fiction: Shelly Oria

It Is Something Like This.

He licks the stamp, sex in his eyes. I turn away, backpack and everything. I am ready to leave, to face the street, woman about downtown once again. Sure, it will be dark soon. The post office will close its doors, the clerks will go home, cook plums to soften their children’s stomachs, change the bedroom linens in anticipation of the night to come. They will leave, and I will have missed my deadline. Still, I am willing.

It is something like this: You take a tomato out of the fridge. In your kitchen, light enters from the north, painting your cutting board yellow. You chop the tomato, because you are making a salad for lunch. This is something that you do every day, and so you have come to trust the process, your judgment, the tomato. It is only when you sit down to eat your salad that you realize: your tomato is a peach. You have put a peach in your salad, and it is now forced to share bowl-space with cucumbers, mushrooms, corn. For crying out loud, pickles.

Of course, it is natural to wonder; most people would. If only for a few seconds, you think: It is unusual, yes, but is it bad? You think: The universe has made a suggestion, this peach in my salad; who am I to turn it down?

But then you take a bite. Quickly, you reach for the napkin – the fancy one that has balloons all over it, because you’ve been reading this book that says Every meal should be a feast and Be your own guest – and you spit. You spit because the taste in your mouth makes it apparent: a line has been crossed.

With him too, this man who would not tell me his name, a line has been crossed. If asked to describe the line I would fail, but I do know this: for two days I have been entertaining peaches and pickles in my mouth, exploring. I look at him now, and I am ready to spit.

Out in the street, he is confused. I thought we were having a good time, he says. Who are you? I ask. He is still holding one of my envelopes. I look at the brown rectangle: three different forms, filled out; one essay, well written; thirty-five dollars, application fee. I reach for it, palm facing up, open and vulnerable. There is something that I want. He takes a step back, hugs my envelope with his right arm. What happened? he asks; did I do something wrong? Just give me my envelope, I say. Tell me what I did, he says; tell me why you’re mad. I’m not mad, I say, and look down: cement, cigarette butts, a key that someone must be missing. To the pavement I say, How can I be mad at you when I don’t even know who you are? But I am; I am mad at him.

It is something like this: You take a cooking class; a friend has enrolled you as a gift for some occasion. You spend hours cooking saffron risotto, lemon grilled chicken, garlic sautéed kale. When it is time to go home, you are expected to be happy with the skill you have learned. The skill, it turns out, is what your friend paid for; the food will soon be shipped to the nearest homeless shelter. You look around you in search of other disappointed, unsatisfied people, but everyone seems content. You are not content. You want to taste the risotto; you want to consume it. You want to feel each grain between your teeth, pressed against your gums. You want to swallow, slowly and gently, until your creation becomes one with your body. You think: This way I will understand.

He stretches his right arm away from me; my envelope is escaping. His left arm is trying to pull me close, but I won’t budge. He changes his tactic, fingers the zipper of my jacket. You’ve worked hard, he says; don’t you want to mail it? This isn’t about my application, I say. Okay, he says, that’s fair. Most people would call me insane for going as far as I have with you, I say, with this game. But if you knew my name, then it wouldn’t be a game? he asks, amused suddenly, as if rhyming proves a point.

Can’t break the rules, he said with a smile like a wink the first time I asked a real question, the first time I wanted to study him in a way that reached outside the contours of his body, his theories, his humor. There are rules? I asked, confused. There are always rules, he said, didn’t you know? I did not, and I said so. Especially in love, he said, and looked at me with his head tilted to the side like I was standing left of where I was. A small butterfly circled the insides of my bellybutton simply because he used that word, love; love is all about rules, he said, only I choose to make my own. It made no sense, absolutely no sense. Right away, I wanted to understand. I needed to understand.

It is disturbing to me, how close we’ve become.

In his defense, his tongue swirls just the right way. I have been kissed by many men, and they mostly make the same mistakes, like allowing their lips to remember the last mouth they’d touched. But this man, who was putting a red ceramic turtle in the oven when I walked in to Color Me Mine two days ago, has lips that know when to remember, and what to forget. I had a little girl with me, a neighbor’s child I was babysitting. He had a kind of excitement that’s clean, the thrill of first things that the years usually take away. I squinted when I said, Hey.

There was this moment: with his thumb he wiped a tear from my left eye, although there was no tear, and said, But I do want to know; anything you want to tell me, I want to know. We were lying in my bed fully clothed, and I liked his thumb on the skin underneath my eye, a part of my face I had no name for. He was explaining why he wouldn’t ask me anything – it seemed immoral, he said, seeing as he wasn’t willing to answer any questions himself. Then he added these words like a fabric softener: “Anything you want to tell me, I want to know,” and just like that, inside my head, problem was replaced by adventure. I looked at him, and his eyes reminded me of my father’s eyes, years ago, on those long nights when gravel pushed against our stomachs and the sky was dark with the anticipation of beauty, as we talked trash about newbies with bad binoculars, and waited for the birds to come.

So I talked. I talked a lifetime to this nameless man; more than I talked to friends who’d professed love, to therapists, to men whose names I’d known and forgotten.

For example: silly things like how desperately I love passion fruit, and how it always embarrasses me, this dependency. But also important things, like memories. I talked about going birding with my dad, and that made me want to talk about my dad some more, about how a man gets lost inside his own brain to the point where he can’t find his way back, and no one else can find it for him, not even his children, or estranged wife, or his boss Bob the Man. Bob the Man, up until the day he fired my father, was his best friend.

At one point I thought, You are a stranger who knows about the day I had to bathe my father (the water came out brown, the aftermath of some work on the building’s pipe system, and my father tried to drink it). I stopped talking – mid sentence, mid breath. He drew flowers on my knees with his finger for a long time and then said, I understand, though I explained nothing.

I look at his lips now, and for the first time since stepping out of the post-office, I let myself feel the cold. I’ll admit: I want to kiss him. I want to signal with my eyes that if he tries to pull me close one more time he will be successful; I want to let his lips comfort me; I want to believe. But this is what life has taught me: If I do, tomorrow we’ll be back here, next week we’ll be back here, next month, next year. We’ll be standing in line at the post office, and he will lick a stamp with sex in his eyes and I will look at him and think, This man is like a sign, Danger, Please Quit While Ahead. And I will quit then, I will step outside, but it will be cold and he will want to kiss me and he will have something that I want – an envelope, companionship. I will know better but I will not know better and so I will signal for him with my eyes, Play with my zipper, pull me close. When he does I will want to whisper in his ear: And don’t let go, but I won’t, because it is childish and needy and because I will still not know his name.

SHELLY ORIA was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Shelly’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Quarterly West, and cream city review among other places. She curates the series Sweet: Actors Reading Writers in the Lower East Side, teaches fiction at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and is the co-producer of Literary Death Match Tel Aviv. Shelly was awarded the 2008 Indiana Review Fiction Prize for her story “New York 1, Tel Aviv 0,” and is currently completing her first story collection, which carries the same title.

photo credit: Ian Gittler