Bright Lines

by Tanwi Nandini Islam

  “Come with me. Perhaps I can get you some kind of discount. I am on the free-for-family plan.”

  “Sure. I could use the extra four dollars.”

  They walked over to Aman’s register.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got here,” said Aman, scanning Anwar’s purchases. “That’ll be twenty-three forty-nine.”

  “Wait, what are you doing?” asked Anwar.

  “Counting up what you’re taking, so you know how much you owe,” he replied, as if Anwar were a simpleton.

  Anwar set the bolt of silk down and searched his pockets, pretending to look for his wallet. “I—I did not bring any cash. In the past you’ve—” Anwar sniffed. “Very well, brother.”

  “I have enough,” offered Ramona. “It’s not a big deal.”

  Aman held up a hand to silence them. “This is a corporation, not some black market shampoo shop. I don’t do any favors for those who don’t do me any.”

  Ramona glared at Aman and slipped him her credit card.

  “I’ll pay you back as soon as we return to the house,” said Anwar, as they made their way through the automatic doors into the already sweltering morning.

  “What a pinche piece of shit,” muttered Ramona. “Sorry, I know he’s your brother.”

  “Whatever you said sounds about right,” said Anwar. “I’m so sorry. I will pay you back when we get back to our house. When I get back to my house, I mean, whenever you get back to your house—”

  Ramona laughed. “Why don’t we shave this off my next rent check?”

  “Then I’d have to explain to Hashi why and—oh, never mind.”

  “I understand,” said Ramona.

  “I’m walking home. Are you walking home? Do you want to walk home?”

  “Yes, let’s walk home.”

  * * *

  As Anwar and Ramona arrived at 111 Cambridge Place, he could hear the radio blaring from Hashi’s salon. There were two weddings this weekend. The last thing Hashi would want was for him to drop by with a bag of maxi pads. He didn’t feel like saying hello, or making small talk with the wedding party: “No-way-you-met-at-the-food-co-op?” “He’s-Jewish-and-Buddhist?”

  Anwar tied the plastic bag on the vestibule doorknob and leaned the bolt of fabric against the bannister. Hashi would find them eventually.

  Ramona zipped up the stairs in front of him. Step after step, he was captivated by her sashaying rear. He wanted to lay his head on it like a pillow.

  They reached the third floor.

  “I’ll come back to repay you for the items,” said Anwar.

  “I said no worries—”

  “I’m not letting you pay for my wife’s maxi pads. Will you be home for a while?”

  “Until my shift at ten, yes. Bye now.”

  Anwar rushed downstairs to his bedroom. He needed a smoke. He shook from the rush of electricity between his heart and crotch. He stepped on the chair and unlocked the attic door. His bare feet were sweaty on the rungs of the ladder. Once upstairs, he pulled the ladder back in and locked the door. He packed his pipe with a nugget of herb and took a long toke. He felt like he’d just run a mile. If he were indeed having a heart attack, smoking was a stupid idea. Ah, well. He puffed and paced. He bumped his head a few times against the wall he shared with Ramona Espinal.

  “Hello?” he heard Ramona say.

  Should I say anything?

  “Hello?”

  “Oh! It’s nothing! Hello!”

  “Anwar?”

  He tapped a faux Morse code against the wall.

  She tapped something back.

  He pressed his cheek against the cool drywall, and pictured a cross-section view of her doing the same.

  “Anwar?”

  “I want to—” he started to say, but stopped. He hurried himself over to his table to sit down. Where did he keep the key, the key that would open the partition? He went over to the wall and tapped his knuckles on it once more. She tapped an identical rhythm back to him.

  They did this a number of times.

  “Where are you?” she said, sounding as if she were speaking underwater.

  He found the key taped to the side of his refrigerator. Given his tendency to forget items in pockets and crevices, he’d taped it there a couple of years ago, before they’d even had a tenant. He removed the key and slipped it into the doorknob, praying for it to work, for it not to work.

  Ramona pulled the door open.

