The Appetites of Girls

by Pamela Moses

  Before serving our dinner, Amara lit candles, clusters of votives lining the bookshelves, windowsills, dotting the floor near the room’s entry. She arranged two in frosted glass holders on the table between us, then disappeared to the kitchen and returned bearing a large tray holding several bowls.

  “Have you tried Vietnamese food?” She shook a wisp of hair from her eyes, her silver earrings vibrating. “I have a ton.” She set the tray at the center of the table, then identified each dish: curried tofu, vegetable stir-fry, glass noodles, steamed rice rolls.

  “It looks delicious,” I said, and watched as Amara’s chopsticks lifted a few small pieces of tofu, two rice rolls, some thin strands of translucent noodles and placed them on her plate. I was careful to take a portion no larger than hers, to chew unhurriedly as she did. As we nibbled, Amara added to our glasses, and it was not long before our talk turned to dreamier things—what it would be like to own a gallery on the Mediterranean instead of here, the vine-covered villas we could rent in Italy, the weekends we would spend in Morocco, the boats we would charter to southern France.

  As the sky through the open windows melted from pink to orange to navy-black, the candles projected flickering shadows on the darkened walls, making the garnet liquid in our glasses glow. The flame closest to Amara pulsed across her cheeks and illumined her gray eyes, and as I gazed into them, I had the sense that I could see past them, through them, into something I had once belonged to.

  When the last traces of blue faded from the night sky, scattered crystalline stars emerged, below them a sliver of moon. Leaning back into her pillow, Amara began to recite verses from a few of her favorite poems—Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” two sonnets by Shakespeare, Auden’s “Stop All the Clocks.” And a long-ago memory resurfaced of Mother and me sitting after dusk on a deserted beach, a blanket wrapped around us both for warmth as the water grazed our bare toes. “What do I need in this world but you, Opal?” Mother had whispered in my ear, hugging me close as she began to hum a lullaby. And I had breathed with such a deep contentment (a rare, almost foreign sensation for me during my childhood) and rested my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes, believing, for the moment, that only the two of us existed.

  “‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/ And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler, long I stood . . .’” Amara nodded, her hand drumming her knee in rhythm with the words. And with these few lines I knew, I joined my voice to hers. How I wished for a thousand more nights just like this.

  “You’re lovely, Opal,” Amara said suddenly, her broad lips curving slightly. She tilted her glass for a slow sip, exposing the length of her neck, and closed her eyes. “Really lovely.”

  “Oh—thank you. You too,” I murmured, my tongue swollen and dry in my mouth. What was she saying? When she opened her eyes again, she leaned forward, her elbows pressing the table. There was little distance between us now, so little I thought I could feel her breath on me. Why wasn’t she speaking? What was she waiting for? Would she . . . ? Did she think that I . . . ? Something in me was trembling, crackling. Never had I touched my lips to a woman’s. Perhaps if I didn’t look, if I didn’t think— If I could only swallow away the nervous, sick clog in my throat, I could make myself want what she wanted— It would be, I imagined, like kissing a man, only softer, warmer. But now the room was shifting, shifting, and Amara seemed to be listing to one side.

  “You look pale, Opal.” She was patting my hand between hers.

  No, no. It was my fault—I was just— It was just my low tolerance for wine and it was late and I was overheated. I stammered in the dimness as I fumbled about for my purse. Our cheeks pressed in a clumsy, hurried embrace before I dashed down Amara’s porch steps and into the humid night.

  When I rose the following morning, I could see, through my bedroom window, that the sky was cloudless, almost lavender, weather that normally filled me with optimism, but on this morning made my chest ache. Overnight, a handful of the fern’s leaves had shriveled. Had I given it too much sun or too little? Unsure, I watered it, plucked the dried sections, and after some consideration, found a new spot for it on my coffee table. I gulped a glass of vegetable juice, gobbled a small handful of berries, then rummaged through the embroidered cloth box where I stored baubles I had collected over the years until I found a pair of tiger-eye earrings Amara had complimented a few days before. When she mentioned them today, I would pull them from my ears and fold them into her palm, proof that there need be no awkwardness between us. “I do love you,” I would whisper. Then she would know that, though my feelings for her were different from what she had hoped, they ran just as deep.

