Timna looked up at Sima, slowly shook her head. “Sima,” she said, pushing the door open with her shoulder, “enough.” She took the stairs two at a time—when had she last had such energy, Sima wondered—as she retreated, once again, into the night.
Sima watched her go; said nothing. “At least she’s not angry,” Connie pointed out when Sima called, quickly updated her on all that had happened—their argument, her failure to get Timna to reveal anything. Sima had agreed, said yes, thank goodness for that, though she suspected something perhaps worse than anger—sympathy maybe, or the leeway you give the crazy people in your life. When Connie began to talk about J-Date—“You have no idea, Sima, the number of single Jewish men out there. And can you believe my own grandson showed me how to use it?”—Sima made an excuse to hang up.
She’d been in the basement a full hour when she heard Lev open the basement door, begin to slowly descend the stairs—pausing midway, she knew, for her to interrupt him, say don’t come down, I was on my way up. “What is it?” Sima asked instead, massaging her temples when she knew he was looking.
Lev’s white undershirt was stained with coffee from that morning; his navy slacks were faded along the thighs. “You eating dinner?” he asked.
Sima looked at him and then away, annoyed. “What, you want me to cook you something? You see I’m in the middle of this.” She hadn’t told him what had happened with Timna, dreading his I-told-you-so’s, which, she’d have to admit, would be called for. For all her meddling she’d done nothing to help Timna, nor was she any closer to the truth of what had happened.
“There’s nothing to eat.”
“So? You want to go out and get something? You can pick us up falafel.”
“Sima, it’s pouring rain. I don’t want to go out.” Sima recoiled at the whine in his voice. “You’re like a big baby, always needing to be fed.”
Lev didn’t respond.
She sighed loudly. “Okay, if you help me a few minutes, then I’ll come up after and cook something, okay?” Lev nodded.
“Okay then. I need you to open that box over there,” Sima motioned toward a small package by the door, “and check the contents against the packing slip. All right?”
Sima bent over the accounting book while Lev inspected the box. He pulled at the packing tape, and when he couldn’t scratch it loose, stood up and walked slowly toward her, searching.
“What now?” Sima asked.
“Do you have scissors?”
“Lev, where do you think you’ll find scissors, on the counter?”
Lev looked at her, didn’t respond.
“No, by the sewing machine. Come on, use your head. You don’t need me to tell you everything.”
Lev walked over to the machine. He shuffled items around the table: a pad of paper, pieces of fabric, a few spools of thread. Not finding what he wanted, he turned to Sima, mouth open to ask a question, but seeming to think the better of it, lowered his head, opened a small drawer beneath the machine, and drew out the scissors from between rolling bottles of nail polish.
He returned to the first box and began cutting away the tape, pausing halfway to tear off the pink packing slip where it was set in plastic. After opening it, he carefully removed the top sheets of tissue paper, turned toward Sima, and waited a few moments for her to notice him. When she didn’t he asked, “Sima, you want to keep this?”
Sima looked up, annoyed, but nodded her head yes, and Lev carefully folded the paper into a small square that he placed on the floor. Reaching in, he pulled out an extra-large navy blue cotton camisole.
“Ooh, hold that up for me.”
Lev held it up against himself.
“Very nice. Don’t you think that’s nice?”
Lev looked down. “I guess so. Sure.” He folded the camisole, placed it atop the tissue paper.
“Hold on, let me check it off the invoice.” Sima put out her hand, and Lev brought her the pink packing slip. “Okay,” she said, crossing the camisole off the item list, “what’s next?”
Lev reached into the box. “Red nightgown.”
“Sheer Sheath, Scarlet.”
“Ummm … green cotton tank top.”
“Hunter camisole. Right. Next.”
“Blue. … What is this?” Lev held a powder-blue corset from which a pair of G-string underwear dangled by a thin, plastic cord.
“That’s a bustier and underwear.”
Lev turned it over in his hands. “Really?”
“Uh huh.”
“How does it work?”
Sima looked at him slyly. “Stand up.”
“Why?”
“Stand up.”
Lev stood.
“Take off your shirt, then.”
“Sima?”
“Come on, Lev. Timna does it.”
“But Timna’s a woman.”
“Well, half the women I service have bodies not so different from yours. All of these items are plus sizes, and Timna can’t try them for me, but you can.”
“So can you.”
“No, it wouldn’t be right for me to do that—it should really be an employee, not the business owner.” “I’m not an employee.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem you have a job other than this one, so that makes you my employee.”
Lev weighed the pale silk item in his hands, considering. Sima watched eagerly, slightly desperate. “Come on, Lev, it’ll be fun,” she said, “Then I’ll cook dinner, I promise.”
He hesitated.
“It’ll just take a minute. Please?”
With his arms crossed he lifted his shirt over his head. His belly showed a slight half-moon above his belt, his own breasts pulled toward his stomach. Sima stepped behind him and opened the corset around his stomach, pulling it across his back with gripped hands.
“See? It doesn’t fit me,” Lev told her.
“It’s supposed to be tight. Stay still, I’ll get a safety pin.” She moved quickly—even a little eager hop—to the sewing machine, rummaged through a drawer and then dashed back to secure both sides of the corset with a large pin.
