Hold Still

by Lynn Steger Strong

  Maya holds her wine without drinking and stares at her now-bare pale goose-pimpled skin in the mirror, black underwear, a light pink, slightly padded bra. Her posture’s slumped, always has been. Laura presses back her shoulders, places her hands on Maya’s waist. Maya has freckles up both her arms, across her clavicle. Her stomach’s flat, though the skin’s still slightly stretched from her two kids. Her quadriceps extend out above her knees from all the running. Her arms hang long and limby, her hair pulled up high off her bare face.

  She forces herself to let Laura keep hold of her hip bones. “You’re an awful feminist,” she says.

  Laura pulls a dress from its bag and holds it in front of Maya. It’s too big, too many colors, but Maya slips it over her head—it’s sheer and soft against her. She stays still as Laura reaches in her bag for pins.

  “I’m the sort of feminist who likes to take advantage of …” Laura narrows her eyes and grins, her lips full, her earrings—silver again, flat round plates with half-moon cutouts—angling themselves around her face. She pins the dress so it rests far below Maya’s collarbone. She tightens it until it pulls at and hugs tight to Maya’s waist. “All my feminine parts,” she says.

  They go into the city and are seated at a restaurant on West Tenth Street. It’s small and dimly lit, rickety round tables stuck too close together, old straight-backed wooden chairs painted red. There’s a single tea light set before them and Maya reaches her fingers out in front of her until their tips touch the burning glass.

  “How’s the stodge?” asks Laura.

  She means Stephen. Each has only ever tolerated the other all this time.

  Maya smiles, shakes her head. “He’s not,” she says.

  They’ve had periods of deep affection, Laura and Stephen. She makes him laugh. He respects her brain. She quizzes him on obscure French philosophers to prove he’s not as smart as he’d like to be, presumes he is. He often, apropos of nothing, mentions her Midwestern upbringing, wanting to remind whoever else is with them, maybe just to remind Laura, that she isn’t as French or as mysterious as she might like to be.

  “I’ll take you if you leave him,” Laura says. This is not the first time she’s offered. “We’ll go get El, just run away.”

  Laura’s often spent whole weeks at Maya’s house when Stephen’s traveling. Holidays and birthdays, she’s often come along with them. And Stephen let her, didn’t question it. He smiled patiently when she gave him anal beads or brightly colored bow ties as gifts, for no other reason than to make him sit through their opening and say thanks.

  “Don’t,” Maya says now. Not meaning the anger she feels. It feels imperative that she defend her husband. She wants to itemize for her friend all that he has done exactly right. “It’s my fault much more than his,” she says. Her voice is steadier and more certain.

  Laura’s bottom lip pulls in beneath her teeth.

  “Of course.”

  The waiter comes. He’s young, and Maya can’t look up at him. Laura asks for waters, orders a bottle from the wine list, quickly scoots the boy away.

  “I left my marriage because of my husband’s sister’s yellow dress,” she says.

  In all these years, her friend has hardly spoken of her marriage, and never has she said her husband’s name.

  “It must have been an awful yellow,” Maya says; she fingers her napkin, reaches for her water with both hands.

  The waiter sets down two wine glasses and pours a taste for Laura; she twirls the deep red, sips it, nods, and waits for him to fill each of their glasses, leave again.

  “It was at our wedding,” Laura says. She pushes Maya’s wine glass toward her. Maya sips, sets down her glass.

  “You left that day?” she asks.

  “A year later,” Laura says. “But it was over after that.”

  Candlelit downturned faces spot the restaurant; there’s half a wall of mirrors lined with liquor bottles set behind the bar. Maya’s fingers press again against the burning glass and then she grabs hold of her wine with both hands, cupping lightly with her right hand, holding tightly to the stem with her left.

  They order quickly: a petite filet for Laura. Maya orders the same so that she won’t have to read the menu while the waiter waits for her. Laura orders a burrata for them to share to start.

  The waiter leaves, and the table next to them jostles as the couple gathers up their coats and scarves and mittens; the girl is young, the man much older, heavyset, both well dressed; the woman keeps mumbling, Excuse me, sorry, to Maya as she pushes out her chair, and Maya smiles at her, says, I’m sorry, back.