  She stood there wearing nothing but a pair of rather large underwear and a utilitarian-looking bra. Not what he’d pictured. Her body dripped with sweat—she did not have air-conditioning in her bedroom. His kind of woman.

  Anwar took a step forward and tripped on the matrix of extension cords on the floor. Every appliance she owned—iron, hair dryer, lamp, CD player—was plugged into a flimsy power strip. “Fire hazard, you know.”

  “Yes, Señor Propietario, thanks for your warning,” she said. They laughed and sat next to each other on her bed.

  Anwar felt her eyes on him, waiting for him to do something. But he’d already done the unthinkable: He’d walked through a wall.

  “It’s strange to have you over here like this,” said Ramona.

  “It’s strange to be here.”

  She sniffed the air. “I wondered if I were imagining marijuana.”

  “You are not imagining things. Do you want some? I can go get it—”

  “No. How about a drink? How about a shot of tequila?”

  “Tequila, I’ve not had since 1982!” he exclaimed. “No drinks, for that matter.”

  “Well, then, let’s drink some tequila.”

  She hopped off the bed and disappeared.

  In his fantasies, they never spoke. They never shared anything. They were just fucking. He looked around her room. She had built a bookshelf into the wall above her bed—a nice touch. He stared at some of the titles. The Bell Jar, This Bridge Called My Back, Ulysses, NCLEX-RN Examination, Davis’s Drug Guide for Nurses. She kept things pretty neat in her bedroom, besides the extension cords. Late afternoon light filtered through the blinds in stripes along the floor. Plants in plastic vessels dotted the windowsill. They needed watering.

  Ramona reappeared with a bottle of clear tequila marked TRES GENERACIONES, and two shot glasses—one held in her lips, the other balanced on her forefinger.

  “You have a lot of books.”

  “Yes.” She dropped the shot glass into Anwar’s palm.

  “You know the layout of your floor is like ours,” said Anwar. “I wanted to build two of everything, so that maybe I could have my own place within a place.”

  “No tengo limas. You’ll get the full taste.” Ramona poured the clear liquor into his tiny glass, and then into hers. She sat down next to him, and said, “On three . . .”

  “Let me try—” said Anwar.

  “Uno, dos, tres,” they counted together, laughing.

  Anwar felt his mouth explode. “Fire,” he sputtered.

  Ramona shook her head, feigning exasperation, and slid even closer to him. Her breast grazed his arm.

  “You know, I thought you had a boyfriend,” said Anwar.

  “I just broke up with my husband of seven years.”

  “Husband? The stocky man with a”—Anwar flicked an imaginary ponytail—“a rattail?”

  “Ha. Yes, that’s him.”

  “Your husband?”

  “Well, once upon a time we did it for the papers, but we were in love. Now I’ve got the papers, but there’s no love.”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “Hugo. He’s a biology professor at NYU.”

  “Biology professors have changed since my day. How did you meet him?”

  “We’ve known each other since we were in college in Mexico City, but we fell in love here.”<
br />
  She stopped speaking and poured another shot of tequila, and Anwar pushed his glass forward. Again they counted to three, but this time they said ek, dui, teen. The shot burned less this time around. He leaned forward and met Ramona’s lips. Each rapturous tickle of her tongue, each whiff of her breath that tasted like salt, breath mint, and tequila, engorged every cell in his body with desire.

  “What madman would ever let you go?” he found himself asking.

  “That’s the funny thing. He’s already let me go once before. But this time, he’s sure. He never wanted to be married.”

  “Not worth a second more of your time,” said Anwar.

  “It’s hard to just stop loving someone, no?”

  “You never will stop. But seven years, it’s not so long. Try twenty-five.”

  “I wish.” Ramona said the words with a touch of sadness.

  Anwar wanted to get her back to a kissing mood. Sometimes, talking it out did just the trick. “How did you two meet?”

