Lynn Strong - Hold Still

“We pretend,” says Laura. Holding her glass toward Maya, then taking a big sip. “We women. We pretend we’re okay by dressing up.”

Maya holds her wine without drinking and stares at her now-bare pale goose-pimpled skin in the mirror, black underwear, a light pink, slightly padded bra. Her posture’s slumped, always has been. Laura presses back her shoulders, places her hands on Maya’s waist. Maya has freckles up both her arms, across her clavicle. Her stomach’s flat, though the skin’s still slightly stretched from her two kids. Her quadriceps extend out above her knees from all the running. Her arms hang long and limby, her hair pulled up high off her bare face.

She forces herself to let Laura keep hold of her hip bones. “You’re an awful feminist,” she says.

Laura pulls a dress from its bag and holds it in front of Maya. It’s too big, too many colors, but Maya slips it over her head — it’s sheer and soft against her. She stays still as Laura reaches in her bag for pins.

“I’m the sort of feminist who likes to take advantage of. .” Laura narrows her eyes and grins, her lips full, her earrings — silver again, flat round plates with half-moon cutouts — angling themselves around her face. She pins the dress so it rests far below Maya’s collarbone. She tightens it until it pulls at and hugs tight to Maya’s waist. “All my feminine parts,” she says.

They go into the city and are seated at a restaurant on West Tenth Street. It’s small and dimly lit, rickety round tables stuck too close together, old straight-backed wooden chairs painted red. There’s a single tea light set before them and Maya reaches her fingers out in front of her until their tips touch the burning glass.

“How’s the stodge?” asks Laura.

She means Stephen. Each has only ever tolerated the other all this time.

Maya smiles, shakes her head. “He’s not,” she says.

They’ve had periods of deep affection, Laura and Stephen. She makes him laugh. He respects her brain. She quizzes him on obscure French philosophers to prove he’s not as smart as he’d like to be, presumes he is. He often, apropos of nothing, mentions her Midwestern upbringing, wanting to remind whoever else is with them, maybe just to remind Laura, that she isn’t as French or as mysterious as she might like to be.

“I’ll take you if you leave him,” Laura says. This is not the first time she’s offered. “We’ll go get El, just run away.”

Laura’s often spent whole weeks at Maya’s house when Stephen’s traveling. Holidays and birthdays, she’s often come along with them. And Stephen let her, didn’t question it. He smiled patiently when she gave him anal beads or brightly colored bow ties as gifts, for no other reason than to make him sit through their opening and say thanks.

“Don’t,” Maya says now. Not meaning the anger she feels. It feels imperative that she defend her husband. She wants to itemize for her friend all that he has done exactly right. “It’s my fault much more than his,” she says. Her voice is steadier and more certain.

Laura’s bottom lip pulls in beneath her teeth.

“Of course.”

The waiter comes. He’s young, and Maya can’t look up at him. Laura asks for waters, orders a bottle from the wine list, quickly scoots the boy away.

“I left my marriage because of my husband’s sister’s yellow dress,” she says.

In all these years, her friend has hardly spoken of her marriage, and never has she said her husband’s name.

“It must have been an awful yellow,” Maya says; she fingers her napkin, reaches for her water with both hands.

The waiter sets down two wine glasses and pours a taste for Laura; she twirls the deep red, sips it, nods, and waits for him to fill each of their glasses, leave again.

“It was at our wedding,” Laura says. She pushes Maya’s wine glass toward her. Maya sips, sets down her glass.

“You left that day?” she asks.

“A year later,” Laura says. “But it was over after that.”

Candlelit downturned faces spot the restaurant; there’s half a wall of mirrors lined with liquor bottles set behind the bar. Maya’s fingers press again against the burning glass and then she grabs hold of her wine with both hands, cupping lightly with her right hand, holding tightly to the stem with her left.

They order quickly: a petite filet for Laura. Maya orders the same so that she won’t have to read the menu while the waiter waits for her. Laura orders a burrata for them to share to start.

The waiter leaves, and the table next to them jostles as the couple gathers up their coats and scarves and mittens; the girl is young, the man much older, heavyset, both well dressed; the woman keeps mumbling, Excuse me, sorry , to Maya as she pushes out her chair, and Maya smiles at her, says, I’m sorry , back.

“It was lovely, actually, my husband’s sister’s dress,” Laura says. The way that she says “husband”: like the word might not be real.

Maya pulls herself closer to the table. She inches herself forward on her chair.

“Poor girl,” Laura says. She laughs now, her face younger, barer. “I’d never seen her look so great,” she says.

Bread’s been set down in front of them without Maya noticing. Laura reaches for a piece and tears. “It wasn’t,” she says. “She wasn’t beautiful.” She pours oil onto the plate next to her wine glass, dips her bread. “There’s a sort of carelessness that feels necessary for something to be beautiful.” Laura chews and swallows. “She was the most desperate thing I’d ever seen.”

She picks up a second piece of bread.

“She was hungry , you know?”

Their cheese comes and Laura cuts a large piece for Maya, serving her. She fails, though, to look at her straight-on.

“She must have been twenty-two or — three, just finished college, nursing school. She’d lost thirty pounds in the months leading up.” She spoons the fig reduction onto Maya’s plate. “I hadn’t even noticed it,” she says. “She’d always been a little chubby, the little sister. I’d known her her whole adolescent life.”

Laura looks up then and smiles at Maya, who’s cut the cheese into smaller pieces, chews a corner of it — smoke and milk — as her friend talks.

“She must have been starving herself,” says Laura. “And there was this hunger on her, you know? And not just from not eating.” She laughs again, cuts off a larger piece of cheese, then splits it between hers and Maya’s plates. “She was out to be seen that night, to prove she could be, should be looked at; she was so desperate to be wanted, like that was all she needed to survive.”

Maya pulls a piece of bread out of its basket just to hold it. She dips the edge of half into Laura’s plate now filled with oil and slowly eats.

“And I was just so sad for her, so angry,” Laura says. “That she could think something so seemingly simple was worth all that energy.”

They each sip their wine and watch as tables fill and empty. Maya stares into her glass.

Their food comes and Maya watches Laura wink at their young waiter. He refills their glasses, gives each of them a sharper knife.

“The dress was strapless, old-fashioned,” Laura says. “Her posture was perfect for the first time.”

Laura gulps her wine. “It wasn’t the dress.” She shakes her head, cuts her first perfect slice of meat. “It was the idea that that was the best she had to hope for, those few hours, someone looking at her, feeling worth something, being, I don’t know, a girl at whom people, men especially, but everybody — she wanted everyone to look.”

Maya’s not sure what to do with all the food in front of her, where to start, how she might ever finish it. She cuts off a small piece of asparagus and considers it, looking past her fork, the spear of green, back to her friend.