She got on at 26th and Kedzie with four bags and no free hands and argued with the driver about fifty cents before she had put the first one down.
“I gave you a dollar,” she said. “Last week it was two twenty-five.” The driver said something without looking at her. She said something back, fast, in Spanish, and the woman behind her laughed out loud, and then she paid the fifty cents anyway and came down the aisle with the bags knocking the seats.
I had the back row to myself and nowhere to be, so I watched her.
Fifty, maybe fifty-two. Five foot three in flat shoes and heavy the way some women get heavy after fifty, which is not the same as fat. Thick arms that kept moving when she stopped. A big soft chest that pushed her blouse out and pulled the buttons into a line of little gaps. A stomach that came out over the waistband of her jeans and stayed there. Short legs. Ankles that had given up. She walked like a woman carrying her own weight and used to it.
The back of her was the thing, though.
She had an arse like a piece of furniture. High and round and split into two heavy halves that pushed the black denim out behind her and pulled it tight enough across the seat of it that the seam disappeared. It stuck out past her back, a full hand’s width, and when she walked the whole thing moved on its own beat, one side and then the other, and she did not look behind her once to see who was watching, because she already knew.
Round brown face, wide through the cheekbones, a thin white scar through one eyebrow that had healed badly. Dark eyes with eyeliner that had been perfect at nine that morning. Red lipstick worn off in the middle of her mouth from talking. Black hair, thick, clipped up at the back with grey coming in at the temples where she had stopped fighting it. Gold hoops the size of a half dollar and a thin gold chain, and a red thumbnail with a chip out of it.
She smelled of cooking oil and gardenias and something underneath that was just her, warm, like a kitchen.
Two plastic bags in one hand with nopales and a knot of tomatillos in them, the big woven market bag hooked over the other arm, and a paper bag with a bolillo sticking out of the top that she had already broken the end off and eaten.
The bus filled up at Little Village. By California there was standing room and a man asleep across two seats with his hat over his face, and she came down the aisle looking at the seats and then looking at me.
Not at my face. At my lap, first, quick, the way they all do it. Then at my face.
“You mind?” she said.
“I mind a lot. Sit down.”
She laughed. It was a big, dirty, room-filling laugh and half the bus turned around. “Ay, look at this one.” She dropped the plastic bags between her feet, put the woven one on her knees, and sat down, and the seat gave under her and her hip came up against mine and stayed there.
She was warm. That was the first thing. Warm like a radiator that has been on all day, and the whole side of my leg and hip and ribs had her against it.
“You are going far?” she said.
“As far as you are.”
“Mm.” She looked at me sideways. “You are one of those.”
“One of what.”
“One of those,” she said, and opened the paper bag and tore off another piece of bread, and offered it to me without looking at me, and I took it, and that was that. We were friends.
Her name she did not give me. What she gave me was everything else. She worked at her brother’s panadería on 26th, in at four in the morning, six days, and the ovens were older than she was, and the girl on the register was stealing from the till, and her daughter had two kids and a husband who did not work. She had been in this country thirty-one years. She had a knee that needed replacing and a doctor who kept moving the appointment.
She talked with her hands. Every time she made a point the whole arm came up, and the gold hoops swung, and once her hand landed on my forearm to make a point and stayed there a second longer than the point needed.
I looked at her chest while she talked. I did not hide it. She caught me at it around Western and she did not pull her blouse up or fold her arms. She sat back instead, and put her shoulders back, and let the buttons strain, and said, “You are not subtle, you know.”
“No.”
“My husband, God rest him, was subtle,” she said. “Twenty-two years. He did it like he was paying a bill.”
We hit the light at California and the driver stopped like he had somewhere better to be, and she slid on the vinyl and her hip drove into mine, and she grabbed the seat in front of her with one hand and swore in Spanish.
At the next corner the driver did it again, worse, and she came up off the seat entirely, bag and all, and came down again half in my lap.
She did not get up.
She sat there, sideways across my thigh, one hand still on the seat in front, and settled herself with two small movements of her hips that she could have called adjusting, and the second one was not adjusting. Her arse was on my thigh and my cock was hard against the back of it and there was no way on this earth that she did not know.
“Ay,” she said, to the window. “This driver thinks he is in a race.”
I put my hand on her hip. She turned her face to me with the scarred eyebrow up and said nothing at all, and did not move, and I left my hand there and we went past Washtenaw and Troy like that.
Then I moved it. Down, over the tight black denim, over the whole heavy round of her, and I got a handful of her arse through the jeans and squeezed, and she made a noise low in her throat and pushed back into my hand.
“You have a hand like a shovel,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Did I say sorry?” She reached back with her left hand and put it flat on my thigh, then further in, and found the shape of me through my trousers and closed her hand on it and held it. “Mm. Okay. Okay.” She said it twice, the second time much quieter. “Now I understand why you are not subtle.”
The man asleep at the front had not moved. Two rows up a kid was watching a video with the sound on. Nobody in that bus was looking at anything but their own business, which is the great thing about this city.
I got my hand between her and the seat back, down the back of her jeans. They were so tight that I had to work at it, and she lifted herself an inch to let me, and under the denim there was nothing but her, hot and smooth and enormous, and she put her forehead against the seat in front and breathed out through her nose.