  “It was lovely, actually, my husband’s sister’s dress,” Laura says. The way that she says “husband”: like the word might not be real.

  Maya pulls herself closer to the table. She inches herself forward on her chair.

  “Poor girl,” Laura says. She laughs now, her face younger, barer. “I’d never seen her look so great,” she says.

  Bread’s been set down in front of them without Maya noticing. Laura reaches for a piece and tears. “It wasn’t,” she says. “She wasn’t beautiful.” She pours oil onto the plate next to her wine glass, dips her bread. “There’s a sort of carelessness that feels necessary for something to be beautiful.” Laura chews and swallows. “She was the most desperate thing I’d ever seen.”

  She picks up a second piece of bread.

  “She was hungry, you know?”

  Their cheese comes and Laura cuts a large piece for Maya, serving her. She fails, though, to look at her straight-on.

  “She must have been twenty-two or -three, just finished college, nursing school. She’d lost thirty pounds in the months leading up.” She spoons the fig reduction onto Maya’s plate. “I hadn’t even noticed it,” she says. “She’d always been a little chubby, the little sister. I’d known her her whole adolescent life.”

  Laura looks up then and smiles at Maya, who’s cut the cheese into smaller pieces, chews a corner of it—smoke and milk—as her friend talks.

  “She must have been starving herself,” says Laura. “And there was this hunger on her, you know? And not just from not eating.” She laughs again, cuts off a larger piece of cheese, then splits it between hers and Maya’s plates. “She was out to be seen that night, to prove she could be, should be looked at; she was so desperate to be wanted, like that was all she needed to survive.”

  Maya pulls a piece of bread out of its basket just to hold it. She dips the edge of half into Laura’s plate now filled with oil and slowly eats.

  “And I was just so sad for her, so angry,” Laura says. “That she could think something so seemingly simple was worth all that energy.”

  They each sip their wine and watch as tables fill and empty. Maya stares into her glass.

  Their food comes and Maya watches Laura wink at their young waiter. He refills their glasses, gives each of them a sharper knife.

  “The dress was strapless, old-fashioned,” Laura says. “Her posture was perfect for the first time.”

  Laura gulps her wine. “It wasn’t the dress.” She shakes her head, cuts her first perfect slice of meat. “It was the idea that that was the best she had to hope for, those few hours, someone looking at her, feeling worth something, being, I don’t know, a girl at whom people, men especially, but everybody—she wanted everyone to look.”

  Maya’s not sure what to do with all the food in front of her, where to start, how she might ever finish it. She cuts off a small piece of asparagus and considers it, looking past her fork, the spear of green, back to her friend.

  “I hated her for it,” Laura says. “For showing me how small her world was, how small my life was about to be.” She looks down into her glass again. “I was getting everything she wanted …”

  “Except,” Maya says.

  “It was how desperate she was,” Laura says. “How small and simple what she wanted seemed to me then.”

  Maya takes her first bite of steak, having sliced it slowly, lets the juice sp
read into her asparagus and under her potatoes; it sits awhile on her tongue, the salt and grease coating her mouth.

  “I wanted something bigger,” Laura says. “I wanted …” She cuts herself another piece of steak, considers it a moment before she chews and swallows. “Paris. Life. Free Women.” Laura laughs. “I thought what I had then was something people got no matter what.

  “I got it wrong, maybe,” Laura says.

  Maya sips her wine, sets down her glass, and picks up her fork again.

  “I didn’t see …” says Laura. She holds her glass a long time, considering its fullness; she dips it forward, holds it straight again, then tips it toward her lips.

  “I left because I wanted to,” says Laura.

  Maya reaches for her napkin, wipes her mouth, her eyes searching for her friend again.

  “But you should never listen to me; I know nothing about marriages,” Laura says.

  Summer 2011

  “I’m so sorry,” Jeffrey says, rushing through the door and breathless. He’s promised to take Jack to dinner, but had an emergency with a patient and rushed out. Annie’s at the restaurant, El and Jack still in their bathing suits. The day’s storm has stopped and they’re watching a movie. Outside, the whole world is very still.

