The Careful Undressing of Love

by Corey Ann Haydu

  At least fifty people are crowding the room, spilling into the hallway, sitting all the way up the staircase, drifting into the almost kitchen that is really only a counter, two cabinets, and an old yellow fridge that Mrs. James refuses to replace even though it’s ancient and barely cold enough to keep milk from going sour.

  Cruz and Charlotte and Isla sit on the ground near Delilah. Mom and I stand by the bookcases and we both cover our noses with our hands, trying to escape the smells of scented candles and old lady perfume and days of overcooked eggs and undercooked lamb. Even Mom’s hairspray isn’t enough to cover all the other scents. She’s using more of it today than usual—her short hair is somehow harder to contain than her long hair, and wisps keep falling out of the tiny bun she’s fashioned at the back of her neck.

  “Thanks,” Delilah says, her voice so small that it can’t compete with the din of the whole street asking one another why we’re here and shaking their heads at the Abbound family’s cruelty or Isla’s dress that might be a slip and her tights that are ripped all the way up her thighs.

  They’re always more concerned with Isla’s outfits than mine. The other night at Julia’s I was wearing less than Isla is now, but it didn’t incite the same kind of outrage when I walked down the street. I think Isla must notice it, too, the way her body is a particularly tense battleground compared to the rest of ours. I think of the way Ms. Abbound looked at Delilah, too. It’s uncomfortable to think of us as anything but a single organism, but of course it’s easier to be a white Devonairre Street Girl.

  Isla has red and white bracelets from her wrists to her elbows.

  I cut mine off. They were itchy and got ratty and gray as soon as I showered in them.

  “Thank you for coming,” Delilah says. Angelika puts a finger to her lips and hushes everyone who hasn’t stopped chattering.

  I text Cruz. I can’t help it. I should be texting Owen, telling him where and when we can meet up later, who will be bringing beer or ice cream or a condom. But I don’t need to text Owen. I’ve been pawing at him all week, resting my head on his shoulder while watching movies, straddling him most nights in my loft and once in the garden when it was late and I couldn’t sleep and I persuaded him to sneak out.

  In the three a.m. blackness, I felt good that Cruz was no longer the last person I’d kissed there.

  By sunrise, I was miserable.

  Everything’s all wrong, I text Cruz now. I watch him feel the buzz of his phone; I watch him check it; I watch him tell Isla it’s someone else entirely, probably.

  You’re scared, he texts back. I’m not.

  Isla’s scared, I write. Delilah’s scared. Even Charlotte seems scared.

  I watch him read my list and he scratches Charlotte’s back but I think it’s by accident, a gesture so familiar it doesn’t have meaning anymore. If he were scratching my back, it would be something to notice.

  Cruz doesn’t reply. He doesn’t stop looking at me, either.

  I look away first.

  “We have to do something,” Delilah says, like we are in the middle of a conversation already. “Something must be done.”

  “Delilah came to me,” Angelika says, weaving her way around the bodies sitting on the floor and nearly tripping on a few dropped lemons until she reaches Delilah’s side and squeezes her shoulder. “Too late, she came to me. But now we have to look forward. It’s too late to fix everything. Delilah knows now. She understands. She’s one of us. And finally it’s time to do more.”

  I cringe at the words one of us.

  “Delilah’s one of us,” I say, even though I know better than to talk back to Angelika.

  Angelika looks my way. Her gaze shifts between me and my mother. Her nose wrinkles. Mom’s heart flutters. Mine gets close to stopping.

  “Us is a funny word, is it not?” Angelika says, after decades have passed in this small room that is in desperate need of an open window. “It never used to be this way. We used to all be women of Devonairre Street. In it together. There was one Us. You young kids . . .” She drifts off, lighting another candle. “Well. It never used to be this way.”

  Charlotte looks at the floor. Delilah and Cruz look at the floor. Isla, even, looks at the floor.

