Sima's Undergarments for Women

by Ilana Stranger-Ross

  Patrick walked quickly. In the bar he’d been attentive, but outside it seemed he’d forgotten her, or maybe he was just used to walking alone. Neither of them spoke. They turned down one street and then another, and Sima was sure they passed the very building where an uncle had lived decades ago; she started to tell Patrick but then stopped, thinking why would he care?

  Their breath formed clouds before them. A young couple walked past and the girl smiled at them. No, Sima wanted to say, we’re not what you think we are. But she let it pass.

  “Here we are then,” Patrick said, pressing his keys to click open a black car. “Sorry for the long walk, but parking around here is impossible—”

  Again it took a moment before she understood: they’d been walking to his car all along.

  “Where to?” Patrick asked.

  Sima said no, she had to get home, she’d hail a cab. Patrick shook his head, said he couldn’t allow it.

  Sima swallowed. They were on a dark street not far from the highway. The street was empty, everything quiet but for the scuffles Sima could hear emanating from within a pile of black garbage bags. This is it, she thought: murder, rape, death. The blackness filled her.

  “You’re wondering if I’m the type of guy who stuffs women in my car trunk and dumps them in Staten Island, right?”

  Sima looked at him. “No, it’s just—”

  “Sima, you’re as pale as a sheet. I’m sorry, it’s just when I walk—my wife and I used to walk a lot. I forget to talk, I guess.”

  She kept her eyes on the sidewalk, thought she’d never heard anything sadder.

  “Come on, do I look like a cold-blooded killer? You know how it is—our generation, I have to see you home. But I’d rather give you a lift than cab fare. You know how much it’ll cost from here to Boro Park?”

  Sima laughed. “It cost me almost thirty the other day.”

  She got into his car.

  The radio was set to a sports station, but Patrick moved the dial until he found some old jazz. He hummed along to the song—“Are there stars out tonight?” the singer asked—and Sima, relaxing, sank into the plush seats. “You know,” Patrick told her, glancing over as they merged onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, “If you wanted to come over—”

  Sima looked at him. Smiling, he gave a small shrug—a gesture of hope. She shook her head, then began to laugh.

  Patrick looked at her and grinned. He was happy, she saw, that he’d made her laugh; she didn’t need to say it wasn’t him she was laughing at. She thought of giving him Connie’s number, but decided no, this one was her secret to keep. When he pulled up outside her house, she leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. His car idled while she bounded up her steps, opened the front door. Turning back to him, she waved goodbye like a young girl before vanishing into the black house.

  Connie updated Sima over omelettes at the Dairy Delicious. “Mr. Escort-shmescort,” as Connie now called him, hadn’t lasted. “A good man,” Connie said; she felt they could have had a go at it, only she wasn’t ready. That first date there’d been the thrill of discovery—“Life after death,” Connie told her, and Sima understood: a boat lost on water and suddenly there’s land—but the two dates that followed hadn’t recaptured the initial excitement.

  “No couch?” Sima asked, stabbing a mushroom.

  “No nothing.” Connie scooped up a square of omelette with a slice of buttered toast, took a bite. “It’s just so much work,” she said, two fingers pressed to her lips to hide her chewing. “You have to tell your stories, you have to learn his; my kids, his kids, grandchildren, friends, all to build—what?”

  Sima sipped her coffee. “Maybe you’re just not ready yet.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “And what about Art? Is he still leaving those messages?” Art had been calling constantly over the last few weeks. Connie rarely picked up—“We just end up crying when we speak,” she’d told Sima—so, like millions of other penitents, Art spoke to the machine.

  “Yup. E-mails too. It’s ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ every which way, which is really all the same way, over and over. I’m telling you, it’s so repetitive—I might have to take him back before I die of boredom.”

  “Oh?” Connie had never even joked about that before. Sima leaned forward, surprised at her own reaction: the quickening of hope, when she hadn’t realized she’d been holding out for hope. “Nu?”

  “Nu yourself.”

  “What’s the debate?”

