“Sick?”
“Yes. She’s tired, and—” Sima paused, unsure how to explain without revealing too much. “Her stomach is upset a lot I noticed,” she said, pleased at her subtlety.
There was no response; immediately Sima worried she hadn’t been subtle enough. “I wouldn’t call,” she explained, a sense of shame growing, “but you know Timna, she refuses to see a doctor, and I don’t get the feeling her cousins really pay attention, and I didn’t want to just sit by if there really is some problem—” Sima paused, why wasn’t he jumping in?—“if I could be of help.”
“You think something is the matter with her health?”
“Well, I don’t mean to set off an alarm—” She drew the cord tighter, so that it pulled at her skin.
“You think she needs a hospital or something like that?”
“No, not exactly.” Sima hesitated. She’d hoped that Shai would confide in her, relieved to have someone to share the weight of Timna’s secret; she’d imagined, as she’d watched Timna assist a customer that afternoon—noting how she ignored the woman’s baby tucked in its stroller, though usually Timna was sure, like any good saleslady, to coo over every child—that together she and Shai would solve Timna’s troubles. “Thank you, Sima,” she’d pictured him saying, “I couldn’t have done it without you.” And though what “it” was, she hadn’t decided but that Timna would be left safe and happy—which might in fact entail Shai’s removal—still she smiled to think of how she’d wave away his thanks, say it was nothing, it was just what anyone would do.
“What I was wondering—” Sima began, determined to make one last try. “Is whether you and Timna have talked about this at all. About her not feeling so well?”
Shai took a moment to respond. “I don’t think she mentioned it.”
“Just because,” Sima said, taking his pause as a wearing down of defenses, “I know you’re one of her, umm, closest friends in New York, so I thought she might have said something to you—”
“No. Actually, I haven’t seen her in a while.”
Sima let go of the phone cord. Timna had reported going to the movies with Shai a few days earlier. “When was the last time you saw her?” she asked.
“A few weeks ago.”
Sima lowered her voice. “Did something happen?”
She didn’t need to hear the silence to know she’d overstepped a boundary, shown herself not for the concerned friend she’d hoped to appear but instead a gossiping, meddling old lady. “No. Just busy,” Shai said, and Sima made an excuse to end the conversation—well, sorry to bother you, I should get going—before he could.
She had to sit after hanging up the phone, sort out the questions running through her mind. Shai might be lying: as the father, he would have reason to. She imagined Timna crying as he raged—this is your problem, he’d say, this is your fault—pressed her own hand to her lips as she pictured Timna curl beneath his anger, Timna’s face flushed and her breath uneven as she rocked herself back and forth, back and forth.
Or maybe it was Timna who rejected Shai, told him, her voice low and thin, don’t ever touch me again, don’t ever call me again, and though he’d pleaded—I love you, he’d have told her, we can do this—she’d walked away, knowing she was alone and his best promises inert as the future rose before her wide and dark and terrifying. Sima saw Timna turning down dim city streets, the same stale questions circling in her head as she moved alone among strangers, and no one placing a hand on her shoulder, no one saying, as Sima longed to, “I’m here now, I’m here for you.”
Sima bit her fist lightly, touched by the image before her. Timna needed her; she would say something first thing tomorrow, no matter what. She placed a hand on the counter, steadying to stand, when another thought made her pause. Timna might not be alone. Shai might have been replaced weeks ago by some other boyfriend Timna hadn’t even bothered to mention to her. And was it this stranger who had taken Timna to the movies the other week, or did the movie excursion cover a darker one—a health clinic somewhere, lavender trim against the ceiling and the intermittent beep of glass doors sliding open?
Sima dialed the operator. “Yes, I need help finding an international number. Israel, Herzeliyah. The last name is Shachar.”