  I don’t know where to look.

  “Are you one of us, Lorna?” she asks.

  “I—”

  “Don’t answer now,” she says. She doesn’t tell me when to answer. “Naiwny,” she mumbles, a Polish word I don’t know.

  There is so much space between Angelika and me and the things we understand.

  There is a space growing between what Delilah and I understand, too.

  I can’t stay and watch this new future unfold. My heart squeezes, thinking that Delilah might never fall in love again.

  “I made a mistake,” Delilah says, lowering her head. She shakes it, swallows, and tries again. “No. More than that. I killed someone. I killed—I didn’t listen—I—”

  Angelika nods. I hate her for nodding.

  “Okay, all right, that’s enough,” Mom says. I’d forgotten she was beside me. She tucks the rogue strands of hair behind her ears. She captures my shoulder in her hand.

  “It’s not enough,” Angelika says, staring Mom down. I watch the two of them wait each other out, and it’s Mom who gives up first, her chin dropping to her chest, her head moving back and forth in a tiny, silent no.

  I choose to look out the window instead. There’s an older couple walking by the building and I wish Delilah had thought to draw the curtains, because I see them seeing us. I’m positive they’re tourists from their slow gait and their running shoes. They came by to see the Cursed street from the paper before heading off to the site of the Times Square Bombing and a tour of Ellis Island.

  I know what we look like to them: sad, hunched women cramped into a small living room, all long haired and wool clad. I wonder if they can smell the lavender or if they notice how we all shrink in Angelika’s presence. The woman smiles like she’s seen exactly what she came here to see. The man blushes and wipes his forehead.

  She says something and snaps a picture.

  I hate whatever it is she’s seeing in us.

  Angelika—standing up straight, shoulders back, face relaxed and almost young looking—scans the room, looking at every girl and woman with a critical, careful eye.

  The couple on the street light up at the sight of her. They whisper something, shake their heads, and finally move on.

  “Charlotte,” Angelika says, stopping on Charlotte’s braids and blue eyes and nervous, twitching mouth. “No key?” Charlotte touches her collarbone, the place her key usually rests. It’s not there. She turns a deep red, as red as some of the candles. It’s not like her to forget anything and it’s not like her to get embarrassed.

  “I took it off,” she says. “A couple hours ago. I forgot to put it back on.”

  “You shouldn’t be taking it off at all,” Delilah says, which I thought was Angelika’s line.

  “Right,” Charlotte says. And then again, “Right.”

  Isla runs her fingers through her collection of keys and they clatter, a metallic chime. She smirks. Angelika looks her way, too, but doesn’t praise her for her keys. Even Angelika must know that they’re not enough.

  The one around my neck has done nothing at all to keep me from being terrible.

  “I wanted to meet you all because it’s been an awful ten days and I don’t know what else to do but reach out to my community,” Delilah starts. She rolls her shoulders back and she looks like the Delilah I know again. I want to be near that Delilah; I want to take her away from here so we can sit close and spill secrets and laugh at the things that hurt the most, like we’ve always tried to do.

  She’s not looking at me, though. She’s not looking at anyone in particular. She’s not part of LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla. I feel it as
certainly as I feel that I don’t love Owen, that I miss my father, that I wish the anniversary weren’t looming, that I can’t believe Jack is gone.

  “I asked Angelika for help,” Delilah goes on. Her breathing changes and she hunches over. She speaks like she’s at confession, rattling off her sins, all the ways she’s disappointed Angelika, all the things she should have done differently. Her hands shake, her knees shake, her voice gets louder, and her hands grip the sides of her neck like she’s holding herself together. Then she’s crying, my Delilah, tears rushing down her face so fast I couldn’t catch them if I tried.

  Older women nod and fold their hands in front of them like prayers of having known better. Isla on the floor deflates, pulling her knees to her chest and resting her forehead on top of them. I wonder if she feels hidden, sitting like that.