  Along my route to the gallery, I fiddled with the dangling earrings, my stomach beginning to churn. I tried to imagine how we would greet each other. The gift of the earrings would help heal any hurt pride, any discomfort, wouldn’t it? Still, until then, what would we speak of?

  But I could have spared myself these worries because Amara, for the first morning in the three months I’d known her, was late for work. In fact, she did not appear until close to noon, and when she finally arrived, gave a hurried apology but no explanation for her absence. For once there seemed little time for chitchat; the gallery was busier than usual, the seats around the health bar filled, and Amara had to use the slower moments for the paperwork and phone calls she had missed that morning.

  “Thank you, again, for dinner,” I said during a brief spell of quiet, offering a section of the apple I had just sliced, hoping to find some way to ease into a discussion of what I was certain had almost occurred between us.

  But Amara only smiled and blew a stream of air between her teeth as if to say my expression of gratitude was an unnecessary formality, as though nothing whatsoever had happened. “Oh, you don’t have to thank me, Opal.” Then “Pretty earrings,” she added, as if she had never seen them before, and returned to her work too quickly for any further interchange.

  At the end of the afternoon, Marco Everly came back in. Calliope had left hours earlier and Amara had disappeared again, too, driving to Cape Coral to meet with a photographer friend whose work we would be exhibiting in late fall. I wished Marco hadn’t reappeared, showing up now when I was alone, interrupting time I needed to think.

  “I’ve done a few new paintings. I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask if they might be of interest.” His smile was all sunshine.

  But I disliked his new paintings more than those he’d shown me the first time. These were of carnival performers—jugglers, clowns, a tattooed man—all posturing in a Toulouse-Lautrec sort of style. The reds and yellows in the nighttime scenes jarred, and the exaggerated angles of the figures felt garish.

  “You’re not a fan,” he said, smiling but with something sober in his cheeks now, amused and disappointed at the same time.

  “To be honest, I find them a bit dislocating but not in a way that’s understandable.”

  “Dislocating but not understandable? Wow! You’re a tough critic.” He tugged at his earlobe as if forming a thought, as if I had all the time in the world to muse over his artistic style.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m just getting ready to close up,” I began to say. But he was talking again—

  “I’m at a loss, I suppose, to prove my meaning. But are you going to tell me you understand these?” He gestured to Lee Claybourne’s watercolors currently on display, depictions of placid pine groves, of window-boxed cottages nestled behind sand dunes. “Do they mean something?”

  “They don’t have to mean something for me to admire them.” I admired them for the mood they created, I was about to say. Instead I turned to the register, intending for him to leave.

  “Okay. I can take a hint!” he laughed, and closed his portfolio case. “Are you always so serious, Opal?” He turned as he reached the door. “You are, aren’t you, but I’m fond of you anyway.” He grinned almost too brightly as he had the first time we’d met.

  What nerve he had! Returning to the gallery, sugge
sting his work had value beyond what we were showing, attempting to endear himself to me. When I saw Amara the next day, I would tell her every maddening detail. And we would criticize the whole interchange and the presumptuousness of men.

  Over the next days and weeks, Amara missed another three mornings. More than once, she disappeared for an hour or two at midday. And now, rather than lingering after five to share an additional cup of tea, as had been our habit, she appeared in a hurry to rinse the last of the glasses, plates, and spoons, to empty the register, and close the store. So I had wounded her more than I’d known. I needed to make her understand that the mere thought of this made my head throb with surging tears. I ached as much as she! Maybe more. But each time I attempted a conversation, she winked at me or smiled broadly, often giving mere half-answers to my questions, sometimes tapping a finger to her temple as if simultaneously trying to remember some other thought. How masterfully she masked her feelings. How unusually cheerful she seemed, humming to herself as she readjusted any of the framed pieces that had been nudged out of place during the day or tossed strawberries and sections of orange and honeydew into the blender.