The metal was cold against his skin. “This is horrible, Sima.”
“You think? I think it’ll look nice on you. Turn around.”
Slowly, Lev turned around. The skin on his chest swelled above the top of the corset.
“Okay. How does it feel?”
“The wire is digging into my skin.”
“Stop complaining. Go look in the mirror—see how it shapes you.”
Lev walked to the dressing room, pulled aside the heavy curtain. Sima stood behind him, saw how the whiteness of his body surprised him: so many pale folds, so much exposed. Lev pushed a thin strand of gray hair away from his face and lifted his hand to smooth down the remaining hairs across his scalp, but glancing at the flesh of his armpit exposed—a deep recess shadowed gray—quickly brought his hand back down, pawed at the corset.
A scrim of sweat appeared on the fabric. “I can’t undo it, Sima, help me.”
Sima undid the pin. When she peeled off the corset, there were red lines on Lev’s body.
Lev turned away from the mirror. “Okay, now can we have dinner?”
“Of course. But first we have the whole box to go through.”
“Sima, are you out of your mind?”
“It’s a small box, Lev.” She held out a yellow kimono. “Here, try this. It’s easier.”
Lev waved it away. “Sima, I’m not playing dress-up! Enough!”
“But we’ve just begun.”
“I said, enough. If you want Timna to be your little doll, fine. But I won’t do it.”
“This has nothing to do with dolls,” Sima said, thinking how little he knew, how little control she had over Timna. “It’s about business.” She looked down at the kimono. “You know, you’d look awful in this.”
Lev reached for his undershirt, pulled it on. “Thanks.”
“Don’t take offense—everyone looks awful in yellow. I can’t imagi
ne why Timna chose that color.”
“Well, you can ask her tomorrow,” Lev said, moving toward the staircase. “I’m going to get dinner, with or without you.”
“Without me.”
“Fine. Be that way.”
Sima watched him turn away. “Thanks a lot,” she said, wanting suddenly to stall him, “I ask for one simple favor, but as usual—”
Lev paused, tightening his grip on the banister. “As usual I disappoint you? I’m sorry if that’s true, Sima, but I think this time you’re asking too much.”
“You don’t trust me.”
Lev turned around. “What are you talking about?”
“You should just assume, after all the time we’ve been together, that, if I ask you to do something, it’s for a reason. But instead you always doubt me.”
“Sima, how can you say I doubt you?” He stepped off the staircase, back toward her. “I’ve given you my life.”
“Some life,” Sima responded, whispering so he could hear.
“What?”
“Some fucking life.” She knew she shouldn’t say it, but once again felt she couldn’t stop.
“What are you talking about?”
There was a pleading in his voice, desperation. She hardened against it. “I’m talking about you. I’m talking about what, over forty years at that school and not a single student keeps up with you, not a single coworker calls? All this time we’ve been married and it’s all on me; I’m the one has to keep you fed, clothed, and then also provide the entertainment.”
“You want entertainment? That’s what you want?” Lev walked quickly toward the open box, reached in and removed a lace nightie. He pulled it over his head, tearing the arm slightly as he did so.
“You’re tearing it!”
“So what? It’s entertainment, right? It’s always fun to laugh about me, right? Without me to make fun of, you wouldn’t have any material for your friends anyway.” The nightgown clung to Lev’s body, lavender lace veiling his undershirt, gathering in a ring around the belt line of his pants.
“That’s just the way women talk.”
“Yeah? Well most women do more than talk.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He paused. “Most women, Sima, most wives, love their husbands. Make them feel loved.”
Sima looked at him, furious. “You’re talking about sex. I don’t have a goddamn uterus. Sex can’t do anything for me—”
“It can’t do anything, huh? And I can’t do anything, either.” Lev pulled off the nightgown, threw it back in the box. “Is that all you think about, who can do what for who? At least I don’t spend all my time trying to control everyone else.”
Sima stared at him. “Did Timna say something to you?”
“About what?”
“I called Shai,” Sima said. “I called Shai to find out what was going on, so I could help, but then Timna got back together with Alon—”
“Alon in Israel, her old boyfriend?”
Sima nodded. “We had a talk, and I told her she was pushing him away from fear, that it took courage to stay—” Sima looked at Lev. “It’s a long story. She listened to me and called Alon, and they decided to give it another chance, but when I told her I’d spoken to Shai, of course she was furious—” Sima paused for Lev to ask, what did she say, the inevitable excitement of someone else’s terrible story, but he just looked at her, waiting.
“She didn’t come in yesterday at all. When she came in today, things were a little more like normal, but then you know what she said? She said I should stop interfering in her life and pay attention to my own.” She looked at Lev. “Maybe it’s true that I try to control too much. But believe me, it’s not for me. It’s for you, for Timna. I care so much about her, I try—”
“I know, I know.” Lev shook his head slowly. “But what about your own life, Sima? What about me?”
Sima stared at him. “You want this?” she asked. She undressed quickly, dropping her green turtleneck sweater and gray wool pants beside her; she unfastened the thick, tan strap of her bra, lowered the belly-hugging underwear, kicking away the socks beside her. “This is all I have, is this what you want?”