She didn’t hang up after the operator gave her the number, held the phone against her chest, one finger pressing it off, and surveyed the shop—all the spaces where Timna wasn’t. She glanced at the notepad beside her: a series of numbers to awaken Timna’s mother from across the world, a curled cord to pull her in, spiral Sima out. Timna would likely quit as soon as Sima told her what she’d done, and even if she didn’t, even if she ended up saying thank you, you were right, even if Sima reunited mother and daughter with one phone call, even then—Sima knew she’d lose her. Replaced. Redundant. Waving goodbye, wishing she’d write.
Sima looked over to Timna’s sewing table, thought of that earlier conversation when they’d agreed that the bra shop, like Timna’s supermarket freezer, was Sima’s refuge, safety. She wondered whether that was still true. In the past months she’d been aware of all she’d gained from Timna: the joy, the excitement, the flush of watching her beauty, winning her laughter. But with that gain had come loss: she’d loved her days in the shop not because they were her own but because she’d shared them with Timna.
Sima hung up the phone and glanced, briefly, at the smooth curve of the chair that did not hold Timna before walking up the staircase, turning off the light.
Sima would say, afterwards, that she didn’t come to the bra business—it came to her.
“You need to keep yourself busy,” Connie told her. They’d run into each other outside the green grocer, where Sima had responded to her suggestion that they get a manicure together with an indifferent shrug. “I’ve been thinking about it,” Connie continued. “You need to get a job. Something to get up for every morning, something that’ll be fun.”
“A barrel of laughs, I’m sure,” Sima said, dropping three tomatoes into a plastic sleeve.
Connie ignored the comment. “A legal secretary maybe, or a saleslady at A&S or Gimbels—just think of the discounts.”
Sima tied a knot at the top of the baggie, frowned. She didn’t know many working women her age: most of her friends had married straight out of high school, and though a few earned degrees as teachers and nurses or entered the family business—textiles, electronics—they stopped working when the babies were born, staying at home at least until all the kids had entered school.
“Come on, Sima,” Connie said, following her over to the oranges. “You know if you’d been raised anywhere but the Boro Park ghetto we came from, you’d have gone to college, gotten a real job. You’re so smart and so capable—you saved us from poverty, for God’s sake.”
Sima pretended to concentrate on the oranges—the pale ones, she’d recently read, were the sweetest—not wanting to admit how the compliment flattered. “I did not save you from poverty, Connie, I just taught you how to keep a budget.”
“Poverty, Sima. My boys would be in rags if it weren’t for you.”
Sima looked up. “Are you being fresh with me?” she teased, repeating a question she’d heard Connie put to Nate and Howie.
Connie laughed. “Think about it, okay? Just do me that favor.”
Sima became the bookkeeper for three neighborhood shops: Faye’s Fashions, Michael’s Film and Processing, and Holy Land Travel. She’d been concerned about Faye’s Fashions before she began. Changing outfits three times before the interview, she was sure she wouldn’t be as elegant as they’d like, but it quickly became her favorite place to work. At the film and travel shops she sat away from the customers: at Michael’s she shared an old metal desk with a barely mustached teenager whose job it was to sort the photographs into the correct envelopes, and whose beet-red blushes gave away every bikini-clad woman—worse, Sima didn’t let herself think—he came across, and though Holy Land gave her a mahogany desk complete with olive desk-set, the lea
ther cylinder always flush with pens, they expected only that she would sit quietly for the time it took to balance their accounts, then leave.
But at Faye’s she sat beside the counter with one of the shop girls, or with Faye herself—her hair dyed blond, her nails long, her voice husky from three decades of smoking, her smile always conspiratorial, always making Sima feel it was her and Faye against the world. Faye paid her for only five hours a week, ten at tax time, but Sima often stayed longer, standing beside Faye as they looked through the samples the salesmen brought or debated what to put on sale, and for how much.
“You,” Faye once said, “are the typical Boro Park woman. I’m here to give that woman flair, but I can only push so far—you’re like my litmus test.”
“If I’d wear it,” Sima laughed, “then anyone would, right?”
Faye smiled. “Only thirty-five, and already the most conservative woman in Boro Park.”
