“Yes, you should have told me,” he said, standing, looking down at her. “It wasn’t worth ruining our marriage over, Sima. It wasn’t worth it.”
After he left, she curled back to her side, brought her hands to just under her knees and held in the shaking. It was over. She’d leaned up against that terrible secret for so long that she wasn’t sure she could stand without it. A brain aneurysm, she thought, a stroke—anything to make her disappear. Lev would return to find her dead, suddenly cold like her own mother, pale above the bedspread.
But dark came and hunger and she was still alive. She went into the kitchen, prepared enough ravioli for both of them, delayed until the pasta turned cold before taking the food to the table, eating. She placed his leftovers in Tupperware, cleaned the dishes, retreated to the bedroom, waited. He can’t leave me, she thought, he can’t survive on his own. She’d always envied the way Art cooked and cleaned, but now she comforted herself with their differences: Lev doesn’t know how much laundry detergent to use, doesn’t know how to roast a chicken—she repeated the complaints that brought laughter from her customers, recited them in her head like a well-worn prayer.
He returned after she’d lain down for bed, worried, though she wouldn’t admit it, over where he’d been—stabbed in a gas station; pushed onto the subway tracks. When she heard the door open, she closed her eyes, whispered thanks.
There was enough light in the room that she knew he could see her, but he was silent as he undressed, brushed his teeth, urinated. She felt the rush of cold air as he peeled back the covers and then the warmth of his body beside her and still he said nothing. She had to speak.
“Well?” Her voice was not as gentle as she would have liked.
He was silent another moment while she listened to the shallows of his breath. “Goodnight, Sima,” he finally said.
“That’s all you have to say, ‘Goodnight’?” After hours of worrying over his response, she couldn’t stand to be ignored: he was cruel and uncaring, so indifferent to her feelings, so oblivious to her needs, that even her darkest secret was not worthy of anger. “What’s my punishment? What are you going to—”
“There’s no punishment, Sima.”
“Well, there has to be something. Doesn’t there have to be something, after all this time?” She hated him for making her beg for his rage.
His voice was even. “You’re the one who made the choice, Sima—”
“I was sixteen!”
“That’s not the choice I’m talking about.” He paused a minute before speaking. “You chose not to tell me, Sima. Decades you didn’t tell me. So what is it you want me to say now?”
Without thinking, she told him: “That you understand.”
“What would it mean, to understand? What would it change?” He folded his arms across his chest, each hand on the opposite elbow, holding. “It doesn’t matter anymore. You could have told me five, ten years ago—it’s all the same. But if you’d told me then, if you could have let me in then—” He paused; she could hear his breath become fuller. “We might be better people now, Sima. We might have had a better chance.”
It was the cruelest of all, his regret. She was the one who regretted, she was the one who mourned—never Lev, never before.
“Who wouldn’t?” she asked. “Who wouldn’t have been better, if only?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know anyone but us. It’s just a shame, is all, it’s all just such a shame.”
Sima had been to the mikvah, the ritual bath, only once before. Two days before her wedding she’d rung with a trembling hand the yellowed bell, immersed herself in water to enter the marriage clean, purified. Ten years later, she returned to the mikvah—a sort of goodbye.
An old woman, a paisley kerchief covering what remained of her hair, opened the door, led her inside. It smelled of damp and sourness; a blue-striped towel Sima remembered from five years before was still dangling from the ceiling, half-protecting a torn pipe. The walls were the green of hospitals and elementary schools; the floor a white tile faded gray round the edges.
The woman pointed toward a small room with a few lockers and some wooden benches. She spoke with an Eastern European accent, “Undress there, yes?” Sima nodded, entered the room.
Sima hadn’t intended, when she awoke that morning, to come to the mikvah. It was in line at the butcher that the sight of a yellow-haired child hiding behind her mother’s leg had made the envy rise up in Sima’s throat so that she felt, surrounded as she was by the torn, plucked bodies of birds, her own neck twisting, choking.
