by Lauren Groff
Men were not as disciplined or as smart as women, she thought; men almost always took what they were offered, their appetites too crude and raw to put up much resistance. They were like children, gobbling down their candy all at once, with no thought about the consequences of their greed. She and her visitors often kept the neighbors awake, but the neighbors rarely complained; when they met her in the hallway, they usually became confused by the neat and elegant gray dresses Helena wore, her severe tight bun, her pale and haughty face. It felt wrong, somehow, to make such an embarrassing complaint of a woman whose posture was so very correct.
After her month of slaking her thirsts, Helena found she was almost eager to return to the close, doily-riddled apartment and her mother’s half-swallowed cries of pain in the night.
* * *
—
A week after the shopkeeper had seen her in all her glory, two weeks into her stay in Salvador, she came home early one morning with one of her boys. She’d met a group of flight attendants at a bar, and their lone man was clearly uninterested in her, or perhaps in women in general, and so she’d gone along with the giddy bunch to a local nightclub. There they were out of place among the gorgeous young creatures with their barely-there clothing, their feline sleekness. The flight attendants eventually vanished, and Helena was left dancing with a tall, very dark-skinned man of eighteen or so. Though his English was limited to the rap lyrics he mouthed to the music, she managed to convey what she wanted to do to him. He grinned beautifully. They rode his scooter to her part of the city, Helena pressing her pelvis against him as they rode, touching him, and he went so fast he nearly lost control when they hit the cobblestones. They laughed with relief and something richer when he turned the bike off, and they slid down and, hushing each other, went together through the wrought-iron fence. She pulled the gate closed and glanced out into the street as it clanged. She was startled to see the moon-faced shopkeeper. He was in a crouch, about to pull up the metal gate protecting his storefront. He was watching her. She felt the smile fall off her face as he gave an imperceptible shake of his head and turned his back. She had a sudden urge to call out to him, something desperate and true, about the long, dry years spent in the wilderness of her mother’s illness, but the boy drew her away by the waist, his voice warm and sibilant and nonsensical in her ear, and when she looked back, the shopkeeper had turned away.
* * *
—
Helena woke in the mid-morning to find the boy gone. In the kitchen, she discovered a plate he’d left with a smiley face drawn on it in hot sauce, and she set it in the sink and watched as the face dissolved under a stream of water. She spent the morning slowly caring for her body, taking a long bubble bath and exfoliating and depilating, filing and polishing, seeing elaborately to her hair. The gnawing feeling she’d woken to hadn’t gone away, and so she put on her primmest outfit, a long black dress and sturdy walking sandals. She hesitated and threw a shawl around her shoulders to give an even fustier impression. She hadn’t, as yet, bought anything from the grocery across the street—the owner of the apartment had warned her in his letter that the prices at the clean chain grocery three blocks northward were half what the local shop’s were—but she needed some bananas and papayas and coffee and bread, and she gathered her courage to face the shopkeeper.
The store smelled strongly of fruit on the cusp of rot, and the shelves were packed, the rows tight. Two people with baskets could have hardly slid by each other. There was nobody else in the store, she was relieved to see, save the shopkeeper and a friend of his who had been chatting by the register until she came in. She gave them a small nod, and they nodded back, both unsmiling.
She browsed for a while, until the men began to speak again in a low tone. Back by the toilet paper and festive paper napkins there was a little narrow doorway in the wall, which was empty when she first looked past it. When she looked again, though, she saw a small foot, then a hand, a dark head. When the whole person came into the light, she was either a very short woman or a young girl. Helena assumed she was indigenous, brown-skinned and broad-cheekboned, then wondered if she was the shopkeeper’s daughter, though she had assumed the moment she saw him that the shopkeeper was black; he was only slightly lighter than the boy from last night. But Brazil was so confusing this way, Salvador especially so, with its slave-trade blight of long ago: you never could tell exactly where people belonged. She had been surprised to find that this city upset some deep Northern Hemisphere sense of order that she didn’t know she treasured.
The shopkeeper saw the girl or woman and said something in a harsh voice, and by the swift fear Helena saw on her face, the way her shoulders dropped subserviently, and the speed with which she vanished from sight, Helena thought there was something wrong here. She didn’t know what to do; she had to swiftly rest her head against the cool metal of the shelves to pull herself together. When she took her purchases up to the shopkeeper, her hands were trembling and she could barely look at him, getting only an impression of shortness and powerful shoulders. She fixed on a small tin statuette in the window above his head, a woman knee-deep in sharp-looking waves. Yemanjá, she remembered from the marketplace, goddess of the sea. The man pointed at the numbers on the register with a blunt finger. Helena paid the money to Yemanjá, not to him.
By the time he put her purchases in a plastic sack, she was able to look him full in the face, saying silently, You are a bad man and I am watching. For the rest of the day, she fretted over the girl, wondering if she needed rescuing. Still, she savored the way the shopkeeper had flinched under her eyes.