  Jack smells like salt and his skin sticks to Ellie’s legs as he lies against her. She wears a T-shirt and no shorts. Jeffrey runs toward Jack and scoops him up, his arms brushing against Ellie’s calf. “I’m so sorry,” he says again.

  His hair hangs heavy, mussed and limp in his face. He doesn’t seem to have the energy to push it behind his ears. “One of my patients …” But he stops. He has stubble, Ellie notices. It’s speckled through with streaks of gray.

  She wants to ask him what happened. She waits to listen just in case.

  “It was horrible,” he says, shaking his head.

  Jack takes hold of a tuft of his dad’s hair. “I’m staaaaarving, Daddy,” he says. They’ve had two bowls of popcorn, but Jack’s been looking forward to this dinner with his dad. Jeffrey grins at him, burying his nose into his son’s chest.

  “Nor comes?” asks Jack, looking back at her. She’s standing, holding her shirt down to cover the bottom of her bathing suit.

  “Well, yes,” says Jeffrey. “I think Nor should come.”

  He raises his eyebrows at her. He looks just like Jack.

  She nods toward one and then the other of them. “Sure,” she says. “Sounds great. I just …”

  Jeffrey smiles down at her bare legs, then looks back at Jack.

  “We’ll wait,” he says.

  They walk twenty minutes to Jack’s favorite Italian restaurant in the small stretch of busy peopled street a quarter mile from their house. “No one walks here,” Jeffrey says, holding tight to his son’s hand. “I like having a New Yorker around to remind us of all the ways we don’t live right.” The restaurant’s nearly empty. Ellie can just make out the sound of the river lapping up against the seawall; she smells brackish water and the crab traps laid out to dry on the docks across the street from where they sit. They order spaghetti, meatballs on the side, all three of them.

  “Is everything okay now?” Ellie asks Jeffrey.

  “I hope so.” He shakes his head. “Who knows?”

  Ellie stays quiet, waiting. Their food comes; Jack slurps his noodles, leaving splotches of red on his white shirt. Ellie picks up her napkin and wipes the red sauce from Jack’s mouth and nose, dips the napkin in her glass of water and dabs the spot out of his shirt. She cuts up the two massive meatballs on a separate plate, and drops the smaller pieces into his bowl.

  “Thanks, Nor,” he says, his mouth full. She feels Jeffrey watching her, but keeps her eyes on Jack, then on the food she’s cutting for him. She takes a bite of her meatball and looks back at Jack before she speaks again.

  “It must be hard,” she says.

  “It can be.”

  She feels competent and capable, taking care of Jack; she’s never felt this before now. She sips her water, holds her hand up over her mouth as she chews.

  Jeffrey pulls his napkin up off of his lap, places his palms on either side, and rips the napkin evenly in half.

  “Tell me about painting,” he says. She’s started again. The days when Jack’s with his parents, she sets up an easel in the yard or out at the beach.

  He leans in close to her and Ellie eats small bites of pasta.

  “I …” She wants to tell him; she doesn’t know what she would say.

  He’s smiling. He sits back, his food only half eaten.

  “It’s not something I’m very good at explaining,” she says.

  The cuff of his shirt has a red spot just below his palm and she almost reaches over with her napkin. She stops herself, shakes her head, and shrugs.

  “I went to this woman when I was little,” Ellie says. She looks out toward the docks. “I thought she was the coolest person. She’d smoke cigarettes out on her balcony and walk around in old paint-stained jeans and clogs. She had this incredible wiry gray hair.” Ellie reaches her hand up to her own hair. “One time, she asked me to draw her, you know? I’d only ever done still lifes, fruit and stuff. But then she said she was going to pose for me.”

  Both Jack and Jeff are listening, but Ellie looks at neither of them. She cuts her noodles into tiny unforkable pieces, then looks outside again.

  “I got really into drawing her. The whole time I thought I was making this perfect thing, you know?” Ellie stares down at her plate. “She always told me I was good.” She picks up another piece of bread and rolls it with her thumb. “I guess she probably told everyone that. But I was really deep in it, you know? All the lines and shades of her. She was all these incredibly thoughtful, layered lines. And now I had the chance to remake her, you know?” Jack angles his hand on her knee so he can lean closer in to his spaghetti. Ellie holds the back of his shorts so he doesn’t slip off of the booth. “But then my mom came to get me, and I saw that I’d been …” She shakes her head. She doesn’t know how she got here, why she’s telling this to him. “I’d made her really ugly, you know? By accident?”