“I can see you,” Sima had joked to the hidden child. The girl, a look of fear on her face that Sima remembered from her own childhood when strange, smiling women would lean over to twist her cheeks, burst into tears.
“I’m so sorry,” Sima said to the mother who, pleased to be needed, bent down, whispered into the child’s ear something that made her laugh, “I didn’t mean to upset her.”
“What’s to be sorry for?” the mother answered. “You know how it is.”
Sima found herself saying, yes, of course she knew, her own child after all—so that she missed the butcher calling her number.
She passed the mikvah on the drive home; circled the block once and parked, leaving the meat on the front seat. Maybe if she’d gone regularly, she couldn’t help but think, after each period as prescribed, things would be different. At the very least she’d go now. Close up shop, she told herself, not smiling at her own dark humor.
Sima removed her clothing slowly, folding it in a neat pile on the narrow bench, and placed her jewelry—wedding ring, pearl earrings, cracked-leather band watch—in the pocket of her shirt. She walked naked to the sink, surveyed the various toiletries scattered beside it: a half-empty tube of toothpaste, perfectly rolled from the bottom up; one box of Q-tips, slightly worn from water around the blue cardboard edges; a cup filled with cotton balls; a pink bottle of nail polish remover; and a dozen or so plastic-sealed toothbrushes gathered into a loose pile. Sima brushed her teeth, cleaned her ears, and scraped with one nail the dirt from the others—not caring about the cold that blew in from the air duct. After spitting into the sink, she splashed it with water, then entered the shower. There was a sliver of green soap and a bottle of pink shampoo—she worked both into thick lathers before ducking under the water, closing her eyes as it ran hot down her back.
Sima walked dripping into the mikvah room. For once she did not cringe to hide her body as the attendant bent down to check that her toenails were unpainted, lifted her hair to confirm her earlobes were unadorned. The old woman assessed her briskly, professionally, and Sima relaxed under her disinterested gaze: she was just one more naked woman among the hundreds the attendant had seen, and what a relief to be so reduced. Without jewelry, makeup, polish, Sima descended the seven steps to the bath.
The water wasn’t as warm as she remembered; Sima shivered slightly, hesitated. She looked up at the old woman a moment, a tiny woman, shrunken, and, realizing for all their difference in age they were the same—thick inside with the green fur of mold, useless, over. She bent into the water.
She immersed herself completely so that not even a strand showed on the surface, once, twice. Arms and legs out, eyes open. Rising, she recited the blessing that praised God for the commandment of immersion. Without pausing, she recited the prayer she’d spoken as a bride: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who kept us alive and preserved us and enabled us to reach this season.” As she came to the final words, this season, Lazman hazeh, her voice cracked. The tears were warm on her wet face, and she bent down once more to blur them into the pool of water, hide them as she did late at night while Lev slept and she wept to her reflection in the bathroom mirror, taking some sympathy from the pained face that looked back.
“What’s the matter, dear?” the old woman asked when Sima stood again, her voice softer than Sima expected, soothing.
Sima shook her head in response, clenched her eyes s
hut.
“You’re married?
Sima nodded.
“Children?”
Sima placed a fist to her lips and bit, lightly, for control.
“Next time maybe. Every woman has that loss. How far along was it?”
“Two months,” Sima told her.
“Two months? Yes, it’s hard. Next time my dear. You’re still young.” The woman patted her head, absently, as Sima stepped out.
Sima dried herself carefully in the dressing room. She touched the scar on her abdomen, the purple mass. The woman must have been almost blind not to see it, her check for nail polish and jewelry a sham. Sima felt angry for a moment, wanted to report her. It was a ritual, after all; the attendant needed to be competent—things could happen, women could drown. But no, she was just an old woman in need of work. The children she’d had, at any rate, had left her on her own.
It’d been two months since the surgery. The nurse had told her to massage cocoa butter into the scar to keep the keloid down, but Sima had not bothered. For the first few weeks the scar was just a sharp surgical line, cutting from her belly button to her pubis—another red line, pointing. As it thickened and deepened in color, its drama seemed to justify her sadness.