“Except for the Hasidim.”
“Except for the Hasidic men, maybe. You wear short sleeves and pants, sure, but have you seen how nice some of those women dress? I’m thinking of designing a line just for them. Every spring we’d do a High Holy Days fashion debut. Can you imagine what I could make on hats alone?”
Faye became a friend. Sima loved sitting beside her, coffee and cookies always within reach, as she gossiped with each woman who entered the shop. “We sell them something better than themselves,” Faye would tell her. And though the clothing was mostly cotton and polyester, Sima felt, as she watched a woman grin at her reflection, turn before the mirror, that Faye really was a fairy godmother, capable of making even the dullest women gleam.
Sima confided in Faye, as all the women did. She told her that she was barren, to which Faye replied that barren was a terrible word, horrible, and she never wanted Sima to say it again. “Barren is a desert where nothing grows. That’s not you, Sima. That’s the opposite of you.”
Sima believed her when they were together, in the shop with the women laughing under cream-colored lights (“No one wants to be naked under fluorescents,” Faye told her), or smoking cigarettes in the backroom while Faye updated her on the gossip (“You didn’t know Hazel has mafia connections?”). But at home she felt barren, just as Faye understood the word: empty, useless. She and Lev had lost each other, and though sometimes the space she felt between them made her angry and sometimes ashamed, more and more she became resigned to what she imagined was not uncommon: two people living together who did not exactly love each other, but who had no reason to leave each other either.
All the women at Faye’s Fashions complained about their husbands, and though Sima suspected that the distraction of children made their marriages happier than hers, she also knew her own parents had not loved as she’d once hoped she and Lev would. How many did, she asked herself, and how much, after all, could one expect from life? The country was at war; the evening news full of images of dead soldiers, burned jungles. Her own sorrows were insignificant beside that reality, the barren desert Faye conjured no larger than a brushing of sand in the weeds that grew against the public bathrooms at Brighton Beach.
Sima had been at the store two years when Faye announced her retirement. It was not just surprising; it was a betrayal. “You’re barely fifty,” Sima argued, concentrating to keep her voice calm, “who retires so young?”
“I want to be a lady of leisure while I still have time to enjoy it.”
“Time? You’ll have fifty years.”
Faye placed her hands on either side of Sima’s face. “My own dear child,” she said, smiling, “I’m off on a new adventure. Can’t you be happy for me?”
Sima thought a moment. The answer punched her in the stomach: “No.”
Faye had a cousin who sold shoes from her basement and was looking to expand; she came by the store before it closed, bought what was left of Faye’s handbag and belt stock. “Talk about ideal,” Sima told Faye after the cousin left, “a business in your own basement. You don’t even have to walk two blocks to work.”
“You know how she got it?” Faye asked.
Sima shook her head no, though Faye had told her before.
“Well,” Faye said, sitting down. “So—”
Sima listened again to the cousin’s story: her father had owned a shoe store on 13th Avenue and kept his overstock in their basement a few blocks away. Eventually his regulars realized the basement contained the best bargains and began to go straight there.
“Why pay rent when you’ve got a basement?” Faye
asked. “For a small operation like they have, it’s perfect.”
“I have a finished basement,” Sima said, as if she’d never realized it before. “Actually, since we’re just one block off Thirteenth, it’s a great location for a store, right near everything.”
Faye looked at Sima. “Are you thinking of going into business yourself?”
“No, no,” Sima said, shaking her head. “I just meant I have a good basement for that sort of thing is all.”
“Well, but have you thought of it? I haven’t sold off my all my stock yet. The lingerie—”
Sima had thought of it—her own shop, women asking her advice—but didn’t want to admit the fantasy for fear of Faye’s reaction. “What would I do,” Sima said, “just up and open a shop?”
“That’s what I did.”
“I thought your father owned it first.”
Faye waved her hand. “He sold junk. I changed everything when I took over.”
