The Appetites of Girls (35 page)

What nerve he had! Returning to the gallery, suggesting his work had value beyond what we were showing, attempting to endear himself to me.
When I saw Amara the next day, I would tell her every maddening detail. And we would criticize the whole interchange and the presumptuousness of men.

Over the next days and weeks, Amara missed another three mornings. More than once, she disappeared for an hour or two at midday. And now, rather than lingering after five to share an additional cup of tea, as had been our habit, she appeared in a hurry to rinse the last of the glasses, plates, and spoons, to empty the register, and close the store. So I had wounded her more than I’d known. I needed to make her understand that the mere thought of this made my head throb with surging tears. I ached as much as she! Maybe more. But each time I attempted a conversation, she winked at me or smiled broadly, often giving mere half-answers to my questions, sometimes tapping a finger to her temple as if simultaneously trying to remember some other thought. How masterfully she masked her feelings. How unusually cheerful she seemed, humming to herself as she readjusted any of the framed pieces that had been nudged out of place during the day or tossed strawberries and sections of orange and honeydew into the blender.

Soon Amara made our shared exercise routine an impossibility as well. With her depleted hours at the gallery, there was no longer a free half hour for calisthenics. Perhaps I only needed to be patient, I told myself; perhaps, after a time, everything would return to normal.

It had been a week or more since I’d last worked on my drawings, and it occurred to me that showing them to Amara might be a good way to break the ice. I slid them into a plastic sleeve to bring with me to the gallery. But each day, Amara seemed more preoccupied, and a right moment to approach her with my work never seemed to arise. When we ran out of wheatgrass, of filters for the water purifier, of the soft cloths we used for dusting the frames of the artwork, she neglected to reorder; and when I pointed out these oversights, she only shrugged her shoulders and laughed. And now, to my irritation, when male customers fed her flirtatious lines, she no longer turned to me with a commiserating smirk,
rather smiled to herself, as if she harbored some happy, private thought. So she was taunting me, punishing me. And though I tried to steel myself against her torments, I began to feel that if something did not change soon, I would fly into a hundred pieces. So one Friday, just before closing, I determined to confront her. She was spraying the spider plant in the front window.

“Oh, Opal!” She looked startled, jogged out of some reverie or surprised at my presence, as if she’d forgotten I had not yet left. “It’s late, isn’t it?” She glanced at her wrist, though she wore no watch, then slid one of the spider plant’s spindly leaves between her forefinger and thumb. “Such pretty little things, aren’t they? Simple but so lively. So what is it, Opal? What’s on your mind? You look absolutely
tragic
.”

I crossed my arms over my waist to hide their fidgeting. My lips went numb. But I had to speak. Yes, there were things that needed to be said. “We used to talk, Amara. You used to tell me things.”

“Have I been distant lately? I’m sure you’re right.” She held her lower lip between her teeth, and I watched her work to suppress a smile. She gazed at me but with eyes unfocused. And as I studied her face, I knew—I had misunderstood—she faked nothing. She
was
happy.
I
alone suffered. And a familiar queasiness oozed through me, the same unease that had seized my stomach for days prior to each of Mother’s announcements that we would, once again, be moving, a sinking feeling of what I had intuited was coming before she’d even said a word.

“Well, since you ask . . .” Amara was beaming now. The truth was she had met someone. A woman. Was I surprised? “I was slow to tell you only out of apprehension,” she said. “It’s not everyone who feels comfortable with such things. But you, of all people, Opal. I should have known better.” She gave my elbow a squeeze.

Amara had met her at the small party she hosted the night before my birthday. Fosca had been her neighbor’s houseguest for some weeks. She was from Florence originally but now lived in Nevada. “Las Vegas, of all
places! Can you believe it?” She tossed her head nonchalantly, but crimson flowered across her cheeks as she spoke. And I noticed, as she lowered her eyelids, a pale dusting of sea green beneath her brow bones and faint yet unmistakable pencil lines darkening the rim above her lashes. Amara paused, her hands clasped behind her neck. I was aware that she awaited my reaction. But long seconds passed before I found the self-possession to mutter a choked “Congratulations.”

