Sima's Undergarments for Women

by Ilana Stranger-Ross

  She almost missed the house. A disappointment: an entirely ordinary brick home. The cement steps could use a new coat of gray paint, but the living room curtains hung clean and pink in the wide front window. Semidetached, a narrow alley separated the house from its neighbor on one side. Stepping forward, Sima peered down the thin passageway.

  She was looking for something magic. If not in the façade of the home, then in a glimpse of garden out back: bluebells, beanstalks. Instead she saw only two olive garbage cans beside a chain fence. Above her, a thin piece of wire connected the house to its neighbor, part of the figurative gate, eruv, that enclosed Boro Park: thin plastic string wound from telephone pole to street sign, the neighborhood itself drawing its arms around the residents, allowing the women and men to push strollers and carry keys on Shabbat. Volunteers patrolled Boro Park’s eruv each week, alert to even the smallest breach that would render the entire border (which stretched to Flatbush, taking advantage of walls and train tracks along the way) unkosher.

  A car slowed down, and Sima tensed, forced herself to keep walking. She passed a new red-gloss brick building—curved marble steps, cascading miniature hedges, French windows—that stood beside a crumbling two-story stucco a shade of smoker’s gray. In Boro Park such juxtapositions were common: everyone walked to synagogue, and so everyone lived crowded together, wealthy and poor alike.

  Now that it was over, and for nothing, Sima felt ashamed. She decided to skip the hardware store—she’d waited this long to get the lightbulbs, she could wait a little longer. On the way to Timna’s she’d amused herself wondering over what Timna would notice: would she have smiled at the knot of children on the stoop, waiting for their mother to carry down the triple-stroller? Did she give a few coins to the old woman on the corner, “Saving money for Aliyah to Israel” scrawled in black marker on a cardboard sign? But as she turned down her block, she realized that Timna might take any number of routes home. Pointless to wonder what she’d notice, what she’d look at, and all of it anyway so pathetic: a cluster of pale children, a beggar; so little to offer, and her own life, the least.

  “I’m back,” she called out as she bent to unlace her shoes in the entranceway.

  “Oh?” Lev said, coming through the kitchen. “I didn’t notice you were gone.”

  OCTOBER

  9

  SIMA WATCHED TIMNA RUMMAGE THROUGH HER DESK drawer, searching for hooks to match a bra Ida Horn had dropped off earlier. She took out four extensions in different shades of off-white—one tinted yellow, another blush—lined them up to check the color. “Hold it up to the light,” Sima told her, putting aside the catalog she’d been leafing through, “That’s the only way to tell.”

  Timna did as Sima suggested. “What do you think?” she asked, pressing one and then another against the bra, a double-D cup in plain stretch-nylon, “I think the darkest one, no?”

  Sima nodded. “Seems that way.”

  Timna lowered the bra, put the other extensions back in her desk drawer. “So I wanted to ask you if I could have next Sunday off,” she told Sima as she cut off the original hooks, two of them bent beyond repair. “We’re thinking of going to Philadelphia.”

  “Who with,” Sima asked, “your cousins?”

  “Oh no, not them.” Timna positioned the bra under the sewing machine, lined up the new extension with the edge of the bra strap. “I’d go with those Israelis I told you about, Shai and our friend Nurit. The ones I met at that café.” She bent her head over the sewing machine, guided the fabric under the needle. “Assuming it’s okay with you.”

  Sima let the question hang just a moment before acquiescing. “You have a way to get there?”

  “We have a car. Shai has a brother who lives in New Jersey, and he’s lending us his.”

  “So it’s all worked out.”

  Timna nodded, removing the bra from the sewing machine. The new hooks blended perfectly, Sima saw: if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t have been able to tell.

  “Well then,” Sima told her, “it sounds like a plan.” She bent over the catalog, feigning preoccupation. After a few minutes she allowed herself to glance at Timna—she was leafing through a fashion magazine, seemingly unfazed by what Sima took to be an awkward silence.

  “So,” Sima asked her, “have you and Alon traveled together a lot?” It was a lame question, she knew, but Timna could never resist talking about Alon.

