Timna immediately suggested a cruise; green waters somewhere surrounded by white sand, palm trees. Sima nodded, pretended interest—Hawaii versus the Caribbean versus Mexico—didn’t admit it wasn’t the destination she was after, but the escape.
“Lev,” Sima said as she came into the kitchen after work that afternoon, “Lev.”
He looked up from the newspaper he’d been reading; she paused. She’d imagined, in the short flight of stairs to the kitchen, that she’d tell him Timna was leaving, that she’d cry, mourn her loss. She’d imagined, in the one-two-three-four-five-six-seven steps, sobbing out the news, and indeed the tears had gathered, her throat had softened with salt water. But as she opened the door, as she called his name, as she took in his calm gaze, the words fled her mouth, her eyes grew veils, her throat turned dry. He’d say, I told you so, I told you not to become so involved, and he’d be right. She swallowed the salt, turned it bitter.
“Yes?”
Sima stood in the doorway, touched her finger to the metal hook on the side of the accordion door—a pinprick, a press back to action. “I hope you’re not just waiting for me to cook dinner,” she said, “because I need to rest. I’ve been up and down the shelves all day cleaning, and then Timna mopped the floor with just the dirtiest water, so I’m going to need your help going over it later—”
Lev nodded, stood.
“I don’t know what the story with that is, maybe they don’t mop in Israel or something but—” she looked at Lev, who had begun to walk toward the sink. “Where are you going?”
“I thought I’d put on some water for tea.”
“Oh.” Sima stepped into the kitchen, sat down at the table. “So after dinner maybe you can help me with the mopping. One thing I won’t miss about Timna is the way she cleans, I can tell you that much.”
Lev filled the teapot with water, placed it on the stove.
“Anyway,” Sima said, feigning distraction as she reached for the abandoned newspaper but raising her voice so he’d be sure to hear, “that’s all over at any rate.”
“What’s all over?”
Sima, pleased, did not look up. “Timna.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s over, that’s what I mean.”
“What—you’re firing her because she can’t mop?”
“No, I’m not firing her for anything. Lev, you really think I’d—”
“No, no. But then—what?”
“She’s leaving, that’s what. She bought a plane ticket to L.A.; she leaves in two weeks.”
Lev didn’t say anything. He opened a cabinet, took out two mugs, and put a tea bag and teaspoon in one. Sima folded the newspaper closed and clasped her hands above it, watching for Lev’s reaction.
“Maybe we’ll see her again? She might come visit New York.”
Sima shrugged, impressed by the plea in his voice. “Maybe, but it won’t be the same. Of course,” she said, before he could, “I knew it was coming—”
“But something like this still always catches you a little by surprise.”
Sima nodded, surprised and relieved he felt the same. She ran her hands along the table, her nails brushing the white Formica. “We’ll have her for Pesach,” she told him, “She’ll come to the second seder, and that’s it.”
Lev reached for the kettle, took it off the burner. “Well,” he said softly, as he poured the steaming water into each mug, “You can’t blame her, anyway. A trip like that.”
Sima moved the paper aside as Lev approached, watching he didn’t spill as he carefully set each cup on the table. “Who’s talking about blame? She’s young, she can do things like that.”
Lev nodded. “And what will you do?”
“What do you mean, what will I do?”
“I mean, for a seamstress, for an assistant.”
“Oh. Well, actually, I thought that maybe I’d reduce the shop hours for a little while.” Sima kept her eyes on the dark surface of the tea. He could say no, dismiss her fledging plans—too much bother, too much money. “We could go on vacation now, not bother waiting until August.”
Lev removed the tea bag from the second mug, placed it on a napkin. Sima watched the brown stain spread.
“Timna pointed out: I own my own shop, I can take vacation whenever I want. It’s not like I need to worry about building up the business or something. If anything,” Sima said, carefully building her argument, “I should reduce the hours. What do I want to work six days a week for, eight hours a day? We have your pension and my savings, it’s not like we’re desperate for the money—”
Lev nodded in agreement.