  Jeffrey grabs a piece of bread and smiles at her. “She was very old?”

  “Not really,” Ellie says. “But her skin was wrinkled.” She smiles at the floor, thinking of her mom scolding her when she caught her smoking in the park. “The cigarettes. I mean, I guess I got it right, you know; it was her. But I hadn’t realized till I saw her that way. It felt like my fault.”

  Jeffrey takes a large gulp from his wine glass and nods toward Ellie; his chin and mouth are steady, firm.

  “Anyway,” says Ellie. She holds tight to Jack.

  “Anyway,” Jeffrey says.

  “I never went back after that,” she says.

  She looks around the restaurant, which has emptied since they started talking. There are two waitresses leaning on the bar. Jeffrey, Jack, and Ellie are the only table left.

  Ellie nods toward them. “I think they’re waiting for us.”

  Jeffrey turns toward the girls and waves with two fingers. The girl who has waited on them—young, tall, with slick brown skin—walks over to them.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” says Jeffrey. He reaches up and holds her forearm. His other hand holds back his hair. “We’re almost done. I promise.” He shows almost his whole front row of teeth.

  The waitress waves her hand at them, Jeffrey’s hand still on her other arm. “Don’t worry,” she says. “Take your time.”

  She starts to walk away, then turns back toward them. She touches Jeffrey’s shoulder and stands very close. “Your family’s gorgeous,” she says.

  Ellie feels a thrumming in her stomach. Jeffrey smiles. The girl brings her hand back to her side.

  Winter 2013

  They’re inside a club Maya hadn’t known existed. It’s the sort of place she’s never been, or meant to go: dark lights, loud music, young, lush people. They walked past the line straight through the door. Laura nodded at th
e doorman. “I sleep with him sometimes,” she muttered. And then here they were.

  Maya’s hips move as they wait at the bar and order drinks from the hardly more than adolescent bartender. She’s tattooed all down both arms and her belly is bare before them, flat and firm and covered in some liquid that makes it catch the light.

  Laura gets them martinis. Maya’s feet wobble underneath her—there have been two bottles of wine in addition to the one they had before leaving her house. Her knees buckle beneath the weight of all she’s drunk.

  She can’t remember ever being out this late.

  Laura leads Maya to the dance floor. Booths line the edges of the club where people sit and drink. A few of them are hidden by curtains. A cage hangs in the center over the crowd, suspended in the air by hidden lines. Inside the cage, a girl dances. Maya wants to get her out and take her home with her. She’s writhing, a small roll of fat on her belly curves and twists as she throws her arms back, lowering herself deftly to the cage’s floor. She wears only a sparkling red bikini. The top is oddly old-fashioned, a sweetheart cut, thinks Maya, though she can’t think how she knows this term.

  Laura puts her hands lightly on Maya’s hips from behind her. She turns Maya toward her and Maya gives the dancing girl one final look. And then Maya and Laura are dancing together. They’re dancing in a spirited imitation of the caged girl. Laura’s grip gets firm on either side of Maya, and Maya lets herself dip into her friend. Her hair’s out of its clip and down her back now, and strands of it catch in her mouth as she smiles at her friend. She tastes smoke and her shampoo, and she’s enjoying not having hold of anything. It feels as if she’s finally been let loose.

  The music gets louder, faster. She likes the feel of Laura’s hands on her. She wants to fall into her and let her hold her as she moves.

  Slowly, though, Maya feels herself begin to slip. She’s either too drunk or becoming not quite drunk enough. The result is nausea, nausea and wanting to get out. She puts her hands on top of Laura’s shoulders, which are slick with sweat right through her shirt.

  “Bathroom,” she says and then screams it twice more before Laura nods that she’s heard. They walk determinedly toward a bright red EXIT sign. The bathroom’s nearly empty. A girl, so young Maya thinks a moment she should scold her, is leaning close to the mirror, lining her eyes in black as a girl in the one occupied stall yells to her about “that fucking assface Ross.”