But, she thought, wrapping her arms around his neck, it was.
Stan stepped forward, keeping her close until her back knocked against the hallway wall. “Now I’ve got you,” he whispered, his lips close to her ear. She laughed a little too loudly, and then louder still when he brought his hand to her collarbone, traced it slowly. He walked his fingers along her breastbone, pulled the neckline of her bathing suit away from her skin, and dipped his hand down her body.
Sima stood on the slick tile, conscious of the awkward pull of his hands, the uneven edge of his breath. She reached her arms around his back, thinking to tell him, as her nails caught lightly along his bare skin, that she had to go: the girls would be almost changed by now, they’d be waiting. “Stan,” she began, speaking softly, but seeing him so close before her—his eyes closed, mouth open, face soft with wanting—leaned forward instead, brought her lips to his.
So this is love, she thought, as she moved her body against him, so this is what it feels like.
* * *
“Here we are,” Stan said, holding open the door to his apartment. “Home sweet home.”
Sima laughed nervously. Stan had been inviting her to spend the night at his apartment almost since they’d first kissed; it had become a joke between them: Stan asking, Sima saying no. She wasn’t sure why she’d said yes the last time—just for something different, maybe, just to surprise him. It worked: he took her hand, squeezed it hard. “Friday night, then,” he’d said, as she turned to join the girls, “no backing down now.”
Sima nodded, the feel of his hand still warm on her wrist as she’d bounded up the staircase to the locker room, hurried the girls back to the day camp.
No backing down, she thought as he stood aside to let her enter, no turning back. She’d lied to her mother, told her she was spending the night with Connie. Her mother, as usual, was distracted, hadn’t asked any questions. “Sima’s such an easy child,” Sima had once heard her tell a neighbor, “she never does anything, so I never have to worry.”
Stan’s apartment was small but clean: a bookcase in one corner of the main room, a radio on a small desk in another, a brown tweed couch in between with two wooden chairs facing. He shared it with a roommate who wasn’t there when Sima arrived; “Out of town,” Stan said vaguely, “for the weekend.”
Sima nodded, though she knew he was lying: as if either of them knew anyone who went away weekends, as if that was something young people did.
She didn’t mind the subterfuge, feeling it only added to the glamour of the moment: the bachelor apartment and the out-of-town roommate, even the most mundane items—two clowns dancing across the needlepoint surface of a throw pillow, a cue stick leaning against the kitchen’s slat-door—proof of an exalted life, one lived away from family, independent.
When he lay her down on the couch, her whole body shook. She’d borrowed a bra from Connie that Stan undid with one hand while the other reached for her foot, brought it up bent around his back. As he unbuttoned her blouse, she thought of her mother, imagined her discovering the truth, finding her with Stan. Sima brought her arms across her breasts, wanting to hide, but Stan kissed each wrist as he pushed them away, lowered his hand to unbutton her shorts. His weight was heavy and warm and safe above her; she closed her eyes as she pictured the two of them under water, free.
When the pain came, it tore inside, and she resisted for a moment pushing him away but instead wrapped her arms across his back, held on tight. Afterwards, when she’d wept and he’d kissed her and she’d told him she loved him and he’d repeated it back to her, she moved toward him again and this time, as she allowed herself to touch his body—her fingers circling a small mole below his bellybutton, brushing lightly down his sides to make him laugh—understood how to coax from him the ragged breaths, and then again, as he ran his hands down her back, how to yield to them herself.
It was only kissing that got them caught.
It was so unlike her not to hear the footsteps, Sima would later think, because all her life she’d been listening, concentrating on the movements of others as always so much more important than her own. Lou slamming the refrigerator shut, her mother yelling, “Don’t slam!”; Max pouring juice and the drip-drip of some of it on to the floor; her mother switching off the radio, a hum to silence, calling “Dinner!”; her mother cursing as the dishcloth slipped, her hand touching the burning edge of the pot as she served the chicken: “Damn!”; the wet slap of meat on their plates, the smack of mouths closing around food; the scrape of chairs being pushed back as Max and Lou stood to leave, her father this time, “You didn’t even have time to chew,” and her mother, “Don’t!”, as too late the door slammed again; the fade of steps in the stairwell, the rolled-marble of her father cracking his knuckles, her mother’s lowered voice, worse than raised: “Why do you have to do that, you know it drives me crazy”; Sima shuffling to the sink, her arms cradling dishes to lightly lower to the counter, careful not to crash, not to bang, because after all, it is better not to make too much sound.