“So why sit around,” she continued, “waiting until August to go somewhere unbearably hot for ten lousy days? I could close the shop for two, three weeks after Passover, and we could really take a vacation. Boston, Maine, Nova Scotia—there’s a ferry, we could drive straight to Halifax.”
“Halifax?”
“I’ve always wanted to go,” Sima said. “Remember how we almost drove there on our honeymoon?”
“No.”
“Anyway. It’d be a beautiful drive, and you’ve always loved the ocean.”
“You think it’ll be warm enough in April?”
“By the time we get there, it’ll be May.”
“I guess so.”
Sima looked at him over the rim of her raised teacup. “Well,” she asked, tensing for an argument—he’d say it was all about Timna, when one thing had nothing to do with the other— “what do you think?”
“I think it sounds like a good idea.”
“Really?”
“Sure, why not?”
Sima nodded, sipped her tea. “Are you sure though?” she asked, because now that he’d agreed, she wasn’t so convinced. “You don’t think I’m just looking for an escape?” She paused, drummed her fingers against the side of her mug. “I mean, you don’t think it’s only because I got so caught up with Timna,” she said, knowing as she spoke that they both knew it was true, but needing him to forgive her for it so she could forgive herself, too, “and so now that she’s leaving me—”
“Why else do people travel if not for escape?”
“Yeah? I guess so. I guess maybe so.”
29
SIMA WENT AGAIN INTO THE CITY. A FEW LOOSE EXCUSES in her mind—the farmer’s market she still wanted to explore, the appetizing place she’d been told had stuck around, still sold herring the way Lev liked it—but mostly a desire to simply walk the streets once more, again experience that freedom.
She smiled coming up from the subway, imagined seeing her friends—Patrick from the bar, Liza from the used-clothing shop—laughing to recognize each other out on the street, Saturday morning, springtime. She walked through the Union Square Market, tasting and asking and for once not resisting her urge to buy: some cheese for Lev along with pink crackers in cellophane-ribbon wrapping; the beeswax candles and rose potpourri for herself, the scent of the dried flowers like the way it was supposed to smell after rain.
From the market she wandered east and then south, following again Timna’s footsteps and the echoes of the old people who’d once lived there. Hungry, she paused at a few restaurants to glance at the menus, but finally stopped at a small diner whose laminated menu was identical to so many others she’d known: the rice pudding and cottage cheese salad, the Greek and Italian specials and bagels with a schmear.
Her coffee had arrived but not yet her omelette when Timna entered the diner.
Sima saw her immediately.
She looked down, looked to the side—heart beating heavy as when she’d spied, thinking, caught! But then she felt Timna pause, see her, call her name with surprise but also warmth. She hadn’t been following her, Sima reminded herself, she hadn’t been following, yet here she was.
“What are you doing here?” Timna asked.
Sima, steadying, mentioned the market. Timna nodded, distracted by her ringing cell phone. Sliding into Sima’s two-person booth, she answered
her phone, glancing at her watch as she said something in Hebrew.
“Nurit’s going to be late meeting me, so I’ll sit with you a bit,” she said, hanging up the phone. “So, the market? I wouldn’t have thought that was your thing.”
Sima showed her the purchases, disbelieving. Here she was opposite Timna—what she’d hoped for and feared all along. Timna lingered over the scent of the dried flowers, said it reminded her of a garden they’d gone to when she was a kid, wild roses beside the sea. When the waitress arrived with the omelette, Timna, complaining about Nurit’s constant lateness, ordered a coffee. “Same check,” Sima told the waitress, just a little proudly.
When the waitress had gone, Sima looked at Timna. She didn’t want to end this easy chatter, but knew she had to say something, had to know where she stood. “You won’t believe,” she told Timna, “Lev and I are going to do it. A vacation—a road trip even. Up along the coast to Canada, Nova Scotia. We’re leaving a week after you.
“Really? That’s wonderful.”