  Soon Amara made our shared exercise routine an impossibility as well. With her depleted hours at the gallery, there was no longer a free half hour for calisthenics. Perhaps I only needed to be patient, I told myself; perhaps, after a time, everything would return to normal.

  It had been a week or more since I’d last worked on my drawings, and it occurred to me that showing them to Amara might be a good way to break the ice. I slid them into a plastic sleeve to bring with me to the gallery. But each day, Amara seemed more preoccupied, and a right moment to approach her with my work never seemed to arise. When we ran out of wheatgrass, of filters for the water purifier, of the soft cloths we used for dusting the frames of the artwork, she neglected to reorder; and when I pointed out these oversights, she only shrugged her shoulders and laughed. And now, to my irritation, when male customers fed her flirtatious lines, she no longer turned to me with a commiserating smirk, rather smiled to herself, as if she harbored some happy, private thought. So she was taunting me, punishing me. And though I tried to steel myself against her torments, I began to feel that if something did not change soon, I would fly into a hundred pieces. So one Friday, just before closing, I determined to confront her. She was spraying the spider plant in the front window.

  “Oh, Opal!” She looked startled, jogged out of some reverie or surprised at my presence, as if she’d forgotten I had not yet left. “It’s late, isn’t it?” She glanced at her wrist, though she wore no watch, then slid one of the spider plant’s spindly leaves between her forefinger and thumb. “Such pretty little things, aren’t they? Simple but so lively. So what is it, Opal? What’s on your mind? You look absolutely tragic.”

  I crossed my arms over my waist to hide their fidgeting. My lips went numb. But I had to speak. Yes, there were things that needed to be said. “We used to talk, Amara. You used to tell me things.”

  “Have I been distant lately? I’m sure you’re right.” She held her lower lip between her teeth, and I watched her work to suppress a smile. She gazed at me but with eyes unfocused. And as I studied her face, I knew—I had misunderstood—she faked nothing. She was happy. I alone suffered. And a familiar queasiness oozed through me, the same unease that had seized my stomach for days prior to each of Mother’s announcements that we would, once again, be moving, a sinking feeling of what I had intuited was coming before she’d even said a word.

  “Well, since you ask . . .” Amara was beaming now. The truth was she had met someone. A woman. Was I surprised? “I was slow to tell you only out of apprehension,” she said. “It’s not everyone who feels comfortable with such things. But you, of all people, Opal. I should have known better.” She gave my elbow a squeeze.

  Amara had met her at the small party she hosted the night before my birthday. Fosca had been her neighbor’s houseguest for some weeks. She was from Florence originally but now lived in Nevada. “Las Vegas, of all places! Can you believe it?” She tossed her head nonchalantly, but crimson flowered across her cheeks as she spoke. And I noticed, as she lowered her eyelids, a pale dusting of sea green beneath her brow bones and faint yet unmistakable pencil lines darkening the rim above her lashes. Amara paused, her hands clasped behind her neck. I was aware that she awaited my reaction. But long seconds passed before I found the self-possession to mutter a choked “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you, Opal, thank you. So, listen! Fosca wants me to go away with her.” Amara’s voice grew louder, her words rushed. She clutched my fingers as if believing I shared her enthusiasm. “She needs to be in Rome for four weeks on business. At first I declined. You know, with all of the work we have here.” She swept her hand through the air. But she knew how reliable I was, she said, and that with Calliope’s help, I could handle things on my own for a while. Of course, she would pay me extra for my added responsibilities. Besides, it had been ages since she had taken a vacation, and didn’t Italy sound too, too tempting?

  I said almost nothing, only returned to some receipts I had been sorting, flicking each one to the counter with an audible snap of paper. What a fool she had made of me! Even if my wants had not been what she must have assumed. What right had she to say things, to make me believe things! A receipt fell from my hands to the floor beside my feet. I made no move toward it. Let Amara crouch to retrieve it! At the very least, she owed me this, this tiny gesture. Silently I took the slip from her, my face burning.