She wanted the physical scar as a symbol of her loss.
“You don’t need it now,” the doctor had told her, “and with childless women there are all sorts of problems, cancer the worst of it, of course. Given your fibroids, I’d feel more comfortable just taking everything out. And these days a hysterectomy is really a very simple procedure.”
She was thirty years old.
Sima had nodded, signed the right forms. Lev ventured once to ask if she was sure about it. “Sure I’m sure,” Sima told him, unwilling to admit fear for worry it would stop her.
Lev did not press further.
Of course, she thought, he wouldn’t.
A few days after the surgery Lev wheeled her out of the hospital. The wheelchair was difficult to maneuver; Sima felt herself coming dangerously close to walls and corners at every turn. “Lev! Watch it!” she’d cried, surprised at how damaged her body felt, how vulnerable. She held her breath in the crowded lobby until, just outside the hospital doors, she was again allowed to stand.
Sima leaned against the windowed entranceway while Lev ran for the car, brought it up beside her. In the front seat was a stuffed animal, a small white bunny with pink eyes, ears, and nose.
“A bunny?”
Lev nodded. “For you. A gift.”
“It’s Eastertime. They sell these at the drugstore.”
Lev didn’t respond.
Sima rolled down the window, dropped the bunny into the parking lot. Despite herself, she watched it as they pulled away: it lay sideways on the cement, a few whiskers bent toward the sky.
Sima paused on her way out of the mikvah to open her purse, leave some money in the jar by the door. The kerchiefed woman did not close the door after her, and Sima, remembering her own mother, did not say goodbye.
JANUARY
20
SIMA FROWNED. IT WAS BAD ENOUGH TIMNA HAD abandoned Alon, looking for some bright-edged future that, Sima knew, would always be out of reach, but now she looked ill—her skin was pale, her lips chapped, dark roots were beginning to creep along the edges of her scalp. “Hello, doll,” Sima said as Timna entered the shop late that morning, pretending not to notice when Timna barely responded, draping her coat—some suede thing she got at a thrift store, not right for this weather when all the other girls wore ankle-length wool coats, proper—over her chair, though Sima had asked her before to hang it up.
“Were you out late last night?” Sima tried to sound casual, but she heard in the echo of her voice that ring of disapproval she’d always recognized in her own mother’s questions.
“Mmm. We went into the city, to the bar where Nurit works. We didn’t even stay so late. It just took forever for the train to come.” Timna crossed her arms on the table, laid her head down atop them.
“You took the train home?” This time she didn’t attempt to hide her judgment. “Timna, it’s not safe to take the subway alone at night, and so far—”
Timna turned her head so she faced Sima, but kept her eyes closed as she spoke. “I wasn’t alone. Shai and Nurit were with me.”
Sima nodded. She wanted to warn Timna that maybe these friends weren’t the right sort—going out late at night, returning by subway at all hours—but wasn’t sure what to say. “You’re just jealous,” Lev had told her when she complained to him that when Timna’s friends called the shop they never said hello to her, always asked for Timna with that flat, uninterested voice so many young people had these days, “it’s normal for a young girl to make friends.”
“I know what’s normal,” Sima said, making a show of unpacking the groceries, banging the cabinet closed, “but they aren’t nice, they aren’t friendly.”
Since her confession she and Lev had returned to the usual dull exchanges, and Sima didn’t know whether she was relieved or disappointed by that; she was forgiven, at any rate, but after so many decades of silence she wasn’t sure what forgiveness meant. She’d imagined fury, renunciation, but that kind of passion had disappeared, along with all others, years ago.
“They’re fine. It’s just a cultural thing, Sima. You know how Israelis are—sabra, remember?”
Sabra: the tough cactus hide, the juice of the fruit: prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside, as if a people could be reduced to a plant. “I don’t begrudge her friends,” Sima said, moving aside a carton of milk to make room for an orange juice container, “and I’m not just judging them on whether they say hello or not.”