Sima nodded. “It’s because of you. Seeing how you enjoy yourself—you’ve inspired us a little.” She paused, cut a bite of her food. “Which is why I feel so bad, especially, about everything that’s happened—”
Across the table Sima could see Timna gathering into herself, her body stiffening, a tighter smile on her face and her eyes cast down to the half-empty sugar packet she’d poured into her coffee.
Sima forced herself to continue. “I think you know I acted out of concern for you, so I won’t say more about that. No matter why I did it though, I was wrong. I’m sorry, and I was wrong, and I just wanted you to know that once and for all.”
“I do know that.”
“Well, I wanted you to know again.”
There was a pause. Well, that’s it, Sima thought. She’d done what she could, and if it wasn’t enough—well, and how could it be enough? She’d ruined love. She always ruined love.
“Sima,” Timna said, “it’s okay. Really.”
Sima looked at her skeptically.
“When I say it’s okay I mean it’s okay.” She looked at Sima, smiled. “So, will you stop with all the melodrama now?”
Sima grinned. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“And thank you for the coffee.” Timna stood to go. “If Nurit isn’t outside right now I’m never talking to her again.” She grabbed her purse, looked at Sima. “Okay then? We never have to talk about all this again?”
Sima nodded. “I promise.”
Timna took one last sip of coffee. “I’ll hold you to that,” she said, smiling.
After she left Sima sat, stunned. Such dumb good luck, she thought. And then: what she deserved, too.
30
SIMA HAD CARDS WITH HER NEW HOURS PRINTED AT THE stationery store around the corner, tried to remember—angling the card tray before the cash register—to hand one to each customer. “I’m closing the shop for two weeks in May,” Sima told them, “and when I come back, it’ll be reduced hours, just noon to three.” The women took the cards—a cartoon bra in one corner at Timna’s suggestion, though Sima had put her foot down against the hot-pink print Timna preferred—said, “Good for you, easing your way into retirement,” or “What, so many old businesses gone and now yours too?” Sima shook her head no, swore she’d die in the shop. And meant it: could not imagine her life without its safety.
Such a little shop, she thought: linoleum floor, polyester curtain, wooden shelves, metal racks. A hidden space, inconsequential, not even a pinprick on the borough map, but for her, standing behind the counter with light coming through the one window, a whole world. She couldn’t envision closing the shop without also envisioning her own death; she saw the basement empty, thick with shadows and clogged with dust, and her own skeleton self forever sitting at the counter, awaiting customers who would never come. She remembered images from adventure books she’d read as a child—the pirate ship full of cobwebs, the beer stein from which the captain had drunk still clutched in his bony hand. Her life would be that abandoned.
And yet, she thought one evening as she watched car beams cut across the bedroom ceiling, perhaps all the years behind her were years of skeletons and cobwebs, and only since Timna’s arrival had she experienced the return to full flesh. She’d made a business, a space for herself in the crowded city, walls she couldn’t reach even with hands outstretched, a ceiling she could not jump to touch. Beside her store another home and then another and another, each just a few feet from the one that came before; blocks and blocks of houses and apartment buildings reaching through Brooklyn and Queens, crossing bridges to stretch into skyscrapers, so much brick and stone, so much brown and red, the bright painted metal of children’s playgrounds and the green-brown of park grass curved around black tar. Somewhere the clouds, somewhere, just as far away, hills and streams, wildflowers alongside the highway. She’d made a physical space but had kept herself lonely, all the chatter of her days knocked limp, year after year, against the glass silence of evening.
How many others like her, she thought, how many others lonely within their walls? And then one day realizing that every room has a door, and opening it.
31
“WELCOME,” SIMA SAID. TIMNA STOOD ON THE porch, a bottle of wine tucked under one arm. “Welcome? After all this time I get a welcome?” “You’re a guest now, right? No longer an employee.” Sima took the wine, linked her arm through Timna’s as they walked into the living room. She kept her head turned toward Timna, admired the bright eyes that so easily narrowed to laughter, the soft lips that spread simply to a wide grin. Sima nodded but did not listen to a story Timna told—the walk over, a customer she’d run into. It was their last night together; she would allow herself to look as long as she wanted.