  Timna bent her head slightly to the side, considering. “We went camping a few times,” she told Sima, “but we were in high school and then the army, so it’s not like we had much time, and it’s not like Israel’s some big country to explore.” She closed the magazine, smiled. “But did I ever tell you about the time Alon and I almost sailed to Jordan?”

  Sima leaned forward in anticipation. She loved the brightness in Timna’s eyes when she spoke about Alon, the way she smiled wide, sometimes shyly tucked her head to hide the grin. “Such romance in my shop,” Sima had told Connie, “it gives me a reason to get up in the morning.”

  Connie had frowned. “You’ve only been working together two months—what got you up before?”

  Sima didn’t answer, could only think: I have no idea, no idea at all.

  “We were on our senior class trip to Eilat,” Timna began, “so you can imagine the scene—typical high school stuff. A lot of eighteen-year-olds lying in the sun, trying to get someone else to go buy soda and beer.”

  Sima nodded, as if she’d ever experienced anything of the sort.

  “Anyway, a bunch of us went for a walk and found this sailboat attached to a yacht. So we start talking about how nice it would be to rent the boat and go for a ride, but of course no one knows whose boat it is. Well, at the end of the beach is this tiny, dark bar, and so we go in and ask the bartender if he knows anything about the boat. And he—it was like a movie, he just pointed his hand toward the back and there was the owner, sitting there eating lunch.”

  “Is that a coincidence.” Sima shook her head in wonder; it was just the sort of luck she ascribed to Timna—the water always warm, the chariot always ready.

  “We asked him about the boat, and at first he says no way, he won’t rent it, but then he sees we’re just some kids looking to enjoy our last few weeks together before the army so he says, fine. So we pay him and get the boat and we’re so excited—sailing along the coast and waving to everyone on the beach, and of course getting further and further away from shore.” Timna ran her hands through her hair; Sima watched it cascade perfectly back to place. “Now, the thing about the Gulf of Eilat is that you have Egypt right below Israel, sharing the same shore. And then opposite Israel is Jordan, and right below Jordan is Saudi Arabia. And they’re all so close—you can see each country on a clear day. So there we were, sailing back and forth, right and left across the sea,” Timna moved her hand in a zigzag before her, “and we keep getting close to Egypt and then Jordan, Egypt and then Jordan. Finally we decide why not, let’s sail to Aqaba. So we turn the boat around and start heading straight toward it. Pretty soon we can see the city right before us, and we’re getting closer and closer—”

  Sima saw the boat cutting through the sea, Timna leaning against the sun-warmed ledge with her hair in the wind.

  “And suddenly, just as we’re sure we’re going to make it to shore, these Israeli military boats appear out of nowhere. There are all these soldiers, and they’re shouting,” Timna deepened her voice, curled her fingers around her mouth like a megaphone, “‘Turn back, reverse course!’”

  Sima leaned back, impressed. “Did you get in trouble?”

  Timna shrugged. “Looking back, I can’t believe we were ever that stupid, that young. The way things are now, and having been a soldier—” she paused, ran a hand across the curved back of the sewing machine. “Sometimes I still can’t believe that Alon’s an officer, that he outranks all those soldiers who seemed so old and serious at the time.” She placed her hands in her lap, looked at Sima. “I still haven’t forgiven him for t
hat, for becoming an officer.”

  “I thought you were proud?”

  “No. I mean, I’m happy for him because it’s what he wanted, but I worry about him all the time, and I can’t stand to think what he does.” She paused. “Ever since he was a kid, he idolized those soldiers. Most of the boys do, and the girls too I guess. But you grow out of it. Once you put that uniform on and see yourself in the mirror looking just like all the heroes of your youth, you realize then it’s not real. Because you know you’re scared and young and unprepared and insecure, and you know then that all those soldiers you looked up to all those years were the same.”

  “But maybe for Alon it was okay?” Sima asked, wanting to defend him. “Maybe to him it felt right, felt real?”