  Charlotte keeps her hand where her key should be, but Cruz just looks at me. I’m not positive, but I think his head shakes a little no, like my mother’s did before. No, we’re not going to believe. No, Delilah’s not right just because she’s sad. No, whatever’s coming next isn’t for us. No, we can’t let Angelika steal this power, take advantage, make Jack’s death her own imperative.

  I can’t locate that certainty. I can’t really locate myself.

  Angelika takes Delilah’s hand in hers. I know Angelika’s hand so well I can imagine it in my own palm, the gold wedding band hard on my finger, the texture of her palm surprisingly soft. A hint of a smile is on Angelika’s face and I watch her thumb rub a spot on Delilah’s hand.

  Mrs. James gets choked up and leaves the room.

  With Delilah crying and the rest of us stunned and saddened and subdued, Angelika is in charge.

  “We used to have rules,” she says. Her voice rumbles and I wonder what the Polish word for rules is. “They were good rules. They made us good.” The word good sounds like a fist on a table, the way Angelika says it. Delilah keeps crumbling under the words. A candle near her goes out. Delilah gasps and shakily relights it, then loses herself in the flicker while Angelika carries on.

  If the tourist couple were still on the street, I think they would be scared of the way Angelika watches Delilah’s every move; they’d talk later about how we nod in sync, fold our hands in time with one another like we’re in church. They’d notice the intimidating lean of Angelika’s body as she starts her new list of rules. They’d see what makes the rules impossible to ignore.

  “We will light red candles every night. Keep them in the windows so we can see them. So we can know they are lit. We will be looking for the keys around your neck, for your growing hair, for the lavender tea and the things you are eating. We will tend to the garden.” Angelika is listing things we already do, aside from the red candles, which seem a small price to pay if they’ll help Delilah calm down. “Your skirts will be below the knee. Your shirts will be above the collarbone. There will also be a curfew. Ten o’clock at night, all women and girls need to be home, without men or boys around.” The older ladies stay still. I think a few of them even smile their thin-lipped smiles. Saad and Hiba lower their heads. They are used to being ignored and forgotten about in these moments. They don’t count because Angelika has decided their love isn’t real.

  My insides and my outsides start to shiver with a cold fear. “We can’t control the world out there,” Angelika says, lifting an arm like it weighs a great deal and gesturing to the window and the world beyond. “But we can control our world.” She pauses, considering. She looks at me. “Us.”

  Mom tenses up beside me. She’s about to say something, but doesn’t. I look to Cruz again, and he’s looking at me still, for longer than anyone has ever looked at anyone else, I think. I can’t read his face. I can’t read Charlotte’s face, and Isla’s is still hidden. I am the temperature of winter, of ice, of the things that scare us most of all. I am that exact temperature.

  Delilah is the only person I can read, and all that’s there is grief and fear, a combination so familiar I can barely name it. It’s the look of the widows of Devonairre Street; it’s the look our mothers have had and fought off; it’s the look Angelika and Dolly and Betty and the rest of them wear like a badge.

  Maybe I have that look, too, now, but without the shadow of belief hanging over it all. Belief turns fear and grief into something simpler. I get that now.

  Belief makes grief seem solvable. But it isn’t.

  “Love happens at night,” Angelika says, whispering like it’s a secret some of us might not know. “So we’ll take away the night.”

  A few throats are cleared. A few feet are shuffled.

  I’m faint from the smell of apples and cinnamon and melting wax. Fifty people is too many to be in this tiny space and ten o’clock is too early to be locked into my home and even what I’m wearing today—a wool skirt that hits above my knees and a pink shirt that dips low—is suddenly in violation of the Devonairre Street rules. Angelika and the other widows look at me and Isla and Charlotte like we should have already found a way to cover ourselves up and make ourselves invisible and acceptable and unwantable.

  I’m frightened by Angelika saying we’ll take away the night, as if night were a thing that is up for grabs, something that is hers to distribute, the way love has always been.