In the weeks and months that followed, Sima would go over it again and again in her head—how could she not have heard Mrs. Lewis approach? How did she not hear the footsteps, the click-clack of heels rather than the soft suction of the children’s plastic pool shoes?
The answer: for those few moments her body was so taken with Stan’s that everything else disappeared, the only sensation his mouth, his hands. For those moments her mind was blank, empty but for the warmth of him.
She would never be that way again, her whole life.
“Well!”
When Sima heard Mrs. Lewis’s cry, she pushed Stan away so violently that she banged her own head against the tile wall, turned to see Mrs. Lewis shaking her finger, “Shame on you, shame,” as the pain swept across her skull and the chlorine burned her nostrils. Sima looked down, suddenly shocked by her own body: her stomach swelling under the damp navy swimsuit, her thighs wide and fleshy, goose-pimpled purple, her feet pale and veined, toes splayed on the mildew-spotted floor. From the corner of her eyes she saw Mrs. Lewis’s finger condemning her, and she wished to slip under the tile as into the pool, to become once again both whole and weightless in the water’s grasp.
“Get dressed, and come straight to my office!”
Sima, released from the place where the finger, shaking, had held her, took the stairs two at a time in her rush to escape.
She expected to hear him follow, chasing her again. She expected even then, despite the flip-flopping heat in her stomach, for him to grab her ankle, touch her leg, for the two of them to collapse together laughing, for him to kiss her fears away, plot the lies she’d tell her mother, for them to spend the rest of their now-empty summer days together, and then all their lives after that. She changed quickly, roughly drying her body with the towel, waiting for his tap on the locker room door, his apologetic kiss on the nose.
She checked herself in the mirror: dotted on lipstick, pinched her cheeks pink, practiced a you-have-to-admit-it’s-funny grin to hide the shame she felt circling inside.
There was no one outside the locker room, in the hallway, on the sidewalk. Maybe they’re taking the girls up, Sima told herself as she crossed the street back to camp. She needed Stan more than the girls did, but she forced a smile to think of him holding their hands, promising whoever changed fastest a piggyback ride across the street.
She knocked on Mrs. Lewis’s door, glancing through the hallway window to the yeshiva across the street—he still hadn’t emerged, and why not—before heeding Mrs. Lewis’s “Come in.”
Mrs. Lewis sat behind a metal desk, a stack of envelopes on either side of her. As Sima entered, she brought an envelope from the pile on her left toward her lips, licked it closed, and placed it in the pile on the right. Sima watched the slow curl of her tongue, the wet path it left on the paper. “I don’t need to tell you,” Mrs. Lewis said, picking up the next envelope, “that you’re fired,” tongue arched, a thin line of saliva clinging to
the paper, “Stan will stay, of course,” closing the flap, snapping the saliva, “since we need lifeguards,” placing the sealed envelope to her side, “I already spoke with him about it,” picking up another from the pile, pointing the tip of her tongue along its edge, “and he has agreed.”
Sima didn’t reply, concentrated on breathing. She felt dizzy, nauseated—Mrs. Lewis’s tongue uncurling against her neck, licking a moist trail along her throat.
“Are you surprised?” Mrs. Lewis asked, arching her eyebrows at Sima’s silence. “But you must see,” she said, an envelope in her hands, her tongue, pink, moving slowly against the glue, “his behavior is more understandable.” She placed the envelope at her side, smiled at Sima. “It’s no shock that he doesn’t respect you, Sima. What’s surprising is that you don’t respect yourself.”