“Thank you, Opal, thank you. So, listen! Fosca wants me to go away with her.” Amara’s voice grew louder, her words rushed. She clutched my fingers as if believing I shared her enthusiasm. “She needs to be in Rome for four weeks on business. At first I declined. You know, with all of the work we have here.” She swept her hand through the air. But she knew how reliable I was, she said, and that with Calliope’s help, I could handle things on my own for a while. Of course, she would pay me extra for my added responsibilities. Besides, it had been ages since she had taken a vacation, and didn’t Italy sound too, too tempting?

I said almost nothing, only returned to some receipts I had been sorting, flicking each one to the counter with an audible snap of paper. What a fool she had made of me! Even if my wants had not been what she must have assumed. What right had she to say things, to make me believe things! A receipt fell from my hands to the floor beside my feet. I made no move toward it. Let Amara crouch to retrieve it! At the very least, she owed me this, this tiny gesture. Silently I took the slip from her, my face burning.

“We leave a week from tomorrow. For exactly a month,” she promised. But I knew well how these things went: four weeks stretched into five, five into six, and so on.

“I’m so glad we had the chance to chat,” Amara said as we stepped into the damp air of early evening. She locked the door behind us, oblivious that for the last thirty minutes I had spoken not a word. Then before parting, she kissed the top of my forehead, an old habit of Mother’s when
the thrill of a new man in her life filled her with uncontainable feelings of affection and largesse. I closed my fists, my nails biting into the flesh of my palms.

•   •   •

A
mara had vowed to send postcards, snapshots, the predicted itinerary for her travels, but I counted on none and none arrived. The only contact information she had left me was a phone number for the pensione where she and Fosca planned to stay. “It’s not necessary. I won’t need it,” I had told her, dropping the bit of paper dismissively onto one of the bamboo stools. But when I dialed it in a panic one afternoon, unable to find the shut-off valve for the back bathroom toilet, which had a tendency to overflow, the woman who answered explained in broken English—and shouldn’t I have expected this?—that Miss Silver and her companion had vacated their room two days before.

On the morning before Amara’s departure, she had handed me a page of notes, including numbers for the cleaning service and trash collector, directions to the bank where our weekly deposit was made, the hiding place beneath the bar where two spare keys and some “emergency” petty cash were kept. But nowhere did she list how to reset the alarm when it was triggered accidentally, how to compensate Calliope when she worked overtime, the proper procedure for returning incorrect orders to distributors. By the middle of each afternoon, my head ached from fury. I fantasized about the look on Amara’s face when she returned after long months to find her store flooded with water from the broken sprinkler system, the gallery walls naked of art with no arrangements for future exhibits, imagined how she would gasp with horror and beg me to help her. I struggled to calm my nerves the only way I knew how: I ran both mornings and evenings now, worked through Amara’s calisthenics routine in solitude in the quiet of my living room, afterward sipping tea with royal jelly. But even this seemed to do little good. Unopened mail began
to pile on my kitchen table: bills, advertisements, letters from Mother and Kimberly that I could not find the will to open. I ignored the flashing red button on my answering machine, messages from Ruth and Fran and Setsu, I guessed, because I had neglected to contact them this month, had not responded to their attempts to contact me. On days when business in the gallery was slow, I spent hours perched on one of the stools of the health bar with a stack of magazines and books and newspaper crosswords. On the days Calliope came, she would join me for a time, then disappear to the back room to make murmured phone calls to her boyfriend.

During the first week or two after Amara was gone, I had kept careful track of the days, but after a while, time began to blur. I would wake without knowing if it was Thursday or Monday or Saturday, needing to switch on the local news to check whether or not I needed to dress for work. I rotated the same few outfits, having no desire to search my closets for the skirts or tops I thought most became me. And I must have managed to brush my teeth, scrub my face, to pin up my hair with no more than a glance in the mirror, because what stared back at me one Sunday afternoon, from the glass walls of the yoga center that Amara had recommended, stopped my breath. My complexion under the fluorescent lights was white and flat as paper. The knot into which I had pulled my hair accented the shadows below my eyes and new faint lines etched on either side of my mouth. And there, in Studio Three of the yoga center, as I studied my reflection, without warning, a sob swelled from the very depths of me.