* * *
—
For three days, Helena dressed with ostentatious primness and made small purchases at the grocer’s, but the shopkeeper never greeted her and she never saw the girl or woman again. Helena’s ardor had cooled by the third day, and she began to wonder if the girl wasn’t simply the man’s wife or girlfriend or stock person, a person to whom it was a wrong but not a crime to speak to in such a way. She began to feel a chill of guilt that she had jumped to such conclusions—what an arrogant, American thing to do!—and to avoid the whole marshy emotional terrain, she began making her purchases at the chain again.
On a trip back from the other store, her milk and eggs swinging in a bag by her hip, she saw the shopkeeper out in front of his store, and he looked first at her bag, and something folded in his face, and he gave her a not-unfriendly wave, and she, confused, pretended to not see him.
Upstairs in her apartment, she fretted. Was she never to walk out of her house without being swamped with bad feelings? Was the shopkeeper going to ruin her entire vacation? She made herself a fruit salad and sat vengefully on her balcony to eat it. A great thick cloud had formed, and the wind had risen, and when she finished, she stood to take a look at the ocean. She watched as a distant sheet of water descended from the black clouds and sped toward her, drawing a swift curtain over the cruise ships outside the harbor, then the fishing boats motoring in, then the harbor itself, then the church steeple. When it hit the red rooftop across the street, she stepped inside and shut her glass door a breath before the storm smacked loudly at her, as if raging that she was still dry and safe when all the rest of the world was vulnerable.
* * *
—
The storm against the many windows was terrifically loud, and for a full day, Helena was stuck in the apartment, unable to go out to her museums or films or restaurants and bars and nightclubs. She read all of her books and wrote letters to her sisters and mother, telling them of this strange, dreamy town with its pastels and hills and wandering bands of drummer girls who danced under the streetlights and played ferociously in the former slave market filled with textiles and handicrafts. She wrote of the first man she had met there, though she stretched the truth far out of shape, taking what was simply a jet-lagged hour or so and implying a love affair, as she always did in her letters during her months at large. Her mother w
as a romantic, and her sisters, stuck in their happy marriages, only pretended to censure her entanglements, tsking and gorging themselves for a full year on Helena’s hints and subtexts. She wrote of visiting the Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim, translating it as Our Lord of Happy Endings, knowing her mother would hear the sonorous Portuguese and imagine a dark-skinned Jesus on a cross, that her sisters would get the joke and laugh behind their hands.
When a kind of night fell over the afternoon, she felt desperate and tied a plastic shopping bag over her head and wore the only trench coat she’d brought, because it was supposed to be summer in the Southern Hemisphere, after all. She ran, holding her shoes, to the convent-cum-fine-hotel at the end of the street. At the very last second, the bellhop opened the door for her and she burst into the lobby, laughing and shaking the water from her yellow hair and untying the plastic bag from her head in a vast gold-framed mirror. This was much better, she thought as she surveyed the hotel with its jungle of plants and woodwork, then checked her hair and makeup. She was flushed and very pretty. She slid on her shoes, and the bellhop gave her a little applause and gestured to the fire.
But she shook her head and went over to the bar, which was normally too expensive for her. The storm had kept her in the night before and she couldn’t give a fig for budget; she needed to make up for lost time and her sort of businessman frequented this kind of hotel. She caught her breath and sipped her Scotch and watched the display behind the bar, blue-lit bubbles in some kind of oil, rising with preposterous slowness.
There was a pair of American men who smiled back at her, but who were joined instantly by their wives in print dresses. She winked at an old fellow who looked alarmed and tottered away; she slowly put on a coat of lipstick in the direction of a Japanese businessman who had eyes only for his computer. There was no one else, and the bartender was a woman. Helena ordered a hamburger with a luxurious heap of fried onions and gorgonzola on it, and ate it slowly in neat bites, watching the doorway where nobody came in.
The lights flickered and went out, but there were candles on the table in a soft constellation. She watched the bartender light more until the room was again twilit.
She felt full of frantic energy by the time she had finished her food, but from the deafening sound of the rain outside, it was going to be a dud night. Nobody in his right mind would go out in such weather. Reluctantly, in the light from the fire and the scattered candles, Helena tied the shopping bag over her head again and slid on her unpleasantly soaked trench coat. At the door, however, the bellhop shook his head and said, No, no, miss! and waved his arms.
I know it’s storming, but my apartment is literally fifty feet away, she said, touched by his distress. She tried to show him through the glass, but the rain was so thick and the night so dark that the world melted away a foot from where they stood. She grinned at him—he was cute, big-eared; in such a pinch he would do—but he only turned toward the reception desk and called out something. A woman rushed over. She was tall, a German Brazilian, Helena thought, with hazel eyes and long streaked hair, and Helena felt a warm burst of hatred rise in her, for the woman was more beautiful than Helena had ever been, even in her prime.
Miss, the woman said. We cannot let you go. It is a tremendous rain. With winds. What is the word?