The scar, white as bone, seemed to glow on her body, cut the round swell of her stomach in two, point a way between the heavy, brown-nippled breasts and the curl of her pubic hair, gray against the pale flesh of her thighs. Sima watched as Lev looked at her body: the thick of her ankles, the fold above her knees, the hair and the scar and the pull of her breasts and the veins, blue and still, waiting, on her neck. She stood before him, exposed, readied herself for his rejection—he’d turn away in disgust, she’d be left, for the second time, alone in the basement, abandoned.
Lev looked up, meeting her eyes. “Yes.”
Sima was sixteen the summer she worked as a camp counsellor at Pinocchio Village Summer Day Camp, in charge of eleven nine-year-old girls. The girls made brightly colored construction-paper chains; sang Elvis Presley songs; practiced first, second, third position, their skinny legs pointed out at the knees; scrambled up and down the plastic slide that Sima, at their pleading, coated with water for coolness. Behind the fence was the rush of traffic, but on the rubber mats of the playground, fitted together like fingers intertwined, the girls sat in rows sipping milk from mini-cartons.
Afternoons Sima stewarded the girls across the street, single-file holding hands, to the pool inside the boys’ yeshiva. It was a new building, all brown tiles reflecting the glare from the lights above. The girls ran along the empty hallways, wearing their towels like capes and calling partners for underwater tea parties.
“You can’t swim?” one of the lifeguards asked the first day, grinning. There were two of them, but he was the good-looking one, and it was obvious from the way he teased each girl—rustling hair, making up nicknames, introducing himself not as Stan but “The Stan”—that he knew it. Sima shook her head no, dangled her feet in the pool.
“Come on, you at least have to put on a suit.”
“I didn’t bring one.” Her terrycloth shorts were damp from the wet concrete; she felt conscious of his eyes on her, reddened slightly. He was older than she was—eighteen, nineteen? His cheeks and neck were shaded with stubble.
“Uh-oh,” he said, shaking his finger at her in mock imitation of Mrs. Lewis, the camp director. “Unprepared.”
Sima practiced a pout. “Very funny.” She concentrated on acting self-assured and sexy, like the women who lounged beside pools in movies: Grace Kelly, Katharine Hepburn.
“Next time,” he told her, before turning his attention to her campers, their lips already purple with cold, to instruct them on the dead man’s float.
“Let’s try away from the pool edge, okay?”
Sima and Stan stood knee-deep in water, facing each other. He gave her a confident smile, told her she was ready. She nodded. He’d had her kick her legs while holding on to the pool wall for two afternoons already, concentrating on her while Bernie, the other lifeguard, took charge of the children with only a little protest.
Sima breathed in deep, half-lowered her body a few times, tried, unsuccessfully, to let go of the ground and float. She didn’t trust that the water would support her, imagined it parting beneath her only to gather above her sinking body, a ceiling she would not be able to break through to breathe.
She lifted her legs a few times, reached up her arms to dive forward, but couldn’t let herself go. “I give up,” she told him, hoping her fear seemed flirtatious rather than pathetic. “I can’t help it; it scares me.”
Stan held his arms out below the water. “Okay, just lower yourself onto my arms. That’s right. I’ve got you.”
Sima lay lightly across his arms, bent her head into the water. Gone were the sounds of the children: the songs and splashes and high-pitched screams. She was weightless, and he was holding her; when he tipped her to him, moved her body against his own—her hips touching the wrinkled waist of his swim trunks, the soft hair of hi
s belly—a heat coursed through her, and with that heat a fear deeper than water.
Sima opened her eyes beneath the blue, parted her legs, and, reaching forward with both arms, pushed herself free. By the time she realized she was swimming, she’d already escaped Stan’s reach, and though she nearly stopped herself with the surprise of it, she forced herself to keep going instead: head above water, arms paddling furiously, legs kicking wild splashes up and down.
Stan chased.
Sima laugh-shrieked, swerving to stay free while Stan’s fingers brushed her ankles, gripped her calves. He stopped her near the deep end, waited for her to catch her breath—she’d raised her elbows to the concrete edge, attempted a nonchalant pose though it made her arms ache—before gathering her to him, bringing her back into the water where, kicking for them both, he kissed her.
Some of the girls noticed and cried out, but Sima didn’t listen. His lips tasted like chlorine: clean and sharp. She kissed back.
Sima sent the girls up to the locker room without her, and stayed behind, as she’d taken to doing the last few weeks, to say goodbye to Stan. They made a production out of it, as her mother would have said: each kiss was supposed to be the last, but then one or the other would smile or stare or hold on a little too long until it was another kiss, and then another, and then just one more.
Stan wrapped his arms around Sima’s waist. He pressed against her more closely than usual; she stepped back, unsure about such intimacy. She wanted him near, thought about him constantly, but when she was actually with him, found he scared her too. It had happened so quickly: the summer, Stan, their stand-up kisses in the hallway. Sometimes she still didn’t quite believe it: an older boyfriend, with his own apartment—like something out of a movie, something she’d never dreamed could never be hers.
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