  Connie sighed. Some moments, she told Sima, she found the whole situation absurd. “Almost fifty years,” she said, “and I throw it away over some nothing? Who does that?” But other times the nothing was everything, the betrayal so painful because of the bedrock of their marriage. “I can forgive him,” she said, her fingers interlaced around her coffee mug, “I’ve realized that. But we’ll never be who we were again. And maybe that’s the worst outcome. Maybe it’s better to be alone than to be together, but—” she struggled for a word—“less than we were.”

  Sima looked at Connie. She thought about Patrick, his car, the closeness of his body; a whole city of people like him and her, Lev and Connie and Art, all longing, all wishing for more than they had.

  “I wish I knew what to tell you,” Sima said.

  Connie smiled wryly. “You, at a loss for advice? I must really be screwed.”

  “Am I that bad?”

  “The worst. And also the best.”

  Sima leaned back again. “Okay then,” she said.

  “Call him.”

  “Call him?”

  “Meet somewhere. Coffee, whatever. I’m not saying take him back, but if you don’t—it’s just, do what feels right for you, not what feels necessary because you’re afraid of not having what feels right.”

  Connie tipped her head to the side. “I think I followed that.”

  Sima took another sip of coffee. “I know you did.”

  Sima wiped down the counter while Timna handed Rita Grossman the altered bras, repeated the admonishment to never put them in the dryer.

  “After what I paid for these,” Rita said, “believe me, I won’t.”

  Timna smiled, pulling on her coat before Rita was even out the door.

  “You have plans?” Sima asked, watching as Timna, bending over, ran her hands through her hair.

  Timna nodded, flipping her head back up so that her hair settled in waves around her face. She drew a tube of lipstick from her purse, walked over to the dressing-room mirror. “A few of us are going to see a play in the Village. Nurit knows one of the actors.”

  Sima leaned forward over the counter, watched as Timna smoothed gloss over her lips, opened her eyes wide for mascara. “You look gorgeous,” Dottie Katz had said when she stopped by that morning, and Sima had to admit it was true: Timna’s skin was smooth and even, her body slim in black corduroys and a short navy cardigan. “What’s your secret?” Dottie had asked, and Sima listened hard, hoping to hear, but Timna had just laughed it off.

  She’s back to her old self, Sima thought, as Timna closed the dressing-room curtain behind her. But that self, she had to accept, remained for her a mystery.

  “Today’s the first day that feels even a little like spring,” Timna said, tossing a lipstick-blotted tissue into the garbage can by the door. “I can’t wait to get out into it.” She opened the front door and took a deep breath; Sima breathed too, recognizing the damp green scent of early spring. “I didn’t even realize how much I missed the sun.”

  Timna grinned as she waved goodbye, a child escaping into a new season.

  Lev was sitting at the kitchen table when Sima entered the kitchen; the paper spread open before him. “How was work?” he asked, as she poured herself a glass of seltzer. “Anything new?”

  Since their fight in the basement and the touch that came after, she’d felt shy of him, her husband of forty-six years. She responded to this fear in the only way she could. “What have you been doing all afte
rnoon,” she asked, “just sitting here reading the paper?”

  Lev looked up, and Sima turned quickly away. She imagined Timna shaking her head, felt inside that disappointment. But Lev just shrugged. “So still no word from Timna, huh?” he asked.

  Sima smiled, aware she’d been caught acting poorly but forgiven. “Nothing,” she said, “and I’ve given up on throwing hints.” She sat down at the table, both hands around her glass. “I’m telling you, Lev, maybe I was delusional all along. I should be committed to a mental institution, put in a straitjacket.”

  “They only use the straitjacket when you start foaming at the mouth.”

  Sima laughed. “I don’t know,” she said, circling the edge of her glass with one finger, “maybe sometimes no matter how much you love someone, there are things you aren’t meant to know.” She looked up at Lev, pressed her lips into a smile. “You still reading?”

  Lev shook his head no.

  “It’s a beautiful day. Maybe we could go for a walk? Get a little sun?”

