The shop took its last appointment at six, and the six o’clock was Sefa’s, because she had asked for it: the last slot had nothing after it, and if the fitting ran long, no one would be waiting on the room.
The shop was called Loy and did not have a sign. Loy was the tailor. She worked alone, in a room with one fitting pedestal under a raking warm light, a wall of gray-covered bolts, and a curtain that divided the room from the alley door. Loy did three fittings to a garment, and today was Sefa’s third. The dress was for her sister’s wedding, in the spring.
“Undertight first,” Loy said, and snapped the curtain across, and Sefa changed, and stepped up.
The pedestal was forty centimeters high, the light raked, and Sefa had been standing on pedestals since she was nineteen, so none of it meant anything. The dress was wool-crepe, unhemmed, pins down one side. Loy knelt at the side seam with a mouth full of pins and began to feel her work.
Sefa had meant to use the toilet before the appointment.
She had meant to at two, when she left the studio. She had meant to at the cafe, where the line was long. She had ridden out on the four o’clock bus with her leg bouncing against the window, and walked in past the alley door, and met Loy’s eyes, and gotten on the pedestal because the appointment was the point. Two hours of it. The need had arrived sharp.
“Arms out,” Loy said, around pins, and Sefa put her arms out, and the wool moved against her middle, and the want to press her legs together went from a habit to a job, and she stood very still, and did not do it.
The gait had been wrong. Loy would have seen it.
Loy’s mouth-full-of-pins rule was strict: nobody spoke while the pins were in. Any shift of the body meant a new measurement. Her tape came out and she measured the waist again, and this time her hand was flat against the waistband of the undertight, warm, deliberately still, and she looked up at Sefa over her glasses and asked with her eyebrow, and did not move her hand.
“The waist’s fine,” Sefa said. “We did the waist Tuesday.”
“We’re doing it now,” Loy said, and took the pins from her mouth one by one and seated them along the hip, and each seat of the pin was a small flat press of her fingers against the crepe, hand over hand, unhurried, each one slow.
“Can we break for a moment,” Sefa said. “Before the hem.”
“The hem is in an hour,” Loy said. “You have a bus to catch at nine. I have your sister’s dates.”
The undertight’s waistband sat across the fullest part of what she had been ignoring for two hours. Loy’s hand was on it. Loy was not looking at the dress. Loy was kneeling, and her face was level with Sefa’s waist, and her thumb was resting on the band, and Sefa understood that Loy had read the gait, had read it at the alley door, had read the bus ride out and the cafe and the two o’clock, and had skipped the waist on Tuesday, and was now on her knees with a hand flat on the exact center of the problem.
“Say it,” Loy said.
“I can’t step down.”
“You can.”
“You’ll let me?”
“I will do nothing of the kind,” Loy said. “The bus is at nine. I have a hem. You will stand.”
The light raked her. The warm room held her. Loy’s thumb moved, and rested, and moved, and the pinning had stopped, and Sefa’s legs began a slow work of their own, the standing-tremble that precedes, and she got her hand down flat on the pedestal’s edge.
“Don’t hold,” Loy said. “Just stand.”
She stood. And it broke the way it breaks after two hours, with a hand flat on the center of it and a voice telling her not to hold — not in a flood but in long slow pulses, the first one soaking the band and Loy’s thumb right through, running warm under the wool’s edge and down the inside of her thighs and the inside seams of the undertight, and the crepe took it the way wool takes it, dark spreading in a slow bloom from the fork of her, a stain with edges that moved.
The pedestal caught it. Forty centimeters up, and it ran off the arch of her foot — she felt the line of it go down one shin, tick at the ankle, and begin a thin tapping on the pedestal’s top, and then a second line down the other leg, and the tapping doubled, and that sound was the whole shop. The warm light raked the wet wool and made it gleam. Sefa stood up on the column of wood in a widening dark and heard herself saying something, low, over and over, not stopping, and Loy knelt in it with her hand still flat, her thumb still on the band, riding the pulse of Sefa’s whole body under her palm.
“There it is,” Loy said. “Stand.”
She stood. The last of it came slow, spent out, wrung, and it kept almost-finishing and then giving one more, smaller each time, until what was under the wool was just warm and heavy and clinging, and her legs were shaking the way a held-too-long thing shakes when it’s done, and the tapping stopped, and the shop was very quiet.
Loy’s other hand came up, then, and rested on the shaking inside of Sefa’s thigh — not moving, just warm and steady on the soaked seam — and stayed there while the shaking wound itself down.
After, Loy said, “step down,” and Sefa stepped down, and Loy unpinned her, and each pin went straight into the paper lining of the case, hands herding the ruined undertight off her hips, everything brisk, until the curtain snapped and the shop closed between them, and Sefa heard the taps run, and the door to the alley open. The bus was at nine. The hem was done in forty minutes, in a fresh undertight from the shop’s stock, in silence. Sefa paid for the fitting and the garment and the second undertight, and Loy wrote out the ticket, and at the door Loy said, “Spring will come fast. We should do the sister’s measurements in March — same hour,” and Sefa, on her way to the bus, said, “I’ll take the six.”
“Good,” Loy said. “I’ll plan for it.”