “how cheap are they that they can’t pay her to do it?” He would give a shrug-shouldered suggestion that she simply refuse next time, but she was always unable to do so. The truth: she got some pleasure, too, from time alone in Connie’s house. She’d walk slowly through the house, admiring shoes, lotions, new pieces in Connie’s powder-blue Wedgwood collection. But best of all was Connie’s night-table drawer: every now and again she’d find stashed there a love letter from Art. A real love letter, written for a birthday or anniversary and details she didn’t think a man would remember to notice: a joke Connie had made, a blouse she had worn. The letters sometimes made her eyes water, sometimes her body flush. Like nothing Lev had ever written her, even back in that dim-distant time that hurt to think about when she knew they’d been happy.
Sima turned the key in the lock. Hard to believe, but of course it still worked.
“Connie? You there?” Sima placed the grocery bag on the kitchen counter.
From the bedroom, a groan.
Connie lay in bed, a soft dark shape Sima could just make out in the dim room, the curtains drawn and a sour smell in the air. “It’s like a horror movie in here,” Sima said from the bedroom doorway.
Connie pulled the covers over her head.
Sima drew back the white pointelle curtains, securing them behind ornate faux-bronze hooks. Light streamed in, illuminated motes of dust that swirled softly toward the beige carpet below. “I’ll be right back,” she told Connie, switching on the light as she left. Connie groaned again in response.
Sima returned with a glass of water and a just-damp olive green tea towel. She shushed softly as she lowered the covers, gently touched the towel to Connie’s forehead, cheeks. When Connie opened her eyes, Sima helped her to sit up, held the glass to her lips.
Connie drank. As her body awoke to thirst, she took the glass from Sima’s hand, held it, slightly trembling, with both of her own.
“Look at me,” Connie said when she’d emptied the glass, “wallowing in bed like someone died.” She offered a weak smile.
Sima took her hand.
“Someone did.”
While Connie showered, Sima heated chicken soup, unpacked bakery rolls, put on a pot of a coffee. When Connie appeared in her bathrobe, Sima nodded for her to sit at the table. “I know it’s a cliché,” Sima said, placing a bowl of soup before her, “but sometimes things are clichés for a reason.”
Connie looked up at her. “You’re the best.”
Sima smiled, turned quickly away. Connie’s hair, always perfectly blown, hung damp; her skin was pale and blotchy, not a spot of foundation. For all their closeness, Sima had
never seen her without makeup; Connie was one of those women who, when making plans, did not shy away from saying, “Just give me a few minutes to put my face on.”
It scared Sima to see her this way.
As Connie ate, she described how she had hardly left the bed in three days, no hunger and no reason, she felt, to wake, and yet for all those days in bed still she was constantly exhausted. “You know that expression,” Connie said, “‘pulled the rug out from under me’?”
Sima nodded.
“It feels just like that. Art cheats on me, the most typical thing in the goddamn world, and it’s like the floor is gone, the walls, the roof. A cyclone, the whole planet spinning and I’m like Dorothy—remember? Only my bed felt safe.”
Sima pushed a poppy roll toward her; Connie took it, ripped off a small piece to press into butter.
“And my boys. My wonderful, devoted sons. Selfish bastards. They call, they talk a big game: ‘How could Daddy do this?’ they say. ‘We’ll kill him when we see him.’ Then two days later they’re begging me to take him home, saying he’s so sad, he’s lost without me. They don’t care about me, they care about themselves. Two grown men, Howie with a family of his own, and they’re like little boys again, simpering for Mommy and Daddy.”
Sima stood to pour herself a cup of coffee. “But to them, you’ll always be—”
“Sure, sure, because all these years I made them my world. So now, when I kick Art out, when I make a choice for my own life—as if I had another choice to make, cheating on me with his secretary, for God’s sake, talk about original—they can’t handle it. They have one stupid beating hope: that Art and I will stay together. Well, I’m too old for compromises.”
“You’re exactly right,” Sima said, though just an hour before she’d been telling Lev they had to get back together, didn’t make sense apart. “Look at you—three days in bed and you’re like a woman reborn.”
Connie raised a fist in mock salute. Then her face fell: mouth, cheeks, eyes, all the quick brightness gone again. “Oh shit, Sima. How am I going to live alone? Tell me—what do I do now?”
Sima looked down, opened and closed her fingers around the coffee mug. Of course Connie didn’t mean it like that, but Sima was the one who knew how to live without love. Only there was nothing to tell. You just did.
16
ONCE AGAIN, SIMA SAT ON THE SUBWAY, NOT QUITE reading the novel she’d brought along: four generations of Jewish matriarchs, from Odessa to Palestine to New York City. She dozed between stops, sure enough of her route to know she would waken on time, her head sagging toward her shoulder, jolting up and down as the train vibrated along its steel tracks.
She woke up with one stop to spare, forced her eyes awake. When the train reached her station, she stepped out, already opening her purse, removing one dime for her beggar. It reassured her to see him there, sitting, as always, straight-backed against the white tunnel wall; she kept her eyes on his profile as she approached, but barely looked at him as she tossed the coin into the cigar case, the light thud of landing a comforting sound: there, that’s done at least. She continued on, approaching the dark end of the tunnel, the sharp turn toward the exit staircase.
“Sima!”
She knew it was him, though how could he know her name? A chill coursed through her body and she couldn’t move and meanwhile he came closer—footsteps, breath—the tunnel suddenly and inexplicably empty.
