I have one rule and I have never broken it: if she does not look, she does not exist. Not look at my face. Look at the other thing. Every woman on every bus in this city knows exactly what the difference is, and so do I. The ones who look and then look away are nothing to me. The ones who look and cannot look away are the entire reason I ride the 34 South Michigan at eight in the evening instead of the Red Line like a normal man.
It was a wet Tuesday in November, the kind of night when the lake wind comes up Michigan Avenue and the windows steam up from the inside and the heating is turned up too high because the driver is cold and does not care about anybody else. The bus was half full. I took a seat on the left, by the aisle, and I did not have to wait long.
She got on at Garfield, the fourth stop of the run, and the Ventra reader took her card on the second try.
She was in her early fifties. A headscarf in deep plum, tied close under her chin, the fabric worn thin along the edge where it had been knotted a thousand times, and at her temple a few strands of grey-brown hair had worked themselves loose. Her coat was dark and long and buttoned most of the way, and it strained a little across the chest, and beneath it I could see a floral dress in colours that had faded out of fashion years ago. Sensible shoes. Ankles that had given up on being ankles sometime around her fortieth birthday.
She was a big woman. Properly big, not the polite kind of big that people mean when they say curvy. Wide through the shoulders and wider through the hips, thick arms, a soft heavy belly that pushed the coat forward, and breasts so large and heavy that they sat low and dragged the buttons into a gap. There is no elegant way to put it and she had stopped trying to find one. Round face, deep laugh lines at the corners of her mouth, a mole on her left cheek, and eyes that were dark brown and heavy-lidded and tired in a way that sleep does not fix.
She had a string bag of vegetables between her feet and a paper Jewel-Osco bag with two loaves of bread in it on her lap. A gold wedding ring, loose on her finger. A thin gold bracelet. She smelled of cooking — onion and something green — and faintly of lavender hand lotion.
She sat down beside me because there was nowhere else, and she put the bread on her knees and stared straight ahead with the particular dignity of a woman who has decided to be furniture.
Then she looked at me.
Just once. A quick turn of the head, a glance down at my lap, and then her eyes came back up to my face and her whole body changed. Her shoulders went back. Her hands closed on the bread bag. Her mouth opened a little, and her tongue touched her lower lip, and then she shut her mouth hard, as if she had caught herself doing something shameful in public.
She turned to the window and said, quietly, without looking at me, “Sit somewhere else.”
bus, stranger, headscarf, older woman, widow, big breasts, curvy,
“Sorry?”
“Somewhere else. Please.” Her voice was low and steady and it cost her something to keep it that way. “I am not — I do not want — ” She stopped. Her ears had gone red. “Please.”
“All right,” I said. “I am sorry.”
And I got up, because that is the rule, and the rule is not a joke. I stood, and I put my hand on the rail, and the bus braked for the lights at the corner, and she reached out and closed her hand around my forearm.
She did not pull me down. She did not say anything at all. She simply held my arm, hard, the way you hold a rail, and she did not let go when the bus straightened up.
I sat back down.
Her hand stayed where it was. One finger moved, just slightly, into the inside of my wrist, where the pulse is. She was looking at the window the entire time. Her reflection was in it, and mine was behind hers, and in the reflection her eyes were not on the street at all. They were on my lap, where my cock had already made its position completely clear.
“If I say stop,” she said to the window, “you stop.”
“Yes.”
“I am not joking.”
“Neither am I.”
She nodded, once, and then she did something that undid me more than anything that came after. She shifted her bread to the other side, took her coat off, folded it over our laps, and slid her hand underneath it.
Her palm was warm and dry and it landed on my thigh and stayed there, and her breathing went wrong. “I buried my husband three years ago,” she said. “Twenty-six years I was a wife. Twenty-six years. And I have been invisible ever since. In this scarf, on these buses, I am a chair. Do you understand? Nobody looks at me. Nobody has looked at me since the funeral.”
“I am looking at you.”
“Yes.” Her hand moved, an inch. “Yes, you are.”
Her fingers found my belt. They were clumsy, and she was embarrassed by how clumsy they were, and she kept her eyes fixed forward like a woman doing something difficult in a crowd and refusing to acknowledge it. She got the buckle open. She got the button. She pulled the zip down slowly, and the sound of it in that humming bus was the loudest thing I have ever heard.
When her hand went inside and closed around me, she made a small noise in her throat and her head went back against the seat.
“God help me,” she said.
“We can stop.”
“Do not you dare stop.” Her fingers tightened. She was not gentle about it — she was greedy, the way somebody is greedy after a long time of getting nothing. “Look at the size of you. Look at it. What am I supposed to do with that?” She said it almost angrily, as if I had done it to her on purpose.
“Whatever you want.”
“I do not know what I want.” Her thumb found the place under the head and pressed, and I had to grip the seat in front of me. “I want — I have not been touched in three years. Three years. Do you know what that does to a woman? I have been so lonely I could scream into a pillow and nobody in the building would come.”
“Then be quiet now,” I said, “because I am about to make it worse.”
She laughed. It came out cracked and wet, and then she cried a little, two tears, and wiped them away with her free hand, furious with herself, and all the while her other hand kept moving on my cock like it belonged to somebody else.
The bus hit a pothole coming up to Fifty-Fifth and everybody in it came off their seat. My hand went out to catch the rail and landed on her thigh instead, high up, under the coat, where the dress had ridden back and the skin was bare.
She went absolutely still. Then she pushed her thigh up into my palm, a small movement that she could have denied, and her hand on my cock stopped moving altogether.
“Careful,” she said, to the window. “I have not been touched there in three years. If you start, I will not be able to make you stop.”
