It started with a haircut.
A young mother with a baby on her hip had come into Gas ’n Donuts one slow afternoon when Raj was starting fourth grade, and as Maya Patel filled her box of doughnuts she found herself strangely drawn to her. The woman was slender, with skin the color of coffee, and she wore a gold-colored waitress uniform as if it were a gown. Her hair was shaved nearly bald and she had big plastic hoops dangling from her ears. The woman cooed to her baby as Maya rang her up, and after she left, Maya watched her stroll up Colfax until she became small and disappeared.
The woman had seemed so tall to Maya, so proud. She seemed to know exactly who she was.
For the next few days, Maya was unable to clear this woman’s presence from her mind, and soon she felt an urgent need to do something with herself. She’d always had long, lush hair, and spent fifteen minutes every morning and evening brushing it out, and she was careful to only use shampoos with scents that appealed to Rohan. He was a big fan of her hair, though he only showed it about once a week when he made love to her, leaning on his elbows and immersing his face within it, sometimes even holding it between his teeth like a ribbon as he emptied himself inside her.
Many times Maya had caught Rohan watching the women of Colfax, especially the ones who went braless in the sun or who wore short skirts and corky sandals, and she convinced herself that he would be pleasantly surprised if her appearance was to take a bold shift in their direction. She wouldn’t wear a tank top or anything too slinky, but she did buy a pair of Jordache jeans to wear instead of, or perhaps beneath, her sari, and even visited the stylist at the Glamour Guru salon down the street. He ran his comb through her hair, studied her from different angles, and recommended going short.
—Very short. Mrs. Brady short. Dorothy Hamill short.
Maya shuddered but agreed.
During those first days after the haircut, when Maya and Rohan passed each other behind the doughnut shop counter, he would barge though the space and make her step to the side, or he’d lift his hands, palms out, as if she were contaminated.
—I didn’t marry a boy, he told her. We’ll share a bed again when your hair is long.
These were his words to his wife of a dozen years, the mother of his child. Here she thought he would be aroused, but instead this marked the beginning of a long famine in their bedroom. Many of those nights, she slept alone on the couch.
A month or so after the haircut, in the depths of her marital misery, the corroded pipes in the doughnut shop crawl space burst. This was in the fall, long before the first deep freeze of the season, and Bart O’Toole spent the next two days working beneath the floors, lugging around his toolbox in that quiet way of his, and carrying lengths of copper pipe in and out of the storage pantry where the hatch to the crawl space was located. Rohan was at his side for most of the work, making sure he got the job done right, yet Bart still managed to throw looks at Maya all the time. She wasn’t sure if Rohan ever noticed, but she certainly did. Every time she turned around, this handsome, soft-spoken man was looking at her, but it felt more like an offering than a stare, as if he were rolling his gaze gently at her feet and asking her to pick it up. For so long in her relationship Maya had felt herself teetering between invisibility and repulsion, and here was this lean blond man with blue eyes and a mustache—the opposite of Rohan, she thought—pouring his desire on her. She felt like that woman on television, the one in the street throwing her hat in the air.
When the work was finally finished, Rohan inspected the job and clapped Bart on the back and that was supposed to be it. But early the next morning, before the shop had even opened and just after Rohan had left to drop Raj at school and pick up a new spray arm for the dishwasher, Bart O’Toole knocked on the glass door. Three minutes later he was in the crawl space, clanging around with his hammer and flashlight, and his toolbox sat on the floor outside the hatch. The shop would be opening in twenty minutes and there was work to be done up front, yet Maya poured him a cup of hot coffee, the first pot of the day, then crouched on the floor next to the crawl space. Bart was on his back on the cold dirt in there, directly beneath some junction between pipes, trying to unstick an old valve that he’d soaked with penetrating oil the last time he was there.
—Nothing urgent, he assured her, just a precaution.
Maya found that from where she crouched she could see him from the neck down, and as he inched his way deeper into the crawl space, his shirt shifted and his belly became exposed, its faint trail of hair disappearing under his Coca-Cola belt buckle. Just as she was about to look away she realized with a ripple of pleasure that she didn’t need to look away at all—that because of the angle of the crawl space, he couldn’t see her seeing him—and she wondered if this was like the nudie booths she’d heard about at the adult shops down Colfax, the ones she was sure Rohan visited, where the men could drop in quarters and peer into two-way mirrors and see naked women on old blankets and red pillows, bobbing to music, and the women couldn’t see the men out there at all. Above the clang of pipes, Maya watched Bart’s slender body for what felt like a long time until, without warning, he’d scooched toward the opening and caught her consuming him with her gaze.
—Coffee, she blurted, and handed the lidded paper cup in his direction.
He sat up on an elbow.
—I don’t get this kind of service at home, he said. That’s for sure.
—At home? Pshh. Who does?
Bart took the coffee from her and screwed it gently into the cool dirt inside the crawl space, but Maya’s small hand remained extended, and he studied her fingers for a long time before reaching out and touching them. Within seconds they were on the tiled kitchen floor, mouth to mouth, breathing hard and fitting themselves together.
The crawl space hatch was sealed shut and Bart was out the door with his toolbox a full three minutes before Gas ’n Donuts opened.
After, Maya thought she would feel guilty, or terrified, yet all day long she could feel herself smiling, and when she closed her eyes she could still feel Bart sliding tightly inside her, his hands clutching the back of her head, right where her hair was the shortest. A few times she went into the kitchen and stood over the tiled space, as if to remind herself of their union. One of those times, Rohan appeared right behind her.
—Customers!