  Timna opened her hands, a gesture of not knowing. “He thinks he can do more good from within than without, but he’s wrong. No matter how much you try, once you’ve got the gun—” She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and rubbed the back of her neck. “Anyway,” she said, looking at Sima, “Where was I?”

  “On the boat,“ Sima told her, eager to return Timna to a story of love. “About to be arrested.”

  “Right. Well, we weren’t arrested. They treated us like a bunch of criminals and we had to talk them out of filing a report, but in the end we got them to let us go.”

  Sima raised her eyebrows, teasing. “And how did you do that?”

  “My friend and I were in bikinis. It wasn’t hard.”

  “You really are something,” Sima said, proud. “You know that?”

  “Well, it was better than lying on the beach. Our teachers were furious though—we weren’t allowed to go to the dinner that night. They made us stay back at the hotel.”

  “Something tells me you didn’t mind.”

  Timna grinned. “Anyway. That’s the story of my almost-escapade to Jordan. Not much of a travel adventure in the end.” She looked up, smiled. “Shai and Nurit and I have all sorts of plans, though—Philly this weekend, then Washington, D.C., for Thanksgiving, and then over that winter break you mentioned Boston—”

  Sima watched Timna a moment before turning away, aware of how foolish her feelings of pride had been. Timna was not hers to be proud of: the excitement of Timna’s life was as inaccessible to Sima as the most well-guarded foreign shore, silent boats skimming through darkened seas, silhouette men speaking a language she could not understand. She opened a drawer beneath the counter and placed the catalog inside, forced it shut.

  Just after their third wedding anniversary, Sima took the subway into Manhattan to see the doctor. Among the other passengers were secretaries on their way to work. She found herself imagining their lives, envying the dull gleam of their mahogany desks and the steady click of their polished nails on the typewriter; the easy condescension to their bosses—solid, red-faced men—the “Good morning, Mr. Thomas” and “Good afternoon, Mr. Thomas” and the jostling subway ride home with the grocery list clenched in one hand, the leather of the subway strap in another.

  And yet, she realized, looking down, she too was a young woman in a navy skirt, a cream blouse, a wool jacket. Maybe all the women on the train were young wives without babies, maybe all the women on the train had thrown their underwear in the garbage, furious at another month lost.

  Sima opened her purse, checked the doctor’s address for the fourth time that morning. Just looking at it relaxed her, the slow curve of the letters spelling Park Avenue. It wouldn’t be just her problem anymore, it would be Park Avenue’s problem, and with all the marbled height of those buildings supporting her, surely something as insignificant as her own body could be made to work for a baby.

  Sima blinked as the train emerged from the tunnel-dark, arched across the Manhattan Bridge. She breathed in deep; the space between the cables casting patterns across the floor: shadow and light, shadow and light. She had never been so far on her own, thrust not just out of Brooklyn but up in the sky, the East River blue beneath her. Remembering her father’s stories of swimming in the river, she looked expectantly toward the train doors: as if she might see a diving board, as if she might see her father, pink with the thin muscles of youth, scissoring through the gray air, body braced to meet the water.

  Nothing: just the steel girders, one after the other after. One, two, three, she counted, one, two, three.

  It wasn’t until after the train slipped back beneath the sidewalk that Sima realized someone was watching her. She became aware of a concentrated presence across the aisle, looked away from the window and toward the source of this stillness.

  The man smiled.

  He wore a hat pulled low to one side; Sima thought, but couldn’t be sure, that he winked at her. Her cheeks warmed as she registered his gaze, lowered her own eyes to her hands.

  Well? the man’s look seemed to ask when she dared another quick glance.

  Well nothing, Sima answered silently, concentrating on the crooked edge of her thumbnail.

  The receptionists wore white uniforms, their hair smoothed back underneath their caps; when they passed her forms to complete Sima could smell the soft scent of baby powder on their hands. She answered their questions quickly: her name, her address, her husband’s occupation. She didn’t realize she was nervous until, hearing her name called, she was suddenly overcome with hunger, fought the urge to vomit.