  “We met in 1992. He’d just published his landmark publication, Coleópteros Británico (The Beetles). Others in the Biology Department were jealous of his success. His attitude was just like any other brilliant man. Ego, humongous. Dick to match. Always unchallenged. So when New York University offered him a tenured position, he accepted, and the night he told me this, he said he couldn’t get me a visa. I asked him to marry me.”

  “You asked him to marry you?” Anwar said, incredulous.

  “If I didn’t, he never would.”

  “He said yes?”

  “He didn’t answer me and we spent hours fucking, until we were too dehydrated to keep on. He snuck out while I slept, no good-bye, nothing. From that morning, I had massive headaches. Nothing could help me. La migraña, said the doctor, es por causo del estrés. No shit, I told him, of course I’m stressed. The doctor wrote me a prescription for painkillers and told me to think positive. I lay in bed, nibbling codeine, dousing it with tequila. Needless to say, I didn’t get better. This went on for four months; by the end of the term, I had failed every class. Dead broke, couldn’t afford our place, refused to move back to my parents’ house in Zacatecas, so I rode a bus north to Cuautitlán, to live with my cousin Leticia. She’d never been one for school like me, the family nerd, so she toiled at a Kimberly-Clark paper mill. Kotex pads, tampons, diapers—for babies and for old folks when they laugh or sneeze—it was that type of place, where all the girls felt plugged up in others’ shit, piss, and blood, just like nurses. A foreman called Pepe messed with Leticia. He favored his girls short, soft, and brown like caramels.”

  “Did you start working there?” asked Anwar.

  “Please, of course not. I was not about to start working in a maquiladora for shit money and perverted bastards. I kept trying to convince her to leave that awful place. One evening she agreed, after a treacherous day at the mill. We figured the highway toward Mexico City was a straight shot; all we needed to do was hitch a ride. We set out around four a.m., and scored our lucky break.”

  “Isn’t hitchhiking deadly business in Mexico?”

  “Not more than any other place. It was safer back then. We found a ride with two boys in a truck—brothers or lovers; we couldn’t tell at first.”

  “So, you hitched a ride with these fellows.”

  “Yes. So, the platinum blond, called Art, was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. He was studying moles in Oaxaca, where he seduced Paco, a Spanish national and fellow student at their cooking school. They skipped out of that town to play house in Mexico City, renting an apartment in Zona Rosa, but they decided to return to Phoenix to open a restaurant.”

  “The Spaniard was an illegal, too?”

  “Yes. And they just took a liking to us, I guess. They thought we were lesbians.”

  “Oh?”

  “My hairdo was short in those days.”

  “But how can you ride a car across the border? Don’t the police check everyone’s papers? I took a plane so I’ve no idea.”

  “Art, the solo American, drove us a mile south of the Arizona border checkpoint at Nogales. It was around eight o’clock in the evening. Deadly hot if you go any earlier in the day. You risk getting caught. Paco, Leticia, and I walked for three miles in the desert, armed with bottles of water, Paco’s flashlight, and each other’s company. I think we stopped once, when Leticia stepped in some prickly pear and we had to pull out the thorns. I don’t remember being afraid, but it’s easy to die of thirst. I don’t remember much except about the desert itself, for I was too captivated by the millions of stars guiding our way. El Carro guided us, all the way to the access road on Interstate 19, where Art was waiting in his pickup truck. We drove the next couple of hours to Phoenix. Leticia and I waitressed at their new restaurant, Los Amantes. We crashed upstairs, in a one-bedroom with three other waiters, well-bred men who offered us a curtained-off square, the size of a playground sandbox. Leticia married one of them, Victor, and they moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to start their own Los Amantes. I waited until Leticia left to telephone Hugo in New York. It was December twenty-fourth. I hoped that maybe the season, his birthday, and maybe, my voice, would soften him enough to score a plane ticket to New York.”

  “And he married you?”

  “Yeah. We loved each other. And I could get my degree.”

  “And now, you are no longer married.”

  “For now, we’re apart.”