“So what are you judging them on?” Lev asked.
She ignored the question, complained that he hadn’t told her the milk was almost gone and now she’d have to go back to the store. She was acting cowardly, she knew, but she couldn’t explain to him why she objected to Timna’s friends—that it just felt wrong, to replace Alon with a whole new crowd. If Timna could really do that, what sort of person was she? And if she couldn’t, and was just protecting herself by pushing him away—Sima knew this had to be the case—then it was her job to help Timna find her way back to him.
Timna opened her eyes wide, stretched her mouth in a yawn. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t come in so tired. I’m not sure why, but lately I’m just exhausted.”
“If you want to go home, rest—”
“Sima, you’re too nice to me. Maybe I just need some coffee. Is there some upstairs?”
“Of course, of course. Go, Lev will be thrilled to share some article with you.”
Timna stood and stretched her arms above her head, her hands clasped and her back curved. Sima watched as Timna leaned back, letting the stretch curve up and out through her body before bending over, wrapping her hands around her ankles, pressing her chest toward her knees. Like a Degas dancer, Sima thought, though she was aware of a tightness in the way Timna grasped her ankles, holding on, that she hadn’t noticed before.
Timna straightened. “And now for the coffee,” she said, smiling. “I have to admit, I think it beats yoga.”
Sima watched Timna disappear into the kitchen, listened to the warm hello, the rustle of Lev’s newspaper closing. She wiped the counter clean with a dry cloth, checked the change in the cash register drawer. In twenty minutes the shop would be crowded for the next five hours: women vying for Sima’s attention, calling to her from behind the dressing-room curtain. The bell rang as Timna walked down the steps: one hand on the mug handle, the other cradling the cup for support.
“You ready?” Sima asked.
Timna yawned, nodded. “Let’s go,” she said, and Sima pretended not to hear the exhaustion in her voice.
“How’s Debra?” Sima asked as she rang up Rose’s purchases, her voice just a hint louder than usual so that Timna, who was assisting a new customer, would hear.
“Oh,” Rose said, “The usual craziness. First she c
alls, says she’s moving back to Brooklyn, can we help her find a place. So, fine. Herbie spends the whole week driving around, making calls, looking at listings. Finally we find just the thing, a perfectly clean one-bedroom in a young area, right near Seventh Avenue. He calls her, and guess what? She changed her mind. Now she says maybe L.A.; she has friends there.”
Sima opened the neckline of a camisole, checked the price. “What friends, from here?”
“Who knows? I think she just wants to drive us crazy.” Rose sighed, placed her purse on the counter. “What do I owe you?”
Sima punched the numbers on her calculator. “One thirty-five,” she told Rose, “with the discount comes to one twenty-one, fifty.”
Rose opened her wallet, a black leather weave, and counted out the bills. “The last time I saw her,” Sima said, folding a camisole, two bras, and three pairs of underwear into a plastic bag, “was what, five years ago? She was just starting college and she bought that pushup bra, remember?” Sima saw Timna was turned just slightly toward them as her customer looked through the nightgowns, comparing colors.
Rose smiled thinly. “To think, we once fought over push-up bras. What I wouldn’t give to have arguments like that again.” She handed Sima the worn bills, let her wallet fall back into her purse.
“How long has it been?”
“Since college, actually. There she was with that impressive scholarship, and then—” Rose paused while Sima put the money in the register drawer, waited for the ring of the purchase to fade. “She stopped showering at one point. I never told you, but when Herbie and I first went up there, she had dreadlocks. Actual dreadlocks, from not showering.”
Sima glanced at Timna. “And how did you know to go there?” She raised her voice another notch, wanting Timna to know: sometimes an older perspective was necessary to see what was wrong.
“It didn’t take a brain surgeon. She stopped calling, and then when we called, she sounded distracted. And then—” she paused a moment—“that’s right, her roommate called, said she was worried.”
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