“So, what’s the scoop du jour?” Connie asked, taking Timna’s hands in her own, “when’s the honeymoon?”
“It’s not—”
“I know, I know. But, so, when do you leave?” Connie reached for an olive from the coffee table.
“We leave Saturday.”
“Two days, wow. And when will you be back?” Timna lifted one shoulder slightly. “Don’t know.”
“Oh lord. To be off like you. Nate,” she said, turning to her son hunched over the coffee table, spreading chopped liver on a matzoh cracker, “why don’t you ever go anywhere?”
Nate paused midspread. He was skinny and a little sunken around the cheeks—“Too much laboratory light,” Connie had said when she’d introduced him to Timna—and, seemingly shy of Timna, avoided looking at her. “I’m going to Paradise Island in a month, Ma,” he said, raising an eyebrow as if to say: you know this.
“Paradise Island, Shmaradise Island. This girl really is going to paradise—Thailand, right?”
Timna nodded.
“They say youth is wasted on the young. Come on, Nate, start wasting!”
“Actually,” Sima said, “we may do some traveling of our own.”
Connie looked first to Timna, who shrugged, smiling, and then to Sima. “What’s this?”
Sima grinned. “I’m taking three weeks, and Lev and I are driving up the coast all the way to Nova Scotia. Then we’re going to take a boat to Prince Edward Island, spend a few days there.”
Connie put a hand on Nate’s knee—exactly the touch she would have given Art if he were there, Sima noticed. “Sima Goldner. Why have you mentioned none of this to me? You just up and abandon your friends—”
“Three weeks only,” Lev said.
“Without so much as an announcement.”
“This isn’t an announcement?”
“But how long have you known? You never mentioned—”
Sima shrugged, enjoying the chance to withhold detail, appear mysterious. “Two weeks? Once I knew this one was abandoning ship—” she lifted a bottle of wine, angling it slightly toward Timna before pouring Connie a glass, “I figured what the hell, why shouldn’t Lev and I also have a little adventure?”
They toast
ed to Timna’s journey, and then to Sima and Lev’s, and then, because Connie brought it up, to Nate’s receipt of a government grant, and then to each other. Lev led the seder, and Sima watched proud and pleased as they followed the regimen: ate the parsley dipped in salt water, roasted egg, horseradish, chopped nuts and fruit; drank four glasses of wine; split the matzoh and, at her cousin Millie’s urging closed their eyes while Nate hid a piece—though no one remembered to search for it after the actual meal. A dinner of symbols: desperate tears and deep bitterness, backbreaking labor and the rush of escape, but also fertility and rebirth, the round of the egg and the green of fresh herbs.
Sima studied the scene, hoping to hold it: the light cast from candles warming white circles on the tablecloth, the purple of wine streaking the sides of wineglasses, the gloss of plates cleaned of food (the casual crumple of cloth napkins abandoned beside them), and friends around a table, a holiday, spring, once again a sense of rebirth and new beginnings.
“Goodbye beautiful,” Sima said, pulling away from the hug before she had the chance to hold on, “Be well.” She stepped back into the shade of the porch, suddenly ready, after so much dread, for the moment to be over—she didn’t want to cry in front of Timna, she needed to pull off an upbeat goodbye, a jaunty wave.
“Goodbye, Timna,” Lev said, kissing her quickly on the cheek. “Keep in touch. Write to us, we’ll write back.”
“Just leave an address,” Sima told her. “A hotel maybe, in the next city you’ll be in?”
Timna nodded, said something about Los Angeles—Sima was barely listening, just counting down now until she could close a door behind her, collapse.
“Tell Alon we say hello,” Lev said, managing the wave Sima hadn’t—her own hands were clasped before her, slightly damp.
“Yes, tell him hello from us,” Sima said, “and send some pictures, too.”
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