Not a hurricane, Helena said. There are no hurricanes in the South Atlantic. She knew this because her mother had fretted, and Helena had found the entry on Brazil in the old set of encyclopedias to put her mind at ease.
Well, the woman said, shrugging. But even if it is only a storm, you must stay.
Helena explained again about the apartment, so few feet away, and suggested that she bring the bellhop with her, glancing under her lashes at him, wondering if he’d take the hint. But he took a step backward, and there was such terror on his pale little face that she laughed. I’ll be all right, she said.
Stay, the woman said. I will give you a room for half price.
Helena felt herself flushing, but said, Which is?
The woman said a price that was the cost of the entire month of her apartment’s rent. Too much, Helena said.
Quarter price, the woman said in distress. I am not authorized to go more low.
Thank you, Helena said. I’ll be all right. She took off her shoes, snatched open the door, marched out, and immediately knew that she had made a mistake.
* * *
—
The wind carried her breath from her mouth, the rain pounded into her eyes, and Helena stepped back until she felt the hotel’s stucco under her hand. She couldn’t see the doorway or the rug she had just been standing on, and she was able to breathe only when she made a windbreak of the crook of her elbow. She was not one to go back, though, not ever. Her place was a few steps away; it had taken her a minute, at most, to run here barefoot a few hours earlier. She dropped her shoes and felt her way painstakingly over the curve of the old convent to the wrought-iron fence around the courtyard. Here, it was slightly easier because she pulled herself hand over hand like a sailor up a mast, until she reached the next stucco texture, the next building.
By the time she got to this building’s doorway, she was weeping. She stopped and pressed her body against the glass and tried the door, but it was either locked or the wind was holding it shut. She breathed for a while in the lee of a mailbox until she stopped crying, and wiped her swollen eyes, and started out again. Stupid woman, she said to herself. Stupid, foolish, terrible woman. You deserve what you get.
She inched forward. There were three more doors, she thought, before her own wrought-iron gate that swung inward, that the wind would whip open as soon as she tried it, and pull her inside the courtyard, home. Or maybe four doors; she couldn’t quite remember, and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t paid much attention before now.
But before she was even to the third door, she tripped over something and went sprawling and felt the skin of her knee open painfully. She curled into a ball to gather her strength and lay there, crying with anger and exhaustion. She was alone and she conceded to her aloneness, she would always be alone, she would always be in these puddles that grew even as she lay in them. For a very long time, she lay there, and it wasn’t terrible, despite the wind and rain upon her. It was only blank.
* * *
—
Suddenly, something rushed out of the storm, something seized her wrist, and she felt herself being pulled bodily over the cobblestones, her limbs cracking against the hard ground. And then there was the absence of, first, the wind in her face, then the driving rain; and she opened her eyes to darkness. She was so grateful to be breathing that she didn’t wonder where she was until her breath calmed and she hushed the whimper she had just heard rising from her chest and she listened to a harsh metal clang that muffled the storm even more, then a pounding that was the wind angry to be left outside. She pulled herself painfully up and drew her legs in, the cut on her leg smarting terribly, and leaned against whatever was behind her, so soft and covered in plastic. She felt with her hands and knew she was leaning on wrapped paper towels, and only then did her dulled mind grasp that she was in the grocer’s. He, of all humans on the planet, had saved her. Now the smell of the place rose to her, the sour half-rot and flour. She heard him shoving something heavy against the door.
A flicker of something ugly began to stir in her, and she pushed herself farther against the paper towels, up onto the shelf, letting the displaced rolls pad onto the floor. She was shivering, and she put the collar of her dress between her teeth to keep them from chattering. The place was dark, the only light from a distant red flickering of something electrical, which illuminated nothing.
Helena hoped for the girl or woman she’d seen on her first visit to be here. She longed for the little body to come close to hers, to hold her hand and warm her, but she listened so acutely she could hear that there was nobody in the store but them, she and this man; their breathin
g was the only breathing. She forced herself to listen to him, his heavy shoes shuffling closer to where she was sitting. It was maybe an accident that he kicked her calf when he drew near; she couldn’t tell what he could see. She held her breath, but he knew every inch of the store, of course, and stepped even closer. She could smell him, a particular stink of feet and armpits and denim that has been worn to grease.
He said nothing, just stood over her for a long time. He gave another shuffle closer and the fabric of his jeans brushed her face and she was glad for the dress in her mouth or she would have shouted.
He said something in his gruff voice, but she didn’t understand and didn’t bother to respond. She tried to keep her breathing light and unobtrusive, but her stomach, so upset by her struggle and the heavy food, gave a gurgle, and he laughed unpleasantly.
The shopkeeper moved away then, and she felt the tension fall out of her shoulders. She could hear him rummaging, then the double kiss of a refrigerator opening then closing across the room. She thought wildly of running now but knew she couldn’t get the metal door up in this wind, and she was fairly sure there was no back way out of the store. And, as bad as he might be, she had been in the storm outside, and she wasn’t sure, but she thought it must be worse.
* * *
—