IRINA
Saturday I woke at six and the apartment was wrong.
Not wrong. Insufficient. The apartment that had been correct for three years—the grandmother’s clay bird, the Moka pot, the hardwood floors, the queen bed with one compression on the right side—was suddenly a container for a woman who did not want to be contained, and the not-wanting had started at 3:40 yesterday in a break room over criminal coffee and had not stopped during the night and was not stopping now, at six AM on a Saturday in September, in a bed that smelled like Sunday’s laundry and the residual trace of a week spent breathing recycled air in a building that held a man whose name I had spoken for the first time on Thursday and the speaking had changed the chemistry of my mouth.
I showered. The water was too hot. I made it hotter.
The mirror. My body in the steam—the fogging glass showing me in pieces, which was accurate, because pieces was what the week had produced. My breasts through the fog. My stomach. The ridge of my hip where the towel caught. I looked at myself and the looking was different from every other Saturday’s looking because this Saturday I was looking at a body that was going somewhere, and the somewhere was a man, and the man would see this body at some point that the afternoon or the evening would determine, and the looking was: Is this what he will see? Is this enough?
Prostie. The body is the body. The body has been enough for thirty-four years and the body does not require a Saturday-morning audit conducted in steam by a woman whose pulse has not returned to sixty-two since Friday.
I dressed. Jeans—the dark pair, the ones that fit. The green sweater. Not cashmere, not performance—merino, the mid-weight, the one that sat on the body without announcing itself. Boots. The ankle boots with the low heel that were walking boots and not office shoes and the difference was: the walking boots went places the office shoes did not go. Hair down. The hair down—the version the building never saw because the building got the clip and the pull-back and the professional architecture. Saturday got the hair as it fell, and the falling was blonder at the ends where the sun had been and darker at the root where the body was, and the body was Romanian and the Romanian did not bleach.
I made coffee. The grandmother’s Moka pot—the original, the one with the cracked handle that I used at home and would use until the handle failed entirely because the handle was my grandmother’s grip, and the grip did not let go. The coffee bloomed. I drank it standing at the counter, looking at Madison Avenue through the kitchen window, and Madison Avenue was doing its Saturday—the farmers market setting up on Lark, at the end of my block, the vendors unloading crates of late-season tomatoes and bread and cheese and the particular September abundance that the Hudson Valley produces when the summer has been wet enough and the frost has not arrived.
9:00. Lark and Madison.
I walked to the corner. The air different from the building’s air—unfiltered, unrecycled, carrying the smell of the river two miles east and the bread from the bakery vendor and the coffee from the cart on the corner. Sixty-four degrees. The body registered it precisely, involuntarily.
He was already there.