the same.
Boring.
“Speak English,” I said.
I wanted to pretend I didn’t know what he said. I wanted to hear him say it to me again. He turned around and took off his sunglasses and looked at me cold with his pocket eyes. He wanted to make sure I saw him, his face and his eyes. And then he turned away, walked out of the alley and back to the Twin Palms.
I watched him walk and he didn’t turn around this time. He didn’t check to see if I was watching him. He just knew. I contemplated chasing him. But he had called me an American. Common.
“ Spierdalaj! ”
It was all I knew. He turned around, laughing. “The mouth you have.”
I smiled at him.
“Didn’t your mother teach you better?”
I shook my head no, coyly.
“Come here, Anya.”
I walked real slow. Counted each step. I made him wait.
When I came up to him he took off his sunglasses and he smiled at me and he didn’t look so bad anymore.
“What do you do, Lev?”
“What you mean?”
“What are these?” I held up his fingers gently and we looked at the rings tattooed on.
He squeezed my hand and pulled it away. “If you were Russian I could tell you.”
He winked at me.
“Lev!”
He turned around and the thin man from before was standing there. He started speaking in hurried Russian and Lev started moving, leaving me in the alley. Then he stopped and turned around and came back.
“Anya, I’ll come for you tomorrow.”
I nodded.
He left quickly and I began to panic.
When tomorrow? Where tomorrow? I stood in the alley for a long time. Hoping he would come back and tell me that it wasn’t going to happen. He was rushed. He wasn’t thinking. I wouldn’t have to go through anything. Why did I nod? I was ill prepared for any kind of evening with him. A truck rolled by with a flat bed full of broken down cardboard boxes. They stared at me, slowed and whistled, then said something in Spanish, whistled. I scowled and began to move. I would have to prepare. I would have to start with my undergarments.
I remember the first time I saw my grandmother’s bra hanging in the shower in her apartment. It was large and sturdy. It was peach colored or off-white or maybe just discolored. One side was slapped over the top of the bar and the other hung down, limp and dripping. I touched it, pressed in the fabric. It was thick, synthetic feeling. Like it was made from something that was supposed to pass for satin. The cups were terrifyingly huge. I had hoped that I would never fill in like that. She was
“full figured.” She had blossomed early. I would have to enhance my blossoming.
I was going to get a bra today, but Miracle Bras were too expensive. I would have to go for the imitations. The imitations didn’t have the same gel-like quality to them. The firmness and “realness.” The pads of the cheap ones were stiff, curved, but only $14.99. The best I could get. I walked into the dressing room of the discount store and saw the sallow faces of the red-shirted women sifting through the bring backs. The mountain was growing as people kept tossing the items that did not work onto the pile and walking out. I waited my turn. The woman took my bras and counted them. Took a blue placard with the number eight written in white and shoved it on the hook on the door. She tried to untangle the plastic hangers from one another as she put them in the dressing room for me. It wasn’t working. The straps were impossibly tangled. She gave up and tossed them onto the bench, weaved around me, and shut the door. I stared at myself in the mirror. The lighting was bright and crass. My makeup was smudged. My skin pale. I wondered if a trip to the tanning salon might not be a bad idea. I took off my shirt and bra. I still had tan lines from the previous summer. It didn’t make sense but I went with it. The first bra was black and simple. Too small. I thought purchasing an A cup would make me look like the girls in the Victoria Secret ads. “The
Donald Luskin, Andrew Greta