  The doctor looked like the doctors on the soaps, his light brown hair perfectly peppered with gray and his mustache trim above his lips. He leaned forward across his desk, shook her hand warmly. “What can we do for you, Mrs. Goldner?” he asked, glancing at her file.

  “I’ve been trying to get pregnant for almost two years,” Sima said, a sense of failure as she spoke—unnatural woman, to need a doctor’s help—“and nothing has happened.”

  “Quite common, absolutely,” the doctor assured her, leaning back casually, balancing on his chair. He asked her a series of questions, and she answered clearly, trusting. She’d been married three years, never used the pill or an IUD, always had normal periods. She forced herself to answer even the most personal questions, blushing to tell him two to three times a week on average, though for the last four months she’d asked Lev to wait, taking her temperature each morning in the hope of, averting his gaze, “timing it right.”

  He nodded as she spoke, made her feel as if such troubles, to her a source of secret shame, were the most natural thing in the world. She was shy to show him her temperature charts—fumbling in her bag for the graph-paper pad, apologizing for the shaky lines sketched in the half-light of winter mornings—but he complimented them, pleased that they showed a regular pattern of ovulation.

  Sima smiled, proud that she’d done her homework and without even being asked. She imagined announcing her pregnancy to him, how he’d grin, shake her hand, tell her that under those circumstances he didn’t mind losing a patient—

  The doctor leaned forward, hands clasped on the dark wood desk. “I should warn you, Sima, that the tests we’ll need to perform can be,” he paused, half-smiled, “somewhat uncomfortable.”

  Sima crossed her legs, folded her hands neatly in her lap. “I’ll do whatever it takes,” she said, taken by her own determination.

  The doctor grinned, surprising Sima with the yellow of his teeth. “And your husband,” he asked, “have you spoken with him about this? We do try to see couples together these days.”

  Sima assured the doctor that Lev knew she was there, but that it wasn’t easy for him, a teacher, to get time off in the middle of the day. She didn’t tell him about the argument they’d had a few nights before, when she realized he wasn’t planning on coming with her.

  “Find out how it works,” he’d said, as he sat down at the kitchen table, anticipating dinner, “and then we can figure out a schedule that makes sense. But I can’t just miss class for no reason—”

  “No reason?” Sima asked, thinking of her body, her heart, her longings all centered, more and more, on a wish for a child so strong it almost physicall
y ached. She’d canceled plans with Connie that week, stayed at home feigning sickness just to avoid the tightness she felt inside when she watched Connie cradle her baby, coo as her lips grazed his skin.

  “The doctor’s going to tell you not to worry,” Lev told her.

  “No?” Sima said, standing to check on the chicken. “Then why haven’t I gotten pregnant in two years?”

  “But it’s only four months with that chart thing. Listen, Sima,” he told her, as she opened the oven door, “If you want to see a doctor, I think that’s fine, no reason not to. But it’s not like you’re being rushed to the emergency room or something. It’s not like I need to miss work for this.”

  Sima lowered her head to the oven heat. “Okay,” she said, too furious to protest further—he should understand, she shouldn’t have to explain—“I’ll go alone then.” She’d prodded the chicken with a fork to check whether the juices ran clear, noted grimly the thin stream of blood that trickled forth.

  The doctor nodded at her explanation of Lev’s absence, his face unreadable. “Well then,” he told her, “we’ll begin with some blood tests and a basic pelvic exam and then take it from there.” He outlined a course of action: a sperm sample from Lev and a series of “investigations” for her: a cervical mucus exam, an endometrial biopsy, a Rubin’s gas insufflation test possibly followed by a hysterosalpingography. He said the strange words quickly, ticking each off on his fingers as if he were listing recipe ingrediants.

  Sima nodded, did not ask questions. She was grateful for his attention, for the office of white coats and the smell of baby powder in the air, felt if she followed carefully the dotted line—one test after another, scheduled in time with her cycle—she’d receive her reward in the end. She gave her blood willingly, almost eager to bare the white of her arm to the nurse, and she did not cringe when the cold metal of the speculum pressed against her flesh—the doctor stepping between her legs as his hand disappeared inside her—reminded herself it was, like everything else, just a test.