An underwater echo filled Sima’s ears; she heard the tick of the clock, the brush of Mrs. Lewis’s nails against the cream-colored envelope, the buzz of the light overhead, trapped in its round metal cage. She found herself signing a form, accepting a check, lifting her hand in a timid goodbye that Mrs. Lewis did not acknowledge, all the time nodding her head as if to say, I understand, while the green colors of the room—pine-marbled tile; mint walls; olive leather chair—swirled around and over her, finally floating her out of the office, down the hallway, and past the plastic-mat courtyard.
Sima stood still, feeling the waves recede. Then she ran, lurching, two blocks, before leaning against an apartment building, vomiting onto the sidewalk.
When Sima didn’t hear from Stan, she called, mouth pressed close to the receiver ready to whisper. When he did not answer, she took to walking down his block, hoping to bump into him. One afternoon Sima waited for Bernie outside the yeshiva, asked him, not caring how desperate she might seem, where Stan had gone. He told her he’d taken a position as a beach lifeguard somewhere in Queens. And then, blushing, he asked if she was free that Friday night.
She walked away, wishing she had the courage to slap him; leave him stinging on the street.
To Connie she only said, “He was getting boring anyway,” and never told what happened between them.
Two years later she passed Stan on Coney Island Avenue, holding hands with a Polish girl. Sima put her head down to hurry past but knew anyway he would not recognize her; her body had changed since he knew it, the stretch marks curving over swelling skin, and though she’d taken to pounding her hips each evening, they had not gone away. She turned to see how the blond leaned lightly into him as they walked, and she dug her nails into her palm till it hurt—what you deserve, she told herself, all you deserve.
27
EVEN AS SHE WALKED THROUGH THE ENTRANCE TO THE bar, Sima thought, I’m going too far, I should not be doing this. Somewhere she was watching herself through her own fingers, humiliated yet unable to look away.
She’d followed Timna from the subway. They’d gotten off at Union Square again and walked the same streets, and Sima had worried it would end the same—Timna would disappear into the tenement, and how much used clothing would Sima buy before she gave up on trailing Timna? But instead Timna entered a bar, and Sima could see from the way she pulled open the door, stepped inside with her mouth already opening for hello, that she’d been there before.
Sima had hesitated, but only for a moment. She was wearing the green coat, and had tied the rose scarf around her hair like a kerchief. Timna wouldn’t recognize her, or not right away at least. She counted to five and then ducked inside.
Inside it was crowded, dark, loud. Sima pressed against a back wall, breathed deeply while she surveyed the room. In the center two anorexic women moved languidly behind a long bar, seemingly unaware of the crush of young people who waved bills and flashed smiles as they pressed against the wood counter, desperate to be served. Sima looked for Timna, but couldn’t see her. So many of them looked something like her—the same clothes, the same attitude—but none, Sima felt, had her beauty.
She forced herself away from the wall, watched as a young woman, her pierced belly button visible beneath a striped halter top, slid off her stool and walked to the back of the bar. Following, Sima passed through a narrow corridor that opened into a second room, just big enough for a pool table and a ring of bar stools around it.
Timna, leaning over the pool table, eased the cue stick through her fingers. Sima watched as she looked up at the man across the table—dark hair, a few Chinese letters tattooed around one arm—and grinned.
A gasp, a grunt, a sound Sima had never heard, wouldn’t have recognized as coming from her, escaped; she brought her hand to her throat as Timna turned toward her.
Sima turned faster. Pushing her way through the crowd—a few bored glances following her retreat—she rushed out of the bar and across the street, thinking only: hide.
On the opposite corner was another bar.
Sima slipped inside.
“What can I get for you?”
Sima was startled when the bartender addressed her. She hadn’t realized she’d come so close, hadn’t tried to catch his eye. But then the bar was practically empty: a young couple at one end, the woman slowly shredding her paper coaster; a man her age a few stools closer, the New York Post open on the counter beside him.
“Do you want a drink?” The bartender had greasy hair and sinewy arms; a black tattoo—a bird? a bat?—took up all the skin between his wrist and elbow.