  “We leave a week from tomorrow. For exactly a month,” she promised. But I knew well how these things went: four weeks stretched into five, five into six, and so on.

  “I’m so glad we had the chance to chat,” Amara said as we stepped into the damp air of early evening. She locked the door behind us, oblivious that for the last thirty minutes I had spoken not a word. Then before parting, she kissed the top of my forehead, an old habit of Mother’s when the thrill of a new man in her life filled her with uncontainable feelings of affection and largesse. I closed my fists, my nails biting into the flesh of my palms.

  • • •

  Amara had vowed to send postcards, snapshots, the predicted itinerary for her travels, but I counted on none and none arrived. The only contact information she had left me was a phone number for the pensione where she and Fosca planned to stay. “It’s not necessary. I won’t need it,” I had told her, dropping the bit of paper dismissively onto one of the bamboo stools. But when I dialed it in a panic one afternoon, unable to find the shut-off valve for the back bathroom toilet, which had a tendency to overflow, the woman who answered explained in broken English—and shouldn’t I have expected this?—that Miss Silver and her companion had vacated their room two days before.

  On the morning before Amara’s departure, she had handed me a page of notes, including numbers for the cleaning service and trash collector, directions to the bank where our weekly deposit was made, the hiding place beneath the bar where two spare keys and some “emergency” petty cash were kept. But nowhere did she list how to reset the alarm when it was triggered accidentally, how to compensate Calliope when she worked overtime, the proper procedure for returning incorrect orders to distributors. By the middle of each afternoon, my head ached from fury. I fantasized about the look on Amara’s face when she returned after long months to find her store flooded with water from the broken sprinkler system, the gallery walls naked of art with no arrangements for future exhibits, imagined how she would gasp with horror and beg me to help her. I struggled to calm my nerves the only way I knew how: I ran both mornings and evenings now, worked through Amara’s calisthenics routine in solitude in the quiet of my living room, afterward sipping tea with royal jelly. But even this seemed to do little good. Unopened mail began to pile on my kitchen table: bills, advertisements, letters from Mother and Kimberly that I could not find the will to open. I ignored the flashing red button on my answering machine, messages from Ruth and Fran and Setsu,
I guessed, because I had neglected to contact them this month, had not responded to their attempts to contact me. On days when business in the gallery was slow, I spent hours perched on one of the stools of the health bar with a stack of magazines and books and newspaper crosswords. On the days Calliope came, she would join me for a time, then disappear to the back room to make murmured phone calls to her boyfriend.

  During the first week or two after Amara was gone, I had kept careful track of the days, but after a while, time began to blur. I would wake without knowing if it was Thursday or Monday or Saturday, needing to switch on the local news to check whether or not I needed to dress for work. I rotated the same few outfits, having no desire to search my closets for the skirts or tops I thought most became me. And I must have managed to brush my teeth, scrub my face, to pin up my hair with no more than a glance in the mirror, because what stared back at me one Sunday afternoon, from the glass walls of the yoga center that Amara had recommended, stopped my breath. My complexion under the fluorescent lights was white and flat as paper. The knot into which I had pulled my hair accented the shadows below my eyes and new faint lines etched on either side of my mouth. And there, in Studio Three of the yoga center, as I studied my reflection, without warning, a sob swelled from the very depths of me.

  That night I sat at my kitchen table and sorted through the stack of neglected cards and letters. I listened to my string of outdated phone messages. Why hadn’t I called them back? Setsu and Fran and Ruth wanted to know. Should they be worried? So many calls they’d filled my answering machine. I had considered giving up on them, but I understood now they were not giving up on me. The final recording on the machine, now a week old, was from Setsu. She would be arriving in Fort Myers the following Thursday and could use company while she was in town, she said. Was I around? She still hadn’t heard back from me. It would be good to talk to a friend. “James and I have been having some trouble lately. Maybe it doesn’t surprise you. I know you never liked him. And maybe years ago I should have listened. Anyway, I can never, ever get you at home. But please let me know if you have time next week. Call me, okay?”