by Warren Adler
She was off to the clubhouse for her Wednesday Mah-Jongg game and she had taken out her knitting, mentally counting the knits and purls for the beige socks she was knitting for her grandson, Kenny. It was hot, she would remember, although the movement of the shuttle bus created a light breeze that gently stroked her cheeks and rustled her hair.
The little folded note, on white paper, seemed to flutter to her lap and, looking up to see how it got there, she had seen his face, tanned, with a shy smile. The shuttle bus moved on, and, she remembered, she had turned forward with some embarrassment after she had observed what she imagined was a wink, as he stood where he had apparently stepped off the shuttle bus, looking after her. Perhaps it was a trick, she thought, looking at the folded note on her lap, then turning again to see his figure in the distance still rooted to the spot where he had disembarked.
Replacing her knitting in the bag, she fished for her glasses, found them, perched them midway on the bridge of her nose, because they were half-glasses just for reading, and opened the note. She read the words, gasped lightly, then looked around her to see if anyone had noticed what had happened, or was looking over her shoulder. It was purely a reflex, as the shuttle was half empty and the occupants seemed absorbed in their own thoughts.
"I think you're cute," the note read. She read it again, turned it over, as if searching for more words, then looked back to that spot where the man had been. But the shuttle had already turned into the broad street leading to the clubhouse, and another row of condominiums blocked her view of where she had seen him last.
"I think you're cute," she repeated to herself. "Cute?" Either the man had mistaken her for someone else or he was simply crazy. Some of these old men reverted to childishness as they grew older. She had heard enough stories about that and had observed some strange goings on to be able to dismiss such silliness as sheer senility.
"Me, cute?" she thought. She couldn't wait to tell the girls at the Mah-Jongg game. But when she got to the card room and slid into her seat at the table, she could not bring herself to say a word about the incident. Maybe it would be better to remain silent, she decided, although she made a mental note to tell her husband, Jake. But she could not get it out of her mind.
"You're not concentrating, Rose," Dotty Cohen said with her usual haughtiness. She was all business at the Mah-Jongg table and could tolerate no bad moves by others.
But the admonishment didn't help Rose's game. Her mind kept wandering, reconstructing the man's face, which was fading quickly from her memory. All except the wink. No, she decided, it was definitely not a tic.
She didn't tell Jake either, and when he dozed off in his chair in front of the television set, she looked at the note again. She had refolded it and put it in her change purse. Her fingers shook as she opened it and read the words again. She wondered what it meant.
Later, as she creamed her face in the bathroom, her eyes lingered over her image in the mirror. The lines spread out from the sides of her eyes and, despite the best efforts of her various pre-bedtime moisturizers, her facial skin seemed to her like the hide of an elephant.
"You're an old lady," she whispered to her reflection, although she admitted to herself as a sop to her vanity. "Maybe you don't look sixty-eight. But you also don't look cute."
She smiled, showing the evenly matched front capped teeth attached to the back bridge, which she removed and put into a glass, poured in the cleaning fizz and put it into the medicine cabinet for the night.
But when she got into bed, she still could not put the incident out of her mind. Years ago, in public school, they would pass little puppy love notes between them. There was a fat boy in the back of the classroom who dropped tiny folded papers on her desk; on them, in bad penmanship, were written what were gigglingly referred to later as professions of love. "I really like you," they would invariably read, under which would be a long uneven line of X's and one big "smack," which was the blockbuster kiss symbol in those days. She would show the note to her girlfriends after school, many of whom had received the same missives. She couldn't remember the fat boy's name.
She hadn't thought about that part of her life for years and was surprised to discover how detailed her recall was. It was nearly sixty years ago, she thought, proud of her memory and warmed by the recalled images. She imagined that she could even smell the pungent ink that half-filled the little inkwells while the faces of her childhood friends floated in her mind. Finally, flushed and happy that she was able to remember such pleasant things, she slipped into sleep.
She was still happy in the morning, feeling an uncommon lightness within herself that she could not understand. The apartment looked particularly cheerful to her, the furniture, the drapes, the little knick-knacks that were scattered on tables and shelves, well-suited to their environment. Even the pictures of her children and grandchildren scattered throughout the apartment seemed to reach out, triggering even greater pride than usual.
The toast seemed crisper, the butter more delicate, the soft-boiled eggs perfect and the coffee the most delicious she ever tasted. Even Jake noticed.
"You're singing," he said, watching her move about the little kitchen.
She hadn't realized, putting her hand over her mouth to stifle an eruption of giggles.
"So I am," she said, not understanding how the tune had slipped into her mind. She had been singing "I'm in Heaven," repeating the phrase over and over again and humming the rest of the tune. After a while, she began to sing again.
"There you go," Jake said.
"I guess I just feel good," she said, kissing him on the forehead.
Later, when she went outside to sit on the lounge chair behind her apartment, she found herself breathing deeply, savoring the perfumed smell of the tropical flowers, flavored with the morning moisture. Even the sky looked incredibly blue to her. She resumed her knitting, but her mind wandered, and she found her thoughts again telescoped to her girlhood.
