“This is your first time here?” she said as she bagged the bread.
“I’m new to town.”
“From where?”
Isaac hated claiming Alliance as his hometown. It told people too much about him. “West Palm Beach.”
Fannie raised her eyebrows as she handed him the bag. “Exotic.”
“Sometimes,” he said, wanting badly to come off as a guy who got around.
Isaac handed Fannie the change. She was an attractive girl, not beautiful like some of the girls he’d gone out with in West Palm Beach, but definitely pretty.
Isaac bought three more loaves of challah, on three subsequent visits, before he saw Fannie again. The following Friday, to save himself from buying a fourth loaf unnecessarily, he walked past the store twice, just to be sure she was working behind the counter.
“I came in yesterday but you weren’t here,” he said, once he had made it to the front of the line.
“I’m at secretarial school on Thursdays.”
“Ah. And Wednesdays?”
“You came in on Wednesday as well?” Fannie asked, a large smile spreading across her face.
Isaac tried to think of what he used to say to prospective buyers at Orange Grove Estates—people who had no business buying property but who wanted it very badly all the same. Sometimes, the right approach was to play along, to treat them like Rockefellers while ignoring the holes in their shoes. But other times, it paid to be honest, to acknowledge that the payments might make things tight at first but that, if they hung in there, they’d be rewarded.
He couldn’t offer Fannie dinner, or even a cocktail. The people behind him in line stirred, and he tried to think of something fast. “I’ll take another loaf,” he said. “And maybe later we could walk over to the harbor and feed some to the ducks.”
She laughed then. “We won’t tell my father what you think of his bread.”
“Actually, I think this loaf is very fine,” Isaac said. “It’s the other two loaves, back at my room, that have gone a little dry.”
One look at her and he knew she was sold. If he’d been selling binders, he could have asked her to sign one on the spot.
“Hey, Fan,” Isaac said, into the dark void of the hospital room. “Do you remember that first day we met? In the bakery?”
“Ummm-hmmm,” she said.
“What did you think of me?”
The room was quiet for a minute.
Isaac stood up and moved over to the bed, feeling for the edge of the mattress and the thin sheet that covered his wife. He touched her shoulder. “Move over?”
She turned away from him, inched toward the far side of the bed to give him enough space to crawl in beside her. When they were settled, his arm around her bulging middle, her backside nestled against his groin, the sheet pulled over them both, she spoke. “Back then, I thought that if I didn’t touch you, I might die.”
He smiled into the nape of Fannie’s neck, could feel himself becoming aroused. Their courtship had consisted of little more than a series of long walks, each an excuse to discover the quietest parts of Atlantic City, the places where they could explore each other in private. Between New Hampshire and Maine avenues, the crowds thinned considerably but the Boardwalk remained elevated. In the evenings, after the sun set, Isaac would lead Fannie down the stairs to the beach and under the Boardwalk, where he could kiss her mouth, her neck, her collarbones, and as they grew more comfortable together, even the pink flesh of her breasts, her nipples hard as cherry pits in his mouth. The footsteps of the occasional passerby overhead mingled with the crash of the waves to drown out Fannie’s soft moans. Several times Fannie had begged for all of him, but Isaac practiced enough restraint for them both, waiting until her parents had agreed to the marriage, until he had started work at Adler’s, until their wedding date was within sight. On the day that Trudy Ederle swam the English Channel, while the rest of Atlantic City’s residents sat with their ears close to their radios, Isaac had secreted Fannie up to the room he’d rented on Lexington Avenue, and devoured her. “First American Woman Finishes,” Fannie had proclaimed into his bare chest, and he had rolled her over onto her back and begun again.
“Did you worry?” he asked now.
She shifted slightly to make room for his erection between them. “Worry?”
“That I wouldn’t be enough?”
She hesitated, or at least he imagined she might have if they hadn’t been interrupted by a subtle tremor that emanated from the spot beneath his hand.
“Do you feel that?” Fannie whispered.
“That’s him?”
“Or her.”
“Right. Or her.”
Isaac couldn’t tell Fannie that Florence was dead. Not today. He liked her like this—warm and supple, forthright and forgiving. He moved his hand across her stomach and along her hip bone, fingering the waist of her underwear. He tugged at the garment slowly, pulling it down over her exposed hip.
“Isaac, the baby,” Fannie warned, which might have convinced him to stop had she not, at the same time, shifted her weight to accommodate him as he worked the underwear down around her knees.
It had been two months, maybe longer, since he’d felt his way into the warm, wet spot between her thighs. “I’ll be gentle, Fan. I promise.”
He needn’t have promised much. He was barely inside her before his body started to buzz and then to pulse. On this front, he could hold nothing back.
Isaac’s tryst with his wife was enough to buoy him for the remainder of the week. The following morning, he was at his desk earlier than normal, prepared to make the necessary concessions to his father-in-law. Joseph, of course, would hear none of it and accepted all of the blame for their dispute. After all, Isaac was fulfilling the terms of their loan agreement, and he presumed the hospital fee would be worked out.