“Do not stop,” she said. “I swear to God.”
I got my fingers down between her legs from behind and she was soaked, running, and she clamped her thighs on my hand and rode it in tiny movements that anybody looking would have taken for the bus, and she came like that with her teeth in her own wrist and the bread bag crushed against her chest, and afterwards she sat very still for a moment and said, “Dios mío,” into the paper bag.
Then she straightened her blouse, took her clip out and put her hair back up, and said, in a completely normal voice, “Two more stops. You help me with the bags. And do not say anything stupid.”
Her flat was the second floor of a two-flat off Sawyer, and the stairs smelled of somebody else’s rice. She had the door open before I had put the bags down and she was talking again, about the neighbour’s dog, about the price of the gas, and then she was inside and the kitchen light was on and the whole place smelled like the inside of a good pot.
There was a pot on the stove with the lid on and a wooden spoon across it. A Virgen candle on the counter with the flame going. A sofa with a plastic cover on it and a blanket folded on the arm. A television on with the sound off. A photograph of two little girls in school uniforms. A calendar from a funeral home.
She put the bags on the counter and started taking things out, and I stood in the middle of her kitchen with my coat still on, and she said, without turning around, “You are going to stand there like a post or you are going to come here?”
I came here.
She turned around and put both hands on my chest and pushed me back against the counter and kissed me, and she kissed like she talked, all at once, no shyness in it. She tasted of bread and coffee. Her hands went into my coat and pushed it off my shoulders and then she had my belt open and her hand inside my trousers and she made a low, pleased sound against my mouth.
“Big,” she said. “Big and stupid, like you.”
“That is not a compliment.”
“It is from me,” she said, and pulled me by the cock into her bedroom like a woman leading a cow.
She undressed herself in the middle of her own room with the light on and no ceremony at all. The blouse first, and her chest came out of it heavy and low, brown and soft, the nipples long and dark and already hard, the undersides creased where the wires had been. Then the jeans, which took work, and she had to sit on the bed to get them off her ankles, and she laughed at herself doing it.
Naked she was enormous. The stomach hung, soft and marked with pale lines and an old scar low down, and her thighs were thick as my waist and touched all the way down, and her arse, freed from the denim, was even bigger than the jeans had suggested. Two great round heavy halves, high and wide, with a dimple over each one, and when she turned around to get onto the bed it swayed and settled and she knew exactly what it was doing.
“You are staring,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She got on the bed on her hands and knees and looked back at me over her shoulder, and that was that. I got behind her and put both hands on her arse and pushed them apart, and she said, “Ay, sí,” in a voice that came from somewhere under her ribs, and then I pushed into her and she took all of it without a sound, and then made a sound.
She was wet and hot and she pushed back to meet every stroke, and her whole body moved with it, the heavy arse hitting my hips with a slap that was louder than the television, and she kept up a stream of Spanish that I did not understand a word of and did not need to. Twice she stopped me to change the angle. “Up. Up a little. There. There, there, there.”
I put my thumb in the dimple of her arse and she came so hard that her arms went out from under her and she put her face in the mattress and shouted something into it.
Then she rolled over, pushed me onto my back, climbed on top of me, and sat down on my cock with her hands on my chest and her hair coming out of the clip.
She rode me slowly at first, watching my face, getting the angle right, and then she found it and stopped being polite about it. Her tits swung, her stomach moved, the whole weight of her came down and up, and she had one hand on the headboard and the other flat on my chest and she was saying, “Yes. Yes. Like that. Do not you move, do not you dare move.”
I was close and I told her.
“No, not yet,” she said, and got off me, and turned around.
She knelt over me with her back to me, and reached behind and put me between her cheeks, and pressed them together with both hands, and moved.
I have never felt anything like it. Soft and heavy and hot and tight all at once, sliding, and she worked it with her hips and her hands and looked back at me over her shoulder with her hair in her face and her mouth open, and said, “Now. Now, mijo. Give it to me.”
I came on her lower back and her arse and the sheet, and she kept moving until I could not take it, and then she sat down on the bed beside me and laughed until she had to hold her stomach.
“Ay, ay, ay,” she said. “Look at this. Look at the mess. Fifty-two years old and I have a mess on my back like a girl.”
She went and got a towel from the bathroom that smelled of bleach, wiped herself down, threw it in the hamper, and put on a robe that was pink and old and had a stain on the sleeve.
Then she fed me. The pot had chicken and rice and something green in it, and she put a bowl in front of me at the kitchen table and sat down opposite with her own, and told me about her sister in Cicero, and the funeral home calendar, and how the ovens at the panadería were older than the girl on the register, and it was the easiest hour I have had in a year.
At the door she gave me a plastic container of the rice and held it out and said, “Tuesdays my sister comes. Not Tuesdays.”
“And Wednesdays?”
She looked me over from my shoes up, unhurried, like she was pricing a sack of avocados.
“Wednesdays,” she said, “I go to the market.”
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
Related posts:
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
The Cunning Linguist – part-08
A Mother’s Worry – part 15
A Mother’s Worry – part 09
A Mother’s Worry – part 12
A Mother’s Worry – part 07
The Cunning Linguist – part-07