Sima glanced at the shelves behind him, the colored-glass bottles arranged in straight lines. “A Bloody Mary,” she told him, remembering a wedding a few years ago when she and Connie had drunk three, giggling each time they’d returned to the bar.
The bartender brought her drink; Sima stared at it, unsure. The coast is clear, Sima thought, remembering the phrase from childhood games of Kick the Can. She could leave, go home, and deny everything tomorrow morning. Of course it wasn’t her, she’d tell Timna, why would she have been in a bar—
“New in town?”
It took a moment before she realized she was being spoken to. The man beside her set aside the newspaper, smiled at her. Sima thought to move away, but noticing what he wore—a button-down shirt and gray slacks, no visible tattoos—decided there was no reason to be rude.
“New in town? I was born here.”
“Here, here?” He tapped the bar.
“At the bar? No. In Brooklyn.”
The man laughed. “Fair enough.” He introduced himself, told her his name was Patrick and that he was from Queens. “Pleased to meet you, Sima,” he said, putting out his hand, and Sima, again not wanting to be rude, took it.
As she sipped her drink, Patrick told her about himself: how he’d been a housepainter but was now retired, swam in the mornings and took a few classes at Hunter in the afternoons—criminal law, history—sometimes came here in the evenings, just a place to unwind, meet new people.
He smiled when he said that, and Sima, ashamed, looked away. She considered leaving, but Patrick ordered another beer and she felt it’d be rude to leave before that arrived. While she waited, she sipped her cocktail, and he told her about his grandchildren, as if of course she’d be interested. “The youngest is only five so I don’t expect I’ll make it to his wedding,” Patrick said, taking his pint from the bartender, “but the twins are fourteen already, so with them I have a chance—”
Sima smiled. Her customers made similar comments all the time. They wanted to live to see their grandchildren born, and then their grandchildren bar mitzvahed, and then their grandchildren married, and then the great-grandchildren. And it went like that, around and around, and some of them did and some of them didn’t.
She wouldn’t.
She sat beside Patrick and sipped her drink and, when she finished it, allowed him to buy her another. “It’s on me, Sima,” he said, and though she knew that it was the oldest trick in the book, she nodded demurely; it’d never been her book, after all. She faced him as he spoke, and she laughed, giving in to the warm fuzzy feel of the alcoh
ol.
Patrick wasn’t bad-looking, she noticed. Bald but for a ring of white hair along the bottom of his scalp and his belly a soft paunch, but he hadn’t fallen apart as some men did: long hairs in their ears and nose, dandruff on their eyelashes, shaving cuts on rough cheeks as if suddenly they were teenagers again, unsure with the razor blade. His eyes were warm hazel; his shoulders still broad from years of labor. She nodded eagerly when he mentioned the neighborhood, how it had changed, and made him laugh when she told him about Liza, the homing device for used coats.
Still, some of herself she kept separate. In the separate part she pictured Lev on their bed and the empty space beside him that was hers, and even as she leaned over to look at pictures of Patrick’s grandchildren—a tangle of kids on a front stoop, the oldest at the top with a baby on his lap—she was waiting to return to that spot.
But it was also all right, she told herself, to watch as his hands curled around his beer glass and think, vaguely, of what they would feel like on her body: cool and soft and knowing and sure. “Do you know what I mean?” Patrick was asking, and Sima nodded. She hadn’t really been paying attention—something about his wife, cancer—but she knew the question. How many women had asked the same of her, about their breasts and and bodies, about their children, husbands, parents.
“Do you?” Patrick asked. “That kind of loneliness, it’s like a punch in the gut.”
Sima nodded, but in her own mind she thought not like a punch but a stab, a knife where it’s warm and dark and the cut of the steel takes your breath.
He was looking at her now, and in that separate part of herself she called, Lev! and he rolled over in their bed and she moved in to the warm space beside him.
“Should we go?” he asked her. “It’s a little cold outside, but sometimes I like walking in the winter. You?”
She was so far from Lev and he would never find her. She left the bar.
Sima's Undergarments for Women Page 22