She met Jake while she was still in high school, Girls' High, taking a business course. Jake worked at his father's delicatessen, standing behind the counter in a big white apron that was stained with all the colorful residues of the appetizer section.
He was a born kibbutzer and flirted outrageously with the female customers. She remembered how important he looked behind the counter. The raised floor walk made him seem especially imposing. Their first date was a Sunday afternoon in Prospect Park. He took her to the zoo and they went rowing on the lake. She remembered that Jake had rolled up his sleeves, showing off his large biceps, which he seemed to be flexing perpetually. In those days, big muscles were supposed to devastate young ladies.
She was already in love with him by the end of the day, and she let him kiss her lips when he took her home, a very daring action, because even at sixteen she believed that girls could get pregnant if a man kissed their lips. One of her girlfriends assured her, however, that if you kept your lips closed tight--which is what she had done--nothing would happen. The idea of it provided much humor in the family for nearly fifty years, the telling and retelling of it, already passed down through two additional generations.
But she never told about other intimacies. They seemed so benign in today's world, she thought, reveling in the idea of her early naiveté. Once he had cupped her breast and she had been moved to near hysterics, frightening him, as if she had cried rape.
"You won't respect me," she whimpered.
"I love you," Jake assured her.
"You'll think I'm a loose woman. Then you'll lose all respect for me."
There was something magic in the concept of respect, she remembered.
One didn't discuss such things with one's parents in those days, especially hers. Her father was a tailor who took piece work home and worked on his sewing machine every night. Sometimes, in the night, she could still hear the whirring of the wheel and the staccato movement of the needle. And her mother was always cooking, cleaning, washing, sweeping, rarely stopping until she fell exhauste
d into bed. Sex, as a topic of conversation between parents and children, was unthinkable.
"I was dancing with Jake last night," she said to her friend, Helen, who lived in the next apartment. "Why does he have to carry such a big pen in his pants?"
"A pen?"
"I felt it rubbing against me. He got real mad when I asked him what it was. He said a pen. I wanted to ask him what he needed a pen for when we were dancing, but I didn't."
"You should tell him to leave it home."
"I did. I was real mad at him. I even told him he smelled of pickled herring."
"And what did he say to that?"
"He said what else was he expected to smell from, considering where he worked all day." She had lived with Jake nearly fifty years and, although he had not worked behind a delicatessen counter for ten years, he still smelled faintly of pickled herring.
They went steady for nearly a year before she learned what she thought then were the facts of life. A girl at school, Milly Katz, unraveled a bit of the mystery.
"They have this thingie between their legs."
"A what?"
"A thingie."
"Oh. You mean what they make number one with."
She had, after all, two younger brothers and she had seen them naked on numerous occasions, especially when they were babies.
"It gets hard sometimes."
"So?" That, too, wasn't much of a mystery. She had seen her little brother's thingies get hard sometimes, when they woke up in the morning. Theirs had poked out of their pajamas.
"Well, when they put their hard thingies in the place where we make number one, you have babies."
"Without kissing?"
"I think so."
"It sounds so yukky."
"I know." Milly made a face. "It's getting me nauseous just to think about."
When she realized that kissing alone would definitely not make babies, she and Jake spent long hours on the porch hugging and kissing and staring into space. She even let him put his hands on her breasts over her dress. Occasionally, she would see his pants bulge, which she thought disgusting. By then, she realized that he was not carrying a pen in his pants.
They were the first of their friends to get engaged. But even after he had given her a ring and she finally let him put his hand inside her dress, but over her brassiere, she still had only the vaguest idea of what sex was all about.
There was a battered musty smelling couch on his parents' front porch and after a walk, or a movie, they would come back to her place and lie together on the couch, hugging and kissing. A couple of times, she felt him shudder and moan and he had jumped up with embarrassment, telling her a quick good-bye and going home.
"Don't you feel well?" she would ask.
"I have to get up early," he would say, bending over awkwardly and kissing her on the cheek.
She, too, experienced strange and oddly pleasant feelings, especially when they were together and she found herself developing a compelling curiosity about what he had in his pants. By then, her friend Helen had gained greater knowledge and was able to provide additional information.
"White stuff comes out," she whispered to Rose after Rose had expressed some curiosity about what happens when the thingie goes into her.
She had already discovered the place with her fingers, although she couldn't believe anything thicker than a finger could go in there.
"That's what Kitty told me." Kitty was one of the Italian girls in her class. "She knows a lot about boys."
"You mean it comes out in a stream, like number one?"
"And Kitty says they feel a thrill when it comes out."
"Did she ever see it?"
"Plenty of times, she tells me." She put a hand over her mouth to be sure that no sound escaped. "She said she can make the boys do it by holding it in her hands and rubbing it. Up and down."
The idea of it excited her curiosity, and the next time she was with Jake the back of her hand felt his thing over his pants. He moved away, quickly mumbling something about "after we're married." It was then that she realized that marriage meant being naked with each other and doing things. After that, knowledge came swiftly as she questioned some of the older girls she knew, one of whom had recently gotten married.
