“You’re calling the numbers too fast,” she said.
“I know. I heard all of you. I slowed down.”
She scowled at me. “You don’t have to be rude about it. Where have you been?”
I didn’t really know what to tell her.
“Away on holiday with your boyfriend?” she continued.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said.
“When I was your age I had six.” She glared at me. Her face was round and her eyebrows overgrown. She had red lipstick on; smeared on account of the éclairs she had just eaten.
“I thought you were already married by my age.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Yeah, I was already married. And he was handsome. So handsome. He treated me like a princess. A doll.”
“I’m sorry, Mary.”
“You need sex. I need sex. Everyone needs sex.”
This was a weekly thing and I was used to her frankness.
“I still need it. You think I don’t have needs? I’m 82 and my libido is raging. Look at Carla. Ninety-two. She wants it.”
I stared at Carla. She was small, hunched over, her curled bouffant was tilted with her head, a little to the left. I didn’t think she still wanted it. But Mary called her over anyway. “Carla, how’s your libido?”
I was starting to panic. I would have to call the numbers again in a second. The other women were getting restless.
“My what?” Carla stared at me. Her eyes said that she still wanted it.
“Libido. I said libido.”
“My husband’s dead. What am I going to do? Who cares?”
“The young ones are the ones I want. They can still get it up. The old ones just squish.” Mary smiled at me. “Get a young one. You don’t want to feel the squish.”
“All right, Mary. I’ll try.”
“You can’t fuck? I can tell in your hips you can fuck.” She shook her head at me as I walked away.
B9
They all stared at me and waited for me to call the next number. They held their blotters — shaking and salivating.
~ ~ ~
I HAD LEARNED FLIRTATIONS IN RUSSIAN WHILE Lev was gone, but by the time I saw him again I had forgotten them all. My hair was growing out at the roots. I had given up making it into the Twin Palms. The women had stopped donning their fur coats as the weather became warmer and warmer. The bright days stretched longer and longer. They stomped around the sidewalk in silk and polyester. Bright knits in clashing patterns. They exposed their arms, wrinkled and sagging. The jewels on their hands could not obscure their aging fingers. With the furs gone they looked like immigrants again. Inexpensive fabrics and ill-fitting dresses and pant sets. The older women wore gauzy tops over satin shirts and covered the sag of their arms with volumes of sheer sleeves in melons and chartreuse. Their husbands and lovers clutched on to the fabric and led them upstairs. They were relics of the old world again. They were escaping the villages and gray Eastern Bloc high-rises the Soviets admired, our bloki.
When Lev parked again I was returning from Fairfax with a loaf of rye in my hand. He said something to me I couldn’t understand, his accent newly thick. He repeated himself. Asked if he would get in trouble for parking here today. I told him I didn’t know. Asked him where he had been, as if I had any claim to him. He didn’t act surprised. He had been in Russia. I nodded. He was trying to shake off his accent again. Re-acclimate. He drew out his words carefully, overstated them, and asked how the weather had been. I had hoped we would have moved on to more probing topics. He stared at my hair, at the light strands coming in at the roots, making the dark brown look cheap, and fake. My dishwater blond was coming back. I quickly told him it had been hot here. Summer came early.
“In Russia it’s still snowing.”
After weeks of anticipation our meeting was underwhelming. Had he thought about me at all? I wanted to ask him where he went that last night. Who he had allowed to move his car in the morning. Who she was.
Instead, I said, “It must have been very cold.”
He smiled and said, “Like Poland.”
I smiled and nodded. Wanting him to say more so I could answer him.
“So it was good?” was all I could come up with.
He pulled out his buzzing cell phone and I saw the rings tattooed on his fingers. He smiled at me and turned away. Walked down the street.
He was a thief. A prisoner. He had black ink puckered in squares on his forefinger and pinky. How had I not seen them before? He looked back at me and waved as he walked away, toward the Twin Palms. It was the most attention he had ever paid me. He remembered me and remembered I was Polish. He looked thinner today. Younger. I had wished him back and he had come back.
~ ~ ~
ON WEEKDAYS I RUN FOUR MILES AROUND the track at the high school across the street from the stores that sell Gefilte fish and latkes. I run and watch the old women push carts and pull groceries and go back to their apartments called The Hawaiian and The Tropical. They walk slowly, hunched over. One step at a time. Some wear chustki on their heads. Some just simple buns. They push and pull and walk down the street back home. My grandmother is doing this walk, in Poland. She leaves her tenement and makes the walk, past the decaying shops to the market. To buy small wild strawberries. Soups and potatoes. She carries the bags home, slowly, careful on the uneven sidewalks. She walks back to her empty apartment, the one room she occupies in the large apartment with high ceilings. Her room is crowded with crocheted tablecloths, photographs of us, small trinkets mismatched and misshapen, and her blaring television carefully tucked into the corner, directly opposite her sloping twin bed. She only watches American shows from the 1980s. Soap operas like Santa Barbara.
One man’s voice is dubbed over the American shows and he is the voice of Polish TV. He does the men’s voices and the women’s voices. He does the children’s voices. He does the voices of dogs and cats and birds. His voice is hypnotic.
I watch these old women in my neighborhood make this walk and I know that I never will, this old woman babushka walk. I will never wear a chustka on my head or put my swollen feet into perforated Eastern Bloc shoes with their American brand names. I will not crawl down the street, hunchbacked and slow. These are remnants of the old country and I am not that anymore. Or I never was.