“Still,” Sima told her, “it probably wouldn’t work.”
Faye didn’t respond, and Sima took her silence as agreement. She wanted to protest—though she wasn’t much for fashion, it was surprisingly easy to order the basics and follow well-established trends, and as for customers, the truth was she knew some of them preferred her matter-of-fact approach to Faye’s exhausting need to entertain. But instead of arguing, she rejected the possibility herself, before Faye could. “It was just a thought,” Sima said, “nothing serious—”
“I’ve got it!” Faye spread her hands apart as if unveiling a marquee. “Sima’s Showcase. Sima’s Showcase —is that not perfect?”
Sima grinned.
24
SIMA MEANT TO CALL TIMNA’S MOTHER BEFORE BREAK-fast, but instead she lay in bed making excuses; the room was so cold and the bed so warm and probably her mother wouldn’t be home then, anyway—she’d call later. But then the shop was busy all day, and Timna was there, and she didn’t feel it was right to leave her alone while she snuck upstairs to call her mother. Twice she tested her, “How’s Shai?” she asked once, and “What movie was it you and Shai saw again?” another, but Timna just answered fine, and named some comedy, and Sima could not think how to question her further.
At lunchtime Timna stood and stretched, mentioning a few errands she needed to run—buy a birthday card for her mother, pick up a jacket from the dry cleaner. “No problem,” Sima told her, grateful for the time alone, “go, take your time.”
As soon as Timna left, Sima sat down behind the counter, tucked her head against her arms. You need to say something, she told herself, you can’t let her leave tonight without trying to help her. She tried out lines in her mind—”We need to talk, Timna,” she might say, or “There’s been something I’ve been meaning to ask you”—but each sentence echoed lamely in her head. Timna would dismiss her concern again, and Sima would be left without words to express her fears.
When the doorbell rang, Sima smiled at the woman who peered tentatively into the shop, glad for the distraction. “If you’re looking for bras, you’ve come to the right place,” Sima told her, moving out from behind the counter.
The woman smiled. “I am,” she said, taking off her coat. She wore a black sweater dotted by white cat hairs; she tucked her hair behind her ears in a shy, self-conscious gesture.
“Thirty-four-D,” Sima said, glancing at her bust. “So what can I get you?”
The woman raised her eyebrows. “I heard you w
ere a pro, but—”
“It’s easy to be a pro in this field,” Sima told her, walking them both toward the dressing room. “There’s not much competition.” She stepped aside before the curtain, watched as the customer walked in ahead: a tall woman, she moved with a slight stoop. “So what’s your name?” Sima asked, warming, as always, to displays of insecurity. “What can I get for you?”
“Louise. And I’m looking for anything that minimizes.”
“Are you sure? I get women here, they’d pay for those.”
“I’d pay to get rid of them.”
“Well,” Sima told her, “we’ll see what we can do without surgery, okay? Just wait here, and I’ll bring you some choices.”
Louise tried on the bra Sima brought—“Our best-selling minimizer, you’ll love it”—grinned at her reflection in the mirror.
“It fits perfect,” Sima told her, tugging at the shoulder straps, “but a young woman like you should be showing off a little. This bra is good for work, but let me get you something for evenings, for when you want to feel a little sexier—“ Sima left the dressing room before Louise could protest. “A little black, a little cleavage, something nice, not too much.” She spoke quickly as she moved up the stepladder, reached for a box. “I’ve got just the thing,” she called, removing a bra. “You’ve got to at least try.”
Louise tried on the bra—black, with two stitched birds that met just below the rim of each cup—paused in front of the mirror. The bra lifted her breasts, creating cleavage that swelled above each cup. “Look at that,” she said, angling her body before the mirror, “I never knew they could do that.”
“Oh, they can do plenty.” Sima smiled at Louise, remembering how Timna had shrieked over the bra when it arrived at the shop. “Have you ever seen something so nice?” Timna had asked, shifting her shoulders before the mirror as she modeled it.
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