  Anwar wanted to feel her as he’d fantasized about her. Without words. He pushed her back onto her bed and straddled her hips. He took a moment to look at her lying beneath him, sprawled open. She put her hands to his cheeks. He scratched her nails along his stubble as if it were an emery board. Her eyes twinkled—was it her story or the tequila? She leaned upward, until they were nose-to-nose. She wasn’t wearing a drop of makeup. There was nothing artificial about her.

  “You are beautiful, Ra-mo-na.”

  “That’s the tequila talking.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “We shouldn’t be doing this, Anwar.”

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No.”

  The glass honey jar he saw her use every morning was on the nightstand. He grabbed it and struggled to unscrew the lid.

  “This would be no problem if it were a plastic bear!” he grunted. “One moment—ah!” He rolled off Ramona, onto his back, and she propped up on her elbow, frowning. Trying with all his might, ek . . . dui . . . teen . . . finally, he popped open the jar. Debonair and determined, he dipped his finger into the honey, and stroked her collarbone with it. He licked it off her skin. Euphoria.

  She shuddered. He pressed his forefinger against her lips to tell her to be quiet. She fell backward onto the bed. He straddled her, feeling himself swell up against her pussy. With his finger, he painted her lips with honey, and bent down to kiss it off. They did this for what seemed like an hour.

  He pressed his hand against her crotch, but she shook her head no.

  “I guess diapers are the theme of the day,” said Anwar.

  He wanted to fuck her for hours and leave her there, begging him for more. He slid his rigid hard-on between her breasts, just as he had pictured—

  Ek, dui, teen, he counted his thrusts.

  Two minutes.

  A shudder of ecstasy.

  “Been a while?” Ramona asked.

  “You’ve no idea.”

  “I think I do.”

  “I—I must go back home.”

  “Of course.”

  Anwar crept out of her room. “See you—”

  “Soon,” she said.

  And once more, he walked through the wall, back to his side.

  * * *

  After a couple of puffs of the old pipe, Anwar passed out on the floor of his studio. A loud pounding beneath stirred him awake. He looked at the wall clock—i
t was eight p.m.

  He opened the door and nearly got hit in the head with a broomstick.

  “Arré! Watch it, Hashi!”

  “You’ll suffocate up there! What if you have a heart attack? We’d never know!”

  He checked his body for marks or stains—everything was intact. But just thinking of Ramona stirred his pants. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. “Coming, coming.”

  Hashi stood at the foot of the ladder, watching him miss the last rung. She wore a long robe over a silky mint green nightie. It clung limply to her breasts.

  He pulled her toward him, and rammed his tongue deep into her mouth. Hashi didn’t resist. He was surprised when she jutted her tongue against his.

  “You taste salty,” Hashi whispered.

  They collapsed onto the bed. Anwar pinned her down. She raised her backside without any cajoling on his part. He brought her bottom up and down, picturing Ramona until he finished.

  * * *

  Hashi lay naked on the bed, legs splayed open, like when they were first married. “Check the door, please. The girls walk in without knocking.”

  Anwar obliged and then rejoined her on the bed. Hashi wrapped her legs around his.

  Anwar looked up at the ceiling. “I wonder where all the bits of dust and matter go. Maybe we breathe it in.” He paused. He couldn’t make sense of this: He was able to fuck Hashi, for the first time in a long time.

  “Everything becomes dust, I suppose,” said Hashi, leaning her body in harder against him.

  Anwar wanted to go back upstairs, take a toke, steal his way into Ramona’s bed.

  16

  I hate Mondays, was Anwar’s first thought as he awoke to Hashi looming over him. He opened his eyes a sliver—she was whispering a quick protection dua and leaned over to kiss him on the forehead. She shook him. “Anwar? It’s already eight thirty. Aren’t you going to the office today? Do you want anything for breakfast?”

  He had never understood why the woman persisted in calling his store an office. “Unnnnh,” he moaned. “No, no breakfast. I am not hungry yet.”

  Hashi sat next to his head and started stroking his chin. “I heard your stomach rumbling; I can fix you something—”

  “No breakfast.”