"It hurts like hell," Harriet Marks told her. "Especially the first night when he breaks the hymen."
Hymen, she thought. She had an Uncle Hyman and, although she had a clear picture of what occurred, she was still confused about what she was supposed to do and what was supposed to happen.
They spent the first night of their marriage at the Prince Georges Hotel in Brooklyn, and she stayed in the bathroom for nearly an hour before she found the courage to come out. When she did, he was on top of her in less than a minute, trying to get his thing into her. It hurt like hell, just as Harriet Marks told her, and she was sore for the next three months. Also, the mystery was solved and it was no big deal, she decided. Later, after they had been married a few years, it got a little better in that department. Occasionally, she even felt a thrill herself.
That was a long, long time ago and she had never even entertained the idea of doing it with anyone but Jake. She didn't even do it that much with Jake. The whole idea of it eventually became boring, unimportant to their lives.
Sitting in the lounge chair, thinking about those early days, made her smile. Such innocence, she thought. Incredible! How the world had changed. Nothing was left to the imagination anymore. Why am I thinking about this? she wondered, but the memories continued to make her feel good.
There was more to it than just feeling good. She felt a heightened sense of perception and, later, when they went to the clubhouse to see an amateur play, she turned and searched the faces of the audience. But the face of the man who had sent her the note, who had winked, seemed blurred in her mind and, besides, many of the men seemed to look alike. All the old men look alike, her friend Minnie Halpern assured her.
Yet she persisted in her search, not admitting that this was her sole intention as she became more mobile than usual, spending more time in the clubhouse and the pool area. She even persuaded Jake to play shuffleboard with her, a game she usually detested.
"Slow down," Jake protested.
"I don't like to just sit."
One day as she sat by the pool, she set aside her knitting and, feeling drowsy, closed her eyes and dozed fitfully. Jake had stayed home to watch a television program and she had declined to participate in the usual yenta conversations that tinkled around her in the tropical air.
She might have been dreaming, though it was not clear, but something passed near her or over her; a shadow had come and gone. Opening her eyes, she saw his face again watching her from across the pool, a tall man with a heavy shock of white hair. His head moved, jaw thrust forward, in a kind of signal suggesting that there was something she must do.
Looking around her, she saw the white folded paper lying on her half-finished knitted socks. Her reactions were confusing; she felt that she wanted to grab for the note, but she was forcing herself to hold back. Her heart was beating wildly in her chest. She also wanted to smile at the man who continued to observe her at a distance, thrusting his jaw out--which she now knew was a signal for her to read the note.
With trembling fingers, she opened it. But it was not clear enough for her eyes to read and she had to dip into her knitting bag for her glasses. Turning her back to him, she read the note.
"I really think you're cute." The word really was underlined. The intensity of a hot blush increased the temperature of her skin, which was already warm from the sun. But she did not turn to look at the man again, although she was certain now that she had memorized his face. Yet she felt the urge to turn and smile, actually to wink back at him, but she resisted that, too. Instead, she picked up her knitting and, sitting awkwardly on the side of the lounge chair, resumed her stitching. When she did finally turn, he was gone.
But now that she had a clear picture of him, she found herself i
magining him in various situations and in conversations. She began to daydream a great deal, sometimes as she sat at the table.
"What are you thinking?" Jake asked. He might have made the remark before, but it had just penetrated her consciousness.
"Nothing," she answered, resuming her eating.
It was incredible to experience such thoughts and feelings, she decided.
An old married woman like me. To have a secret admirer was something that happened in movies. She had already determined that she would never, never acknowledge the man's intentions, never stop to pass the time of day. And if she passed close to him, she knew she would have to turn away.
But the more she would try to deny him, the more his image grew in her mind. She wondered what his name was. He wasn't so bad looking himself, she thought, mentally comparing his looks with Jake's. He didn't have Jake's huge paunch and he still had all his hair. What a beautiful head of hair! Did I think that, she admonished, as she began to clean her apartment furiously, running the vacuum cleaner at a fast clip until even Jake began to notice her uncommon speed.
"Take it easy, Rose."
She slowed down her efforts. It hadn't helped much anyhow since she could not eliminate what was on her mind.
One evening, as she and Jake were coming out of another show at the clubhouse, he loomed in front of her, full face, a sliver of a smile on his lips, a brief wink, and thrust a paper into her hands. She clutched the note, tightened her fist around it, and continued to walk past him. It all happened in a split second. What surprised her most was that she actually abetted the action, conspired with the strange man. Her hand opened and closed as if she had expected the offering.
They rode the shuttle bus back to their apartment. Her hand was moist as she clutched the paper, and both her curiosity and anxiety were churning her insides. They had barely opened the door when she made a beeline for the bathroom and, locking the door, stood for a moment against it, calming herself, getting her breathing to function properly. Then she took her glasses out of her pocketbook and opened the note, soggy with perspiration. She had to read the note three times before she could believe its meaning.