  It was hard for them to keep pace with each other at first—it’d been so long since they walked somewhere together just to wander, rather than rushing from a car to a restaurant or with the groceries home. “Where are you going?” a neighbor asked, pausing to watch them go by. Sima shrugged, said something about the sun, spring, so that the neighbor glanced up and down at Lev, clearly evaluating whether he was ill and she hadn’t yet heard.

  They walked down quiet streets lined with square brick homes, past the occasional yeshiva—red or yellow tile buildings lined with dark bay windows, their wide concrete yards, empty squares behind a chain-link fence, silent in the late afternoon—and the old corner grocery store, its signs well-faded: Te-Amo Cigars, and Breyers, and Milk. Sima told him about Timna, about what Dottie had said that day, about how happy Timna looked, how beautiful. “It’s not that I’m not glad for her,” Sima said, “but I still feel, if only I’d been able to help—”

  “But you did help. She’s back with Alon, maybe because of you.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Sima said, not admitting how much she hoped it was true, how she hoped her love mattered.

  They walked quietly for a few blocks, Sima lost in thought about Timna—would Shai be at the play, she wondered, and would they speak about her? As they passed by a neighborhood daycare—plastic toys scattered on the steps outside, cartoon images on a worn paint sign beside the door—Lev cleared his throat. Sima looked at him, suddenly aware of the silence between them, afraid for what he might say.

  “Sima,” Lev began, “what you said before, about how sometimes maybe we’re not meant to know everything, even about the people we care about most—”

  Sima stepped more quickly, as if she could outwalk the conversation. Her stomach swarmed with worry. Not again, she thought, I can’t do this again.

  “Everything that happened, back then and now—”

  She nodded, did not need to ask, when.

  “The way I was cut out of it.” Lev pulled at a dull green hedge, a few small leaves slowly circling toward the ground. “It’s like, you took all the blame for what happened, but also all the sorrow. You didn’t let me grieve along with you. You didn’t believe I could.”

  Sima was angry. She stepped across one, two, three sidewalk squares before answering, thought of the old line: step on a crack; break my mother’s back. “Lev,” she said, “I never—” She turned to him, furious that he should push her when she already had so much on her mind, but seeing his head lowered as he waited for her response, as if readying himself for a blow, softened. “You’re right,” Sima said, “I did keep you out. But to say I didn’t let you feel sorrow—that wasn’t mine to take. How could that be mine to take?”

  Lev reached out for another hedge, tearing a handful of tiny leaves loose.

  “You turned away,” Sima said, “to your work, your students. I used to watch the clock for hours. Remember, that stupid old clock we had with the orange and yellow marigolds around its face? I can see it so clearly, how I’d watch for you to come home. When you finally would, you’d be busy and tired and satisfied from a day of work and I’d just feel—how many days until the weekend, until we could both be unsatisfied?”

  They crossed the street, turned a wide corner: an auto mechanic advertising spring tune-ups, cars parked at strange angles jutting into the street and a stack of snow tires arranged beside the front door.

  “There wasn’t room,” Lev said. “There wasn’t space for me to grieve. You were so pained, so tragic, and I just felt—you wouldn’t have believed me, anyway, so what was the point?”

  They stepped aside to allow a family to pass—three girls all in the same dress, velvet blue with a white sash across the waist, the mother wheeling a baby carriage as the father walked beside her, lean and pale in a dark suit. Sima looked around. The trees were beginning to bud, the square lawns deepening into green, and when had it happened, all this change around her? She tried to remember what it had been like with Lev back then, but all she could recall, it was true, was her own grief—and that only as a dark space inside, a misery she could not truly look back on without averting her eyes.

  “Sima, do you see what I’m trying to say? I just want you to know, after all this time, that I hurt too. I wanted children too. You acted like I didn’t care, like I never thought—”

  “How come you’re saying this now, Lev? Why didn’t you say this earlier, at the time? Remember all those appointments, and you never came along. If you’d been there, just once for me, if you’d tried to understand—”

  Lev stopped walking; turned to her, forcing her to halt. She brought a strand of hair behind her ear self-consciously; shifted her feet on the cold ground.