“Sima.”
Her eyes widened, her heartbeat quickened, her mouth went dry.
He placed a hand on her arm, like a handle moved her toward him.
As in a movie she tried to shout, but found only her own breath, shallow.
“You dropped this, it’s yours—”
A postcard. Her name on it. An image of Hawaii on the front, her friend’s ridiculous bubble writing on the inside: thinking of you!!! A high school girlfriend she hadn’t heard from in years, married and then divorced (lower your voice), and now married again and on honeymoon and needing to plaster the world with images of palm trees, proof of her normalcy. Sima looked down at her handbag, realized she hadn’t closed her purse after taking out the dime. Somehow it had been pushed up and out.
“I didn’t know,” he said, “if it was important.”
She still stared at him.
“Your name was on it.”
Up close, he was younger than she’d thought. Not some noble beggar after all, but a young man sharp with the scent of liquor, and no excuse not to be working.
She nodded, took the postcard from him, careful to grab only the corner farthest away from his hand. “Thank you,” she managed, before retreating down the tunnel, taking the stairs two at a time.
They repeated the gas insufflation and scheduled a hysterosalpingography: a length of dye injected inside her, the x-ray tracing its path as she lay in the dark and prayed, make it all right, make it okay.
But it wasn’t.
“Sima,” the doctor asked, closing the door behind her, “do you know why you might have tubal scarring?”
She shook her head, no, watching him for the answer.
He sat down, smiled weakly. “This is a rather delicate subject, but—” he leaned back, drummed his fingertips against the table. “The kind of complete scarring you have seems to point to your having been exposed to—” he shifted forward, “a venereal disease.”
Sima looked down to the tan carpet, watched the individual weaves of knot blur beneath her eyes.
“Sima, have you asked your husband about his own,” he coughed, “proclivities?”
She focused on her feet. Her toes were visible in the buttonhole of the shoes; unpainted, yellow like the doctor’s teeth.
“Mrs. Goldner, I know how difficult this must be for you—”
“It wasn’t Lev.”
“I know you might feel that, but the facts remain that you’ve been exposed and—”
“It wasn’t Lev.”
The doctor drew in his breath. “Well then, Mrs. Goldner, how can you account for the fact that—”
She looked up. “It was me, it must have been me.”
He looked at her longer than she could stand, long enough that she envied the plaster bust on his bookshelf, wished she could be like that—without flesh, without feeling. She mutely accepted his censure, proud at least that she had defended Lev: he had done nothing wrong, and she wouldn’t let him be judged.
“Well,” the doctor said, taking a manila file from atop a tidy pile, “that’s that, then. The infection has run its course, so there’s no need for antibiotics for you or your husband.” He opened the file, glanced at a note scrawled within. “On the way out, please see Terry about the bill.”
Sima nodded. “And the next appointment?”
He looked up.
“To get rid of the scarring? To open up the tubes, right, we need to get rid of the scarring?” Sima paused, watched his face sharpen. “So I can have a baby,” she said, her voice wavering as she tried not to see the glint of his eyes, the long muzzle of his nose.
The doctor put down the file, brought his fingertips together like the schoolyard game—Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors, see all the people—leaned his chin on top. “Sima, I’m sorry if this wasn’t clear to you, but—”
The words ripped through her, cutting like scissors someplace secret, deep inside.
17
LEV KNOCKED ON THE BATHROOM DOOR. “SIMA? YOU’RE taking a bath?” She could hear him outside, shifting his weight, his hand on the doorknob but hesitant to enter. “Everything all right?”
“Of course, I’m taking a bath,” she said, speaking above the rush of water, though it was true it’d been years since she’d done so. She crouched to open the crowded cabinet beneath the sink, pulled out perfumed bath products from years of birthdays and anniversaries: bath salts and soaps and scrubs, bubbles and pearls and beads nestled in bright bottles; gifts from Lev and occasional customers that she’d smiled over and stored away, sa
ving for an occasion. Well, she decided, ripping the dusty wrap off a wicker gift basket, this was it.
The doorknob rattled again. “Sima, you sure—”
“Lev, what do you think I’m doing, slashing my wrists?”
“Sima?”
“A joke, Lev. Listen, just give me twenty minutes and then I’ll make dinner.”
She could hear him hesitate a moment before he answered—”Fine then, whatever you say”—listened to his slow-shuffle retreat: the television turned on, the newscaster’s voice rising.
She’d sent Timna home an hour early—too hard to keep up appearances in front of her—and when Lev looked up from his place at the table as she came up the stairs, the question, Why are you home so soon, forming on his face, she’d found herself overwhelmed, unable to answer. She’d rushed to their room, slamming the bathroom door behind her, quick as she’d run in years but not fast enough that he wouldn’t have seen her face collapse as she hurried past.
Sima stood, looked in the mirror. Heat steamed the glass, obscuring her reflection and muting the wet-redness of her skin. She unscrewed the cap on a mini-bottle of raspberry bubble bath, poured it into the tub.
It was hard to act normal after what Timna had told her. At least they might have mourned together, her own tears disguised as sympathy rather than selfishness, but Timna had insisted she was fine, and indeed had looked terrific, radiating energy as she moved about fitting shoppers, making small talk.
She’s in shock, Sima thought, as she slipped her hand under the water to check the heat, she doesn’t have the tools to deal with this loss and so she’s overcompensating.
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