That night I sat at my kitchen table and sorted through the stack of neglected cards and letters. I listened to my string of outdated phone messages. Why hadn’t I called them back? Setsu and Fran and Ruth wanted to know. Should they be worried? So many calls they’d filled my answering machine. I had considered giving up on them, but I understood now they were not giving up on me. The final recording on the machine, now a week old, was from Setsu. She would be arriving in Fort
Myers the following Thursday and could use company while she was in town, she said. Was I around? She still hadn’t heard back from me. It would be good to talk to a friend. “James and I have been having some trouble lately. Maybe it doesn’t surprise you. I know you never liked him. And maybe years ago I should have listened. Anyway, I can never,
ever
get you at home. But please let me know if you have time next week. Call me, okay?”

I played her message a second time and then again. Yes, I thought I could discern it, could hear it in the softening of her voice, her genuine wish to make things right between us.

•   •   •

O
pal, I’m so glad you called back. Where did you disappear to? Anyway, it’s so great to see you!” she said when we met for coffee near her hotel her first afternoon in Florida. She asked about the artist we were showing now at the gallery, about how I was getting along without Amara. She quizzed me about my drawings, the books I had been reading. She talked about a recent trip to Los Angeles she had taken for her job, her coworkers at the investment bank where she had been employed since June, and then of James. For some time she’d had suspicions, sickening doubts. But James denied every insinuation, accused
her
of degrading their relationship, of wearing away at it with every question, every evidence of mistrust. But this last time, she’d seen it with her own eyes.

“I’m sorry for what you’ve been through, Setsu,” I said.

“You probably think I’m ridiculous. You’ve always been so smart about men.”

My voice cracked with the start of a laugh, a sound I had not intended to make. So smart for years I’d hardly moved, hardly taken a breath. “No, I don’t think you are ridiculous, not at all.” And then I told her. The secret from childhood I’d never before had the courage to speak aloud. Yes, I knew, too, terrible, terrible dangers that could come from seeking
affection in the wrong places. But I was beginning to see that at some point, yes, we had to cut loose old hurts, or they would swell and swell until they infected the parts of our true selves that remained.

•   •   •

W
e made plans to meet again on Setsu’s final day in Fort Myers. That morning she called me at home. By the way, she said, she had just discovered that one of the analysts at her firm who’d also come for the seminar, Charlie Blithe, was a fellow Brown alum, graduating only a year ahead of us. “And he remembers you, Opal. Do you know him?”

I had a vague memory of having met Charlie at some International Awareness Fair in the gymnasium at the end of my junior year. He had managed the Latin American table, crammed with plates of fried plantains and mangoes, stacks of books by Gabriel García Márquez, postcards of Rio de Janeiro and the rain forests of Costa Rica. During the hour or so I had spent at the fair, I passed his table twice. The first time, he shyly offered a plantain, the second, attempted a conversation about literature, accidentally tearing the cover of one of Márquez’s books as he spoke and neglecting to attend to two other customers. I remembered whispering to Fran as we walked away that if his responsibility was to sell food and books, he was doing a rotten job. “Do you ever give
anybody
a chance?” Fran had laughed, nudging my shoulder with hers. “No!” I’d answered, coming to a full halt in the middle of the crowded floor, shrugging without turning to her, which had made us collapse into giggles.

How long, long ago this seemed, but I could still smell the tangy, thick scent of the gym, still hear the reverberations of our laughter in the high-ceilinged hall. And I felt, once again, what I had tried to hide from Fran at the time—the straining in my cheeks as I fought to keep my hilarity from disintegrating into tears. Tears at the recognition of a truth that had been closing me in like a fortress.

“Charlie said he would be meeting some friends later today. Do you want me to ask them to join us?” Setsu asked.