  “It was a mistake, I know. I just didn’t know how to, and then you didn’t seem to want me there. So I let it go, because it was easier.” He paused. “It’s not an excuse, Sima, it’s just for you to understand. Do you see how it was for me? Does that make sense?”

  “We were both so young,” she said, thinking how strange that it should take her so long to recognize such a simple truth.

  “Like Timna.”

  “Like Timna.”

  Lev looked at her. “Is it too late then?”

  Sima thought again of the old kitchen clock—orange and yellow flowers round its white face, and when had she gotten rid of it, finally, why couldn’t she remember some last image of it in a garbage can, the flowers half-obscured by coffee grounds, vegetable peelings? “Lev,” Sima said, reaching for his hand, cold and soft and smaller than she thought it would be, “it’s been too late for so long that I don’t think time matters anymore.”

  APRIL

  28

  SIMA SNAKED A RAG ALONG A CLEARED WOOD SHELF while Timna mopped the floor, the spring cleaning timed to coincide with Passover preparations. “Guess who Connie’s bringing to the seder,” Sima asked, using her nail to loosen some gummed dirt in the corner.

  “Who? Art?”

  “No, not Art. Though—did I tell you? They met for coffee at the new Starbucks the other day.”

  “You think she’ll take him back?”

  Sima shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. I don’t think she knows. But—she is bringing a man to the seder.”

  “Who? Not the escort?”

  “Nope.” Sima looked over her shoulder to catch Timna’s reaction. “It’s Nate.”

  “Her son?” Timna raised her eyebrows. “I can’t believe I’ll finally meet him. After all I’ve heard.”

  “I know,” Sima said, pleased she’d gotten a reaction. “Me too. I’ve hardly seen him since he moved away after college, but every time he sneezes I hear about it.” She watched Timna swirl the dirty water against the floor, reminded herself she could always redo it later with Lev.

  “Oh,” Timna said, “speaking of surprises, I almost forgot to tell you.” Sima heard a forced brightness in Timna’s voice and turned immediately away, a thread of fear weaving down her spine. She looked
at the rows and rows of shelves before her, the stacks of boxes on each shelf—none she could crawl into, no space where she might tuck in her legs, pull down a lid, hide.

  “—I checked and L.A. was on sale too, so I went and bought the ticket: one way to Los Angeles, nonrefundable.” Timna paused, but when Sima didn’t respond, she kept talking. “It leaves at six A.M., on April twenty-third. Six A.M.—what time will I have to wake up for that?”

  Sima ignored the question, gripped the shelf as she felt the plane take off across her body: slicing from her hip to her shoulder, cutting through her belly, her breast.

  Timna was leaving her, the curtains closed, ball dropped, lights off—the brightest joy in all her days over. She laid her head against an empty space on the shelf before her and breathed in the damp smell of wet wood, transporting her back to childhood summers: jumping through the beaded strings of sprinkler water that fell against the frame of their Catskill bungalow while her mother sat smoking on the screen porch, laughing with other women over jokes Sima could never understand.

  “Sima?”

  “Mmmm?” Sima lifted her head, opened her eyes. “Just tired. Passover cleaning,” Sima said, stretching her arms above her head, “is always so exhausting.”

  “Maybe you need a vacation, too.”

  Sima stepped slowly down the ladder. “Right, a vacation in the middle of spring.” She placed the rag in the water, swirled it around in a soap-smoky trail. “Maybe you noticed,” she said, gripping the rag in both hands, wringing it above the bowl, “I happen to own a store?”

  “Exactly,” Timna said. “You own it, so you can give yourself a vacation.”

  Sima looked at Timna. The rush of air left in the plane’s wake disappeared through her body, swallowed by cells, carried away by rivers of veins. She felt a warmth rise in its place, concentrated to capture, for just one moment, its source: Timna—the gold of her. Sima took her in, marveling at how even in jeans and a black T-shirt, a pink silk kerchief knotted over her hair, Timna glowed. She basked a moment in that light before shifting the stepladder again, tackling the next set of shelves. “Maybe you’re right,” she said, swabbing the wood with water, “maybe it is time to go away.”