  I wait for someone to laugh it off. When that doesn’t happen, I wait for someone to tell Angelika she’s not in charge. Instead, a room full of people chew on their lips and wipe their eyes. My mother’s hands make tight fists at her sides.

  I think I see Charlotte and Isla nod, and that tiny maybe-movement forces words out of my mouth.

  The night is ours, I think, but I am too scared to say. Love is our right, and so is the night.

  “You can’t—” I try to stand up to her a little, even if not with the words I wish I could say.

  “I’ll say it again, if you weren’t listening,” Angelika says.

  “I was listening,” I say, and that’s it; the discussion, somehow, is over. All that’s left is a table of Curse-fighting food no one wants to eat but apparently everyone will.

  • • •

  When the first few people are readying themselves to leave, Angelika stands again, gripping the back of one of the folding chairs Delilah put out. If she leans too hard against it, it will topple over, and I think I want that, a little.

  I hush that thought and remember Frank Sinatra and jigsaw puzzles and crying into the crook of Angelika’s neck when my mother had locked herself in her room and asked me to stop bothering her.

  I think of Aramis, the smell of someone who is solid and comforting and there.

  “The article,” Angelika says. “I know we’ve all seen it. I’ve given it thought. After the war, people knew about us. They avoided us. There were fewer temptations, fewer deaths. Fewer accidental loves.”

  When Angelika says the war, she means World War II. She was a little kid at the time, but it’s when her father died and it’s when the Curse allegedly began. None of the married men from Devonairre Street came back; none of the boyfriends returned.

  According to Angelika, Devonairre Street was Blessed, first. Everyone on the street was falling in love. It was said that if you lived on Devonairre Street you would find true love and remain happy forever. Single women and men moved into the brownstones, hoping to find husbands and wives. Bridal shops, florists, chocolatiers all moved to the street. “The commerce of love,” Angelika always calls it with a sour look on her face. “They called it a love epidemic, but it was only hubris,” she always says right after. “They took that love for granted. They thought it would always be there. You must pay for hubris.”

  The Curse happened when too many people were taking the Blessings of Devonairre Street Love for granted.

  The day Angelika was born, a dozen men from the street were shipped off to war.

  “My parents were part of it. My mother moved to the street to find someone
. Rented an apartment and waited for love to come to her. Like she was owed it. Well. She learned. We all learn, eventually.” The things Angelika says when she is talking about the Blessing of Devonairre Street are frightening. If anyone from off the street heard her, there’d be even more stories about us.

  “My grandparents always lived here,” my mother always reminds everyone with a shrug, like that makes us better than those whose ancestors moved here to fall in love.

  “I think the article was a good thing,” Angelika says after a long pause. No one moves, like we’re having a Minute of Silence here and now, even though it’s not a Tuesday morning or Tuesday afternoon. “Delilah has been contacted to comment on Jack Abbound’s death.”

  Delilah winces at the word death. It takes ages for it not to be a surprise. My stomach dropped for an entire year, every time someone mentioned what had happened to my father.

  “The city wants to know more about our street. About the Curse. There’s interest. I think it will be wise for us to tell them everything we can.” She looks to me, to Charlotte, to Isla, to Delilah. “For you girls to tell them what you’ve done and who you are.”

  I don’t want her to say it again, but she will.

  17.

  We are on display at Bistro the next night.

  Mom’s wearing her short hair down instead of in a bun, and I’m housing an order of French fries and mayo. I don’t know the official street stance on mayo, but I know the stance on me and Mom.

  We are bad.

  Mom’s knees are showing, and I found out I don’t own a shirt that covers my collarbone.

  It’s nine. Curfew is looming and Roger hasn’t arrived yet, but we’re waiting for him. I think we’re waiting for him and we’re waiting for ten o’clock and we’re waiting to see what will be done about us when we break more rules.