So I did not stop. I got my hand under the hem of her dress and up over the hot crease of her thigh, over the waistband of her knickers, over the soft heavy apron of her belly, and then further, until my palm was under the weight of her breast where it hung down inside the dress. Her nipple was already hard. When my thumb crossed it she made a sound like a gasp with all the air let out of it and her hips came up off the seat.
“The coat,” she said. “Put your hand under the coat.”
I put my hand under the coat and took her breast properly then — the whole heavy thing, my fingers sinking in and disappearing — and I rolled her nipple between two fingers while the bus went on down Michigan as if nothing at all were happening. She had her eyes shut and her lips apart and she was breathing hard through her nose, and her own hand had started again on my cock without her having decided to.
At the light at Thirty-Fifth I moved my hand down and around until I had a palm full of her arse through the dress — big and soft and warm, and she pushed back into it — and I pulled her towards me on the seat. She came without any warning at all. She made no sound: her whole body locked, her nails went into my wrist, and then she let the breath out slowly and said, “Oh,” in a small, astonished voice, and looked at me for the first time since she had told me to sit somewhere else.
“Do not say anything,” she said. “Not one word.”
The bus emptied out. Stop by stop, people stood up and shuffled to the doors and were gone, and by the last stretch there were four of us left in the whole bus: the driver, a sleeping man at the front, her, and me. Her hand had settled into a rhythm by then — slow, ruthless, exactly what she wanted for herself, and her coat had slipped until it covered almost nothing.
“I cannot do this here,” she whispered.
“Then do not.”
“Get off at my stop,” she said. “I live two streets from the stop. It is not far.”
I looked at her. She looked back at me, and there it was again, that stare over the top of her scarf, and this time she did not hide it or take it back.
“Yes,” I said.
Her flat was on the second floor over a shuttered dry cleaner, and the radiator in the hall was ticking like a clock that had gone wrong. Crocheted covers on the armchairs. A photograph in a frame, turned face down. She did not offer me tea. She stood in the middle of her own living room with her coat still on and said, “I do not even know your name,” and then reached up and took off her scarf.
Her hair came down heavy and dark and shot through with grey at the roots, and she shook it out with both hands and let out a breath that she must have been holding for years. Then she unbuttoned her coat, and her dress underneath had a row of small buttons from the collar to the hem, and she opened every one of them, and did not turn around, and did not cover herself.
She was enormous and soft and pale, and everything on her had given in to gravity a long time ago. Her belly hung, and her breasts — her breasts were magnificent and low and heavy, the nipples wide and dark and standing up in the cool air of the flat, and she lifted them in her hands like she was thinking about selling them and had never found a buyer.
I put my hands on her hips and pulled her against me, and she made a sound like someone setting down a heavy bag after carrying it a long way.
“Stop,” she said.
I stopped.
“No.” She caught my wrist. “I did not mean that. I said it to check whether you would.” She looked at me with her hair coming down around her face. “You did.”
“I said I would.”
“Nobody ever does,” she said, and then she pushed me backwards onto her bed.
The mattress was soft and too small for what we did on it. She climbed over me and put her breasts in my hands, and when I squeezed them she gasped so sharply that I stopped, and she slapped my shoulder and told me to do it again. They were so heavy that my fingers sank into them and disappeared. Her nipples were thick as a thumb, and when I took one in my mouth she went down onto her elbows and buried her face in the pillow and swore steadily, softly, in a voice I had not heard from her until then.
Then she sat up, took her breasts in both hands, and put them around my cock.
I could not see my own cock for a while. That is how big she was. She pressed them together around it with her hands and pushed them up, her palms flattening, the wet of her own mouth on the head of it, and she looked down at what she was doing with the concentration of a woman doing her own accounts. Then she moved, and the softness closed around me like a fist with a pulse, and I made a noise that was not a word.
“Look at you,” she said. “Look at you. A man like you, on my bed.”
She did it until her arms ached, until the skin of her chest was slick and her breath was coming in short angry bursts, and then she spat on her hand and pushed her breasts aside, and wrapped her fingers around me, and started to work.
“Tell me when,” she said.
“Not yet.”
“Tell me.”
“Now.”
She did not slow down and she did not look away. She leaned back, put her weight into it, and watched my face while it happened, and when I came she aimed it at her chest on purpose, so that it went across her breasts and her collarbone and one streak of it caught her chin. I came for a long time. She kept her hand on me the whole way through, and her jaw was tight and her eyes were wet and she did not let go until I could not stand it and had to push her hand away.
Then she sat there on her own mattress, in her own bedroom, breathing hard and looking down at her own body, and laughed — a big, unladylike, ugly laugh, the first completely free sound I had heard her make.
“Well,” she said. “Well.”
“Are you all right?”
“I am filthy,” she said happily. “I have never been so filthy in my life. Twenty-six years I was a wife and I never — ” She stopped, took a breath. “Do not say anything kind to me. If you say something kind to me, I will cry, and I have an early shift tomorrow.”
She got up and gave me a towel and cleaned herself with another, and threw her dress over the chair and put on a dressing gown the colour of oatmeal, and then she did make the tea after all. We drank it sitting at either end of her sofa with our knees touching, in a room that smelled like lavender hand lotion and onions and the two of us.
At the door, she said, “Do not ride this line again. I mean it. This does not exist. In the morning I am a widow in a headscarf and that is what I am.”
“And tonight?”
“Tonight,” she said, and adjusted her headscarf in the hall mirror, and gave me one last look over the top of it, “tonight you were a very large mistake.”
She closed the door gently, like a woman in her own home.
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
Related posts:
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
Colleen – chapter 01 – part-04
The Cunning Linguist – part-08
Colleen – chapter 03 – part-09
Colleen – chapter 01 – part-03
A Mother’s Worry – part 12
Colleen – chapter 03 – part-01
